New Orleans is home to the National World War II Museum. It’s an effort to remember and recognize the significance of a war that increasingly is being forgotten, with the passage of time and the passing of those who fought in history’s greatest conflict.

The annual meeting I’m attending had a dinner at the Museum.  Although the hour and the occasion didn’t allow a visit to the exhibits, I did have the chance to walk around a hall where planes hang from the ceiling and PT boats and tanks and jeeps are available to be examined.  One of the devices was a Higgins boat, the famed amphibious landing craft with the plop-down bow that ferried our invading troops from ships to shore and made the invasion of Normandy and the island-hopping strategy in the Pacific possible.

We also watched Beyond All Boundaries, a film about the war narrated by Tom Hanks.  The movie, and a short introductory film that set the stage for the conflict, are powerful reminders of how many millions of people were killed across the globe, the awful horrors of the war, and how dramatically the war changed society and the world.

The film is designed to make the audience feel like part of the story, as lights flash around the theater, seats rumble, snow falls, smoke fills that air, and objects drop from the ceiling and rise from the floor.  However, the words of the soldiers and some of the pictures in the film — the starving Holocaust survivors in their ragged concentration camp uniforms, frozen bodies of dead soldiers loaded onto trucks, a dead Japanese child floating in the surf off one of the Pacific islands where the fighting was so intense — pack far more of a punch than the gadgetry ever could.

After watching the devastation, and the death, and the carnage, I wasn’t exactly in the mood for a dinner party.  We should all thank the Americans who fought in that bloody conflict that helped to restore freedom to the world.

We’ve stood on our third-floor balcony at the Royal Sonesta Hotel the past few days and watched a number of wedding parties go marching and dancing past on their way down Bourbon Street.  Tonight’s wedding group was a particularly festive one, with some great music from a great band and a bridal party that was happy, energized, and ready to party and celebrate a fabulous day for their soon-to-be-married friends.

I don’t think anyone thought it was ominous that the bride and groom in their white outfits were walking past a “Temptations” sign.

As I mentioned earlier, it’s Navy Week in New Orleans.  One of the stolid, gray Navy ships docked at the pier on the Mississippi River is the U.S.S Mitscher.  As one of the polite, crisp, white-clad Navy officers who are everywhere around town patiently explained to me, the Mitscher is a guided missile destroyer that is bristling with weaponry.  “It’s a great ship,” he said.  It’s named after World War II hero Admiral Marc Andrew Mitscher, and its motto is “Seize the Day.”

Oversize beads hanging from a tree in a sculpture garden in New Orleans.

On a windy Monday afternoon, my friends and I slipped into the Spotted Cat bar on Frenchman Street in New Orleans. We ordered a round of Abita beers and listened to Sarah McCoy’s Oopsie Daisies, a 1940s-style blues lounge band. Sitting on stools in the middle of the bar, we shared a cigar while watching the lead singer in a red dress croon love ballads.

Only in New Orleans could you stumble on such a great band on a Monday afternoon. The town is saturated with great musicians. With the older ones, you get the sense they’ve been playing in New Orleans for decades and long ago passed the line of virtuoso into whatever comes after. You feel that the young ones came because they love music and know there’s no city where they’ll be more appreciated.

Sarah Mccoy’s Oopsie Daisies perform in the Spotted Cat on Frenchman Street.

You don’t have to worry about whether they’re good or not. New Orleans doesn’t tolerate bad musicians. Even the street musicians are high caliber and play with passion. We saw great jazz bands, blues bands, funk bands, rock banks, and the wonderful Treme brass band, which pulled my friend Liz on stage during their last number after she distinguished herself in the crowd with her dancing.

The Treme band.

I’ve heard New Orleans called the most unique city in America. Although I’ve been taught to be skeptical of the word “unique,” I think the title is deserved. The city’s past as part of the French and Spanish empires has left it with a perceptibly non-American cultural strain. In most of the United States, houses are decorated modestly, but not there. They paint their houses as if they’re competing to have the most colorful one on the block. They put rococo frills wherever they can, especially on their metal balconies. Even weeks after Mardis Gras, it’s not uncommon to see a tree whose branches are so dense with hanging beads that it looks like it came from the candy paradise scene in Willy Wonka.

New Orleans also stands out among American cities by allowing open containers of alcohol on the streets at any time of the day, which people take great advantage of in certain quarters.

