Hometown hurricane inside baseball

I've been in the Midwest for a while, y'all.

This means I have grown accustomed to looking to local government for, well . . . government. This means I've grown unaccustomed to looking to local government for entertainment.

Then another hurricane hits Louisiana and I end up glued to the computer, watching the hometown TV news online, and suddenly I'm confronted by some clown dressed unconvincingly in police casual as he tries to rock it like Clint Eastwood rockin' it like Dirty Harry.

Again, unconvincingly.

And I'm thinking "What the f*** is this?"

THIS THOUGHT LASTS for a split second. Of course, it's the mayor of Baton Rouge, Kip Holden (right).

And of course, it's a hurricane. Hurricanes mean that Baton Rouge mayors have to start acting all bad ass -- it's a city ordinance or something, I think.

They have to tell people obvious things as if the fine citizens are abject morons -- which, of course, many are. They have to threaten to arrest all those potential offenders of the public order, throw their asses in jail and then laugh when Yankee civil-rights advocates demand that arrestees be supplied with soap on a rope.

I think I even saw Kip do that corner-of-the-lip thing. He even may have said "punk" a couple of times, but don't hold me to that. I was laughing pretty hard -- it all was soooooooo Baton Rouge.

I MEAN, if you were a looter, would you be deterred by the sight of . . . that?

Me neither. By the way, nice flat screen you have there, Your Worship. And you keep the jewelry and cash where again?

And for what it's worth, I think the Boss Hogg look (top) would work a lot better for you. And if you could have a joint press briefing with Gov. Bobby Jindal when he's doing his "Mister Rogers on speed" act, that would be great.

What is dumbth?

WAFB 9 News Baton Rouge, Louisiana News, Weather, Sports
I can't define it, but I know it when I see it.

Oh, look! Here's a great example caught on camera as Hurricane Isaac turned Louisiana's Lake Pontchartrain into a swollen, storm-tossed tempest -- which, of course, is to moron 20-something males as a light bulb is to a moth. And with similar results.

The last Founding Father

I would be remiss if I failed to point out that George Jefferson was a Founding Father. He also is on the $2 bill.


Not many people will tell you the full story about how momentous the sitcom character's passing is, along with that of his alter ego, Sherman Hemsley. But I just did.

You can thank me later.

Yes, this is an oldie but a goodie. But how could I not revisit it on this sad and notable occasion? Jordan Jefferson: The gift that keeps on giving.

If Louisiana were capable of shame . . .

. . . the following "fun" fact would do it.

But it's not.

C'est la vie.

SO, WE'LL just have to let J.R. Ball of the Greater Baton Rouge Business Report be ashamed . . . verklempt . . . mortified on its behalf.

Here's a fact that should make anyone who breathes the contaminated air in this state shudder: Haiti commits a greater percentage of its budget (13%) to higher education than Louisiana (11%).

That's right, the government of a third-world, impoverished nation still struggling to recover from a massive earthquake in 2010 invests more, on a percentage basis, in higher education than the government of Louisiana. That would be the same Louisiana that supposedly is in year five of the eight-year Louisiana miracle.

For those conditioned to respond to such dismal news by saying, “Well, at least we're not Mississippi,” consider that the Magnolia State commits 17.7% of its state budget to higher education, nearly 7 percentage points more than the Bayou State.

So pardon me if my reaction to the just-concluded regular legislative session is a bit more muted than that of those celebrating the “historic” reforms that were approved by Gov. Bobby Jindal and friends. No doubt it was a great session for those demanding reform of K-12 education, but it was another dismal one for higher education. It's gotten so bad that we're forced to celebrate a cut of just $66 million because it could have been as much as $225 million. Yet, remember, higher education must also cut $25 million between now and the end of the month, for a total hit this session of $91 million.

If you are keeping score at home, that's $451 million in budget cuts to higher education since the Jindal administration took office. Moreover, the administration -- thanks to gutless special interest legislators—is now oh-fer-two in its attempts to merge a struggling four-year institution with another university, including one involving Southern University at New Orleans, recently rated as the worst-performing university in America.

