Fruit o’ the Loon
’07 Installment # 5
If I have failed to offend everyone, I’m sorry.
NOTABLE QUOTES
Political Correctness is a doctrine fostered by a delusional, illogical, liberal minority, and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd by the clean end.” Anon. The Loon includes this not for the opinion stated, not even for the florid tenor of language, but rather, for the imagery.
2. “One old friend is better than two new ones.” Yiddish Proverb, The Loon would agree,
provided the old friend had not become a “no count”.
NEW ORLEANS AFTERTHOUGHTS
The loon finds New Orleans eternally interesting, even fascinating. It is as close to a foreign city as we have in the United States, yet it is also utterly American. The native New Orleanian accent is redolent of that spoken in Brooklyn and upper New Jersey. The people are more than friendly, they are gregarious. On an extraordinarily pleasant day, Rudy and I stepped out onto the street after lunch in the French Quarter and the doorman of a hotel said, “This weather is so nice, I think I’ll get married again.” Where are you gonna go to hear something like that?
New Orleans has let one of the biggest private contracts ever, to keep the French Quarter streets clean, and it is working. Trash laden gutters, long an eyesore for fastidious tourists, are no more. Guys drive many little street sweeper machines, and guys walk around with pointy sticks and bags, and Voila! the streets are largely free of trash. Is it not miraculous what the private sector will do for money?
New Orleans is home to a large working class and a large artist class. The strategic shipping and petroleum industries in southern Louisiana require a considerable labor force, and that is why arguments to just abandon post-Katrina New Orleans were never taken seriously. And, one need only stroll about in the French quarter, the Garden district, Up-town and the Forbourg/Marygn and Bywater neighborhoods to appreciate the presence of a huge artist community. In addition to music, which everyone knows about, painting, sculpture, jewelry, needlework, and glass art studios abound. Further, New Orleans is a cherished home to many writers.
Of course, the city jealously guards its old architectural appearance. Many Katrina ravaged modest homes which I would have thought were certainly “tear-downs”, are having replacement clapboards lovingly fitted over the skeletons of old black moldy 2 by 4s, and ornamental cornices on shotgun houses* are considered precious. If you own a building in the French Quarter, and want to paint or repair anything, you must get permission from the Vieux Carre commission which rules on any alterations and even the color of paint you may use. For good or bad, more than any city in America, New Orleans is in love with it’s past.
* A shotgun house is a long thin house from front to back, so called because if you shoot a shotgun in the front door, you will shoot out the back screen door, and, like as not, kill everyone in the house. Shotgun houses are often duplexes set on deep lots with only about 30 feet of frontage, and many shotgun houses appear to have been longerated by the addition of multiple rooms onto the rear.
Residential and commercial New Orleans is being rebuilt—one house at a time, and one business at a time. Not all neighborhoods are coming back. Some are all but abandoned and in a state of arrested ruin, but in those neighborhoods which are struggling back, you can seldom drive a block without seeing a Dempsey dumpster on a front lawn, or a covey of worker’s trucks parked on the street. Indeed, almost half the vehicles on New Orleans streets are trucks—not ‘burb faux-cowboy pick-ups mind you, but working trucks, many pulling trailers full of rubble, building supplies or tools.
The proliferation of small communities of 24 foot long travel trailers continues. Often they are fenced and gated in parking lots and the trailers are lifted well off the ground so the external above ground sewer pipes have enough slope to drain. If they have a prolonged hard freeze down here, it will cause a constipated mess in the sewer pipes. Doubtless, most of these trailers are housing for construction workers. Rental housing is very tight and damned expensive in New Orleans, and on the 80 miles of Interstate10 between New Orleans to Baton Rouge (we drove it) truck traffic is thick day and night. In residential neighborhoods, it is hardly possible to be out of sight of a travel trailer parked on a front lawn. Some front lawns have two travel trailers. While some are temporary housing while the home is being worked on, it is apparent that some of these houses are now occupied, and the trailers are either grey-market rental housing, or housing for relatives or friends who have lost their homes.
I visited an old friend who lost his home in Mandeville, a small town on the north shore of Lake Pontchartraine. His one-story home was 5 feet above sea level on a bayou near the lake, and the storm surge brought the water up to about 5 feet above sea level, and so they had to take down the building. He said many non-evacuated families thereabouts lived for weeks in the same buildings where they worked. That is to say if they had buildings left to work in. Streets were impassible for several days due to down trees, and electrical power (in late August in southern Louisiana) was off for weeks. There were whole lakeside housing developments which were reduced to sodden flotsam—cars turned over, piles of wet furniture, insulation, roofing tiles and structural lumber piled up like jackstraws. The only buildings spared were those raised 10 feet on concrete pillars.
