New Orleans: A Brief Visit; Rekindled Affection 

K and I flew in from LA after visiting some of the grandkids to celebrate our anniversary and take another look at a city we’ve always enjoyed.

We hadn’t been here in 12 years. In that time, the city was devastated by Hurricane Katrina, then pounded again by several other hurricanes, and then economically strangled by the COVID shutdown. Not to mention the usual political corruption and bureaucratic incompetence. New Orleans has a reputation for being dangerous, although, like most cities of its size, most of the crime takes place in drug-dominated neighborhoods. As a tourist, as long as you don’t wander into an obviously bad neighborhood, drunk and alone, at night, the Crescent City is safe and welcoming.

The city’s economic poverty is evident in the degenerate state of the roads and sidewalks and the condition of its public buildings. But that is more than offset by its rich social and cultural history, which is still very much present in the diversity of its architecture, customs, cuisine, and populations. A visitor can see the footprints of the American, Spanish, and French colonizers, the African slaves and freemen, the Creoles and the Cajuns. Not to mention the many other cultures that immigrated into the city over the last 150 years and became part of its local color and heritage. I love New Orleans for all of that.

Another reason I love New Orleans is the food and drink. As far as food is concerned, New Orleans reminds me most of Rome. Its restaurants favor common, vernacular cuisine. And, like Rome, you don’t need a guidebook to locate a good restaurant. They are ubiquitous. If the joint looks interesting and reasonably clean, it’s pretty much guaranteed to serve a good meal.

There was a time in my life when an evening in New Orleans was about drinking on Bourbon Street until I could barely walk home. This week, K and I were glad to discover that the city is replete with interesting and even elegant bars and lounges that serve up all sorts of fun and tasty specialty cocktails that are not meant to knock you off your barstool. And the wine lists are not just extensive and well curated, the prices are generally very good.

New Orleans is the heart of southern jazz and plenty of other forms of American music, too. On any given night, there are literally hundreds of places you can go to listen to great music, not to mention the street corners where buskers play for change.

And finally, New Orleans has this tradition of not taking itself too seriously. It’s about “Where is the party today?” And that Mardi Gras impulse manifests itself every day in the French Quarter where it is no longer possible to distinguish oneself by sporting a handlebar mustache along with eye shadow and a tutu. “Relax,” the city says. “We’ve got you covered.”

I don’t know why I’m telling you all this. I suppose it’s because, in coming here this time, I’ve been reminded of how much I love this city. And in case you’ve never been here or, like me, it’s been a dozen or more years, to encourage you to check it out.

Pulling a Tom Sawyer

In The Pledge, I outlined something I once used to identify which of my many life ambitions corresponded with my unconscious values. I called it the Tom Sawyer Strategy. As in: If you could eavesdrop on your own funeral (as Tom and Huck Finn did in the Twain classic), what are the sorts of things you’d like to hear people say about you?

From my family, I would have liked to hear things about being a good provider and protector. From my business colleagues, it would have been about being smart and energetic. And from my friends, it would have been about being generous and loyal.

The reason to put yourself through this exercise is that you can identify the qualities you admire and want to emulate in each sphere of your life. You can then use what you discover to guide your decisions as time passes.

I still think it’s a good and useful practice. But I’ve come to realize that even if you do your best to behave in accordance with your core principles, you have no control over what those you leave behind think of you.

This little bit of anagnorisis has made its way into my mind several times over the decades. Just this past week, it came to me in an unexpected and frivolous way. AS, one of my golf buddies (most of them high school mates), told a very funny story about a friend of his vomiting. This prompted many other throw-up stories, each one funnier than the last.

It was all good fun. And I was very much enjoying myself when I recognized that more than half of those stories were about me. Me. Vomiting. I had forgotten what a sensitive stomach I had as a teenager. Apparently, my friends had not. And I realized that my lofty hopes of being remembered for my kindnesses or accomplishments would be forgotten. The stories told at my funeral would be soaked in vomit.

Let’s Talk About Egos!

In my piece about Trump’s “impending arrest” in the Mar. 28 issue, I said, “What Trump’s foes hoped would come from [an indictment] was a derailment of his presidential campaign. Given the strength of Trump’s ego and the passion of his fans, that doesn’t seem likely.”

“I’m no shrink,” SL wrote after reading it, “but it seems to me his ego is about as strong as an egg laid by a malnourished chicken. His characteristic bravado and bragging reflect a fragile ego. Don’t you think?”

SL makes an interesting point. Putting aside the clinical Freudian definition, when we, as laypeople, say, “He’s got a big ego,” we usually mean, “He thinks a lot of himself.” And when we say, “He has a fragile ego,” we mean, “He is excessively sensitive to criticism.”

Hmmm. That gives me an idea. It would be interesting to come up with one of those quadrants where we create four classifications of personalities based on those two ego factors: size (big vs. small) and strength (fragile vs. durable).

That would give us a quadrant that looks like this:

1. Big and Durable
2. Big and Fragile
3. Small and Durable
4. Small and Fragile

Thinking about Trump in these terms, I would put him in the first category. He certainly thinks a lot of himself. And he is amazingly insensitive to criticism. Can you think of any public person that has endured more? And has any of that made Trump cower or retreat? Quite the contrary, he feeds on it!

