A Little Trip to the Big Easy

OK, I'm back from the bowl. As I'm sure you know by now, the Mean Green fell short again, 31-10 (and the touchdown we scored didn't occur until the last six seconds of the game), but it was still an awesome trip.

I won't do a lengthy synopsis like last year's, but the game came down to this: no protection from the offensive line. Scott Hall spent way too much time looking a the Superdome ceiling, and Jamario Thomas had no holes in which to break one of his trademark long runs; they held him to only 92 yards last night, way below his average of 188.9 yards per game going into the bowl. The defense played solidly, but in the end, they were on the field too long. The crushing blow came when Southern Miss linebacker Michael Boley stepped in front of a Hall pass early in the fourth quarter, returning it 62 yards for a touchdown and a 24-3 lead. At that point, I turned to Halfling and made the "putting a fork in it" motion, which was all too true.

The game results notwithstanding, it was still fun, as Halfling and I were able to sample some of the area's great food. Within mere minutes of his grandparents' picking us up from the airport, we were chowing down on shrimp po' boys from a local place called La Bella's. After the game, we tried to hit Copeland's in the Garden District, but it turned out that the 11:00 closing time they told us when we called was really 10:00, which we missed by five or ten minutes. But no worries; we were in a town famous for its culinary delights, so we hit the waterfront to see if some of my favorite haunts were open. The Crescent City Brewhouse was just closing (though that place hasn't been quite the same for me since they took the alligator pie off the menu a while back), so we dined just down the street at Cafe Maspero instead, and then we topped off the evening at--where else?--the famous Cafe du Monde. We came back to a good four hours of sleep (half an hour more than last year--yay!) before having to go to the airport this morning.

The flights back were uneventful (yes, flights--there was a layover in Houston for about 15 minutes), and we even grabbed a tiny bit of sleep on the planes. We snagged lunch at Snuffer's on Greenville since we were in the area, and then Halfling departed for Denton and I went back to a rather sleepy afternoon of teaching for about four hours. Having just now awakened from what turned into an inadvertent five-hour nap, I'm probably going to be all kinds of messed up tomorrow, but the semester ends at the end of the day, so laziness will commence soon enough.

So again, despite the outcome of the game; the trip was still awesome. I'm hoping we'll have another sequel next year. And the year after that. And the year after that...

Comrade in arms: Phil Dokas, the artist formerly known as Stereoboy, rants against the Machine. He makes the great point that many of the biggest downloaders of music are also the biggest buyers of music (such as himself).

QUOTE OF THE DAY: "Good Lord, no, I can't fit through there. I'm a hundred and ninety-five pounds!"--Parking lot attendant in New Orleans, when Halfling pulled up to the window of her booth before she had a chance to get back in.