Improbable cross examinations

 East Texas State Park -April 4, 2011

We moved 200 miles west into east Texas. It started to rain so we pulled in early, but the forecast tornadoes and severe thunderstorms have turned to afternoon sunshine.


ATTORNEY:  What was the first thing your husband said to you that morning?
WITNESS:     He said, 'Where am I, Cathy?'
ATTORNEY:  And why did that upset you?
WITNESS:     My name is Susan!
____________________________________________

ATTORNEY:  What gear were you in at the moment of the impact?
WITNESS:     Gucci sweats and Reeboks.
_____

It's probably still 600 or 700 miles to the Big Bend National Park in West Texas. I'm thinking that the cactus should be in bloom.

_______________________________________

  ___________________________________________

ATTORNEY:  Are you sexually active?
WITNESS:     No, I just lie there.
____________________________________________

ATTORNEY: This myasthenia gravis, does it affect your memory at all?
WITNESS:     Yes.
ATTORNEY:  And in what ways does it affect your memory?
WITNESS:     I forget.
ATTORNEY:  You forget?  Can you give us an example of something you forgot?
___________________________________________

ATTORNEY:  Do you know if your daughter has ever been involved in voodoo?
WITNESS:     We both do.
ATTORNEY:  Voodoo?
WITNESS:     We do.
ATTORNEY:  You do?
WITNESS:     Yes, voodoo.
____________________________________________

ATTORNEY:  Now doctor, isn't it true that when a person dies in his sleep, he doesn't know about it until the next morning?
WITNESS:  Did you actually pass the bar exam?
____________________________________

ATTORNEY:  The youngest son, the 20-year-old, how old is he?
WITNESS:      He's 20, much like your IQ.
___________________________________________

ATTORNEY:  Were you present when your picture was taken?
WITNESS:     Are you shitting me?
_________________________________________

ATTORNEY:  So the date of conception (of the baby) was August 8th?
WITNESS:     Yes.
ATTORNEY:  And what were you doing at that time?
WITNESS:     Getting laid
____________________________________________

ATTORNEY:  She had three children, right?
WITNESS:     Yes.
ATTORNEY:  How many were boys?
WITNESS:    None.
ATTORNEY:   Were there any girls?
WITNESS:      Your Honour, I think I need a different attorney. Can I get a new attorney?
____________________________________________

ATTORNEY:  How was your first marriage terminated?
WITNESS:     By death.
ATTORNEY:  And by whose death was it terminated?
WITNESS:     Take a guess.
____________________________________________

ATTORNEY:  Can you describe the individual?
WITNESS:     He was about medium height and had a beard
ATTORNEY:  Was this a male or a female?
WITNESS:     Unless the Circus was in town I'm going with male.
_____________________________________

ATTORNEY:  Is your appearance here this morning pursuant to a deposition notice which I sent to your attorney?
WITNESS:  No, this is how I dress when I go to work.
______________________________________

ATTORNEY:  Doctor, how many of your autopsies have you performed on dead people?
WITNESS:     All of them. The live ones put up too much of a fight.
_________________________________________

ATTORNEY:  ALL your responses MUST be oral, OK? What school did you go to?
WITNESS:     Oral...
_________________________________________

ATTORNEY:  Do you recall the time that you examined the body?
WITNESS:     The autopsy started around 8:30 PM
ATTORNEY:  And Mr. Denton was dead at the time?
WITNESS:     If not, he was by the time I finished.
____________________________________________

ATTORNEY:  Are you qualified to give a urine sample?
WITNESS:     Are you qualified to ask that question?
______________________________________


ATTORNEY:  Doctor, before you performed the autopsy, did you check for a pulse?
WITNESS:     No.
ATTORNEY:  Did you check for blood pressure?
WITNESS:     No.
ATTORNEY:  Did you check for breathing?
WITNESS:     No.
ATTORNEY:  So, then it is possible that the patient was alive when you began the autopsy?
WITNESS:     No.
ATTORNEY:  How can you be so sure, Doctor?
WITNESS:     Because his brain was sitting on my desk in a jar.
ATTORNEY:  I see, but could the patient have still been alive, nevertheless?
WITNESS:     Yes, it is possible that he could have been alive and practicing law.

Social Hour at Betty's RV Park in Abbeville, Louisiana.

You're not from around here, are you?

Touchet's Roadhouse, Abbeville, Louisiana

We're back at Betty's RV Park. It has been rated as the best small RV park in America. Betty has about 15 spots and it can be hard to get one. Betty make the experience. She runs a daily social hour that lasts three or four hours. The guests share appetizers and drink wine.




Betty guides you to local restaurants and musical venues of Cajun or Zydeco music. She suggests tours of craw fish farms, hot sauce factories or things like the drilling rig museum down in Morgan City where my best friend, Big Kenny, lies in an unmarked  pauper's grave.

