Cap’n Ken’s Homespun Wisdom

Just 977 short days after the city was flooded by the failure of federal levees, UNO”s Lakefront Arena will re-open next May with a Disney High School Musical / Ice Extravaganza.

See, Katrina wasn”t that bad.

It”s hard not to get behind the charitable/awareness effort by Nike being organized for the LSU/Tulane game in New Orleans this weekend. The city can use the attention, and the Tigers playing the Greenies in NOLA is a great opportunity for that.

The big deal, of course, is Nike mucking around with LSU”s fantastic, “look at me, it”s 1950!” uniform. White jerseys, purple and gold shoulder stripes, gold helmet, gold pants. It”s just the way the world works.

But this weekend, we get:

Purple jersey with only a hint of shoulder stripes, white helmet, white pants. Outside of the context of helping New Orleans, this is totally not cool. Again, I”m hesitant to tear apart a noble effort, but these are some ugly-ass uniforms.

On the shoulder is the special Nike Pelican/Phoenix logo:

I”m not sure I understand why the Peliphoenix has flowing blonde hair (credit: extraface), but the logo has a bit of a throwback Deco feel to it, so for a good cause I”ll accept that instead of stripes on Tiger shoulders … for this one game.

More troubling, though, is the inexplicable “eye of the Tiger” on the special white pants:

I would like to make this perfectly clear - the “eye of the Tiger” crap is ridiculous and I”m embarrassed that the logo continues to live at the 50-yard-line of Tiger Stadium. It was pathetic to associate LSU with the band Survivor and Rocky III back in the 1980s, and it”s disgusting that LSU still embraces the “eye”. To see the logo spread to our uniforms is troubling to say the least. I fear it will become a permanent fixture.

If this special uniform is a one-off thing only for the Tulane game, fine. But giving Nike a foot in the door of LSU uniform design is more than a little concerning.

LSU must look like this:

Not this:

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.

It”s good to see my buddy Dave and the Imagination Movers getting another step closer to kid rock (not Kid Rock) superstardom with the debut of a new set of videos on Playhouse Disney. The videos are a precursor to the TV show in development with Disney, and the Mouse influence is evident with slicker production values.

Some enthusiastic Movers fan (me) has posted the new videos up at YouTube (note to Disney … it”s for the purpose of promoting your new act, so embrace it, please). Vids and notes:

Imagination Movers Theme

This video gives a glimpse inside the Idea Warehouse set for the TV show and sets the tone for the band and the series.

Mover Music

The mac daddy new Movers video. Choreographed by one Trish Sie, who did a couple of neat little videos for her brother”s band - OK Go. You know, treadmills and all that. Wins herself a Grammy and follows up with doing an Imagination Movers video. Not shabby.

Shakable You

Big David Byrne jackets …

Seven Days A Week

Not an Irish drinking song … but close.

Farm

This one may be my favorite song and video of the bunch. You can”t lose with an ornery pig (what is that, a Razorback??) and “The roosters … the roosters … the roosters are tired!”

An interesting dynamic of the Disney stuff is that they cut what are full-length songs down to 60-second and 90-second video versions (you can check the 60-second versions here). Having had a chance to see some of the full-length videos, it”s too bad that they have to get cut down, since there”s some actual good songwriting and instrumentation going on here. But that”s life in the big media world, I suppose.

In any case, nice to have Disney putting the machine behind the Movers.

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.