If you consider lashing back at your critics to be a form of weakness, I take your point. But whereas someone with a fragile ego might lash out initially, he/she would not make a daily meal of it. For, Trump, criticism is just another opportunity to see his name in the media. In other words, I don’t believe that lashing back comes from fragility, any more than I believe counterpunching is a fragile strategy in boxing. It’s just the way Trump plays the game. And I believe he thinks he is always winning.

Since SL and I are armchair-analyzing the man, let me throw this out – something I’ve been saying about Trump since The Apprentice days:

Trump’s primary personality characteristic is narcissism. And one of the defining features of narcissists is that, notwithstanding their constant drive to be the center of attention, they are indiscriminate about the sort of attention they get. For them, negative criticism is almost as good as positive criticism.

If you agree, let’s continue the conversation. If you think Trump belongs in a different box, make your case. At the same time, let’s take the opportunity to categorize other public figures about whom we know only the most publicized details. Not just politicians, but actors, athletes, etc.

Here are four to get you started…

* Jimmy Carter: Small and Durable

* Arnold Schwarzenegger: Big and Durable

* Will Smith: Big and Fragile

* Marilyn Monroe: Small and Fragile

Has Your Baby’s Car Seat Expired?

“No need to bring a car seat,” we told our niece. “We have at least four of them somewhere.”

“How old?”

“You mean for what sized child?”

“No, how old are the seats? When were they manufactured?”

“What difference does that make?”

“If they are older than six years, they may be expired.”

“Expired? Like a bottle of milk? You’ve got to be kidding!”

I looked it up. She wasn’t kidding. Car seats sold in the US these days come with expiration dates. As in: Do not use after…!

It’s not a federal or state law. But all car seat manufacturers use expiration dates. And you’d be hard-pressed to find any information that doesn’t advise parents to respect them.

It sounds absurd. But I searched online and found numerous websites that provided some justification in terms of safety. Improvements in technology and changes in standards are made all the time.

I can certainly understand, then, why my niece wasn’t going to strap her most precious cargo into something that was antiquated and possibly dangerous. Still, I wanted to know: Is this just another umpteenth rule about parenting?  Is there any, as they say, “science” behind it?

I spent more time looking. There were many magazine articles and even published guidelines by parenting organizations that abided by the idea that car seats can expire. And there were even some explanations – i.e., the plastic can harden, the straps can weaken, etc. But I could find no studies. I found only one article in Motherly Parenting that that even addressed the issue. Click here.

Of course, the lack of evidence that baby car seats expire is not proof that they don’t. And when it comes to the safety of our bambinos, what parent is going to roll the dice?

And what do we do with all those hundreds of thousands of “expired” baby seats? Are they put into landfills to slowly biodegrade and cause more pollution? Don’t worry. No Green issue here. Most of them are collected and resold south of the border.

The Incontestable Importance of Editors

In most areas of publishing, the importance of editors is never in doubt. But in the world of newsletter publishing, editors have played only a minor role. They are usually tasked with cleaning up the text. And rarely asked to make decisions like, “Should this be published at all?”

I’ve not convinced all of my colleagues to work with highly intelligent and skilled editors. But for my own writing, I’ve relied on the same editor to guide me in everything I’ve written in the past 40 years. J doesn’t pay much attention to grammar anymore. (The algorithms do a good job of that.) But she regularly helps me sort through my ideas, separating the wheat from the chaff.

The older I get, the more important this becomes. I’m finding that my confidence in what is interesting or funny, clever or juvenile is diminishing quickly. Luckily, J is still good at knowing the difference.

For example, look at the image above. (It’s from a viral twitter thread featuring AI-generated portraits of all 46 US presidents reimagined as professional wrestlers.) I saw it somewhere and thought it was clever. But I had doubts about including it in this issue.

So, I sent it to J, saying: “I’m passing this along because, at first, I thought it was funny. Now, I’m not sure.

She wrote back: “If you have to ask…”

True Story 

This happened Tuesday morning…

K: “Did you ever find the check for C and M?”

(C is our nephew. M is his new wife. I was supposed to give the check to them at their wedding, which was held at Paradise Palms. I wrote about the wedding in the Jan. 31 issue. Remember the above photo?)

Me: “No. I looked everywhere I could think of. I can’t find it.”

K: “Are you sure you didn’t give it to them?”

Me: “No, I’m not sure. I can’t remember anything anymore.”

K: “Did you check your pocket?”

Me: “What pocket?”

K: “The pocket of the suit jacket you wore that night.”

Me: “What suit was it?”

(K goes upstairs to look in my closet. A few minutes later, she comes down with check in hand.)

Me: “So, you found it!”

K: “No.”

Me: “No?”

(She shows me the check. It was for SB’s wedding, which took place in 2013!)

Me: “Oh, boy!”

K: “Exactly!”

Me (sheepishly grinning): “Gee.”

K: “No wonder we never got a thank you note!”

Me: “I guess I’ll have to write another check.”

K: “With interest!”