The House of the Rising Sun

New Orleans

Now the only thing a rambler needs
Is an RV and a gun
And the only time he's satisfied
Is when he's on a run

This is one of Jim's old guitars in a store window. They only wanted $55,000 for it. If you've been following my blog for awhile, you must know by now that I was Jim Morrison before I faked my death in Paris back in 1972 and moved to Tampa under an assumed name to become a CPA.

Past the touristy areas of the French Quarter you wander into the ancient residential areas. Looking at the bases of the homes, there was no sign that the water had lapped up here during Katrina..

We found an entertainment area on Frenchmen Street just outside the quarter. It was lined with places that play music. Most of them opened somewhere between 7 PM an 10 PM. One building at the end of the street has a sign describing the execution of six Frenchmen by the Spanish Governor in 1769.

We stopped in the courtyard of the Mojita for the Pinot Grigio and little plates of tapas (excuse the redundancy). This one was crab and avocado drizzled with garlic and melted cheese. They also had deviled quail eggs and grilled gator tail sausages, but we wanted to save room for dinner.

We wandered on though the French Market near the Mississippi River. They had some cool voodoo dolls, gator heads and feather masks.

Outside the market is a golden statue of Joan of Arc on a golden horse. Apparently she was 19 when she died. The statue was a 1991 gift from the citizens of France to the City of New Orleans.

Mrs. Phred shopped for shoes in St. Charles Square. Nothing kills the blues like a new pair of shoes. They had nothing that fit her feet.

I talked to some colorful residents on a park bench while she shopped.

Mrs. Phred led me to the other side of the Quarter to a place called Tommy's Cuisine. The veal picata was covered with crab pieces. Mrs. Phred had some really disgusting sweetbreads. The waiter asked her if she really knew what they were...Ugh! Gag me with a spoon!

It is a great place to visit. I could live here. We spent about seven hours of walking the streets of NOLA, listening to music and eating fine chow. What a place.

Gumbo and Etouffee

New Orleans, Louisiana

I haven't had an oyster Po-boy yet. They tend to run about $13.95 with an extra three dollars for blue cheese topping. In fact, I've never ever had a oyster Po-boy, but it's still on the list of things I want to eat before I die.

What we have had is a whole lot of shrimp and sausage gumbo and crawfish etouffee.

We wandered around the French Quarter for hours looking at restaurant menus. In most cases they were not open before 6 PM. We stopped in at Antoine's for some wine and to read the menu. That restaurant has been open and operated by the same family since 1840 when the original ancestor immigrated from Paris and taught the locals that there were better things than boiled meat. Everything on the menu was "A La Cart" and expensive. I figured $200 with tax and tip would do the trick.

We tried a restaurant on Dalphine just a block off Bourbon Street but they were booked until 9:30. Another restaurant we had eaten at before was not open on Tuesdays. I tend to think that Mrs. Phred had romanticized  that one anyway, which had just reopened after Katrina.

Eventually we settled on a little place near St. Charles Square called the Gumbo shop. It offered us a four course Cajun meal for $23.99. I got the shrimp and sausage gumbo, crawfish etouffee, smothered collard greens and praline sundae.

While we were eating, a huge thunderstorm hit the city. I bought some cheap plastic raincoats and Mrs. Phred took off her shoes as we made our way to the shuttle bus pickup point during the downpour. On the way, a wise and friendly overweight black lady told Mrs. Phred  to put her shoes back on. You can step on nasty things at night in New Orleans , broken bottles, AIDS syringes, dead rats... I could see hordes of cockroaches moving to higher ground and rivers of trash flowing down the streets. 

A Streetcar Named Desire

Lake Pontchartrain RV Park, New Orleans

A Sailor: Can I help you, ma'am?
Blanche DuBois: Why, they told me to take a streetcar named Desire and then transfer to one called Cemetery and ride six blocks and get off at Elysian Fields.

We like this RV park. We've been here before. It's just off Interstate 10 that runs though New Orleans and it runs a shuttle bus downtown. They have a pool and a bar and a supply of free books as well as a store that sells beer and RV supplies. It's on a wide canal that leads to Lake Pontchartrain.

The Desire line is no longer running in New Orleans. Desire was sold in 1948 to an entrepreneur in Chattanooga and then repurchased and retired again in 1997. There is a replica on the River Line, which I intend to ride in the morrow after my oyster Po-Boy sandwich.

We could probably spend a month in New Orleans without getting bored, but we have places to go and other things to see. Maybe we can stay at Betty's RV Park next in Abbeville, Louisiana if she has space for us. We want to suck crawfish heads, buy some Cajun delicacies at the Piggly Wiggly and dance to a Zydeco band.

I need to watch my "Easy Rider" DVD again and catch the New Orleans cemetery scene with the man with the umbrella.

