The Maan on NBA All-Star weekend and New Orleans

It was great to see a major event return to New Orleans again, that place is by far one of most radically fun places on the planet, and one of the only places where you can bring your wife so she can browse and determine what she wants her boobs to look like when she gets a boob job. Only place I have ever gone where a very attractive set of $3 bead strings can make you the most attractive guy on the street. Truly, the French Quarter during Mardi Gras is a one-of-a-kind experience that everyone should have on their list of hundred things to do before they die. But before Katrina, have any of you ever been outside of the French Quarter? Aside from a few pockets of incredible antebellum homes, the place was an absolute cesspool of drugs and violent crime. And I mean VERY violent crime. I own rental property in some of the toughest neighborhoods of Norfolk, Virginia, so I am a little more thick-skinned about crime areas, and making a wrong turn in that city scared me to DEATH. The only time I ever purposely drove through a red light was about four blocks west of the Superdome...I pulled up to an intersection and made the mistake of looking one of the bandana-headbanded dudes on the corner in the eye as he was transacting with another gentleman. As I slowed, he started moving towards the street looking straight at me and placed his hand on his waistband. That was all I needed to violate City of New Orleans Traffic code and stepped on it, blazing through the intersection (which was dead as if it was 2 AM) about twenty miles over the speed limit. So with this in perspective, and I don't want to diminish the hardships of all the honest hard working people who lived in the cesspool alongside the thugs, thieves, drug dealers and the like, but was Katrina really that much of a tragedy for the City of New Orleans proper? Most of the hardworking homeowners probably had insurance and if they were responsible, had their property insured at the full value. The rest of the people were mostly low lifes and renters, who aside from their stuff getting trashed, didn’t lose anything tangible, and nothing at all if they were responsible and had renter's insurance. I am surprised we didn't hear more from the evangelicals about how Katrina was the 'cleansing hand of God, washing away the filth of a city of sin'. If I am a civic planner who always envisioned what the miles of New Orleans riverfront could be (see Charleston, SC and Hurricane Hugo), I am quietly pumping my fist in jubilation that the utter wasteland that was the ghettos of New Orleans was washed away in the matter of a few days. Lives lost, yes, an absolutely tragedy, homes and memories can't be replaced...but the real estate that existed in most of New Orleans should have been marked for demolition decades ago....Katrina has started a new age in New Orleans, and the dollars lost in the last few years, in my Maan-like opinion, will almost certainly be countered many fold times over with the revenue generated by taxes on the NEW New Orleans, the lessened requirement for one the most hazardous (and crooked) police forces in the country, and the tourism that will spring out of a well planned, historically based residential and commercial development effort. It is my guess that although outwardly the public officials bemoan the tragedies of Katrina, most of them are inwardly grateful for the good that came at a relatively low cost in the big picture.

The Maan on Global Warming

Thanks to Al Gore, we all now know that our extensive carbon footprint is eventually going to destroy our ecology, because of the prescence of evil greenhouse gases. You see, the Carbon Dioxide released by the use of so many devices and cars and search engines and light bulbs and...well you get the idea, is creating a huge thermal layer that is trapping all the heat coming off our planet and is essentially making the Earth's surface into a Russian Steam bath. So in order to avoid certain doom, we now have to buy cars that assist the use of fossil fuels with electric rechargable motors, put solar panels on top of our houses and use funky light bulbs that pretty much spell the death for old lamps with shades that used to grip the bulb. Wait....this sounds eerily familiar...didn't we have to stop using anything in a compressed can and stop buying styrofoam because it was creating this huge hole in the ozone layer which if it got any bigger would slowly turn us all into human sized KFC value meals? I've got a great idea....if we started using tons of hairspray again, and drank everything out of styrofoam possible, maybe all the hydroflorocarbons would open a hole in the greenhouse and let all the gases out!!! Viva Big hair! Brilliant! I am definitely getting the Nobel for this one......

The Maan on Super Bowl Commercials

What has happened to the institution of the Super Bowl ad? I can remember a day when the ads WERE the Super Bowl, whether it was the Bud Bowl, seeing what those crazy Frogs and the Cameleon were going to do, the EDS herding cats commercial, all those Miller Lite ads like 'You can call me Jay' back in the 80's. Now we get to watch poorly written, idiot's excuse for humor ads with what I like to call 'dumbass shock value'. For example, let's take the Salesgenie.com ads. One of these has a commercial about Pandas running a bamboo furniture store trying to boost their sales so they call up a panda psychic and it tells them to call sales genie and to stop eating the bamboo furniture and next day they are rich. That's it? That's all you got Sales Genie? You just spent millions of dollars on a super bowl ad, and that is all you can muster? The reason I call these 'dumbass shock value ads' is that they are so fucking stupid that I remember them and therefore the company gets what they were looking for, exposure. The same goes for those Yellow Book ads with Carradine in them. Taco Bell was equally as DSV. The entire ad consisted of a couple dudes who walk into their workplace and a couple mariachi guys make them sit down to eat and they hit on a hot chick from the office. I am serious when I say that description may be funnier than the commercial. The only commercial that got a big thumbs up was the Etrade commercials with the infant that is talking about trading and pukes himself, and then later tells us how he used some of his profits to buy a clown, and how he underestimated how creepy it would be. Now talking babies, THAT's HUMOR!