| September 16, 2006 Welcome back to the Bone Pile, with the columnist almost as full of crap as Arnold Schwarzenegger saying California deserves two new NFL teams. After watching the Raiders play last week, I'm not so sure they shouldn't just pull the plug on that franchise. They've sucked for years and if you aren't a member of the Black Hole, you pretty much loathe them anyway. But I guess since gangs love Raider colors, they are a marketable team. Enough of that, back to the column. I just returned from New Orleans for my brother Jeremy's wedding last week. It was my first time to NOLA since last year's Hurricane Katrina. To be quite honest, I wasn't sure what to expect. I am very familiar with the area we were staying in since I grew up in Louisiana and had several trips down to NOLA throughout my life. We stayed in the French Quarter at the Maison Dupuy Hotel on Toulouse, about two blocks from Bourbon Street. One would think that it was a very good selection. It was, but in hindsight, for a few of our guests, it may have been a bad idea. I'll get to that later. Right across from the street we had a little Irish pub called Fahy's. It's very reminiscent of the worst hole in the wall bar you have ever stepped into. I liked it. So on our first night there, we go and get our tuxedos fitted. I'm telling you, if I ever get a tuxedo for myself that is not a rental, that thing is going to need some heavy tailoring. I guess I never realized it before I started being in a lot of weddings, but I am not built like a lot of other people. Either I need to get a lot fatter or my shoulders need to shrink. Something's gotta give. After the tuxedo fitting, we found our way to the hotel and got in contact with my parents. We settled in and made our way past Bourbon Street to find something to eat. I am a bit leery of eating seafood at most places here in Dallas. I can go with the really nice restaurants in Dallas, but the smaller places...not so much. But in New Orleans, I don't care what the place looks like. It's all good in the Big Easy. And the crawfish poboy I sunk my teeth into did not disappoint. I ate at this restaurant twice while I was there and I have no clue what the place was called. I just know I liked it. Later that night, we decided to hit up Fahy's across from the hotel. One of my brother's coworkers, Josh, met up with us and we played pool all night. Let's just say that Josh is fond of a little concoction called the Jaggerbomb. I'll also say that Jeremy was in a little pain the next morning due to this fondness. I figured this would be Jeremy's last night of drinking for the weekend, but I was wrong. The next morning, Friday, we had a lot of things to take care of. Ok, WE didn't, but Jeremy did. He needed to get to the West Bank to get his marriage certificate signed. We all walked through the French Quarter to Cafe du Monde for some beignets and coffee. Jeremy was going to take the ferry across the river, but he missed the first one, so we took a little trip into the riverwalk mall. This place was empty. A lot of the businesses were open and the sales people were just begging us to come in. Obviously this is a part of the city that hasn't fully recovered yet. We had Jeremy's daughter, Makenzie, with us and she fell in love with a shirt that changes color in sunlight. So we promised to come back on the way out. I decided to chaperone my mother for the morning and get her back to the hotel while Jeremy, Pop, and Makenzie made their way to the West Bank. In typical Pigott fashion though, Jeremy missed the second ferry. It was to buy the color changing shirt. So Pop meets back up with us and we make our way back through the quarter while Jeremy awaits the next ferry (he ends up making that one somehow). We stopped in one shop that was a very touristy place. They had a lot of typical dirty T-Shirts. One was the Hurricane Evacuation Plan with arrows pointing in every direction and the words "Run Bitch Run!" For the sake of keeping my column at least PG-13, one shirt said "F you you F'ing F", a NOLA favorite. My parents were supremely impressed. That night, we made record time with the wedding rehearsal. I really don't know what the point of having the wedding coordinator go through this was because it took no more than two minutes. I'm not exhaggerating at all there. I walked up the aisle and back down the aisle. I asked if there was anything else and she said no. WOW. So then we waited like two hours to walk over to the rehearsal dinner. The rehearsal dinner was at Acme Oyster House. They had the upstairs banquet room set up for us with a buffet. Everything was so good: red beans and rice, crab pasta, jambalaya, fried shrimp, fried catfish, grilled chicken, etc. The only thing I was disappointed in was that there were no oysters on the buffet at a place called Oyster House. Oh well. Food was great...and free for me. But the nighttime is the good time. We had a huge group to go out this night. I led the pack over to Tropical Isle to meet up with some other friends. We had a group of about 50 people with us. We had folks from Ohio, Pittsburgh, Florida, Shreveport, Dallas, and a few other places. Ohio people are nuts