FOR YEARS, every time the wife and I head down to Louisiana for a visit, we have commented on the ongoing "Port-au-Princification" of vast swaths of my hometown, Baton Rouge. This refers to how what was nice-to-average now just has become shabby and vaguely Third Worldish.

And now I'll be damned if Louisiana won't even allow me to use ever-so-modest hyperbole to illustrate a bloody point. No, it insists on seeing my dramatic license and raising me a "WHAT THE Fµ¢#???!!!"

Alas, beating your head against the reinforced-concrete wall of the Gret Stet's cultural and political dysfunction is the height of futility. Unfortunately for Ball, someone's got to do it.

Sigh.

The air that Cher breathes

Cher won't grow up
(She won't grow up)
It's more fun to just emote
(Lots more fun to just emote)
Learn to squawk just like a parrot
(Tweet and squawk just like a parrot)
And spew like a fireboat
(And spew like a fireboat)

If growing up means
It would be beneath her dignity to let her dumbth flow free
She'll never grow up, never grow up, never grow up
Not she!
Not her!
Not she!
Not sheeeeeeeeee!

-- Apologies to Carolyn Leigh

This says nothing good about anybody

There's one hapless hog hunter in Florida who has some 'splainin' to do on, oh, so many levels.

I think I'd best leave it at that. The story is here.

I . . . I . . . uhhhhh . . . you . . . well . . . HUH???

This may be the single most idiotic thing I have ever seen in print.

This is so factually wrongheaded -- and concerning some pop-culture knowledge so basic -- that I suspect it may have been written and edited by space aliens undercover at The Gateway, the student newspaper at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.

You won't believe it. You won't buy a word of it. You'll go slack-jawed. Unless, of course, you're 5 years old . . . or you're a space alien, too.

OK, here it is:

An interesting thing I've heard is that pop radio is an Omaha invention. When I asked Montez about this historical lore, he had some compelling details to add. He said that during some refurbishing in the Benson area, his father recovered memorabilia from a restaurant called Sandy's Escape.

In 1944, Sandy Jackson, who is considered Omaha's first pop disc jockey, got the chance to do a live one-hour show from 11 p.m. to midnight playing groups like The Hollies, The Beatles, The Byrds, The Beach Boys and The Mamas and the Papas on KBON radio. [Emphasis mine -- R21] Soon, he added "The Rhythm Inn" in the afternoon, and by 1946, he was on the air opposite WOWT (Woodmen of the World-TV) star radio host Johnny Carson.

IN FACT, should you follow the link and read this January article about the Omaha roots of Top-40 radio, be aware that it contains pitifully few facts amid an ocean of inaccuracy and sheer ridiculousness. In fact, had an editor cared to actually edit the story, he or she couldn't have -- the only remedy would be to start from scratch.

And by "scratch," I mean start by not interviewing Channel 94-1 disc jockey Montez, because the man either is clueless or was pulling the reporter's leg. Then, after not repeating that first fatal error, the writer would have to re-research the article and conduct interviews with people who know what the hell they're talking about.

He could start here. And here.

After, of course, he relived a major portion of his young life -- this time paying attention.

It takes a lot to shock me after 51 years on God's green earth. This newspaper feature did the trick.

Way to go, Gateway.

I can haz apostrophe?

Molly the Dog can't believe it. She thought the humans were supposed to be the smart ones.

Silly dog.

I suppose it would be too much to assume that the canine on the Milk-Bone box is named Mini. I suppose it's too much to assume that both dogs on the boxes of Milk-Bone "Mini's" answer to Mini.

And I suppose it would be a really gigantic stretch, at this point, to assume the United States hasn't become a nation of blithering illiterates.

OR THAT in another 20 years, as Americans devolve into communicating by a series of grunts and clicks, creatures such as my little friend Molly will come to be known as "the articulate ones."

For all I know, she already may have better mastery of the difference between possessives and plurals than your average U.S. high-school graduate.

Come to think of it, that may explain why, after giving the box of treats a good going over, Molly looked at me, cocked her little head and asked "What the hell, Dad?"

I hate it when that happens

TV flashback -- 1978.

