Our fearless band of part-time pirates, the Buccaneers of Lake Charles, descended upon a local bowling alley this evening to compete for some fantastic prizes. That’s right- they all consisted of some sort of alcohol. Sure, go ahead and laugh, but you have to admit. It sure beats some stupid trophy that will sit on the shelf in the den until your wife one day finally tosses it out along with your back issues of Sports Illustrated.

We have two bowling alleys here in Lake Charles, and the fact that we picked the less well maintained of the two is an understatement. The lanes appear not to have been re-waxed since they cancelled M*A*S*H. My lane actually looked like a terrorist parked a car bomb on it at one time. It didn’t really matter, though, the way our group bowls.

The first thing I noticed when I sat down to put my bowling shoes on was that there was a sign posted warning how bowling is a physical sport and that could potentially be hazardous. I know that in this day and age businesses have to warn you about everything, but I never thought I’d see bowling lumped in with other physical pursuits such as bungee jumping and whitewater rafting.

The fact that we were competing for the Grand Prize of a bottle of Crystal Skull vodka brought out the best in us tonight. Some of us actually managed to strike some pins with the ball, particularly as the night wore on and the alcohol loosened us all up.

No, I did not win the Crystal Skull vodka, nor did I win the prize for being the first person to fall on his ass while attempting to deliver the ball. Next time I’ll drink more beer and thus improve my chances.

We had another eventful week here in the Pelican State. Here’s a summary of the top stories.

• A Justice of the Peace in Tangipahoa Parish has created a whirlwind of attention in the international media when he refused to marry an interracial couple. This story caused reporters from as far away as Russia to temporarily divert thier attention from President Obama and focus their crosshairs on Louisiana. And, although they couldn’t actually see the state from where they sat, it did not stop them from shooting wildly from the hip. The unfortunate result of this volley is that now the rest of the world views Louisiana as a bigoted, redneck state. We all know the truth, though, and that is that any self-respecting redneck would sit down and drink with anybody wh has cold beer, regardless of thier race or nationality.
• And speaking of our Grand Poobah, President Obama visited New Orleans last week to catch up on how things are progressing with the recovery from Hurricane Katrina. He got the predictable response from New Orlenians- that the city would be a veritable Emerald City if only the feds would give them lots more money fast(unless Mayor Nagin had his druthers, in which case the city would be a diferent color).

  The Wiz replied saying that if he could write a check, he would. The arthritis in his writing hand apparently has come on quite suddenly, probably from the city’s humid air. It should pass as soon as he gets back to Washington.

• The Saints further proved themselves a force to be reckoned with in the NFL by totally embarassing the now formerly undefeated New York Giants. Their quarterback, Eli Manning, is the son of Archie Manning of the Saints of yore. This further goes to show that, no matter how talented, a Manning just can’t win in New Orleans.

  Meanwhile, it’s reported from hell that Satan has changed into a long-sleeved shirt.

• Up in Wisconsin, a black bear wandered into a convenience store and made himself at home in the beer cooler. Wildlife officials ended up tranquilizing it, but if they had just waited a few hours that action probably wouln’t have been necessary. Rumors are the bear wandered up from Baton Rouge. I think it was the LSU cap that gave him away.

I’ve got to apologize to you, dear readers, for not having posted for the past week or so. Not wanting to go on public assistance and thus add to the already-burgeoning National Debt, I had to take some time to attend to my other career- the one that actually pays me money. After all, I do consider myself to be a patriotic sort, and so I couldn’t bear having the sole responsibility of having thrown our tenuous economic recovery completely off-track.

What has happened is that I’ve been assigned to a new project “team” at work.

“Ok, so what’s the big deal?” you might ask. Well, in the corporate world, “teams” are considered to be a very big deal indeed, and thus it becomes important to invest the time to build the quality relationships that are essential to the team’s functioning as a cohesive unit. Otherwise, open hostilities of the magnitude seen in congressional hearings or on episodes of “Survivior” are bound to erupt.

In order to build an effective “team”, it is necessary to invest countless hours in “team building” activities. These activities have to be held after regular working hours, outside of the office setting. This way, so the theory goes, you can get to know what everybody is like when they’re not engaged in the details of conducting actual business. In practice, though, you sometimes become exposed to too much information, if you know what I mean.

In order to do effective “team building”, the first thing you have to do is find some common interest shared by most, if not all, team members. It does no good, for instance, to go on a hunting trip when half the members have never hunted for anything more than the morning paper after the delivery boy had lodged it into a tree limb.

Now, ours is a multi-cultural “team”, representing countries as diverse as The United States, South Africa, and Texas. Thus, finding something in common was a particular challenge in our case. However, after much deliberation, we were able to find one activity that we all equally enjoyed- that of drinking beer.

So, as you see, with all of this time I have had to invest at the Fox and Hound Tavern downing pints of Shiner Bock so that our new team can become a harmonious entity, it has cut into my time for writing. It’s tough sometimes, but one is forced to make these types of personal sacrifices for the greater good.

Now that things have pretty much gelled into some sort of amorphous blob, I can now turn my attention back towards posting those articles that keep you, dear readers, informed of the important news items from around the state. I realize that you all have been in a complete state of bewilderment during this lapse, but don’t worry. I promise you, things in the state haven’t gotten any less bizarre since my last post.

A good friend of mine heard of this technique from some old timer, and so he shared it with me. It may work for other wild game gumbos as well. There’s probably a law against it somewhere, but when did that ever stop an ol’ coon-ass?

