Diary of a Mad Costumer

I had a great phone chat with Jennifer the other day. Well, maybe it was a few days ago. Anyway, she was telling me how she called Man Law on Kevin for leaving the room before the end of the Saints/Bears game (yeah, the one in which our beloved Saints lost...but we still love them! They came through for New Orleans better than FEMA ever has). Apparently it was illeagal for him to "leave the game" before it had ended (I mean, really, Kevin! Even I watched the whole game). When he replied that he was just in the other room, he pointed out that if they were at the stadium, he would technically be leaving the stadium before the game was over. Good point.

All that to say that I was looking on YouTube for the beer commercials about Man Laws. I was working with Eddie Griffin when he went to film these commercials...I know this because I invited him to come celebrate my birthday that weekend. So, while looking for those beer commercials (Miller Lite, I know that now), I came across some other beer commercials starring none other than my new friend, Travis. It might be funnier when you know him, but still...here he is. And for the record, I don't think he did much acting in this commercial. He really does act that gay around fluffy little doggies.

Oh, and there's this one, but I don't think it's as funny. Maybe because it's hard to tell that he's holding wine coolers. Maybe he should have come out of the store with some Boone's Farm. Can I get an "amen", Amber?

So, all of this leads me to wonder...does he get all the Milwaukee's Best he can drink? And if so, how come I wasn't in on it when he was in The Shreve?

**I guess I shouldn't poke fun at Travis being squashed by a giant can of beer without plugging the movie he is making. Check out the trailer on the website, and if you like it, or think you can help get his movie made in any way, please click on the "help up" link at the top of the page. I haven't been officially asked to do wardrobe for the movie, but he did mention that he although he couldn't pay me, I could live in a tent in Southwestern Tennessee during the shoot. But, I don't know how that will work because Nashville isn't in Southwestern Tennessee, it's pretty much in the center. Good think I told him I'd think about it...

Dr. Paul was one of my favorite customers at Fair Grinds. I only met Helen a handful of times, but she was a doll. Paul and Helen were the type of people you want to emulate in your life. This news breaks my heart:

From NOLA.com:

Killings Brink the City to it's Bloodied Knees
In the sixth New Orleans murder in less than 24 hours, a woman was killed and her husband shot in their home Thursday about 5:30 a.m., said police, who found the bleeding man kneeling at the door of the couple's Faubourg Marigny home, clutching their 2-year-old son.

The toddler was not hurt; the husband, 35, underwent surgery at Elmwood/Charity Trauma Center, police said. The woman, 36, was dead at the scene, police said. Friends identified the Marigny couple as Helen Hill, an animator and filmmaker, and Paul Gailiunas, a family doctor.

Including another murder on New Year's Day, the latest violence brings the new year's total to at least seven slayings in four days, though one of the apparent killings -- a woman's body found Wednesday rolled up in a throw rug on a Lower 9th Ward street -- remains officially an unclassified death. In the past week, 12 people have been murdered in the city.

Police have not identified most of the victims and appear to have few leads in any of the cases.

The Marigny shootings -- for which police offered no motive -- capped a wave of bloodshed severe even by New Orleans standards, and came three days after Police Superintendent Warren Riley called a year-end news conference to put a positive spin on the 2006 murder total of 161, which he called the lowest in 30 years. On a per-capita basis, however, even the most optimistic projection of the post-Katrina city's drastically shrunken population makes that figure an increase from previous years.

The style of the slayings -- which in at least two cases took place with police officers stationed only blocks away -- ranged from a single shot at point-blank range to a spray of 17 bullets. Some victims "had heroin in their hand and crack in their pocket," said New Orleans Deputy Chief Steven Nicholas at a late morning news conference Thursday.

The killings appeared to have no particular geographic pattern, with the exception of two people killed on separate days near the same spot on Josephine Street, as victims fell in neighborhoods citywide, from the Lower 9th Ward to Marigny to Central City to Bayou St. John to Desire.

Stopping the Violence
By Thursday morning, news of Gailiunas' and Hill's shootings had reached the Esplanade Pharmacy, which abuts the former Little Doctors Neighborhood Clinic, the sliding-scale doctors' office that Gailiunas co-founded before the storm.

Staff there talked about Gailiunas' devotion to his patients, many of whom were indigent. "He went out of his way for a lot of people, trying to make sure that they had their medicine, trying to find ways to pay for their medicine, and helping them get samples," said pharmacist-in-charge Gwendolyn Charles, who has owned the corner pharmacy with her husband for 26 years.

Charles said she is appalled at the surge in violence and attributes it partly to people "who are coming home to the city with nothing for them to come home to."

The violence won't stop until everyone sees themselves and others as part of a larger community, she said.

"At this point, we all have to band together and do whatever we can do to help each other," Charles said.

Riley, out of town Thursday with U.S. Attorney Jim Letten, was unavailable for comment, said his spokeswoman, Bambi Hall. Riley and Letten had attended a meeting or seminar in North Carolina with David Kennedy, the director of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

In a morning news conference, police offered few details on their investigations, with Lt. Joe Meisch, commander of the NOPD homicide division, saying he didn't want to "taint" any of the probes. Police said they've gotten no help from witnesses, a long-standing problem in local murder investigations.

