n-judah love song

hey, internet. We're going to New Orleans.

Well hello there, internet! Don't you look nice today? Did you lose weight?

So, I don't know if you've heard, but there's this whole awesome part of our country that keeps getting righteously fucked over.

Thought into action, my friends.

 

 

Demand Satisfaction! » Community Management & The Service Industry

A post I wrote for the Get Satisfaction blog on the parallels between restaurant life and community management.

There’s a great article from the New York Times that describes the “100 Things Restaurant Staffers Should Never Do“. Reading it, I wholeheartedly agreed, and  a lot of these things apply to anyone who deals with customers on a regular basis. I worked for a long time in the service industry, and I went through a few of the highlights of the article to draw some correlaries.

Take a walk with me through the restaurant, will you?

Do not let anyone enter the restaurant without a warm greeting.

Never let the first interaction you have with a customer in your community be silence. We recommend in all of our webcasts to get some content pre-populated into your community to get things going. No one likes an empty restaurant, and we even start you out with a welcome post to help you get started. Need some ideas? Check out some real-life examples, like Mint.com or Nike.

via Demand Satisfaction!

support our troops

shoulda known better than to stare down a voodoo queen

sat by the levee and moaned
Originally uploaded by Brian Oberkirch

This is a post written by my momma, and I won't preface it with much lest I step on her punch line, but you sure can tell from her writing that this apple didn't fall far from the tree.

New Orleans is one of our family homeplaces, somehow wound into our shared DNA. The city's still kind, still sassy, and she still needs our help, yall.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Slap My Momma It’s Time for a Bit of YaYa Gumbo -
Momma KJ

I don’t know how anyone else spends vacations, but my favorite is to go to New Orleans for stripping, screwing and getting plastered. I do it for the benefit of the people of New Orleans through the Episcopal Diocese of Louisiana’s (EDOLA) Rebuild New Orleans Program. Along with a ragtag crew of volunteers-- most who have never done any construction--we work on rebuilding the homes damaged by Katrina.  The homes are owned by New Orleans natives with no back-up resources.  Mostly, my crew has worked for older women.  In seven trips to New Orleans, we’ve done everything from gutting homes immediately after Katrina (stripping), hanging drywall (screwing) and then prepping the drywall for painting which generally entails a whole lot of drywall paste on everyone (getting plastered).

(ed note: my momma can drink you under the table, unless your name is Hailey.)

Our most recent homeowner admits to being over 70, and I seriously doubt she weighs much more than her age.  Like most of the homeowners we’ve worked for, she is all about saving as much of the old as she can, so we have to be innovative.

 

 

EDOLA supplies us with tools, materials, and young team leaders who stay in New Orleans for months at a time, for the whopping stipend of $500 a month plus a place to live.  It used to be a $1,000 a month but like everyone else, EDOLA is hurting for funds.  Fortunately, they still get wonderful young people willing to work for peanut butter.  Any amount you might be able to donate would greatly help.   If you wish to send a cash donation, checks may be sent to ECS 504 Rebuild Campaign, 1623 Seventh Street, New Orleans, LA 70115.  They should be made out to Episcopal Community Services with Rebuild in the memo line for proper credit.

-KJ

 

Please give.

yo dawg | nested functions

This Meme Will Never Die
Originally uploaded by boltron-

The collective iPad announcement nerdgasm is wearing. me. out. I'm sure it's awesome. I'm also dead certain I'd drop mine, or get jacked for it, so I am not buying one until they're made of titaniumplutoniumcarbonite and can handle the abuse I dish out.

Thanks to Nate for the laugh.

Yo dawg internet meme "explained" by Rocketboom.

screen door | austin memories

good morning, good morning

There's birdsong outside. It's been a long time since I heard it.

The almost-fit of screen doors remind me of being small, learning not to slam them shut.

Good morning, Texas.

don't mess with Texas

I'm going to South By Southwest for the first time. I've never been to Austin. In fact, in all of Texas, I've only been to the Dallas airport, which is weird, considering the number of states I've been to.

How is it that I've never been? Either I was broke, or going to Winter Music Conference instead, or both. I'm mostly packed, with the new Four Tet and old Biggie rocking in my ears.

