Next year. The (cold) drought here is so bad this desert rat craves rain, heat and its accompanying humidity. Shorts, tank tops, barbequed ribs and cold beer now! How else is a former Kuwaiti resident to celebrate the death of Osama bin Laden? Screw that, I’m more worried about the impact of the Mississippi River floods downstream. Data nerds, parse this: US Army Corps of Engineers Near Real-Time Gages reporting Hourly Stage Data. Let me know if there are better data to look at.
It occurred to me that a blog post can be two sentences long and provide evidence that neither VatulBlog nor I are dead.
While we’re making discoveries up in here, I
- have uncovered an inverse correlation between extreme productivity at the new job and frequency of blog posts here. It’s not even that I don’t have the time, energy and inclination to post during the day; my brain and creativity are put to such great use in that time that there is little left for the evening. Plus, Big D and I are still unpacking, unwinding, un-everything.
- am an extreme germaphobe, except when it comes to lovin’ on dogs and cats. Go figure.
- beat myself up too much over “not a writer” and/or “don’t write enough” when I clearly write when I put the old noggin’ to it. Example: The Season 2 opener post over at my other joint, Back Of Town. She’s a non-writer who doesn’t have enough time in the day for this blog, but runs an other blog. Uh huh.
- am signing off to watch Bladerunner again. Speaking of which, a number of Philip K. Dick books were posted to Project Gutenberg this morning. Check them out.
Here I sit in a friend’s living room in New Orleans with a few moments to myself. A rare luxury these days.
When things happen in my life, they tend to happen all at once.
1) The Packers won the Superbowl! It all happened so fast – we went from possibly wild card to laying the smack down on the Giants to beating the Bears to making it into the playoffs to beating the Eagles and the Falcons (?!). And then another epic meetup with the Bears in Chicago where we all know JAY what CUTLER happened. And just like that we were in the Superbowl and won it. Tada! Utter disbelief.
None of this has been given any time to sink in because of
2) Some big news I will drop next week. No, I am not pregnant, dear aunties of the world whose ears perk up each time I place the words “big” and “news” in the same sentence.
3) First the Superbowl and now massive labor protests. On, Wisconsin!
Pro-Labor protests in Madison (CC Image courtesy of Lost Albatross on Flickr)
The Cheesehead Intifada, The Velveeta Revolution, The Asiago Agenda is going down in Madison and all over Wisconsin. Cheesy jokes aside, this quick post can do no justice to the gigantic worker protest in my state and its implications for public- and private-sector employees’ right to collective bargaining nationwide. What is at stake here is fair, living wages and benefits for state employees as well as their right to organize together for better contracts. It’s also about our long-term quality of life and services as a nation, which are at risk thanks to short-sighted, stop-gap measures that are politically-motivated and do not even begin to really trim the fat. For as the saying goes, “Pay teachers, cops, etc. as if they’re amateurs and incompetents and amateurs and incompetents are the only ones who will take the job.” Yes, everyone must make sacrifices in this economy, but why are the targets inevitably the people who can least afford it and not the people who broke our economy in the first place? What about Wall Street and parties who got significant tax breaks paying us back?
Thanks to First Draft (hugs and smooches to Scout, who spent days in the Capitol and rocks so hard!) and gl33p for working hard to keep us informed this past week. Check out photos from my friends Plankers and Jon Miner (when he gets around to posting them). And you go on with your bad self, Charles Woodson!
4) And the whole reason we’re in New Orleans: Krewe du Vieux 2011. The 25th anniversary of the krewe and parade. And, boy, were we 25 years Wasted. The Krewe de C.R.A.P.S. theme this year was 25 Years Of Running From Bullshit and we channeled the spirit of the Pamplona encierro as well as San Fermin en Nueva Orleans to honor a quarter century of running from the crap heaped on New Orleans by politicians at all levels.
That’s all I’ve got. The pictures will do the talking. Please do me a huge favor and put links to your KdV photos in the Comments’ section.
FEBRUARY - The New Orleans Saints won SuperBowl XLIV which made QB Drew Brees our Bacchus XLII. All hail!
MARCH - Attended my second Where2.0 conference in San Jose, CA, where I did not play pool with OpenStreetMap founder, Steve Coast.
