Photograph taken on the University of Louisiana Lafayette campus near the Intramural Athletic Fields, Lafayette, Louisiana.
This is a relatively untouched photograph. After I put up this entry I brought it into Illustrator and traced it. Now I’m trying to think of an interesting background to put behind the shoes. Any ideas?
Never Number One: A Whole Bunch of Great CCR Songs
5. “Travelin’ Band”/”Who’ll Stop the Rain” (1969) was denied by Simon and Garfunkel‘s “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” No reason for complaint there, really.
4. “Lookin’ Out My Back Door”/”Long as I Can See the Light” (1970) was held off by Diana Ross and “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.” No shame in that, either.
3. “Green River” (1969) could not overcome the Archies and “Sugar Sugar.” We like “Sugar Sugar” more than most people do, but c’mon, that’s crazy.
2. “Bad Moon Rising” (1969) stalled at #2 behind “Love Theme from Romeo and Juliet” by Henry Mancini, which is pretty close to the exact opposite of “Bad Moon Rising.”
1. “Proud Mary” (1969) was blocked for a week by Sly and the Family Stone‘s “Everyday People,” which is a great record and a worthy rival. But the next week, Tommy Roe‘s “Dizzy” jumped over both of them to #1. And that is a crime not merely against rock, but against art itself.
50 new fairy tales are discovered in Germany
Read one of them here:
more:
In one sense, the rule of the law must be consistent with at least some form of public administration. Over the centuries, governments have had to enforce the criminal law, tear down firetraps, and issue driver’s licenses. It is often not easy to decide what disabilities prevent people from driving or what qualifications must be met to operate a heavy rig. But with conscientious officials, these focused tasks can be accomplished. Today’s “administrative state,” however, goes far beyond this modest level of public administration.
Well You Don’t Say: 10 White Singers We Once Thought Were Black
Lana Del Rey On SNL, Haters, & Her Hair In First Radio Interview And On-Air Performance
Rock Flashback: Patsy Cline’s Plane Crash, 1963
The 12 Dos and Don’ts of Writing a Blog
This guy found Eva in an album of 60s and 70s polaroids at a Berlin flea market. She appears prominently throughout the album, and his curiosity about her life led to Tuesdays with Eva, which began with this post.
Somewhere miles deep underground the dried salt remnant of an ancient sea is being squeezed by the unimaginable weight of the Mississippi delta building up above. All the loose mud from Ohio and Minnesota ends up washed downstream, piles up, and presses down. The salt becomes a sort of geological fluid and globs rise like pale columns in a crystalline subterranean lava lamp – reaching miles up until they almost burst forth under the starry sky.
One of these salt domes sits under Avery Island – pushing the land upwards above the surrounding sea-level flatness. It is truly an island – a disk-shaped protuberance rising above… not the trackless sea but the feckless swamp – a bit of dry, elevated land looking down on the miasma and the bog.
The salt dome rises and bears a number of gifts. There is the salt itself – mined or boiled from springs for centuries with only a short break when the saltwork was captured by Union troops during the Great War Between the States (as it is known in these here parts). There is the gift of petroleum – oil is dragged along and concentrated by the rising column until, like Spindletop to the west, a forest of derricks sprout up sucking at the black gold.
And finally, there is the gift of high, dry farmland – rich and fertile. The Avery Island Plantation could grow pretty much any crop and – luckily for us – they chose a unique crop, grown from seed brought back from Central and South America… Hot Peppers.
For Pepperheads and fans of spicy food Avery Island is capsaicin ground zero and a visit there, at least once during a lifetime, is a necessary pilgrimage – a hot sauce Hajj.
Avery Island is the home and only manufacturing facility of the McIlhenny Company – the maker of Tabasco Pepper Sauce. Every little red bottle – somewhere around 750,000 bottles a day – are made on Avery Island.
