When someone tags you a “scumbag” for criticizing a local institution — and then instructs you to, in less-perfumed blogspeak, consume excrement and expire — it tends to give a guy pause. For example, is the mere disapproval of so many Jazz Fest selections enough to make me a bag filled with scum, or does it take stating that opinion? I would like to think that, at the very least, I am a contemplative scumbag, capable of introspection. In that vein, I’m accompanying my complaints with something more constructive: an ongoing collection of songs from lesser-known New Orleans artists who each deserve their own moment on the main stage. And I’m dedicating this new series to Bob, the pseudo-anonymous, single-named mudslinger who convinced me that brevity and bravado are not mutually exclusive concepts.

“Trebuchet,” Chef Menteur, The Answer’s In Forgetting

Not exactly a festival band — outside of Noizefest, perhaps — but a prime example of the kind of ripe fruit to be found in the city’s fringiest musical groves. A constant, steely guitar strum à la Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” gives way to rippling electronic echoes that expand exponentially, folding back on themselves, churning, swirling into starburst drums and slowly fading away into manmade machine noise.

by Alejandro de los Rios

If you didn’t see this last night you better have been dead or in jail (and even in jail I hear they have televisions, though this might have been after lights out…I digress). Anyway, I got to see this game at Cooter Brown’s last night with some local media folk and a completely packed bar. Though Kobe Bryant got the MVP this year, I think it’s safe to say Chris Paul has one (likely more) in the future. For now, he’ll just have to settle for 1st team All-NBA.

And if you think that I wasn’t just a little bit excited that the Hornets lost last night and thus assured they’d return here for a Game 5, then I’ve done a terrible job of portraying how fun it is to cover these guys.

If you’re interested in the present state of health care — more and more Americans are concerned with the current state of affairs  — the Kaiser Family Foundation Web site is a solid point of reference. The foundation is a non-profit, private operation that focuses a health care issues facing the U.S. KFF isn’t a cheerleader, nor is it interested in merely positing opinions. Instead, as their mission statement points out, “Our product is information, always provided free of charge – from the most sophisticated policy research, to basic facts and numbers, to information young people can use to improve their health or elderly people can use to understand their Medicare benefits.”

That’s what voters need in this upcoming presidential election: well-researched info that takes a macro and micro view on the subject of healthcare.

Speaking of politics, as the country inches closer and closer to only two candidates, and a number of upcoming congressional elections, the question will become: will health care coverage and costs remain a concern and will newly elected officials do anything about it?  Drew Altman, president and CEO of KFF, doesn’t necessarily answer that question in his “Pulling It Together” section but he does illuminate the issues and provides the potential scenarios for health care reform, or the lack thereof.