Convalescence Dispatch

A big howdy from the second floor.

Twitter communications have still been emitting from my portable tech device, though I wouldn't describe it as wrestling manatees by any stretch of the imagination. I have mostly gotten over the feeling that something with a screen and a keyboard will explode if I touch it.

I still can't extend my arm all the way out, though I haven't worn a sling since the first week of my injury, but, after the news in the second week that the cracked ankle bone wasn't healing in a perfectly aligned manner - a millimeter off, the doc said - I did get better news on the ankle today. No more shifting of dem pesky bones. Gonna peel open a Halloween Fun-Size peppermint patty sometime today in celebration - perhaps when I sit out on my porch later tonight and give candy to the spooky things that pass by. Apparently, every NOPD district station will be giving away candy as well...just a couple of days after they had a prescription toss-out event. Check your treats, kids.

It's amazing how insane staying mostly indoors in one place can make a person. Having to stay off this ankle for  these past few weeks, nervous at even the slightest bit of weight put on it for fear of a further separation of the cracked bones, necessitating a cast and/or surgery, wishing that, perhaps, one of these could migrate from the New Museum to my house so I wouldn't have to deal with my stairs - it all reached a fever pitch this past Saturday when it seemed like the walls were closing in and I was a useless lump reduced to reading and cross-stitching to pass the time. Dan took pity on me and got me out and about that night, and then I went to check out the latest Saints game at Edie's the next day. Ah, the freedom. Even if it was only a few hours' worth.

One thing I am also free of is the Vicodin - no that it did much for me anyway. I appear to be in that subset of the human race that does not get loopy on the stuff. Both my parents cautioned me strongly against getting hooked on it, and hey, my dad should definitely know, but it didn't even get its hooks in me to begin with. Only real painkiller for me was rest and less stress, I guess. No, I will not be passing out those little blue pills along with our Almond Joys.

There'll be more later on some of my other musings in past days, most notably this, probably over on Humid City. This was just to let you know what's doing.

Dan saw loads of Christmasy stuff following close on the heels of the Halloween stuff that began appearing in the stores around late August (it seems) and asked if the Nola blogger Hostilidays You-Tube Wars would be beginning after tonight. Guess the only answer I'd have to that right now would be this. In other words, it could get hairy.

Both Sides Now?


Perhaps it's just me, but the tone of this trailer for Learning Matters upcoming documentary on New Orleans public schools seems a tad too hopeful, and a bit dismissive of the activists and parents who have experienced serious flaws in the current "system of schools" here.



I do have more to say on the BESE board elections, but I have to resign myself to one more week of making sure my cracked ankle bone doesn't realign itself while it heals. What I will direct you to is why the sleeper campaigns that flew under the radar in the middle of this past Saturday's elections were much more important than you would think.

"BESE races are where it's at," said Timmy Teepell, the governor's campaign manager, but also the prime mover behind the GOP Victory Fund, which is spending heavily in BESE campaigns. The Republicans are joined by a deep-pocketed coalition of business groups that are active for the first time in education elections.

They are opposed by the Coalition for Public Education, comprised of the statewide organizations for teachers, superintendents and school boards, which are using their extensive grass-roots networks to counter the financial advantage of the conservative coalition.

As one consultant put it, the Republicans and business PACs, with all their money, can only marginally improve the conservative majority in the Legislature, but they can have a profound effect on BESE by turning just a couple of seats while defending the ones held by their allies.
 Why that now matters so much to business leaders is their commonly held view that the greatest barrier to economic development in Louisiana is not the tax structure, government regulation or the legal system but the shortage of skilled workers to fill available jobs and the more that could be created. The fastest way to change that is through better public schools, whether their kids attend them or not.

The business coalition is targeting two districts for turnover: in northeast Louisiana, where incumbent Keith Guice, a Monroe Democrat and former superintendent, is being challenged by Republican businessman Jay Guillot of Ruston; and in the southwest, where incumbent Dale Bayard of Lake Charles, who recently switched to Republican, faces GOP newcomer Holly Boffy, the 2010 state teacher of the year, from Lafayette Parish.  

 Those groups also are supporting Teach for America leader Kira Orange-Jones in an uphill race in the New Orleans-based district against incumbent Louella Givens, who, despite a $1.3 million IRS lien on her business and a DWI arrest this year, is backed by some local officials and the Louisiana Association of Educators and will be hard to beat.  

