Cap’n Ken’s Homespun Wisdom

Outside of Louisiana (because nobody who lives there seems to know about this), the phrase “LSU fans smell like corndogs” appears to be gaining some traction. Apparently this was started by an Auburn fan visiting Baton Rouge a few years back, and I guess it”s supposed to be the Auburn equivalent of UGA fans saying “Florida fans wear jean shorts.” I find it funny that an Auburn fan would take the aroma of LSU tailgating as being that of corndogs. I guess that”s the height of fried food at Auburn games - the cuisine their fans associate with the fried-food smell. LSU fans absolutely end up smelling “fried” after a long day of tailgating, but that comes from boudin balls, fried turkey, things like the amazing etouffee-stuffed fried bread I had Saturday and - last weekend, especially - fried alligator. No self-respecting LSU tailgater would serve corndogs.

And if “you smell like corndogs” is the insult the rest of the SEC wants to lay on LSU, have at it. Auburn fans smell like people who watched South Florida and Mississippi State beat them.

Leslie”s Balls - As somebody who”s never been much of a Les Miles fan, I had to ask myself how his determination to keep the ball against Florida and LSU”s amazing success - seriously, who ever goes 5-for-5 on fourth downs? - in doing so changes my perception. Right after the game, my thought was that Leslie displayed a ton of guts, but I wasn”t sure if the calls necessarily showed him to be a great coach.

Later I learned that keeping the ball away from Tebow was a key strategy going into the game, and it was a good one. The Gators had the ball for a total of 2 minutes, 27 seconds in the fourth quarter, which left little room for Timmy to do his magic. It was a great gameplan, and Leslie showed the balls to stick to it when the decision to do so got really tough. He left the execution to his coordinators and his players, but the strategy and decision-making was his. That”s what a head coach should do, and Leslie did an outstanding job with the Florida game.

Today I am officially changing my stance on Leslie from “questionable” to “favorable”. I wanted the coach to prove me wrong this year, and so far he”s doing that.

Miles and Michigan - Les Miles is a Michigan Man; there”s no way around that. If the job comes open this year, next year or ten years from now (if he keeps winning), Miles will be a candidate, and he will think hard about taking it. I can”t fault him for that. Unlike Nick Saban, who nobody believed would stay in Baton Rouge forever, I could see Miles making LSU his long-term gig. But Michigan is a big-time job, and a Michigan Man rightfully would kill for the chance to lead that team. LSU fans realize this, and would wish Leslie well if he decided to go.

Now, if he left to coach in the NFL and re-appeared at Ole Miss a few years later, that would be another story. So, Leslie, if Michigan offers you the job and you want to take it, I”m cool with that.

Bo Pelini”s prospects - There”s a really good write-up on Bo Pelini at Yahoo Sports this week, with the crux being Bo should already be a head coach and no doubt will be soon. There”s no doubt about that. Pelini is a defensive genius and demonstrates the kind of leadership, drive and personality that would make him a successful head coach. He seems to be cut very much from the Nick Saban mold.

And he”ll get a head coach job, maybe this off-season. I just hope the timing works out so that if Leslie leaves for Michigan, LSU can elevate Pelini to head coach and keep that talent in Baton Rouge. If there”s anybody left at LSU from the Mike Archer days, that might be a scary thought, but Pelini is a keeper.

LSU tailgating from the Gator perspective - The generally excellent college football blog Every Day Should Be Saturday took a roadtrip to Baton Rouge for the Florida game and ended up with an astoundingly accurate depiction of LSU tailgating from the visitor”s perspective. The most significant observation is the unique LSU fan behavior of lobbing crude insults at the opposing team”s fans then turning around and offering them a drink and some awesome food. That”s the LSU way - we hate you, but we love a party even more … so come on in!

The blog hints at the other thing LSU is becoming known for - there are a lot more people tailgating than will actually go into the game. LSU estimated that between 160,000 and 170,000 people were on campus Saturday, and only 93,000 of them got into the stadium. I was among those who spent all day eating, drinking and socializing before settling in to the best TV experience I”ve ever had:

Tiger tailgating lends itself to not necessarily caring about getting into the game. It starts early, finishes late and the food, drink and fun as a standalone event beats just about anything else you could be doing on a fall Saturday.