about OSU. It's a good thing I'm a Notre Dame fan and not wearing the die hard UT gear. Anyway, we meet on the upper level of Tropical Isle. First thing everyone does is order a Hand Grenade. When in Rome... My friend, who shall be known as Mongo, ordered one and was finished with it in about 5 minutes. He promptly ordered another one. After being there for about 30 minutes, Mongo told me that Hand Grenades were weak and that he didn't know what the big deal was. I asked how many he'd had and it was already two in only 30 minutes. If you are unfamiliar with what this drink will do to you, allow me to explain. It is a very sugary drink, so it goes down easy. I have no idea what is in it, and I'm not sure anyone but the owner does either. But after a while, it goes off and you are floored. I have seen two put a grown man down. Now my friend Mongo has just taken two down in half an hour. This should be a fun evening. After a while, we made our way over to Cat's Meow, the "karaoke" bar. This place is fun because it's not just straight up karaoke. There are entertainers on stage singing and doing their thing between singers. I signed up for a few songs for the night because I like doing that kind of stuff and I had the group egging me on. Mongo found his way to the bar for a Hurricane (not the Pat O's kind, but still will do the trick). We must have spent three hours there. I know I had my share of drinks because the last time I got on stage, I called the entertainer Seal. He looked at me like I was on dope, but then laughed. Come on, the guy is a big black bald guy with some features very similar to Seal. Not as mangled in the face, but he's not gonna be called in by a modeling agency any time soon. My friends were cracking up at that comment when I got back to them. We figured it was time to head out after that and found our way back to Fahy's. At Fahy's, the Pittsburgh boys decided to challenge the Pigott boys to a game of pool. I suck at pool but Jeremy is good. So we accepted and proceeded to whip their asses for about five consecutive games. I look over at Mongo and his head looks like it has been superglued to the bar. He's out. I keep running by him and slapping him across the head to minimal reaction. We start a fifth game of pool and somehow, Jeremy gets distracted by something at the bar. Personally, I think it was his old friend, Patron Silver. After a while of waiting on him, I called him over for his shot on the table and he stumbled out of the bar and gave me the finger. Brotherly love. I still ended up beating the Pittsburgh boys. Don't know how, but they were pissed. We ended up getting Mongo off the bar and taking him across the street to the hotel. We told him to go up to room 337 and sleep it off. Me and Josh and Frank went back to Bourbon Street to get some pizza. The next morning, I woke up and the room was empty. I called Jeremy to see where he was and he was over with my parents. Mongo was staying with us, but he was nowhere to be seen. Surely he wasn't already up, because I figured he'd sleep until 2 or 3 in the afternoon. Then Jeremy came back to our room and we got a call. Mongo wanted to know where we were. He had gotten up and showered, but realized his room was empty. Jeremy asked him what room he was in and Mongo quickly replied 807. Maison Dupuy only has 5 stories. Silence. "Oh shit!". Somehow, our friend Mongo had made his way completely across the French Quarter to the Queen and Crescent Hotel. Not only that, but the 8th floor of that hotel was being renovated and they have no record of checking out a room for him that night. This leaves a few looming questions. How does a guy who can barely walk get over 8 blocks across the French Quarter without falling down, getting robbed, getting his kidneys removed, or getting butt raped? Second, how does he get into a hotel room that is pretty much off limits? Mongo has no recollection of any of this, so we may never know. Results from the Free Clinic are pending. So on Saturday, Mongo is the talk of the day, naturally. But it is Jeremy and Kat's wedding day, so we try to play it down. Not really, we ride him all day about it. Most of our softball team, TaterSalad, makes it over to the Five O'Clock Cafe for some lunch. Burgers are not on the menu there, but it you order one, it is one of the best you will ever get. Trust me. Most of the day is spent resting up for the night. It's about 95 degrees outside with 100% humidity and I have to wear a monkey suit. Good timing bro. We get cleaned up and the wedding is really beautiful. The reception was also really nice. All of this was done in the courtyard to the Maison Dupuy. During my best man speech, I got to slide in two Flavor Flav quotes, so I'm proud of myself for that. Kat and I both love "Flavor of Love", so Yeeaaah Booiiiyyy! After that we changed into more comfortable attire and we made our way out to the Cat's Meow again. No Hand Grenades for Mongo. We were having a good time and I decided to sing a little tribute to my new sis-in-law by doing White Wedding, by Billy Idol. Fun times. So after a 3-hour reception and a few hours at Cat's Meow, Kat's cousin Gary was a bit hammered. His parents