Frozen Dead Guy Days, part II: The Polar Plunge!

Sorry for the inundation of photos, but I feel they speak for themselves:

Splash!

Retro Bathing Suit Man

Everybody's got a little Elvis in them...

The safety dudes enjoying a float before people start jumping in...

Running cold after the plunge...

The Caped Crusader

This kid was dressed in a "Death" costume, and then he lost his mask in the water and was really upset...

The little guy almost didn't do it...

The dry suit the safety guys (firemen) wore while sitting in the water...

Norway vs. Sweden!

Superman!

The Belly Flop

The Piggy Back Jump... she threw her nice faux-fur hat to the firedude sitting on the side before jumping in...

So in order to jump in, you had to sign a waiver that basically said: "If you die, it's not our fault." We didn't jump only because 1) there was no one to hold our stuff and 2) we really didn't have the $40 to spare that it would cost us to jump in. Maybe next year...

Frozen Dead Guy Days, Part I

So there’s this frozen dead guy. He used to be frozen in Norway, which is where he lived and died and froze (because Norway is cold). He died, he froze, and then he was shipped to a cryonics lab in California, where he hung out as a frozen dead guy in liquid nitrogen. His family wanted to take care of dad/grandpa (as good children are wont to do), so they take frozen dead Grandpa in and keep him at an average of -60 degrees F in a shed in Nederland, Colorado, where the happy family dreamed of inventing their very own cryonics lab (presumably without being scientists) using dry ice (or, “Po Man’s Liquid Hydrogen”). Grandson gets deported for overstaying his welcome (green card), and Daughter (Grandson’s Mom) gets evicted because she’s living in her house with no electricity or plumbing and with a frozen dead dude, all three of which are apparently against the law. But because Daughter was do distraught that her father might defrost, the city adopts a (get this, its great) Grandfather Clause (I know, right!?) for the anti-dead-guy-in-freezer law, and a local environmental company and a cryonics preservation company band together to assure that Grandpa stays frozen and sanitary. They even built a shed for Grandpa, in honor of him being dead and frozen. In double the honor, the town holds Frozen Dead Guy Days every March (beginning in 2002), featuring several delectable events, such as a parade (can’t have a festival without a parade!), coffin races (with homemade coffins and homemade dead people!), a polar plunge (in which people strip down and jump in a frozen pond, fun for the whole family!), a ball (with a “best dead person” costume contest), and pancakes breakfasts (which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like). Also, live entertainment! We headed up to them thar hills to see a band that is supposed to be much better live than they are on their CD (Elephant Revival, and they are!!), as well as some other unwashed hippy bluegrass bands (the best kind!).

Scenes from the Parade:

The obligatory old farm equipment pictures!

The covered pedestrian bridge over Boulder Creek, the main pathway to the beer tent!
You can really see in this shot up around the edges how its getting blurry... yeah, water got INTO my lens, and then proceeded to fog up the inside of the camera... I think it may be time for a new lens...

The bustling little town of Nederland, CO... this is the town's 1700 people mulling around after the parade

Bear! Rawr!

Jonmikel and his long hair

A hearse in the parade passing by the town's original Panama Canal Steam Shovel!

Snow prophylactics

She got lost in the parade...

Mini-Bear! Rawr!

People in the parade... these guys all went on to compete in the coffin races (to be featured in a later post)

New Orleans, 1/15-16/09

After scoping out St. Louis Cemetery I (the others were a track through the ghetto and not high on our "let's walk to it" list), we navigated our way through a dog parade (complete with those soppy dog owners who dress their dogs up in pink sweaters and such), played with a pit bull puppy, and established ourselves at a hole-in-the-wall bar (I bet you didn't know there were any of those in the French Quarter, did you?) serving crayfish. Only they were out, so we had shrimp at the crayfish price and red beans and rice. We walked around, did some shopping, walked along the river, putzed, and ended up at another seafood-and-beer place for dinner, followed by a stroll along Bourbon Street to take in the shenanigans. We then stepped it up a bit by closing out a jazz bar with wine. One of those dark, seedy, brick-lined bars off a more lonely street, packed full of wine drinkers in slinky, stylish clothes. Our final stop for the night was the Cafe du Monde at about 1 am, experiencing the daytime tourist destination the way Louis and Lestat experienced it, dark and damp and full of smoke and shifty conversation. Locals and the homeless mingled freely, sipping coffee and licking powdered sugar off sticky, dirty fingers, absorbed in one another and hardly taking notice of the only tourists venturing that way so late at night.

The next morning we hopped a ferry to "historic" Algiers, across the river and made up of rows of dockyards and storage containers. We also managed to find some quick and wonderfully messy peel-and-eat crayfish at an eatery we visited yesterday, and we caught a cab to the airport while I picked shellfish entrails from my fingernails. Never could get that pealing right.

