Who was this for?

The entire reason there even is a Mike VII in the first place is because, when Mike VI passed on, the school had to make some firm public commitments to treating any future tigers humanely.

To this point, LSU has drawn a hard line against involving Mike VII into Tiger Stadium. In September, LSU veterinary school spokeswoman Ginger Guttner said the institution “is not in discussions to bring Mike to any games this season.” 

Mike VII, an 8-year-old Bengal-Siberian tiger that became LSU’s official mascot in 2017, has never attended a football game. Previous Mikes have been placed in a trailer and taken to the sidelines of Tiger Stadium, and some have even traveled to away games. The university announced it would stop the tradition when it adopted Mike VII as a cub.

And they have done that. The tiger enclosure on LSU's campus is very much along the lines of what you might find in any reputable zoo exhibit.  Mike has room to move about and swim and relax in the open. If you at least accept that there will be a tiger in captivity there (and, yes, I understand that many will not, which is fine) then it's reassuring to know that he's being well cared for rather than paraded around like a circus animal. There's nothing in your "tradition" that demands you do anything different.

Shockingly, it turns out this reasonable position is shared by an overwhelming majority of LSU football fans. 

In The Advocate's online poll, which was an unscientific survey, 90% of respondents believed a tiger should not have returned to Tiger Stadium. Nine percent supported bringing back the animal, and 1% felt indifferent. About 1,500 people participated.

“As somebody who grew up with the memory of what it used to be, it kind of sterilized that memory a little bit,” said Justin Giglio, an LSU graduate who lives in Prairieville. “That wasn't what I enjoyed about what it used to be. The part of me that does agree with maybe we shouldn't be doing this to a tiger anymore, that feeling was definitely maximized. I felt bad for Omar.”

We felt bad for Omar, the tiger being lugged around the field in a cage.  And we felt a little bit bad for Mike VII too. The Governor's stunt, cry as he might about "respecting tradition," can only be seen as a direct slap to the face of our very good kitty.  Both of these tigers, and the entire LSU alumni (a community to which Jeff Landry does not, in fact, belong) deserved better.

Hello, and welcome to a fabulous New Year of blogging yellowly

Unfortunately this new year is still among the 2020s which, as we all know, are categorically bad. Anyway, I know I've been saying it is time to get the Yellow Blog back into running shape for a while and I know that every time Twitter starts to die, it seems like that is the time to crank it back up over here. But I really do mean it. Maybe this will finally be the thing that does it. 

Twitter CEO Elon Musk has confirmed that the character limit for tweets will increase from 280 to 4,000 characters early next month.

The feature, which was first proposed in December, is one of a number of changes to the social media platform that the tech billionaire plans to roll out over the coming months after purchasing it for $44 billion last October.

The increase in character length will be only the second time in Twitter’s 17-year history that it has changed the limit, having previously boosted the original 140 limit to 280 in 2017.

As the big social media sites have absorbed and siloed off the whole internet over the course of the past decade, so has Twitter eaten up more and more of my blog posts. That's mostly because I am incredibly lazy and it's easy to just tweet a half-baked thought out and let it go. But, when I'm doing it right, a blog post shouldn't be longer than one or two tweets anyway. Ideally, this is where the half-baked thoughts are supposed to go. 

But, also, this is supposed to be where I put stuff that I want to remember later. And a chronological, taggable, searchable web log of annotated bookmarks is far better for that purpose than the increasingly unreliable instant gratification machine currently being dismantled by a chaotic billionaire.  And if the tweet stretches out to blog post length anyway, (I just checked. So far this post isn't even over 2,000 characters.) it might as well be posted over here instead.  So this time, we mean it. We're gonna try and put the stuff that happens this year on the Yellow Blog so that it doesn't all blow by in a confusing haze this time. Besides, 2023 makes 20 years of posting here so we need to have a nice round archival number. 

I think what we'll do for a while is try to get at least one post up every day or so that collects some of those annotated bookmarks I mentioned. There are a couple of drafts of longer form writing that have been lingering for a while which I would like to finish but let's wade back into this a step at a time.

With that in mind, here is today's stuff I wrote down so I might remember it later. 

The Louisiana Democrats will need to find their own loser candidate for governor instead of borrowing a Republican loser

Late last year, there was a parlor game discussion going around trying to parse whether Dem-aligned power brokers and/or centrist establishment media would rally around a Bill Cassidy campaign for Governor in 2023. Cassidy is a "weird dude" and a perpetual darling of the Advocate editorial page. But that's not exactly an unassailable coalition to ride up against the Jeff Landry juggernaut. The last reporting we've seen has Landry wielding a $3 million war chest plus the official endorsement of the state Republican Party and multiple Super PACs all of which multiplies his fundraising capacity many times over. Anyway, Cassidy decided it wasn't worth it. Much better to sit around in the World's Greatest Deliberative Body doing nothing forever than to take on that headache. His fellow Senator John Kennedy (although he theoretically might have posed a stronger challenge to Landry) reached a similar conclusion last week.