SATURDAY: DICK TRACY LERNS TO SPEL

SATERDAY: DICK TRACY LURNS TO SPEYL

SATURDAY: DIK TRACEY LEANS TO SPELD

SATURDAY: DYCK TRACY LOYNS TO SPAYL

SATURDAY: DICK TRACY SEZ JUST @#$! IT

You mean there's a difference?

The journalists of the PBS Newshour can find one-armed gay yak herders in Tibet for long-winded features on the homoerotic qualities of thin air and missing limbs.

What they can't find is Mississippi on a map.

Thursday evening, during a story on the Haley Barbour pardon scandal in the Magnolia State, a full-screen infographic presented the eye-raising tale of the tape, while underneath the litany of statistics was a map of . . . Louisiana. I can't speak for Mississippians, but I think I can speak for those born and raised in the Bayou State.

They ain't happy.

The visual error probably came down to something as mundane as public television's image bank of state outlines stopping short of "M," thanks to the cheapskate ways of pledge-dodgers like yourself. I must confess, however, that my first jaded thoughts turned to East Coast parochialism and the perils of being stuck in "flyover country."

All those states where people talk funny and live in trailer parks are pretty much all the same, right? Am I right? Louisiana . . . Mississippi . . . it's all like In the Heat of the Night, right? Who'll notice?

The first thing I saw in my mind's eye (after I had made sure my eyes' eye had seen what I thought it saw) was that iconic cover of The New Yorker. This one:


I REALIZE the Newshour is produced at WETA in Washington, but the general thesis holds up. Both Louisiana and Mississippi are in front of the lump called Texas. Somewhere.

I think you can get there by exiting the Beltway -- someplace -- but it's harder if you get in the HOV lane.

As a native of one corner of flyover country and a resident of another, that -- like I said -- was my first aggrieved thought. I was probably being a little paranoid and conspiratorially minded.

I'm sure the error, which I'm sure the Newshour staff regrets, was due to something as simple as the nearsighted arts editor of the Economist, fresh in from London, sitting in for the WETA graphics guy, who had a few too many cups of chai and had to make a trip down the hall. Hell, it's not like I could find Stratford-Upon-Avon on a map of England.

Or . . . it might've just been that the JPEG clip-art folder only went up to the letter "L."

Thanks to viewers like you.

Noted newspaper fails epically

I totally forgot to post this until now. I think that was a Freudian thang or something.

But I did want to post the front page of Tuesday's Baton Rouge Advocate to show you what LSU's offensive game plan would look like if it got translated into a newspaper front page about the BCS football championship.

"TIGERS LOSE"? Are you (expletive deleted) kidding me?

If any of the approximately 12 billion unemployed American newspaper journalists saw this thing -- an effort the newspaper's designers and editors apparently phoned in between bouts of worshiping the porcelain god at a local sports bar -- they probably shut down the computer, cursed God at the manifest unfairness of it all . . . and then died of a burst aneurysm.

"TIGERS LOSE"? Really?

Almost three decades ago, Mother Teresa visited some of her nuns in Baton Rouge. It was a really, really big deal locally. And the then-Morning Advocate's banner headline on the Page 1 story?

"Noted nun visits B.R." No fooling.

Some things never change.

Almost any combination of coins

Can you have a true Catch-22 if you can't put in your 2 cents' worth?

Will a Catch-20 suffice?

Inquiring minds want to know.

And there I went to the newspaper machine with what I thought was a fail-safe plan to unload a buttload of pennies.

The Twitterian Paradox

"Follow me and I follow you"?

Uh, not exactly.

And not only because of the hypocrisy of it all will I not follow back @followmeback on the Twitters. I will not follow back @followmeback because I'm allergic to spam.

You follow me?

It's oy veh, oy veh. . . .

Kill me now. No . . . wait. No need to. Just let this here video play out, and that should do the trick.

Is it just me, or did Christianity start to lose its savor (if not its Savior) when it stopped leading the culture -- embracing and creating art for beauty's sake, because beauty itself is a manifestation of the divine in this world -- and started following a false gospel of crass utilitarianism?

I wonder what went first, the church's mind or its heart?

You remember how, in "American Pie," Don McLean sang "the Father, Son and Holy Ghost caught the last train for the coast"? I now know why the Holy Trinity might have done that.