Rudy and I drove to Slidell (also on the north side of Lake Pontchartraine) to look at the house I rented for a year in 1974. It was a beautiful old place on Liberty Bayou, Built on 14 acres of Loblolly pine forest by a curator of the New Orleans’ Audubon Zoo as a summer house, It was then sold to jazz clarinetist, Pete Fountain, who sold it to Al Stone who was the project engineer for the Lunar Rover (that 10 million dollar one-of-a-kind taxi cab we flew to the moon and left there). Al then rented it to me. It was a large two story 3 bedroom square frame home with a large added kitchen. The first floor great space had a huge fireplace, and was lined with Pecky (worm-eaten) Cypress, a rare and expensive lumber today. Out back, there was a swimming and wading pool connected by a small water-fall. Other buildings included a screened pool house, a six stall horse stable and a shed. There were two small ponds and two improved pastures on the property. There was a barbeque pit, a shelter house, and a dock down by the bayou. There is nothing left of any of it. The only reason why we know we were on the site is because we saw the white plastic bones of a temporary greenhouse which had been there about 15 years ago. It was clearly the most elegant and memorable house I have ever lived in, and it makes me sad to think it has simply disappeared into the Katrina vortex.
CYCLIC EPIDEMIC PROPAGATION OF E-MAIL FORWARDS
Is it the Loon’s imagination or have the best of the internet forwards become both unduly reiterative and cyclic? It appears to me that when I see a new e-mail forward, usually a good joke, or piece of political cant, it often appears from multiple sources, and then, it goes away. Later, it reappears with another flurry of forwardings, and sometimes it can even recur once more. It is understandable why forwards have geometric propagation; it is sooooo easy to continue the e-contagion when you don’t have to make a copy, put it in an envelope, affix a stamp and take it to the mail box. The cyclic appearances of a forward is also understandable; when a forward reaches an addressee who has not seen it before, the natural belief is that it has not been around the cyber-horn before, and thus, the addressee starts another round of e-contagion. It’s like internet Influenza. Of the last 53 e-mails I have sent, only one was a forward, but of the last 53 e-mails I have received, only 9 were principally addressed to me, all the rest were forwards and some of these were repeaters. The Loon has a remedy. See, if these computers are so damned smart that they can detect spam, why can’t they detect previously received forwards, and automatically return them to the sender, informing the sender that the Loon has already received the forward. Is that too much to ask? Are there any gifted software scribblers out there who will volunteer to do this simple thing for the Loon?
DEAD PLAYBOY PLAYMATES
Every now and then the Loon will receive a titillating e-forward, e.g. a recent one entitled “Dead Playboy Playmates”. Well, maybe this was more morbid than titillating, as it listed the 30 now dead Playmates. Since the quarterly “Playboy” began in December 1953, there have been, by the Loon’s calculation, 257 playmates, (No! I have never subscribed), and since all were young women when they appeared in the magazine, none could be much older than, Oh! say, 75 today, and with a median age today of about 47. The mortality rate of 11% for this cohort of women, all of whom, obviously lived to be very Ahem! healthy in their early 20s seems high. This is what killed them; three died of suicide, five of drug overdoses, three of automobile accidents, two by homicide, seven of cancer, three of other natural causes, one in an airplane accident and the rest due to unknown causes. There must be some doubt that a control group of demographically similar non-Playmate women would suffer an equal or greater mortality rate. Further, consider this; the average age at death of the 30 Playmates was 47. This raises two questions: 1. What is there about being a Playboy Playmate which reduces longevity? And 2. Who beside the Loon has so much spare time on his (I presume they are all “his”s) hands, that he can gather or analyze this kind of data?