When Bill said he wouldn't run, all of that speculation about Democrats and media picking a favorite Republican shifted over to Lt. Governor Billy Nungesser. For a long time it seemed like Billy and Jeff deserved each other.  For example, we know they both have a problem with librarians. Landry is on a typical "anti-woke" crusade to burn them all while Billy is retaliating against them for blowing the whistle on his corruption. Heck, since the day they were elected to their current positions, we've had them neck and neck in a pool to see which of the two would be the first one indicted and whose scandal would be the stupidest.  Maybe this is just a sign of the times, since despite the fact that each has had his share of doozies over this term, neither has yet landed in jail. Guess we should have bet the over.

And like any pair of like alpha dunces vying for the same space, Jeff and Billy clearly do not like each other.  Nungesser hasn't been shy about saying so. In December, Nungesser said that he had to run against Landry if Kennedy didn't because "Jeff is a bad person." That's was after a long summer of scrambling for endorsements and pre-announcing that he was planning to announce a candidacy.  

And yet, today, Billy says, nevermind all that. 

“But the worst pandemic in our lifetime and a series of devastating storms leaves me with unfinished business to bring tourism back to its peak performance, especially for the near 250,000 families who rely on this industry for their livelihoods. For that reason, and after much thought and prayer, I have decided to seek re-election to the Office of Lt. Governor"

Those devastating storms and the pandemic did not happen just this last month, though.  So who knows what really got Billy to back down? The upshot is the Democrats no longer have an easy way to just quietly sit out a Governor's election they had clearly been planning to just quietly sit out.  Can't wait to see what they come up with. They don't seem to be generating a lot of excitement these days, that's for sure. 

Ad-hoc garbage service

This Sunday morning, we were stunned to see a Richard's Disposal truck picking up on our block. Turns out they're dealing with a "backlog" maybe? What is going on here?

In a statement Monday night, Richard said the company is addressing the backlog with 70 additional personnel, pulling from crews in Baton Rouge and Jackson, Miss. Richard said he and the company "look forward to working cooperatively with the city council, mayor and all of city government to address the market conditions and other circumstances that affect timely trash collection,” according to the statement.

The statement did not address the administration's decision to turn over some routes to different contractors. 

Those "other contractors on some routes" is confusing. Apparently the city is juggling the routes that contractually belong to Richards among Waste Pro and IV Waste, the companies who recently took over Metro's territory. Now they're encroaching on Richards bit by bit as well. But it all seems to be happening according more to whim than a comprehensible scheme. 

Richard’s contract expires in March, 2024, though the city can terminate it for cause or "convenience," which essentially means it can be ended at the city's discretion. Officials have previously said they want to rebid the contract this year, but they have not laid out a time frame. 

Asked how long he expects his company to supplement Richard’s, Torres said officials had advised him “to be prepared to do it until they put it out to bid.”

Meanwhile, they're just making it up as they go. And paying a premium for it. 

My FNBC jury duty notice was sadly lost in the mail

 I didn't even get invited to the tailgate party.  Anyway, the trial is kicking off. 

A jury was seated Monday in the federal bank fraud trial of First NBC Bank founder Ashton Ryan, Jr., as lawyers readied for what is expected to be a weekslong trial probing the actions of Ryan, other executives and bank borrowers ahead of the institution's stunning 2017 collapse.

I have said many times there is probably a good book someone could put together centered around this bank collapse that might tell a broad story about the post-Katrina era of New Orleans politics, real estate, education, and non-profit corruption.  I don't really see this trial telling that whole story but... I may have liked to take a look at this list.

Lawyers involved in the case have said the prosecution's witness list initially was between 100 and 200, though it will call far fewer over the next few weeks. Witnesses are likely to include at least some of those who have taken guilty pleas in the case, including Gregory St. Angelo, the bank's former top lawyer.

Speaking of post-Katrina failures and corruption...

This is part of a series the T-P has been running about "changing streets" or some such. I think the idea here is to frame the massive displacement and dispossession New Orleanians have endured as just "inevitable progress" or whatever. But some of this stuff you can't gloss over. 

According to statistics from the New Orleans Data Center, since 2000, the area encompassing the Marigny, Bywater, St. Claude and St. Roch neighborhoods has gone from 61% Black and 32% White to 17% Black and 72% White. The number of households with annual income over $100,000 a year rose from 3% to 19%.

The article trots out familiar apologists CW Cannon and Rich Campanella to sigh and shrug but at least Cashauna Hill is here to point out that these aren't just natural forces at work. They are deliberate policy choices.  

