It’s hot. It makes us twitchy. Sure, September is here, but where in the heck is that fall weather? Since soaring temps tend to make us do crazy things, we at NolaVie are relieving hot-weather stress with a short series of daily rants. Just, you know, to vent. In the heat. Please join in.
Internal improvements or the beginning stage of the Versailles of sand castles? It’s hard to tell these days.
End-of-summer Rant No. 3
In case you haven’t noticed (hopefully you have), road work in New Orleans not only takes AN ETERNITY to complete but also seems to be haphazardly organized, burden-inducing and, generally, bearing the characteristics of a 3-year-old’s adventures in the sandbox. In fact, we’re pretty sure City Hall has a Wheel of (mis)Fortune set up in its offices where a well-suited Pat Sajak lookalike spins to determine the next street we’re going to demolish and leave wound up in red tape and orange cones for t-minus infinity days.
This got us thinking: Perhaps the city’s experiments in roadwork may NOT EVEN BE GROUNDED (so to speak) in the principle of internal improvement.
So if the city isn’t actually fixing the street, WHAT THE #!&##! are they doing out there with all of those demolition toys? Join us in a group exercise to fill in the blank:
City crews aren’t really repairing the roads, they’re actually _________.
1. Searching for the buried treasure that metal detector-owning Steve in Accounting promised was there.
2. Coping with their lingering distress about mom taking away their Tonka trucks too soon.
3. Building the Versailles of sand castles, or, rather, asphalt-dirt castles.
4. Upcycling 28 Christmases-worth of saved red ribbons.
5. Testing Fred in Logistical Operation’s theory that you can, in fact, dig your way to China.
6. Fulfilling their childhood aspirations of becoming archaeologists by excavating ancient, 5-year-old cockroach and squirrel remnants.
7. Planting Babylon.
8. Building a moat … Oh wait, we’re below sea level, aren’t we?
9. Looking for that time capsule Napolean buried in 1802.
10. Excavating tunnels for a new subway system. Oh wait, we’re below sea level, aren’t we?
11. Patching 100-year-old leaky water pipes with Silly Putty.
12. Burying telephone lines so that Carnival throws don’t hang around, literally, for a year.
13. Digging a lazy river through the metropolitan area.
14. Drilling for oil. Somehow we have to balance the city budget.
15. Making us crazy.
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