Archive for March, 2006

March 10, 2006 | Filed under: hello, nurse!

This is a long one. About 6 minutes–three minutes over my self-enforced limit. Sometimes limits were set to be broken. Click the pic to see the state I was in when I came home from work this morning. I was unsure of whether to post it, so I hurried up and did it anyway lest I change my mind. No titles. No editing…hence the length.

I only hit around 40% of the points I wanted to make, but that’s what happens when there’s no script. There’s a fair amount of rambling here, and I just kind of plotzed. Inspired by Monika, I meant for this to be a post about why I became a nurse and why I enjoy it so much and instead the post turned out to be something else altogether.

A detailed work-related text post will follow offering clarifications, definitions and more fleshed out ideas…maybe tomorrow. I’m really very drained.

March 8, 2006 | Filed under: big easy, amigos

No, I didn’t get arrested in New Orleans. But a friend of mine did, and under bogus charges. Click here or above for his story, click here for other similar stories and/or read below for details. A brief glossary:

OPP as in Orleans Parish Prison (not as in this)
ICE as in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (not as in this)

Having a videocamera in your hand at the wrong time is not a good thing in New Orleans, particularly when you are, in fact, filming your surroundings in order to maintain a certain level of safety from the police. I filmed him telling his story on Canal street as we waited for a Mardi gras parade to reach us. The next day we all planned to meet up for some more Mardi Gras fun, but alas, he had been arrested again. Something about “interfering with a police action” when in fact, he was taping run-of the mill French Quarter Mardi Gras madness and a police car drove into the scene, presumably to break it up a bit. Except they didn’t, really. They just arrested him. Add a side of “resisting arrest” to that order, please.

March 6, 2006 | Filed under: Uncategorized

I didn’t make this video, but I sure wish I had. If you’re a Simpsons fan, or even if you aren’t, you gotta love this. You can either click on the “Play” prompt in the center of the picture and watch it right here, or click on the YouTube logo and and go see it there. Watch it while you can, before Fox’s lawyers get ahold of it…

March 5, 2006 | Filed under: Uncategorized

Acadamy Awards? Jon Stewart? Comments? Questions? Concerns? Seemed to me that the first half of the opening monologue plotzed, but he picked up speed once he got to the Gay Cowboys Through The Ages montage and became progresively more comfortable as the evening wore on. The Acadamy has once again cast a wry, witty, small-screen East Coaster to host the show (think Letterman, think Rock) only to recoil in horror when they take jabs at Hollywood. The movie industry takes itself way too seriously. People: you work in entertainment. Entertainment.

Hollywood should actually be jabbed at more often. Those creepy production numbers were reminiscent of the infamous Rob Lowe/Snow White song & dance fiasco of 1989. I liked Jon Stewart. I don’t think they’ll ask him back next year, but I think in the end he was pretty damn funny. Not as funny as Lily Tomlin and Meryl Streep, though–you think any of those new big-eyed startlets could have pulled that off? Keira and Reese, perhaps? Or maybe Jennifer and Jennifer? I seriously doubt it.

I liked the faux smear ads. I liked Uma’s dress. I like that luminous little Chinese actress whose name I can’t pronounce (can I use her as a Christmas Tree angel next year? She’s just so teeny and adorable and glowing–is that messed up? Wanting to use a human being as an ornament?) and I liked that Three 6 Mafia won for best song. Not the competition was fierce, or anything, but they were just so darn psyched about it. I really liked the South African winner for Best Foreign Film. Everyone else seemed bored.

And, really, so was I.

The cable box gets turned in tomorrow. I wish my last tv hurrah could have been a little more thrilling. Maybe I should wait a week.

March 5, 2006 | Filed under: big easy, Holiday! Celebrate!

Here’s one last Mardi Gras video for posterity–well, maybe not the last. It’s a sampler platter of characters I ran into on Mardi Gras, each one more outrageous and memorable than the last. Where else can you enjoy an “airplane” taxiing down a city street? Or Colonel Sanders surrounded by giant-sized chickens? Or a dapper older gentelman dancing with an Outer Space mermaid? A man sporting a permanently wind-blown tie? New Orleans, of course. A place where it’s possible–likely, even–for traffic to come to a dead halt due to spontaneous dancing in the streets.

What else is there to do but hop out of your car and join in?

Where else can you get away with traipsing around the city dressed as Gene Simmons when it’s months away from being Halloween? Needleess to say, The Three Genes were a big hit. People screaming everywhere we went “You wanted the best, you got the best!”. We even got called out by Peaches at her show at One Eyed Jacks. You simply haven’t lived ’till someone yells “WE GOT KISS IN THE HOUSE!!!” in referrence to you from the stage of their own concert. It rocked. Next year we plan to add spandex.

I wanted so very much to have some coherent footage of The Three Genes but, alas, it was not to be. So instead you get incoherent footage of the Three Genes. Too much wine, too much giggling and way too much of Gene #3 pushing the buttons of the ridiculous “Mayor in Your Pocket” key chain trinket he aquired on Decatur Street, duplicating his tendency to say exactly the wrong thing at exactly the wrong time.

One last Mardi Gras highlight was not caught on film…I’ll write about it later. It’s a doozy.