Update, 8-14: this post got nominated as a Just Post for a Just World! Thanks, Holly!

At an antiwar march, circa late '60's-early '70's, Dad had an epiphany from mis-hearing the crowd's synchronized cries to end the fighting in southeast Asia. "Peace - NOW, Peace - NOW," they shouted in time to their waving fists, swinging back in the air with each "Peace" and forwards with each "NOW".

Dad looked around and, for a moment, thought he was in the middle of a ragtag parade in Nuremberg. The forward motions of everyone's arms had an outstretched hand, fingers together, instead of a fist. The protest for peace had become "Sieg -HEIL" to his unbelieving ears.

It was the beginning of his disillusion with marches as effective forms of protest. Not to say that he doesn't believe in pointing out the idiocy of our leaders when it comes to that, or how insane people's attitudes towards the sciences these days are. He's simply more likely to be trying to marshal the already converted or the more-likely-to-be-converted with letters, emails, and citations of evidence to support his views, like most any scientist (or any individual with half a brain) worth his/her salt does. It does you no good if you are in prison for your beliefs, just speak up only when you have to and pick your battles carefully.

Then again, Dad is a human being. Sometimes he'd get so mad, the barely passive-aggressive behavior would come out - like the time he got so incensed at the electric company sending him a late notice threatening disconnection if his payment was late when he'd already sent the payment. He decided not to pay it at all for a couple of months, which led to the lady taking care of my then-infant brother shooing representatives of the electric company out of our backyard for a while. His knee-jerk reactions to some things can be at best irritating and at worst scary. But hey, life can be unpredictable, and my dad can be just as unpredictable right back at it.

We all want to be able to plead our cases against injustice, idiocy, and stupidity as sanely and as calmly as possible in order to be taken seriously. It's certainly what my grandmother tried to teach me and, on occasion, beat into me as a child: little girls especially should be seen and not heard. God help you if you are too loud, too assertive, and, sin of all sins, too prone to lose your temper as a young woman.

And things are still that way...even if you are a woman nominated for the Supreme Court:

The hearing was a performance of a broader set of social rules that govern race and gender interactions in American politics. Women, and most especially black and brown women, have to prove their fitness for public life by demonstrating the ability to endure harsh brutality without openly fighting back. The ability to bear up under public degradation is a test of worth. America's favorite black woman heroine is Rosa Parks, a woman who is remembered as silently enduring the humiliation of being ejected from a public bus for refusing to comply with segregated seating.

Sotomayor passed the test. She met the Senators' questioning with thoughtful responses. Her voice did not quiver. Her face did not scowl. Many women of all races feel inspired by her. But I wonder about this lesson that continues to teach women that we can only have space in the public realm as long as we control all emotion.

I wonder about this quite a bit, myself, as something has come to my attention regarding blogging and social justice...namely, a blogger's vulnerabilities.

There are loads of reasons to speak out, certainly, about misconduct and the way things really

work...but the consequences of doing so are too great for too many. Though this is indeed worrisome, it is a fact of life. The internet is becoming a place with a higher profile, and with that higher profile comes more of a realization that the monitor you view the typing and publishing of your posts on is not one-way glass. It is best to keep in mind that, though many employers are using the internet as a tool to help them weed out candidates for positions, they may not be as thorough in their background checks due to being pressed for time. In such situations, a creative outlet or a virtual place in which one can blow off steam can be a liability.

There are creative solutions to such problems without having to give up the blogging: anonymity, clever disguising of real-life situations, password protecting those posts that might be incriminating, or not putting those situations into your posts at all. When a job is involved, these are things that must be weighed.

I personally find that having a child in my care puts even greater emphasis on the latter of the four solutions described above. Since the closure of my son's school due to a case of the swine flu amongst the students, the name of his school has been fully unmasked. Though I would like to rail against the school for a number of things that have been going on there in the past year, I have to balance out the knee-jerk feelings I have to expose all the dirty laundry there in the name of change and a touch of spite (and maybe not necessarily in that order, considering the nature of my reactions sometimes) with the facts of the positive things the school has done and still does for my child, and with my belief that there are still some things that can be changed from within. I don't want to jeopardize his education - and the fact that we aren't paying out the nose for it - for the world until it really doesn't seem to be working for him. This doesn't mean I won't be blogging about any schools in the area...just not the one he's attending.

To get a bit biblical about it, the Tanakh speaks of "every man being put to death for his own sin". This world doesn't quite work that way. My son could well suffer for what I write.

And though I really really want to change how that works, I must pick my battles ever more carefully.

It's a lot to chew on.