Ingredients:

Corn
Early Times Whiskey
Ducks
Your other favorite gumbo ingredients- roux, onions, green peppers, celery, spices, and the like.

1. Take the corn and soak it in the Early Times whiskey for several hours.
2. After the corn is well soaked, take it and spread it around on your lawn or even in your driveway.
3. Wait for the ducks to come, which they eventually will do. They are attracted to corn like a certain President is to television cameras.
4. Allow the ducks to forage on the corn, and then wait a short while. They will begin to show the tell tale signs of alcohol consumption, such as singing karaoke.
5. Once you notice these tell-tale signs, go out and grab a couple of the staggering birds by the neck. This should not pose to be a challenge.
6. Butcher the ducks, and prepare the gumbo according to your favorite recipe
7. Put on a pot of rice and enjoy.

I am told that the meat obtained from this method is very tender and not the least bit gamey, as the ducks will have suffered absolutely no trauma having been caught by this method. Lest the animal rights activists criticize me for publishing this, don’t you think that this is a better way for them to go than by the more traditional method, by which they neither get fed or get any whiskey?

I have been going camping at a folk festival in Texas for the past several years. This year, I decided to bring my wife along. I’d like to say she got a rude awakening, but that would be a mis-statement, because she got no sleep to wake up from. I tried to warn her.

She is used to camping in state parks, where they are anal about keeping the campgrounds quiet after dark. There, if you’re out walking at night, and you step on a twig, the noise thus created will cause the guy in the fifth wheel across the road to call the park ranger on you for disturbing his viewing of the World War II battle scene he’s watching by satellite on the Hitler-y Channel.

The experience of camping at a folk festival is quite the opposite. This is because you are camping out with musicians, which are known to be a nocturnal species. Here I think they will evict you from the campground if you are too quiet at night. The guitars here play until, and sometimes past, sunup.

We pitched our tent where I usually do, near a place called “The Crossroads”. The Crossroads is ground zero for the all-night song circles, because it is under a big street lamp. Itattracts musicians the same way it does moths.

I understand the situation at the folk festival, and I somewhat like camping at the Crossroads, as the music and laughter lulls me to sleep after a hard night of drinking at Camp Tequila Mockingbird. There, I play guitar until the tequila makes me forget where my fingers are; then it’s off to be serenaded to sleep- not too difficult in my condition.

One one particular evening during this festival, however, my wife had apparently gone too light on the tequila. As we retired to out tent at some hour that begins with an “f”, the music from the Crossroads Gang was a bit too much for her.

“Go out and tell them to stop playing; it’s late!” she complained.

“No, actually it’s early,” I replied. “It all depends on how you look at it.”

Now I knew full well that trying to get these musicians to stop playing would be about as effective as waling up to a pack of hungry lions who are feasting on their latest kill and tell them to stop eating. However, for the sake of preserving my marriage, I went anyway.

The result was as I expected. After returning to the tent, I noticed a subtle shift in the repertiore at the crossroads from Simon and Garfunkel to Guns ‘N Roses. Oh, well, at least I did my duty for the good of the marriage.

The moral of the story is, if you want to sleep while camping at a folk festival, either drink a lot of tequila at night, or take a nap in the afternoon, if the Texas sun will let you.

This is a short little tune that was inspired by a comment from a co-worker one Friday morning. Standing there at the coffee pot, in response to the usual “how ya’ doin’”, I answered as many of us would, with a “TGIF!” To that he said something like, “Isn’t it funny to think that we just seem to be wishing our lives away one week at a time?”

That comment stuck with me, and I found a perfect use for it here. The song is one I threw together with the intent of creating a good opener for a CD. Well, until that CD gets made, I thought I’d put it here on the blog for your listening pleasure:

“First Shot of the Weekend”

I came across this story earlier in the week about a Texas man who was arrested in Mansfield on drug charges when some construction workers called police after noticing him crawling “on his hands and knees, eating mud, and growling like a dog”. I don’t know what kind of drugs this guy was on, but it makes me recall a song that was out back in the sixties about that sort of thing. It went something like this:

One pill makes you larger and one pill makes you small
And the one you ate last Thursday made you want to lick your balls
Go ask Alan when he starts to crawl

The construction workers should feel fortunate that the guy didn’t feel inclined to hump one of their legs.

The thing that really got me about this story was the mud eating part. As far as I know, dogs, or any animal for that matter, are not known to eat mud. Now, hypothetically speaking, if I were a dog, I think I would go find the best restaurant in town, hang outside the kitchen door, and beg for scraps. You can do much, much better than mud, with the possible exception of a few all-you–can–eat buffets that I have come across.

Better yet, if I were a dog, I’d go and hang out someplace like the Schooner Wharf Bar in Key West, Florida. It’s one of my favorite bars in Key West, and in this establishment dogs are not only welcome, they’re treated like royalty. But I can’t explain this scene as well as singer/songwriter Michael McCloud. If you’re ever in Key West, you can see him play there most afternoons. So, let’s hear him describe it to you:

In this story by 9NEWS in Baton Rouge, a 25 year-old motorist, apparently realizing he’d had a few too many to be behind the wheel, decided to do the responsible thing and get a hotel room to sleep it off. Problem was, what he thought was a Holiday Inn Express was actually the Troop A Station of the Louisiana State Police. I suppose the uniforms of bellhops and state troopers looked pretty much the same to him in his state. One thing for sure is he did manage to find accommodations for the night, just no mint on the pillow, no continental breakfast, and no pay-per-view movies. But you can bet your boots he did get a wake up call the next morning.

I just hope he didn’t make matters worse and try to steal any bath towels.