Life in Louisiana

There are some things about living in Southern Louisiana that I haven't managed to get used to yet, and probably never will, and some that I'm already a little too used to. For simplicity's sake, here a handy list:

Lightning - a little bit of lightning goes a long way in England. Not so in LA - apparently, every third day is grounds for a spectacular electrical storm, which separates us from the locals in as much as we're there going 'Whoa - what the fuck?!' and trying to take photos, whilst they are all so used to it, it barely registers on their conscious.

Accordions - after the jam at Deckbar on Wednesday we stopped in at the Bayou Park Tavern to see Lynn Drury on the recommendation of Sam, the bassist. Three or four songs in, I heard an accordion, but because there wasn't one on stage, I just assumed I was imagining it. It wasn't till I mentioned it to the Boy Wonder that he pointed out a guy playing accordion from a seat at the bar. Apparently spending any time in southern Louisiana makes 'hearing an accordion' the default position, and the presence of an actual accordion player is only marginally more likely than the alternative.

Gun and ammo shops - I'm not sure if you have to be born in a country that enshrines the right to bear arms in its constitution to find the regular sightings of gun shops commonplace, but I'm pretty sure I will never get the the point where I stop being surprised to see them along the highway. Massive ads for gun shows are also pretty common place, as are otherwise normal people telling you they have a gun.

Brass bands in the street - the first time we went out in the quarter and saw a 10 or so piece brass band just playing in the street, we were kind of enthralled and stopped for a look. Yesterday we went down to Frenchmen St, where there was a brass band playing in the street and we thought 'I hope everyone standing around gets out of the way before we run them over'.

Dungeon Master - the film

This film doesn't seem to have anything to do with the game, except perhaps having been written by avid fans given the essential lack of believable dialogue and ridiculous premise, but in the game's defence, the film is somehow less comprehensible and more disturbing

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dungeonmaster

To read the Wikipedia entry, you'd think that the 'seven distinct story elements' within the film would be noticeable, whereas the reality is that there are seven almost identical 'trials' that the protagonist has to endure, each of which he overcomes by using his apparently multi-purpose, wrist mounted laser-shooting computer. Even the author of the Wiki on this clearly gave up trying to paint the plot as anything other than fairly lame as no sooner have they alluded to the riddles they must figure out than they point out the surprising versatility of X-CaliBR8 in putting an end to each obstacle as it appears.

It's mental - I can't quite work out whether the poorness of the dialogue is due to the makers' belief that they had such whizz bang special effects, or whether it's just because the whole thing was made by a bunch of super geeks who realised that not having had a girlfriend between them made them uniquely unqualified to write anything believable for the couple to say to one another, but either way this film is actually bad enough to be funny, making it yet another bonus late night find on crazy American TV.

The Outer Limits

3am in New Orleans can only mean one thing - The Outer Limits on NOLA 38. It's a hugely compelling show, with the opening credits being particularly appealing as you are warned that both the horizontal and vertical elements of your television picture are being controlled, and night after night we have come in from a gig, settled on the sofa for some wind down beers and flicked on the Outer Limits to freak us out before bed.

It's a little like 'Tales of the Unexpected', except that where those stories are sometimes confusing throughout only to have the whole point of the mystery revealed in the twist at the end, the Outer Limits is almost the opposite in that the storylines are often compelling until the last five minutes where the ending reveals a surprising lack of plot development and a strange petering out of all the storylines which appeared throughout to have potential to at least provide a slightly unexpected ending. Not that it stops us of course, because occasionally there is something in an episode which makes it worth watching regardless of how everything pans out, like this guy, from an episode called 'Mutant':

(Image from http://i.ytimg.com/vi/k7Ak2DdRCto/0.jpg)

Currently, we're watching one about a bee who's turned into a woman for some as yet undisclosed purpose (I suspect to stop the scientist who can talk to bees from making the most effective insecticide ever) and which will no doubt end with a bit of a whimper, but strangely be no less compelling for that.

ETA Indeed, the purpose of the bee girl was never fully revealed - she turned up at the entomologist's lab, pissed off his wife before killing her (using bees of course) and then tried to get him to marry her at which point he threw her out of the window. Not quite sure what the point was, but enjoying it nonetheless.