I think LSU supports the idea of huge crowds coming out for Tiger game days, so I”d like to offer a suggestion. The university should set up a low-power UHF transmitter and broadcast the games across campus. The Florida game was perfect because it was at night and on CBS, but that”s a rarity. When ESPN has the game, the only way to watch is with a portable satellite rig, and those are still not quite common. Give every tailgate the chance to watch the game with a 13-inch Sylvania and a pair of rabbit ears, and you”ll get 250,000 people out to the games.

As loyal readers of The Wisdom know, I”m a big fan of Alton Brown and Good Eats (although the current season is kind of disappointing. Whole fish? No thanks. Didn”t even watch that episode). And I enjoyed the heck out of the first season of Feasting on Asphalt, Alton”s motorcycle tour / eating show.

But the first episode of Feasting II left me puzzled and hugely disappointed in Alton and the gang. Feasting II is a culinary motorcycle trip up the Mississippi River (on land, of course), which should yield a bounty of food and culture, at least until they reach Memphis. Episode 1 took the crew from the mouth of the Mississippi to just north of New Orleans, a slam dunk for a food show if there ever was one.

They blew it. Completely.

First of all, except for post-production voice-overs, Alton goes out of his way to not call Katrina by name. What”s that about? Driving from Venice to New Orleans, they show shots of land-bound shrimp boats and wrecked buildings, but only talk about the storm in vague phrases like “a very nasty lady” and “a little storm they had here a few years ago.” Strange, but whatever.

So the team rolls into New Orleans at dinnertime, and their restaurant of choice? Mulate”s. That”s right, Alton picked a tourist Cajun restaurant as his showcase of New Orleans cuisine. On the show, they”re surprised to find that the place is packed with tourists and decide they need a new plan. Alton announces that he has “the name of a place” that”s supposed to be “real” but it”s “not listed”. Unfortunately, they can”t find it and end up eating tourist Cajun food in the street.

How the hell do you plan a food show trip to New Orleans and end up at Mulate”s (which Alton couldn”t even pronounce - it”s MU-lots, not Moo-la-tays)? We”re talking about America”s great culinary city here. As hard as it can be to figure out what”s open when in the post-Katrina world, this is a professional production by a supposed student of culture and cuisine. Inexcusably lame.

Alton also doesn”t seem to understand that Louisiana isn”t sweet tea country. It”s not the South, Alton, it”s Louisiana.

The other place Alton visits in New Orleans is Big Fisherman on Magazine Street. OK, it”s a local place, but it”s also Cajun. And not that the Atchafalaya wouldn”t make for a darn fine road trip, but this is New Orleans. Go to Central Grocery and show the world a real muffaletta, head over to Franky & Johnny”s for some “yat lunch or, hell, head over to Cooter Brown”s. Anything would have been better than following the trip to the Cajun tourist trap with another Cajun place … and then splitting town.

Alton gave the nuanced and complex New Orleanian food experience the shaft, and he should know better.

The rest of the episode was pretty good, as they got out of New Orleans and found some good … Cajun food in Vacherie and … Cajun andouille sausage and hog”s head cheese in LaPlace.

Episode 2 premieres tomorrow night, and they”re headed toward Baton Rouge. Maybe they”ll find some Cajun food there.

If there was any doubt that Google”s new position in the mindset of America is “rich whipping boy”, that”s been clearly shown in the past few days of this “Google thinks Katrina never happened” crap. For those of you too caught up in the endless sea of lame April Fools” stories online, here”s the skinny - somebody noticed that the aerial imagery in Google Earth and Google Maps showed New Orleans before the failures of the federal levees during Hurricane Katrina. They also remembered that there was a time when Google Earth and Google Maps showed really revealing photos of the flooding brought on by the levee failures. Thus, in the logic of the masses, Google is involved in some kind of revisionist history.

As best as I can tell (thanks to Google News), this started with an AP story on March 29 headlined “Google Goes Back to Pre-Katrina Maps” that was nothing more than AP reporter Cain Burdeau noticing that aerial imagery in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast pre-dated the arrival of Katrina. That story was picked up in media outlets across the country and around the world. For the March 30 news cycle, a TV-version of the story added the phrase “Google recently replaced satellite imagery of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina with pictures taken before the storm” without any kind of attribution of the “recently” statement.