Many of those pushed out crossed St. Claude Avenue, where the process continues today, said Cashauna Hill, executive director of the Louisiana Fair Housing Action Center. 

Hill said population changes and demographic shifts are often inevitable, and said opposing gentrification does not mean opposing investment.

The problem, she said, is that the city’s leaders have consistently favored policies that encourage gentrification — pouring millions into Crescent Park and the Rampart-St. Claude streetcar line and failing to rein in short-term rentals — while neglecting policies that would prevent it — primarily funding affordable housing.

No need to catalog all of the atrocities right now. But I will point out that the City Planning Commission is once again this month rolling out yet another round of STR regulation that looks on track to once again favor wealth over residents.  We'll catch up on that later. But seeing this picture of where our neighborhoods are today, reminded me of this remark from Mitch Landrieu when he took office as mayor. 

In August, when Mayor Landrieu announced his plan for spending New Orleans’ hard-won recovery dollars he warned a famously tradition-bound city that the time had come for change. “It’s especially important that we stop thinking about rebuilding the city we were and start creating the city we want to become,” he said, echoing his inaugural address.

This is the city we chose to become.  

When the "cyberattack" eats your homework

Amazing story from over the weekend. Let's see if we can sum it up in under 4,000 characters. I think we can. 

So, to start with a cop shot a dog. Apparently this was not the first dog this cop shot either. Which is why the owners of the dog that was shot (the second dog) requested the Public Integrity Bureau file on the first shooting as documentation for their lawsuit against the city. The city agreed to hand over the document. Except  WHOOPS it turns out the city cannot actually produce it because it is locked away in the Iron Mountain. 

Document storage company Iron Mountain is withholding hundreds of boxes of files it is storing for the city of New Orleans because of an ongoing financial dispute with Mayor LaToya Cantrell's administration, a City Hall spokesman confirms.

So, according to this report, the city hands over "hundreds of boxes" of public records (which departments and types of records is unknown although clearly NOPD is one) to a private contractor who can, apparently, hold them up for ransom in the (seemingly inevitable) event that the city falls behind on its bill.  That's very interesting! We'd love to know more about that situation. But, WHOOPS guess what. 

But there is no record of a contract to store old paper files for the NOPD or any other department. Iron Mountain’s local administrator, Robert Leamann, spoke to a reporter in early December and declined to provide information about the company’s scope of services for the city. He also said at the time he was unaware of a dispute with the city or the subpoena. After being sent a copy of the court records, he referred subsequent requests for comment to a corporate email address, which did not respond to multiple emails.

The company’s local attorneys, Kellen Matthew and Kathleen Cronin, also failed to respond to emails seeking comment.

Joseph could not say why the city purchasing office could not locate a contract with the company, but noted that all contracts and purchase orders contained in the city's BuySpeed and AFIN databases were lost in a 2019 cyber attack.

Oh man that "cyberattack" sure did a number on public records, huh. Man that is a shame that nobody can get anything from those databases. Unless, somebody... looks it it up and gives it to them... wait.. what? 

What?

Here are Buyspeed purchase orders the city pulled for @misaacstein last year. https://t.co/jffDInLBzN https://t.co/KuGGmE7HWD

— Charles Maldonado (@Maldonado_CB) January 9, 2023

Sometimes the cyber attacks and sometimes it doesn't, I guess. Just a mystery we'll never fully get a grip on. I wonder if it is going to attack those unwritten garbage contracts next.

Keep Doing What You're Doing

Honestly, I have no idea what Saints fans are so upset about this week. They're all ready to fire Dennis Allen after one season as Head Coach even though that one season was the greatest of his entire NFL career to date. In three prior seasons with the Raiders, the dude had never won more than 4 games. This year he won three whole games more than that. That's a 75 percent improvement! 

I'm never clear on what it is Saints fans are really after these days. We already won football in 2009 so there's no need to stress over that anymore. From that point until the time when the brutal criminal enterprise that is the NFL collapses under the weight of its own contradictions,  I just want to see as many interesting things happen as possible. A lot of interesting things happened to the Saints in 2022.  We listed some of them here. Whether those things are "good" or "bad" is really a matter of taste. 

All pro football teams are pretty evenly matched talentwise. Most games are decided according to a combination of dumb luck and which team is the least injured that week. Most of the jawing about whose fault that is or is not is just how fans have fun. NFL fans are basically conspiracy theory hobbyists constructing grand bullshit theories to draw certainties out of what is essentially unknowable. You feel a lot better about it all once you understand this.  Not everybody wins the Superbowl every year. Most teams, in fact, do not! Hopefully fans of the teams who do not don't see this as a complete waste of their time. How sad, that would be if they did. 

Anyway, I can't have strong feelings about Dennis Allen one way or the other.  He seems like a pretty boring middle-management guy. That's probably why he's risen to this particular point of mediocrity.  I definitely don't think the Saints got the most out of their offensive players this year. That seemed like a coaching issue to me. But, again, I'm just spinning theories like anybody else there. Whatever they do, I hope they don't bring those awful black helmets back.  I don't think those helped matters one bit.

