| Submitted by: Mark R. LeeperUnited States |
| Submission Date: 15 February 2005 |
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Anyway we stopped at the Holiday Inn which was considerably more expensive than the AAA book claimed, but there was not much competition. The room is a little worn, especially the floor. We were in by about 5:30 PM, but there was not a lot to do. We stayed in for the night. For dinner I had the leftovers from Joe's Crab Shack. I think the diet of fatty foods is really starting to show on me. This is one of our cheapest trips, but it is also one of our least healthy. If you go into a barbecue place, what can you order that is healthy? What is healthy at a Mexican restaurant? Every meal I have is heavy on fat. My belt is starting to leave heavy grooves in my stomach.
Well, I guess this is an evening to rest up. All we really did today was go to one site and spent the rest of the day traveling.
I mostly worked on my log. We did watch a program on PBS about language and the acquisition of
language. I kind of wish there was some way to discuss the ideas with the people putting them forth. I really want to disagree in some places. For example, they said that before you can associate ideas with sounds you have to have syntax. Baaaahhhhh! There, I have just presented the idea in a syntax free form. Syntax implies the juxtaposition of sounds. But ideas can be communicated with single sounds and animals do it all the time. I am sure the origin of language is in animal signals and predates humans. I don't know whether animals can appreciate syntax or not but they give every sign of being able to understand sentences with multiple variables. '{Fetch/Put away} the {ball/stick}.' It may be they (say it is a dog in this case-a cat might understand but just not care) consider that to be four different sounds and they memorize the sound of each, but I doubt it. You can say 'Put away the....' and pause and the dog already knows what the action is. The dog just needs the final piece to understand the request. That is understanding syntax.
The other place I disagreed was they said that everybody knows it is correct to say 'the big, red balloon' but that nobody accepts as correct 'the red, big balloon.' I guess it is the mathematician in me but the only difference I see in those expressions is the frequency of usage. But if there are several big balloons of different colors, I would see nothing wrong with referring to the red big balloon. Adjectives are commutative.
We got a TV Guide to tell us what is on most of the stations, but it is useless for PBS since every PBS station sets up its own schedule.
Such are my thoughts in Thibodeaux.
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09/05/97--Thibodeaux and New Orleans, Louisiana:
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(Pronounced LOOZ-i-AN-a)
Up at 4 AM. Well, I went to bed early. Then I went back for a little more sleep.
At about 8:45 AM we got to the Wetland Acadian Culture Center, a sort of museum of Cajun culture. It opens at 9 AM so we sat in the parking lot eating handfuls of dry Wheat Chex. I hadn't realized General Mills had bought them out. They probably could afford to buy them and raise the price. Kellogg's and General Mills have been jacking up the price of cereals the last few years. For a while Post resisted and the prices went down a bit, but they are headed up still higher. Someone pointed out that steak and eggs is cheaper than cereal these days. It is a convenience food so people are willing to pay for convenience.
The Cajuns were French peasants who came to the New World starting in 1604 and settled first where Maine is, then moved to Nova Scotia, then called Acadie. They called themselves Acadians. The British settlers started moving into the area and made the French unwelcome.
When Nova Scotia was given to the British in the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, the Acadians were called French Nationals. The Acadians refused to sign an oath of allegiance to the English king and were forced out in 1755 in the war between England and France. In a ten-year journey they moved many places but especially to Louisiana, then owned by France. And while that territory changed hands several times, they remained.
There is a small one-room museum. They have a set of tapes they can show, but the other visitors picked first and they picked a piece on hand-fishing. Basically the Cajuns just walk into a bayou. They reach into the water, grab fish, and throw them to the shore. Supposedly it is very rare to see people hand-fish. Bears do it all the time. Normally I would not be interested in a film about fishing, but it had plenty of Cajun music and showing of Cajun food, and that interested me.
My particular interest with the Cajuns started with seeing the film Belizaire the Cajun. It is a fun film with a sort of Mark Twain feel to it with Armand Assante as a Cajun outsmarting some racists. I was particularly interested in the music which sounded to me like Blue Grass sung in French. I really got into Cajun music and to a lessor extent Zydeco. Cajun music is the music of the Cajuns, the local Blacks picked up the sound and mixed it with some others and that is Zydeco. Cajun music is almost always a fiddle and an accordion (which for some reason is not called a 'corjun') and whatever other instruments they want. If you have not heard it, it's a really peppy music with a strong beat. In New Orleans the center of Cajun music is Tipitina's. It is like Preservation Hall for jazz. For four or five dollars you get red beans and rice, about four hours of good music, and to watch a bunch of working-class people dancing and having a really good time. Really a good time.
After the hand-fishing tape we asked to see a film on the roots of the Cajuns. It was not quite as interesting, though it did have some history. It was more about how the Acadians came to Louisiana and how some returned with oxcarts to Nova Scotia. It is much like two halves of the same culture.