We were going to drive back to Dallas from Lafayette, about a seven hour drive, but I wanted to go see the McIlhenny Tabasco factory on Avery Island first so we drove south instead and, after a couple of wrong turns, crossed the little wooden toll bridge (one dollar per car) onto the complex of green hills atop the salt dome.
The first thing you notice when driving up to the factory is the smell. It is wonderful. It’s not a hot, painful tear-gas like capsaicin reaction like you might expect, but a mellow, complex warm feeling that envelops the whole complex. First, we took a tour of the factory. You get a lecture; watch a film, then walk past the filling lines behind a glass wall. It was a Sunday, so the filling lines weren’t running, which was fine with me – I’ve seen plenty of food filling equipment filling food in my day. It was good enough to be standing behind the glass looking at the place where all the goodness happens.
At the end of the tour was a little museum with facts about Tabasco Pepper Sauce. I already knew most of it, having seen it on the How It’s Made television show. The most amazing thing about Tabasco is that the ground up peppers are aged in second-hand whisky barrels and allowed to ferment for three years before being mixed with vinegar, blended, and bottled. The barrels are covered with a layer of Avery Island salt while they age. Ground peppers (the seeds are developed on Avery Island, though the peppers are grown in Latin America), water, salt, and vinegar… that’s it.
To help the pepper pickers pick the perfect peppers they are given le petit baton rouge – a little red stick. This is painted the color of a perfectly ripe Tabasco pepper.
Then we walked across to the Tabasco Country store and bought our share of touristy knick-knacks and hot sauce products. I looked long and hard at the gallon jugs of hot sauce with the plastic pumps – and was able to resist the siren song. They had a sampling table with all the different flavors, including one I have never seen before – a chipotle raspberry sauce (I bought a bottle). There is no reference to this chipotle raspberry Tabasco anywhere – it’s a bit gimmicky, but it tastes good.
They also had spicy cola, two flavors of ice cream, and anything else you can imagine – plus a few you can’t. Candy bought some stuff for Nick (he loves Tabasco) and a bag of cooking wood made from their broken fermenting barrels.
One odd thing I did buy was a big ziplock plastic bag of pure pepper mash. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with it, but it makes every room smell wonderful.
I took a walk around and snapped a few pictures, like a good tourist. Down at the end of the factory were some long brick buildings – these must be some of the fermenting warehouses where the sauce ages for three years in those oak barrels because the odor wafting out of the vents was unbelievably wonderful. One must have been the Chipotle warehouse because I could detect a smoky note in the air.
We had planned on stopping by a tony Cajun restaurant north of Lafayette on the way home, but there was a little trailer set up next to the country store selling red beans, rice, and sausage from crock pots. Of course, there was a large selection of spicy condiments available for testing.
I doubt the expensive restaurant had anything on the five dollar foam cup of red beans that I gobbled down with dabs of at least seven different Tabasco sauces on different nibbles.
There is a lot more to Avery Island – the Jungle Gardens and the Bird City went unvisited by us. We had a long drive ahead and couldn’t tarry. I’ll be back though, to smell that smell and explore some more. Once is not enough.
The factory has this crazy bayou gothic look to it.
The recycled whisky barrels with salt on top. The mash ages in these for three years.
Walking around, I found this pallet of old barrel lids after the peppers have been aged.
A box of labels from the filling line.
The food stand - great beans, rice, and sausage.
I haven't seen or read about this anywhere else.
Taking on Big Tabasco – Or, a little undercover research into le petit baton rouge
Tabasco’s Red-Hot Beginnings in Louisiana
The Fascination of Tabasco Sauce
Cajun Country’s Saucy and Spicy Tour
January, 2012. On the Geaux – Again – in Louisiana
McIlhenny Tabasco – Avery Island, Louisiana
Avery Island and Tabasco Sauce
Yes! My Camera Loves New Iberia Louisiana
5 Healthy Reasons to Love Tabasco Sauce
Avery Island – Tabasco, Alligators and Egrets
Touring the Tabasco Hot Sauce Factory and Scenic Avery Island, Louisiana
RV Trip Favorite Photos #51-55
Roadtrip: South Louisiana, Part 1
“Black girl, black girl, don’t lie to me
Where did you stay last night?
