People 'dat ain't from 'dere just don't understand!

You might be from New Orleans if...
You're out of town and you stop and ask someone where there's a drive-thru daiquiri place, and they look at you like you have three heads. You drive your car up onto the neutral ground if it rains steadily and heavily for more than two hours. You call the 'Median' the 'Neutral Ground.' You have flood insurance. The four seasons of your year - crawfish, shrimp, crab and oyster. You greet people with , "Howzhyamomma'an'em?" and hear back, "Deyfine, darlin!" Someone asks for an address by compass directions and you say it's Uptown, downtown, backatown, riverside or lakeside. Your burial plot is six feet over rather than six feet under. You know the Irish Channel is not Gaelic-language programming on cable. You can pronounce Tchoupitoulas but can't spell it. You don't worry when you see ships riding higher in the river than your house. You have no idea what a turn signal is or how to properly use it. You can cross two lanes of heavy traffic and U-turn though a neutral ground while avoiding two joggers and a streetcar, then fit into the oncoming traffic flow while never touching the brake. You can consistently be the second or third person to run a red stop light. You've been rear-ended 10 times by people with no insurance. You get off the stoop, walk down the banquette and cross the neutral ground to go get a sno-ball. You know better than to drink hurricanes or eat Lucky Dogs. You consider a Bloody Mary a light breakfast. The major topics of conversation when you go out to eat are restaurant meals that you have had in the past and restaurant meals that you plan to have in the future. You judge a po-boy by the number of napkins used. The waitress at your local sandwich shop tells you a fried oyster po-boy dressed is healthier than a Caesar salad. You know the definition of "dressed." You can eat Popeye's, Haydel's and Zapp's for lunch and wash it down with a Barq's and several Abitas, without losing it all on your stoop. You have gained 10 or 15 pounds permanently, but you don't care anymore. You think "drinking water" when you look at the Mississippi River. The smell of a crawfish boil turns you on more than Chanel #5. You enjoy sucking heads more than sucking face. You burl crawfish or fry them in erl, and pack the uneaten tails in furl. Then you wrench your hands in the zinc with an onion bar to get the crawfish smell off 'em. There is a St. Joseph lucky bean in you mama's coin purse. When you speak with a tourist, he asks, "Are you from Brooklyn?" You're not afraid when someone wants to "ax" you. You were born at Baptist, raised in Metry and hang with Vic and Nat'ly. You go by ya mom-ne-ems on Good Friday for family supper. You don't learn until high school that Mardi Gras is not a national holiday. You push little old ladies out of the way to catch Mardi Gras throws. You leave a parade with footprints on your hands. You believe that purple, green and gold look good together-you will even eat things those colors. Every time you hear sirens you think it's a Mardi Gras parade. You go buy a new winter coat and throw your arms up in the air to make sure it allows enough room to catch Mardi Gras beads. You have a parade ladder in your shed. Your finest china has Endymion written on it. Your first sentence was, "Throw me something mistah," and your first drink was from a go-cup. You wonder what Anne Rice has against a building that looks like a Mardi Gras float. You have a special set of grungy, well-broken-in shoes you refer to as your "French Quarter" shoes. Every so often, you have waterfront property. Your last name isn't pronounced the way it's spelled. You believe Al and Anne are the Uptown version of Vic and Nat'ly. You know what a nutria is but you still pick it to represent your baseball team. You have spent a summer afternoon on the Lake Pontchartrain seawall catching blue crabs. You watch a movie filmed in New Orleans and say things like, "Dere ain't no way they can run out of a cemetery right on to Bourbon Street." Speaking of which, you haven't been to Bourbon Street in years. You have to buy a new house because you ran out of wall space for Jazz Fest posters. You drink Dixie, whistle Dixie and name your dog Dixie. You describe a color as K&B purple. You like your rice and politics dirty. You worry about deceased family members returning in spring floods. You reply to anything and everything about life here with, "Only in New Orleans." You have a monogrammed go-cup. A friend gets in trouble for roaches in his car and you wonder if it was palmettos or those little ones that go after the French fries that fell under the seat. You move somewhere else - and you feel like you are FROM Oz and you moved to Kansas.

