 |
02/16/12
Since Eve Kidd Crawford and I can never agree, we’re doing another point-and-counterpoint-style blog series this week. Unfortunately for me, that means I had to come up with five things that suck about Mardi Gras, since she got the cake assignment to write about things that are great about Mardi Gras. But since Yankees apparently like nothing better than pissing on other people’s good time, I figured I’d try to live down to the stereotype.
Think of it as Carnival satire. Krewe de Jersey.
And since even I don’t really believe my own baloney, I’ve offered some workarounds to the “problems” of Carnival.
5. Bathrooms.
Finding them is difficult. Surviving them is nearly impossible. Nearly a million people all have to make due with...
|
 |
02/10/12
Tomorrow I’m running from Baton Rouge to New Orleans.
That’s an exaggeration. Actually, it’s a boastful perversion of the truth. I’m part of a six-person relay team running from Baton Rouge to New Orleans. Five-sixths of the time, I’ll be reclining in the relative comfort of a 15-passenger van, thinking about what a horrible mistake we’ve made and wondering why anybody would do anything so foolish.
So far our team, Hot Tag-Team Action, has dealt with shin splints and sprains. Two team members are coming in from Memphis. Only one of us has run a relay before, although we have between us two ultra-runners, another marathoner, two triathletes and two 10K enthusiasts.
And no, you’re not counting wrong—that adds up to seven team...
|
 |
01/27/12
Constance Adler began composing the vignettes that would ultimately form My Bayou: New Orleans Through the Eyes of a Lover in 2004. This was before two of the seminal events in the story—the literal whirlwind of Hurricane Katrina and the emotional maelstrom of her divorce from the “Yoga King of New Orleans”—and, as such, the narrative becomes a journey that the reader takes along with her.
Adler delves into vodou (vodoun? voodoo? she explains the etymology better than I can in her book), recalls the bitter fury of wearing a back brace as a child, meditates on the connections between humans and animals and humans and other humans, chats with death, gets mugged, crosses the country and ends up back on the banks of Bayou St. John.
Originally a journalist,...
|
 |
01/20/12
This week, for a special companion edition of our Friday blogs, Eve Kidd Crawford and I decided to open up a hornets' nest for you all to try and close: The issue of children and Facebook. I concede that I am fighting well above my experiential weight; not only is Eve a parent (whereas I am not), she is also fiercely protective as such. And yet, it was I who came down on the side of arguing against children using Facebook and their parents’ posting pictures of them on it.
My first contention is the most obvious. One teen’s innocent fun could be some stranger’s aphrodisiac. That statement alone needs no qualification; everybody’s into something, and a lot of people seem to be into teenagers, if recent celebrity arrests are any indication. Facebook...
|
 |
01/13/12
In early November, Premier Event Management—captained by Bill Burke, the godfather of Big Easy multisport events—announced that the IronMan 70.3 New Orleans (IMNOLA) and 5150 New Orleans races would be held on the same day in late April for the 2012 season. This would have meant that local tri-jacks had to choose between the long-course (1.2-mile swim, 56-mile bicycle ride and 13.1-mile run) and international-distance (1.5K or 0.9-mile swim, 40K or 25-plus-mile ride and 10K or 6-plus-mile run) races for their home games.
IMNOLA draws athletes from all over the globe; IronMan-sanctioned long-course races are rare, and “destination races” rarer still. Ditto 5150 New Orleans; as Burke rightfully asserted, there are no other 5150-series races in the...
|
 |
01/06/12
Now write us some more books, please
|
 |
12/30/11
So, some stuff happened this year. Some of it was good. Some of it was bad. A lot of it was weird. Most of it was some combination of those three. Here at MyNewOrleans.com, we like to think we draw a pretty good bead on what's what, but every so often, we like your feedback. Hence this experiment.
We've put together a year in pictures for your viewing pleasure. Some of the images in the slideshow come from our archives, but more of them come from you, our readers. It had been our intention - OK, my intention - to give you all some music along with the pictures, but as it turns out, two weeks during the holidays wasn't enough time for me to procure licensing permission. (It's something we'll keep in mind for next year.)
Without further ado, here's the...
|
 |
12/23/11
And other things you might not know about the holidays
|
 |
12/16/11
It's almost the New Year, so here at MyNewOrleans.com we're going to put together a photo slideshow, set to some appropriate music, of the last year. But we don't trust ourselves to tell the full story of 12 whole months. We want you to tell it, through the photos you've taken over the last 52 weeks.
We're looking for 50-75 images total, capturing the best, worst and funniest of the last 365 days in New Orleans. Winning submissions will receive a photo credit on our website and, of course, our heartfelt congratulations.
The rules:
•No nudity. Sorry folks, we're a family publi...er, website. Keep it SFW, please.
•No more than five images per submission.
•Please use .jpg as your file format. It will save your grateful editor a...
|
 |
12/09/11
Print is Dead: Long Live Print
I’m going to interrupt my usual broadcast on the local literature/film/mutant-killer-lizard scene for a brief meditation:
A few thousand years ago, a fellow with a knack for telling stories – who may have been blind, a captive or, in fact, several different people – paced around campfires and town squares, mumbling about heroes named Odysseus and Achilles, one-eyed monsters, sea creatures and jealous gods. Eventually, somebody figured out that his kids might get a kick out of these yarns and they became written (instead of oral) history. Now, you can read the epic poems in their entirety – in any language – without even leaving your house.
The transcription of Homer’s epics ran more or less parallel with...
|
Alex Gecan (it's a hard "c") is a Yankee and a carpetbagger. Despite these failings, he wisely moved to New Orleans in 2002. In 2008, he joined Renaissance Publishing as a humble intern. Since then, he has covered state politics and elections for The Trentonian in New Jersey, local news and events for The Brooklyn Ink in New York and penned a bevy of freelance articles. He eventually came full circle to rejoin Renaissance as Web Editor.
