Random Pro-Reading/Book Bumber Sticker

Seen yesterday on the streets of New Orleans:



Many variations on this theme are available but the only one I could find with the coffee cup - NICE TOUCH! - is through a shop where you can personalize them for your own store. Need to find me a blank one, or get them for our library.
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Random Nude Art

In the "you never know what you'll find" category, we saw this on a routine walk in our neighborhood over the weekend:

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More Fun at the BP Trial

Its not like I’m reading the BP Trial transcripts religiously, but, as I noted two weeks ago, the web set that Judge Barbier had the e-discovery company and the Plaintiff’s Steering Committee set up to make all the court documents public: 

http://www.mdl2179trialdocs.com/

is amazing in its transparency - all daily transcripts are available by the evening of each day of the trial, as are all the exhibits, deposition transcripts, and even videos. After just six weeks of the trial - likely just the half-way point of this phase - the transcripts alone are 8500 pages long. And, by my count, there are over 7000 other documents that have been entered into evidence, or at least posted on the web site.

The trial must be beyond tedious, so I guess its no surprise that the attorneys and staff occasionally try to inject a little levity into the proceedings, like March’s birthday celebration for a court staff member.

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Snake and the City

Found this guy dead on the side of St. Charles Ave. near Constantinople:

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Leonard Cohen in New Orleans

After traveling twice to see him - Denver last fall, and Austin in 2009 - tomorrow night Leonard Cohen is playing his first concert ever here in New Orleans.

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BP Trial Documents and Court Staff Birthdays

Today is Day 19 of the BP Trial, which will probably end up being one of the biggest, if not the biggest, environmental law cases ever. Its flying pretty much under the radar nationally, but is in the daily news here in New Orleans.

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Possum Accomplished!

Caught this guy over the weekend:

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Jazz Fest, Professor Houck, and Global Warming: Year 3

This is my second update to my original post in 2009 about Tulane Law Professor’s Oliver Houck’s prediction of how global warming will affect Jazz Fest. Prof. Houck’s article, Can We Save New Orleans?, 19 Tul. Envtl L. Rev 1 (2006) (PDF), is a very good piece written just after Hurricane Katrina and intersperses his personal evacuation tale amongst a detailed, pessimistic history of the environmental indignations that Louisiana, New Orleans, and the Mississippi River have suffered for the past century or so.

At one point Houck recites a litany of the worst predictions of rising global temperatures and, to try to make it more relevant to us here in New Orleans, flippantly says:

So what? Here in Louisiana we will be warmer in summer (think, maybe, 103 degrees at Jazz Fest) . . . . Houck, 19 Tul. Envtl. L. Rev 1, at 27.

The source he cites says that:

[It] is projected that by 2100, temperatures in Louisiana could increase about 3°F (with a range of 1-5°F) in spring and summer, slightly less in winter, and slightly more in fall. Envtl. Prot. Agency, Climate Change and Louisiana 2 (1997).

(See last year’s discussion for the minor problems with this cite in Houck’s article.)

Since I had been to many Jazz Fests when I read this article, and never remembered the temperature being in the high nineties, I thought this "prediction" was way off base and then, of course, had to figure out when the hottest JazzFests on record were. My original post on this, in 2009, talks about how I got the temperatures for all the past Jazz Fest (a pain in the ass) and about my methodologies in compiling them. Long story short, the hottest Jazz Fest ever was 2002, when the average temperature for the ten days of the Festival period was 89.7°F. Pretty damn hot, but a good thirteen degrees away from 103°F that Houck predicts and well out of even the maximum range by which the EPA says temperatures “could increase.”

This year’s Jazz Fest, with an average temperature of 82.6°F, was the 20th hottest on record. Here are the updated charts, current through the 2011 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival.









Conclusions? The 2011 was statistically right in the middle of all of them; three of the five hottest Jazz Fests were between 1987 and 1995, and three of the ten coolest Jazz Fests have been since 2004. There is no global warming trend evident at Jazz Fest.

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Annual Mardi Gras Legal Satire

Every Mardi Gras seems to have some satirical take on the legal profession, and this year was no exception:




That's from a float that had several portrayals of local attorneys on it, but I was only able to capture this picture of our second floor computer lab's namesake.
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2010 New Orleans Saints Who Dat Nation Membership Quiz

On the occasion of the start of the regular season today, all Saints fans should take the following quiz to determine their true level of committed Who Dat-ness!

1) The 2010 Super Bowl Champion New Orleans Saints were:

A) The greatest team fielded by the Saints in franchise history.

