Pumpy Goes to College

Pumpy
Originally uploaded by deglinkta.

The daring exploits of America's most overworked and under-appreciated criminal, the Pump Handle, are now standard reading for students of the University of New Orleans' Hotel Restaurant Tourism program. You heard me right - the once reviled Scam Bible has made the erudite leap from fugitive underground classic to college textbook, and the students of Dr. Jeffrey Schaffer's HRT 3140 - "Cost Control in the Hospitality Industry" - are in for a real education.

You can imagine what a thrill it is for a couple of armchair anthropologists like Pete and myself, after years of thankless and patient observation, to be ushered into the hallowed halls of learning, our humble research awakening and edifying eager young minds along with giants like Louis Leakey, Dian Fossey, and other disciples of human nature. I guess we're kinda like those amateur astronomers that discovered that comet a few years back, the...umm...er...whatever that was.

Hey, it's a legitimate science and when you consider the most common profile for a sticky-fingered worker is a college-educated white male, it only makes sense they would eventually embrace their destiny so.

Pick it up at the UNO bookstore along with Fundamentals of Psycho-analysis by Sigmund Freud.

Happy Birthday, Edgar.

(1809-1849)
Originally uploaded by deglinkta.

"Is everything we see or seem but a dream within a dream?"

- Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)

Post-apocalyptic Folk Art

Folk Art
Originally uploaded by deglinkta.

There's a folky new modernism sweeping the blighted streets of New Orleans. Primitive yet somehow relevant.

New Digs

Promethean Books HQ
Originally uploaded by deglinkta.

Boy, those empty threats I made about nuking Jefferson Parish really got the ball rolling. Barely 48 hours later and my girl’s FEMA trailer was rocked and ready on it’s new grassy plot in the West Bank. They hooked her up with a nice one too – king size bed, microwave, brand new frig, fancy plates and silverware, sub-woofers – the deluxe package.

They still fear my iron fist.

Still, my girl wants to trade the king size for a water bed, any info out there about FEMA trailer options or accessory kits? May as well do it up right, huh?

I suppose I owe those hillbillies an apology, but I was wickedly pissed at the time. I had just heard this cat on NPR bitching about the “riff-raff” from New Orleans invading their neighborhoods and parks with temporary encampments of FEMA trailers and I had to throw my colors up. You would think that people brave or foolish enough to return and try to rebuild New Orleans would be greeted like the Allied Forces, or at least a welcome pack of rubes.

Hey, who can really blame them? Nobody wants unexpected government housing in their neighborhood, even if it’s only for a year or so. As Houston can attest, absorbing any portion of New Orleans means accepting the likelihood that a certain number of your citizens will be ripped off, raped, murdered, or all three. Just the same, you can’t displace 1.1 million and expect to avoid refugee camps, and shouldn’t neighboring communities absorb the increase in crime before, or at least as readily, as neighboring states?

But in the end they managed to squeeze one more big fat diamond out of their ass and put a smile on my old lady’s face, so I forgive ‘em. Of course, she plopped hers down quietly in a friend’s back yard, so more than likely, the villagers are still patrolling their parks with pitchforks and torches. It’s turned positively Transylvanian down here.