Andrew Jackson proudly surveying his very own Square

St. Louis Cathedral

Loved this set of townhouses in the French Quarter...

As an aside, our cab driver to the airport was a fabulous guy from Haiti who looked like he had lived long and hard. He had an almost understandable French-Caribbean accent, and I'm pretty sure he came to New Orleans for the voodoo. :-)

New Orleans, 2/15/09

Cemeteries are inadvertently interesting places. They are meant to hold our dead, to give them a place free from construction or destruction when they can no longer defend themselves from the encroachment of the real world. But the real world is fascinated by such places. We visit cemeteries without knowing a single person buried there. We run our hands over the smooth marble of headstones, make rubbings of intricate designs, tread lightly over freshly piled soil and admire the flowers marking graves. We landscape them, put playgrounds in them, build fountains in them, take naps in the sun in them, meander and loiter. They become tourist attractions, things of beauty, monuments to lives lived fully, a commemoration of life. Why are we so fascinated by cemeteries? Are we awed by death, or are we awed by life?


From St. Louis Cemetery I in New Orleans:

Marie Laveau's tomb, covered with offerings

Jonmikel "chimping," referring to the habit (addiction) of checking your photos in a DSLR after you take them to make sure they look OK... Jonmikel really doesn't do this, but I do!

New Orleans, 2/14/09

Calm and safety never inspire.

Cities of sin, of sex, of violence, of trouble have been inspiring poets and novelists and musicians and philosophers and artists for centuries. Dark, shadowy, shady, damp, old cities. Cities where you pop your collar in secrecy and clutch your bag tighter in anxiety and walk a little faster at night. Cities that seem dark and forbidding well into the day and despite the sunlight. Cities worn and tired and alive. Dangerous places. Places with long, brutal pasts. Violent places. Passionate places. Venice. Tangier. Havana. New Orleans. Port-au-Prince. Prague. Contradictions and confusion.

There are no famous paintings of Columbus, OH, but Columbus does not have the chilling brutal reputation of New Orleans. Safety does not seem to inspire passion or hate or fear or love or lust. It inspires the “Fair-to-Middling,” the “Just Scratching By,” the “Longing for Something More.” The rich and stable who are dull and dry.

I’ve been struggling to find something to say about New Orleans that hasn’t already been said in an Anne Rice book or a Louis Armstrong ballad. That it drives people mad with the desire to sing or write or paint, to live, is a given. The heat, the sweat, the cobblestones, the voodoo and Creole and worn paint and falling shutters. The smells of boiling crawfish, spices, cigar smoke, beer, and oil and urine. The grinding of boats against docks, saxophones against the screech and shuffle of cars, wailing sirens against overwhelmed voices and clinking beer glasses. The poverty, the tiredness, the aimlessness, the helplessness. Characteristics that have epitomized New Orleans since its birth. To say that New Orleans has ever been a safe place, a happy place, and peaceful place is to forget what it is that makes art so great. New Orleans has never been a “safe” place, so to indicate that the poverty and violence and bigotry is only getting worse is to forget where such a place came from. New Orleans was born from the smoldering cinders of poverty and violence and bigotry, of dark secrets in dark places.

To love and to hate New Orleans are one in the same, and most people intimately familiar with the city often feel an overabundance of both. Residents can swing from loathing to lust in a matter of words, mentioning the unspeakable devastation from Katrina and the poverty following it in the same sentence they use to emulate the beauty and passion of Mardi Gras. The city arouses the extreme, extreme emotions, extreme behavior, extreme artistic expression, extreme deficiency living crushed against extreme wealth.










Birthday fun in New Orleans. We arrived at our hotel and were promptly greeted by a pre-Mardi Gras parade. Apparently they start celebrations earlier and earlier each year, this year beginning back in mid-January. We had raw oysters and micro-brews for lunch, hit up Pat O'Brien's for an original hurricane and a very tasty mint julip, and then wandered around town for the rest of the night, taking in the sights, smells, noises of the city, the artists and street musicians and wayward horses and jugglers and bead throwers.

Bucket List

I told my mother than I would write up a bucket list that improves upon the lame-o one going around on facebook, so, here it is!

