Voodoo Barbeque

Wreckage from the Voodoo Barbeque


If you are in New Orleans and want to eat some good barbeque you should go over to the Voodoo Barbeque. Just south of I-10 on St. Charles Street, the Voodoo Barbeque offers different kinds of meat and sides. Not only that, but they have two varieties of barbeque sauce that are fantastic! One is called Mango (it is thin, spicy, and a little bit vinegarry) and the other is called Mojo (a bit thicker, less spicy, and not very vinegarry).

Vickie and I went to the Voodoo Barbeque twice! On our first visit an unfriendly version of Macy Gray was our waitress. I had sausage and Vickie had something else. On our second visit a friendly version of former Miami Heat power forward Brian Grant was our waiter. I had more sausage and Vickie had ribs. Then Vickie had more ribs and a t-shirt. Brian Grant sold me two liters of barbeque sauce. I had to smuggle it onto the plane in my luggage. I wrapped it all up in my underpants and stuck it in my checked bag. When I got home there was a letter in my suitcase explaining that my bag had been searched, and there was a sticker on the outside with the word "SAUCE" written on it. I gave some of the sauce to my sister (but I forgot to tell her that it used to be touching my underpants!).

If you like macaroni and cheese you really must go to the Voodoo Barbeque. If for some reason you like corn pudding, my sister thinks you will like the Voodoo Barbeque (www.housepants.blogspot.com).

Smell Recorder

Say, earlier I was thinking about subjects when I came up with the question "why haven't they invented a smell recorder"? Wouldn't it be nice to be able to play back all of your favorite smells? It would also be fun to pause a smell. I wonder what a smell would smell like in reverse or in slow motion. Not to be gross, but if you take the smell "toot" you would expect it to smell the same way backwards and forwards. Either way you'd probably want to fast forward or fast rewind a toot.

I bet if I was a dog I'd really like to have a smell recorder. Dogs use smells like we use speech. Dogs use fire hydrants the same way people use answering machines. That is, they put their smell on the hydrant so that the other dogs know that they have been near. If I'd have had a smell recorder I would've recorded one of Robert's trips to the hydrant so that Albert could always remember about Robert.

Ignatius

Ignatius J. Reilly


Here is the statue of the aforementioned Ignatius J. Reilly. Two things about Ignatius are that he sold pants at Levy Pants and hot dogs out of a cart in the FQ. Not to mention the fact that he was EXTREMELY gassy.

A Confederacy of Dunces was written by a guy called John Kennedy Toole. Toole was a gay wreck of a man who killed his self prior to finding someone willing to publish his book. So, as a sort of tribute, his mom took his manuscript and went searching to and fro for someone to publish her son's book. Finally, she found a publisher and now we have the funniest character in fiction history - Ignatius J. Reilly.

Toole wrote one other book as a youth, The Neon Bible, and it's good as well but for different reasons (i.e., it's not funny). This, too, was published post-mortem.

My friend Julee told me that Drew Barrymore recently purchased the film rights to A Confederacy of Dunces. Allegedly, Will Farrell has been cast as Ignatius. I like Will Farrell, but he seems slightly too unfat to be Ignatius. They'll probably stick him in a fat suit.

Housepants

Hello and I am pleased to tell you that my sister has begun a blog at www.housepants.blogspot.com. Please go look at it. She is a better writer than me, but probably not as interesting. It will be fun to see what she puts!

Last week I was in and around New Orleans (the Crescent City) and Baton Rouge. I will likely write more about that place later, but I'll give a very brief summary now. It has great food, nice people, and a good jazz radio station. It is filthy, smells horrible, and has bad roads.

Here is a microcosm of the French Quarter. We were driving down Bourbon Street when I noticed a lousy man jumping up and down in front of a building holding up a sign that read "BOTTOMLESS". Disgusting!

Overall, I'd give the French Quarter about an F+. You can get good food there, but you can get food just as good outside of the Quarter (I can call it that for I rode through it.)

On the border of the FQ is Canal Street. There you will find the department store formerly known as D.H. Holmes. You may recognize the name from my favorite book, A Confederacy of Dunces starring Ignatius J. Reilly. On the sidewalk in front of D.H. Holmes is a statue of Ignatius which I hugged and took pictures of. That was my favorite part! And let me say that if you like stuff that is funny and you haven't read it yet, please, read A Confederacy of Dunces. I promise that you will like it or my fake name isn't Mister Larry Feathers.

