b.rox

Today Tomorrow I am celebrating a dozen years here at the University. That means we moved to New Orleans twelve years and a couple weeks ago. I can’t conceive of one without the other. A dozen years of work and life at this school in this city. As previously noted, I’ve now spent a quarter [...]

I just learned Gil Scott-Heron died Friday. Today is Memorial Day. Here’s a video.

Recently, after a couple beers, Xy let it slip that she’s not really into the funky weird ponytail I’d been growing out for the last year or so. I can’t say I blame her. It started as the ultimate anti-mullet, long on top, shaved everywhere else. But when it finally got long enough, it started [...]

A couple days ago Xy reported she had trouble with the car starting, and sure enough the next morning it was dead. We packed Xy off in a cab. (When she got to her school on the West Bank, she discovered the cab wasn’t equipped to take credit cards (although the dispatcher had assured me [...]

Someone has finally seen the humor of this photo I took in 2008. It’s featured in a story on Shine (from Yahoo) about “men who orgasm too quickly.” And, yes, they gave proper credit, so I don’t have to send a takedown notice like I did with HuffPo last week.

After the Beyond Jena forum in January of 2009, I had the idea for putting together a one-day conference on the intersection of social media and social justice. Alas, though I blew some hot air around the office, I never actually did it. A combination of distractions and personal lethargy (on my part) got in [...]

So I went down to Michael’s house last night to watch Treme. I fully expected to see a commemoration of Dinerral Shavers, and that is how the show began. The funeral scene was moving. Nakita Shavers, playing herself, gave a heartbreaking eulogy for her brother. I read that she had to do that scene four [...]

Dear Persephone, We’ve been counting down your last days of “school.” I’ve been taking you to daycare starting when you were five months old. The morning time has been our special time together. Since you don’t have to be there at any specific time, and my workday is usually flexible, we’ve had the luxury of [...]

In addition to being my boss’ birthday, tomorrow is supposed to be Judgment Day according to Harold Camping. No, it’s not the end of the world. That’s coming in October. Just for the record, I may as well make my own prediction: There will be no rapture tomorrow. However there will be plenty of discouraged [...]

Ross Luippold & Carol Hartsell of Huffington Post used a photo of mine in their allegedly humorous feature, Eight Rejected Prom Themes. How dare they! I publish my photos on Flickr under a Creative Commons attribution license. All they have to do to be legal is give me credit. They don’t have to pay me. [...]

I got my media credential, so happily I will be attending Tales of the Cocktail this summer for the third time. There’s a host of interesting events at Tales. I find myself drawn to programming around particular spirits (or categories of spirits) and particular cocktails (or categories of cocktails). Your palette may vary. Here are [...]

As I said back in February: I suppose that being an extra in a big film or television production is always kind of weird. But it’s a truly bizarre thing to reenact events that one has experienced firsthand. I haven’t written anything more about my experiences as an extra for HBO’s Treme because I thought [...]

This morning was the Lafitte (Corridor) Greenway Strategic Kickoff Meeting. It ran from 7:30 to 9:00 AM, which was a tad problematic for me. I’m usually getting my girl to daycare around 9 AM, and I really hate to rush our morning routine. Yesterday morning, she got into a mood and hid under the dining [...]

I don’t believe I’ve mentioned it, but the house next door to ours was finally purchased. I believe it went for around $40K after sitting on the market for a year. The initial price was twice that. It needs a lot of work, which is underway. The new owner’s intention is to renovate and sell. [...]

It’s been terribly dry here in Southeast Louisiana for a long time. In the midst of this drought, it’s hard to believe that the Mississippi River is riding at historically high levels. All that water is barreling down toward New Orleans. The US Army Corps of Engineers is opening the Bonnet Carré Spillway right now [...]

Happy Mother’s Day to all the mothers out there — including my mom, my mother-in-law, my baby-mama, and of course the Great Mother: Mama Earth. I love you all. Forgive us, mothers, for we know not what we do.

News from around the world certainly has been interesting of late. Unfortunately it shows no sign of letting up. I call that unfortunate because “interesting” usually means “bad” so far as news is concerned. Even when bad news doesn’t affect me directly, it’s troubling and problematic for me in two different ways. Of course it [...]

It’s been a while, but I’m still aiming to catalog all the two-letter words in the English language. That brings us to am, which is a simple and common word. I’m sure you can use it in a sentence. But can you define it? According to the Wiktionary, it’s the “first-person singular simple present indicative [...]

This used to be a mellow time of year for me. Mostly I work with faculty, and faculty tend to get very busy toward the end of the academic year. That means they have less time to work with me. But since 2009 that’s changed. There are two new factors that have made this a [...]

Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner My rating: 5 of 5 stars It took me a good long while, but I finally finished a book by William Faulkner. I’d read a few pages from The Sound and the Fury a few decades ago, gave up, and avoided him like pellagra ever since. It took me almost [...]