Photo courtesy Ben "Le Petit Catfish" Niolet, actual New Orleans dude (and taken by his brother, Paul Niolet)
GateHouse — Thoughts, scribbles and stolen text-message jokes regarding Super Bowl XXVLXVIXCSI, which ended in a satisfying win for an iconic American city that has endured unfathomable hardships, and will, if there is any justice, spend the next five days drinking itself into a state of eyes-crossed, pants-whizzing oblivion. (Sorry, it’s all I can work up at this late hour, as its important to hear the winning franchise’s 275-year-old owner share his thoughts on the victory, because people really heart owners, and also FYI however long you think it takes to scrub a couple of bowls of queso out of the couch, it’s like six times that).
As happens nearly every year, a 30-second TV commercial featuring a guy barely old enough to drink but who can throw a football straight caused me to adjust my entire stance on a major moral issue. Last year, of course, it was Eli Manning warning me about the dangers of sexting.
How about that interception from INDIANA UNIVERSITY GRADUATE Tracy Porter, much-needed proof that they have those in the NFL. (Call me for directions to the practice field, Scouts of America!)
According to TV, I, as a dude, do not spend nearly enough time thinking about the care and quality of my skin, which is entirely true, as I have never in my life exfoliated or moisturized anything important. So no, Commercial Than Ran Six Times At A Cost Of Six Million Dollars To Jergens Or Whatever, I am not yet comfortable in my own skin. And I’m not alone: “I’m about two beers away from being comfortable in my own skin,” cracked my friend Jason, while he was being much funnier than me.
GateHouse — People ask me why it is I am pulling for the New Orleans Saints today instead of my near-hometown Colts, and there are many reasons, most of which are comical and dumb, but here’s the main reason I am rooting against Indianapolis: They sit down at Bruce Springsteen concerts in Indianapolis.
Much has and will be written about Indy, which, to many New Orleansianians, went from a pleasant, corn-smelling spot on the map last week to a rival arch-nemesis empire that must be vanquished (however unlikely this is gonna be) this week. There have been snarky remarks about its status as a large suburb, its sudden obsession with the tenderloin and the lively diversity of its thousands upon thousands of Chili’s restaurants. And there have been jokes about Peyton Manning, a pleasant-looking sort who apparently plays football if he’s not plugging products on television, which happens almost 20 minutes every day.
But I will not join in the seasonal-affective piling-on, for a very good reason: My friends will be mad at me, and I like getting calls on my birthday. It is a perfectly lovely place, except for the thing about the Bruce.
Pictured: The worst remake of "The Adventures of Milo and Otis" ever.
Island Packet — Let’s be honest with each other, Lowcountry people: A major reason that we expatriated ourselves here in the swamps — in addition to retirement, golf and/or the realization of our dream of opening a makeshift bar in a storage facility — is so that we could spend no small amount of time gloating at all of the slushy saps who have elected to live in the North, on purpose, despite considerable scientific evidence pointing to the fact that winter has been known to occur nearly every year.
Over the years and in my two separate stays here in the Lowcountry, I have done this a lot. I did it last week. I’ve done it enough so that I have been occasionally disinvited from important family gatherings. Now and again I’ll load up the weather forecast for Chicago, gasp in farcically overwrought Glenn Beck-ian horror at the shockingly low figure before me, do a genre shuffle for “Reggae” on the iPod and sit back and drink my morning margarita.
One afternoon in 1998 I mentioned to my absurdly talented photographer ex-roommate that I was heading out to finish my Christmas cards by our apartment complex’s pool; he responded, “Shovel the sidewalk while you’re out there!” chortling with a good-natured what-ho as we patted each other on the back and enjoyed the sort of convivial laughter you’d expect of very old criminals, smirking inwardly at our friends and family who had, very likely, spent a good part of their morning chucking a Tootsie Roll-brown mixture of slush, road salt and small former animal chonks off of their wheel wells. (Karma being a jerk, three weeks later I found myself stranded in Chicago’s O’Hare airport — I can’t remember exactly how long it was, but I do know I began to make vague plans about which fellow travelers should be eaten first — but that’s probably for another story time.)