Sorry, guys, there's no escaping sanctified diarrhea like "Sunday," which merely rebrands the secular diarrhea of Rebecca Black's "Friday." And sadly, the fact remains that crap like this is about the best American Christianity can muster anymore.


I'D CALL crap-evangetastic mush such as this liturgical lounge lizardry if the mere association weren't totally unfair to Nick the Lounge Singer.

It ain't rocket science, brothers and sisters.

If you spend four or five decades bombarding the wretched masses with superficial garbage and calling it Christian, don't be shocked that the world isn't beating a path to the church house door. Even heathens (well, some of them, at least) have standards.

And eventually, they come to think that God is as full of crap as His people.

Culture shock, demonstrated

I guess word takes a while to reach Massachusetts.

This sometimes results in good-government consultants not having heard, and then in people being shocked. Which, given the reputation of New Orleans and Louisiana, is itself just a little bit shocking.

Anyway, this "turnaround consultant" came to the Crescent City to advise Mayor Mitch Landrieu on how to slide the city an inch or two toward the good side of the "government generally works, people generally care" continuum, and he didn't quite run screaming into the humid night . . . but it was pretty close there for a while.

Really, the guy hadn't seen anything like it. And it's not like he just fell off the proverbial turnip truck or something equally clichéd.

AFTER EVERYTHING had been studied, his recommendations drawn up and his report tendered to Landrieu -- and after he presumably had cried into a few stiff hurricanes at Pat O'Brien's -- David Osborne talked to the Times-Picayune:

Osborne, who has advised dozens of cities on streamlining efforts, said Thursday that New Orleans faces myriad, deep-seated problems, the likes of which he has never encountered.

"I was kind of shocked," said Osborne, who served as a senior adviser to then-Vice President Al Gore's National Performance Review initiative. "I think they inherited the least competent city government I'd ever seen in this country and the most corrupt -- a really tough experience. I just haven't run into this level of dysfunction before, and I've been doing this work for almost 25 years."

(snip)

Other observations about city operations included poor customer service, a focus on relationships rather than results, centralized authority that gives little power to rank-and-file employees, contracting and internal workforce systems that lack rewards and penalties, unnecessarily complex purchasing procedures, a fragmentation of city services among independent boards, and poor working conditions and equipment.

"These people, they feel hopeless," Osborne said of morale among city employees. "It's drinking from a fire hydrant. There's so much work coming at them, and they can't keep up with it, and a lot of it is paper rather than automated. And then there's skill issues: secretaries that can't type. I mean, stuff that you just don't see other places."

NO, you don't.

I have written about this. A lot.

Maybe it could have been fixed if the victorious Union hadn't bailed on Reconstruction after only a decade and a half or so. Nation building, after all, always is a long and messy process, and the Yankees didn't occupy the Gret Stet long enough to even make a dent in the cultural underpinnings of a whole heapin helpin' of dysfunction and non-American thinking.

So there you go. As we in the expatriate community like to say about Louisiana (and this goes double for New Orleans), it's a great place to be from.

2011 was a bad year for history education

Dear Louisiana T-shirt purveyors:

You might find it helpful to stick to tried-and-true subject matter for your sartorial creations. For example, LSU (spelled L-S-U) is always a winner. Likewise, you can't go wrong with "Geaux Tigers" (spelled L-S-U).

Also, gastronomic subject matter generally is safe. You know, gumbo, red beans and rice, jambalaya (spelled ???????) and "Suck da heads."

You might, however, wish to avoid more complex subject matter, such as politics, socioeconomics, religion (apart from WWJD, spelled W-W-J-D) and Louisiana or American history. For instance, take the T-shirt design above.

Can you spot what's wrong with that shirt?

Think Louisiana history class. Eighth grade. I'll wait while you look confused and then flail about on Google.

Oh, dammit to hell, here's a hint: The parishes north of Lake Pontchartrain and east of the Mississippi River are called the Florida Parishes for a reason. What is it?

A flaming zip

The good news is that we're still a creative, innovative nation.

The bad news is it's increasingly in the service of the banal. The dumb. The pointless.

And the profane.