My imaginary friends

I have two imaginary friends - one, who is kind of a downer, questions everything I do, and the other, who is a little bit like a puppy, is relentless impressed with my every activity. For example at this moment, the first one is saying

'Are you sure it's a good idea to write about this? People might well think you're mentally ill and medicate me out of existence. And by the way, if you phrased it slightly differently, the punctuation wouldn't be so ambiguous.', while the second one is saying 'Nah - people will think you're delightfully kooky, and it's not like anyone reads this anyway. Not because it's not entertainingly witty of course, just because you're way too modest to tell people to read your blog, which is after all supposed to be an outlet for your thoughts and is only so great to read because your thoughts are naturally hilarious. I say go for it!'

I suppose it's a little like the cartoon angel and devil that pop up occasionally on the shoulders of characters on television, except there is way more moral ambiguity and neither of them seem to necessarily have my best interests (or those of anyone else) at heart.

For example, when we go out to jams here (NOLA), quite often the Boy Wonder will get up to play and not be let off the stage for an hour or more, and the first voice (Grumpog, I call her) always hopes that there won't be anyone we know there, or at least that they will be otherwise occupied and leave me alone. The other voice (Happog) is always looking around for someone to chat to, and encouraging me to strike up a conversation with anyone who catches my eye - I know it's fairly common to have an extrovert and and introvert side, but I'm not sure how common it is to name them, or for them to interfere generally in other aspects of your life.

Perhaps I just listen to them too much, although like me they are both way more likely to be wise after the event and just bang on about how they knew that would happen but I never listen in time. Perhaps they are my way of sharing the blame for some of my most socially awkward moments in an attempt to demonstrate that I'm not alone in my social ineptness, but either way I quite like having the company.

Plarguments

I am vaguely aware that some couples play fight, but the Boy Wonder and I are way too clumsy to even attempt that without the whole affair ending in genuine injury, which kind of negates the whole point of the 'play' element of play fighting. Instead, we have play arguments or 'plarguments' as I have christened them, which more often than not end with one of us threatening to punch the other in the face or poke them in the eye.

I sometimes worry that when we do this outside the house, we run the risk of being overheard and that someone might only hear the end part whereupon they could be forgiven for thinking that we are intending to throw down and fully explore the limits of an abusive relationship once we get back home and can let our middle class rage out without embarrassing ourselves. So far nobody has ever approached us to ensure that we aren't about to do injury to one another, but it may only be a matter of time.

I also worry that if anything were ever to happen to one of us, although I'm sure our friends would tell the authorities that we were very happy together, under more prolonged questioning, one of them might let slip that they have heard us threatening to smack one another in the faceholes and start considering the other as a suspect. Having said that, I'm also worried at what a CSI team would find under our sofa, so maybe a little distraction would buy me enough time to whip round with a hoover.

Brain upgrade

I know that the human mind is an incredible thing, and we have more processing power in our heads than all the computers in the world combined (or something similar), but there are also some pretty cool things about computers and I wish I could just do a little upgrade in my brain to include some of them. Ctrl F is one - it would be so brilliant to be able to use this when reading, or on the information stored on my brain. It would also be great to delete files and rid myself of information that I know to be false so that I would get false positives when remembering information that I suspect might be incorrect, but then can't remember whether that's the reason I know it. If I could overwrite it with the correct information or just delete the incorrect snippet all together, I would save a lot of space.

Thanks Ollie!

The weather here in New Orleans is hot - not just a bit hot, but ridiculously, relentlessly hot. However, one upside of this is that the other day I watched a weather report which featured a dishevelled looking man wafting himself with a piece of paper in front of a weather map and just saying 'It's HOT, New Orleans - have you been outside? There's no rain, it's just really hot!' much in the style of Ollie the weatherman on Family Guy, making me wonder whether that is just a comedy construct, or whether this is common enough as a format for weather reports that it's actually a pastiche.

May Bugs

I am generally quite a fan of bugs - I'm not in love with them (as the Boy Wonder seems to think) but I don't have a particular problem with them and I find quite a lot of them actively interesting. The only ones I actively dislike are Daddy Longlegses and that's because I'm always really scared that in the process of trying to catch them to release them into freedom I will trap one of their teeny weeny legs and pull it off, or otherwise damage their ridiculously fragile little bodies. My favourite kind of bug was, until today, the caterpillar, and although physically it still is, name-wise it has been overshadowed by the fact that I discovered today that another name for the may bugs is a cockchafer. There is no amount of maturity that will make that cease to be funny to me, and quite frankly if there was I would hope not to reach it - life's too short not to be entertained by the word cockchafer.

