Friday – The New Orleans Bingo! Show had an unprecedented five “winnahs” and had to settle the tie with a Robot Dance-Off. Most contestants had sad robot dance moves, though a grade school teacher made her students proud when she broke out real robot moves to simulate head on Ronnie Numbers. The winner was a big boy whose moves resembled the bear in Carrollton Station’s old Bear Hunt shooting game, but there was a robotic quality to his lurching that won the day.
Saturday – Art for Arts’ Sake on Julia Street was a sad shadow of its former self while Magazine Street was livelier than ever. Still, Lesley Dill’s “Hell Hell Hell/Heaven Heaven Heaven: Encountering Sister Gertrude Morgan & Revelation” at Arthur Roger Gallery was powerful and smart. Dill clearly thought about Morgan and her work, then produced art that captured her understanding of Morgan without aping her art. The folk art dimension of Morgan’s painting shows up in the loose threads and frayed fabric in the dress constructions, and the obsessive quality in Morgan’s work is mirrored in the stuffed-to-brimming installation.
Sunday – The Saints’ final stand and the deafening crowd in the Dome. At the end of a frustrating game, the Saints bowed up and stopped the Panthers’ final drive. At the same time, so did the fans, who just 10 minutes earlier booed a tepid-at-best offensive series that included poorly thrown passes, needlessly dropped balls and uninspired blocking. I’ll take character wins; they bode well for future games when we have Pierre Thomas, Reggie Bush and our defensive backfield healthy. Also, I was impressed that the Saints didn’t bitch about the fans booing, unlike Les Miles a couple of weeks ago, who called out the fans for booing Jordan Jefferson. Big boys know that the fans are crazy loyal, but after having seen a season of inspired play, truly, woefully weak shit will get booed – as it should.
It should also be noted that this is the closest Chris Lee’s Madden picks have come to being right – a low-scoring game that the Saints won by two, not four as he predicted.
Lowlight of the Weekend – Easy. LSU’s ridiculous win in the Stupidest Win Ever. The idea of sending in four players with fewer than 17 seconds remaining is absurd in itself, but why Jordan Jefferson didn’t spike the ball to stop the clock is a mystery. Either he’s so gunshy where making decisions is concerned that he’d sooner let the game go than do the leadership thing, or he doesn’t realize that time is blood in the closing seconds on the three yard line. In either case, that’s one problem.
Despite sending in the players, center T-Bob Hebert says he didn’t know what the play was, which means players came in and communicated nothing. When Hebert snapped the ball just to get the ball in play before time ran out, he did so when a play hadn’t been called. Someone should lose a job for such a shameful situation occurring, but that’s not going to happen. T-Bob ended up the hero because his blind “hope shit works” snap caught Tennessee in process of screwing up worse than LSU, temporarily debrained by the monumental nuttiness of Les Miles.
To make matters worse, here’s Miles on the end of the game:
“When we put the goal-line personnel back on the field, we should have had two plays (called), ” Miles said of the second-down play. “That’s what should have happened. Or if we run the one, clock it (spike the ball) and have a second play, the timing of the call is easy and the issue then is let’s just run the play versus the defense they line up. Instead we exchange personnel. That’s the difficulty.
“We did not need to exchange personnel. We should have clocked and/or had the other play ready to roll.”
What’s fascinating in that is how out-of-his-control all of that sounds: ‘We should have done one thing, but instead we exchanged personnel.’ If the coach a) has no control over his coaches and team, and b) can’t man-up and take responsibility, there’s no reason to expect the team to show character or quality execution this season.
