More on Who Dat-gate

A little something my buddy LSUfreek put together...

A children's treasury of photos from today's 'Who Drag' parade in New Orleans

Today former Saints quarterback and WWL radio personality Bobby Hebert, fulfilling a promise made long ago by the now-deceased sportscaster Buddy Diliberto to march down Bourbon Street in a dress if the Saints ever made it to the Super Bowl, led a procession of hundreds, if not thousands, of male Who Dats in drag through the French Quarter. A kind reader sent in a few pics she and her husband took today of what some are calling the "Who Drag" parade. Enjoy (Click on the individual images to enlarge them)...































And finally, here's a camera phone pic of Bobby someone sent me...



The Thibodaux Daily Comet has a story on it as well as a few more pictures here.

I hope he wears heels

Former Saints QB Bobby Hebert promised to march down Bourbon St. wearing a dress if the Saints ever made it to the Super Bowl. Tomorrow, he will fulfill that promise wearing a dress designed by his daughter, who lives in NYC and works in the fashion industry. Buddy D would be proud.

Whore-mongering diaper-fetishist David Vitter takes on the NFL over Who Dat-gate

Reports WWL:

Sen. David Vitter has picked up the cause of local merchants who are being threatened by the NFL to cease and desist the use of “Who Dat”, Saints fans' rallying cry, saying that he will print his own t-shirts and challenged NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell to sue the Louisiana senator.

“This letter will also serve as formal legal notice that I am having t-shirts printed that say "WHO DAT say we can't print Who Dat!" for widespread sale in commerce. Please either drop your present ridiculous position or sue me,” Vitter said in an e-mail.

The senator said examples of the phrase in minstrel shows and by a local high school football team showed that the iconic rally cry was used in other places before it was adopted by the New Orleans Saints.

"Who Dat" was probably first heard in New Orleans minstrel shows well over 130 years ago. Much more recently, but before it was used in connection with the Saints, it was used as a rallying cry by St. Augustine High School in New Orleans,” he said.

“In the 1980s it was adopted by Saints fans in a completely spontaneous way. Only later did any legal persons, including the Saints and the NFL, try to claim it through registration.”

Finally, David Vitter does something I can get behind.

Oh come on!

As you may have heard, the NFL is claiming that it owns the rights to the term "Who Dat" and has ordered vendors in South Louisiana and other places to stop selling merchandise emblazoned with "Who Dat" on it. This, of course, is beyond ridiculous, not to mention just plain arrogant. This report from WWL in 1983 explains the origins of "Who Dat," and as you'll see, the NFL had no part in its creation. Assholes.

Hitler is not pleased with the iPad

Jubilation

The scene on the Saints fan side of Bar None as Garrett Hartley's kick sailed through the uprights, along with a few minutes of post-victory celebration. At about the 8:50 mark, I'm the guy leading the second line with a big black Saints umbrella, though I'm not really all that visible because of the crowd. Good times. More than 24 hours have passed and I still find myself breaking out in spontaneous tears of joy.

Also, at around the 7:30 mark, you can hear the guy recording the video get into a brief conversation with some of the Vikings fans at the bar who'd come over to our side to congratulate us. They were all extremely classy in defeat.

Holy shit Doris, the Saints are going to the Super Bowl!!!!

The cover of this morning's Times Picayune...



The front of the "special section" in the Times Pic on the game...



We're not coming down off of this cloud for some time. I still can't believe it. I'll write more later when I have more time. Oh lordy this is crazy.



Also, here's the audio of last night's WWL postgame show if you happen to be in need of a distraction.

A small plea but sincere plea...

Two weekends ago, I met a few friends at the apartment of another friend in Brooklyn to watch the wild card round of the NFL playoffs. All of us gathered there were Saints fans, guys who get together at a bar every Sunday in the fall and early winter to watch our beloved team play. On this day the Saints weren't playing, but there was a game taking place between the Arizona Cardinals and the Green Bay Packers that would determine who'd we play the following week, so what was taking place on television was kind of significant.

However, the highlight of that day, for all of us, wasn't anything that took place in the games being broadcast live. You see, at halftime of the first game, the friend who hosted the gathering announced that he'd downloaded the broadcasts of a few of the more memorable games, which are few sadly, in Saints football history. And so we watched a good portion of a 2000 playoff game against the St. Louis Rams that was at the time the first playoff win in our team's history, one of only three in total. Additionally, we watched a good bit of the Monday night game against the Atlanta Falcons in 2006, the team's first in the Superdome following Hurricane Katrina.

