The Cajun Boy

This GQ story on former Colts receiver Marvin Harrison is absolutely unreal…

Robert Nixon had seen everything. He had seen more than enough to put a rich and famous man, an NFL superstar, in prison. But this is what you tell the police unless you’re a fool. You can’t go wrong if you say you ain’t seen nothin’, and you can go very wrong if you say otherwise. And as far as Robert Nixon is concerned, what happened to the fat man with the Muslim beard is proof.

…

Marvin Harrison is six feet tall and 185 pounds. He has a neatly trimmed mustache and the body-fat content of an Olympic swimmer. He became the dominant wide receiver of his era not by outleaping or outwrestling defenders but by exploiting an almost supernatural talent for getting open: for feints, fakes, jukes, dodges, bluffs, stutter steps, sudden bursts of sick speed. But at this moment, Nixon says, Marvin Harrison did not run. He stood on the sidewalk and calmly raised his wiry arms. In each hand, Nixon clearly saw, was a gun.

Nixon froze.

“YOU A BITCH-ASS NIGGA!” Nixon heard the fat man scream at Harrison. “YOU AIN’T GONNA SHOOT. YOU AIN’T GONNA SHOOT. DO WHAT YOU GOTTA DO.”

Nixon was across the street and thirty yards away when Harrison started shooting. Pop pop pop pop pop pop—a great staccato gust of bullets. Steadily, Nixon says, Harrison unloaded both guns into the fat man’s car, stippling the red Toyota Tundra with bullet holes as the fat man ducked in his seat. Eventually, the fat man sat up and sped off, heading straight toward Nixon’s position as Harrison darted into the street and continued to shoot.

Just go read it.

I don't know who makes these, but they're never not funny. This one is ridiculously funny...

In case you didn't know, David Simon, the creator of "The Wire," is doing a series about post-Katrina New Orleans for HBO called "Treme." The trailer was just released...


EMBED-HBO Series Treme Teaser - Watch more free videos

via Warming Glow

I find it highly amusing that stories of Palin's dumbassery during the 2008 campaign are still leaking into the media. The latest from Politico reporting on an upcoming 60 Minutes profile of McCain advisor Steve Schmidt:

Sarah Palin’s charming opening debate line for now-Vice President Joe Biden — “Hey, can I call you Joe?” — was scripted after she repeatedly referred to him as “O’Biden” in preparation sessions, former McCain campaign senior adviser Steve Schmidt told “60 Minutes.”

Schmidt was interviewed by Anderson Cooper for a segment about "Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime," a book about the 2008 presidential campaign by political reporters Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, to be published Monday.

CBS News said in a release previewing the segment, to be broadcast Sunday at 7 p.m. ET/PT, that Schmidt recalled a reflexive tendency by Palin to refer to Biden as “O’Biden.”

“It was multiple people — and I wasn't one of them — who all said at the same time, ‘Just say, "Can I call you Joe,"’ which she did,” Schmidt recalled.

Good lord.

What I miss is the society. Lunch and dinner are the two occasions when we most easily meet with friends and family. They're the first way we experience places far from home. Where we sit to regard the passing parade. How we learn indirectly of other cultures. When we feel good together. Meals are when we get a lot of our talking done -- probably most of our recreational talking. That's what I miss. Because I can't speak that's's another turn of the blade. I can sit at a table and vicariously enjoy the conversation, which is why I enjoy pals like my friend McHugh so much, because he rarely notices if anyone else isn't speaking. But to attend a "business dinner" is a species of torture. I'm no good at business anyway, but at least if I'm being bad at it at Joe's Stone Crab there are consolations.

When we drive around town I never look at a trendy new restaurant and wish I could eat there. I peer into little storefront places, diners, ethnic places, and then I feel envy. After a movie we'll drive past a formica restaurant with only two tables occupied, and I'll wish I could be at one of them, having ordered something familiar and and reading a book. I never felt alone in a situation like that. I was a soloist.

-Roger Ebert on losing his ability to eat and drink. Coincidentally, I am also a bit of a "soloist." Just saying.