HANK BAUER DIED LAST WEEK
The Loon was in the French Quarter to see the parade of the Mystic Krewe of Barkus, a floatless parade spoofing the up-scale Krewe of Bacchus parade. Barkus krewe members are dogs; hundreds of dogs; all breeds of dogs; mongrel dogs being pulled in wagons by people; painted, uniquely clothed and artistically clipped dogs; almost all of which were well behaved—a few alarm “Woofs”, but not one dog fight, nor a canine disagreement. It was there that the Loon saw across the street a St. Louis baseball fan suitably attired in a Cards warm-up jacket. Crossing the line of parade (a no no) the Loon identified himself as a fellow Cards crazy. We shared the moment when Cards’ pitcher, Wainwright, froze the Mets’ Beltron, (who had worn out Cards’ pitching) with a monster curve on a 3 and 2 count with two outs and the winning Mets’ runs on base in the last of the ninth of the 7th game of the series. That curve made the Cards 2006 National League Champs and assured, in my mind, that they were destined to win the World Series. And, that which was destined came to pass. .Before we parted company, my fellow fan mentioned that Hank Bauer had died three days before. How in the hell could Hank Bauer die and me not know it? Memories flooded back. A mere Loon fledgling in waiting in St, Louis went to baseball games at Sportsmen’s Park early to see infield and outfield practice. Even after 25 years as an infielder in baseball and fast-pitch softball, the Loon still relished the regimented ritual of infield practice as a graceful form of sports ballet. The adolescent Loon adored watching major league outfield practice, three fungo flys to each outfielder, with one throw to second, one to third and one to home. Guys with cannon arms liked to have their fungo flies sent deep so they could show off their guns. Right fielders usually had the best arms as they had the longest throw, to third base. Hank Bauer was a right fielder and he had a gun. He was a Yankee but when he uncorked a really good throw in warm-up, usually to home, the St. Louis fans in the stands would go “Whooooooo!”. I played baseball with only one man who made it to the major leagues, Charlie Peete. He died in an aircraft accident after one year up with the St. Louis Cardinals. Charlie Peete had a gun. When he threw the ball, it made a boiling churning sound as it went through the air. Both Hank Bauer and Charlie Peete could “hang blurred ropes” from the outfield. The Loon has seen ‘em both do it.
PREVIEWS OF COMING ATTRACTIONS
The Loon has finished reading “Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon” by Daniel C. Dennett. It was one of the most difficult books the Loon has ever read, and writing a Loon’s Mini-Book Report will be equally difficult, but, brace yourselves, as it will be in the next FotL.
DISCLAIMER
You must know that a “Fruit o’ the Loon” is never finished; only abandoned. The process of writing takes a couple of weeks of gathering bits and pieces which pique an interest, and when it reaches a certain length, the Loon just get tired of picking at it like a scab, to cull jangling syllables and useless words. And when that happens, out it goes with the bits toward the top benefiting from repeated editing; while those toward the bottom are usually rife with raggedy-assed writing. This one is out of the oven—out it goes.
Allen Hall, the Loon
February 13, 2007 in post-tornado New Orleans
’07 Installment # 5
If I have failed to offend everyone, I’m sorry.
NOTABLE QUOTES
Political Correctness is a doctrine fostered by a delusional, illogical, liberal minority, and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd by the clean end.” Anon. The Loon includes this not for the opinion stated, not even for the florid tenor of language, but rather, for the imagery.
2. “One old friend is better than two new ones.” Yiddish Proverb, The Loon would agree,
provided the old friend had not become a “no count”.
NEW ORLEANS AFTERTHOUGHTS
The loon finds New Orleans eternally interesting, even fascinating. It is as close to a foreign city as we have in the United States, yet it is also utterly American. The native New Orleanian accent is redolent of that spoken in Brooklyn and upper New Jersey. The people are more than friendly, they are gregarious. On an extraordinarily pleasant day, Rudy and I stepped out onto the street after lunch in the French Quarter and the doorman of a hotel said, “This weather is so nice, I think I’ll get married again.” Where are you gonna go to hear something like that?
New Orleans has let one of the biggest private contracts ever, to keep the French Quarter streets clean, and it is working. Trash laden gutters, long an eyesore for fastidious tourists, are no more. Guys drive many little street sweeper machines, and guys walk around with pointy sticks and bags, and Voila! the streets are largely free of trash. Is it not miraculous what the private sector will do for money?
New Orleans is home to a large working class and a large artist class. The strategic shipping and petroleum industries in southern Louisiana require a considerable labor force, and that is why arguments to just abandon post-Katrina New Orleans were never taken seriously. And, one need only stroll about in the French quarter, the Garden district, Up-town and the Forbourg/Marygn and Bywater neighborhoods to appreciate the presence of a huge artist community. In addition to music, which everyone knows about, painting, sculpture, jewelry, needlework, and glass art studios abound. Further, New Orleans is a cherished home to many writers.
Of course, the city jealously guards its old architectural appearance. Many Katrina ravaged modest homes which I would have thought were certainly “tear-downs”, are having replacement clapboards lovingly fitted over the skeletons of old black moldy 2 by 4s, and ornamental cornices on shotgun houses* are considered precious. If you own a building in the French Quarter, and want to paint or repair anything, you must get permission from the Vieux Carre commission which rules on any alterations and even the color of paint you may use. For good or bad, more than any city in America, New Orleans is in love with it’s past.
