• TROUBLE: Lil Wayne pleads guilty to felony gun possession, may be spending a year in the pokey….
• HOLLYWOOD SOUTH: Production on the new Green Lantern movie moves to New Orleans….
• SPEAKING OF MOVIES: New Orleans-raised writer/actor Byron Lane will see his debut film premiere at the Austin Film Festival this weekend. Title? Herpes Boy….
• POOR POOR PITIFUL US: Sportswriter Rick Gosselin of the Dallas News writes about his trip to New Orleans for the Saints game last weekend:
Four years after Katrina, New Orleans still isn’t back. Not even close. The population has been cut almost in half from the 500,000 before the hurricane, and a city that survives on tourism is struggling to attract the major conventions that once flocked to New Orleans.
I’ve had some nightmare travel days in New Orleans returning to Dallas from games in the pre-Katrina years, showing up at Louis Armstrong International Airport two hours before my flight on Monday mornings and then having to scramble through lengthy security lines to board my plane on time.
But at the airport at 8 a.m. Monday, there was no one at the ticket counter ahead of me and only one person ahead of me in the security line. You could have rolled a bowling ball down the center of Terminal C and not struck anyone.
• UH…THANKS (WE THINK): Walt Pierce, editor of The Independent in Lafayette, sends up a salute from Cajun country:
We envy newspapers like The Times-Picayune and Gambit Weekly. New Orleans has corruption in its government institutions — widespread, endemic, congenital corruption; cancerous corruption that no chemical can ameliorate. It cannot be zapped by microwaves. New Orleans has bribes and kickbacks, back stabbing and malfeasance — all the colorful enumerations of bad, selfish, greedy behavior by which Louisiana’s political reputation is calculated. That malaise is apparently spreading with the city’s white flight: Mandeville’s recently former mayor pleaded guilty a week and a half ago to federal tax evasion and mail fraud charges. Now that’s working for the people (in the press).
• AND FINALLY: In a blogpost titled “Yet Another Sign Hoda Kotb Is Going to Snap,” Gawker offers a clip of the Today show, in which Kathie Lee Gifford lectures Hoda about, of all things, her Hula Hoop skills. (”Just tell me one more thing I’m doing wrong,” Hoda sighs.) Gawker adds:
You know what I’m waiting for? The day Hoda (Peabody Award winner, Edward R. Murrow Award winner) just walks right off the set.
Us too.