Just don't be boring

What I was actually trying to tell Ralph here is that the post-Payton era can involve the Saints winning a lot of games or losing a lot of games. That's not anything anyone has any control over. Professional football teams are evenly matched for the most part. Most games are decided by very few points and hinge on minor freak incidents.  Seasons are determined according to which teams sustain the fewest injuries. The universe decides these outcomes and nobody has any valid reason to complain or assign blame for any of it.  Your team's record can be good or bad or somewhere in the middle and you can live with that.  What you do not want your team to be, though, is boring.

Do whatever you want in the draft but do something interesting. I don't want to hear about nerd stuff like 40 times or vertical leaps or RAS scores.  Figuring out which complicated human being will have a successful career in any job is never going to be science based on clear cut "measurables."  So it's important to understand that the raft of nerd stuff promulgated by football executives and media is really just there to entertain nerds.  But nerd stuff doesn't entertain everybody.  Which is why we need other metrics.  Payton would occasionally do things like draft a player because he thought his dad had a cool jacket. Not everybody thought that worked out for the best, but it wasn't really a mistake either. Anyway it was different.  

Dennis Allen doesn't strike us as the kind of guy who does interesting things.  But if we could ask for anything it is just try not to bore us. If that means making everybody mad by trading all the way up into the top 5 just to take a tackle then so be it. If it means going after this angle, then do that. 

Fine, you want my draft prediction for the Saints' first round? As NOLA Twitter legend Skooks reminded me, the Saints already have a player named Taco Charlton, so drafting a corner named Sauce Gardner and a receiver named Jameison Williams feels like it'd be completing the cool food named player triple play.

Just don't be boring. That's all we can hope for. 

Law of conservation of Ohio State guys

 How many more do the Saints have to draft now in order to make up for this?

Twelve years later for the 2021 season, safety Malcolm Jenkins remained the last vestige in New Orleans from that team after the retirement of Drew Brees and release of Thomas Morstead.

Jenkins' run as the last man standing came to a close Wednesday, as the two-time Super Bowl winner and three-time Pro Bowler announced his retirement from the NFL after 13 seasons in an interview with Ryan Clark and The Pivot Podcast.

Also this means they will go into next season with two new starting safeties.  Right now it looks like Saints fans are focused on the head coaching change and the... lack of changes... happening with most of the roster. But so far the biggest problem by far that I can identify is replacing Marcus Williams.  People want to draft a quarterback and all but really I'm going to have to look up who played safety for Ohio State this year because that's the most likely direction now. 

Jameis Winston

That is the answer to the question.  I realize there is a fun parlor game going on in trying to make it something else but that's what it's going to be and most of the people playing the game know this already.

It was a miserable time, would be a shame to see it end

Ordinarily, preparing to watch your team in a playoff game is a confrontation with mortality.  By this point you know your heroes well. You've learned their strengths and weaknesses. You know their endearing qualities and their annoying faults.  You've seen them endure setbacks and overcome obstacles.  A playoff season is a successful season by most measures so by and large they've done well. You like your team by this point. You've lived an entire journey with them. And now it could all come to a sudden end. So when the day comes that it can all end forever, naturally the question arises, what was it all about?

What was the 2020 Saints season all about? Should it even have happened in the first place? Did it? There were so few witnesses. We've long argued that live pro sports is a kind of civic exercise. It builds community and solidarity among the masses around shared passions, symbols and experiences. It inspires creative and elaborate cultural expression.   Like any entertainment, it offers diversion and comic relief from daily drudgery.  But among such entertainments sports is uniquely populist. Its energy, its sense of authenticity derives from the presence of a crowd.  

But there have been no crowds this year. Despite Gayle Benson's reckless and selfish desire to gather one, and despite the mayor's bending over backward to accommodate her while yelling at you for having Christmas with your family.  Despite Sean Payton's extremely coach-brained scheme to quarantine 50,000 people, there will only be about 3,000 brave but deluded Saints fans in attendance for today's possible concluding event. Even if we set aside the guilt and anxiety that would come with being among that audience during a pandemic, it's not anything like the immersive, cathartic experience of a full Superdome. The risk of being there is real. The benefit is non-existent. 

Again, that's been the case all season, so what have we been doing?  Well we've all been watching on TV and trying, in our increasingly spare leisure when we can allow ourselves to put aside the burning world around us and enjoy something, to connect with something like the experience we remember. And it's in there somewhere.  It's underneath a hundred layers of dissociation and confusion and a laugh track of fake crowd noise, but somewhere in there we can see our guys. There's something of this thing we're all invested in. We still care about that. It's just that, like a lot of things, that's been harder to feel this year.  It could end today.  A whole epoch of it could end, in fact. That's still a shame, right?

