Do Not Try Sneak Up on This Saint

His name may sound French, but rest assured that Marques Colston will not let anyone anything near his rump.



Via PRW.

Brooklyn's Floating Pool Opens Tonight

This is possibly as awesome as cars that turn into robots:

Ms. Buttenwieser and her team looked south, and in 2004 bought a decommissioned cargo barge in Louisiana called the New Orleans. In a bit of good luck, Hurricane Katrina did not damage the 85-by-300-foot vessel, but it did delay the first stages of conversion.

Now the pol on the edge of Brooklyn Heights is finally ready to go. I thank Ms. Buttenwieser for living up to her utterly philanthropic name.

(Second pic via)

New Orleans is kinda sorta coming back.

I mowed lawns three days a week for a decade, desperately hoping the teenage girls of Ohio would cruise by, see the young man pushing the machine with his shirt off. When you're mowing all day at the entrance to the neighborhood, you know they have to drive by sometime. It was a strange, underpants-gnome kind of theory.

Point being, I have mowed some grass in my time. I've mowed into oncoming traffic, mowed for $15 a lawn, mowed for charity. I mowed a rabbit once, threw up, then kept on mowing. I tried to mow up a hill once that was so steep that the whole machine tipped over and came clattering after me as I ran terrified from it.

Yet, until the Times posted this slideshow of New Orleans folks making do, I did not know you could mow heroically. (You have the two minutes to listen.)

It comes down to mowing and setting up a mail box:

Maps of mail deliveries, prepared by the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center, a local nonprofit group, show the strength of the revival. Last August, for instance, an insignificant number of households in the flooded areas were receiving mail. A map compiled this spring showed that postal customers per square mile in those neighborhoods had multiplied into the low thousands. If the overall population has also increased to about 62 percent of the pre-Katrina count — from 49.5 percent last July, as postal deliveries have — that means the city’s current population may be up to 250,000 to 260,000.

It is a long way from the prestorm population of 450,000, but the effect of the new residents is clear in block after block.

With extremely minimal help from anyone else.

I helped saved New Orleans by buying a t-shirt.

I realize the stupidity of the argument, but I'm still buying.

History Will Be Unkind to The Diesel

Generally, I love the way Shaquille O'Neal refuses to take himself seriously. I appreciate someone who can contribute the greatestist commercials of balls thyme to TV history and still find time to slum for Icy-Hot. No johnnyjudgements with Shaq. Generally.

I know that when Jim Brown refers to modern black athletes as the "most embarrassing collection of individuals I've ever known," he's talking about guys like O'Neal.

But Shaq is just too entertaining to dismiss... until he passes the kind of comment he did to Newsday about having the 2008 All-Star Game in NOLA:

"I'm not sure if the city of New Orleans is ready for something like that," said O'Neal, who played at LSU. "I would rather see it come to Miami or even New York. I don't know what New Orleans' situation is, but from watching the Spike Lee special and watching the news, it doesn't look like it's ready for something like that."

I've only seen one episode of the aforementioned Spike Lee Joint, and as far as documentaries go, it sure seemed like a nice kick in the nuts. Which I mean in a good way.

But this is an issue where O'Neal could have a very deep rolodex of people to talk to and advocate for if he wanted to pick up the phone. Or he could have no comment. Just blabbing away Shaq-style is not really helpful, though.

These kind of events are crucial to New Orleans' economy. And attaching his name, as an LSU alum, to an anti-All Star meme without looking into the issue is really just lazy. It's another moment suggesting that history may be a hell of a lot kinder to Brown than to O'Neal or anyone else in his generation.

(Thanks, Shoals)