"At this moment, we don't have one single witness to come forward. . . . We understand there is a risk associated with that," Nicholas said. "But we need witnesses."

"This is not CSI," the deputy chief said. "You don't solve crimes under the microscope."

'We are begging'

Nicholas said police know that people saw several of the killings, but didn't say which ones.

"We are begging all members of the community to come forward," he said.

At least two of the day's shootings were retaliatory, and some involved the drug trade, police said. Nicholas cited "a culture, a certain population in this city intent on committing violent crime."

Randall Thomas, 19, victim of a fatal shooting Jan. 3 in the 2500 block of LaSalle Street, has been identified as the killer of Corey Hayes, 28, who was the year's first homicide victim. Hayes was killed in the 2300 of Fouth Street in Central City on New Year's Day. Thomas was killed in retaliation for Hayes' slaying, Meisch said, but police have not arrested or identified a suspect in Thomas' shooting.

Darlene Cusanza, director of Crimestoppers, also pleaded for leads in the cases, and took the unusual step of raising the organization's standard $2,500 reward to $3,500 for the next 48 hours.

"Enough is enough. This is an anonymous call," she said, trying to soothe the fear of retaliation. "There's no way to trace your identity."

Asked about the spike in murders, Nicholas sought to portray New Orleans violence as part of a national trend. "Murder rates are up all over," he said.

Historically, however, the city's police and court system bring a small faction of those arrested to justice. Indeed, most offenders are never arrested, and only a tiny fraction of those who are arrested are ever convicted of a crime, according to recent studies.

Witnesses fear revenge
In New Orleans, the lack of reliable witnesses has long stymied murder probes, said Anthony Radosti, deputy director of the Metropolitan Crime Commission. Many people fear street retaliation more than they trust the police's ability to protect them, Radosti said.

"In certain areas of the city, people live under the gun," he said.

The commission found that between October 2003 and September 2004, the system convicted just 12 percent of people arrested for murder or attempted murder -- a figure that doesn't include the cases in which police never make an arrest.

The poor conviction rate has remained constant through the years: Another MCC report that tracked New Orleans arrests from June 1999 to May 2000 found that only 13 percent of homicide arrests resulted in convictions.

The district attorney's office and police need to work more closely with potential witnesses to make them feel comfortable coming forward, and establish better witness protection programs, Radosti said.

The spate of murders comes after a violent post-Katrina year, despite the significantly decreased population in the city, said Peter Scharf, a criminologist at the University of New Orleans.

Scharf noted that there were 161 murders in 2006, just one less than the all-time low of the past couple decades when the murder rate dipped to 162 in 1999.

But the population in New Orleans that year was about 460,000 people, compared to today's numbers of anywhere from 181,000 to 230,000 people, the figures most often used in estimates of how many people have returned to live in the city.

If there are 220,000 people in New Orleans, the city had a 2006 per-capita murder rate of 73 per 100,000 people, said Scharf. That figure is destined to put the city near or at the top of national murder rate lists.

Riley has chafed at these comparisons, saying they are unfair because the city's population is unknown. He believes the population is much higher than the popular estimates.

Little is known
Many of the recent shootings appeared to be of a variety that has become all too routine in the city. And most of those victims remain nameless, unidentified by police. The Marigny shootings appeared to be the exception -- a seemingly settled and successful married couple, shot in their own home -- and immediately drew a public outpouring of sadness and anger from their friends.

Police offered no theory on the killing of the woman and the shooting of her husband. Authorities supplied only this account:

n Thursday, shortly before 6 a.m., police responded to reports of a shooting at a shotgun double on the corner of North Rampart and Spain streets in the Marigny neighborhood. Just inside the front door, Gailiunas was found on his knees, holding his toddler son and bleeding from gunshot wounds to his hand, forearm and cheek, police said.

Inside, his 36-year-old wife lay dead with a gunshot wound to the neck.

Both Hill and Gailiunas were community activists, volunteering at Food Not Bombs and local educational workshops, friends said.

These were people who came here and worked for the poor and helped out those in difficult situations," said Robert Thompson, a friend and owner of Fair Grinds, a Mid-City coffee shop where Hill held free filmmaking seminars.

The couple had moved into their North Rampart Street apartment in August after returning from South Carolina, other friends said. They fled their Mid-City home during Hurricane Katrina and were trying to rebuild it.

"They were proactive people that were trying to help solve the city's problems," Thompson said. "They cared."

"This is a huge loss for the city," he said.

There are more articles, pictures and video on NOLA.com. And also there is a memorial site for Helen. Please keep her, Paul and Francis in your thoughts and prayers.

Diary of a Mad Costumer

Saturday, April 7

What does MP stand for?

Friday, January 26

The things you can find on YouTube.

Friday, January 19

Learning...Please ignore

Friday, January 5

Remembering Helen

Monday, January 1

Happy New Year!

Sunday, December 31

Look Everybody! It's The M&M's Candies Man!

Saturday, December 30

Who Else Seen the Leprechaun, Say Yeah!

I am Sam. Sam I am.

What I had to say when:

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