The late entry of School Board member Jimmy Fahrenholtz in the Sept. 6 Democratic primary is bad news for former TV newscaster Helena Moreno. She’s still the only female in the race, but she’s no longer the only non-black candidate. That means she will not have a lock on white votes, if she ever had one in the first place. Just as Bill Jefferson and his African-American challengers will have to slug it out for black votes, Moreno now will have to run against Fahrenholtz among whites. This changes the dynamics quite a bit.

The only person less happy than Moreno to see Fahrenholtz join the fray has to be Jefferson, whose best shot at re-election is getting a white opponent in the runoff. Depending on turnout, he may not even make the runoff himself, although he probably starts out with the largest bloc of committed votes.

The Humane Society of Louisiana has recently formed a new Animal Cruelty Investigation Bureau to get back to its original mission of investigating cases and rescuing animals from abuse. The team recently rescued the largest number of animals its ever encountered in an abuse case.

In late June, animal rescue volunteers delivered hundreds of live birds and animals from a sick situation of abuse and neglect outside of Walker, La. More than 590 live animals and 240 dead animals were seized from a rusty mobile home and surrounding property of Cindy Jones and Samuel Stroup and their five children, ages 3 to 13.

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The more you know about NASCAR the more likely you are to know who Junior Johnson is. A former moonshiner and bootlegger, he went legit not with booze but in NASCAR racing. He’s one of the sport’s early legends and after his retirement from driving in 1966 went on to hire a slew of famous drivers to race his cars (including Bobby Allison, Cale Yarborough and Darrell Waltrip). And he’s still coasting on the fumes first generated by his still.  Read the rest of this entry »

You might not get Bernard Pearce’s sound — the narcotized haze of psychedelic textures, brass-band exuberance and unbridled funk/rock fun does take a spin or 10 — but it will hit you in a little while. The one man in One Man Machine, Pearce is the perfect mascot for this new age of New Orleans music: He’s both challenging and rewarding, gregarious and scarily intense. On “Get My Sound,” the title track from his March debut, he’s an out-and-out rock star, and not an altogether reluctant one. A muted bass line and soft drums pitter-patter out 1-2-3, 1-2-3-4. Guitars follow suit with a slow-motion funk shuffle. And a growled hook that’s in no real hurry still arrives immediately: “My girlfriend, her hair is brown/And her behind is nice and round/We go shakin’ it all over tow-ow-ow-ow-ow-ow-owwwn,” that single elasticized syllable moving down, then up, then down, then — marvelously — allllll the way around.

One Man Machine plays the Dragon’s Den Saturday, July 12, at 10 p.m.

When I went by the AT&T store in Covington this morning, there looked to be about 30 people in line waiting to buy the new iPhone. Were you among them? Well, not so fast, Mr. or Ms. Early Adopter:

The process of obtaining an iPhone 3G appears to be going in slow motion because of AT&T activation server crashes that have been confirmed in New York, San Francisco, and Palo Alto, Calif.

Unlike its predecessor last year, the iPhone 3G must be activated in-store, an antihacking measure that Apple had said could take 10 to 15 minutes. That’s long enough to make the line move a lot more slowly than the speedy process that made last year’s iPhone launch astonishingly efficient. But crashing AT&T servers required for the activation made it even worse.

Looks like some people are not happy. While you’re waiting for yours to be activated, why not enjoy this Mad TV parody of that twee but oh-so-catchy Apple commercial with Feist?

There’s an old saying among fishermen that God gives each of us a certain amount of time on earth, but the time we spend fishing doesn’t count against that total. The long, well-lived life of Blackie Campo, patriarch of Shell Beach and a friend to every fisherman in southeast Louisiana, is proof that there’s something to that old wisdom.

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