At New Orleans is a massive lake called Lake Pontchatrain (sp?). It has a bridge that is 23.9 miles long, but that doesn't have a top on it (a'la the Golden Gate Bridge, e.g.). It got me thinking about why certain bridges have covers and others don't. Certainly the covers can't be just for decoration. I called my brother-in-law who knows about all, and especially about things. I asked him why some bridges need covers. He explained a lot of stuff about wave action and seismology. I told him that it's too bad for all that stuff on account of I thought I'd discovered a new way to make bridges (without covers!). He told me that before I start discovering new bridges I need to be a civil engineer.

I'll write more crap about Louisiana later. Wait until you find out about how they give you a bowl of new potatoes instead of a loaf of bread as an appetizer at certain restaurants. Ooooweee!

Brains

I came to an understanding of things the other day that on one hand makes me feel glad and on the other hand scares the heck out of me.

The thing Jesus gives us while we are alive is free will. That being said, it occurs to me that our free will is constrained by the way blood flows to our brain (something we can't exert control over despite our free will). So what we really have, I think, is the free will to operate within narrow ranges of options - ranges determined by our circulatory systems.

I was looking at these pictures of people's brains. They illustrated the areas of the brain where blood mainly flows for "regular" people, autistic people, gambling addicts, and some other kind of people that I can't remember right now. Anyway, different people have different regions of the brain that are most active, and that's what governs their decision making and behavior.

So here are my conclusions. First, for me to get mad when people act badly is folly! What I'm really mad about is the way blood flows to their brains. What use is it to get mad about that? This is the conclusion that makes me glad. I should be able to forgive anybody for anything, because the bottom line is that they couldn't help being mean to me! The other good part is that if I forget to forgive somebody, it's okay, on account of that's the way the blood comes to my brain. Don't hold it against me.

My second conclusion is kind of scary. I have come up with a way to rationalize anything bad that people do. I think the thing to get out of this conclusion is that the only suitable punishment to an offense is one that goes directly to the cause of the transgression - blood flow. The mind can be trained to think differently (i.e., blood can be trained to flow in a different way). That should be the focus of our system of criminal justice - to retrain the way blood flows.

So let me ask you how we can continue to use the death penalty? The fact is that we give the death penalty to people guilty of the same stuff as the rest of us. That is, we are guilty of not being able to control the way our brains work (at least without therapy and/or drugs). If one person deserves the death penalty it seems like we all do.

Maybe there are things people can do to optimize blood flow to the brain. Reading books, writing poems, singing, writing songs, skipping, cheese, doing miscellaneous? I guess thoughtful people should try to figure out what makes our blood flow best and then do it.

This has been about a very important discovery I made that affects all. Talk to me!

Sore Art 

Here's a Good One

Auditor Lisa just called to book a room at the Holiday Inn Express in Denison, Texas. At the end of the call, she asked Reservations if Denison has any "eating restaurants".

A Stunning Victory for the Grey Shirts

Friday night the Grey Shirts improved their record to 1 win and 5 losses. We beat a team who was previously undefeated (I think). Anyway, they were pretty good. I'm not quite sure how we pulled off the win, but it had a lot to do with:

• Mr. Kip's incredible defensive effort
• Pitcher Kit's offensive explosion (plus he finally kept his gaping hole shut and showed good sportsmanship)
• Pipe's clutch game winning double in the bottom of the final inning
• Brad Fortney's swingin' bunt hit (rumor has it that B.F. plays without his underpants on)
• Skip's good base running and hustle

We had fun. I re-tore up my knee, sprained my left ankle, bruised my hip, and got a hernia all on the same play. I was called out.

The Hiccups

My grandpa is one of my favorite people of all time. The only thing that makes my dog Robert being dead from the world tolerable to me is that I'm sure my grandpa (who is also dead) is playing with him until I get to come up there.

