Mobile Mardi Gras, 2009 Bands let it rip

I've saved the best for last: the multiple bands interspersed among the floats. The revelers aboard the floats seem to hail from a surreal, faraway world -- but the participants in the bands look more like your neighbors out for a much rehearsed good time. Let the good times roll!


There was a rock band -- very loud indeed.


The country genre boasted old men on a wagon -- "Old MacDonald" perhaps?

But the stars were the high school marching bands.




Often the moms trailed alongside.


Each high school showed its colors.




And the drum majorettes were strutting their stuff.


Hey kid, is that hat going to soar off without you?


There was plenty of joyful noise.

The marching bands, proud and amateur in the true sense of lovingly putting on their show, reminded me of the weekly parade in Cusco, Peru.

Mobile Mardi Gras, 2009 Some of the people

How does it come to be that so many people put some much energy, and creativity and love into a civic festival? The seasonal events run over a three week period during which there are dozens of parades involving probably thousands of people. I saw just one and I awed by the work and devotion that went into it.

The remarkable documentary Order of Myths offers some clues about Mobile, Alabama's Mardi Gras. I will not try to summarize. If you are at all interested in this complex set of social rituals --- rituals that enforce, create and reinvent racial and sexual patterns -- by all means, make sure to see it. It's out on DVD.

Each of the floats shown in the previous post carries a crew of costumed, masked (white) men who throw beads and other trinkets to the waiting, rapturous crowds.


The pink color of the more extensive masks make the figures on the float seem all the more inhuman, magical.


On the other hand, the small masks that merely cover the eyes show that the costumed figures are merely guys.


Some are obviously having the time of their lives as they fling beads to the crowds.


"Hey you, this one is for you!"


Horsemen from the Conde Cavaliers also pelted the screaming crowds. I was very impressed with the training of the horses and the skill of their riders -- I can't imagine it is easy for horses to travel through a gauntlet of screaming children and excited tourists.


The parade's police escort rode somewhat more sedately.


Friends from the Episcopal Urban Caucus (whose meeting I was attending0 joined the clamor for the thrown loot. In the small corner of the street where I was standing, they were the only Black faces in the crowd.


They pulled in a large haul of goodies with great delight.


Behind the raucous tourists, a more formal crowd was gathering. Apparently this first parade in the Mobile season is also the night the LGBT community holds its formal seasonal ball and folks were dressed accordingly.

See some of the floats in last night's parade here.

Mobile Mardi Gras, 2009 A parade of adventurers

If you ask the citizens of Mobile, Alabama, they'll tell you theirs is the "Original Mardi Gras" celebration. New Orleans' festival is for Johnny-come-latelys. Mobile was the first capital of the 18th century French outposts on the Gulf Coast and it is proud of its interpretations of those traditions.


Last night the Conde Cavaliers, one of the local "mystic societies," the voluntary organizations that put on Mardi Gras, did it right in the first parade of the season. Yes, Ash Wednesday is still 18 days away; but why limit a good thing to a single Tuesday night before the church's penitential season of Lent begins? Later in the season Mobile hosts several parades a day.


The adventure theme set the pattern for the many floats that passed through eager crowds on South Royal Street in front of the hotel where I was staying for a meeting.


Indiana Jones came along.


For those of us who are culturally illiterate, a sign bearer preceded each float.


I was glad for the sign.


Though I might have recognized this image on the float's side.


This blue-eyed gent evidently was one of the 18th century French explorers who opened up the area to European settlement.


Somehow I doubt the indigenous population looked quite like this -- but what do I know?


No doubt the Gulf Coast had its share of these.


Somehow I missed the front of this float, but I guess Harry Potter qualifies as an adventurer.


Continued, here.

Friday cat blogging: Super Bowl residue

That's "Bigfoot." He watches TV all the time, according to his human servant.

For those in peril on the sea...

Staying here briefly beside the port of Mobile, Alabama, I chanced to read a little about what happens at sea.

...merchant seafaring is still, by some accounts, the world's second-most-dangerous occupation, after commercial fishing.

The cranes and derricks that handle container cargo are gargantuan.

According to Imperial College London, 200 supertankers and container ships have sunk in the past two decades due to weather. Wolfgang Rosenthal, a scientist at the European Space Agency, which studies sea conditions via satellite, estimates that two "large ships" sink every week on average. Most of these, he says, "simply get put down to ‘bad weather.' "

The lifts are also inhumanly beautiful.

"The shipping industry is decades behind the airline industry" in its management of risk, says Geoffrey Gill, a maritime attorney. Why?

This monument, placed by several seafarer's unions, disguises, perhaps intentionally, who the sailors are.

"Because there are no passengers, and because most merchant mariners these days are Filipino. A lot of people don't seem to care if 25 Filipino sailors drown."

Someone thought it worthwhile, in the shadow of a gleaming new building, to preserve this small shrine to the patron of the sailors.

And drown they do. How many, exactly?

The patron of seafarers looks out from his niche. They need him.