 The ultimate goal of the business coalition is to give Gov. Bobby Jindal a clear board majority that will enable him to hire the superintendent he wants and to press his agenda for charter schools and performance-based teacher evaluations. Changes in K-12 education figure to be the centerpiece of his legislative agenda in 2012, leading to a showdown with teacher unions and school boards over modifying tenure.  

 Why K-12 education matters so much to Jindal, for his future, is that, by the end of his second term, he hardly will be able to claim to be an effective governor if public education still drags in the rear of national rankings.

Add in NYC mayor (and head of NYC's public schools) Michael Bloomberg's nifty financial contribution to an anti-teachers' union PAC just a few days before this past Saturday's elections and anyone paying attention to what's going on with public education these days gets the idea that something's up. Since the abandonment of this state by viable Democratic party candidates, though, the best the state can muster is Runoff City in the BESE elections to let Jindal & Co. know we won't be taking his special interests lying down. If you are in one of those runoff districts, don't miss your chance to have your voice heard. Go vote.

Update, 10-25: The Daily Kingfish has more.

So, major financiers from elsewhere (all rabid pro-charter donors) are boosting a Louisiana BESE candidate. So what? For once, I guess we have to agree; this is way the game of politics is played. But at some point, doesn't it become hard for us in-state to stomach the fact that our education system's future is compeltely in the hands of a bunch of trust-funders and corporate fat cats? Buying our elections must be rather cheap for these 1%'ers. 

While housebound...


I've been discovering what a great bunch of friends we have to have been assisting me all this time. They've spoiled me with granitas from my favorite coffee place, they've baked me cookies and made me gumbo, and they've even helped me down and up my stairs for a lovely evening outing. I am a lucky, lucky person and a grateful one.


I've also been doing a lot of Twitter scanning, reading, and cross-stitching to pass the time up on my second floor. What follows is a small sampling of stuff that has occurred to me while my bones have been healing (I hope - I'll know for sure come the orthopedist's appointment Monday).


My dad called me last week from Oklahoma City's brand new Whole Foods Market to see how I was doing. I asked him how he liked it and he said it reminded him of the Wegman's store he and my mom used to frequent when they lived in central Pennsylvania. What he didn't like was that the pizza my mom ordered from the Whole Foods' pizza bakery hadn't even gotten started when he came around to pick it up. I heard a "You suck" from my dad to said pizza bakers. "It's not good pizza anyhow, Dad," I told him. Not a good way to get started in OKC, Whole Foods.
___________________________________


I was told once by my aunt's ex-husband that, as a kid, I tossed a frisbee on a Fire Island beach and, when it got out of control, a nice man picked it up and tossed it back to me, a man my ex-uncle swears up and down was E.B. White. I am currently in the middle of Michael Sims' account of how Charlotte's Web came to be and don't want the book to end. It is written so lovingly and carefully about White's inner life that I find myself wanting to curl up with it, take it slowly, then hunt down most of White's writings and look them over again with new eyes and new knowledge. The best nonfiction should have this effect.
___________________________________


My thoughts on Sean Payton's injury, through the prism of my own injuries, are up at Humid City. I am also jazzed to learn that HC blogmaestro Loki will be moving back down here later on this year. Sit down and get crunk - that's how I'm rolling right now.
___________________________________


It's nice to have reminders of how great this city is, especially when it takes Los Angeles to task. It's also nice to have reminders of why being the first generation under the 24/7/365 media microscope is a burden we're frankly tired of. What we still have on a local level, however, are reminders of our failures in the realm of public safety that go beyond the pain of storm-and-levee breach recovery. Paul Gailiunas' brief return to New Orleans for the premiere of his and his late spouse Helen Hill's film The Florestine Collection was one such reminder. I had similar feelings as Kelly had when I read the front page account of Gailiunas' return in the daily paper, along with some real anger at how little things have changed. It is irreparably damaging, the crime that we have here, and are we really any closer to addressing the causes of it? I don't know that we are. I don't know that the same police force that accused Gailiunas of being a suspect in his wife's murder isn't still at work in key positions on the force now, which means Helen Hill's murderer has even less a chance of being found beyond the ordinary passage of time making the case ever colder with each passing year. There is a lot that makes New Orleans great, but we are still a damaged community. Some damages have cut deeper than others and are still hurting us. Are we really easing this pain, or performing a rushed triage, thinking we can get to some things later? We are long past the band-aids.
___________________________________