That’s not to say the city isn’t American. The most prominent culture in the city, probably, is African-American. There’s been controversy over the city’s shift toward a whiter population since Hurricane Katrina led to the evacuation of black neighborhoods, but it’s still 60 percent black. The black community has established the blues and jazz core of the local music and seem to make up most of the musicians.

The iconic New Orleans sandwich, the po’ boy, also originated with the community. I wouldn’t recommend eating a po’ boy every day if you plan to live past 40, but they’re delicious in a greasy way, and they do a great job of preparing your stomach for a night of beers.

New Orleans also has a distinctively southern character. While eating New York-style sandwiches in Stein’s Deli, a place we became addicted to during our stay, we started talking to a pair of older ladies who seemed to come from the southern gentry. The more talkative of them proudly told us that the other lived in the house Jefferson Davis died in (her friend nodded proudly). We confirmed this afterward.

The talkative southern lady insisted on giving each of us hugs after our conversation, even though the four members of our group ran the spectrum from loving hugs to reserving them for weddings, graduations and funerals. This was one of countless examples of extraordinary friendliness we encountered in New Orleans. The night we arrived, a group of twenty-somethings devoted nearly a half hour of their night to giving us advice on where to go. It’s not uncommon while walking down the street for passersby to give you an earnest “good times!”

The supreme act of friendliness was our encounter with Wendell Pierce, the New Orleans native who played Bunk on The Wire and Antoine Batiste on Treme. We read in the Times-Picayune that he would be opening a grocery store on the outskirts of the city in an effort to eliminate a food desert, so we stopped by on our way to see the beautiful marshland at the Jean Lafitte National Park.

The alligator-infested marshland in Jean Lafitte National Park.

We were bashful about approaching Pierce, who was busy talking to neighborhood folks in the crowded supermarket. We almost left, but then we saw Pierce suddenly standing alone. He shook all our hands (we agreed that his handshake was really soft, but not in a bad way), and asked where we were from. He was happy to hear we were from Mizzou, and asked some sports-related questions I didn’t understand.

Later, we worried that he thought we were in town as part of a charity effort instead of being on vacation. Still, I’ll always remember his generosity in opening the grocery store and taking the time to ask questions of four strangers on that busy day.

I only spent a week in New Orleans, but I think I’ll carry a little bit of it with me for a while. It makes you want to be more passionate about music and to take more out of life, in a friendly way.

Next week at this time Richard, Russell, UJ and I will be in New Orleans.  It’s going to be a boys’ weekend, complete with lots of live music, oysters, cajun food, and beer.  Our goal is to hit every music venue on Frenchmen Street during our visit.  Given the astonishing number of joints on that stretch, it will be a challenge.

I’m looking forward to the trip to catch up with the boys and also listen to some live music.  There are few better things in life than experiencing great music in an exotic venue, with an ice-cold beer in your hand.

If anyone has suggestions on good places to eat or listen to live music in New Orleans, we’d love to hear them!

Tomorrow Richard, Russell, UJ and I are heading off to New Orleans.  On this “boys weekend” trip, our needs are few.

We want to watch live music at every venue on Frenchmen Street, from the Blue Nile to the Spotted Cat Music Club.  We don’t really care what kind of music it is, as long as it is live.

We want to visit the New Orleans Oyster Festival and eat oysters until we just can’t stand it anymore.

We want to eat Cajun food that is so hot and spicy that the collars of our shirts ignite spontaneously, without the need to add Tabasco sauce.

We want to drink Dixie beer that is so cold that it hurts your teeth to chug it.

We want to smoke cigars that are as long as a man’s leg.

Yes, New Orleans is in our future.  Our needs are few.

Horn, stand-up bass, banjo, and torch singer, rocking out Blue Skies.. People dancing. Cold beer, too.

We’re deeply into Frenchmen Street.

This little duo at the Apple Barrel — did she say their names were Hillary and Miles? — are great. The guy plays like Django Reinhart and the woman has a fabulous smoky voice. Blue Gardenias was awesome.

So far we’ve stopped at three places, heard three totally different kinds of music, and they’ve all been fantastic.

I’m not sure what’s better in New Orleans — the food or the music.  It’s too close to call.

We started our evening on Frenchmen Street at the Praline Connection.  It’s a cool soul food spot where the waiters wear black pants, black Fedoras, and white shirts with neckties.  The tables in the restaurant have a permanent plastic covering for easy clean up and feature two condiments — a hot sauce, and a hotter sauce.