B) The greatest team fielded by any NFL franchise in league history.

C) The greatest team ever fielded in any sport in all of history from the dawn of time to the end of the universe.

2) The Saints' successful on-side kick at the start of the second half of Super Bowl 44 was:

A) The gutsiest play ever called in a Super Bowl game.

B) The gutsiest play ever in any football game.

C) The single most significant strategic decision ever made by a human being.

3) Tracy Porter’s fourth-quarter Super Bowl interception that took the Saints to their decisive 31 to 17 winning lead was:

A) The best turnover play in the history of the Super Bowl.

B) The best and most decisive victory-sealing play in the history of sports.

C) The single greatest accomplishment in human history, surpassing agriculture, writing, and the discovery of fire.

4) New Orleans Head Coach Sean Peyton is:

A) The best coach the New Orleans Saints have ever had.

B) The greatest coach ever to walk the face of the Earth.

C) The most supreme strategist ever to command men, usurping all other piker wannabes like Napoleon, Rommel, and Sun Tzu.

5) New Orleans Saints Quarterback and Superbowl 44 MVP Drew Brees is:

A) The greatest quarterback in Saints history.

B) The greatest athlete ever in human history.

C) So amazing and all-encompassing in his athletic skills and leadership abilities that he transcends human experience and cannot be fully appreciated by such mortals as we who are merely fit to touch the hem of his jersey as we grovel before him and avert our gaze from his face.

Answer Key: If you answered anything but “C” to any of these questions, burn all your Saints memorabilia and gauge your eyes out before game time because you do not deserve to call yourself a true member of the Who Dat Nation.


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BP Oilspill and Possible Related Graffiti?

My update Tuesday about Professor Houck, Jazzfest, and Global Warming is sort of a minor issue these days here in town because of the largest Gulf of Mexico oil spill in 30+ years that’s now threatening Louisiana and the rest of the central Gulf Coast. Technically, its not a “spill” since its still flowing out of this uncapped well; I think “oil spew” is more accurate, even if #oilspill is the main Twitter hashtag for this event (I really liked #oysterocalypse, @agramsci’s hashtag, but I think he and I were the only ones using it, and I think we both realized as funny as that is, this isn’t really a situation to make light of.)
This is tragic in so many ways, the main way, I think, is that no one is sure how much oil is flowing out of this uncapped well and just what the long-term consequences may be. I’ve seen statements that the flow may have already exceeded the oil spilled by the Exxon Valdez, and that at the current rate, the Valdez spill will be matched in a month or so.

And as bad as all this sounds, some perspective is helpful. For example, the low end estimate of the flow, 210,000 gallons a day is, like the PBS site linked above notes, is the equivalent of filling up one olympic sized pool every three days. Yes, it doesn’t take much oil to contaminate a lot of water, but how many olympic sized pools could you fit into the Gulf of Mexico? We’re probably talking about the equivalent of a few drops in a bathtub, right?

I’ve also seen several references which mentions that seven million gallons of oil and fuel were spilled in southeast Louisiana during Hurricane Katrina. One contemporaneous news story I found backs that up:

44 Oil Spills Found in Southeast Louisiana, MSNBC, Sept. 19, 2005
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9365607/

This story notes - and this was three weeks after Katrina - that by then “1.3 million gallons had evaporated or dispersed”. As nasty as all that oil on the open water is, its not going to be an ocean of black sludge forever, or possibly even into the near future. Some of it will evaporate and much of it will eventually be dispersed naturally: the Gulf of Mexico is BIG and as horrific as these images are, and as bad as New Orleans has smelled a few days this past week, the lingering effects will probably not be as horrific as some of the current predictions suggest. A few stories I read even noted that, yes, crude oil is biodegradable. All of it isn’t just going to evaporate and biodegrade overnight but, yes, it bears repeating, crude oil is biodegradable. I even found an authoritative source that supports this:

Biodegradation, in The Environment Dictionary By David D. Kemp
p43-44

Ahh - and a story on the National Geographic web site I just read (Twitter really is most useful during events like these), mentions that the smell we smell when the wind is coming our way, and which people down on the coast are apparently smelling all the time, is

[T]he pungent scent of evaporating surface oil, which rises into the atmosphere and gets broken down by sunlight.

So there are natural processes at work that will help mitigate the oil spew. We shouldn’t wash our hands of BP’s culpability and leave it at that, but, no, its probably not going to be the end of the world for the Gulf Coast and the fishing industry.

