b.rox

Last night we had our Mid-City Recovery Action Meeting, as we do on the first Monday of every month. We’d been planning since last week to address the designs that Victory Real Estate Investments, LLC, appears to have on twenty acres of Mid-City.
What we hadn’t anticipated was Saturday’s front page story in the Times-Picayune. That [...]

Oh, as for the article about our renovation, which I mentioned earlier? I can’t find the text online, alas, but they did use a picture by yours truly:

Also in today’s paper, there’s an excellent editorial by Michael Homan.
Update: Thanks to Adrastos, I found the article about our renovation online.

I picked up the paper off the porch this morning looking forward to reading another story by Stephanie Bruno about our renovation, the 18th in an ongoing series.
But I was somewhat distracted by the headline on the front page:
Giant Mid-City retail project planned

A Georgia development company has been quietly working to assemble a vast swath [...]

I believe the story in today’s paper is the 17th installment that Stephanie Bruno has written about our renovation:

DESPITE SETBACKS, MID-CITY RESIDENTS HAMMERING AWAY
Saturday, March 10, 2007
By Stephanie Bruno
Contributing writer
NOTE: When we last visited Bart Everson and Christy Paxson, work on their Mid-City home was progressing sporadically, and the recent murder of their friend Helen [...]

I have a picture on the op-ed page of the Times-Picayune today, in honor of Black History Month.

I was heartened to read a positive story on the front of today’s paper about Dr. Jeff Wiese, who drove around the country for months after Katrina and pretty much saved the residency program at the Tulane School of Medicine. Now the residents are trying to fill in the gap left by the closure [...]

Front page of the paper this morning: Warren Riley’s mug and the headline, “Officials say city making headway against crime.” Apparently the superintendent and the mayor had a press conference on Friday to “reassure” us. I don’t feel reassured, and here’s why.
From the article:

At the news conference, evidence and numbers detailing any success resulting from [...]

Not a mention, not even a word.
In last night’s State of the Union address, President Bush talked about all manner of subjects, but he didn’t have a thing to say regarding the devastated Gulf Coast region or the slow pace of recovery in New Orleans.
I’m not really surprised. It’s kind of like getting kicked in [...]

Monday’s Times-Picayune carried a story in the Metro section about a young man named Chivas Doyle. He just turned 24 last week. He was attending Delgado Community College. He was a practical joker. Everyone called him Tank because he was 7′ tall.
He was found dead in his FEMA trailer in the Upper Ninth Ward, shot [...]

I wanted to write something cheerful for the end of the year. I certainly didn’t want to cite another story from the newspaper about killing in my neighborhood. But I can’t help it. The details surrounding this incident are just too compelling.
A little background: La Finca is a restaurant/bar that used to be on Tulane [...]

In the paper today:
Prominent musician killed while his family watched
Dinerral Shavers, 25, died from a gunshot to the back of his head at about 5:30 p.m. while behind the wheel of his black Chevrolet Malibu in the 2200 block of Dumaine Street, police said…
Although critically wounded, Shavers continued driving four blocks up Dumaine before stopping.
By [...]

A pair of photos by yours truly are featured on the op-ed page of the Times-Picayune today. The pictures depict a before and after scene on Bienville — a house, and then an empty lot where the house used to be.

This is part of a series of “visual commentaries” that the T-P has been [...]

I heard a thump on the porch and went out to see the newspaper had been delivered. Ordinary enough, you say, but here’s the rub: It’s Sunday’s paper being delivered at 5 PM Saturday afternoon. I opened it up, relishing the notion of reading tomorrow’s news, but was disappointed to discover sections A, B & [...]

Stephanie Bruno has another story about our ongoing renovation in this morning’s Times-Picayune.

Roy Bragg writes about NOLA bloggers (including yours truly) in the San Antonio Express-News.

I’ll be on the local CBS affiliate, WWL channel 4, sometime this evening, talking about you-know-what.

I was on the local news last night — top of the ten o’clock hour.

They pegged it to Nagin’s 100+3 day press conference, citing his quip about commercial blight, and then seguing to our rodent-infested grocery.
They shot the interview with me yesterday afternoon. The camera operator (who bravely ventured into the grocery) turns out to [...]

I think I’ll be on the local news tonight (ABC 26 at 9 and 10) with some other Mid-City residents, talking about that corner grocery. Yeah, you know the one.
It looks like I will also be on NBC Nightly News (national) but I’m not sure when. The producer, a guy named Steve Majors who moved [...]

A few days after the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001, I wrote a short essay titled “I Thought It Couldn’t Get Worse.”
Sadly, it seems it has gotten worse. A lot worse. We’re now embroiled in a war that has nothing to do with those attacks, yet those attacks are used to justify this war.
In [...]

I write here without editorial filter. Sometimes I wish I had one. So it was a pleasure to write an op-ed piece for the Times-Picayune, which appeared in this morning’s paper. It was nice to have a second set of eyes checking my work. Here’s what I wrote, followed by some notes.