Yet in its February issue--yes, the one with Tiger Woods on the cover--it managed to publish one of the silliest, most superficial, and most wildly out of touch articles about Twitter that I've ever read. Called "America's Tweethearts," it discusses the phenomenon of individuals (primarily attractive women) who have amassed notable amounts of Twitter fame, or "twilebrity." (Twilebrity? Barf.)

Accompanying the article, which makes liberal use of egregiously irritating Twitter terms ("tweeple," "Twitformation Superhighway") that were likely coined by folks who blog about "your personal brand" and hand out business cards etched with "Social Media Expert" at marketing conferences, is a stylized photograph of six female "Twilebrities" identified by name and follower count. I know a few of them personally and am familiar with the rest, and I can say that they all have reputations for working hard and really "getting" the power of Twitter marketing and conversation when many people still thought that the microblogging service had about as much lasting power as the pet rock.

-My lovely friend Caroline McCarthy in response to what may possibly be the worst piece ever written in Vanity Fair, a mindnumbingly misinformed and just plain stupid slam on Twitter written by Vanessa Grigoriadis.

Click to enlarge...



(via Places We Used to Go)

Yesterday morning “celebrity DJ” Steve Aoki tweeted that he had just narrowly escaped death, on a boat no less, probably in some exotic locale, because that’s the type of place a “celebrity DJ” like Steve Aoki hangs out on a Tuesday. In his tweet, Aoki said succinctly, “I almost died on a boat today. True story. Blog and video up on http://steveaoki.com soon.” Well, myself and countless others have been refreshing his site for the past 24 hours or so and there have been no updates. What the fuck Steve?

Unlike Eli Roth, who has not been shy about detailing his recent near-death experience on the open waters, Aoki has mysteriously clammed up. So what happened? I have three theories:

1) Steve Aoki’s DJ-digits are sore from finger-banging Lindsay Lohan, thus preventing him from typing his sure-to-be-enthralling tale. Now, I have no idea whether or not Lindsay Lohan was on the same boat with Steve Aoki, but I do know that LiLo was recently on a boat with Gaddafi’s ass-goblin son along with Beyonce and Russell Simmons, so it stands to reason that Steve Aoki was on the same boat, and it also stands to reason that Lindsay Lohan would let a greasy, twatty DJ like Steve Aoki give her a furious, bone-fracturing finger-banging.

2) Steve Aoki has no idea where he is right now. Look, I don’t know Steve Aoki, but he sure as shit looks like a guy who enjoys a little chemically-enhanced escape from reality every now and again. Thus, he could be so blitzed out of his mind that he has no recollection of nearly dying on a boat or tweeting about nearly dying on a boat. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

3) Steve Aoki is too busy saving Gary Coleman’s life to blog. In case you haven’t heard, Gary Coleman was rushed to the hospital today. Perhaps Steve Aoki is by his side using his magical “celebrity DJ” death-fighting powers to save the life of the man responsible for introducing the phrase, “Whatchu talkin’ ’bout Willis?” into the American pop culture vernacular. Let’s all hope that’s the case.

Who knows?

One reason seekers of news are abandoning print newspapers for the Internet has nothing directly to do with technology. It’s that newspaper articles are too long. On the Internet, news articles get to the point. Newspaper writing, by contrast, is encrusted with conventions that don’t add to your understanding of the news. Newspaper writers are not to blame. These conventions are traditional, even mandatory.

Take, for example, the lead story in The New York Times on Sunday, November 8, 2009, headlined “Sweeping Health Care Plan Passes House.” There is nothing special about this article. November 8 is just the day I happened to need an example for this column. And there it was. The 1,456-word report begins:

"Handing President Obama a hard-fought victory, the House narrowly approved a sweeping overhaul of the nation’s health care system on Saturday night, advancing legislation that Democrats said could stand as their defining social policy achievement."