I stayed in the pines where the sun never shines
And shivered when the cold wind blows”
Grove of Pine Trees, Avery Island Louisiana (click to enlarge)
My husband was a railroad man
killed a mile and a half from here
his head was found in a driving wheel
and his body hasn’t never been found
A Simple Song That Lives Beyond Time
Black girl, black girl where will you go?
I’m going where the cold wind blows
You called me to weep and you called me to moan
and you called me
to leave my home
Judice Inn, Lafayette, Louisiana
Lee wanted to go eat at the Judice Inn before the Rugby game in Lafayette. A friend of his at Tulane is a member of the family that owns and runs the restaurant. It’s an unassuming place with a long history. The building was handbuilt on a road out of town by two brothers right after WWII. Now, the city has grown to surround the restaurant, and it seems popular with locals and UL Lafayette students. USA today listed it as one of the 51 great burger joints in the country.
The interesting thing is the menu. Hamburgers… with secret cajun sauce, a few other sandwiches… and nothing else. No fries. No sides. This is Louisiana, so they serve beer. Lee had a milkshake, which was spun up fresh (no humming extrusion of milkshake machine).
Everything was simple and good, like it should be.
Well, I’m standing on the corner of Lafayette state of Louisiana
Wondering where a city boy could go
To get a little conversation, drink a little red wine
Catch a little bit of those Cajun girls dancing to Zydeco—-That Was Your Mother, Paul Simon
Sometimes I think I went all the way from Dallas to Lafayette just to use that bit of Paul Simon. It’s one of those songs that always sits only a hare’s breath beneath the surface of my conscious mind. But that’s not why we are here, we drove down from Dallas to watch Lee play Rugby. He’s on the Tulane Rugby team, a club team, and he’s here in Lafayette to play the University of Louisiana Lafayette Ragin’ Cajun Rugby Team.
I know very little about rugby – I watched some a handful of decades ago, but don’t remember much of anything. It didn’t take long to pick it up though. It was fun to watch the kids play. There seems to be three aspects to the game – the scrum, the weird out-of-bounds plays where players lift each other up for no apparent reason, and the running around.
I have spent so much of my life driving kids to practice or sporting events and sitting on the sideline watching the games. It felt totally natural to drive Lee from our hotel down to the University of Louisiana at Lafayette intramural fields and to stroll the sideline while he and his team played a spirited, but ultimately meaningless, game.
One thing about rugby, though. It is the only sport I know about that actually encourages unsportsmanlike behavior. The language used by both teams and the referee crew was amazingly obscene.
The people from long ago that played rugby said the best thing about the game is that both teams would party together after the game. Since this is South Louisiana, that means food, and the other team, the home team, provided bar-b-que. They had a big smoker trailer going on the other side pouring out blow smoke and delicious odors all day. The ribs were pretty damn good, but the local, artisanal sausage (three varieties – hot ‘n spicy, geen onion, and smoked) was absolutely amazing. I have to find out where to get some of this stuff.
Laissez les bons temps rouler
In the scrum - Tulane Green Wave versus the University of Louisiana at Lafayette Ragin' Cajuns
The out-of-bounds throw in. I really don't understand exactly what is going on here.
The running around part of a rugby game.
That's Lee, running around on the right side of the picture.
Lee
Lee, jumping into the play
Lee, pulling the ball loose.
After the game, local food provided by the other team. It doesn't get any better than that.
Dallas is well known for being inundated by that delicious abomination – the Tex Mex Restaurant. So, if you want to open a Mexican sit down eating place not dedicated to Velveeta Cheese Sauce or plates of tiny tacos you have to distinguish your cuisine in some way.
