Mardi Gras 2009, New Orleans

The one day in the year, and the one place in the country, where a 41-year old heterosexual man can dress up like a flower and not be called crazy:




And Emily looked beautiful in her butterfly garden hat:




And our whole gang posed for our annual photo on Prytania:




It was a beautiful Mardi Gras - one of the best we’ve ever had.

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Mardi Gras Parades and Attorney Zealotry

I thought I could get through the four days of the second weekend of Mardi Gras without thinking about the law, lawyers, or legal education. But right next to us at one of our usual parade-watching spots Sunday afternoon was this girl:




Hahaha... pretty good. And I think she was actually a law student, at that place across the street from us.
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Early Lundi Gras Present from the Yard Cats

Early this morning, I went to check on the yard cats - Monkey is one we have more or less tamed, though he is definitely an outdoor-only cat. He has a new friend who is a big orange and white cat, but he is still skittish.

Anyway, one of them made us a little Lundi Gras sacrifice:




This was probably a “common earth snake”, like we’ve seen in our backyard before:




It might have even been this same one, since that video was from seven months ago and the one the cats killed was about ten inches long. I never really thought there were snakes around in a densely urban environment like our part of New Orleans; a reptile guy at the zoo told me once that there are some in Audubon park, but here I would have thought the cats and traffic and development would have pretty much driven the snake population down to nothing. But nature prevails and we have seen a few over the years.

I couldn’t get Monkey to pose with it like I wanted him to, though he was batting at it for a bit after I got my camera, so the LOL didn’t really turn out like I had hoped:




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Let’s Get the Party Started!

Mardi Gras parades started in earnest this past weekend. The biggest and best parades start tomorrow (Thursday), when festivities become pretty much non-stop through Fat Tuesday. Today I feel like I’m eight years old again with Christmas just days away, but instead of being a kid waiting for presents from Santa Claus, as grown-ups we’re waiting for the one occasion where its acceptable to dress up in a costume and gallivant around in public with thousands of other revelers.

This is NOT to be confused with the tens of thousands of tourists who will be getting drunk on Tuesday on Bourbon Street but not while costumed. The locals do Mardi Gras differently, but that’s rarely covered in the brief news spots that the rest of the country sees. I guess its something that has to be experienced to be understood. BUT these short videos I made on Mardi Gras 2007 give a taste of what we locals do. This first one is an informal marching group that heads down to the French Quarter each year:

and this is a quick shot of Frenchman street later that same day:


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Law Librarians LOL

The recent flame war on law-lib between Leslie Germaine and Ron Huttner got me to thinking: who are the people behind these names we have come to dread seeing in the "from" line of our e-mail? So I thought it would make a perfect law librarian LOL:


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Mayou Angelou, Horned Beast & New Orleans City Web Page

New Orleans’ city’s web page, while having plenty of useful information somewhere in it, has always had a pretty crappy search feature that rarely finds what’s relevant and which takes forever and usually times out before bringing anything up. Like I tell my students, better to use a Google search and restrict it to the domain for the city’s web page.

But the city and its web page has enough problems without exacerbating things by putting up this picture of Maya Angelou, who was in town recently to speak somewhere and to whom the mayor gave some proclamation, said picture making her look like a horned demon-beast:


I’m sure this is a badly-cropped picture of her wearing a cutting-edge stylish hat, but come on. Doesn’t somebody at City Hall look at this stuff before it gets posted? Maybe its just me, but I saw it and thought right away - whoah! Somebody photo-shopped a horn onto Maya Angelou’s head!

Here’s a more typical problem with their web page: I subscribe to a city e-mail news list and want to change it to a new address. I can unsubscribe via a copy of the current mailing at my old address, but searching for “e-mail list”/“email list”, etc., didn’t find anything, but looking for “subscribe” took me - jeez! - to the “subscription confirmation” notice, but not the actual subscription page. (The only OTHER hit from “subscribe” is a page about the city police department’s education and training program.)

New Orleans' streets are pitted with countless potholes and we still have tens of thousands of blighted and un-remediated houses from Katrina, so the city's web page is really the least of our worries, but it is at least something pretty limited and finite that shouldn’t be hard to make effective, easy to use, and without making Maya Angelou look like Tim Curry from Legend:

(There is more than a passing resemblance, if you ask me.)

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Sam's Club Auto-Calling about Peanut Butter Recall?