But it’s the unknowable aspect of this that is most alarming and, like many other people have said, its like watching the possible projected path of a Cat 5 hurricane when its three days out: you just don’t know for sure what’s going to happen, and you feel completely helpless while you’re waiting.

And on a possibly related tangent: inspired by one of the only blogs I look at regularly, What I Saw Riding My Bike Around Today (the excellent photo-journal/blog of a nameless fellow bicycler), I’ve started carrying my small digital camera with me. And Thursday, while taking a varied route to work, I saw this stenciled message on Prytania:


Since I don’t ride by there regularly, I don’t know if its new, I’m not sure what it means, and I’m not even sure if this has anything to do with the BP oil spew. No references online to the phrase “Oil Dances Uninhibited” that I could find. Is it a comment on the oil spill? On dancing? An exhortation that we should dance in as uninhibited a manner as the oil spill is dancing over the Gulf waters? I’m baffled.

Despite my possibly unfounded optimism, I am still concerned, so concerned I put that PBS Gulf Leak Meter up on the right there. Yes, like a lapel ribbon, it shows my sincere, deep concern.
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Jazzfest, and Global Warming: The First Annual Update

Well, “first annual update” since I initially addressed this last year. In brief summary, Professor Oliver Houck of Tulane School of Law, in his article Can We Save New Orleans?, 19 Tul. Envtl L. Rev 1 (2006) (PDF), mentions several possible effects of climate change on New Orleans, including:

Here in Louisiana we will be warmer in summer (think, maybe, 103 degrees at Jazz Fest) .... Houck, 19 Tul. Envtl. L. Rev 1, at 27.

But the source he cites to:

Envtl. Prot. Agency, Climate Change and Louisiana 3 (1997) available at http:// yosemite.epa.gov/OAR/globalwarming.nsf/UniqueKeyLookup/SHSU5BURCA/$File/la_ impct.pdf

merely says:

[It] is projected that by 2100, temperatures in Louisiana could increase about 3̊ F (with a range of 1-5̊ F) in spring and summer, slightly less in winter, and slightly more in fall. Envtl. Prot. Agency, Climate Change and Louisiana 2 (1997).

(Yes, I found that on page 2 of this report; I didn't see any discussion of temperatures on page 3 like Prof. Houck cited. And the EPA report is no longer at the URL he provided in his article - a perfect example of link rot in law reviews - so I put it on Google Docs.)

Last year I finally got around to researching the average temperatures of all Jazzfests during the past 40 years and, long story short, its never been so hot at Jazzfest that a 3 degree increase (or even, at the high end of the EPA range, a 5 degree increase), would get us anywhere close to 103 degrees: the hottest Jazzfest ever was 2002, with a average daily high temperature of 89.7 degrees (and, yes, I know, I know, you can argue that Prof. Houck was just being all folksy and informal, essentially saying “gosh-its-gonna-be-a-hunnert-an-three-at-Jazzfest-if-we-don’t-DO-something!!!”).

But this WAS written in a leading environmental law journal published by one of the country’s top fifty law schools and if this is the level of argument that counts as serious scholarship, then law professors everywhere should give up all pretense at objectivity and logic and just preach what they think the law SHOULD be. (Most of them are already doing this, but if they didn’t bother with “supporting” sources, citations, and footnotes, all these beleaguered law review students could be saved a lot of needless effort doing their sub-and-cites.)

So here’s my update of the charts I made last year, now including this year’s average temperatures at Jazzfest. (For the methodology, read last year’s post.) This year’s Jazzfest was in the cooler half of all 41 Jazzfests, with an average daily high of 81.0 degrees. Here’s the charts:

First, the average temperatures of all 41 Jazzfests, in chronological order:




Yes, we had a very mild week and a half of Jazzfest, a full 2.6 degrees cooler than last year. And, yes, the climate change alarmists will say that normal variations may results in an unusually cool week and a half in a certain location despite “global warming”, but you’d be hard pressed to find one say that, by the same reasoning, normal variations may also result in an unusually hot week and a half (like Jazzfest was in 2002). The bottom line is we’re 23 degrees away from Prof. Houck’s apocalyptic - and totally unsupported by the source he cited in the relevant footnote in his article - prediction, and in the four years since he wrote this Jazzfest temperatures have been trending down.

Here are the 41 Jazzfests ranked hottest to coolest:




And ranked coolest to hottest:



Conclusions, like last year, to be drawn are that, yes, the planet got measurably warmer in the past century but temperatures have reached a plateau and stayed at about the same point for the past decade, despite predictions that global temperatures should keep increasing steadily.