GateHouse — Historically, I’ve been subject to bouts of Olympic Fever, the biennial ailment that presents with an inventory of symptoms that includes high levels of NBC, a temporarily furious interest in bobsledding, feelings of a violently competitive nature toward citizens of Slovenia, medal pox, constant exposure to Bob Costas and several unpleasant rashes, which may or may not be connected, but I thought I’d bring them up. (Incidentally, this 34-year-old professional writer just now satisfactorily determined the word that means “every two years,” English major WHUT.)
I always get excited about the Olympics; I find them extraordinarily comfortable and reassuring in that Weather Channel sort of way, pleasingly static yet always on, so that if you find yourself woken in the dead of night by a dream in which your pillows are suddenly crawling with spiders (erm, hypothetically), you could blunder out to the living room, ignite the flatscreen and discover that somewhere on the planet people are playing out their lives’ dreams on a court or a field or a mat or a luge track or whatever they do curling on. Shuttlecock, I think.
But that was before I watched parts of my first ever Winter X Games, and now I am officially amending my stance: the Winter X Games are the greatest sporting event in the galaxy and make the Olympics look like recess at fat camp.
It was my understanding there would be no spelling on this
Billboard — Excepting “Weird Al” Yankovic and possibly AC/DC, there isn’t a musician alive who needs worry about recalibrating his system less than Jimmy Buffett, though he could pretty much deliver an album of sousaphone-powered oom-pah standards and still sell the fins out of his summer tour next year. True to form, “Buffet Hotel,” the title of which will ensure that the “one T/two Ts” debate among the entertainment world’s copy editors will persevere until the end of time, is an easy, breezy stroll through basically all of Buffett’s usual stomping grounds: well-poured sunshiney escapism (“Summerzcool,” better than its title), light ballads with Hawaiian hints (“Beautiful Swimmers”), a gently insistent carpe diem (Bruce Cockburn’s “Life Short Call Now”), a nearly unbearably cheesy love note to his fans (“Big Top”), a tale of international adventure (the title cut, featuring Toumani Diabate) and a snarky, Steve Goodman-style vaguely political monologue on current events (“A Lot To Drink About’). “Buffet Hotel” might be less about the songs and more about the generating a vibe, and if you subscribe to it going in, you’ll check out happy.
Island Packet — If you’re anything like me, you’ve spent the last month engaged in some combination of coughing, sneezing, cough-sneezing, whining about cough-sneezing, amassing a pile of tissues large enough to suggest you’re constructing a border wall out of them, waking up feeling like someone poured a couple of gallons of vanilla pudding mix into your lungs and, of course, the always-delightful snort-sneezing, which is something that can make you get a cramp in your sinuses while sounding like you’ve briefly turned into a rhinoceros who is giving birth inside a submarine.
I say this not to turn readers off, but because there’s a good chance that most readers are sick, because everyone is sick, because apparently this area has been made ground zero for a nefarious federal Cold and Flu Experiment of some kind, like a “Lost” thing, only with fewer aliens and infuriating asides.
GateHouse — If you page back through human history, you’ll find a pretty short list of reasons that people have had to run for long distances, which are all basically some variation of “I was being chased by this thing with blood in its teeth and meat-tearing claws, and what’s with all the questions anyway, Glunk?” This is, it is logically said, the primary reason our ancestors north on the evolutionary scale developed foot-speed in the first place: When you wake every morning to the very real possibility of being ground into a hairy goo by a predatory hellbeast whose name includes the word “saber-toothed,” it probably doesn’t take long before you develop a singular talent for panicked escapes. (Our creationist friends are invited to substitute “velociraptor” in previous sentence. Also in this hypothetical the human’s job is something he can do with a club, obvs.)
