Mardi Gras Monday: Alcohol
  photo credit: nyki_m |
If you want to learn about “portion distortion”, head to Bourbon St. on a Saturday night.
Between the “Huge Ass” beers, fishbowl hurricanes, giant hand grenade glasses and much more, “only having a couple of drinks” is even more meaningless to the nice police officers than usual.
Alcohol is entwined with Mardi Gras in a way that no one can deny. From drunken revelry in the French Quarter to the wine tastings in the Garden District, alcohol is practically the gasoline that fuels Mardi Gras.
Now, I have to plead a little bit of ignorance. I’m not really much of a drinker, I much prefer a glass of wine at home to a pair of hurricanes in the quarter. However, I’ve brought in a little bit of help (from both Google and harder drinking friends) and am going to bring you the need-to-know information about drinking during Mardi Gras. Read more
Cone of Stupidity
If you live in New Orleans or any place else along a cost potentially impacted by tropical storms, you need no definition for what the forecasters call the “Cone of Uncertainty”.
For those who have never had the good fortune of a rushed evacuation from the latest “Mother of All Storms” allow me to take a moment and explain.
When a hurricane or other tropical storm is out in the ocean, the nice people at the National Hurricane Center do their best to try and predict where it is going to go. They use all kinds of computer models, forecasts, voodoo magic and dart throwing to come up with a forecasted track, meaning line.
They try to predict where the storm will be in roughly five days and make the best guess they can. However, they admit they aren’t very good at this and that nature has a way of making them look like idiots. So, they hedge their best some and create what they call a “Cone of Uncertainty” that goes out from either side of the track.
Since they are pretty good at the 12-24 hour range, the cone starts off very narrow but, by day 5, grows to approximately 350 miles on either side, meaning 700 miles across.
Now, that really isn’t that bad. If you’re within 350 miles of a big hurricane, you’re going to feel it. So anyone within the cone should be paying really close attention. At worst, the storm could make it personal and hit them directly, at best they’ll need to reschedule their boat race and bar-b-que.
Useful it may be at times, I’ve undertaken the decision to, in my household, rename this aforementioned cone the “Cone of Stupidity”. Why? I’ll explain. Read more
Update on Gustav
I’m really not sure what I am going to write here. I just got done updating Plagiarism Today with my plans regarding the storm, setting up the linkroll and doing the show notes for the Copyright 2.0 Show.
I’m preparing to leave my office in an hour or two to head home. There, we plan on boarding up the house (the previous owners were kind enough to provide us with the needed wood, pre-cut) and then, most likely, head out.
This storm has me very worried. It’s track takes it west of us, which puts the city on the strong side and puts the West Bank side of the river, where I live, in the greatest danger.
There are a lot of things that favor my wife and I personally, the location of our house, the nature of my closest levees, etc. but with my side of the river being more at risk, I am finding it difficult to consider staying. Read more