We began our meal with some appetizers and our first beer of the evening — a local brew called Abita Amber that was quite good.  The appetizers, selected after careful analysis of a menu that was filled with tantalizing options, were alligator sausage slices with a thick and tangy tomato dipping sauce and fried chicken livers.  Both were excellent.  I’ve always had a soft spot for fried chicken livers, and these were plump and crunchy.

For my entree I ordered crawfish etouffee.  I’ve loved that dish since I spent time in Lafayette, Louisiana on a case in the early ’90s and had my first crawfish etouffee at a wonderful restaurant called Cafe Vermilionville.  The Praline Connection version of this traditional Cajun dish more than met my lofty expectations.  Served with a volcano-like mound of white rice in the center of the gravy and tender crawfish tails, with cornbread to crumble over the top and help to soak up the goodness, it was the perfect start to our New Orleans adventure.  We ate every morsel and were ready for some music.

Today we walked through the Marigny Faubourg neighborhood to Bywater, in search of two junk shops Russell wanted to visit. We didn’t find anything worth buying among the piles of junk, but it was fun to see some of New Orleans’ neighborhoods. Marigny Faubourg, in particular, is a place where you can find beauty and color around every corner.

It’s been a rainy few days in New Orleans–but it hasn’t been a consistent rain. Instead, I feel like Forrest Gump — we’ve seen fat rain, and skinny rain, and windy rain, and rain so powerful you feel like it’s going to knock the roof down.

The most impressive rain storms are what Midwesterners would call gullywashers, with rain so heavy it turns streets into lakes and instantly soaks whoever is caught in the downpour. We watched one such storm advance up the Mississippi River, the rain forming a kind of gray curtain as it swept forward. It gave us fair notice to scurry under cover before the deluge came.

I suppose you have to give the realtor selling this French Quarter property credit for truth in advertising. Or maybe there’s a market for condos that you share with a poltergeist.

We stumbled across this fading barfront sign as we walked through New Orleans to the Bywater neighborhood.  Imagine!  Cold Dixie bottled beer for only 13 cents each — and highballs for only 35 cents a pop.  Of course, that was back when people actually drank a drink called a “highball.”

The beers that we drank in New Orleans this past weekend all cost more than $5 a bottle.

We saw lots of interesting things on the streets of New Orleans, but this was one of the most compelling and evocative sights — a trash can, decorated to resemble a human face, with the words “If ever I cease to love” on it.  When I tossed my trash away through the wide mouth, I wondered what the heck was the significance of those words.

There is, in fact, an explanation:  “If ever I cease to love” is the name of a classic Mardi Gras song.  According to the New Orleans Times-Picayune blog, the song has been the anthem of the Rex’s Boeuf Gras parade ever since the Rex organization first marched in 1872.  I think that explains the trash can’s crown and the bright coloring.

If you’re interested in hearing this Mardi Gras classic, a YouTube performance is below.

UJ celebrates another birthday today, which means that he is now officially a year old than me again.  The picture is of UJ and me on our recent trip to New Orleans.  We decided to take a picture at this Bourbon Street location because Lucky Pierre was Dad’s nickname.

Kish has made a lot of really good decisions about decorating our house, but one of my favorites is what she has done with the brick walkway leading to our back yard.  It used to have a flimsy wire fence, but Kish decided to replace it with a wrought iron fence and then hang some planters along the fence line.  Because the walkway is between two houses it rarely gets sunlight, so the planters are filled with plants that thrive in the shade.

The result looks very cool in my view, and reminds me of of what you might see in the Garden District of New Orleans.

A former Ohio State football player, Will Smith, was killed in an apparent “road rage” incident last night in New Orleans.  Shortly before midnight Smith’s car was rear-ended by another vehicle, and the driver of the vehicle shot Smith multiple times and shot Smith’s wife as well.  Smith was pronounced dead at the scene, and the driver of the other car was charged with second-degree murder.

It’s one of those senseless deaths that make you shake your head.  Of course, I heard about it only because the victim was a great defensive line star at OSU and one of the players that helped the Buckeyes win the 2003 National Championship.  But lots of people who aren’t pro athletes are victimized by “road rage.”  Statistics are hard to come by, but one recent report indicated that 1,500 people each year are hurt or killed in road rage incidents — and the number appears to be increasing.  If you’ve been out on the roads lately, you probably won’t find that difficult to believe.

Reports indicate that road rage incidents often start with something small, like a bad driving maneuver, or tailgating, or giving someone the finger, but they for some reason escalate to the point where cars are chasing each other at high rates of speed through rush-hour traffic, trying to run each other off the road, or following each other until one car stops and a physical confrontation occurs.  Who knows what set off the shooter in the Will Smith incident — but a simple rear-ending fender bender wouldn’t cause a rational, sober person to start spraying bullets.