 Zydeco and Cajun music are different. It's mostly a matter of race and instrument preference. The black Louisiana Creoles tend to prefer the piano accordion and eschew the fiddle. The Cajun prefer the fiddle and go for things like the steel guitar and amplified instruments. The jam session today was all white with lots of accordions, a fiddle and several amplified electric guitars. I'm not sure what it was, but it was happy music with a Cajun flair for a friendly crowd.



I still want to eat some craw fish (and suck the heads) and play some tennis before we move on Monday to San Antonio. There is an old, abandoned  Masonic cemetery we want to visit and photograph.



This area has 186,000 acres of craw fish farms that yield a product worth $121 million a year. You have to read the labels to make sure you're getting the real thing instead of a Chinese product with a Louisiana sounding name like Thibidues's or Boudin's.

Down on the Bayou

Sam Houston Jones State Park, Louisiana

The good news about this Louisiana park is that Louisiana cuts your camping fee in half if you have a federal Golden Age card so we only pay $8 a night instead of $16. The bad news is that they are not currently renting boats, as advertised, to cruise the bayous and swamps, which is one reason we came.

We cooked the de-boned chicken stuffed with crawfish and rice on the grill last night. The leftovers went into a crock pot of gumbo today and I added brown rice, vegetables, a jar of spaghetti sauce and a liberal dollop of Chipotle Tabasco sauce.


I finished reading “The Devil in the White City” which was about the 1892 Chicago Worlds Fair architects and a psychopath named Mudgett who may have efficiently murdered as many as 200 visitors to the fair. Great read,… to me it explains a lot about the fantastic architecture of modern day Chicago.

Last night we drove to Lake Charles and listened to a free concert by Boom-A-Rang, a great group. Lake. Charles reminds me a little of Tampa back in 1954. They have one tall glass building built by Capital One. I think of it as the house that credit cards built. It reminds me of how offended I was when a bank built the first tall building in Tampa in the early 1970s. “They’re just finance“, I thought. “They don’t really do anything useful or produce anything. Why should they have so much money?”

As we wander the small downtown, we see sidewalk paintings, perhaps done by children.



Today we drove a small Louisiana town called Starks. They were having their annual Mayhaw jelly festival. We’ve never heard of Mayhaw berries before. We bought some Mayhaw berry jelly from a man whose wife makes it in the kitchen. You can also buy frog legs, gator-on-a-stick, red rice and beans, crawfish and other delicacies there. It’s a very modest fair with artificial bull rides and some other attractions.




During the hour and a half we were there, they we having sack races. They slowly work up from kindergarten to adults. I’m waiting for the senior, over 65, sack race, but it doesn’t happen. I ask about it and they say that the hospital is too far away for that.

Hot! Hot! Hot!

Avery Island, Louisiana

We set the GPS controls for the heart of the Sun...No, Really...for Avery Island, one of the strangest and most unlikely places in the US.



They make real Tabasco Sauce there. Accept no substitutes. As you approach the Island at the end of a deserted two lane highway, it rises in an unlikely manner from the surrounding terrain.



The island is a natural salt dome that begins 16 feet below ground and goes down about the depth of Mt. Everest. The MacClenny family began experimenting with pepper sauce in 1862 and sold the first 650 bottles in used perfume bottles in 1866.



Today, as we tour the factory, they are pumping out 700,000 bottles a day. The peppers are selected when ripe and ground into a paste. The paste is stored in used Jack Daniels oak whiskey barrels where it ferments for three years. When ready, the fermented paste is mixed with vinegar and stirred for 28 days, until properly liquefied.



The family (there are now 100 heirs) has established a lovely garden of oaks, bamboo, cypress, lagoons and gators on a large part of their 2,000 acre island. A highlight of the gardens is "Bird Island" which they established to encourage breeding of endangered waterfowl.

If you were a bird, and lived on high,
You'd lean on the wind when the wind came by,
You'd say to the wind when it took you away:
"That's where I wanted to go today!"

Most Louisiana hot sauces simply grind up peppers and add vinegar. Tabasco is the real deal. Go to their website for great recipes. Can't wait to try their new Chipotle sauce, made from smoked jalapenos.



We'll be hitting a 184-mile scenic drive along the coastal marshes of Louisiana on the way to Judge Roy Bean's out in West Texas. I'll be looking for freshly squashed giant Nutria along the highway. When you cook giant rat gumbo, you don't want to tell folks what you're cooking and you want to use plenty of Tabasco sauce to cover the taste.

By the way, in case you were wondering, a bayou always has flowing water, but a swamp occasionally drys up so tree seeds can germinate. If it has trees in it, it's a swamp.