[alas, i cannot take credit for this lovely work, it was forwarded to me about a zillion years ago.]

habeas what?

i wear black today in honor of the death of habeus corpus. apparently the "great writ" is now the "not-so-great writ."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/09/AR2005090900772.html

on being poor

http://www.scalzi.com/mt2/mt-tb.cgi/3315

a good read

the blogosphere has indeed produced voluminous amounts of rambling shite (e.g., this blog), but there are some truly talented folks out there (e.g., matthew frederick davis hemming, aka cheeseburger brown). mfdh (http://mfdh.ca/) first caught my attention with "the darth side: memoirs of a monster," (http://www.darthside.blogspot.com/) a fictionalized, serialized first person account of darth vader's most personal thoughts and feelings. not a big devotee of fan fiction, i found "darth side" to be hilarious, insightful and downright cheeky. i was sad to see it end. imagine my surprise, however, when i went to the site to re-read some old passages (sick in bed, bored) and found that mfdh has a new project: simon of space (http://simonofspace.blogspot.com/), a serialized sci-fi novel "detailing the adventures of hyperspatial-amnesiac and gentleman-about-the-galaxy N. Simonithrat Fell." i am finding it addictive, as i am sure you will, too. an interesting facet is the comments section, where people are posting editing type comments, which, i feel, really rounds out the "online publishing" metaphor. also, people ask (generally) intelligent questions about the process of writing, etc., which mfdh responds to, making the story that much more interesting.

do you know what it means to miss new orleans

tipitina’s - café du monde - beignets & café au lait - f&m patio bar - lafitte’s blacksmith shop - abita beer - crystal hot sauce -mardi gras - dr. john - warehouse district - george porter, jr. - the radiators - kermit ruffins & bbq swingers - voodoo - rebirth brass band - the mardi gras indians - marcia ball - magazine street - semolina's - drive-thru daiquiris - michalopolous - commander’s palace - emeril’s - french quarter - french market - crawfish etouffe - red beans & rice - pat o'brien's hurricanes - po-boys - uptown - tulane - city park - audubon park - jazzfest - the howlin’ wolf - blue dog - the maple leaf - crawfish boils - harry connick, jr - garden district - tchoupitoulas - wedding cake house - muffuletta - central grocery - pralines - plum street snowballs -

add the things you miss about new orleans to the comments.

give a little to help rebuild the crescent city at http://www.habitat.org/disaster/2005/katrina/

Patti Labelle

Sitting next to Patti Labelle at gyu kaku restaurant in westwood. Oh, and John, too!
Sent wirelessly via BlackBerry from T-Mobile.

the way it is

i am livid knowing that congress can't be bothered to come back from vacation until later this week to vote on measures to help the victims of hurricane katrina when they sure enough all got back fast enough to vote on a measure to keep terry schiavo in misery. they will move heaven and earth to help one vegetable white woman in florida, but obviously don't give a shit about thousands of poor african-americans left behind by society and struggling for their lives in new orleans. for shame, congress. for shame.

if the federal government won't help new orleans, please let's help them ourselves. please give what you can to private relieve agencies helping out in the area. a good site to research all the different organizations and donate is the network for common good. http://www.networkforgood.org/topics/animal_environ/hurricanes/

Test

A test of the mobile blogger functionality.

i'm going to change the name of this blog...

...to "how dumb is our immigration system?"

here's a new one fresh off the wires from the aila liaison's service center operations liaison update (AILA InfoNet Doc. No. 05082660 (posted Aug. 26, 2005)):

"1. Schedule A Memo. There appears to be an error in the new Schedule A memo. At the end of page 6, the memo instructs that documentary evidence bearing on the application should be provided to the "appropriate USCIS office, i.e. the office where the Form I-140 petition has been filed." The Schedule A memo also instructs adjudicators to outright deny any petition where the notice was not posted within the 30/180 day time window. Assuming someone does not properly comply with the actual (versus misleading under the new schedule A memo) requirements regarding the content of the posting, such action cannot be "cured" because it will be outside the time window.

This instruction, however, is erroneous because the DOL regulations at 656.15(b)(2) state that Schedule A applications should comply with the posting requirements at 656.10(d). Section 656.10(d), in turn, states [at subparagraph (3)] that the notice should instruct that documentary evidence can be provided to "the Certifying Officer of the Department of Labor". The Schedule A memo is therefore wrong. The postings should reference DOL, not USCIS.
We understand that a corrected memo is being worked on. In the meantime, however, we are starting to see denials on this basis, in contradiction to the regulations. Can the Service Centers agree to follow the regulations, rather than the memo, on this point?"

i cannot reiterate enough how much i f'ing love my job!

petitioner or hostage

from an email from a colleague...

"The US Consulate in Guangzhou has requested the following: (1) have the USC Petitioner take a photograph holding a newspaper which clearly shows the date of the newspaper, (2) "notarize the photograph" (as translated from Chinese, I assume the Consulate means have the Petitioner make a written statement regarding the authenticity of the photograph and notarize the Petitioner's signature), and (3) send the "notarized photograph" and the original newspaper to the Consulate."

seriously, it's like a hostage photograph. this is ridiculous! in 2005 shouldn't there be a better way of doing this?

is this for real?

http://www.walken2008.com

freedom!

