A story came out recently about Governor Bobby Jindal’s use of a State Police helicopter on Sundays to attend church services around the state at the taxpayers’ expense. Many say that this is a complete waste of tax money at a time when the budget is tight. When I think about it, I’m not so sure that that’s true.

Our governor is a very busy man, and he’s got lots of important things to do, like go around the country and atttend various fucntions while he’s not getting ready to run for President in 2012. And if your church is anything like mine, the mad dash out of the parking lot at the end of the service resembles the traffic during a mandatory hurricane evacuation. Our governor just doesn’t have the time to contend with all of this traffic, so he needs the helicopter.

I personally think this thing is all the fault of the church-goers. If they’d just take their time and proceed to exit in an orderly manner, then perhaps Governor Jindal could get by with just a stretch Hummer limo. I could maybe understand this behaviour during NFL season. Our pastor, for instance, obviously not a football fan, likes to stretch the services out almost to the noon kickoff time. But this mad dash for the exits happens 52 Sundays a year!

I’ll use my church again as an example. I play guitar in the folk choir, so I always get to the church early to rehearse, before the preceding service has let out. Even with my puny compact, I can hardly squeeze by the cars that are just barely backed in to the parking spaces, front ends pointed toward the exit. They look like they’re lined up waiting for the green flag at a NASCAR race.

At the end of our service, when the priest says, “The Mass has ended, go in peace,” you’d think he’d actually said, “Gentlemen, start your engines!” The pews are empty before I can strike the first chord on my guitar. I once suggested to my choir director that we change the recessional hymn from “Just A Closer Walk With Thee” to “The Race Is On”.

So take it easy on Bobby here. Fellow church-gores, if we really want to alleviate this situation we should organize some raffles and bake sales to raise money for HOV lanes in our parking lots.

A little while back we reported on the eight years worth of Mayor Ray Nagin’s missing e-mails. Now, I come across another strory about technical foul-ups in the city (although the e-mail deal may not have actually been a foul-up). It seems that, a few years back, the city spent $6 million to install cameras in some of the more, let’s say, unstable neighborhoods in an effort to crack down on crime.

So, how well has this program been protecting the citizens? About as well as the Saints’ defense did last year protecting the scoreboard. (For the record, they were tied for 5th worst in the NFL. So maybe in fact they did slightly better than the cameras.) Depending on who you believe, these cameras have caught either none or one criminal since they were deployed. The city claims one, but that may have been from a camera owned by a citizen and the city is just taking credit for it.

The problem: it seems that most of the time, these cameras are either not working or producing videos so fuzzy that they can’t even identify the criminals. A teenager can make a better You-Tube video while he’s riding a stunt bike.

Perhaps the city should have hired a technology chief whose skills were at least slightly above a neandrathal’s (with due apologies to the Geico cavemen). Or at least it should have been somebody besides Greg Meffert, whose skills were more in the area of graft than in gadgets.

I’ll tell you how the city could have saved a whole bunch of money and made a serious dent in the crime rate. Instead of cameras, they could have brought in a bunch of retired Catholic school nuns to patrol the streets. If they’re anything like my old 6th grade teacher, Sister Candida, they have more eyes on their heads than a potato that’s been in the pantry for three weeks. They could spot a perpetrator in an instant and quickly demobilize him with a well placed eraser shot to the temple from thirty yards. Then, she’d single-handedly drag him by his earlobe straight to the principal’s office- I mean, police station.

Anyone who’s ever attended a Catholic grade school would agree with me here that such a plan would make New Orleans one of the safest cities in the nation.