Colleen Kane

The First of the Last Vistors

My dear friend and former roommate Amanda, known to nearly 100,000 YouTube viewers as Flight Attendant, came to visit for a few days. She's the first of a series of visitors who will come during our last six or so months in Louisiana (!). So now that we have to show the place to fellow Northerners, what did we show?

For one thing, we met LSU mascot Mike the Tiger. It looked like this:

This is Halloween

Here is me as Meg Fright of the imaginary rock and roll zombie combo (zombo) the Fright Stripes, based of course on the real life rock and roll combo the White Stripes. The hubbs doesn't like to be pictured on this blog, but he was Jack Fright. (I don't think Meg Fright's drum technique would be much different from Meg White's, by the way.)

 

So of course we went to New Orleans, which is one of the best places on Earth to celebrate Halloween. I want to say it's The best, but more on that in a moment.

Watching the World Wake Up From History*

* Can't believe I just quoted Jesus Jones.

If you're a nerd or someone who loves them, you probably heard that as of yesterday, GeoCities is under construction no more. To bring the rest up to speed, GeoCities was an online community that was a precursor to blogging, enabling any slob who could follow a few simple directions to have a free website. Of course the quality of those websites were laughably Ye Olden Internette Style: cheesy bright colors, flashing words, animated GIFs of happy faces doing things, rampant abuse of Comic Sans font (and isn't it all abuse?), and lots of under construction signs. As users switched to blogs and other platforms, GeoCities became a ghost town of abandoned websites, lingering on unnoticed for years. Parent company Yahoo! announced earlier this year that the service would shut down.  

Although no one thinks they look good anymore, the websites still make up part of the history of the Internet. It would be wrong to let all those pages just disappear. Get a load of some GeoCities sites, helpfully preserved at Internet Archeology. On a personal note, some of my first writing on the Internet went up on a GeoCities site that I'm happy to see go, but I've included a sample below. 

To Catch a Teabagger

(Image)

Last night someone using the handle "SVO" posted an 850-word comment on my other blog, Abandoned Baton Rouge. Disheartened by the decline of his former neighborhood, SVO recounted his story of growing up there. Feel free to skim it all the way to the bottom, where the comment takes an unexpected turn: 

How sad to see the old Baton Rouge go, but we all know why don't we? Think the letter 'N'. And I'm not ashamed one bit to say so.

Uhhhhh, no. We don't all know what word beginning with the letter "N" ruined Baton Rouge. Nachos? Nerds? Nylons?

But I'm just being cute. Unfortunately, I do get the drift of what SVO is saying.

I decided to look into SVO's identity, which was a breeze using the email address he provided when leaving a racist comment on a blog. (He really must not be ashamed!)

I Make the Salads that Make the Young Girls Cry

Above is a sign I've been meaning to photograph for probably about a year now. You know, just in case any of you need it.

Below is another one.

 Which driving school would you rather: "ALERT," or another local school called Angelwood? The former has the classic misused quotation marks, negating the word they're trying to emphasize, and the latter name contains a word for someone who used to be alive. Neither instill much confidence, driving school owners.

The Youngs and the Olds

Early on Saturday, I departed with friends Kevin and Alicia to observe some Cajuns in their natural habitat. First we went to the Zydeco brunch in Breaux Bridge, which was amazing. Not the brunch so much, because due to a crazy mix-up we never had any food: it was the dancing. It was more than the dancing, really.

While the three of us agreed the band wasn't music we would listen to on purpose at home, they were part of something larger here, and I couldn't think of a more rocking show I'd been to all year. The dance floor was packed with revelers, the floor pulsed with their steps in time, and it wasn't yet noon. Here's the thing: collectively it seemed there was something more in the room than just sounds and people moving in time. Like, isn't this the transcendent feeling you want from a musical performance or any kind of mass gathering, really that hardly ever happens? Yes.

 I hope I'm not overstating the Zydeco brunch, but I wouldn't want to understate it either.

Oh, *really.*

Grill 'Em All

While my friends and family back North are sweatering into autumn, a season I very much miss, it's still grilling weather here, and so we hosted Grill 'Em All on Saturday in honor of the hubbs' birthday. 

We got the cheapest and best local shrimp we know about at this roadside truck, above. Yes, people buy seafood off the back of a truck at roadside stands here, which doesn't sound so advisable, but it's actually fine. It's a good feeling to buy dinner from someone who probably is related to the fishermen or at least knows them.

Goals for the Semester

Here in Baton Rouge, it's a new school year. The hubbs and I have approximately 250 days left in Baton Rouge, not that anyone has an online countdown bookmarked or anything. In addition to a general resolution to make self-promotional efforts or write on every one of those days (because to paraphrase bff ecs, you can't get mad about not getting jobs you never applied for), I've come up with a few more specific resolutions.

In homage to a hand-written list on a paper towel found in our then-new residence two years ago, I present my goals for the semester. Or really, for the school year. (If you're unfamiliar with said list, click the link to see it or the next bit won't make as much sense.)

The sad part about this is I started this post on September 5 but we were out of paper towels, so I had to wait til we could afford to go grocery shopping (don't ask). 

Down by the Riverside: the Shrimp and Petroleum Festival

Each Labor Day weekend since moving here, the hubbs and I have been captivated by the Shrimp and Petroleum Festival (which, if you haven't heard, exists). The foremost draw was the insane name, and with encouragement from their effusive website, we also hoped for new and unusual culinary adventures. Since hubbs was probably on hour 200 of his school/studio week come S&P Festival time the last two years, it wasn't possible to go sooner. But we were finally able to make it this year because it's totally SENIOR YEAR.

The name Shrimp and Petroleum Festival conjures either an image of shrimp struggling in an oil spill or simply a giant question mark. But! Petroleum and shrimp are the industries of Morgan City, where the festival is held, and word is that shrimp are drawn to offshore oil rigs, which is probably about as healthy as it sounds.

Very well. We made the approximately 1-hour drive southwest to Morgan City, along levees, past rickety fishing camps, past a sign urging drivers to not do wheelies in the parking lot.