Candy and I have been eating our way through the restaurants in the Bishop Arts District (there are more than you would suspect). So we decided to cross one off of the list and stopped by the Veracruz Cafe.
They seperate their style of cooking from the regular pedestrian Tex-Mex by advertising themselves as: Mesoamerican, Mayan, Huasteco & Aztec Cuisine. I’m not sure about all that, but I can say that it is delicious.
The restaurant sits on a corner on an edge of the Bishop Arts district. A group was coming out the door carrying to-go boxes, Candy asked, “Is it any good?” They all said it was great and offered their leftovers – tempting, but we decided to go in and pay for our meal anyway.
Inside is attractive – dark with a unique purple color scheme. It’s cool and relaxing. The service was excellent – I was a bit dehydrated and they were able to keep my water glass going, which was no small feat. I had the special, Pescado Tajin, a Tilapia filet covered with shrimp and scallops, with a tomato sauce and vegetables. Tajin is a Mayan archeological site near Veracruz. Unique and very good.
Cafe Veracruz has a tough job competing with a number of very well known restaurants in the area. It more than holds it own, though, and seems to me to be a popular place with the locals that live in the area. I deserves a close look from visitors too.
Above the entrance to Cafe Veracruz
The Daily Special Board - I had the Pescado Tajin
The pleasant and colorful dining room.
One restaurant that everyone in Dallas has to eat at is Smoke in the Belmont Hotel. It has been the vanguard of the revitalization of Oak Cliff – about to come to fruition with the impending opening of the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge (unfortunately I will be out of town for the grand opening festivities). The Bar at the Belmont is one of my favorite places and the restaurant next door is not far behind.
Smoke is an upscale Bar-B-Que sort of place – a very non-traditional Texas Bar-B-Que – no serving line where greasy slabs of meat are slopped onto your foam plate and you choose the green beans on the side (not that there is anything wrong with that). You do get the seductive smell from the smokehouse out back and the piles of wood are carefully displayed to make sure you know where the goodness is coming from.
Smoke works hard to serve selections of local, handmade, and artisanal ingredients. It is a popular and crowded restaurant. Usually I don’t like to wait very long for a table (I don’t do well with the packed, chatty crowd), but they enter your phone into an iPad and you can sneak next door to the Bar Belmont to enjoy the skyline while you wait. They’ll send you a text when your spot is ready.
The brunch menu was up when we ordered. It was all good. I had the eggs florentine – with smoked salmon and collard greens (instead of spinach). I know this sounds odd – but it was the greens that made the dish. The slightly wild and bitter flavor of the collard greens added a bit of texture.
I appreciate the effort and thought that the chefs at Smoke put into their menu and the risk they took a few years ago to move into an area that seemed to be forever moribund. Luckily, it looks like their foresight, courage, and hard work is paying off and will continue into the future.
The view of the Belmont from the porch at Smoke - Dallas skyline in the background.
The porch and entrance at Smoke
Eggs Florentine at Smoke
Dallas Art Deco Architecture
365 Things to do in Dallas – 266. Catch the View and a Drink at Bar Belmont
DAY 5 & 6 of Shepard Fairey (OBEY) in Dallas
Smoke: The Best Brunch in Dallas
Such a lot of work for such crappy beer. A cannon that can shoot Bud Light, Bud Light Lime, and Pabst Blue Ribbon? Really?
Funny and smart tips to make life easier
Just the Two of Us (and Ken Jeong)
Make your own popping corn in a bag
I remember winning a cheap pocketknife in a claw machine when I was a little kid. I think the guy running the machine (it was at a fair, not a restaurant or something) set it so I would win. After all these years I still smile when I think of the clunk that knife made falling down the chute.
Five Keys to Sleeping Well Tonight
Noel Rockmore, ‘Picasso of New Orleans,’ revisited
Wordiness, Wordiness, Wordiness List
For a long time, I have had an idea that, when I was silly enough to say it out loud, received more than its share of derision. The idea is a theory I have had concerning the question of why has crime been falling so much in the last decades.