Still haunted by the ghosts of grandma

Look, of course, there is so much happening all the everywhere at the moment but it is still important to stop and appreciate the little details when we can.  For example, it is adorable that Sean Payton still thinks about this. 

Sean Payton says on WWL radio the statistic that he's beaten 31 teams in the NFL just isn't true.

"It's 32 teams, including the Saints," he says laughing.

"Tampa Bay at home, we're up by four, we run the double reverse and fumble it. I beat the Saints."

— Amie Just (@Amie_Just) December 1, 2020

As well he should. People's grandmas died that day. (Wow, that was almost 13 years ago to the very day! This is quite a momentous week in Saints history, all told.) But it made Sean a better coach so the grannies did not give their lives in vain. We must always remember to thank them for their service.

The worst elected person in Louisiana not named Clay Higgins

 It is Josh Guillory

While the New Orleans Saints wait for approval to have fans in the Mercedes-Benz Superdome, Lafayette Mayor-President Josh Guillory on Friday suggested Lafayette would be happy to host the next game — with fans — at the Cajundome.

"If @mayorcantrell will not allow fans in the stands of the Superdome, you are more than welcome to play your home games here in Lafayette. We can have fans safely attend the game. Cajun Field would be a great venue!" Guillory wrote Friday morning on Twitter.

We touched on this in the last post but the primary consideration here is obviously not safety.  It isn't even trolling, really.  Instead it is a deliberate effort to force people to accept the shitty conditions of a post-COVID  existence.  The virus hasn't been stopped or vaccinated and it may never be.  We could think about ways to prevent 200,000 people from dying over the course of six months, or we could just tell everyone to get used to it. The bosses have determined you are to get used to it. And that means, among other things, pretending it is safe to do all the things we normally do.

Dr. Alex Billoux is stepping down as the state Office of Public Health's point person on coronavirus response. Yesterday, he had some parting thoughts on the wisdom of gathering large crowds together to watch football under the current circumstances.  

“In the grand scheme of things, it’s kind of ridiculous,” Billioux said. “If this were a story 100 years from now and I said, 'Listen, you know, people were willing to have three to five people die for a football game every week, because it was that important to them … people were willing to sit next to people with a tremendously infectious disease that kills people because they weren’t willing to go a single season without going to a football game.'”

What kind of an idiot needs to be at a football game right now?  I can say this speaking specifically as the kind of idiot who loves watching football very much. I love going to the Superdome and watching football.  I love going to Tiger Stadium to watch football. I love going to a crowded barroom, or, on occasion, a crowded art gallery or street party to watch football. I am a complete idiot and yet even I do not think any of those things is worth endangering my or anyone else's life right now.

Guillory's "offer" (I don't know if we can consider it an actual good faith offer) to host a Saints game flies directly in the face of Billoux's comments. It doesn't help that the Saints are also applying pressure themselves to bring more fans into the dome.  It would be putting it charitably to say they are being selfish.  More accurately, they and Guillory are engaging in a deliberate ideologically driven campaign to get the Governor and Mayor to end their emergency precautions.  

In a letter to the mayor they publicized today, the Saints claim their health and safety plan "was touted as one of the best and most comprehensive with the ability to safely adapt to numerous seating capacities based on local and state governmental guidance."  They don't say by whom the plan was touted.  Nor do they specifically say what the expectation should be that it would actually mitigate transmission of the virus. But it's a mystery why anyone should think they've got any credibility in that regard. 

The bosses won the pandemic

The football wars are a perfect microcosm of what's going on out there. 

Just over a month after the Big Ten became the first major conference to postpone the 2020 football season, the league reversed its decision Wednesday and announced plans to begin playing the weekend of Oct. 24.

The Big Ten will have medical protocols that include daily coronavirus testing and enhanced cardiac screening, the announcement said. The conference’s university presidents and chancellors voted unanimously to resume the season.

Most of the stories about this emphasize Trump and the role of the Presidential election.  Big Ten schools are in midwestern "battleground" states.  Trump can rile up the usual hooting hogs over something like this. Biden, meanwhile, because his strategy is all about peeling off Republican votes in those states, can't really complain too much. Nobody wants to be the grinch that stole football. Since Trump has the liberty of not actually caring about whether or not football is safe, he distorts the entire debate. In reality, we shouldn't have football this fall.  But because Trump departs from reality and says we can, then anyone who disagrees is trying to take something away from us.

That's all true enough. But it's also just the surface level electoral handicapping. Like every other policy debate during COVID, this is really about the balance of power in the labor market. We don't just have to have football because people like football. We have to have it in order to make the point that bosses can force people to work under dangerous circumstances.  It's the same reason we're insisting that schools return to "in-classroom learning" despite the concerns of teachers all over the country. It's the same reason Republicans keep trying to sneak liability immunity for employers into every relief bill.  The pandemic is giving the bosses a chance to alter the terms of employment to their advantage and every forced "reopening" is another point of leverage for them. 