One thing about Louisiana, when you drive you see a bunch of meaty insects in their last instant of time. They just collect on the windshield. You here a click on the windshield and neither you nor the insect are any too pleased about it.
Evelyn saw an article recommending Bob's Cafe in Houma. We decided to look for it. Houma is a hard town to look for anything. They have two main streets a block apart. Each has a one-way stretch of two-lane highway. One road goes one way, one goes the other. We passed a seafood restaurant with a bunch of cars in front. I noticed it, but few particulars. When we decided we could not find Bob's we decided to look for my place again. We went over to the other main street and headed back in the direction we came in, never knowing if we had passed the place we were looking for or not. We returned to the first main street and hoped we would pass the restaurant again. Luckily we did. It turned out to be a place called Tubby's Seafood. I had Chicken and Sausage Gumbo and a hot tamale. Evelyn had Shrimp Gumbo. It came a little cold and they had to take it back and reheat it.
We were driving through town and there was a barber shop. I was due for a haircut eight days earlier so I figured what the heck. I got a barber 78 years old; he's been cutting hair since he was 18. I think his name was Dodie. According to him, the area is building up as a place for oil drilling. Should bring some money to the area. This is the kind of barber you hear about in the South. He was slow and deliberate and talked a lot. He believe in herbs and thinks they cured his cancer and some other problems. He suggested that perhaps Baton Rouge would be crowded with LSU fans having a big football game coming up tomorrow. We may have to plan around that. The barber put something on my neck that sort of burned. I am not sure if it felt hot or cold.
As we drove the sky looked like it was getting dark. We got hit with another lightning storm and heavy rain, but it did not last long. We were quickly in territory where not only was it not raining, it had not rained.
England never accepted that the American Revolution had succeeded, like Mexico did not accept the Texian Revolution. Their ships at sea continued to impress American sailors into duty. In 1812, the new nation declared war on Britain and attacked Canada. Britain was tied down fighting Napoleon. They didn't really want to be fighting in the Americas and the Americans did not really want to be fighting them. In the spring of 1814, Napoleon was defeated and the Americans realized they were facing an angry enemy. An attack at Fort McHenry was turned back. Francis Scott Key wrote about what it was like in the a song, 'The Star-Spangled Banner.' The British did, however, make it to Washington where they burned the White House and the Capitol Building. Eventually a piece treaty was signed in Ghent. But before word got out and before the treaty was ratified by Congress and Parliament there was one last major battle. The prize of the war would have been New Orleans. Control of the delta meant access to the Mississippi. Even had both sides known the treaty had been signed, this battle might have been fought to give the British better terms before the first treaty was ratified.
The British had 10,000 men led by thirty-six-year old Major General Sir Edward S. Peckenham, who had a very good record in the Napoleonic War. Commanding the American troops with about half as many men was Andrew Jackson.
On December 23 Jackson stopped Packenham' advance nine miles from the city. He attacked at night and stopped them by the Rodriguez Canal. They held the Americans pinned down there for better than two weeks. In spite of an infantry attack and artillery attack, Packenham could not move the Americans. The Americans we protected by the natural embankment near the canal almost like a trench. Complicating matters was that all British materials had to be ferried 64 miles.
The actual battle of New Orleans took place on the morning of October 8, 1815. It took less than two hours. He had two flanks of troops at the two sides of a wide, short rectangle across a sugar cane field, now cut down to stubble. The American rampart formed along a canal at the far side of the rectangle.
Toward the back of the left flank he had his crack Highlanders to come to the assistance of either flank that had trouble. It was a foggy morning. The troops that ran into trouble earliest were the ones on the right flank so Peckenham had his highlanders march diagonally across the battlefield, nearly parallel to the American rampart, almost but not quite like parading ducks in a shooting gallery. When the fog cleared the Americans caught the beautiful sight of enemy troops just marching right to left in front of their guns. They had hunting and squirrel guns, slow to reload, but they line up in four rows along the rampart. The front row would fire and go to the back, reloading while the other three rows fired and then moved to the back. By the time the gunner was back to the front he was ready to fire. And there was a Highlander right in front, obligingly marching to the left. It was a lousy day to be a Highlander and for most their last.
The Highlanders were pretty much cut to pieces by the continuous rifle shots. Peckenham went to the back of his right flank. He was hit with an American bullet and was killed. The net result was a little less than two hours of battle, with 2000 British killed or injured, six Americans killed, and seven more injured.
The movie The Buccaneer said that Jean Laffitte and his pirates made a big difference, but their telling guns and powder did more than the manpower, according to the park ranger. It was much more a bad order from a good commander and really bad luck with the weather. The British lost their attempt to get control of the river, and Jackson became a national hero.
There was a ranger giving a lecture, mostly for a group off a tour boat. |
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