Tomorrow's a voting day. My husband asked me about the state school board representative elections, and I personally feel I have to go with the one person who has been speaking out against the rush to charterization, despite her other failings. G-Bitch has more on this, but also emphasizes the need for informed voting. Don't go to the polls and leave your brains at home.
___________________________________


That's all I got for now, folks. See you all on the Tweeter Tube, as it's easier for me to tote the trusty Droid around while using my stylin' walker to schlep to the terlet. yes, I wash my hands, even though the broken elbow makes that kinda tough. Don't fall on your roller skates, kids.

Arrrgh, I have the perfect picture of the current torture device I must wear 'round my ankle right now, but I cannot upload it from my otherwise trusty Droid. Suffice it to say it has unceremoniously been dubbed Das Boot because, honestly, it isn't really helping me out pain-wise right now. What I CAN say is that I am 38 years young and I have possibly learned some lessons.

1. Even though my brain pretty much thinks I'm 25, or 21 on my best days, it reverted back to my preteen self the second I walked into the skating rink with my son for his school's skate party last night. I was never a roller queen as a kid, but I did enjoy it. I strapped those rental skates on with some relish, helped the little guy get his on, and we gamely stumbled into the carpeted area surrounding the huge, flat oval. He headed for the kiddie rink while I took a few turns around the big one, turns that weren't half bad considering I hadn't been near a rink in a couple of decades. The trouble began when I got back on that loud carpet to get the kiddo.

2. My powers of denial are something to behold. Truly. Put mine up against any current GOP presidential wannabes and I'd leave 'em all in the dust. Ankles already weakened from some trips 'round the concrete floor, plus even greater crowds of stumbling kids to avoid, plus having to make sure a stumbling little guy was staying intact led to my falling on my butt and trying to cushion the fall with my right elbow. My right foot was also not feeling so good. I carefully removed my skates right there, made it to the picnic table where I'd stashed our shoes, struck up a conversation with the parents of a new kid in my son's class, and asked them if they could get me some ice for my ankle. The elbow wasn't doing as bad at the time, but boy did that change. Dan was at a band practice near the lakefront, so it was just me and the little guy in Metairie. Don't even ask how I made it to Touro's ER. I'd probably have admitted even then, with the pain finally getting to me, that sheer denial that the swollen ankle could be more than a sprain, but hey, let's get it checked out for kicks was stronger than anything else getting me to a doctor last night.

3. ERs ain't nothing but elaborate reassurance machines, a reality I've only really had to face in relation to the little guy's care up to this point. The most the X-rays got me were crutches, Das Boot, and a Vicodin prescription Dan didn't think he could refill unless I was at our local pharmacy in person doing it, so I haven't had much more than a couple of ineffective Percocets until this afternoon. Putting me on crutches with this bum elbow is kinda ridiculous right now, but ERs are not known for expert interpretations of X-rays. Plus, I live on the second floor of a grand ol' New Orleans home with high ceilings, a house that is already four feet off the ground to begin with. Don't ask me how I got up 24 steps with a broken bone in my ankle and possibly a broken one in my elbow. "Possibly?" you're asking. I couldn't get in to see the orthopedist referred to me until tomorrow. Until then, I've gotta struggle. A good first step on the road to using my left hand more is, apparently, using chopsticks. Thanks for these lessons, Touro ER.

Ultimate moral? If you're old and decide to roller skate, wear pads. I talked about my dreams and fears about becoming a Big Easy Rollergirl to Dan in the ER waiting room, among them that I'd become injured and it'd throw the household out of whack because my primary responsibility is the care of the little guy, and he said, "Well, here's your biggest fear realized. Is it really so bad? Besides, roller derby's great exercise. You should go for it." He was dead serious. No idea if he'd fallen on his head on the way to helping me into the ER.

Then again...they say a broken bone becomes stronger after it's healed...and I wasn't wearing pads...oh, somebody stop me before I try out for the BERG!

Humid City Supplemental

I attended the Occupy New Orleans march yesterday and had all this to say about it. I also have the pictures to show for it.