Call me crazy, but I can't resist this:

One southern Wisconsin homeowner is probably not in love with the Oscar Mayer wiener. The famed hot dog's Wienermobile crashed Friday into the deck and garage of a home in Mount Pleasant, about 35 miles south of Milwaukee.

Police said the driver was trying to turn the Wienermobile around in the driveway and thought she was moving in reverse. But she instead went forward and hit the home. It sat in the driveway as if it were stuck in the garage Friday afternoon.

I hope the wiener whistles are okay.

And speaking of wieners....

I emailed ConAgra Foods, the makers of the world's superior hot dogs, about the "Louisiana style" hot dog and what it is. I got a response that essentially said a Louisiana style dog is one that is sold in Louisiana....an answer that ought to have had the Wienermobile crash picture illustrating it.

Katrina-related published works have been a part of my reading material for a few years since this time in my life...and I keep trying to figure out why this is and how much I ought to be ashamed of it, or stoic about it, or whether I should stop the nonsense altogether once again.

I think a lot about whether or not reading these things will eventually build things up within me to a point where I can't take it anymore, whether reading repeatedly about the billions of unkind cuts administered to this region by the many people, organizations, and levels of government who were supposed to be helping us will be damaging my psyche irreparably. The last thing this area needs is another psychotic person running around with a grudge against any authority whatsoever...there are more than enough of those around, which is what I suspect is behind this lady's decision not to run for city council again.

I'd date allowing more of the memoirs and such into my piles of books to about late 2007. Actually picking them up and reading them to 2008. And I must say that, though the writings tug at my mental well-being some, it is not as bad as my current reactions to what I was doing over a year ago.

Most days, I veer past one location in particular that is threatened with demolition, am compelled to jump in there with my camera, and then I remember this.

I'm scared at what I could find.

At the same time, however, I got this notification through my flickr email a number of days ago:

I am from New Orleans, and found your site looking for photos of my old High School, Abramson.

I left after Katrina and my wife does not want to move back, but I worked there until last year.

I told him Abramson is gone - even the temporary classrooms are no longer there - and that it is questionable if any school (hell, anything at all) will be built on the vacant grounds.

I thought I read in the Picayune that they were going to build a combination elementary and middle school, but that was a while back.

Another graduate (I graduated there in 1970) told me about it being torn down.

A lot of memories were in that school. . .

And that hurts my heart more than any piece of 8-29-05 writing has to date.

My inner struggle continues.

Update, 4:02 PM: Seems at least one school is in the last bit of its rebuilding phase. The grand tour:

Bon quatorze juillet, everybody!

Yep, it's the commemoration of that day in 1798 when the populace of Paris had fun storming the prison.

Dan and I heard an announcement on the radio for the French Market's celebrations of Bastille Day, took in the announcer exclaiming over the "special guest - Napoleon!", and immediately broke into big grins, because we were thinking the same thing.

I can imagine Napoleon coming today to where he was offered a refuge here in New Orleans when he was instead exiled to Elba and booting everybody out, with a "merde" or two thrown in for good measure. Funny, though...the Napoleon House is closed for vacation, beginning today. L'Empereur Bonaparte probably just wouldn't let everybody back in come le trente juillet.

Then again, despite Marie Antoinette's inclination to serve brioche to the masses (not cake), I can certainly see the queen of France getting into the swing of things with the uptown upper crust. I especially picture her online response to questions such as these as being along the lines of "Cancel les vacances? C'est une idee terrible!" as she runs for her hameau to slum it as an idealized dairymaid.

There ended up being many excesses in revolution as well as in the halls of Versailles and the Louvre, however, which is why I think the current occupant of the Place de la Bastille is especially apt:

Vive L'Opera de la Bastille! (on the left)

And go have some cake.

I found a funny in this morning's Times-Pic travel section. In an article about the Newseum in Washington D.C., a teenage visitor is overheard saying, "Picayune. That sounds so stupid," when he sees the front page of our local rag exhibited in the hall of "Today's Front Pages".

Well, yeah, I guess it does, to people who don't know about da paper's history.

It seems, however, that its history might be overshadowed by its online presence.

- I can't find the article online that I am referencing here - at least, not yet. And even if it were already up on the nola.com site, I wouldn't be able to find it unless I did a direct search of the article's headline along with its author. The site is difficult to navigate, for certain.

- Even if I could find the article easily, there's the question of whether or not I'd want to bring traffic to it by linking to it:

I read the headlines and get an understanding of what's happening but I don't dig too deep. Sometimes I go a day or two without looking at all. Last night I was playing around on the Internet when I finally checked the news and saw the stories of all the killings. There was a double murder in the Iberville Housing Development that caught my eye because of the location and ages of the victims (There won't be anymore links to news sites on this blog until someone figures out how to clean up the comments section. I am not promoting any websites that condone people disrespecting my race.)