Bucket List

(x) See the Northern Lights
(x) Ride a camel in the Sahara Desert
( ) Climb Mt. Kilimanjaro
( ) SCUBA dive the Great Barrier Reef
(x) Become a certified SCUBA diver
( ) Sky Dive
( ) Swim with Great White Sharks
( ) Learn to speak a foreign language fluently
(x) Fill up a passport
( ) Train a mustang
(x) Live in a foreign country
(x) Work on an archaeological dig
( ) Sail down the Amazon River
(x) Go on safari in the Serengeti
(x) Go at least a week without showering
(x) Go whitewater rafting
(x) Swim with dolphins
(x) Write a book (working on it!)
(x) Pay off my student loans (I did once, and then I got more loans out!)
(x) Kiss the Blarney Stone
( ) Learn to Tango in Buenos Aires
(x) Learn to belly dance
(x) Learn CPR
( ) Get a tattoo (I have it picked out)
(x) Find a record player and actually sync up Dark Side of the Moon and the Wizard of Oz
(x) Look up the significance of all the things Billy Joel mentions in “We Didn’t Start the Fire”
(x) Go to the World Series
( ) Go to the Super Bowl (alternatively: see the Bengals FINALLY go back to the Superbowl)
(x) Sail around the world
( ) Visit all 50 states (6 to go, but one is Delaware and one is Alabama, and I’m not sure how I feel about that…)
(x) Walk on the Great Wall of China
(x) Go to the Taj Mahal
( ) Go on a cattle drive
( ) Ride the Orient Express
( ) See the Pyramids of Egypt
( ) See the sun rise on all 7 continents (Only two to go!)
( ) Go to Carnivale in Venice
(x) Go to a Pagan Ceremony
(x) Go dogsledding
( ) Stay in an over-water bungalow
( ) Go to Petra
( ) Go to La Tomatina in Spain
(x) Break a horse
(x) Eat food I can’t identify (do it all the time!)
( ) See the mosques of Mali
(x) Go out into the ocean and spend time where you can’t see anything but ocean
(x) See the Khmer ruins in Cambodia
( ) Go to the Kentucky Derby

Place an X by all the things you've done and remove the X from the ones you have not, then send it to your friends (including me).

Things you have done during your lifetime:
() Gone on a blind date (have never needed to)
(x) Skipped school
( ) Watched someone die
( ) Viewed an autopsy
(x) Have a passport
(x) Been to Canada
(x) Been to Mexico
(x) Been to Florida
( ) Been to Hawaii
(x) Been on a plane
( ) Flown a plane
( ) Been on a helicopter
(x) Been lost
(x) Fired a gun
(x) Smoked
(x) Had a hangover
(x) Gone to Washington, DC
(x) Swam in the ocean
(x) Cried yourself to sleep
(x) Had surgery
(x) Played cops and robbers
(x) Recently colored with crayons (well yeah!)
(x) Sang Karaoke
(x) Paid for a meal with coins only
( ) Been to the top of the St. Louis Arch
(x) Done something you told yourself you wouldn't.
(x) Made prank phone calls
(x) Given first aid to a stranger
(x) Given money to a homeless person
(x) Been down Bourbon Street in New Orleans (just last weekend! I got (earned) beads!)
(x) Laughed until some kind of beverage came out of your nose & elsewhere
(x) Caught a snowflake on your tongue
(x) Danced in the rain-naked
(x) Written a letter to Santa Claus
(x) Been kissed under the mistletoe
(x) Watched the sunrise with someone
(x) Tried Sushi
(x) Been in love
(x) Been betrayed
(x) Been published
(x) Blown bubbles
(x) Gone ice-skating
(x) Gone to the movies
( ) Been deep sea fishing
(x) Driven across the United States (many, many times…)
( ) Been in a hot air balloon
( ) Been sky diving
(x) Been kayaking
(x) Gone snowmobiling
( ) Been surfing
(x) Been in a hurricane
(x) Experienced an earthquake
(x) Seen a tornado
(x) Lived in more than one country
(x) Lay down outside at night and admired the stars while listening to the crickets
(x) Seen a falling star and made a wish
(x) Enjoyed the beauty of Old Faithful Geyser
(x) Seen the Statue of Liberty
(x) Gone to the top of Seattle Space Needle
(x) Been on a cruise
(x) Traveled by train
(x) Traveled by motorcycle
(x) Been horse back riding
(x) Ridden on a San Francisco Cable Car
(x) Been to Disneyland/ Disney World
( ) Truly believe in the power of prayer
( ) Believe in Karma (I used to, but I don’t anymore)
(x) Hate someone
(x) Had a near death experience
(x) Are close with your family
(x) Been on TV
(x) Been in a rain forest
(x) Seen whales in the ocean
(x) Been to Niagara Falls
(x) Played a sport
(x) Ridden on an elephant
(x) Ridden on a camel
(x) Swam with dolphins
(x) Held a snake
( ) Been to the Olympics
(x) Walked on the Great Wall of China
(x) Saw and heard a glacier calf
(x) Love to read
( ) Been spinnaker flying
( ) Been water-skiing
(x) Been snow-skiing (snowboarding?)
(x) Been to Westminster Abbey
( ) Been to the Louvre
(x) Swam in the Mediterranean
( ) Been to the Great Pyramid in Egypt
(x) Been to a Major League Baseball game
(x) Been to a National Football League game