One of the things I've been thinking about this whole time, though, is Gary Shteyngart's reaction to the prescience of his most recent novel, Super Sad True Love Story, in which people are judged by their credit ratings, the United States is in many wars over oil - the latest being with Venezuela - and the financial state of the country is beholden to China. One particular series of scenes revolves around people who have camped out in Central Park and Tompkins Square Park in Manhattan, in part out of protest at being made homeless by the government, and, ultimately, because the majority of the campers are "Low Net Worth" and have no other place to go. Sounds a tad familiar...

...his prophetic tendencies started to crop up as early as 2006. "When I started writing 'Super Sad,' the research took me to the idea that the real estate market, because of all the sub-prime mortgages, was going to burst, and that it would take along with it all the hedge funds and investment banks, provoking an economic meltdown," he said. "Well that happened in 2008."  

 He was forced to make his satire more and more extreme. He shifted focus from the real estate bubble to China.  

 "Flying from the stunningly modern Beijing airport to the Newark airport now is like flying from Paris to Burkina Faso," he said. "There's a different spirit in China. They have a market of a billion people who are so extraordinarily energized, in the way we haven't been since the fifties."  

 The currency of choice in "Super Sad" is the yuan-pegged dollar, and luxury Manhattan apartments are priced in yuan and "Northern Euros." China's rise culminates in a Washington summit between the ruling "bipartisan party" and a group of Chinese dignitaries, which leads to the announcement of the U.S. default. It's a chain of events specific to the satiric world of the novel -- which Shteyngart noted makes the current standstill in Washington seem even more absurd. We don't yet have other central banks breathing down our necks. So why trigger such a potentially catastrophic event?  

 "The debt talk is just complete nonsense," he said. "It's all calculated to appeal narrowly to a political base. No one really thinks that it'll help anyone if our debt rating gets downgraded."  

 Shteyngart said that he's depressed by how many of the parodic, extreme predictions he's made have come true. So with his next book, which he's in the midst of writing, he's getting out of the futurist game. Instead, he's looking back, in a memoir, to his experience growing up in the Soviet Union.  

 "I'm going to write about my childhood," he said. "It's about time."

I can't even bring myself to type it. It'll always be the Louisiana Superdome. There ought to be a rule about stadium sponsorship: If the owner(s) can't get a stadium sponsor's product to every fan, then sponsorship is out. Alas, none of us will be getting a luxury car anytime soon. It's totally fair that Alabama gets a factory from the Superdome sponsor that creates jobs, while one man gets loads of dough from that same sponsor. Oh, yeah.

Perhaps, on Dome Renaming Day, we can reenact this famous scene with a bright red vehicle straight from Benson Motors:

One of the first "Killer Bee" movies to come out in the late 1970's "The Savage Bees" starts out with this Brazilian banana boat, the Cornila Rios, limping into New Orleans Harbor with everyone on deck being either missing or dead.  

later in the movie a local Sheriff Donald McKew, Ben Johnson,finds his dog Zeth dead and despite it being Fat Tuesday and the Mardi Gras parade he takes Zeth's body to the City Coroner's Office to find out what killed him. Assistant Coroner Dr. Jeff DuRand, Michael Parks, sees something in Seth's stomach that truly disturbs him and calls his girlfriend and entomologist Jenny Devereaut, Gretchen Corbett, to check it out. It turns out that his as well as the city of New Orleans, worst fears are borne out. Zeth was killed by a swarm of deadly killer African Bees. With a number the crew of the Corlina Rios bodies recovered from New Orleans Harbor it becomes more and more evident that the banana boat has a colony of African Bees hidden in it's hull.... 

Jenny ends up being stuck in her red Volkswagon,the color red attracts the killer bees. Jeff in a last act of desperation has her drive the car with him in a police car pushing her Volkswagon, the last mile, through the now empty streets of New Orleans into the Superdome. 

The temperature inside the enclosed sport facility is lowered to 45 degrees immobilizing the killer bees and having them collected and brought into the custody of Dr. Rufus Carter's lab for further study.

Crank up the meat-locker temperatures, Saints fans. It may be the only way to immobilize Tom Benson.

Suspicion

This might just be me on a lack of sleep, but we are a country full of suspicious minds lately. This goes beyond my son wanting to be an amateur sleuth, when he's not telling me how he'll kit-bash HO-scale model trains.