I'm looking forward to seeing some of "my tribe" of nerds and other fun people. Anyplace that supports me eating something with hot sauce on it at every single meal is okay by me. Cowboygirl boots are packed. Yall ready?

 

Foods That Will Win the War

via www.cutesexyfunnyawful.com

TED talks: Jamie Oliver on diet-related disease

Modern day life, how fast food takes over not just the hungry and hurried, but entire economies, families, and ways of life.

Via Kokochi.

bent hoops and singing salmon

He was notoriously mean to servers.

We were, quite simply, a ragtag group of bare-faced litmag kids, with copies of On The Road stuffed in back pockets, and Jack knew so much more. He never made us feel badly about our ignorance of the simple fact that he had lived it, loved it, admired and tasted it all; whatever we were fifty years too late to be, to beat.

Oh, but we wanted it anyway, and so spent nights underground on Selectrix typewriters, pretending to know what the fuck we were writing about. Producing terribly adequate prose.

Dr. Booch, Mistah Jack, Sir: you were our bad cliche and an amazingness, and you believed in all of us, however meager our talent.

 

 

 

bent hoops and singing salmon - jack booch

This whole Columbia River Crossing debacle sure is getting on my nerves. Correction — the idiots holding up progress in the name of artistic expression are getting on my nerves.

Recently, bridge designer Miguel Rosales pompously proclaimed, “The chosen design for the bridge should reflect Portland’s unique tradition and core values.” What’s that? Core values? Is he perhaps suggesting Lady Justice winking at a crooked mayor?

Or maybe a giant basketball hoop? The headlines above the fold in The Oregonian are nearly always Blazer-related, and as much as I enjoy the occasional sporting event, I have to say obsessive interest in Greg Oden to the exclusion of all else is illustrative of the sort of “core values” Rosales will need to symbolically express.

These boobs might as well request that, as the poet Auden put it, “the river jumps over the mountain/And the salmon sing in the street.”

Setting aside the innate absurdity of such concerns, one wonders how it has escaped so many Portlanders’ attention that this bridge is an INTERSTATE bridge, not a Portland bridge. It’s the Columbia, you morons, not the Willamette.

Furthermore, in the midst of a terrible recession, it would stand to reason that the single most important factor with regard to its design would be the efficacy of its impact on interstate commerce. Following that are concerns regarding the employment of local workers and the feasibility of its overall cost.

The St. John’s Bridge was built during the Great Depression, employing tens of thousands during a time when the average Portlander was struggling mightily to survive financially.

The end result was a beautiful combination of gothic arches and streaming cables that has stood the test of time, promising to do so well into the future.

That’s how you plan a bridge — not by imagining it adorned with giant salmon (if you think I’m exaggerating, see the pedestrian bridge spanning I-205 as part of the Airport MAX extension).

Barry Johnson, in a recent Oregonian column, expounded inanely about the need for a bridge design that will express Portlanders’ “feeling about their river.” My feeling is I’d like to be able to cross the damn thing without getting bolloxed up in traffic around Jantzen Beach.

Mayor Adams — bent, but unbowed — proclaimed in his agenda for his first 100 days that we need an “aesthetically appealing bridge design” that reflects the city’s needs and interests.

When I read of Metro Council President David Bragdon’s insistence that we keep Adams around after his recent sex scandal because he’s “the city’s point person on the Columbia River Crossing bridge project,” I thought to myself, “Alright already. I give up. Let’s just make the thing a big, bent basketball hoop and call it a day.”

via www.vanvoice.com

Never use two words when one will do. I'll never forget his cackle, demanding another martini, or his gruff kindness. Jack understood in a moment the precarious position that a lovely, lovesick barmaid felt, and tipping extravagantly for the performance. Helped me realize about people-watching as a competitive sport. He was my champion in a time when I felt I had none.

 

Like a commenter, the bar regular knows a different sort of innermost secrets. Especially a writer who understands what it's like to ache inside, the world-weary knowhow of love that's never meant to be. And so, instead of crying, we write, cheers, and celebrate.

 

We'll miss you terribly, good sir.