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Meghan Daum and Rob Walker

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from: Rob Walker

Olfactory Report

Posted Monday, Feb. 26, 2001, at 1:07 PM ET

Hello Meghan,

Actually the big news here in New Orleans is, in fact, the weather: Tomorrow is Fat Tuesday, that is to say Mardi Gras, and it's gray and drizzly. It's impossible to overestimate the importance of Mardi Gras here, and there are many column inches devoted to it in the Times-Picayune this morning. Before I moved here, I associated Mardi Gras with the three-second clip of the drunken mobs on Bourbon Street that makes the national news every year, but actually Carnival turns out to be a multiweek tangle of parades and balls and parties that I couldn't begin to explain. Suffice it to say that there's a picture of Larry King on the front page today, wearing an elaborate costume because he "reigned as Bacchus" in that super-krewe's parade, which "rolled" yesterday and featured "a talking medallion bead for a signature throw." Heard enough? And I haven't even mentioned the Endymion party I went to Saturday! Anyway, we're all on the edge of our seats down here, not because we're all about to throw up in the gutter from drinking too much at Endymion, but because any minute they'll announce which "prominent local citizen" will be named Rex, the King of Carnival. Don't they report this stuff in Lincoln?

Anyway. Somehow I missed this bit about the Reagan pardonee. But I did read a story in the Times about what Dan Burton (Republican representative from Indiana) smells in the Clinton pardonpalooza: Maybe the former president didn't do anything illegal, but "the fact of the matter is the appearance of impropriety is there." Hmm. Well, you can't argue with that. You can, however, suggest that Burton's reasoning doesn't pass the smell test, which is essentially what your former senator, Bob Kerrey, did, saying that Burton is on "a very slippery slope." The fact of the matter is that the slope may not turn out to be slippery, but the appearance of slipperiness is there. How does that smell to you?

Since I also get the city sectionless national edition of the Times, I did not see the story you refer to. But either way, any claim that I've stopped paying attention to publishing gossip wouldn't pass the smell test; in the year or so since I left New York, the Romenesko site has definitely become part of my morning routine. Then again, so has Funky Winkerbean (are you aware that the protagonist of that strip is currently in rehab after attending an AA meeting in which he actually said "My name is Funky, and I'm an alcoholic"?) as well as an e-mail list called Monkeywire. (From one recent dispatch: "Researcher Gordon Gallup, a psychologist at the State University of New York in Albany, has demonstrated that apes, unlike most animals, can be trained to recognize themselves in a mirror.") So you can draw your own conclusions as to whether that makes me more or less literary than I might have been when I lived in lower Manhattan.

Since it's sort of a scattershot news cycle today, I'll mention two other staples of my morning current events and procrastination routine. I always check the "People" column in the Times-Picayune to see how many names I recognize on the list of today's celebrity birthday. And I usually finish with the obituaries from the Times. Today I recommend the one on Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula, an Aboriginal painter. "He died a penniless alcoholic," says the Times, which notes that a painting the man sold in 1972 for $75 recently traded hands for more than $250,000. On the other hand, a friend of the deceased "described him as a basically happy man with a slight stutter."

Happy birthday today to Michael Bolton. He is 48.

rw

the breakfast table
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from: Rob Walker

Olfactory Report

Posted Monday, Feb. 26, 2001, at 1:07 PM ET
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Meghan Daum's essay collection, My Misspent Youth, will be published in March. Rob Walker, a journalist living in New Orleans, writes Slate's "Moneybox" column.
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Reader Comment From The Fray:


I have a suggestion for some 'reality based' TV programs. How about Refugee Boat? We could take contestants and put them in a third world, war torn country and give them thirty days to figure out how to make a raft, find food and get set afloat before despotic soldiers order them to dig their own graves.

Or, how about Street Survival? In this one, the contestants must survive three months on the street with only the clothes on their backs and no identification. They would be required to jump trains, sleep outdoors in alleyways and in shelters, and generally try to survive their new found compatriots, welfare rolls and dumpster diving.

And, how about this beauty? Prison Guards would be a reality based show where one would become a prison guard in one of the most feared prisons in the United States. In this show contestants get thirty days training and then must work as a prison guard in the most violence-prone sectors of the prison for at least two months. Talk about ratings! I know that I would personally be glued to the screen.

Let's give vanity and greed a real price. Instead of paying people to play the mind games most of us have to wade through in our regular work week, let's up the ante a little. I can't wait until the spotlights burn and we get to see one of these numbnuts have to face a freight train's worth of trouble rushing headlong into them.

--Rogue

(To reply, click here.)

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