Nobody knows for sure, but the number of seafaring fatalities appears to exceed 1,000 lives per year, and the number-one cause of accidental death is believed to be drowning.

I had no idea that contemporary cargo shipping was so dangerous until I read Monsterwellen by Donovan Hohn in a recent issue of Outisde. That article is the source of all the quotes in this post.

Repeal Prop. 8: whose campaign?

My partner snapped this picture of a gentleman working passersby in Berkeley yesterday. He was getting people to sign this petition, a project of the Courage Campaign, CREDO Mobile, Join the Impact and MoveOn.org. A couple of observations on this:

• These groups are doing an online organizing project -- but they've actually moved someone to take the campaign to the street as well. Interesting -- and good for them.

• These groups are not the formation that ran the "No on 8" effort -- nor are they likely to be automatically at the center of any future initiative campaign about gay rights. Aside from Join the Impact they are not groups that are particularly LGBT-identified. I don't have a problem with that. They are collecting up activists on the issue while the issue is hot; better someone should than that the energy should dissipate. At some point, they and the established campaigners, and a lot of other people who were not deeply included in the campaign last year will have to get on the same page if California has another ballot measure about marriage equality.

• Wonderful as these groups are, they are not recognized leaders in the constituencies who, past results showed, must be included better from the outset if we are to win this. That is, marriage equality can't succeed without more votes from religious people, including religious people in the communities of color. That's going to take folks who will probably need to be brought in by overtures other than those of the Courage Campaign, CREDO Mobile, or MoveOn.org.

Meanwhile, the California Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on Thursday, March 5, 2009 in the Proposition 8 legal challenge.

California: broke, broken and still predictive?

Sunset over the Pacific.

Finally, as we look forward to IOUs instead of tax refunds, the people of California are beginning to understand that we broke the state government and we'll have to fix it. Here's a hopeful development.

The PPIC Statewide Survey taken in mid-January finds for the first time that a majority -- 54 percent of Californians -- believe that it is a "good idea" to change the two-thirds majority to a 55 percent majority for the state Legislature to pass a budget. Five years ago, California voters soundly rejected an initiative that would have done exactly that. ...

Pollster Mark Baldassare

The state still doesn't have a budget or any plan to deal with the deficit because it takes two-thirds of the legislature to pass one. Not a majority, not 50 percent plus one -- but two-thirds, 66 percent. Democrats have 63 percent of the legislature, a margin that would be plenty to complete a budget in any other state -- but no go for us. In the '70s and '80s, Californians fell for a right wing fiscal con, a promise that we could have the services we need without taxes, and now we have this nonsense.

Having pissed off the emerging majority of people of color, Republicans are a dwindling bunch of cranks, "dying at the box office" as their own cartoon character governor admits. Their sole remaining power is obstruction that thwarts the majority.

Peter Schrag, former Sacramento Bee editor and author of some of the best descriptive political journalism about the state, recently nailed it.

With each passing day, Republicans look ever more like a suicidal cult than a political party. ...

Forty years back ... California Republicans didn't take no-new-tax pledges, and those who voted for tax hikes didn't face primary opponents backed by their own party.

In 1967, faced with a serious fiscal crisis, Ronald Reagan signed the biggest tax increase in the history of this or any other state.

...what applies to ideological narrowness applies as well to gender and ethnicity. Of the 15 Republicans in the state Senate, one is a woman and one is a Latino. Of the 29 GOP Assembly members, one is Vietnamese and four are women. If you don't count the members of Portuguese or Azorean extraction, all the rest are non-Latino white men.

Of the 51 Democrats in the Assembly, 16 are women, 17 are Latinos, six are black and seven are Asian; of the 25 Democrats in the Senate, 12 are women, nine are Latinos and two are black.

The San Jose Mercury News, no bastian of liberalism, chimes in:

Californians should be furious. ... The governor and all 120 legislators share responsibility for this. But most of the blame for the immediate crisis falls on Republicans in the Legislature, who this past summer -- to a person -- signed a pledge to not raise taxes. ...These lawmakers constitute barely over one-third of the Legislature. But because the California Constitution requires a two-thirds vote on the budget, it enables the tyranny of a minority to trump majority rule.

Just how we're going to do away with the two-thirds rule is not clear. Paul Hogarth explains why we can't do it in a June election, even though voter sentiment seems to be edging toward breaking the dam -- and sweeping the Republicans away in the subsequent flood. But clearly, because the right wing state GOP has fallen into contributing nothing but obstruction to our governance, we'll finally have to take away their power to destroy. To climb back to influence, they'll have to decide to contribute the general welfare -- and that seems a distant notion.
***Watching Washington these days, especially the House, perhaps California, with all its idiosyncrasies, remains predictive. Can't say the national Republicans are doing much better avoiding the "obstructionist crank" label than our local ones.

View out my window: Mobile, Alabama

I was told this is the tallest building in the state. It's the Retirement Systems of Alabama Battle House Tower. I'm looking at it from the 18th floor of a nearby hotel -- it's 35 floors high.