* A shotgun house is a long thin house from front to back, so called because if you shoot a shotgun in the front door, you will shoot out the back screen door, and, like as not, kill everyone in the house. Shotgun houses are often duplexes set on deep lots with only about 30 feet of frontage, and many shotgun houses appear to have been longerated by the addition of multiple rooms onto the rear.
Residential and commercial New Orleans is being rebuilt—one house at a time, and one business at a time. Not all neighborhoods are coming back. Some are all but abandoned and in a state of arrested ruin, but in those neighborhoods which are struggling back, you can seldom drive a block without seeing a Dempsey dumpster on a front lawn, or a covey of worker’s trucks parked on the street. Indeed, almost half the vehicles on New Orleans streets are trucks—not ‘burb faux-cowboy pick-ups mind you, but working trucks, many pulling trailers full of rubble, building supplies or tools.
The proliferation of small communities of 24 foot long travel trailers continues. Often they are fenced and gated in parking lots and the trailers are lifted well off the ground so the external above ground sewer pipes have enough slope to drain. If they have a prolonged hard freeze down here, it will cause a constipated mess in the sewer pipes. Doubtless, most of these trailers are housing for construction workers. Rental housing is very tight and damned expensive in New Orleans, and on the 80 miles of Interstate10 between New Orleans to Baton Rouge (we drove it) truck traffic is thick day and night. In residential neighborhoods, it is hardly possible to be out of sight of a travel trailer parked on a front lawn. Some front lawns have two travel trailers. While some are temporary housing while the home is being worked on, it is apparent that some of these houses are now occupied, and the trailers are either grey-market rental housing, or housing for relatives or friends who have lost their homes.
I visited an old friend who lost his home in Mandeville, a small town on the north shore of Lake Pontchartraine. His one-story home was 5 feet above sea level on a bayou near the lake, and the storm surge brought the water up to about 5 feet above sea level, and so they had to take down the building. He said many non-evacuated families thereabouts lived for weeks in the same buildings where they worked. That is to say if they had buildings left to work in. Streets were impassible for several days due to down trees, and electrical power (in late August in southern Louisiana) was off for weeks. There were whole lakeside housing developments which were reduced to sodden flotsam—cars turned over, piles of wet furniture, insulation, roofing tiles and structural lumber piled up like jackstraws. The only buildings spared were those raised 10 feet on concrete pillars.
Rudy and I drove to Slidell (also on the north side of Lake Pontchartraine) to look at the house I rented for a year in 1974. It was a beautiful old place on Liberty Bayou, Built on 14 acres of Loblolly pine forest by a curator of the New Orleans’ Audubon Zoo as a summer house, It was then sold to jazz clarinetist, Pete Fountain, who sold it to Al Stone who was the project engineer for the Lunar Rover (that 10 million dollar one-of-a-kind taxi cab we flew to the moon and left there). Al then rented it to me. It was a large two story 3 bedroom square frame home with a large added kitchen. The first floor great space had a huge fireplace, and was lined with Pecky (worm-eaten) Cypress, a rare and expensive lumber today. Out back, there was a swimming and wading pool connected by a small water-fall. Other buildings included a screened pool house, a six stall horse stable and a shed. There were two small ponds and two improved pastures on the property. There was a barbeque pit, a shelter house, and a dock down by the bayou. There is nothing left of any of it. The only reason why we know we were on the site is because we saw the white plastic bones of a temporary greenhouse which had been there about 15 years ago. It was clearly the most elegant and memorable house I have ever lived in, and it makes me sad to think it has simply disappeared into the Katrina vortex.
CYCLIC EPIDEMIC PROPAGATION OF E-MAIL FORWARDS
Is it the Loon’s imagination or have the best of the internet forwards become both unduly reiterative and cyclic? It appears to me that when I see a new e-mail forward, usually a good joke, or piece of political cant, it often appears from multiple sources, and then, it goes away. Later, it reappears with another flurry of forwardings, and sometimes it can even recur once more. It is understandable why forwards have geometric propagation; it is sooooo easy to continue the e-contagion when you don’t have to make a copy, put it in an envelope, affix a stamp and take it to the mail box. The cyclic appearances of a forward is also understandable; when a forward reaches an addressee who has not seen it before, the natural belief is that it has not been around the cyber-horn before, and thus, the addressee starts another round of e-contagion. It’s like internet Influenza. Of the last 53 e-mails I have sent, only one was a forward, but of the last 53 e-mails I have received, only 9 were principally addressed to me, all the rest were forwards and some of these were repeaters. The Loon has a remedy. See, if these computers are so damned smart that they can detect spam, why can’t they detect previously received forwards, and automatically return them to the sender, informing the sender that the Loon has already received the forward. Is that too much to ask? Are there any gifted software scribblers out there who will volunteer to do this simple thing for the Loon?
