b.rox

Here’s an example of marital telepathy and a harrowing tale of a narrowly averted information crisis. Yesterday, Xy was doing some work at her classroom, with a little help from our friend James. (It seems someone donated a million dollars of supplies to the schools at the beginning of the year and the administration waited [...]

I’ve never had a steady doctor here in New Orleans, for a variety of reasons, not least among them the fortunate fact that I’ve been in remarkably good health ever since I moved here eight years ago. Still, I’ve always heard that once you turn 40 you should get annual checkups as a matter of [...]

How many pages do I have out there on other sites? Here’s fifteen or so just off the top of my head… del.icio.us Facebook Flickr Friendster GoodReads last.fm LibraryThing LinkedIn MySpace Netflix Twitter Vimeo Wikipedia Wish List Wordie YouTube

So, I was listening to Kenny G’s Intelligent Design show on WFMU yesterday, and he starts playing a piece by Steve McLaughlin called “Run for Your Life.” The piece consists of all of the Beatles albums, from Please Please Me to Let It Be, played at eight times normal speed. The whole thing is just [...]

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“The media… is where democracies conduct their civil wars.” — David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas, 2004

Juan Molina’s crew has been working on our house since Monday morning. They’re doing two separate tile jobs. One is the floor of the back room: The other tile job is the shower. I got two different colors of tile and told them to just randomly mix them up: Unfortunately the grout I special ordered [...]

This morning I noticed something kind of strange. This new graffito, on the back of the RTA facility… …bears a striking resemblance to this older one just a couple blocks away. Do you see it? The head of the turkey is the exact same shape as the fish. I can’t recall how long the turkey [...]

Just got a package of books from my friends in Montana, J & Day. It arrived here at the University ten days ago, but for some reason it was just sitting down in the post office. I wonder if they would ever have called me if I hadn’t called them? Anyway, now I’ve got some [...]

By late Friday night it was evident that Depression #10 was not a serious threat to the Gulf Coast, so Saturday morning we hit the road and headed out to Orange Beach, Alabama. Better one night that none at all. We drove through bands of rain and sunshine to get there. We were able to [...]

I thought it would be nice if Xy and I got out of town to celebrate our wedding anniversary. Nothing fancy, just a day at the beach. After our trip to Vero I resolved that we’d get out of town every few months for the mental health benefit. So last week I booked a couple [...]

Many people on campus today are wearing black in support of the Jena Six. I’m reminded of my high school days in Greenwood, Indiana. We often had “Spirit Weeks” to support the football team with different dress-up days. One time we had something called “Black ‘Em Out” day. Everybody was supposed to wear black. One [...]

I spent much of the weekend cleaning the “utility room,” the biggest room of our house. I’m still sore from all the bending and scraping. There was a lot of sheetrock mud on the floor, and a few magazine pages which had adhered to the concrete during the flood. I think I still need to [...]

I can’t make it to Jena, Louisiana, tomorrow so I will be wearing black to show support for the Jena Six.

I participated today in a panel discussion at Loyola, sponsored by the Society of Professional Journalists. Kind of funny, given that I am not a professional journalist. The topic: “Online User Comments and its impact on news coverage, news Web sites and freedom of speech.” My fellow participants were all involved in one way or [...]

My expectations for K-Ville were extremely low. (I get exposed to more than my fair share of bad police dramas because of Xy’s execrable taste in televiewing.) I was pleasantly surprised that K-Ville wasn’t as bad as I’d imagined it would be.

I administer an online discussion group for my neighborhood. With 432 members at last count, it’s been fairly successful, and we do our best to promote it as a higher-quality alternative to the notorious nola.com forums. However, there’s always room for improvement. After toying with the idea for months, I decided to try an experiment [...]

The 24th story about our renovation appears in today’s Times-Picayune.

There will be a segment about Helen Hill‘s unsolved murder case on America’s Most Wanted tomorrow night. I believe they’ll be using some video I shot of her jazz funeral. Also, Helen’s brother, Jake Hill, is in New Orleans to hold a meeting and press conference at the Sound Café (2700 Chartres) this afternoon (Sept. [...]

Friends of New Orleans is mounting a campaign to bring a presidential debate to New Orleans. I have mixed emotions about this. The presidential debates are something of a farce. They should be organized by a nonpartisan group, but they’re not. They’re organized by the Commission on Presidential Debates. They claim to be nonpartisan, but [...]

Humberto is hitting Texas, but we’re feeling the effects all the way here in New Orleans. I stopped and took this picture on the way to work this morning. If I hadn’t paused, I might have made it to the office relatively dry. As it was, I got a soaking. But as my friend Kevin [...]