But in modern times, with the whole hunter-gatherer situation pretty well replaced by a land stuffed with a surfeit of Golden Corrals and/or meat-ish clumps stacked three high and available without your removing yourself from your car, there’s really only one reason people run long distances: they are crazy fools whose brains have been replaced by oatmeal and a deep enjoyment of simply avoided injury.
Papa Smurf, left, and his girlfriend prepare to fire an arrow into a rainforest full of metaphors.
Island Packet — ‘Avatar” is lame. You know it, I know it, portions of James Cameron’s animatronic exoskeleton know it. By contrast, though, and in the interest of objectivity, here is an incomplete list of people who seemingly don’t know it: billions of moviegoers all over the planet, the lucrative international market and the important movie-industry people who will spend the better part of the next two months passing expensive awards around crowds of themselves.
Whatever. I am no stranger to standing alone when it comes to the hating of highly popular movies — seriously, two rum-and-cokes and one mention of “Forrest Gump” and I am not responsible for whatever happens to your carpet — so let me take this opportunity to start the local post-Golden Globes pre-Oscars “Avatar” backlash.
Well, technically I can’t start it, as I am already behind the Vatican, whose movie reviewer — who incidentally has the cushiest gig ever, except for having to see all those Kirk Cameron films — called the sci-fi throwdown “simplistic,” adding that the film “cleverly winks at all those pseudo-doctrines that turn ecology into the religion of the millennium.” This officially marks the first time in about 20 years me and the Vatican are totally eye-to-eye on something, which means the introductory brunch at the 2010 Vatican City Humor Columnists Seminar should hopefully be a little less awkward.)
Because he puts an addictive chemical in his chicken that makes you crave it fortnightly, smartass.
GateHouse — I can’t be sure how much time my reader(s) spend in the state of Indiana — except my mom, who I’m pretty positive spends most of her time there, and if not I need to get some birthday cards forwarded at once — but here’s one thing about Indiana: It is not especially difficult, when in Indiana, to be aware of your nearby fast-food options. (It is also not difficult to locate people who command an astonishing supply of Manning family facts and students currently furious with Lady Gaga, but those are both for other times).
Certainly, Indiana is hardly alone in this regard. We do a good bit of road-tripping in my family, thanks to the deeply rewarding feeling we get by paying for gasoline, and as I’m sure you have noticed, there are vast sweeps of American interstate that branch off into exits of inveterate sameness, exits that exist seemingly to explore the countless land-planning combinations that can be made using only fast-food providers, jerky superstores and Cracker Barrels. I have driven — and I’m sure you have driven — upon thousands and thousands of federal roadway just off of which, using solely the context clues provided by local eateries, you would have hopeless little clue about where you are currently super-sizing something (with the notable exception of a Burger King in Spartanburg, S.C., which has been forever scorched into my brain due to the extraordinary inability of its waitstaff to successfully furnish to me a Regular Coffee With A Couple Of Little Creamer Packets, which is a story I’m saving for an eventual book series, as I could expend probably six chapters discussing how I passed the time waiting in vain for someone to smoke out a stirrer).
That said, today I’m writing about Indiana for two reasons:
I know about 30 people in Indiana who get instantly indignant when I make jokes about my home state, such as gags about the time that the bulk of the capital’s populace rose up in seething, pitchforks-and-slogans revolution when the Colts pulled their starters in the 3rd quarter one time, and how, depending where you are standing, the state smells either like the scorched earth of the steel mills or John Mellencamp’s hair. Sometimes both.
All About Jazz — Joe Henry’s strategy for coaxing Mose Allison back to the studio for the first time in twelve years was simple enough: All he had to do was quietly and thoughtfully stalk the jazz icon for a year.
“He kept at it, and kept calling me and emailing and so forth,” the 82-year-old Allison said of the courting process by Henry, who received two Grammy nominations this month for his production on Allen Toussaint’s The Bright Mississippi and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott’s A Stranger Here. “And so I finally decided, ‘Well, what the hell, I haven’t done a record in a long time.’”
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