So what's to be done? Do we go so far as to take digital photos of the dead tree T-P to corroborate what we read in the news today (oh, boy)? Do we keep writing the people who run nola.com and tell them what schmucks they are being by not moderating comments, equating "freedom of speech" with "anything goes - even racism, sexism, and just plain offensive talk"? Do we tell kids at the Newseum some of the nicknames we have for our local rag that might enumerate how stupid we think it is sometimes? Or do we support the local daily regardless of it all, because it's ours and it's the only one we've got?

Yep, only in New Orleans...well, with Pamplona as inspiration...and nobody here died from being gored by a bull...at least no one I know of.

The Running of the Bulls in New Orleans

STUCK...big time...

I married someone who is, geographically speaking, a great deal like me.

We are both from places, but not of them.

How best to explain this?

Though I was born in Tennessee and grew up in Texas, I have no strong attachments to either place anymore and can't even navigate my cities of birth and of childhood well without a map. There are only two places in which I have truly felt at home - New Orleans and New York City. NYC is more the domain of my paternal grandparents, but it is also the first place where I truly felt as though I were charting my own course apart from my family.

Dan, though born and raised in California, tends to feel closer to the midwest, specifically Chicago, as well as New Orleans. Both are places he landed in post-college. Chicago was also where there were strong ties to a set of his grandparents.

Geography is much larger than just where you are this second. It is a good part of how you identify yourself...but it helps to be realistic about this.

For instance: I am fond of kidding my in-laws in No-Cal about the San Andreas being all their fault, since they live quite close to it...

...but they don't deserve to be in a state that is now so financially strapped it can't even conduct Michael Jackson's funeral without asking for help to pay for security. Where one charter school in particular is successful enough to have a new building, but has to go begging for the necessary stuff to put inside its walls.

"Hey, for once, your state is making ours look less bad," Dan said to his mom with slight glee when she bemoaned her state's financial crisis.

At the same time, however, when an exhibit at the Queens Museum of Art superimposes the locations of foreclosures atop its semi-historic Panorama of the City of New York...

Each plastic triangle represents a block where there have been three or more home foreclosures. Visitors on the balcony walkway that surrounds the Panorama, at the Queens Museum of Art in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, can see in a single glance precisely where subprime lenders wreaked the most havoc.

Hundreds of these pink stigmata cover Bedford-Stuyvesant, Crown Heights, East New York and Canarsie in Brooklyn like an invading army. In Queens most markers are camped out in Ozone Park and Cambria Heights, as well as in parts of Jamaica and Corona. As for Manhattan, there are precisely two.

This mapping of the 45-year-old Panorama is part of a larger exhibition about housing, in which politics intersects with art.

“I hope that my work operates on a principle of opening up a set of issues for exploration,” Mr. Rich said.

Titled “Red Lines Crisis Housing Learning Center,” the show includes photographs, models, drawings and sculptural installations — like a large, three-dimensional wooden graph of interest rates over the past 70 years — that offer an explanation of how the private housing market works, beginning with the federal government’s involvement during the Depression.

...it seems that neither end of the country is faring too well these days.

If it isn't the loss of our homes or our money that will hurt us, it will most decidedly be our health that does us in. Thank goodness we've still got that. As my grandpa says, if you don't have your health, then what have you...

...Oh. Right.

Time to give Mary Landrieu another call, y'all. And don't mind any rude staffers you might come across.

Dear God, we are so stuck.

by Greg Peters

Click on the pic above to read the whole thing.

The other day, I suddenly thought of one of the many stories that used to be on the national TV news.

It wasn't one of the momentous, earth-shattering ones that seems to be the lifeblood of all news stories today, the ones that have numbed us all to the point where the same earth barely whimpers when a news anchor shouts. It was about a man who lived near a major crossroads, where many had gotten lost and he was the only one around to give the lost a clue as to where they were and in what direction they should be heading. Sick of this position he found himself in, the man began making his own road signs, directing everybody to all the places they'd asked him about, adding new destinations on the signs based on the wayward travelers' queries that still came his way, despite the signs he'd made.

The story had appeared on a segment of the CBS News that was called On The Road. The man who brought us the story: Charles Kuralt.

I remembered the gandy dancers, the man who decided to build his own highway across a midwestern state, the small town cafe where all the coffee cups were emblazoned with a regular's name after said regular had drunk five gallons of coffee...all due to Charles Kuralt.

I began to read his book America at a moment in my grandparents' house when I was cutting the boredom with a knife, and was charmed at the tale he told of a house for sale that had once belonged to an upper crust member of Charleston society, who was appalled when a potential buyer had ventured into a part of the house in which the soon-to-be former owner would never have gone: "You went into the kitchen?"