When we, all grown men, watched these clips, there were few, if any, dry eyes in the room. We have, perhaps irrationally, an undying and unconditional love for that football team, as do thousands of others who come from where we come from, and there's a bond that's so visceral that the emotional attachment feels sort of similar to the emotional attachment that many of us have with the first great loves our lives. We can move on and do other things, cheer for other teams in other sports, but no team moves us, I mean really moves us, quite like the Saints can. Many have written about how much the Saints mean to their fans, some very eloquently, but I've yet to read anything by anyone that really nails it, and I doubt that I ever will. I just don't think it's possible to put it into words. It's something that just has to be felt to be truly experienced.

Now, there was a point in my life where I felt sort of ashamed by this and, frankly, I thought maybe it wasn't all that healthy to invest so much of myself into a damn football team, and I'm sure that I'm not the other one who's questioned themselves in the same way. Needless to say, I got over it. Further, I learned to embrace it. Saints football is one of my favorite aspects of life, period, and I don't give a shit what anyone thinks about it.

In 30 hours or so, the New Orleans Saints and Minnesota Vikings will play in the NFC championship game with the winner advancing to the Super Bowl. Like many of my fellow fans, I never truly thought I'd live to see the Saints play in the Super Bowl, and here we are now on the doorstep. I can't even begin to tell you how giddy and excited and anxious I am for the game to hurry up and start. Honestly, I'm a bit of a wreck right now. The minutes are just crawling by at a snail's pace and I'm sure tonight will be one of the longest sleepless nights I'll ever have because tomorrow will be, win or lose, a day I'll never forget, solely for the emotional rollercoaster I know it's going to be.

With all of that said, I, we, have a request: If you're not a fan of the Minnesota Vikings, please pull hard for our Saints to beat the Vikings. I mean, REALLY hard. I know, I know, you probably think it's "irrational" to believe that whether or not you, sitting on your sofa in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania or in a bar in Birmingham, Alabama, pull for the Saints will have any effect on the outcome of a game played in New Orleans, Louisiana, but we don't believe that. We believe in the power of supernatural forces to create cosmic shifts in the universe (Hello, VOODOO!) especially when it comes to our football team. You have no idea how many items of clothing have been burned because they were worn on a day that the Saints lost a game, thus they were obviously cursed and needed to be destroyed. Duh.

So I, as a self-appointed representative of the Who Dat nation, would like to extend all of you a free ticket to ride on the Saints bandwagon from here until the final second ticks off the clock at the Super Bowl in Miami. After all the years we've suffered through miserable seasons, after a storm of biblical proportions just four years ago nearly washed away New Orleans and the stadium tomorrow's game will be played in, we need this. Hell, I'll even go so far as to say that we deserve it. And besides, from now until the end of my days I want to be able to tell people about how I got the fleur-de-lis that's tattooed on my right arm two days before the start of magical 2009 season that the Saints finally did go all the way.



Won't you please help us? Say it with me now..."WHO DAT!"

David Blaine at TED

I've gone back and forth for some time on whether or not I thought David Blaine to be a jerkoff or not. After watching him describe how he trained to hold his breath for 17 minutes, I have enormous respect him. The man is a bit of a marvel.

A comparison...

Behold, this Vikings tribute created by Prince, arguably the biggest musical talent to ever come out of Minnesota...



And now behold this Saints tribute created by some random Saints fan on Youtube (via KSK)...



Vikings nation responded with this (also via KSK)...



So which team has the advantage here? Yeah, I thought so. The saddest thing of all is that the Vikings fan video is much more entertaining than Prince's lameass effort.

Oh, and Minnesota, y'all can have Lil Wayne. Fuck Lil Wayne.

And long live the Times Picayune...

The battle for Bar None

A lil' somethin' bout the NYC Saints bar and the war that'll go down there with Vikings fans this Sunday.

Hitler is not pleased by Scott Brown's victory in Massachusetts

Another Hitler vid home run...

Marvin Harrison is a bad dude

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.

Hitler is not pleased that Leno is taking the Tonight Show from Conan

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

Here is the trailer for "Treme"

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

“Hey, can I call you Joe?”

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.

Quote of the day II

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.

"We Share the Same Skies" by The Cribs

Quote of the day

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.

Presented without comment

Click to enlarge...



(via Places We Used to Go)

When will DJ Steve Aoki regale the world with his tantalizing tale of near-death on a boat?

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?

Quote of the day

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.

On growth

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.

The Howard Stern version of Sarah Palin's 'Going Rogue' Audiobook

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