Word: gras
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...begun, like fortunately few days that summer, with the smell of vomit and the sound of retching. Matt and Andrew had been out until 4 a.m. drinking on Bourbon Street—New Orleans’ main stretch, where, before Hurricane Katrina drowned the city, Mardi Gras beads were available year-round and brightly lit bars served frozen cocktails from spinning machines, 7-Eleven-style. But the vomiting was all courtesy of an anonymous roommate they’d met in the bunk beds of their hostel, a place called India House. They shrugged it off, washed their faces...
...French Quarter and the Garden District lie dark and deserted, a wasteland of downed power lines, cars with flat tires, massive Spanish oaks toppled at their roots and scattered reminders of the city's former self--a cookbook open to a recipe for ham croquettes, strings of Mardi Gras beads. What little life remains in New Orleans is largely devoted to counting the dead, a task so vast and grim that even the city's coroner, Frank Minyard, doesn't hazard a guess at what lies beneath the receding waters. "We don't really know what's in the houses...
...world are finally addressing the fact that there is nothing particularly romantic or fun about New Orleans’ desperate poverty and social inequalities. I don’t think they’re going to be able to forget about it for a while. The next Mardi Gras is going to be a lot more subdued...
Their music exploded irrepressibly from the forced integration of these castes to sweep the world as the definitive American art form. New Orleans, the Crescent City, the Big Easy--home of Mardi Gras, the second-line parade, the po' boy sandwich, the shotgun house--is so many people's favorite city. But not favorite enough to embrace the integrated superiority of its culture as a national objective. Not favorite enough to digest the gift of supersized soul internationally embodied by the great Louis Armstrong. Over time, New Orleans became known as the national center for frat-party-type decadence...
...both for its charm and its rot, not just from the termites consuming whole neighborhoods but from a corrupt police force, dissolving tax base, neglected infrastructure, rising poverty and a murder rate that inspired old-timers to pack a gun beneath their tuxes on their way to the Mardi Gras parade, could hardly have been less equipped to cope with a catastrophe that everyone knew was coming. "Half of Louisiana is under water," former lawmaker Billy Tauzin used to say, "and the other half is under indictment." Three of the top state emergency officials were recently indicted for mishandling disaster...