The most famous (and controversial) theory is from Steven Levitt and John Donohue – the Freakonomics Guys – they famously said that the drop in crime is mainly caused by the legalization of abortion in the US – so on and so forth. It is an unsettling theory, though a compelling one.
So I read Freakonomics and found the book to be well written and thought provoking, though I found their crime theory to be not completely convincing. I may have missed something, but they did not close the loop in my mind – they showed plenty of correlation, but failed to indicate causation.
Correlation does not prove causation. Never. Read and remember that. Very few people – and nobody that appears on television understands that simple sentence.
So, what is my theory of the drop in crime?
I have been saying for a long time (years before Freakonomics) – as a matter of fact, I predicted it before it really happened – that a large portion of the drop in crime can be attributed to the removal of lead from gasoline.
You see, for years I have had access to sampling results (some done by me) of lead in both emergency release situations (spills, waste sites, industrial pollution) and in background, “ordinary” locations and situations. Over those years I was repeatedly shocked at the elevated levels of lead near highways, especially in urban areas, and at the blood levels of lead in animals and humans living in those areas. These levels were regularly high enough to expect noticeable behavioral effects. While leaded gas was still being sold, I would talk about how I thought that was one environmental hazard that was more serious than anyone thought (and there were plenty of others that I thought/think weren’t/aren’t so important). When the tetraethyl lead anti-knock compounds were formulated out, I felt that we would see an improvement in behaviors from the populations (mostly densely urban) that were exposed to lead residues fairly quickly as the lead dissipated.
Nobody took my rantings seriously. I had one female actually tell me, “That is so typical, for a man to blame something like the drop in crime on some chemical.”
That didn’t make me very happy. My response was, “Well, I think it’s a typical response for a man that has had years of access to large numbers of lead sampling results and who has studied the dangers and effects of lead exposure to the point of doing work on protecting elements of the population from the possible effects of heavy metal poisoning.” She gave me a very dirty look and refused to talk to me any more. It’s no surprise I could never get dates.
I’m not sure what she objected to… was it my refusal to acknowledge the importance of unicorn saliva in making the world a friendlier place? This was before the Freakanomics book, so it couldn’t be a pro-choice argument (though that is a slippery slope point of view that nobody, rightly so, would touch with a ten foot pole). Now, I am very aware of the, “If all you have is a hammer, everything begins to look like a nail,” principle, and concede that there is a lot of that at work, but that still doesn’t mean I was wrong.
You see, unlike most people, and all pundits and politicians, I looked at the data first – then made predictions from the data – then tested this against reality. There is a huge difference between operating from data first and doing what the pundits and polititians do – coming up with some cute theory that you can benefit from and then searching for data to support it.
Well, now that I’ve dug up all this dirty laundry, what is the point? Someone else has come up with the same idea. After all these years, the New York Times has come out with an article that agrees with my point about lead levels and crime rates. There is a detailed study (pdf) that talks about it.
Of course, there are already articles that contradict the theory and I’m sure we will see more.
So what do I think? More importantly, what do I think now?
As I get older and more experienced (and more muddled and more cranky) I have come to believe the disconnect between correlation and causation is even more tenuous that we think. I’m beginning to believe that it is only under very rare and special conditions that we can even talk about causation in a confident way. I think that chaos (mathematical chaos, not philosophical chaos) rules almost everything we do – feedback loops, sensitivity to initial conditions, and unintended results are the norm, not the exception. I think that we are fooling ourselves when we think we know what’s going on and why.
So after decades of thought and research – why do I think that the crime rate is decreasing? Is Batman a transvestite? Who knows? I think the important thing is to remember to enjoy the walk in the evening that we were too scared to take a decade ago.
Here is an old, bad photo of me working on the Geneva Superfund Site in South Houston, Texas. Circa 1983. It's no wonder I couldn't get dates.
Bill Chance 