Fewer than half the words in this opening sentence are devoted to saying what happened. If someone saw you reading the paper and asked, “So what’s going on?,” you would not likely begin by saying that President Obama had won a hard-fought victory. You would say, “The House passed health-care reform last night.” And maybe, “It was a close vote.” And just possibly, “There was a kerfuffle about abortion.” You would not likely refer to “a sweeping overhaul of the nation’s health care system,” as if your friend was unaware that health-care reform was going on. Nor would you feel the need to inform your friend first thing that unnamed Democrats were bragging about what a big deal this is—an unsurprising development if ever there was one.

-Michael Kinsey makes the argument in The Atlantic that newspaper stories are too long, leading many consumers of media to abandon them. Felix Salmon wrote an interesting response to it.

Okay, this might sound stupid but I’m going to go ahead and throw it out there anyway because it involves a subject that I find endlessly perplexing: why is it that corporate entities, whether they’re publicly or privately owned, are always so hell-bent on growing? I suppose what rekindled this mild fascination was the release of Nick Denton’s “unique” memo earlier today where he outlined what he thinks the various Gawker Media properties need to do in order to grow in 2010.

The memo reminded me of a thought I’ve had for a while, which is this: once you’ve achieved a certain level of success, what’s wrong with simply being content with where you are?

By shunning the urge to grow, you can focus your resources/energy toward maintaining what made you popular in the first place with your core customers/audience, rather than channeling those resources/energy into tinkering with the formula that made you successful in the first place just so you can bring in new customers/audience members?

A company I’ve been fascinated with for the longest time, Starbucks, is a perfect example of the potential pratfalls inherent in the relentless pursuit of growth. Once upon a time, and it’s almost too long ago to recall now, Starbucks was a spunky little upstart chain that achieved great success selling a product that most people made at home, coffee. They became popular by simply providing a really good product that was sold by friendly, knowledgeable employees. I used to love Starbucks, as did millions of others. But that all changed rather rapidly.

Fueled by a seemingly insatiable desire to conquer the world, i.e. to grow, Starbucks CEO Howard Shultz started popping up everywhere touting all of the things Starbucks planned to do “to better serve our customers,” which just about any idiot knew was a thinly veiled euphemism for “what we need to do in order to grow.” So Starbucks started opening more stores, both domestically and abroad, at an astounding rate. They also started offering all sorts of crap food. This led to a bit of a problem…in order to staff all of the new stores, Starbucks had to lower their hiring standards a bit and then had to train these new, less-educated and less-motivated employees rapidly. Additionally, the food they were serving would often take time to prepare, which led to longer lines in the stores, not to mention that serving food took the focus off of the product that made them successful in the first place…COFFEE! So then what you wound up having were less than stellar employees serving a less than stellar product to increasingly pissed off customers, all in the name of, you guessed it, GROWTH!

Eventually, many of the core Starbucks customers, people like myself who would make multiple trips to their stores each day, abandoned them, and the company went into the shitter financially. To his credit, Howard Shultz recognized the company’s mistakes and took steps toward righting the ship by closing stores and eliminating some of the food items, but it may have been too late. Personally, I think I’ve had one Starbucks coffee in the past month, a far cry from the days when I was purchasing 2 or 3 per day, and frankly, I doubt that I’ll ever give Starbucks another chance. They just left me with too bad of a taste in my mouth, no pun intended.

I suppose it’s the natural order of things for human beings to aspire to grow, both personally and professionally, but just once, I’d love to hear of a company founder or CEO who has the balls to just put the damn thing in cruise control once they’ve passed their competitors with nothing but open highway on the horizon instead of continuing to push the pedal to the proverbial metal.

“You know what…I’ve got (insert number here) people per day consuming my product. I’ve got a nice house. A nice car. I take great vacations. I’ve got all I’ve ever wanted and more. So I plan on just doing everything I can to maintain doing exactly what we’ve been doing to make us so successful. By trying to attract new customers, we may alienate the customers we worked so hard for so long to build loyalty with.”

That’d be kind of refreshing, wouldn’t it?

What is it that they say about not trying to fix something that isn’t broke? Perhaps I’m naive, but I’m sure they do say that for a reason.

Howard Stern's staff ugh, tinkered, with Sarah Palin's audiobook. Be sure to hang around till the end.

