b.rox

I’m going to be making a presentation to a special interest group at the American Educational Research Association’s upcoming conference. My topic? Blogging in post-Katrina New Orleans. My idea is to recount five or so of the biggest stories to emerge from the local blogosphere since the flooding of the city in 2005. I mean [...]

Over the last few weeks I’ve been fiddling with constructing my family tree on ancestry.com. (Thanks to my old high school friend Georgie for getting me hooked.) I managed to trace one line back as far as Torvild Ljøstad, my great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great [...]

We went looking for this grave after seeing a request on Find a Grave. After some help from “Big Bad John” at the cemetery office, we found it. (The office for Cypress Grove is across City Park Avenue in Greenwood Cemetery.) Turns out I could have just gone to the website and done the search [...]

On Friday, with a little time to kill, my daughter and I stopped by one of the many cemeteries clustered in our neighborhood. I’d been in this one before, but I came through a different gate, so I had never seen the name “Dispersed of Judah.” I hadn’t noticed it was a Jewish cemetery, though [...]

Here at the University today we are celebrating the opening of the College of Pharmacy’s new Qatar Pavilion. This is a big deal. In addition to our president, the mayor will be saying a few words and the special guest is His Excellency Saad Bin Ibrahim al-Mahmoud, the Minister of Education & Higher Education for [...]

I’m still a little “down in the mouth” from getting a temporary crown last week. In the meantime, please check out this link: The Hypothetical Development Organization I’m not really sure what this is all about. As near as I can figure, these folks aim to propose bizarre and fanciful re-developments of existing urban buildings [...]

This morning as I rode to work, just as I approached the overpass, I saw a man who was pushing a wheelchair near the bike path. He wasn’t sitting in the wheelchair, he was pushing it along, with a pile of some clothes or other stuff on the seat. But as I passed near him [...]

I’ve seen this guy around town for years. He’s made a cart out of two bicycles for hauling junk around. For some reason whenever I see this contraption I feel like I’m on some small island in the Caribbean. I’m frankly awestruck by his ingenuity.

It’s not just a sign — it’s a kinetic sculpture. This was constructed by Peter Hickman and friends at the place where the Jeff Davis neutral ground intersects the Lafitte Corridor at the foot of Bayou St. John. It is propelled by the wind. In my personal opinion, it’s a perfect expression of community desire [...]

I’m still in touch with a number of friends back in Indiana. Last week I heard some sad news from one of these friends: His mother had passed away. She was advanced in years, but it was still rather sudden and unexpected. Yet what he asked the next day brought a smile to my face. [...]

Is there any point in even trying to talk about anything else today? No. There’s not, not here in New Orleans anyway. Tonight the Saints play the Vikings in a re-match that is being hyped beyond all belief. And yet the massive hype feels perfectly natural and entirely appropriate, here in New Orleans anyway. I [...]

Over the long weekend I was privileged to observe and even participate in some bizarre graveyard rituals to ensure a victorious season for the New Orleans Saints. These were organized in large part by college professors. There were at least three profs in attendance — maybe more. With getups like these it’s hard to tell. [...]

There’s something I wanted to write at the first anniversary of Katrina, but I never did. I thought about it again at the second anniversary, and the third and the fourth. I still wanted to write about it, but there was something in the way. Too much to do, and time slips away. Or maybe [...]

Now that school’s back in session and my daughter’s back in daycare, I’m back to riding on the Jeff Davis bike path each morning on my way to work. That takes me past Comiskey Park and a sad tableau of signage for a community center that never materialized. I thought to myself a couple times [...]

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Next week I’ll be on a panel called “Katrina 5.0: A Symposium on Technology & Blogging” hosted by the Louisiana State Museum. Among other things, I’ll be talking about blogging, my experience of writing about the aftermath of the levee failures, and how the platform or community has evolved in the past five years. I [...]

Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made. — Otto von Bismarck I had the chance to observe a bit of sausage-making yesterday. I attended the meeting of a committee charged with selecting a team to design a greenway for the Lafitte Corridor. A little context may be in order. [...]

Toast by Editor B Tales of the Cocktail kicked into full gear today. The seminars on this first day are all “professional track,” geared toward industry professionals, with topics like “Raising the Bar: Spirited Media Skills for Cocktail & Industry Professionals.” I’m anything but a professional, so I did not attend any of these, but [...]