After checking out some books of his from the library recently, I found that a great secret of his that he'd kept all the years he'd been traveling the country and wrangling several different types of RVs in his quest for the gems hidden in the everyday, the next-door, and the so-called run-of-the-mill had come to light. He was an adulterer all those years, a fact that seems to have tainted his legacy for all time for some:

Reactions to Kuralt's marital infidelity ranged from censure to sympathy. Faced with two disparate images of Kuralt - one whose friends characterized him as a national hero; the other of a man who cheated on his wife for nearly three decades - I found it difficult to reconcile how I should remember him. His moral frailty contrasted sharply with the seemingly strong convictions of the television personality who espoused goodness and character and virtue.

The apparent contradiction muddled Kuralt's image not only in my mind but also in others. Following my January 1999 cover story on Kuralt for North Carolina's Our State magazine, one reader angrily fired back that he was deeply disappointed that we would pay tribute to Kuralt: "Is it not now widely regarded that Mr. Kuralt led an adulterous, scandalous personal life that must surely have brought great shame to his wife and family? In no way do I view Mr. Kuralt in the high esteem as I did before these revelations."

Each must reconcile a person's gifts to this world with the fact that we are all flawed human beings who mostly want nothing more than to transcend our humble origins - even Kuralt with his legacy. He was not a perfect individual - but even his wife forgave him his longtime frailties. In many ways, the strongly adverse reactions to these revelations in light of the stellar career and personality he built over decades says a lot more about how successful he was at his job than about how good or bad he actually was as a person.

Death seemed to have canonized this man before these revelations, especially when Kuralt passed away on a date as momentous as the Fourth of July:


Watch CBS Videos Online

I for one am grateful that he passed through our lives in his way, showing us all how extraordinary the simple and the mundane could be in this world that seems to increasingly encourage us to leave all of that in the past. Kuralt even convinced Walter Cronkite, a scion of network news, of the wisdom and value in his reporting of subject matter that was not so worldly as to be almost otherworldly.

Without this man, these stories would not be with us today.

Without this man, I probably wouldn't be writing this blog.

Happy belated Fourth to Mr Kuralt, of blessed memory.

My grandmother always loved Ray Charles.



GM, this is for you.

Happy 4th, all.

A little something was passed along through the bloggers' listserv by Matt McBride: the link to this interview that was done with Hizzoner the Walking Id after he was cleared to leave Shanghai and continue on to impart some supposed bits of disaster wisdom to folks in Australia. I am not in the mood to watch it at the moment (as far as I'm concerned, if the identity of the "tech-savvy person" in charge of doing virtual surgery on the mayor's emails has not been revealed in the interview, it's not worth much) so feel free to DIY and leave your impressions in the comments here.

(*Head to Da Zombie for more info on "the professional" and on other recent revelations about misbehavior meant to discredit the Inspector General stemming from Nagin supporters)

I may tackle watching it later on, but I am instead unraveling my feelings of disgust over Barack Obama's plan to dazzle Louisiana people and pols with his rationality concerning the public option in health care: All I can do is make rational arguments and hope they catch; it's a great experiment.

A great experiment.

Barry, man, listen to me, please: this state's health care does not run on anything near the scientific method. We are not one giant laboratory in which we will all submit to being pickled by chronic illnesses for the sake of your rationality - which is suspect anyhow. Presenting rational arguments for a public option and likening their acceptance to throwing them against a wall and seeing what sticks is highly irrational.

According to our governor, who has cut funding to a much-needed mental hospital here in New Orleans, this state is running in the red, a situation in which thrift trumps sanity. According to our Democratic "good" senator Landrieu, it runs on good old-fashioned level-playing-field competition fostered by private insurers, a large number of whom have given her money to ensure that their positions in that level field will be greater than that of the public option. According to those same insurance companies, their rules can be bent and twisted into a Mobius strip of excuses as to why the claims one files for compensation for medical procedures are of no concern of the insurers - pardon us, O claimant, while we take your money and run. Don't get sick, now, stay healthy!

The only rationality that speaks to all of the abovementioned entities in this game of providing affordable health care to all is that of the color green.

Speak rationally, Mr President, but please, carry a big solid gold stick that you have no hesitation about using. Money will keep talking long after your voice has been silenced.

...and if Mary Landrieu's lack of support for the public health option doesn't drive you a little crazy, Bobby Jindal's veto of funding for the New Orleans Adolescent Hospital might well ensure we all go off the deep end here for lack of facilities devoted to the treatment of mental health.

Seems fitting that the forum for advocates of an override of Jindal's veto will be held on Bastille Day.

The folks in Baton Rouge are lucky nobody from here is bringing their protests there....not yet, anyway.