APRIL - In Madison, WI for the Department of Geoscience Alumni Board meeting. Of great interest then was the meteorite that had just landed in southwest Wisconsin and a sample that the UW Geology Museum obtained. The BP oil spill had also just begun.
MAY - Memorial Day weekend brings the Class A Arabian Horse Show to the Ohio Expo Center. These beauties were our neighbors' contestants this year.
JUNE - Hay baling in Northeast Ohio
JULY - Downtown Columbus, OH
AUGUST - Back in New Orleans for the launch of A Howling In The Wires and the fifth annual Rising Tide blogger conference. I moderated the Treme panel of Eric Overmyer, Becky Northcut, Dave Walker, Lolis Elie and Davis Rogan. The smell of Sardines In Louisiana Hot Sauce that Davis placed in my hand has still not washed off.
SEPTEMBER - Fort Collins, Colorado
SEPTEMBER - Chicago for a weekend with Athenae (and her adorable ferret trifecta), Anne and Lisa. And a record number of photographs from the Art Institute.
OCTOBER - The Dude at the Rally To Restore Sanity And/Or Fear in Washington, D.C. What point the rally made I do not know, but we had a blast wandering amongst our own on a beautiful day in the nation's capital.
NOVEMBER - A wonderful week in and around Dublin, Ireland (as opposed to Dublin, Ohio) with Domingo and Mark. The 20+ pubs we hit were great, but what call me back are the hills and hiking trails of the beautiful glacier-carved Glendalough and its monastery. I have to return soon. Like tonight.
DECEMBER - Orlando, FL for the annual I/ITSEC conference. It was very nice to catch up with old friends and take pictures of domesticated hotel ducks without a) scaring them or b) falling in their pool.
Note: Thanks to geobloggers Silver Fox and GeoTripper for inspiring me to do this post. Check out their beautiful travel photographs, too.
The costumes. This is why you have to go vote today. So I stop inflicting these nerdy, quadruple-entendre getups on you.
The sad part is D’s costume didn’t take all that much effort and HE got high fives and “Duuuuude” all day long, while people came up to me and said, “What are you?” (or yelled “Love the hat! What are you?”) If I have to explain this nation’s love-hate relationship with Louisiana and its fuel sources as well as the (most recent and arguably) worst environmental disaster in US history to a bunch of folks attending the Stewart-Colbert Rally For Sanity, we’re in a lot more trouble than people not getting my costume.
… Are more people likely to engage with the subject matter than journalism? Sadly, yes. That is true. If “Treme” runs for some time and gets out on DVD and video on demand, people will find it and maybe it’ll have an audience of 8-10 million. When I wrote a nonfiction narrative about the drug trade in Baltimore, if it had sold 100,000 hardbacks, it would be a New York Times bestseller. The economy of scale is so shockingly different that I have to acknowledge it has a greater reach than actual journalism, which is vaguely disappointing. This is a country that doesn’t read.
I love that this man has an audience and hope he has the opportunity to run Treme through five seasons. He deserves it.
During the Family Reunion / Navaratri Confab a couple of weeks back, I chatted with a cousin who lives in New York, someone I haven’t seen much of over the years what with the two of us moving all over the world and America for most of our lives. Some relatives you grow up with, some you meet again as an adult on adult terms (or, in my case, the closest possible approximation of “adult”). You have to understand my cousins and I were raised in strict, orthodox-Hindu households and to stand with wine glass in hand talking with these people who look like you, in the absence of parental supervision and approval, is kinda a big deal. It’s a bigger deal when your cousin, whom you’re just getting to know again, tells you her husband and she watch Treme and The Wire and that she is head over heels in love with Zeitoun. Squeeeeee! Comparing notes and simply sharing this awesome point of commonality was the best time I had that evening, besides the impromptu costume party later at my house that lasted until 4AM.
Talking David Simon and his work seriously with a member of my family. Who’d've thunk it? Of course, this means more cool people who want to visit New Orleans with D and me as tour guides.
Of course, this also means someone related to me will be reading Back Of Town. Oh boy.
The EPA yesterday concluded a two-day hearing in Binghamton, NY on the topic of hydro-fracking. This is what an attendee said at this hearing (as tweeted by @edrcommonground): “No one wants H2O contamination but NY economy is bleeding blue collar jobs, need fracking now.”