Enter the Flaming Lips' new YouTube project, something the group is calling a "cell phone symphony." It really is quite clever and innovative -- 12 separate videos that correspond to a single track of the band's new free single. (Profanity alert, etc., and so on . . . click at your own risk.)

The idea is for you and 12 of your closest mates to each download a track, go "one, two, ready, play" . . . and you're the Flaming Lips. Or your iPhones are the Flaming Lips . . . whatever.

AND WHAT is this new development in popular music? It's a little avant-garde number called "Two Blobs F***ing."

Paste magazine was all over the story. I hope it was practicing safe keyboarding:

The Flaming Lips have been known to experiment with ideas such as this in the past. The 1997 album Zaireeka is made up of four discs intended to played all at once. Around the same time, the band produced “The Parking Lot Experiments” and “The Boombox Experiments” inviting fans to simultaneously play cassette tapes issued by the band with varying pieces of music through their car stereos and ghetto blasters to create a psychedelic symphony conducted by the band.

Now, the next logical step has come to fruition with “Two Blobs F***ing,” which was specifically designed to be utilized with the mobile devices that dominate our increasingly digital culture. “Imagine the lo-fi symphonic joy that you, along with family, friends, pets, and others, will create at the touch of a button,” reads a press release. “The more devices, the more harmonic possibilities can be constructed. You and your device, at one with the music, become the orchestra, just as the Gods of Technology naturally intended it to be.”

OF ALL the things that could have been done as the first multitrack, interactive, do-it-yourself smart-phone single, we get vulgar nonsense like "Two Blobs F***ing." What could have been genius -- and kind of is genius from a technical standpoint -- ends up being birthed as the idiot offspring of cleverness and a dirty mind.

It's rather like a Philip Glass composition consisting of variations on the theme "There was a girl from Nantucket. . . ."

Call it the debasement of art. Listen for yourself, though. (I assembled all the audio tracks in a multitrack digital audio workstation so you wouldn't have to . . . or have to try to round up 11 friends with smart phones -- and a high threshold of pain.)


I'M NOT SURE what this is more of, prurient or pointless. Actually, what it's more of is 8th grade -- which is where, unfortunately, too much of our culture's "artistic" sensibility lies.

As it is, "Two Blobs" just leaves me with . . . nothing. I'm not shocked. Neither am I outraged.

The single didn't have much of a beat, and you couldn't really dance to it. I might give it a 42, Dick.

It didn't leave me smiling, and it troubled me not with deep thoughts. Really, it's nothing. And art -- music -- should not be nothing.

But we're addicted to pushing envelopes for the pushing's sake, even when we have nothing to say. Unfortunately, increasingly, we're a culture that has nothing to say.

It's almost as if we were 300 million blobs mentally masturbating. Call it a mortal sin of the mind.

When geeks do hype

If we all paid as much attention to making actual good products as we do to bullshit, we wouldn't have to worry about how we'll ever manage to learn Mandarin.

So we can converse with our new Chinese overlords.

This is the Windows Phone 7 team celebrating, no doubt, the inflicting of yet another so-so Microsoft product upon the world. Oy. So geeks think they can dance?

THEN the WinPhone peeps had a "funeral" for the iPhone. And took pictures with an Android phone.

Oops.

Thus, the story of America today. All hype, no substance. All hat, no horse.

All bullshit, no side of beef.

How about this for a revolutionary, countercultural thing for tech hipsters to embrace? How about, when you make a new product, you make sure it's a good one, OK? And then you could, like, shut the hell up about it.

Celebrate by lifting a couple at the neighborhood tavern. Tell someone "Attaboy!"

Or "Attagirl!" We're not sexist.

JUST QUIT giving us reasons to think your mad tech skillz may be, in reality, just as lame as your choreography. And your parade planning.

Jolly good show, Rupe!

As we used to say in junior high school . . . DUHHHHHHRRRRRR!

Imagine . . . Rupert Murdoch locked up The Times website in a virtual Tower of London. His competitors didn't.

And, after he no doubt did all kinds of research to justify what he was hellbent upon doing anyway -- and after no doubt spending loads of money putting up the paywall -- what happened was what I could have told him would happen in exchange for a MacBook and a bottle of good bourbon.