The wrongness of rationing reading

One of the things that I know my Mum found difficult about my childhood is that my brother and I are both avid readers, to the point where we could often be found reading when we should have been sleeping/getting dressed/brushing our teeth/almost anything, forcing Mum to tell us to stop reading and do whatever it was we were supposed to be doing. As a teacher, I know it didn't come naturally to her to actively discourage such an edifying pursuit, and I'm sure that in amongst the frisson of annoyance, there was at least a little pride at the fact that one of my most dramatic episodes of misbehaviour as a child was burning a hole in my mattress with an anglepoise lamp whilst reading after lights out.

When we're at home, I always have a selection of books waiting to be read and whenever I feel as though I'm running low, there are several charity shops where I can find something suitable to replenish the supply. Whilst on the road however, my options are somewhat more limited - the books I brought with me were all finished before we left New York, and although we've been replenishing them relatively frequently, I find myself baulking at the prospect of paying full price for books, particularly as I hate to part with any books I have read (part OCD-like tendencies, part the fact that I occasionally remember almost the whole plot of a book except for some crucial piece of information and have to find it and read it again to get it out of my head), and I know that I won't be able to take months' worth of books home with me, so will be forced to abandon them here and then possibly buy them again once we're back home.

All this means that I am trying to limit the amount I read, which doesn't come naturally to me and given that I am in the habit of reading a lot, it's hard to switch of the automatic response to pick up a book. So, today I have scoured the internet for a suitable second hand bookshop and have located on which claims to have 35,000 books in store, so hopefully we can head off there tomorrow and see what they can offer in the way of cheap, interesting books.

If I made computer games...

...everyone would be playing 'Baroque Band' with plastic harpsichords, lutes, harps and crumhorns set up in living rooms around the world and people fist pumping as they get a 'counterpoint bonus' or find themselves rewarded at the end of a song by all the ladies swooning onto love-seats.

American TV

There are several things about American TV that are weird and confusing - the breaks every five minutes for ads, the way they pretend the programme's coming back on when they are just telling you who supplied the closed captioning and 'other considerations', the insistence that we need to know that the people in the commercials are actors and that the scenarios depicted are dramatisations despite the fact that nothing vaguely 'dramatic' is happening and so on. But the thing I really don't understand is why they make what is inaccurately described 'background music' so freaking loud. We frequently have to turn the TV up too loud just to be able to make out the dialogue over the symphonic strains of whatever interchangeable dramatic music they have chosen to illustrate a point, and I am at a complete loss as to why. Perhaps it's because they have realised that a lot of the dialogue on Law and Order and other similar shows is pretty lame and they want to distract us from it by confusing us with overwhelming music.

Crazy 'mericans

One of the things I love about the US is the fact that they are surprisingly willing to give their businesses laughable names. Here are some prime examples:

http://www.cretinhomes.com/ - this company even has a section on their website called 'Cretin Staff'

http://www.bohnzone.com/ - yes - it's basically Bone Zone and it's not even a strip club, it's a car dealership

http://www.poupartsbakery.com/ - pronounced Poop Art, of course

We have also been enjoying ads for a second hand furniture showroom called Weiner Cort.

One Hour Photo

I know that I don't really like films that much, but this one came on TV at a time when there wasn't much else on, and I was drawn in. And then it finished and I realised how truly lame it was - there didn't seem to be much in the way of 'psychological thrill' except for the rather obvious 'twist' of him having been abused by his father. I think I was overwhelmed by the fact that Robin Williams was not being annoying, and lulled into a false sense of enjoyment which did not last beyond the denouement, fizzling out and making me realise that actually the overly dramatic man telling us that 'One Hour Photo will be back shortly' was by far the most enjoyable element of the whole film.

They do things differently here (4)

Watching a programme called 'Doctors' which is essentially a guy in scrubs, a guy in a lab coat and a guy in a suit recommending plastic surgery for people who have e-mailed in, cackhandedly demonstrating exactly what's involved in sucking out armpit fat on a mannequin and injecting a woman with 'lip-filler' in front of a grimacing studio audience. It's essentially an hour long advert for plastic surgery where they 'discuss' the various benefits of different types of surgery and tell women that their whole lives would be different if they were thinner.

The topic after the break is about a new set of scales which Tweets her weight to all her followers - an otherwise happy, healthy looking woman suddenly starts Tweeting depressing slimming mantras like 'a moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips' and lists of foods she's not eating instead of anything of any interest or merit, whilst claiming that she loved the scales. Her gift for allowing them to broadcast details of her weight - a free subscription to one of those weird food systems where they deliver every meal to you so you're not supposed to need to keep any food in the house.