Last week my wife said we got an automated phone call from Sam's Club say that their records showed that in the past we had bought a particular brand of breakfast bar that was being recalled, presumably because of the tainted peanut butter that's been giving people salmonella and which had killed, as last I heard, eight or so people. I haven't heard of this before, but with a food product as wide-spread as this, I guess auto-dialling people with this message is a good idea.

The big thing that's curious, I guess, is that they keep records this detailed. It is a little big brother-ish, but I'm not complaining. We could have brought any of these breakfast bars we had left back to the store to get a refund, but these were purchased in December for our Christmas road trip to Colorado.
I tried for a bit to find some new stories or references about Sam's doing this. This article is about Costco doing this same automated phone call warning about the tainted peanut butter:

“This Is Costco Calling. Put Down That Sandwich!”
Written by Fred J. Aun
January 28th, 2009

That's from some industry-insider web site about retail technology. It came up, I guess, because of a Sam'c Club ad in the margin. The article says that Costco's system only gears up for a "Level 1" product recall, and that then their search that data and outsource the actual calling to a company specializing in that, and which can send up to 500,000 call an hour. I guess that sort of warning call is exempt from the do-not-call registry and law?

Ok, and further down the results list on Google are some other hits from misc blogs and stuff about people getting the call from Sam's Club about making these calls about a wide assortment of products with peanuts in them.

And a completely unrelated and random discovery while searching for information about this - "automatic phone call" helped, as I had just guessed at the jargon "autocall" which must be some hacker or computer jargon because, even combined with sam's club and peanut butter, it turns up a lot of weird sites that on which is just appears in a long list of words. For example, this search:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=sam%27s+club+peanut+butter+autocall

after the first hit, which is from the Sam's Club web page, but doesn't includ the word "autocall", most of the hits are from pages like this:

http://www.theargon.com/achilles/wordlists/random.txt

Which is a page consisting entirely of text like these lines:

funded EPILOG EPISEPT EPISTAT EPMA EPPS EPQ EPS EQS EQS/PC EQUANT-PC EQUATE EQUORM ERA ERDAS ERICA ERLS ERM ERUMS ERUMS--A ES ES202 ESD ESMR ESP ESPRIT ESRC ESRC/DTI ESS ESSs ESTES ET ETRANK ETS EURECA EURO EV EV1 EVAL EVM EVMS EVOP EVOP-type EVPI EWMA EX EX-TRAN EXACTB EXAX2 EXCAD EXECUSTAT EXPERIMENTOR EXPFIT EXPLOR EXPLOR4 EXPLORA EXPLORE EXPOSMOO EXPRESS EXTENDED EXp EY Early Early-step Earnings Earth Earthquakes Easily Easily-stated Easing powder Easterlin Eastside player Easy score Easy-Link EasyPlot Eating Eberhardt Eberhart-Gardner Eberl Echinococcus Eckler Ecological Econometrics Economical Economically

I guess that's text for some password guesser or something?
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My Far-Sighted Handyman Granddad

At work, my office is like the land of forgotten toys - I have all manner of crap and furniture that I don’t have room for at home. Amongst all this is a little toy robot figure that my maternal grandfather, who was a typical handyman with an amazing workshop in his basement, made in the late 1970s:


I remember him saying that he made this after seeing the commercials for the first Star Wars movie, so they were modeled, or at least inspired by, R2D2 and C2PO:

(From http://www.slashfilm.com/ - I do NOT have any Star Wars crap in my office; plenty of other crap, but not Star Wars junk.)

And I say it was after seeing the commercials for Star Wars because as far as I know he never actually SAW Star Wars. Of course the figure he made out of a power outlet, a light socket, and misc scrap he had sitting around looks nothing like the Star Wars duo but, as a student pointed out to me the other day, it does look like a movie robot of more recent vintage:


So, being the good semi-attorney I am, I have begun copyright infringement proceedings against Pixar, Disney, Steve Jobs, and everyone else associated with Wall-E.

Of course, I will have to get in line behind Steven Spielberg and everyone associated with HIS notable alien movie, which plenty of others have noted bears a similar resemblance to Wall-E:


(From: http://audreycefaly.com/blog/labels/E.T..html.)

Of course, Granddad's creation pre-dated E.T. by several years, so I guess I’ll also sue Spielberg and Amblin' Entertainment or whatever his company was back then:


Yesss! Goodbye student loans!!!

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