Fun New Orleans Facts

Mural on the side of the Mother-in-Law Lounge

Hey!  Is that Kermit Ruffins?!?  It should be.  That picture is part of the mural on the uptown side of the Mother-in-Law Lounge on North Claiborne Avenue.  This is our 301st post on this blog and the 3rd in a row in which we won't be discussing the Mother-in-Law Lounge.  If this is your first visit to our blog, welcome aboard. It's nice to have you here.

To get you up to speed, your humble narrator is an innkeeper in New Orleans who tends to ramble over two or three topics per entry, sometimes tying them together, sometimes just jumping from subject to subject according to his whim.  We're in the middle of a bait-and-switch serial in which I use pictures of the Mother-in-Law Lounge to illustrate things that have nothing to do with it directly.  We are also on our second installment of including video clips of Maurice Chevalier in the movie "Gigi."



Thank Heaven for little girls.  I've often had the same sentiment myself as I wistfully sit at a café table watching the world go by.  It's like that refrain from Ernie K-Doe: "And ohhhh water!/  I can live without lemonade!/  But to live without girls,/ I can't live without girls/ It's like a man with a hole in his head!"  Frau Schmitt sometimes notices a faraway look in my eye and she'll ask me what I'm thinking about.  My answer is always the same: "You."

If you want to hear Ernie K-Doe sing those lines in his own inimitable style, refer to the end of our 300th post where there's a video.  If you don't feel like counting to 300 from the beginning, here is a shortcut: it's the entry before this one.

The Mother-in-Law Lounge used to be Ernie K-Doe's Mother-in-Law Lounge.  Now it's Kermit's Tremé Mother-in-Law Lounge.  You don't believe me?

It's true

Here are some fun bullet points I got off a placemat.  They would make for a good PowerPoint presentation, in case anyone ever asks me to give one:

* 69% of U.S. shrimp are harvested from the Gulf of Mexico.

* 70% of oysters harvested in the U.S. come from the Gulf Coast.  In blind taste tests, 85% of Americans prefer Gulf oysters over all other varieties.  ---That's more than the percentage of people who prefer Pepsi over Coke in a blind challenge.


* 90% of U.S. crawfish (pronounced crayfish where I'm from) comes from Louisiana.  [I've heard it said that 90% of the crawfish harvested in Louisiana stays in Louisiana.  I'm too lazy to look it up, but I believe it.  People eat a lot of crawfish in Louisiana.  A lot.]

* Louisiana is the top alligator meat producer in the world.  It's a $12 million industry in the state.

* Louisiana is the top shipper of live #1 male crabs to the Atlantic Coast.  

* There are 70 turtle farms in Louisiana.

I could go on and on and on, but that's enough of that.

I'm sitting at a café table on North Carrolton Avenue as I write this, watching the world go by.  I can't hear anything because the jukebox is playing loud brass band music (go figure, we're in New Orleans) so I had to rely on my eyes to figure out which brand won the Coke vs. Pepsi Challenge.  I also can't hear the words of the Gigi clip I posted above, but I already know them.  Thank Heaven for little girls.

I don't have a camera, otherwise I would post a picture of what I see.  I see Pandora's Snow Ball Stand.  It's open and there's a line about twenty deep.  It's snow ball season in New Orleans, and I'm not talking about the kind of snow that falls from the sky.  It't the beginning of April and the daytime highs have been running between the high 70s to low 80s on the Fahrenheit scale.

If you stick to the French Quarter, you won't find any snow balls.  There isn't enough money to be made slinging snow balls to be able to afford French Quarter rent.  You have to go out into the neighborhoods to find and enjoy this particular New Orleans treat.  What is it?  Ask me when you get here and I'll tell you.

Here is another picture instead.

I love New Orleans

This is what I see when I'm sitting at my desk in our lobby and I turn my head to my right.  The lobby is a veritable odditarium full of interesting things.  You'll never be bored in New Orleans.

Neither Frau Schmitt nor your humble narrator are New Orleans natives.  When I lose my temper, which is exceedingly rare, and I am talking about crawfish, which is less rare now than it was before we chose to live here, I sometimes lapse into my natural accent.  I slip and call dem crawfish, those crayfish.  

I'm a New Orleanian of a certain distinct type, but I'm not a native.  I don't think I'll ever be considered a Louisianian no matter how long I live in New Orleans.  Those are two different things that can overlap but are not necessarily the same.  Nothing lost, nothing gained.  I am a Nutmegger by birth and by the grace of God.  I always will be.  If you don't know what that means, I'll tell you over breakfast.

Here is a hint:  The official song of my home state is similar to what follows.  It's not the George M. Cohan Broadway version but the more traditional one, the one that a brave tattered army of patriots sang during the Revolution of 1776.

I could go on and on and on, but that's enough for one day.  The moon has been nacreous these past few morning when I've been out getting pastries just before sunup.  If that's not a sentence that will boost my SEO traffic, I don't know what I'm doing.  

I don't know what I'm doing.

À votre santé,
La Belle Esplanade bed and breakfast.