begged me at the end of the night to watch out for him so I said I would. What a mistake. Gary apparently just broke up with his girlfriend and he had it in him that NOLA is a good place to go hoggin'. If you are unfamiliar with this term, you never went to college. Simply it means, find the fattest girl you see and get her to go home with you. A fun trick to play on freshmen, never meant to be taken seriously. Gary was serious. I pulled him away from so many fat chicks. When we left and made our way down to Bourbon Street Blues Company (BBC), we saw Gary out in the street at one point giving a fat girl his hotel key. I walked up to him and told him he needed to just walk away, which I think upset her a bit because she told me "I can hear you!" I told her that he had a girlfriend and that he's just drunk and horny. He needed to walk away before he did anything he'd regret. He kept trying to deny that he had a girlfriend but I was fairly convincing. She starting whining that her friends had already left her. Trust me when I say that this girl could probably take care of herself. But I assured her that a 27-year-old girl can find a taxi home. We went back into the BBC and as soon as we turned out back, Gary disappeared. Not my problem anymore. I tried. We finally made it back to the hotel around 5:30 am. Kat's best friend Shannon somehow got the fat girl's cell number while I was arguing with him on Bourbon Street. She asked where they were and they were in the hotel bar. She went and got him and hopefully kept him from doing the dirty deed that night. We may never know that mystery either. The next morning, we were all to fly/drive out. I hear that Gary was pretty much comatose at breakfast. Everybody else was in pretty good spirits. We packed everything up and headed out. One more story, though. This name will go unpronounced, but apparently some guest of our party had a lot of fun in their hotel room. A friend of ours stayed in 528 and asked if someone from our group was in 530. The reason he asked is because apparently the walls are a bit thin and all night he heard "Right there. Right there. That's the Spot!" and a lot of moaning. Came to find out it was one of our softball buddies and his wife. They had just visited a nudie bar. Good times. So for the weekend, we had someone teleport to another hotel, another guy tried to go hoggin', one couple got down and dirty after visiting the strip club, and one person visited a swingers club. I didn't comment on that last one because I'm still collecting details on that. It's amazing what can happen in just a few days in Ray Nagin's Chocolate City. Congrats Kat & Jeremy. from, T-BONE! |
The Bone Pile
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| "Now let's cut the stupid cake, cause I know the fat guy's gonna have a heart attack if we don't eat again soon." |
Return to Chocolate City
| The Oakland Raiders are a professional American football team based in the city of Oakland, California. They are currently members of the Western Division of the American Football Conference (AFC) in the National Football League (NFL). Legally, the club is a limited partnership operated by Al Davis, who serves as President of the team's general partner, A.D. Football, Inc. The Raiders began play in 1960 as the eighth charter member of the American Football League after the ownership group from Minnesota withdrew from the AFL to join the NFL. The Raiders later joined the NFL themselves in 1970 as part of the AFL-NFL Merger. The team has won one AFL title and three Super Bowls. In 1982, Davis moved the team from Oakland to Los Angeles, California and the club became known as the Los Angeles Raiders, but they moved back to Oakland in 1995 being the only sports franchise to move and then come back without making an expansion team (like the Cleveland Browns). |
| Beau Brummell is often credited with the invention of the formal suit during the early nineteenth century and for appearing at formal functions dressed in black and white when more colourful attire was more the order of the day. As a member of courtly circles until his estrangement from the Prince of Wales, his influence on others led to the style of dress becoming the norm. Until the 1880s the only accepted form of evening dress was what is now known as white tie, worn with a tailcoat with peaked lapels and silk facings. The black silk bow tie and the short mess jacket are of military origin - black silk bow ties were and still are worn by British naval and military officers in ball dress and mess dress when their civilian counterparts are in white tie. Henry Poole & Co. of Savile Row claims to have made a "short smoking jacket" for the Prince of Wales in 1865. This appears to have been worn by the Prince with a black bow tie, and the fashion was copied by various gentlemen in his circle. In 1886 this outfit first appeared in the United States, worn by Pierre Lorillard at Tuxedo Park, a country club in New York. There are conflicting accounts of when and by whom the dinner jacket was first worn in the United States, but it quickly acquired the name "tuxedo". This name is now avoided by certain fashionable sets in the United States, in favour of the usual English terms "dinner jacket" and "black tie". The waist sash, called a cummerbund, was borrowed after World War I from military dress in British India. |