My grandpa had a glass eye courtesy of a rock hidden in a snowball that unfortunately hit him on the eye during his youth. So he always slept with his glass eye open. Then, when he was old, he suddenly got the hiccups. He had the hiccups for a day, then a week, and finally, after a month, they went away. They said it was some kind of palsy. This kind of palsy, I guess, does stuff to the nerves in your face. Anyway, it caused him to sleep with the other eye open!

Even though both of his eyes were open when he slept, you could always tell when he was sleeping for his mouth would come open (my Dad's mouth comes open when he sleeps too, but his eyes stay shut).

One day we were all over at the Mark Elrod Tower (a highrise for olds) looking at my grandparents and my grandpa was sitting in his usual spot at the near end of the couch with his mouth agape and his left hand wrapped around a can of Diet Sprite. Suddenly he awoke, leaned forward, put his hands on his knees, looked at us, then looked at my grandma, and announced, "Well, I guess either they need to leave or we do." We all started laughing, got our stuff, and left.

My grandpa had the Alzheimer's disease. People claim that stem cell research could lead to a cure. There are currently a couple dozen lines of privately funded stem cells available for research. That is a sufficient quantity to perform high quality studies. The President supports stem cell research using the cells that already exist. He is not in favor of federally funded stem cell research. Neither am I.

A Charity About Mister Rogers

A Charity About Mister Rogers


"In every neighborhood, all across our country, there are good people insisting on a good start for the young, and doing something about it." ---Mister Fred Rogers

The other day I was talking to Francine about audit when suddenly one of us mentioned Mister Rogers. We started talking about how important Mister Rogers has been in our lives, and wouldn't it be swell if most kids of today grew up to be just like us (i.e., nice, fancy, GS-12s, etc.).

That's when we came up with an idea with which we hope you will help. There is a book that Mrs. Fred Rogers put out shortly after Mister Rogers died called The World According to Mister Rogers. It contains a bunch of things Mister Rogers wrote throughout his life. It has observations, advice, and miscellany. It is all about being decent.

So our idea is to get a whole truckload of The World According to Mister Rogers and deliver them to new parents in maternity wards. This way, every baby's first book will be the Mister Rogers book and that would be a good thing. What we need is a truck, and some of A) your money, and/or B) your time, and/or B) your copies of the book.

So come on and participate in our charity! We hope you will help. Also, let us know if you have any ideas about how we can get the publisher of the book to cut us a good deal on a truckload of copies.

Here is another excerpt:
"I hope you're proud of yourself for the times you've said 'yes,' when all it meant was extra work for you and was seemingly helpful only to somebody else."

P.S. You can never go down the drain.

Pudding Pops Petition

I was shocked to find out that, sometime when I wasn't paying careful attention, Jello Pudding Pops were discontinued. Why on Earth?

Anybody who ate some Pudding Pops knows that these were no ordinary ice cream treats. Pudding Pops put the D in delicious and now is the time for them to come back! I'm going to write a letter to Jello and Bill Cosby to say that we are ready.

One person probably won't be enough to get Pudding Pops going again, but, together, we can get the job done. Please comment if you want to see Pudding Pops back in your grocer's freezer and I'll add everyone's comments to the letter. Thanks for your help!

Also, if you like to irritate the heck out of people, whenever someone asks a question about movies make your answer, "I'm pretty sure it was "Ghost Dad"." People will hate you!

First Entry

Finally, I received an entry to the Larry Feathers theme song verse contest about music. Here it is:

"Three cheers for Larry Feathers
Grey Shirts on a losing streak
Larry loves puppets
but hates boned meat
Larry, friend to you and I
He's a heck of a guy!"

All of that stuff is true!

Don't forget that there is a beautiful t-shirt of my head that will be awarded for the best entry.

"I'm One of the Nicest People There Is."

Midway through a week of having my back and side fat continuously poked, being called names, being told to shut up, being falsely accused of stealing stuff, and being told to go away and go home, I asked the above Lisa why she is always so mean to me and others. She replied, "I am one of the nicest people there is." She was serious and Alan bursted out laughing.

So I decided to take a candid camera picture of her. I thought that a random snapshot would capture the Essence of Lisa. Did it ever! Look at how nice she is. Move over Glamour Shots, here comes L. Feathers!

P.S. Don't forget that you can look at a bigger version of the picture by clicking on it.