Louisiana Swamp Tour

St. Martinsville, Louisiana

We had some really good food today. For lunch I had a shrimp ettoufee and then, for dinner, fried eggplant with a crab topping. Yesterday we split a “Po-Boy” sandwich with fried oysters, tomatoes, cheese and sautéed onions. The Cajun Creole cooking here is a real culinary experience.



We went on a swamp tour today with Brian. As we pull out from the dock he does a 360 and says. “That was the tour You’ all. Did you enjoy it?”



We see a lot of alligators. One was trying to digest a big garfish. Brian suggests that the gator may need to hide the fish under a log until it becomes more digestible.



Brian’s boat holds 15 people and draws about ten inches of water. It’s very quiet and bumps over many sunken logs.



The cypress trees can live 1500 years. The oldest one in this swamp is about 600 years old. They logged these trees in the late 1800s, but the new growth cypress is lovely. Some of the old logs were “sinkers” that went to the bottom. Cypress never rots in water and the big old “sinkers” now sell for as much as $10,000 a tree, when recovered.



Brian is very knowledgeable about the local birds, turtles, vegetation and gators. He has a Cajun recipe for almost everything we see on the tour.



Henry Ford used Spanish moss to stuff his automobile seats in the 1920s. The moss harbors biting insects and led to one of the first automobile recalls.




We see some unusual nesting birds, gators and turtles. They pulled out a 14 foot gator last year that had been wandering inland and eating dogs. The food supply for gators is good with fish, turtles, ducks and the occasional dog.

Why Betty’s RV Park is America’s Best

Abbeville, Louisiana

Betty’s is sometimes rated as the number one RV Park in America. Others say it is one of the top 25. There are only 14 spots laid out around Betty’s home in Abbeville. There is no pool, no hot tub, no tennis court.

What makes it a top park is Betty Bernard. Every night Betty has a happy hour from 4:30 to 6:30. While, I’m quite an introvert, but in the last two evenings I’ve had very interesting conversations with at least six different people. Mrs. Phred is in her element here, interacting with the other residents.



Many of the visitors to Betty’s are Cajuns. I’ve met three so far, including Marvin, a militant Cajun. Marvin is very focused on the English deportation of the Acadian Nova Scotia French Settlers 200 years ago. He tells me about Queen Elizabeth’s apology to the Cajun/Acadians. I think that the Queen has a way to go with her apologies if you include the Irish, the Scots, the South Africans, the Indians and Pakistanis and all the Arabs.



Tonight Betty put on a potluck dinner that included Cajun red beans and sausage. Tomorrow Betty is taking us all to a Cajun restaurant.

Betty keeps a book of interesting things to see, including:
- Zydeco Music Joints
- Crawfish Farms
- Local Cajun restaurants
- Hot Sauce Factories
- Oil Rig Tours
- Casinos and Horse Races
- Swamp Tours



We signed up for three days and added two more today. I like it here. Marvin says the Cajun culture has assimilated all the other people who have moved in. It’s a good time happy place where you can revel in sucking crawfish heads and dancing to upbeat Zydeco music.

The Voodoo Queen of New Orleans

Pontchartrain RV Park, New Orleans

I find the Voodoo queen of New Orleans online. She sells a love candle for $575, but clearly states that the money is only for the candle and that the spell is complimentary. I’m uncomfortable with online “gris-gris” so I decide to make a real gambler’s gris-gris for my gambler friend Chris . It’s made of chamois, a piece of red flannel, a shark's tooth, pine-tree sap, and dove's blood. I mixed blood and sap together, and used this mixture to write the (undisclosed) amount that I want Chris to win on the chamois. Then I wrapped the chamois in the red flannel with the shark's tooth between the two layers and sewed it all with dead cat's hair. This charm needs to be worn in the left shoe to bring good but uncomfortable luck.



On Bourbon Street a desperate man asks me for $5 to buy crystal meth. We walk the street at night and I eye the girls dressed in scanty outfits. Mrs. Phred points out that most of the girls, while attractive, are actually men with strong legs and relatively flat muscular chests. I regard it as impolite to take pictures.



We do the Katrina tour and get a little more insight about the lingering disaster. The City is, of course, in a huge swampy bowl that sits about six feet below sea level. Lake Pontchartrain on the North and the Mississippi (which flows though the City) is twelve feet above sea level. There are canals cut though the City, one of which connects the Mississippi to the Inland waterway at sea level.



There are levees and walls everywhere which are intended to keep high water out of the city. A barge broke though a wall in the lower ninth ward and flooded a third of the city at varying depths. Most of the damage was due to wind blowing South on Lake Pontchartrain in Katrina’s NE quadrant. Fats Domino, age 78, spent two nights on his roof and was picked up the third day. A lot of the dead fled to their attics and drowned or died of heat exhaustion.