THE READERS all went somewhere else, and The Times was quite effectively removed from the Internet conversation. But don't believe me, believe The Independent -- where you can read all about Rupert's Folly for free:

As the fugitive businessman Asil Nadir flew back to Britain from his North Cyprus bolt-hole last week, Sean O'Neill, the crime editor of The Times, scooped Fleet Street by being the only print journalist on the plane. Yet those searching Google for the latest on the breaking story that morning would have found no sign of O'Neill's exclusive – only follow-up stories by rival news organisations such as The Guardian and ITN.

Two months after Rupert Murdoch's decision to erect a subscription paywall around the websites of The Times and The Sunday Times, thus removing their content from search engines, the bold experiment is having a marked effect on the rest of British media. There are many who still wish the 79-year-old mogul well, hopeful that he is at the vanguard of a cultural shift that will save newspapers. Yet elsewhere there is dismay among analysts, advertisers, publicists and even some reporters on the papers.

Faced with a collapse in traffic to thetimes.co.uk, some advertisers have simply abandoned the site. Rob Lynam, head of press trading at the media agency MEC, whose clients include Lloyds Banking Group, Orange, Morrisons and Chanel, says, "We are just not advertising on it. If there's no traffic on there, there's no point in advertising on there." Lynam says he has been told by News International insiders that traffic to The Times site has fallen by 90 per cent since the introduction of charges. "That was the same forecast they were giving us prior to registration and the paywall going up, so whether it's a reflection on reality or not, I don't know."

He warns that newspaper organisations have less muscle in internet advertising campaigns than they do in print. "Online, we have far more options than just newspaper websites – it's not a huge loss to anyone really. If we are considering using some newspaper websites, The Times is just not in consideration."

THE TROUBLE with newspaper dinosaurs today is that advertisers aren't nearly as stupid as they are. DUHHHHHHRRRRRR, indeed.


P.S.: Thinking on this a little more, I believe there's only one way you'll make paid online "newspaper" content work. It needs to be iPad friendly; it needs to be a rich, flashy multimedia experience . . . and once you've bought it, you need to be able to keep it on your hard drive, or whatever. Just like you can keep a dead-tree edition of the paper.

As they say -- or at least used to say -- in the housing market: Why rent when you can own?

Last (re)call for alcohol!

You want to know why reporters drink?

It's because the jackasses they often have to cover make their brains hurt, and alcohol helps to deaden the pain. A little.

Take the Omaha World-Herald's Maggie O'Brien, for instance. She covers city government . . . and the people who try to blow up city government whenever they get in a toot about something. Usually, it's taxes.

LOOK AT what the poor girl has to deal with daily. If she's not at The Dubliner swilling black-and-tans right now, she's a totally amazing woman:

A group exploring the possibility of recalling Omaha Mayor Jim Suttle has launched a website that will take donations.

The site, mayorsuttlerecall.com, was launched Tuesday. Organizers said donations will be accepted online by Tuesday afternoon.

Last month, the Mayor Suttle Recall Committee announced it had raised $5,000 by Aug. 17, triggering the group to file with the Nebraska Accountability and Disclosure Commission. The group plans to take out recall affidavits later this month.

IN CASE you've not apprehended the irony here, let me help.

The Mayor Suttle Recall Committee wants people who allegedly are so strapped that they can't pay another farthing in any kind of a tax -- no matter how dire the city's financial situation -- to donate money to them to recall the mayor. For raising taxes.

Because we're all broke.

But not too broke to give what you'd likely spend in higher taxes to a bunch of well-off cranks and cynics to blow up city government because you don't want to pay higher taxes.

Because you're broke.

Destitute. A $15 wheel-tax hike from losing your car to the repo guy, losing your house to the bank and being reduced to wandering the streets of River City filling a hijacked grocery cart with castoff aluminum cans -- which you desperately hope you can turn into enough cash to buy a Big Mac and a Budweiser tall boy.

JUST REMEMBER this one important thing, all ye poor, desperate, taxed-into-nothingness wretches of Omaha:

If you are concerned about having your name attached to the recall, donations of $249.00 or less do NOT have to be reported to the Nebraska Accountability and Disclosure Commission.