The Boy Wonder's currently singing a song he's made up called 'We are plastic surgeons' and making me wonder whether 10 minutes of it has been enough to desensitise him to the horror of what they're doing.

Soap opera predictability

Signs that two people are about to get it together:

1. Playing with water

2. Hating each other at first sight

Signs that someone's going to develop an alcohol problem

1. Being seen drinking once

Signs that someone's about to fall pregnant

1. Having their first sexual encounter

2. People talking about pregnancy at all

3. Someone joking about their weight

4. Anyone feeling ill who isn't already involved in a drawn-out set up for some other illness

Important distinctions

Woman wearing just a man's shirt - sexy

Man wearing just a woman's shirt - scary

Shave the sides of your head - mohawk

Shave the top of your head - tonsure

Sandals with socks - wrong

Smart shoes without socks - also wrong

Donating hair - generous

Collecting hair - creepy

Licking the filling out of an oreo - normal

Licking the filling out of a sandwich - arouses stares from other diners

Head stuck in the clouds - unreliable but romantic

Head stuck in the banisters - unreliable and requires greasing/emergency services

Baby oil - sexy

Lard - sick

Remote locking

I remember the first car my parents had with remote locking - when you locked it, the horn/alarm made one noise, and when you unlocked it it made a slightly different noise. As far as I recall, there was a short period when a lot of cars did that, but that was a decade or so ago, and now we have reached a point where it's widely considered to be annoying and intrusive to have your car honking away every time you lock it. That message does not seem to have reached the US yet - every time someone comes in late or leaves early, you hear the sound of a car horn beeping away to let not just the person who owns the car, but everyone else in the vicinity know that the car is locked and the alarm is set. In a country where honking seems to be used as a substitute for braking, waiting, indicating and almost any other form of activity you can perform in a car, it's also quite off-putting to have every recently locked car honking away as you drive down the street, try to park outside a shop or just fill your car with petrol, and why anyone would need to draw so much attention to the fact they have an alarm is beyond me.

The alarm is another excessively overblown event - when one goes off you get a succession of different but equally annoying alarm sounds which play themselves on rotation until someone shuts it off. I have no idea why it should be deemed necessary that one alarm sound isn't enough, but from what we've heard, a loop of different beeps, whoops and two-tone wails is the absolute minimum required to draw attention to the commission of a crime. They like things loud here, and nothing short of eardrum damage will do.

Things that make me gag

1. Thinking too hard about gagging

2. Brushing my tongue

3. Seeing someone else's spit

4. Seeing my own spit

5. Cleaning out a plughole

6. Having hair on me, even my own - once it's no longer attached to my head, it's fair game

7. Seeing someone else gag

8. Hearing someone else gag

9. Writing lists about gagging

You know what, screw it - it might be quicker to make a list of things that don't make me gag, given my irrationally sensitive gag reflex, which I believe is a direct inheritance from my Mum (not the good figure, not the strong nails or lovely teeth - no, I get the gag reflex!). Should I ever wish to become a sword swallower, I'll be absolutely screwed.

Coffee, tea and me

I remember when I was at primary school, several of my friends already drank tea but I wasn't really offered tea by my parents, so I always thought I would just grow into drinking it. The first time I had a cup of coffee was when I was 17 and I figured maybe I was just on the cusp of beginning to like things like that. When I went to work in my gap year I decided to take the plunge and drink tea with a vengeance and drank about 8 cups a day at my desk. I'm not entirely sure why as I still thought that tea tasted like dirty hot water, albeit still infinitely preferable to coffee, but I liked having an excuse to get up from my desk as I frequently nearly dozed off whilst working and everyone else worked really hard while I mostly did filing and telling people on the phone to try unplugging their computer and plugging it in again, so I was glad to have something to contribute to the team.

But now I'm nearly 30 and an reaching the conclusion that I am not going to grow in to liking tea or coffee, and something about that makes me feel as though I'm not a proper grown up. If I need help to cope with a hangover, I have to rely on Lucozade (infuriatingly unavailable in the US) and there's nothing to perk me up if I start the day a little sluggishly. Admittedly, when I try to talk to the Boy Wonder before he's had his coffee and he is incapable of forming a coherent sentence, I do feel a little pleased that I am not a reliant on caffeine as he is to live a normal life, but I still can't shake the feeling that I've bypassed a milestone of adulthood somehow.