Even some of the anthropogenic global warming alarmists will admit this, though they can't all keep their stories straight. Last month, in his New York Times Magazine cover story, Building a Green Economy, Paul Krugman wrote:

Second, climate models predicted this well in advance, even getting the magnitude of the temperature rise roughly right. While it’s relatively easy to cook up an analysis that matches known data, it is much harder to create a model that accurately forecasts the future. So the fact that climate modelers more than 20 years ago successfully predicted the subsequent global warming gives them enormous credibility. (Id. (Emphasis Added))

Except that, according to a story on NPR - which you would expect to be hand in hand with Krugman and the New York Times on this:

Global warming skeptics have made quite a fuss over the fact the planet hasn’t actually warmed that much over the past decade, and there lies a genuine scientific mystery. The planet has been receiving more solar energy than it's been releasing back into space. Heat ought to be building up somewhere but scientists can't find it. Richard Harris, Examining A Climate Conundrum, All Things Considered, April 27, 2010.

So which is it? Is the planet warming like the scientists predicted or are they baffled by how global warming has stalled in the past ten year? The NPR story at least references a few scientists and articles, which Krugman does not, and it concludes with a discussion of one scientist who has what is apparently the only working theory on this, and that he is finding

[E]vidence of warming deep in the ocean. He's still analyzing that data, so he can't yet say whether it will explain the entire paradox. But he says it will explain at least a chunk of it, and thats how science proceeds: mysteries, explanations, more questions and gradually deeper understanding. (Id.)

So the data is still fresh, but the scientist is sure it will explain away the “apparent” lack of warming in the past decade. Thus NPR placates the alarmists with a pat re-assurance that this new research will explain the lack of predicted warming in the past decade and that - oh, relief - yes, mankind IS causing a catastrophic increase in global temperatures, but its just not evident right now. So please continues buying carbon credits from Al Gore.
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Mardi Gras and Lawyers That Suck

Mardi Gras has always had a large satiric component to it, but whatever big political and news stories that may have provided fodder for costumes this year were dwarfed by the jubilation this city has been experiencing since the Saints won the Super Bowl!

But even in the midst of all the black and gold, we found this costume:



At first, yes - great, clever, funny. Even better was her companion, dressed as the truck that ran her over:



But, even better was his bumper sticker:



Michael Hingle, of course, is one of the local ambulance chasers with those ever-present commercials on late-night television. Many of his spiels start out with “If you get caught in a wreck with an eighteen-wheeler...”

That reminds me of an example of why these types of ads may promise just a bit too much. I forgot where I heard this, but it was a story about a father and daughter asking one of these types of attorneys to represent them. After seeing the commercial promising a big check after getting in a wreck with an eighteen-wheeler, they go to see the attorney. The daughter had luckily survived a near-head-on collision with a big rig, and she and her father wanted to know how much they could recover from the trucking company. So the attorney started asking his questions, one of the first being “What were you doing at the time?” To which the daughter said, “well, I had accidentally crossed into the oncoming traffic...”

That’s not verbatim, but I swear I read that somewhere. I’ll try and find it some other time.
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New Peyton Manning Breakfast Cereal

Peyton Manning has a new breakfast cereal coming out after his resounding loss to the New Orleans Saints in Superbowl XXIV!

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Saints Superbowl Countdown and the NFL's Lack of Overseas Trademark Enforcement

If you don't live here, you can't imagine what the Saints winning the NFC Championship and going to the Superbowl for the first time in its 42 year franchise history has done for this city. When Hartley kicked that field goal in overtime, the entire city transformed into a giant block party: like everyone else not in the Superdome that night, our regular game day party crew streamed out shouting and yelling and started randomly hugging our neighbors and high-fiving strangers. Its been impossible to get much work done and all of us real fans are listening to WWL-AM 24/7 and its seems the local TV stations are in a ongoing duel to see who's coverage on Sunday will start the earliest - 7:00am local is what one of them announced tonight: that's ten and a half hours before the game actually begins. The other day I surprised my wife with a second cable box for our kitchen TV so that she can watch the NFL network while cooking, and now I'm hooked myself and have been watching it 2-3 hours a day.

In the middle of all this - four days after the championship - my mother, who has been spending her golden years globe-trotting all over the planet (50+ countries so far, extra pages needed for her passport, etc., etc.) came back from a three week trip to Jordan and Israel and when I called her she said that she would wait to give us most of the knick-knack gifts that she picked up for us, but that she was mailing one that she wanted us to have right away.

