Allison King, a masters student at the University of Texas at Austin, has created a great online history of the Hansen’s Sno-Bliz iconic snowball stand.

Created with the help and cooperation of Ashley Hansen, granddaughter of the late founders Ernest and Mary Hansen, the Web site is a living multimedia document and a rich piece of nostalgia. There’s a Flickr site for the Hansen family photos (check out the shots of Mrs. Hansen with Willard Scott on The Today Show), a blog, and an online multimedia exhibit.

Allison has even set up a YouTube page with some great footage — check out this home movie taken at Hansen’s in 1991:

Craigslist is an excellent resource. But, on occasion, it can lead to more questions than answers. Take this post, for instance:

Are you the #1 Saints fan? Do you watch every second of every game - multiple times? To you have interesting ideas about the team and the NFL? Can you put those ideas into regular blog postings? If so, I have the perfect opportunity for you. I run a New Orleans Saints fan / blog site and I need some real fans who would like to write regular blog postings for the site. The site has a modest amount of traffic already so I am making a little bit of money from the site which I will split with the other bloggers. So you can even earn a little money doing something you love.

First of all, who is this person running this Saints “fan / blog site” and which site is it? Secondly, isn’t it a bit counter-intuitive to claim that you run a “New Orleans Saints fan / blog” site and then ask for “real fans” to write for it? Is this person saying they aren’t a “real fan” (at the very least, they’ve already made it clear that they’re not the #1 Saints fan cause they’re actively searching for it)? Also, since this site is presumably up and running — with a “modest amount of traffic” — doesn’t it undermine everything you’ve done and compromise your “modest” readership by admiting that you aren’t the Saints #1 fan (or even a “real fan”)?

I’ve e-mailed these questions to the Craigslist posting. Hopefully this person won’t take offense to my critiques, as I fuly support any and all Saints fan blogs and their growing prosperity (if only becaues it gives me more places to link to and thus making my life easier).

Join Gambit Weekly this Thursday, August 7th to watch the first Pre-Season Game!

A press release, but a pretty cool one, about The Radiators and how they’ll be sending copies of their latest CD to American soldiers overseas…

Based in New Orleans, The Radiators have been rocking fans across America for decades. Now they are spreading their music around the world with a donation of nearly 3,000 CDs to the troops. Soldiers’ Angels will be receiving the donation and including CDs in some of the thousands of care packages it ships overseas each month….Soldiers’ Angels is honored and grateful to assist The Radiators in their efforts to support the troops, and will make The Radiators their Featured Artist for August on the Soldiers’ Angels homepage.

I’d never heard of Soldiers’ Angels, but I liked this essay on the group’s Web site, as written by an anonymous MP:

When I get a box (or anyone else gets a box) its hard to describe. You find a nice quiet corner and everyone knows not to bother you. You sit there and look over the box as if you had never seen anything like it before. You read who it’s from, and a smile crosses your face–you recognize the name. You might already know what’s inside, but it does not matter. Some tear it open as fast as they can, others take their time and enjoy every second of it.

Once inside, you go through it, every little item once, twice, sometimes three times. It’s a very delicate process. You breathe it in and you think of the person who sent it to you. You think of home, family, cars, summer–everything all at once. And for a very short time, you are there away from this SH*T hole. You are grateful. Then you look around and there’s always a buddy who is down or having a bad day. You share your box–sometimes just with the one guy, sometimes with everyone–and it’s electric. Everyone catches that feeling, and we start talking about home, about things we miss, things we are going to do when we get back, and the heaviness of the day lifts and it’s not so bad.

Inspired to help? Here’s the hookup.

At a press conference this morning, Sandy Rosenthal, president and founder of Levees.org, protested the continuing delays in the investigations of the American Society of Civil Engineers .

     The two investigations were due to release findings in April, but to date, neither has made a report. Rosenthal called the delays “artificially manufactured to give the ASCE time. Time to protect its own reputation and time to discredit those coming forward with ethics violations…and probably worst of all, time so that the American public’s attention will just turn elsewhere.”

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