The advertising jingle

Tragically, in the UK, the advertising jingle seems to have suffered a demise - there are occasional forays into the world of musical ads, but they are often pastiches of the traditional jingle, and whilst they are sometimes funny, they don't really have the charm that the classic jingles of my childhood had.

The US however, seems to have an non ironic love of the advertising jingle which is very appealing. One my current favourites is 'Never paint your house again' which is an ad for a ceramic house covering which will apparently last forever but the innovative nature of the substance is completely belied by the weird 80s rising jingle which sound like a child made it up in two seconds, which makes is surprisingly charming.

There's a spectacular one for a bartending school (which is a concept I enjoy anyway) which is a sung list of a load of different cocktails - who can resist a jingle about a Fuzzy Navel?

I also just heard one for a cheque cashing service which had a high octane female lead vocal jingle which sounded more like something for a fast food restaurant than a service which allows people to slip gradually behind their incomes over a course of months - "The only original, uniquely individual, One-stop money shop - check into cash".

French bread lies

The food here in Louisiana surpasses any other food we've had in the US - New York is kind of a mish mash, with excellent diners that serve a massive range of good food, but it's all much of a muchness and not that different from what you could get at home, albeit not 24/7 and not all in one place. Louisiana, however, has gumbo, red beans and rice, andouille sausage which the Boy Wonder informs me is delicious and they use pork as a seasoning, which shows impressive dedication to eating well. They owe a lot of their fantastic cuisine to the slew of cultures which have melded here, and the French influence is particularly evident as they have taken to heart the French love of rich food, with scant regard for the effects of trans-fats on the body.

And, as the local TV station keeps informing us, they also love French bread, which they sell in long, baguette style loaves almost everywhere that you can buy bread. They use it for po-boys - the unhealthily massive sandwiches which they stuff with more fillings than one person should eat in a sitting - and serve it with their delicious gumbo. However, the use of the term 'French' to describe their bread is a complete misnomer - it simply isn't French bread, I've been to France. I've wanted to move there just to eat bread and cheese for the rest of my (admittedly probably cut short by cholesterol poisoning) life. We've come home with loaves and loaves of French bread in the hope of defrosting it to its former glory to recreate the deliciousness of the experience. What they call 'French' bread here is just bread - sometimes it's ok, sometimes it's pretty bad, but it's never crusty, never has any of the fantastic soft inside and almost mouth hurtingly crusty outside. It's just bread, and given that you can't even export French flour because the French are so proud of their bread, I think they are stretching their definition of 'French' to describe their floppy, quick drying attempts at French bread. None of their bread is crusty - since we've been here we have searched every supermarket and food establishment we have entered for bread that has anything remotely resembling a crust, and it simply doesn't exist.

I love the food here - I have been more adventurous with my choices than ever before, which even extends to eating an oyster the other day (although it was fried and barely distinguishable from any other fried food in that sense), but their stretching of the definition of French bread is something with which I simply cannot get to grips.

Phantom toe-post syndrome

Having worn flip flops for between 7 and 12 hours a day for the last week or so, I have noticed a slightly disturbing phenomenon whenever we get home and I release my feet - I can still feel the toe-post in between my big and second toes. I'm not sure when I first noticed it, but once I had, I started to notice it more and more and now I'v started thinking about it I'm noticing it all the time. I'm not sure whether it's a recognised syndrome, but I'm definitely putting it on the list of things to ask a medical based scientist drunk enough that I feel comfortable asking them stupid questions like this and whether there's a physiological reason why the Boy Wonder's tongue gets brightly coloured when within sniffing distance of artificially coloured food or drink, yet mine stays resolutely tongue coloured despite the fact that I like it when my tongue goes an unnatural shade of pink.

Toothpaste and tequila

One of the things to which we have become accustomed over the last five days of jazz fest is the glorious taste of toothpaste and tequila. This is largely due to the inspirational placement of a frozen daquiri tent right by the entrance where we arrive at the fairgrounds, by also owes a nod to the incredible humidity that makes the 20 minute walk from our apartment to the festival a sweaty affair and one which demands almost instant refreshment. Beer wouldn't really hit the spot, but a mixture of margarita and 'N'awlins punch', which is mostly pink coloured rum, makes for a perfect arrival drink, and on occasion good road drink for the walk home.

So far, I have managed to balance perfectly on the line between dehydration and the need to use one of the portaloos on site. However, we have discovered that there are proper, permanent toilets in the grandstand which is somewhat of a relief and means that I have been able to make free with the beer without having to face my fear of plastic toilet facilities. Yet another reason why jazz fest is so much more civilised than any other festival I've been to.