DEAD PLAYBOY PLAYMATES
Every now and then the Loon will receive a titillating e-forward, e.g. a recent one entitled “Dead Playboy Playmates”. Well, maybe this was more morbid than titillating, as it listed the 30 now dead Playmates. Since the quarterly “Playboy” began in December 1953, there have been, by the Loon’s calculation, 257 playmates, (No! I have never subscribed), and since all were young women when they appeared in the magazine, none could be much older than, Oh! say, 75 today, and with a median age today of about 47. The mortality rate of 11% for this cohort of women, all of whom, obviously lived to be very Ahem! healthy in their early 20s seems high. This is what killed them; three died of suicide, five of drug overdoses, three of automobile accidents, two by homicide, seven of cancer, three of other natural causes, one in an airplane accident and the rest due to unknown causes. There must be some doubt that a control group of demographically similar non-Playmate women would suffer an equal or greater mortality rate. Further, consider this; the average age at death of the 30 Playmates was 47. This raises two questions: 1. What is there about being a Playboy Playmate which reduces longevity? And 2. Who beside the Loon has so much spare time on his (I presume they are all “his”s) hands, that he can gather or analyze this kind of data?
HANK BAUER DIED LAST WEEK
The Loon was in the French Quarter to see the parade of the Mystic Krewe of Barkus, a floatless parade spoofing the up-scale Krewe of Bacchus parade. Barkus krewe members are dogs; hundreds of dogs; all breeds of dogs; mongrel dogs being pulled in wagons by people; painted, uniquely clothed and artistically clipped dogs; almost all of which were well behaved—a few alarm “Woofs”, but not one dog fight, nor a canine disagreement. It was there that the Loon saw across the street a St. Louis baseball fan suitably attired in a Cards warm-up jacket. Crossing the line of parade (a no no) the Loon identified himself as a fellow Cards crazy. We shared the moment when Cards’ pitcher, Wainwright, froze the Mets’ Beltron, (who had worn out Cards’ pitching) with a monster curve on a 3 and 2 count with two outs and the winning Mets’ runs on base in the last of the ninth of the 7th game of the series. That curve made the Cards 2006 National League Champs and assured, in my mind, that they were destined to win the World Series. And, that which was destined came to pass. .Before we parted company, my fellow fan mentioned that Hank Bauer had died three days before. How in the hell could Hank Bauer die and me not know it? Memories flooded back. A mere Loon fledgling in waiting in St, Louis went to baseball games at Sportsmen’s Park early to see infield and outfield practice. Even after 25 years as an infielder in baseball and fast-pitch softball, the Loon still relished the regimented ritual of infield practice as a graceful form of sports ballet. The adolescent Loon adored watching major league outfield practice, three fungo flys to each outfielder, with one throw to second, one to third and one to home. Guys with cannon arms liked to have their fungo flies sent deep so they could show off their guns. Right fielders usually had the best arms as they had the longest throw, to third base. Hank Bauer was a right fielder and he had a gun. He was a Yankee but when he uncorked a really good throw in warm-up, usually to home, the St. Louis fans in the stands would go “Whooooooo!”. I played baseball with only one man who made it to the major leagues, Charlie Peete. He died in an aircraft accident after one year up with the St. Louis Cardinals. Charlie Peete had a gun. When he threw the ball, it made a boiling churning sound as it went through the air. Both Hank Bauer and Charlie Peete could “hang blurred ropes” from the outfield. The Loon has seen ‘em both do it.
PREVIEWS OF COMING ATTRACTIONS
The Loon has finished reading “Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon” by Daniel C. Dennett. It was one of the most difficult books the Loon has ever read, and writing a Loon’s Mini-Book Report will be equally difficult, but, brace yourselves, as it will be in the next FotL.
DISCLAIMER
You must know that a “Fruit o’ the Loon” is never finished; only abandoned. The process of writing takes a couple of weeks of gathering bits and pieces which pique an interest, and when it reaches a certain length, the Loon just get tired of picking at it like a scab, to cull jangling syllables and useless words. And when that happens, out it goes with the bits toward the top benefiting from repeated editing; while those toward the bottom are usually rife with raggedy-assed writing. This one is out of the oven—out it goes.
Allen Hall, the Loon
February 13, 2007 in post-tornado New Orleans
posted by Allen Hall at 3:58 PM
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