The houses sat in a lake of putrid water laced with motor oil, sewage and dead bodies for over a month while the Corp of Engineers pumped it out. The heat produced thick layers of dangerous mold within the homes as well as a later of mud and filth. The contents of refrigerators were unimaginably foul. Each house has to be gutted and dried out, rewired and re-plumbed before it is habitable.



Brad Pitt is helping to construct a number of new homes in the Lower Ninth Ward. I know where he lives, but I’m not telling. Here's one of the Pitt homes in the lower ninth ward.



To put this in context, the bodies here are buried above ground because of the water table. To build a house, you drive in 80 telephone poles and pour a concrete slab on top of the poles. Even so, houses sink, sidewalks sink, roads sink, walls crack and you have to redo everything again about once every ten years (including shoring up the house). We hit the casinos, took a steamboat dinner cruise on the Mississippi, went to the aquarium and IMAX and the WWII museum. We also saw some fine antebellum mansions, a few cemeteries and wandered the French Quarter.



Our RV Park is Pontchartrain Landing. It’s very nice, with a pool, cable, book exchange and runs a 10 minute shuttle to the French Quarter three times a day. It’s Passport America, so you can get a nice spot for about $30 a night. We could spend another week here, but we have reservations in Abbeville tomorrow.



If you get a chance, come to New Orleans. It’s still a lot of fun and they could use your tourism dollars to help the recovery.

Sucking Crawfish Heads

Abbeville, Louisiana - December 11, 2006

This is Cajun country. The Cajuns are of French ancestry and were rounded up in Nova Scotia and expelled in 1755. They settled in Louisiana and are known for fantastic crawfish gumbo and zydeco music, featuring the fiddle and the accordion.

There are lots of things to do here. There is the McIlhenny Tabasco hot sauce factory to visit for a two-hour tour and the agrifactory where crawfish and rice are grown in the same fields. It takes three years to make the Tabasco sauce. It's marketed in 100 languages and the entire world supply is produced on 2,300 acres on an island just a short distance away. Just down the road in Abbeville are eight municipal tennis courts (scores 6-0. 6-1 in favor of Mrs. Phred)

In Morgan City, 60 miles east, there is a 110 foot tower with 61 carillon bells cast in Holland (a photo op) and an oil rig museum.


The carillon bells are closed on Monday and the gates are locked, so we have crawfish gumbo and wait for the 2 PM tour of Mr. Charlie in Morgan City. Mr. Charlie is the first offshore drilling platform. It was constructed from 1952 to 1954. It’s a submersible platform capable of drilling in depths of up to 40 feet.


Mrs. Phred and I are the only people who show up for the 2 o’clock tour. The platform was retired in 1992 and sold for $10. It is currently used to train oil service workers. The company that sold the rig now pays the new owners thousands per worker to train new hires. The old rig is amazingly complex and I listen intently but only understand and absorb a small fraction of the drilling technology. This training program is said to have reduced oil rig worker turnover by 49 percent.

Today rigs float in place in deep water and thrusters keep them in position by monitoring GPS signals.


We are staying in Betty’s RV Park. Betty has a class act in a Louisiana bayou. She has 15 RV sites situated around her house. Every evening at 4 she has a social cocktail hour. We were advised by other travelers to stay here to get a taste of her gumbo, which is made from chicken, sausage, jalapenos and vinegar. I am told that her small RV Park is rated as one on the 25 best in the U.S.


I refuse to suck crawfish heads, but I really like the tails.

Roadside Relics

Port Sulfur, Louisiana – December 8, 2006

It's crisp and clear here where we are camped on the Tchefuncie River in St. Tammany Parish, which flows into Lake Pontchatrain. Big cypress trees line the banks and grow out in the river shallows. The big lake has a 25 mile long arrow-straight causeway leading south to New Orleans, where the levees broke.

Cryin' won't help you, prayin' won't do you no good,
Now, cryin' won't help you, prayin' won't do you no good,
When the levee breaks, mama, you got to move
- Led Zeppelin

Katrina rolled over the Louisiana bayous 100 miles southeast of New Orleans on the way to smash the Mississippi coast. There wasn’t much on the news about this area and I wanted to see and document what happened.



We drive though New Orleans, past the convention center, and 80 miles down the peninsula toward the Gulf. There appear to be very few repairable structures. Large shrimp boats ended up in fields. FEMA trailers are everywhere. Katrina came though this area at full strength. The refineries and heliports that carry workers to the rigs are about the only things that are repaired.



At the very end of the peninsula a sad collection of broken music boxes, a porcelain Santa, and various small figures are placed on a seawall. A boy’s bicycle and an upside-down SUV are in the rubbish near the seawall.


We drive back to New Orleans and have dinner in the French Quarter. This is Friday night so we want to try the mango daiquiris. The businesses in the quarter are back, but the tourists don’t yet know that the city is open for business. We were the only diners in the restaurant we chose.