College athletics is a megabillion dollar industry where the athletes, the labor that makes the whole business possible, still aren't even paid for what they do. Can they perform their extremely valuable but uncompensated labor in a safe environment?  Do we even care if they can?  It does not appear as though we do.

Orgeron said Tuesday that LSU's team has "about three or four guys" who currently are sick with coronavirus, and the team does not have "a lot of guys in quarantine."

"I think most, not all of our players, but most of our players have caught it," Orgeron said. "So hopefully they won't catch it again, and hopefully they're not out for games."

Hopefully they won't catch it again.  It's good to be hopeful, I guess. 

One other thing this Big Ten reversal should tell us is we're definitely going to end up forcing some kind of tourist event for Mardi Gras to happen this year because "the economy" (i.e. owners of hotels and restaurants) will demand it. The looming municipal elections will probably factor in that decision much as the Presidential election is part of the football war. But the real issue, again, will be how big a win can the bosses get and which political figures will work the hardest to get it for them.

Large crowds to gather indoors, perhaps?

The state has approved a plan for having fans cram into the Superdome to watch the second Saints home game.  They haven't said how many yet. Assume it will be in the thousands. But until they say exactly, it's hard to get a feel for how plausible the logistics of all of this might even be. 

All publicly accessible venues at the Superdome, including the parking garages, Champions Square, the Saints' team shop and the Saints Hall of Fame will be closed to the general public during games that are off-limits to fans. It is not yet known what the policy for the team shop and the Hall of Fame will be, but Champions Square, according to Tuesday's email, will be closed on gamedays. 

If the city signs off on the plan and fans are allowed, the Saints said in the email that they want all season ticket holders "to have equitable access to attend games" and that family members and friends can still attend games together if the tickets are on the same account. 

The number of tickets on an account will be seated together and will be socially distanced away from other groups, the email said.

Okay but in order to get into the building, you have to stand in a long line, get patted down by security, and then squeeze through the corridors and concession/rest room lines.  And, of course, once seated, we assume everyone will be planning to.. you know.. cheer the home team on.  That can be a pretty good way to spread the virus, or so we are told. 

Whatever the plan, it's going to be an awkward sell getting people to stay home from second lines or neighborhood bars when we're allowing indoor football program activities to proceed.  The mayor hasn't made a decision yet. Obviously there are important matters to consider such as the public health implications of setting this precedent too early how much money we can wring out of the deal. 

But, Cantrell suggested approval of the plan would likely hinge on whether the state was willing to give New Orleans more of the federal money set aside for local governments dealing with the COVID pandemic. Cantrell and other city officials have been beating the drum recently about the fact that of $88 million in requests for pandemic-related reimbursements, only about $43 million in expenses have been covered.

"The city of New Orleans needs her fair share of resources that are aligned with the state CARES Act that the state has received and the city of New Orleans," Cantrell said, adding that hosting the Saints would require more manpower and resources from the city.

Update: According to this, the plan is to open at 25% capacity which is something like 20,000 maybe. Sounds difficult.  It also says the mayor is "not even thinking about September 27." So this is probably not ready to happen yet.

Blow that bubble

 Somebody's got to.

The NBA has announced that all three playoff games Wednesday will be postponed and rescheduled. The decision comes after the Milwaukee Bucks players did not take the court for Game 5 of their first-round series against the Orlando Magic, which was supposed to tip off at 4 p.m. ET. The protest comes in response to the shooting of an unarmed black man named Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on Sunday. Shortly after the Bucks made a statement by not playing, the Rockets and Thunder decided to also not play today, as well as the Lakers and Trail Blazers. 

Some basketball players just did more politics in one day than either of the major parties have done in a week and a half of TV infomercial production.

Billyvision

Let's take a break from our doomscrolling for a minute to visit with Louisiana's tourism promoter-in-chief for a few minutes of that good ol' irrational exuberance.

.@LouisianaLtGov Billy Nungesser says on talk radio this morning that the state will move to phase three in the coming weeks and that “We’re going to have Mardi Gras, we’re going to have football." #lalege #lagov

— Sam Karlin (@samkarlin) July 29, 2020

 

Oh man does that feel good or what. Football and Mardi Gras are back, baby! Because Billy believes in it.  Give us some more of those beautiful visions, Billy.  What other lovely things do you see in the future?

Nungesser, on whether he'll run for governor next cycle: "“We’re going to look at it. Obviously i’m going to consider it.” #lalege #lagov

— Sam Karlin (@samkarlin) July 29, 2020

 

Ohhhhkaaay thanks. This has been refreshing. We'll check back with Captain Optimism later as the need arises.