Blanche DuBois: You're married to a madman.
Stella: I wish you'd stop taking it for granted that I'm in something I want to get out of.
Blanche DuBois: What you are talking about is desire - just brutal Desire. The name of that rattle-trap streetcar that bangs through the Quarter, up one old narrow street and down another.
Stella: Haven't you ever ridden on that streetcar?
Blanche DuBois: It brought me here. Where I'm not wanted and where I'm ashamed to be.
Stella: Don't you think your superior attitude is a little out of place?
Blanche DuBois: May I speak plainly?... If you'll forgive me, he's common... He's like an animal. He has an animal's habits. There's even something subhuman about him. Thousands of years have passed him right by, and there he is. Stanley Kowalski, survivor of the Stone Age, bearing the raw meat home from the kill in the jungle. And you - you here waiting for him. Maybe he'll strike you or maybe grunt and kiss you, that's if kisses have been discovered yet. His poker night you call it. This party of apes.

A Taste for Flesh

Zombieland, USA

The movie was a tremendous disappointment.

One might expect moviemakers to treat the subject of Zombies with respect and constant action.

Some of the great recent Zombie flicks would include "Dawn of the Dead" and "Legend" with Will Smith. Legend had a nice twist with supercharged Zombies rather than shambling corpses.

Zombieland was filled with many long, boring periods of nothing happening and the Zombies were not treated with respect. They were too easy to kill and the overlay of attempted humor was heavy-handed.

Bill Murray made a cameo appearance. but failed to add much to the movie. Woody Harrelson overplayed his role, which seemed to have echos of his "Natural Born Killers" masterpiece.

I have high hopes that the movie in making, "World War Z", will treat the Zombie population with the respect and fear to which they are entitled. Abberations like "Shawn of the Dead" and "Zombieland" are a disgrace to the genre.

The finale in an amusement park was extremely stupid. Why would any rational person turn on the lights in an amusement park and attract every Zombie within a two mile radius?

Anyway, I'm still sorting though the 2009 pixs for the magical 13 to make up the Firecloud Calendar. My SIL is now on the mailing list.

I think the reason I like Zombie movies so much is that they offer simple solutions in contrast to the complex problems we don't know how to deal with. What do we do with AIDs, poverty, Zombie banks, the recession, unemployment, global warming, peak oil or nuclear waste storage? No Idea. Zombies present simple problems...just shoot them in the head.

Zombies have a much shorter literary tradition than vampires or werewolves. Nevertheless, "American Werewolf in London" had some great music and visual effects.

My favorite horror movie of all time was "Jacob's Ladder" a truly frightening movie in which you never realized until the end that the images and experiences you were seeing were in the dying mind of a wounded Vietnam soldier given an experimental battlefield drug by the government.

In the event of an actual Zombie outbreak, my M1 Carbine and a machete would be useful and preferred tools. The local press will attempt to cover up a Zombie outbreak initially. The latest documented Zombie outbreak occured in 2003 in St. Thomas, but it was only a class-2 outbreak, easily controlled and extinguished by Homeland Security.


There are many simple things you can do to prepare for a Zombie outbreak. For example, I have in my Zombie kit a SCUBA wetsuit I can wear which is nearly bite proof as well as leather motorcycle gloves and a crash helmet with a visor. The important thing is to present as small a bite opportunity as possible.

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.

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.

Living in Infamy Forever

New Orleans - December 7, 2006

December 7th...another one of those days that will live in infamy forever...or at least for a little while.


We spent yesterday in New Orleans, checking out the disaster and the recovery efforts. We had lunch in the French Quarter in a garden courtyard. I had jambalaya and shared a salad with Mrs. Phred. The French Quarter shows little sign of the Katrina disaster. It’s on relatively high ground and was not flooded. There is no obvious wind damage.

The French style 2nd and 3rd floor balconies are decorated for both Christmas and for the Mardi Gras coming up in February.


The business district is a little worse for the experience. The trolley cars are not running yet and there is an occasional small business, obviously smashed and looted, that remains shuttered. Soaked drywall is still being replaced in other ground floor businesses.


In the suburbs, the extent of the devastation is mind-numbing. There are literally hundreds of miles of homes on the beach that are simply gone...washed away... and untold square miles of damaged and destroyed homes and businesses in the sprawling New Orleans suburbs. FEMA trailers are parked everywhere next to damaged and destroyed houses and the countryside is dotted with clusters of FEMA trailers in formerly vacant fields.


This makes me think of Japan in late 1945. I have my own thoughts about the causes of the relatively slow pace of recovery and other thoughts about the public policy of providing insurance for mansions built on the edge of the ocean.

If your house is destroyed or damaged, why not just rebuild like the Japanese?

- First, you need to wait to see what government assistance, if any, will be provided. So get in line.
- Second, if you have insurance, you need to wait and negotiate a settlement amount with them. So get in line.
-Third, you probably don’t have any money or a job and the government didn't help and the insurance didn't pay.

What a spectacle. Fifteen months and very little rebuilding or even refuse removal are evident. Even a superpower needs competent leadership to get things done. They don’t make them like Franklin D. Roosevelt anymore.