Goodnight Yellow Moon
Hello, friends! Rob here.
The other day I saw a Honda commercial where some racecar driver says, "this is no ordinary Civic- it’s a Honda Civic." What in the crap does that even mean?
Had a funny morning today. We agreed to participate in the local tourism board's annual pre-Jazz Fest media blitz, which was great because it was basically an opportunity to brag to a bunch of other cities about how New Orleans has Jazz Fest and they don't. It was pretty different, though. Just as I'm finally reaching a point where I can deliver a halfway coherent phone interview, the Media Gods found another wrench to throw, and so I spent an hour or so this morning sitting in one of those director chairs LIVE ON LOCATION AT THE NEW ORLEANS FAIRGROUNDS, speaking with local news anchors from around the country through an earpiece. I couldn't see any of the people I was talking to, but they could see me because I was talking directly into a camera the whole time (DO NOT break eye contact with the camera or it will look SUPER WEIRD and the production team will not hesitate to tell you how weird you looked during your first interview). All of the spots were much shorter than I'm used to- about two to five minutes. I spent a lot of the time silently praying that I wouldn't do anything Joel McHale-worthy. It was windy and drizzling for most of my hour and I promised Cincinnati, Springfield (MO), and Omaha that it would not rain at all in New Orleans for the rest of Jazz Fest.
All told it must have been about four hours of interviews, which we broke into shifts. Apparently PJ Morton beasted the whole thing by himself last year, which is both a herculean feat and a reminder that it's awesome to be in a huge band. I had the second shift, so I had to be at the fairgrounds at 7:20. Zack was there at least an hour before me, and I don't even want to think about our tour manager Jason's call time. How do people get up this early every day? It's torture. I can't believe this is considered normal. Work should start at eleven o'clock in the morning. Ingraham 2020.
Here’s an all-time scoreboard I’d pay to see: The number of times having the characters of a password show up as MYSTERY DOTS in the password field has caused someone to enter the wrong password by accident versus the number of times those dots have actually prevented genuine security breaches. I bet it’s like, 371,428,959,844 - 6. Hackers usually get passwords by asking people for their passwords (you'd be shocked how often this works), not by looking over someone's shoulder while they type. They don’t even do that in movies, and movies will count anything as hacking. I'm pretty sure that in Die Hard 4: Die Harder the Hardest-est, the bad guy is an ELITE HACKER who, at one point, uses his MAD SKILLZ to HACK INTO the freaking water supply of the city*. Movies are always so incredibly dumb about hacking. I wish that were how it worked, because New Orleans would be the most cyber-secure city on the planet. Some ecoterrorist would try to take over the Sewerage & Water Board and hold our toilets hostage or whatever, and they'd just run straight into a brick wall. It'd be like trying to perform brain surgery on a rock.
*: I looked it up. According to Wikipedia, it was the "natural gas distribution system," which he then used to murder an entire office.
The friend whose thing I'm plugging today is Boyfriend!
Boyfriend, real name [REDACTED], describes her music as "rap cabaret-" a brilliant mix of hip hop, R&B, dance, and theater. Fair warning: content-wise, the above video is an outlier- many of her songs contain extremely NSFW lyrics and your kids should not be in the room the first time you check out her stuff. Beyond all the sex words and cussing (and there is a lot of it), Boyfriend deals in ownership, empowerment, rebellion, and just straight-up awesomeness. If you'll be in New Orleans this weekend, she's playing a late-night show at One-Eyed Jack's on Friday with a SUPER SECRET MYSTERY SURPRISE BACKING BAND. Color me intrigued...
Like many, I was saddened to hear news of the great Charles Neville's passing today. I didn't know him personally, but by all accounts he seemed to be a great guy. He was definitely a great saxophonist with a big, beautiful sound that never wavered, even as he advanced in age and battled cancer. He was a key part of some of the most important recordings to come out of New Orleans in the last fifty years. He'll be missed dearly. Play us out, Charles.