Medical redshirt

For the fans, that is.

In a year that has largely redefined what the word normal means, it should not have come as much of a surprise for New Orleans Saints season ticket holders when they heard they can choose to opt out of their 2020 packages and focus on next season.

The Saints became the latest NFL team to offer deferment of 2020 season tickets to the 2021 season, allowing fans to either use the money already paid toward the cost of their 2021 tickets or to receive a refund upon request.

Might as well take the refund.  By the time 2021 rolls around it's either going to be we've nationalized pro sports or the whole world will be on fire anyway.  

63 yards at sea level

The biggest asterisk in the NFL record book, IMO.

The Denver Broncos' Matt Prater bested Dempsey with a 64-yarder in 2013 — 43 years after Dempsey unleashed his cannon-shot opposite Lions' defenders who had been laughing at what they believed to be an impossible attempt.

Before Prater's kick, three others had also hit 63-yarders over the years.

Prater's kick came in the thin air of Denver, 5,000-feet above sea level, as had those by two of the players who tied Dempsey's mark.

Also, we're all living under unusual circumstances now in the Time Of The COVID. But New Orleans hasn't been completely erased from the world yet. It will be someday. And it will be missed.

As a rookie in 1969, Dempsey delivered an All-Pro season but was cut by the Saints in 1971 after missing seven of eight kicks during preseason, which he attributed to falling out of shape while being treated to countless drinks and meals after his historic kick. But he rebounded and played for several other teams — the Eagles, Rams, Oilers and Bills — before retiring following the 1979 season

Anyway,  RIP, Tom. Prior to 2006, there were only a handful of moments that Saints fans were fond of claiming to have witnessed in person.  And of those, Dempsey's kick was one of the few that was a genuinely good moment and not some ironically cherished mind boggling failure.  "Only 80s kids will remember" a time when the story of this one regular season field goal was passed down to you as a sacred prize of your cultural heritage. It was the franchise's single greatest achievement all the way up until 1987.

I was pleased to find this relatively clear video of the kick on YouTube last night. The footage I grew up seeing was always a lot grainier.




Even when we include the 2009 season NFC Championship and Super Bowl  in the mix, there isn't anything in Saints history that surpasses Dempsey as a pure moment save for one.  And as fate would have it, ESPN is replaying that tomorrow night.

What did Gayle know and when did she know it?

It's hard to imagine a Benson scandal that could be any more Benson than this.

The New Orleans Saints are going to court to keep the public from seeing hundreds of emails that allegedly show team executives doing public relations damage control for the area's Roman Catholic archdiocese to help it contain the fallout from a burgeoning sexual abuse crisis.

Attorneys for about two dozen men suing the church say in court filings that the 276 documents they obtained through discovery show that the NFL team, whose owner is devoutly Catholic, aided the Archdiocese of New Orleans in its “pattern and practice of concealing its crimes.”

Don't really know what they knew and what they might have helped to cover up.  I don't suppose anyone in the Saints organization is a mandated reporter or anything like that.  If there is anything incriminating in the emails, I'm sure it will come out in Gayle's mental competency hearing.

There is an alternate universe where the Saints have advanced to the Super Bowl and this story is breaking and Roger Goodell is convening emergency meetings to get the Saints disqualified from the game.  Also in this universe Antonio Brown is on the roster.

So, you know, just be happy you live on this, the best of all possible timelines.

Oh look here is something else that is apparently a crime

Enjoying a National Championship victory cigar.

Saying it was against building policy, a police officer with the Mercedes-Benz Superdome told a group of hyped-up LSU football players celebrating their national championship win Monday night to extinguish their victory cigars inside the team's locker room.

That's when he felt NFL pro football player Odell Beckham Jr. slap him on the backside.

Odell, who was also spotted handing out cash* to athletes exploited by a corrupt and hypocritical system on Monday, now has an arrest warrant out for him. In the locker room incident above, we find him just trying to stop some Dome mall cops from harassing the kids.  The dude is a freaking hero.

* The cash may actually have been intended for the band. But that's a whole 'nother case of official overreach causing bigger problems than it solves.

Has anything been going on?

I've been watching a lot of football these past few weeks. So I know there's a lot to catch up on.  A bit of a haze going on today, though, on account of the fact that watching football often involves intoxicants. Did they sort out which tigers were "real"?  It's still a little foggy to me.

Actually it adds zing to the barbecue sauce

They say he had no use for it but I don't think they know.

Horn, a Saints standout and fan favorite who retired from the NFL after the 2007 season, admitting paying off co-defendants Vanover and Caldwell and others who helped him submit the false claims, according to court records.

Among those claims was reimbursement for a $52,000 cryosauna, a machine that uses nitrogen vapor to create freezing temperatures for body therapies. But Horn didn’t need the machine and never received it, prosecutors said.