Off to the right, that's a bit of the container shipping port of Mobile.

It's interesting to realize that hurricanes blow through here pretty regularly.


I nursed that thought with a nutty brew.

Strip mall statuary, again

It's an odd genre. But we do seem to have more and more of them. See another example here.


What the heck is that sitting on the patio of an urban McDonald's in Denver? Whatever it is, it has its own pigeon.


Some kind of heroic memorial?


I see, it's "The Fireboys Team." Huh?


There's an eager one.


This one seems to be having hat trouble.


The hero at the top pokes a stick into thin air.

Awfully homogenous little critters, these figures. A lot of firefighters I know aren't nearly so blond or so male. My friend who lives in the neighborhood suspects this piece of "art" was a response to NIMBY objections to the McDonald's.

It probably would have been cheaper for them simply to visit a garden supply company for a set of these:

Guess they would have needed plastic plants too, tho.

Obligatory Super Bowl post: Go Steelers!

This is not only because Troy Polamalu has great hair and Hines Ward has a great smile.

It's also because the Pittsburgh team has an owner who campaigned for a black Democrat. Those rich guys are usually Republicans -- but apparently not Dan Rooney.

Back when then-Sen. Barack Obama was waging an uphill battle for Pennsylvania's Democrats in the party presidential primaries there, Dan Rooney, owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers, stepped up to the plate - uh, no, that's mixing our runaway, unblocked sportaphors - lined up -- much better -- for Obama.

The Swamp

Go Steelers!

UPDATE: Now that was one of the most absorbing football games I've seen in a long time. Way to go Big Ben, Santonio Holmes, James Harrison, the whole lot of of them.

Provincial elections in Iraq yesterday

January 29:

Provincial elections are on Saturday and candidates are dropping. Today three were killed. One in Mosul, another in Baghdad and one in Diyala province.

It's almost expected here. Two others were killed recently as well.

In the United States this would be big news. Here it's a line in the violence report of the day. Better then other days, a huge improvement over the frightening times of more than a year ago but yet still more bloodshed.

Leila Fadel, McClatchy News
Baghdad

Among those who did vote, the experience was sometimes inspiring and sometimes not:

"A long time ago we only dreamed to have something like this in our country. Not long ago we were deprived of a voice." -- Nawal Salam, 48. She and her family were displaced to the Shiite district of Kadhemiyah in Baghdad. Her brother was killed during the sectarian war. She voted for Maliki's party.

"I voted for the Fraternity of Nineveh (Kurdish slate) because it represents my race and we hope it would help us get our rights as Kurds. We want to live in peace like others." -- Leila Solaiman Mohammed, 45, a Kurdish housewife in Sheikhan a village in the northern fields of Nineveh province

"We came to the center with enthusiasm, but we didn't vote. We couldn't find our names. This is the third center we've gone to – and don't find our names. I don't want to lose my voice. I'm afraid that if I don't vote, my form will be used for me to vote for God knows whom." -- Umm Atheer, a Sunni Arab mother of two in Baghdad

Leila Fadel, McClatchy News
Baghdad

In a random sample of The New York Times's ... staff in Baghdad: 40 percent voted, 30 percent could not reach the right polling station; 14 percent could not find their names on the lists; 10 percent of them did not try to vote; 6 percent of them were uncontactable.

Qassim H.J. - NYT cartoonist in Baghdad. VOTED, WITH NO DIFFICULTY. HALF HIS FAMILY VOTED.
I had no problem voting. I didn't think I would find many people in my neighborhood taking part because it has been a very troubled one, with much violence. But many people turned out, and I saw no problems.

Suadad al-Salhy – South of Baghdad. FAMILY ALL VOTED, WITHOUT INCIDENT
I did not vote because I have not found anyone who represents me. My husband feels the same. My parents, brother and sister-in-law all voted, although they had to walk more than two miles to the polling center. It was the first one they went to, so they were lucky.

An Iraqi employee of The New York Times in Najaf. VOTED, WITH DIFFICULTY
After sunrise on Saturday I went on a tour in the main streets on Najaf, as part of my duties as a stringer for The New York Times newspaper. The security forces were all over the place, which gave a sense of security and safety. However, all did not go well. I had to go to more than three centers looking for my name and my wife's name. Finally I found them in a voting center two and a half miles away from where I live. Apparently, we were registered according to what our ration card said in 2005, which was that I lived with my family. Except that I transferred my ration card to another area a year and a half ago.

Riyadh Mohammed - Central Baghdad - DISPLACED. DID NOT REGISTER. I didn't register in advance, so I could not vote. The rest of my family were displaced from west Baghdad because of sectarian violence in 2006 and it would have been very complicated for them as displaced Iraqis to vote. None of them registered and none of them voted. They were all excited about election day, but it was too late.

New York Times' Iraqi journalists react

Meanwhile the Times reports that in the United States

...many Americans view the war as already over, even though more than 140,000 American soldiers remain on Iraqi soil.

President Obama has made it plain that Iraq is not his war; he wants to focus on Afghanistan.