Like most Who Dats, yesterday’s loss to the Bucs combined with last weekend’s loss to the Cowboys has me feeling a little deflated. After all, the football pundits are always crowing about how important it is to be playing your best football going into the playoffs in order to have any success in the playoffs. But here’s some recent history to keep in mind:

-The 2008 Super Bowl Champion New York Giants lost their last four home games and two out of their last three overall going into the playoffs.

-The 2007 Super Bowl Champion Indianapolis Colts were 2-3 in December.

-The team that barely lost in last year’s Super Bowl, the Arizona Cardinals, lost 4 of their last 6 games by a combined score of 167-70.

-The San Diego Chargers are 18-0 in December since 2006. The number of times they’ve been to the Super Bowl in that span…zero.

So is there reason to be concerned? Yes, absolutely, we’ve played, ugh, unwell of late. But is it time to panic? No, absolutely not.

But still…THE FUCKING BUCS?!?!?!

Image via Times-Picayune

The soul of the city is all around me as I drive out Interstate 10. I've seen the things I came to see, felt what it was like during this time of madness in New Orleans. My wife is with me, and we're listening to the Saints game on the radio. She does not like football, but she loves New Orleans, and this is the first team she has ever cared about.

I think about all I've seen -- in the past week, in the years before -- and about the next game in the Dome. The Cowboys are coming to town. Some marketing guy decided in the '70s that they should be America's Team. It stuck, because they were good and because Dallas represented everything America thought about itself: big, consuming, flashy, bragging, unbeatable.

When I drive into Dallas, I see a place sprawling and bland, loops and rings of interstate and, somewhere over the horizon, a stadium representing a just-gone era of bloat and decay … scoreboard so big it interferes with the game … $60 pizzas. It looks new but is dead inside. In contrast, there is the drive out of New Orleans, through a city still battered, past the exits for the Vieux Carre and Uptown, past the Huey Long, which runs narrow and high out to the leaning oyster and chicken shack. All told, this is a city with the opposite calculus of Dallas: It is decayed on the outside, but inside there is life.

-I kinda wanted to hate this, thinking it’d be yet another cheesy “the Saints are saving New Orleans” cliche-laden essay, but Wright Thompson absolutely nailed it, leaving me with Goddamn tears in my eyes by the time I was finished reading the whole piece.

In the event you have any doubts as to how loved the Saints are by their fans, check out this video from WWL of THOUSANDS of fans greeting the team in the dead of night following a REGULAR SEASON GAME in Atlanta yesterday...



And behold, Breesus Maximus...

Yeah, this seems about right...



The AP also wrote a story about this incident.

I snapped this pic of the Fed-Ex Field scoreboard about two seconds after Garrett Hartley’s field goal sailed through the uprights to win the game. It was almost as if I didn’t believe we had actually won and I needed to snap a picture of the scoreboard in order to have something tangible to prove to myself that yes, we did actually win that utterly amazing game in the most improbable of ways.

I still can’t fully wrap my brain around what I witnessed there on Sunday afternoon, and I doubt that I ever will, but there is one thing I’m 100% sure of…I’ll never forget being in that stadium on Sunday. It was pure madness…the range of emotions experienced and expressed by fans of both teams…you could actually feel the shift in momentum permeating throughout the stadium after Suisham missed the kick that would have iced the game for the Skins.

About all of this, I think Drew summed it up rather well in the post-game press conference:

"I believe in destiny, and I believe in karma and what goes around comes around. We've been on the other side of this deal, probably too many times. Maybe it's our time -- that we start catching some of the breaks, start being a team that wins 'em like this in the end."

12 and 0. This is, as I mentioned in the subject line, just getting ridiculous, but Goddamn it’s a fun wave to ride. WHO DAT!

There's no way I could let the premiere of Jersey Shore pass without sharing a few words on the matter, which I posted at Animal. And no, I'm not one of the executive producers of the show, thank you very much.

I don't think I've really felt that the 2009 Saints were "for real" until last night. I can hardly believe this is happening, but am having a hell of a lot of fun riding this wave. WHO DAT!!!