It's the quick-freeze that really locks the flavor in.



Joe Horn Barbecue Sauce. Try some on your Beefy Mac 

If you live long enough, all of your heroes become Uncle Rico, I guess.

Anyway it's a shame this happened.  NFL retirees have had to fight pretty hard to get the league to do anything at all to help with the health care costs incurred after a career in pro football destroys their bodies. Ripping that fund off, in particular, is, as they say, not a very good look.

Of course, under a nationalized single payer health care system, none of this would even matter. But that's another conversation. 

Day in the life

Oh boy

The Sewerage & Water Board said that an explosion occurred in one of its turbines at its Carrollton water plant Saturday afternoon, injuring two people as residents were told to stay clear of the area.

According to the tweets and such (it's BREAKING news so we can't be sure) this is Turbine 5. Last year this piece of equipment made news when it failed a test of its capacity to run on diesel fuel. At the time, SWB said that was perfectly okay, though. 

A newly repaired turbine at the New Orleans Sewerage & Water Board's Carrollton Plant failed a test run using diesel on Thursday, though it is still "fully functional" when using natural gas as its fuel, the utility announced Thursday.

The Thursday test was aimed at seeing whether the repairs would allow Turbine 5 to be switched to diesel in case its main natural gas fuel supply was interrupted during a storm. But officials concluded that "additional repairs are needed" before it'll be able to switch to that backup fuel supply, according to a news release.

After the diesel test, the turbine was tested with natural gas and "continued to show strong performance," according to the release.

Anyway, today it seems to have exploded.

Before we get too carried away, though, it's important to say up front that this probably doesn't have anything to do with yesterday's "cyberattack" on city computer systems.They still have no idea what that might be related to but, apparently, we don't need any of that fancy crap anyway.

Officials said that taking the computer systems offline could result in inconvenience but that city government would continue to operate.

"One positive about being a city that has been touched by disasters ... is our plans and our activities reflect the fact that we can operate without the internet and without a city network," said Collin Arnold, New Orleans' homeland security director.

We should also clarify that, much the same as the computers are not related to the explosion, this water main break in Algiers, which happened today is unrelated to either of those things.  Nor is any of the above mention situations related at all to the other water main break happening Uptown. This is why there is a boil order in effect in Algiers but none on the East Bank.

That's a lot to keep straight, I know. Just be thankful it's a nice day outside so the power is probably not gonna go out and.. goddammit. 

meanwhile at entergy pic.twitter.com/wCsXqU50r4

— skooks (@skooks) December 14, 2019

Well if it's any consolation, this event is unrelated to the computer hacking which, again, is itself unrelated to the explosion that is unrelated to either of the unrelated water mains.

Also it turns out there is something wrong with Drew Brees's elbow. 

NEW ORLEANS — Saints Quarterback Drew Brees is on the team's injured roster, but isn't expected to sit out the Monday game against the Indianapolis Colts.

Brees was listed at the bottom of the weekly injury roster released by the team Friday. According to the report, his right elbow was injured sometime after Thursday's practice.

But just being on the injury report isn't an indicator that the QB will sit on the sidelines. The report notes he attended the full practice Friday.

It's unclear how the injury happened but if Brees practices again Saturday, he will likely start against the Colts Monday.

So that's pretty mysterious. As far as we know this is not related to the already well known problem with his thumb from earlier in the season. And at this we are practically obligated to point out that neither injury is related to any of the above mentioned infrastructure crises which can be a little bit confusing given that elbow joints do occur in both Drew Brees and in water pipes.

Honestly the best advice at this point is not to think about it too much.  Or, as a wise man once said, "Worry about your frickin meat."

Coach O: "Not me, us"

Go read this ESPN feature on the undefeated LSU head coach.  I hope Coach O wins ten national titles before he's through.

"My dad always told me, 'Son, you have to do everything twice,'" says Orgeron, who called some of his former assistants to apologize. "You live and learn. If you want it bad enough, you'll change, and I always wanted to be a head coach. I wanted to be a successful head coach, and I had to try it my way first to see if it would work. In those years I was out from Ole Miss, I just wrote stuff down every day. I changed, and it was a process. ... I had to learn to be a head coach."

For starters, he says he learned to treat people better. That meant handling players as if they were his sons and treating assistants the way he'd want to be treated, with respect. If he saw something wrong, "I'd bring the coach to my office and talk to him like a man," rather than airing things out publicly.

Next, he wanted to cultivate a leadership style that wouldn't be defined by anyone's self-interest. He had seen selfishness of players and coaches creep in during his time as an assistant at USC and LSU, and vowed to create an environment where that attitude couldn't exist.

"I see myself coaching from within," he says. "I don't want to coach from above. I don't want it to be me looking down on everyone else. Na-ah. I want it to be all of us together."