On Friday, the frenzy had grown to the point that a Congressional subcommittee dragged Google CEO Eric Schmidt up to explain what one congressman called “airbrushing history”.

Yesterday, the company announced that it had pushed out new imagery of New Orleans and explained why - six months ago (way to pay attention, media) - the main aerial imagery of New Orleans changed to show pre-Katrina views. Was it dumb for Google to choose higher-resolution pre-Katrina images over what they had in place before that change? Yes. But this only demonstrates the company”s engineering mindset and lack of social skills, not an evil intent.

All of this shows two things - the not-so-hidden desire to beat up on Google and a complete lack of understanding of the online maps & imagery world.

Beating up on Google:

- Did anybody bother to notice that Yahoo Maps, Microsoft Local Live and Ask City all have pre-Katrina images? Yahoo Maps still has a bigger market share than Google and also has pre-Katrina images, so why weren”t they picked on? MapQuest, by the way, has post-Katrina images.

- Does nobody remember the extraordinary lengths Google developers and the Google Earth community went to in providing near-realtime imagery immediately after Katrina? Google Earth was to Katrina what CNN was to the first Gulf War - a unique and invaluable resource that found its highest purpose during a time of crisis. I remember being on the phone with my friend Dave while he was holed up in Houston; browsing through NOAA images via Google Earth trying to help him find out the fate of his life back home. For a city in exile, those early images so well-integrated into Google Earth and Google Maps were the only bits of information available about specifics on the ground. It”s shameful for the media and politicians to jump on this perceived slap by Google in the wake of that.

Not understanding the Maps & Imagery world:

- Contrary to what seems to be popular belief, you cannot carry your laptop outside, load Google Maps and see yourself in the front yard. Map and imagery databases are complex and huge elements that are in constant update mode. It”s just that the world is big, so it takes a while to get back to your neighborhood. Here in Atlanta, Google Maps knows Glenwood Park”s roads exist, but still shows a dirt pit in the imagery. Accurate? Only partly.

- Imagery is the wow factor of maps, not the product. Online maps are meant to be maps; the satellite imagery (and things like Microsoft”s BirdsEye imagery) are meant to be differentiators that draw users from the competition. Online mapping has become vastly more useful in the past few years, but imagery is still mostly just a bolt-on feature.

- The tools are there to get what you want from imagery. Google Earth has a slightly different mission than online maps. It is intended to meld together collections of imagery, location information, etc. from company developers and - more importantly - the GIS community. If you want detailed imagery of just about any place, it”s out there.

- You”re spoiled. Carry yourself back to 1997 and find a satellite or aerial image of your house. I”ll wait …
TerraServer started the revolution in online imagery only a decade ago, and now aerial imagery and relevant location content is inescapable. And by and large it”s free. Online mapping has evolved amazingly in just the past three years, and today we have multi-view mashups like zillow.com that are leveraging the power of mapping, imagery and data for the benefit of consumers (and companies like zillow). It”s easy to forget that not too long ago, this was your only choice for an online map:

So, please, everybody just lay off this Google “revisionist history” garbage.

And I guess I shouldn”t mention that Waveland, Mississippi doesn”t really look like this anymore.

I”m not one to discourage people from being fans of LSU. Quite the contrary. In fact, I”m still hoping some young lady comes along who can do for LSU what Ashley Judd did for Kentucky:

Yum.

Anyway, I was more than a little upset to see today”s “K-Fed holds Britney”s baby!” picture making the rounds:

That”s right - Mr. Britney apparently woke up this morning holding the baby; and the baby just happened to be wearing a tiny LSU football jersey.

Now, I know what you”re saying - the genetic makeup of your typical LSU student is not noticably superior to that of Kentwood”s favorite former trailer dweller and her rap/dancing husband.

Be that as it may, there”s only one Spears I”ve enjoyed seeing in an LSU uniform:

But this is the kind of track I”d like to see all storms that make their way into the Gulf of Mexico taking this year:

Evacuate Tampa now!!!