I returned from an out-of-town jaunt this past weekend to read this about the Wall Street arrests I'd heard about:

The fact is that while at one time in our nation's history individualism was seen as a serious threat to the status quo, now not only is it not dangerous, it's an almost comical anachronism. There is no individualism these days. Nothing truly audacious can stand in our culture, not when our culture has become so monstrously adept at assimilating all forms of rebellion until they become completely meaningless and utterly impotent. Prepackaged, homogenized non-conformity is as close as your local Hot Topic. Agitation is fashion. Defiance is a slogan. Insurrection is product placement. The revolution is not only televised, it can be DVRed and enjoyed at your convenience.

So, no, hundreds of people wearing different colorful outfits, each carrying a sign emblazoned with his or her personal agenda not only constitutes an ineffective mess, it provides endless fodder for the idiots at Fox News, who get to smirk patronizingly and present it as good news from the front, as Matt Taibbi once called it, for their audience of bitter old people.

The protest itself was important -- too important to be incompetently executed to the point that it could be easily dismissed by the masses.

But admittedly, something has happened over the past week or so: A single, fundamental message of Occupy Wall Street has begun to coalesce, and a series of disorganized grievances has slowly started to dovetail into one, coherent movement. What's more, the outrage voiced by a few has lit a match to the anger felt by millions -- and the resulting fire is now spreading rapidly, with similar protests flaring up across the country. Occupy Wall Street may have started as a muddled gathering of occasionally conflicting ideas, but it was the spark that was needed to potentially create a conflagration. And it's damn well about time.

I've always believed that in order for a protest of this kind to be effective, it would have to draw the support of -- and present as a public face -- more than simply the youth, since young people can always be shrugged off as misguided or simply in need of a job to better occupy their time (the latter criticism being wonderfully ironic given the very reason for the protest in the first place)....

...It's more than just a bunch of "deluded kids" now. It's the impossible-to-deny men and women who've found themselves crushed under the heel of an unaccountable and out-of-control corporate culture -- of those consistently on the winning end of the rigged, zero-sum game that success in America has gruesomely morphed into at the beginning of the 21st century. They're part of the vanishing middle-class -- and they're fucking sick of it. We're fucking sick of it.

I'm not a fan of the Rage Against the Machine brand of social upheaval, which is the reason I was wary about Occupy Wall Street at the beginning. But the band was right about one thing, and it may provide the perfect summary of what's erupted on the streets of New York City: It has to start somewhere. It has to start sometime. What better place than here? What better time than now?

...and then I took a look at Jennifer Williams' interview with Julie Lause, principal of the newly reorganized Harriet Tubman Charter School on the west bank and found that I was still pretty suspicious of the people who do want to do better by the kids here but who still must straddle the standards set by the feds and the state. I do wish Lause well in this:

We really believe that if the teacher teaches well all year, we shouldn’t have to do “test prep” to prepare them for the LEAP and iLEAP. All year, teachers are teaching to the standards and these interims are a way for teachers to do course corrections and make sure all the students really are mastering the material.

This is a great thing to aspire to. I hope it holds up when parents begin panicking about Tubman's school rankings, as they will. Unfortunately, the life of the school depends a tad too much on it, which is what's partly responsible for the revocation of the Algiers Charter School Association's Tubman charter in the first place. And, apparently, the former Tubman teachers who decided to stay with the ACSA...

(according to Lause:

LAUSE: All of our teachers are new to this building.

LENS: Was that a strategic decision on your part or was the old faculty reluctant to get involved with the turnaround?

LAUSE: The former ACSA teachers chose to stay with ACSA, I believe.)

.... seem to be getting screwed for their loyalty. If anyone can corroborate the following, please let me know:

@bcreative10 ACSA#rsdcharter annouced to teachers that they will no longer have a retirement plan!

As for somewhat happier, less suspicious news, I started my weekend with bad chicken-treatment information only to spend a good part of my time in Buckhead with my aunt's gorgeous free-range chickens. None of these babies will be swinging 'round anyone's head anytime soon.

Update, 7:27 PM: I am still suspicious of Occupy Wall Street and its satellite movements, largely because they are more re-actions rather than actions. There is definitely something - a whole lot of somethings - wrong, and more concrete goals are needed, because, like it or not, we are a goal-oriented society. Look at the commonalities in all your stories. Please. Then start from there.