It’s frightening to think that there are people so filled with anger just below the surface that one traffic incident or rude gesture could cause them to become so unhinged that they are willing to murder a complete stranger.  When you add loaded firearms to the mix, it becomes an even more terrifying scenario.

The lesson is clear — if you see someone driving aggressively, get out of the way.  Avoid eye contact or any form of provocation.  The old ’60s-era driving slogan has an even more pointed meaning these days:  Watch out for the other guy.

Early Thursday morning, masked workers, operating under a significant police guard, removed a statue of Jefferson Davis, the former president of the Confederacy, that had stood in New Orleans for 106 years.  The statute, located at the end of a park, shows Davis standing next to a pedestal, with one hand on the pedestal and the other outstretched, as if Davis were gesturing during some important speech.

The workers who took down the statue were masked and wore dark clothing, and there was a heavy police presence, because there had been anonymous threats to harm the people involved in the removal.  Others in New Orleans simply oppose the removal of the Jefferson Davis statue — which is one of four statues that honor the “lost cause of the Confederacy” in New Orleans that are slated for removal — on the grounds that the Mayor of New Orleans is trying to sanitize history.  The President of a group called the “Monumental Task Committee,” for example, said:  “Another historic monument was removed under the cover of darkness using amateur, masked workers in armor, unmarked vehicles and equipment with a heavy police presence.  [New Orleans Mayor] Landrieu cannot be inclusive, tolerant or diverse when he is erasing a very specific and undeniable part of New Orleans’ history.”  According to a city spokesman, New Orleans is now looking for a “more appropriate” place to put the statues — like a museum.

As far as I’m concerned, the “more appropriate” fate of the statues would be to melt them down for scrap metal value.  I don’t agree with the notion that removing statues of Confederate leaders in heroic poses from public spaces is trying to “sanitize” our past.  History is history, and whether such statues are kept around, or are removed, isn’t going to change that.  In fact, if anything, the design and construction of the Davis monument represented the effort to whitewash the past, not its removal.  When New Orleans decided to erect a statue of Davis nearly than 50 years after the Civil War ended, why didn’t they create a statue that showed Davis scurrying away from Richmond just before Union forces entered the city, or show Davis behind bars after being captured?  It would have been more accurate, because the South — thank goodness! — lost the Civil War.  The fact that some people in New Orleans more than 100 years ago had the bad judgment to erect an heroic statue of Davis doesn’t mean that the people of New Orleans must be stuck with that embarrassing mistake forever.

It makes perfectly good sense to remove a statue that offends many people because it celebrates a rebellion and a government that was created largely because racists wanted to preserve the immoral and brutal practice of slavery, and that was defeated only at the cost of millions of American lives.  The Confederacy should be remembered, but it should be remembered not as some honorable “lost cause,” but as the last gasp of a shameful chapter in American history.  Removing heroic statues of Confederate leaders is a good step toward putting the Confederacy into its true historical context.

We’re in New Orleans for a family gathering, and last night we hit the Acme Oyster House — a Big Easy institution.  Astonishingly, our group of seven was seated immediately, and we promptly ordered some pitchers of Abita beer, two dozen raw oysters, and the house specialty:  char-grilled oysters.

It’s not easy to describe how good the char-grilled oysters were, and how spectacularly they kick-started our weekend.  They’re topped with Parmesan cheese and are melts and crusty, all at the same time.  They were so good we ate four dozen of them, and probably could have polished off 100 more.

For dinner, Richard and I split the seafood platter, which was a mound of crunchy fish, crab, shrimp, French fries, and hush puppies.  It was the perfect food to consume before heading out for a little live music crawl.  Thus fortified, and with the lip-smacking goodness of the char-grilled oysters still freshly in mind, our hardy band ventured forth into the New Orleans night.

We can’t get enough of the live music in New Orleans.  Last night we hit multiple venues on Frenchman Street, which has just about the best collection of live music venues within a small geographical area that you’ll find anywhere.  We started at one of our favorites, the Spotted Cat Music Club, where this band deftly covered some classic selections from the Great American Songbook.

As always on Frenchman Street, the music options are diverse — from torch songs at the Spotted Cat to roots blues music at the Apple Barrel to a kick out the jams, move your feet horn band at Cafe Negril.  We enjoyed every one of them, and tonight we’ll be back for more.