I thought nothing about that until Wednesday when a small but thick envelope came in the mail. I opened it but couldn't figure out what it was before my wife realized - "It's a Saints yarmulke!" she said.



Oh my freaking Yahweh! My mom enclosed a note that said she didn't want me to convert, but I wish there was a fast track slip-the-rabbi-a-few-bucks express lane route to Judaism so I could go to services at one of the local temples Saturday just to wear this!

With all her traveling, generosity and shopping prowess, this was not, however, my mother's first experience with circumventing the NFL's licensing police by finding non-sanctioned Saints swag overseas. Last summer she went to Russia and bought us a set of Russian nesting "matryoshka" dolls:



As with the yarmulke, I wish she had grabbed a dozen of these - I would have split the profits with her 50/50: the NFL lawyers can't catch EVERYTHING, no matter how much they try to muscle local entrepreneurs over half-assed overly expansive trademark claims.

The matryoshka dolls are part of our Saints shrine below our TV:



And all this compliments my favorite Saints memorabilia: the neon Budweiser Saints sign that I purchased - late in the afternoon when, amazingly, no one else had snagged it (but, it was before the current season when we only 8-8 the previous year) - from the old Rock and Bowl.



And so, given as superstitious as all Saints fans are, I know that the combination of Saints memorabilia is why we are going go KICK THE COLTS ASS on Sunday! Who Dat!!!!!!!

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Saints Beat Redskins to Go 12-0

My prediction/mock-up for the front page of the Times-Picayune tomorrow:



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Even Published Authors Can Mis-speak

Occasional errors in the morning paper don't surprise me any more. Even the Sunday New York Times we get delivered each week (but at thirty dollars a month, maybe not for much longer when I can walk down the block and get it for $5 at Starbucks) has routine mistakes that I chalk up on too much reliance on spellcheck and not enough on real editorship and skull sweat.

But this egregious mis-use/mis-wording nearly made me do a spit-take with my yogurt this morning. Its from an article-slash-interview with Ethan Brown, the author of "Shake the Devil Off: A True Story of the Murder that Rocked New Orleans", an otherwise fine-sounding book about a horrible post-Katrina murder-suicide committed by an Iraqi war vet. Brown worked as a reporter for a while and talked about applying his investigative skills to this story:

"That's what I was doing. Scavenging. Getting everybody's story right. Trying to get these two apocryphal events -- the Iraq war and Katrina -- right. " (Gag-inducing emphasis added.)

Of course - duh - he meant to say "apocalyptic", not "apocryphal", because for damned sure Katrina and the Iraq war are NOT "of doubtful authenticity".

Even a published author, skilled and experienced in weaving words into precise, poetic combinations, can mis-speak. But though these words are similar ... well, they start with the same two syllables, but they really ARE NOT EVEN CLOSE TO BEING SIMILAR ... they are as different in meaning as two words can be. A total, complete, mistaken choice of words.

And isn't it the interviewer's, or the editor's, job to catch this? Doesn't this deserve at least a [sic] after the word? Does anyone at the Times-Picayune own a dictionary that has actual pages?

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Dead Blue Dog Graffiti

Great graffiti, presumedly somewhere here in the city:


Finally something useful from Twitter! Thanks, NolaMaven! For my many readers not from New Orleans, the target of this is New Orleans artist George Rodrigue's ubiquitous Blue Dog motif/mascot/moneytrain.

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Raptor on the Road

The power was out for an hour or so after today's refreshing thunderstorm, so we were out on the front porch for a while and noticed this guy across the street on a neighbor's porch, trash can, and eventually up in a tree. It was hard to get a decent photo, but these are the best:













We've seen various "raptors" in Audubon Park - which isn't unusual - and that's apparently just a loose catch-all term for a wide variety of hunter birds, including falcons, eagles, hawks and condors. We have a big bird book some friends gave us when we were feedings some Monk Parakeets in the backyard, and the closest I could figure was that this was a Cooper's Hawk or something similar. That's one of several types of birds apparently commonly called a chickenhawk, which is what our neighbor said he used to call these when saw then as a kid. One of the others, the Sharp-Shinned Hawk is also sometimes called a chickenhawk, and the WikiP picture of it looks more like the pictures of what we saw.

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Letters to Cleo at Lafayette Park

They have a pretty impressive body of work, but here is a short clip of Letters to Cleo performing their biggest hit, Here and Now, at Lafayette Park yesterday:

(This is a test of how well ImageShack.Us hosts videos - haven't tried their feature for doing that before.)
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