I missed tossing my sins into the Mississippi this year (why symbolically toss your sins into a moving body of water? Fish don't blink.). I've never done this*, and I had no clue that there was a large amount of protest surrounding it. I should've figured. This is pretty cruel:

To get their message of peace for poultry out, The Alliance To End Chickens as Kaporos is going to host not one, not two, but THREE two-hour protest/demonstrations in Brooklyn this year. The group argues their side like this: 

The use of chickens in Kaporos rituals is cruel and contrary to Jewish teachings. It is not a mitzvah but a custom that originated in the middle ages. Most observers give money to charity which they express symbolically by swinging coins while reciting prayers for mercy and peace. Swinging and slaughtering chickens as Kaporos violates tsa’ar ba’alei chaim, the Jewish mandate not only to avoid needlessly hurting animals, but to show them compassion.

There are indeed other ways to show that you've repented. At this point, the chickens ought to go on strike...

Here's to a good, sweet new year. Leave the chickens alone. 

___________________________

*The Gothamist article makes a cheeky reference to the Occupy Wall Street protests in the article to boot. Perhaps some swinging of money about the heads of some investment firms' CEOs might get a little repentance going there. Who knows?

I still cannot resist bookstores to save my life, and I really should, but I took a look in a local one today to get a surprise tome for the little guy (okay, and a little something for myself). I found myself browsing through this one:

Wow.

My little guy is going on nine and is already engaged in reading and talking (or should I say lecturing?) about environmental issues such as recycling, the oil spill, and alternative energy: if he could stand up in front of a group of people and give the impassioned speech he gave on the above-mentioned subjects to his carpool mate in the backseat on the way to school this morning, he could well get more people to start hounding Congress and private research entities for affordable clean alternatives. Yet I hesitated to get this book because of its frightening implications...

A few things instantly came to my protective mama brain:

•  An interview in comic form Art Spiegelman conducted with Maurice Sendak around the time Sendak came out with a children's book about the homeless. I could only find it in Spanish through the interwebs, but I recall the discussion between Sendak and Spiegelman presenting a justification for a graduate school instructor I had to deny her young daughter the opportunity to read Spiegelman's comic opus Maus until she was older because of its frank discussions and depictions of the Shoah. There's something to be said for age-appropriate introduction of thorny subjects - but then there's the point where you have to ask yourself, as a parent, when the protective nature of your child-rearing becomes overprotective.
• There are differences between reading about this stuff and seeing it. Big mistake on our part: taking the kiddo to see WALL-E. We'd been warned about the entire first half of the flick being kind of scary for young kids - a dusty, abandoned planet with a lone robot charged with compacting mounds of garbage, his only friend being a small cockroach he nearly squashes - and he didn't calm down until the lone robot hitched a ride to the humans' ship with his robot love EVE. It's pretty much why we rarely watch the news or take in documentaries like Gasland or anything about the Macondo blowout with the little guy at this age. Does he really need the weight of possible futures on his shoulders at this stage of the game?
• That said, we've all got to struggle with the fact that our time on this planet is finite, as are our resources, yet here we are doing the things that will supposedly ensure that we'll stick around for generations to come: having children, raising them to carry on as we have done. We must also struggle with the fact that some things have gone awry in this assumption of "progress" and take solid steps to alter our paths, because no amount of sheltering our kids is going to keep them from seeing that this world is, in fact, not perfect and we could be doing a hell of a lot better. Any possible models we may have presented them with for living may well be turned inside-out and stood on their heads despite our best efforts. Ultimately, willful ignorance on our part - and on our son's - could be our undoing. But - once again - can an eight-year-old really handle this?

I flipped through World Without Fish quickly and liked a few things in it towards its end. There are actual suggestions of what individuals can do to stop the demise of the fish populations around the world and guidelines for local activism that include having a sense of humor. Not bad, really.

But...not until he gets a little older.

I'm sure he will then be ready for the following:

Heart-breaking pictures of seabirds covered in black crude oil, arresting as they are, can miss the hidden story of an oil spill's impact on wildlife.