'nuff said.

this is why i hate my job

so, i'm at an adjustment of status interview with a client at the immigration service on thursday, july 7, 2005, and something happened that is just so unbelievable that i had to write it down. during the interview, the officer had the radio on in his office...that was tuned to the rush limbaugh show! i am not kidding. and, during the course of the interview, rush and callers were espousing anti-immigration views. seriously, i am not kidding. i couldn't make this stuff up.

london

come on, now, people. stop it. just stop it. right now.

dinner with james bond

so we had dinner with james bond last night. ok, well not exactly, but we were out to dinner at matteo's on westwood blvd. and timothy dalton was at the table next to us. he did have a very bond-like martini, but i wasn't able to hear if he said "shaken, not stirred" when ordering.

true dat

"The most valuable function performed by the federal government is entertainment."

--Dave Barry

as someone whose entire professional career is dedicated to wrangling with the federal government, this incredibly apt observation brought a smile to my lips.

concerts

saw erasure at the avalon on sunday night. 15 years ago, i was using the assistance of a sherpa to hike up to my seats at the very highest point of the forum so that i could stare down at two dots on the stage that, i was assured, were supposed to be vince & andy. on sunday, i got to stand about 10 feet away from the stage. this is a new theory that we're trying out. if you just stay interested in a band long enough, they will eventually become less popular and you can see them in a small club.

erasure were fabulous. vince looks exactly the same and continues to act rather put upon throughout the show for having to wear all the costumes. he did appear to be dressed as a nazi for part of the show, what was up with that? andy was, as ever, flamboyant. he looks absolutely great and has not lost any of the energy. hiv and two replacement hips have not slowed him down. he sounded fabulous as well. he seemed to be having trouble with some of the high notes, but the rest of the vocals were album quality. he came out and sang a version of "ave maria" that would have made the pope cry, if he weren't already crying from the fact that andy was wearing a black sequined elvis jumpsuit with no shirt and body glitter. it was fabulous! they do a great mix of songs, having recognized that no one wants to hear anything from the unbearably depressing "erasure" or disappointing "love boat" albums, they stuck to the hits and the good songs from the new album. "Stop," "O L'amour" and "Sometimes" were outstanding and had the crowd jumping. The crowd was really into it all night and most of them were really cool.

however, some were complete morons and i have a few comments: first, don't act out the songs. do you realize how fucking stupid you look when you put your hand in the air and do the numbers for the "one and one was two, two and two were four" line in "ship of fools"? pretty fucking stupid is exactly how you look. just stop it. and to the pushy trannies who decided that they absolutely had to be in front of us for the encore, all of your tranny coolness points went right out the window when you acted out "i bet your mad at me, i see your eyes so blue" by pointing at your tranfriend and then at your eyes when mouthing the words. you look like an awful karaoke parody. who are you, anthony fucking federov without the trach scar? as dennis miller said (once, when he was still funny), "ain't no dance floor wide enough." which brings me to another point about pushy people. this one goes to the two midget bitches who thought that it was appropriate to push up and squeeze in the space front of us right before the band came on. first, there wasn't enough space for any people in that spot let alone you and your fat asses. that area was something called "personal space" which means, i am standing more than 4 inches behind the person in front of me so that i don't have to be smashed up against them for the length of the concert. i did not stand there for the better part of two hours, suffering through the shit opening band with a 19 year old singer channeling marc almond like no one in the crowd has ever heard a soft cell album fighting to leave a hairsbreadth of space between me and the person in front of me so that you two over-the-hill wannabe skanks could barge right up at the last minute and stand so close that i have to hold my breath so as not to be spooning you. and here's a fashion tip, just throw that tube top out, honey, because its too small and it mashes your saggy tits into a completely unflattering shape that the rest of us will have trouble getting out of our minds for a long time to come.

for the pimp who has everything...

forget gold teeth caps. forget spinning rims for your ride. you need gold teeth caps with spinning diamond wheels, playa.

http://www.triplexgoldteeth.com/spinning_teeth.htm

ucla study

not sure what to do with this information...
http://newsroom.ucla.edu/page.asp?RelNum=6127

humanism

this may be an understatement, i have recently felt very upset by the christian fundamentalist kick that this country is on. i am very offended by the religious right's attitude that i am not a worthy human being because i am not a christian. to be honest, i am not any religion. my family is catholic, but i had issues with that at about age 7 and they graciously let me abstain from further catholic activities. but that does not mean i am not a moral person. i feel that i can be a good, productive member of society and make the world a better place, even if i don't believe in god. i try to do right by the world, based on a foundation of respect for others. i support charities. i lend my services to pro bono causes. but i feel the religious right is winning the war of semantics by defining people like me as somehow wrong because we do not subscribe to their particular religious views. i stumbled across something online that may be the solution: humanism. i am not ashamed to admit that i have never heard of this before. it bears much more investigation.