A New Start ~Moosedenied ~ Welcome back to the most wonderful time of the year, bitches! Hope you're ready to put pretty much everything else on the back burner for the next six months. By all accounts, the Saints have had themselves one hell of a positive offseason. For example, they're one of a dwindling handful of NFL teams who managed to make it through the last six months without any of their players murdering anyone. So we've got that going for us. High five? Gotta love that high-character locker room! Word on the street is that (so far) even John Jenkins has been obtaining his biscuits through legal and nonviolent means. There's been a stunning lack of contract disputes, looming suspensions, internal investigations and daily hatchet jobs from the Legitimate Media™. The buzzword all summer has been (a return to) "normalcy" and optimism seems particularly high as the countdown to August 11* begins in earnest.
It's a Love Thing: A Benefit Love-Fest for Deborah Cotton
Chart: The 7,000 Streams that Become the Mississippi River ~Chris Kirk, Slate
~A new
online tool
released by the Department of the Interior this week allows users to
select any major stream and trace it up to its sources or down to its
watershed. The above map, exported from the tool, highlights all the
major tributaries that feed into the Mississippi River, illustrating the
river’s huge catchment area of approximately 1.15 million square miles,
or 37 percent of the land area of the continental U.S. Use the tool to
see where the streams around you are getting their water (and
pollution).
Officials: 'Major cloud of gas' surrounds platform after blowout ~WDSU
~“The last time I was in a place this dangerous it was Desert Storm,” joked Russel Honoré, the Army general ordered to deal with the chaos after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in August 2005.
Hat Tweet @JenWhoDat LOVE our Coach 
~Join'em Fri., Sat. & Sun. during the festival for free seminars & discussions, featuring a host of speakers, including recording industry icon George Avakian (Armstrong's producer & friend); Michael Cogswell of the Armstrong House & Archives; noted Armstrong scholar and winner of multiple Grammy Awards Dan Morgenstern; writer and Armstrong film collector Ricky Riccardi; Yoshio Toyoma, aka 'Satchmo of Japan,' who also performs with his Dixie Saints; & many other sessions with educational & entertaining speakers who knew or were inspired by Louis Armstrong.
The brown pelican became Louisiana’s state bird in 1966---but where were the pelicans? The Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s website tells us that pelicans nearly disappeared from North American between the late 1950s and early 1970s---and were completely gone from Louisiana by 1963. The problem was pesticides: endrin poisoned pelicans outright and DDT thinned the shells of eggs so drastically that they broke under their parents’ weight. New pesticide bans and rules have brought back our favorite big-billed bird and now Pelecanus occidentalis (as it’s known in scientific circles) is a symbol of both Louisiana and of successful wildlife conservation. ~Jean Lafitte National Historical Park and Preserve 