Exposure to even tiny concentrations of the chemicals present in oil can also cause harmful biological effects that usually go unnoticed, according to a study published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"It's striking that even though the analytical chemistry doesn't indicate exposure, the biology does," says Andrew Whitehead, a biologist at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, who led the study. "We can measure all the chemistry we want in the environment, but if want to know whether organisms have been exposed, we have to ask them."

The researchers studied the impact of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill on Gulf killifish (Fundulus grandis) living in the Gulf of Mexico. They collected water and tissue samples three times from marshes where the killifish lived: once in early May, before oil from the blown well had arrived; once in late June, when oil had reached the marshes; and again in late August, after oil was no longer visible. They collected samples from six sites, but only one -- in Barataria Bay, Louisiana -- was heavily oiled following the spill...

...Whitehead has previously shown that exposure to polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) can cause harmful gene expression changes in killifish, which are an important food source for many species, including economically important ones such as red snapper. Because PCBs and the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) found in crude oil have similar biological effects, the researchers looked at their impact on the same set of genes.

They found analogous changes in gene expression in killifish from the marshes, and in killifish embryos exposed to contaminated water samples in the lab. These changes have previously been shown to cause developmental abnormalities, decreased embryo survival and lower reproductive success. "It doesn't take much PAH to mess with development," Whitehead says.

"The ability of fish larvae to survive has a huge effect on the population down the road," says biologist Lee Fuiman, director of the University of Texas Marine Science Institute in Port Aransas, who was not involved with the study. "A small change in the percent survival equals a large change in the adult population."

If he decides to write about it for school, here's hoping it won't be suppressed.

Sorry, folks, can't resist this:

:

Geaux, Saints.

9/24/2011: Oh, and, my gut reaction on hearing about this was...well, it kinda started to turn my gut inside-out. I agree with Ian that it is indeed probably the worst trend in sports, this insane, seedy business of selling a stadium's naming rights, but the upside is that it spawned a heck of a Twitter hashtag harnessing the best of this town's sense of humor. Go add to it if you've got anything. It's better than antacids.

And, if Benson & Co. were really serious about trying to attract sponsors, they shoulda taken a cue from the New Orleans Levee's second issue ever and put a giant "You Can't Beat Wagner's Meat" bumper sticker atop the Dome's roof.

Halcyon Daze

It's never something known fully at the time - when you're busy living your life, the possibility of stopping to look around is mostly not an option - but there are times that shape and scar your mental landscape so vividly that their impact isn't fully realized until years later.

See, I embarked on something kinda new for me a few months ago (check the, um, reviews in the back of the pdf for my by-line on a few). It's been a challenge, but a good one, although nearly every time I rack my brains trying to come up with ways of describing what I hear (and wonder why I jumped at doing album reviews in the first place in the low points of the process), I discover more and more about the prism through which I see today's music.

1989: My family moves me from sprawling metropolitan Houston to small town Pennsylvania at what I felt was the worst possible time. Sixteen, missing my friends with every fiber of my being, I find some solace in watching MTV on cable - something I never had access to unless I went to friend's houses back in Houston - getting a subscription to Rolling Stone, and getting to know my dad's record collection better than he did. My parents, one New Year's Eve, watching The Last Waltz, were racking their brains trying to figure out which band was the main attraction. "Who are these guys?"

"Dad, you have their albums. It's The Band."

"What, who?"

"They're right here, Dad," I say with teenage exasperation, yanking out the Brown Album and Stage Fright.

I go through the rest of my high school years convinced that, by and large, popular music is kind of a wasteland except for R.E.M., most early-'80's era music coming out of Athens, Georgia, Neneh Cherry, Talking Heads, They Might Be Giants, and early Violent Femmes. My suspicions are confirmed when I go to my first concert, a double-bill of Squeeze and Katrina & The Waves, after a friend urges me to go see a band that's still playing music, not one that's alive only on records, tapes, and posters like the Beatles or the Who. I admit that it was good to dance to but it didn't really speak to me any more than that. It's okay to dance, don't get me wrong, but man, did I want more.

_______________________________

This past Saturday, I turned on NPR and heard snippets of this interview. Later on, that same day, I saw this post, and could not believe how freaking old I felt. 1991? It's been that long ago? Don't tell me that. '91 was the beginning of the process of my busting out of the small town I'd been held in for two years, the home of those who expressed surprise that I'd actually made plans to go to a college outside of Pennsylvania. Yes, the world was bigger than the Keystone State, and it was certainly much larger than my parents' house. Location, location, location...