| A hand grenade is a strong alcoholic beverage sold at only four locations in New Orleans, all owned by Tropical Isle, Inc.. The drink has a unique melon taste, is colored yellow-green, and comes in a plastic half-yard glass shaped like a hand grenade at the bottom, with smaller plastic grenades inside the container. It is extremely popular among tourists in the French Quarter, and it has even been featured in songs by Ludacris and other artists.[citation needed] The exact recipe is a trade secret, but it seems to be made of various liqueurs and liquors. The company that sells it is fiercely protective of its intellectual property rights; however it does sell its mix in quart and gallon-sized plastic bottles. The instructions tell the consumer to add water and everclear (grain alcohol.) One quart of syrup yields 148 ounces of Hand Grenade drink. Tropical Isle also offers two other trade secret alcoholic beverages: the Horny Gator and the Tropical Itch. |
| Clarence Ray Nagin, Jr. (born June 11, 1956) is the mayor of New Orleans. He was first elected on March 2, 2002, to succeed his fellow Democrat, Marc Morial. Nagin gained international attention in 2005 in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which devastated the New Orleans area. At a Martin Luther King Day celebration in New Orleans on January 16, 2006, the mayor gave a speech that created new controversy, with comments that many observers felt increased racial divides and neighborhood antagonisms within the city.[citation needed] Nagin's statements of knowing the will of God was objected to by some. Nagin repeated the "Chocolate City" metaphor and proclaimed that New Orleans will be "chocolate again." This was seized upon and parodied by some commentators, cartoons, and merchandising. Various designs of T-shirts with satirical depictions of Nagin as Willy Wonka were sold in the city and on the internet. Other parts of the speech were reportedly more disturbing to some New Orleanians than the "chocolate" reference. Nagin had also said, "I don't care what people are saying Uptown or wherever they are." Some people took "Uptown" as a coded reference to wealthy whites, such as those who live in the old mansions on Saint Charles Avenue or around Audubon Park. However Uptown New Orleans actually is one of the most ethnically and economically diverse sections of the Metro area. Many of Nagin's original supporters live Uptown. As Uptown contains the largest section of unflooded high ground in the city's East Bank, at the time of the speech Uptown had the city's largest concentration of locals back in their homes, businesses back open, and displaced New Orleanians from other more severely damaged parts of town living there. Locals protested the Mayor's comment about not caring about an important section of his city. Nagin also stated that New Orleans "will be a majority African-American city. It's the way God wants it to be." As most New Orleanians knew the city had been majority African American for decades before Katrina, certain people found the implication of Nagin claiming to know God's will more troubling than the suggested return of pre-Katrina demographics. In the same speech, Nagin further stirred controversy by claiming that "God is mad at America. He sent us hurricane after hurricane after hurricane, and it's destroyed and put stress on this country....Surely he doesn't approve of us being in Iraq under false pretenses. But surely he is upset at black America also. We're not taking care of ourselves." Nagin then went on to relate an imagined conversation with the deceased Rev. Martin Luther King regarding both the response to Katrina and the modern problems of black America which he believes offended God. The speech generated an intense reaction, most of it negative. A Times-Picayune commentator suggested that Nagin had just ruined his own chances at re-election. Nagin later apologized for his remarks, and offered a different explanation of his "chocolate city" metaphor, saying "How do you make chocolate? You take dark chocolate, you mix it with white milk and it becomes a delicious drink. That's the chocolate I'm talking about." Nagin said that his remarks were meant to be a call for African Americans to once again return to New Orleans despite the supposed belief that many of the people Uptown did not want them back. In this metaphorical recipe, Nagin implies the African-American people are represented by cocoa solids, and the milk represents caucasian people. The Mayor apologized for the suggestion that people Uptown (a mixed neighborhood) were racist, noting the importance of that section of town in the city's recovery. He particularly stated regret for the statements about God. "I don't know what happened there," he said. "I don't know how that got jumbled up. That whole God thing, I don't know how that got mixed up in there." Nagin concluded "I need to be more aware and sensitive of what I'm saying [...] Anyone I've offended, I hope you forgive me." |