And if what I'm going to say next sounds like a cliche, well, it happens to be one that has truth behind it. Not much gets the kids into music more than location, and that goes doubly so for kids attending art schools. All-day studios three times a week, homework designed to make you nearly lose your head (you don't want to know about how horrible designer's gouache is), and terrible cafeteria food combined to make the freshman dorms a holding tank for all sorts of crazy doings at all hours. When clandestine underage drinking wasn't going on (all you had to do was look in the recycling bins in the trash rooms to see that it was, in fact, happening), all sorts of furtive sex, some drug use (and hey, wasn't it great that Spray-Fix, a relatively cheap high, was pretty much required in freshman foundation?), or random acts of public art and public annoyance (woke up to two of those: both the upper and lower quad covered with masking tape outlines of people, animals, and bikes one morning, and then sixty people drumming in the lower quad at 3 AM), the next best release was music.

If you could afford going to shows after blowing loads of money on art supplies for your courses, you went. If you couldn't, you got hold of albums wherever you could - if you hadn't already brought a ton of them with you - and you blasted them as you worked in the super-messy dorm studio spaces. The Doors would beat against Blues Traveler shouting down Bob Marley, melding into that Julee Cruise/Angelo Badalamenti Twin Peaks music my roommate would play ad nauseum when she wasn't watching my copy of When Harry Met Sally... on our VCR practically every time I walked into our room (I still can't watch that movie all the way through), folding into De La Soul, Public Enemy, the latest U2, and some Metallica screaming down another hall where, when two guys discovered they were in the room a rock star briefly stayed in during his time at the school, they somehow determined which side of the room his bed had been on and positioned their beds against that same wall to "pick up his vibes." Jane's Addiction vied for attention with Black Flag, Sonic Youth, the Grateful Dead, Neil Young, the latest R.E.M., the Flaming Lips, and Helmet. The effect of walking through the halls was sometimes schizophrenia-inducing; I wasn't entirely sure which music was out to get me more, or which I wanted to carry me off, for that matter.

Once I got hooked on glassworking, I didn't have much of a choice. If you had a blow slot for three hours, one of the best ways to cut the roar of the furnaces was to blast the hot shop stereo. Second or third year glass students would usually monopolize it - one trio would constantly get the Allman Brothers or the Pixies on; I liked the latter better than the former - but the default was always the local indie station, where so many more sounds were piped directly into our brains as we kept hot glass from falling off stainless steel blowpipes and got better at shaping it into vessels and other art works. It thus seemed much more than serendipitous when some of those sounds were coming out of one of the great studio glass Meccas of the 20th century. Seattle was it in no small part because one man with an eyepatch decided to establish a couple of Glass Wonderlands, one of  'em by Puget Sound, another 50 miles north of Seattle proper, where the first students legendarily braved the rain and the damp, raced banana slugs in what little spare time they had, and slowly, steadily built a school for generations of other glass artists.

I finally got to the Mecca to do mostly what I'd been doing up to that summer: work away with my favorite medium. The Pilchuck campus was beautifully isolated and very dry that summer, the only trip into Seattle was to see Chihuly's Boathouse studio, and the only music I remember hearing in the hot shop was Professor Longhair, Morphine, the Iguanas, and Ween. The imagined Pacific Northwest shone so much more brightly back at my art school on the East Coast - the reality was a gas station barista getting pissed off at me because I didn't order a cappuccino the way she thought I should. No wonder Kurt Cobain wrote the kinds of songs he did.

Life went on after that, as did the music. I found I liked Pearl Jam's second album much better than their first, that Nirvana's Unplugged was better than their regular albums in some ways because of their versions of great tracks by the Vaselines, the Meat Puppets, and Bowie, and that I really preferred Hole to Bikini Kill. My time with glassworking flamed out, but my love for music never did.

So, hey, bear with me as I try to decide whether to be shocked or pleased that some of these guys and gals are still making music - or not, as the case may be - and I find some new stuff that may or may not be to my liking. This is supposed to be fun, I'll tell myself as I rack my brains once again over how to put music into words. Fun - or obsession?

I'll get back to you on that...