Mardi Gras

Back in March, I wrote a post called "The 11 Most Miserable Cities In America." The post was based on the latest set of data from Gallup's annual Well-Being Index, which ranks cities in terms of emotional and physical health, work environment, and access to basic necessities, among other factors. Let's be clear: I've never been to any of the cities on the list. In the post, I explained that the list was based on statistics published by the consulting company, and not my own impressions. Even so, I managed to make some folks pretty mad — just take a look at the comments. One person, though, was determined to prove me wrong. Sandy Stimpson, a businessman and mayoral candidate from Mobile, Ala. — which was the third miserable city in America, according to Gallup — started tweeting me invitations to come see the city for myself. @jzeveloff we want to fly you into Mobile, AL and give you the red carpet treatment of our awesome city. Are you up for that? — Sandy Stimpson (@SandyStimpson) April 4, 2013 @jzeveloff would love to have you come visit our town! #mobileal pic.twitter.com/h3oaYAdyNs — Sandy Stimpson (@SandyStimpson) May 8, 2013 At first, I politely declined. But then I started to read about Mobile, and realized it actually sounded pretty neat. Sure, the city fell in the bottom quintile on nearly every ranking on Gallup's index. But it's also home to the ninth-largest port in the U.S., which has worked hard to recover from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010. Airbus is currently building a major aircraft factory there, a move that will create several thousand jobs. Plus, Mobile has one of America's best military museums. And it hosts a Mardi Gras celebration that reportedly rivals New Orleans'. Stimpson reiterated his invitation, and wooed me with a YouTube video and a personalized Tumblr (and a hashtag!). So I ran the idea past my bosses, and decided to take Stimpson up on his offer to show to me that Mobile is not one of America's most miserable cities. I'm flying down to the Gulf Coast city later this week, where I'll visit the Mobile River Delta, eat fresh seafood from the Gulf, and visit the plant of shipbuilder Austal USA. I'm looking forward to meeting Stimpson, who is sponsoring my trip. But I really don't care about the Mobile mayoral race (Stimpson is running against Sam Jones, who's been in office since 2005). I do care about getting a real perspective on the city. As the saying goes, there are lies, damn lies and statistics. I suppose I'll soon find out if where the Gallup stats belong. I sincerely hope that Stimpson and Mobile prove me wrong. You can read all about my trip here, and if you have any suggestions for can't-miss activities or sights in Mobile, please shoot me an email at jzeveloff@businessinsider.com.SEE ALSO: The 11 Most Miserable Cities In America Join the conversation about this story »

Tyson and Allie’s Florida wedding had a music themed wedding with touches of Halloween, New Orleans and vintage. They didn’t want a stuffy and regimented wedding, they wanted a wedding that was a massive celebration of all the things they love. “Halloween is my favorite holiday however I didn’t want to make that the main theme”, explained the bride. “I wanted to add a touch of elegance. My first inspiration was our favorite place, New Orleans. We went on our honeymoon there and instead of making the wedding really obviously Halloween themed, we added the vintage New Orleans spin. It turned out to be the perfect mix!” “We spared no detail in designing our theme. We were Rock n Roll because almost the whole bridal party was (ourselves included) or is either in a band, plays music or is affiliated with it. Tyson and I even got a coordinating tattoo on our first tour with the band to honor our love and commitment to each other.” “We DIY’d everything”, she continued. “My mom is a flea market and yard sale genius and Michael’s craft store was my savior. I did tons of research (mostly on Rock n Roll Bride!) until I put together the perfect silk flower and feather bouquets. All the girls had mini Victorian hats with feathers and birdcage veil. The guys had boutonnieres made from guitar picks, bottle caps and feathers – each different to match their personality.” “For the tables I printed the table numbers on sheet music and held them up with mini glitter styrofoam skulls. We found metal candelabras for $1 each, spray painted them black and glued moss, peacock feathers and flowers to them. We finished the look with mardi gras masks (which we also designed with silver beading, ribbon and feathers) and flameless glitter candles. The favors were Hershey kisses and custom guitar picks printed with a logo I designed with our initials and date.”

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This past weekend, the Applebee's of Coney Island had its grand opening, unveiling a giant shark tank filled with amusement park miniatures, including a neon Wonder Wheel and Cyclone.The tank was made by Las Vegas' Acrylic Tank Manufacturing company, stars of a reality television show called Tanked, in which two guys make large, elaborate fish tanks, e.g., a 57,000 gallon aquarium for a Dallas megachurch and a "man-cave aquarium" for an NFL player. photo: Coney Applebee's Facebook page Next weekend, the international chain restaurant, that honey-glazed, Fiesta lime-flavored emblem of the suburban dining experience, will throw a Mermaid Parade Party in collaboration with Coney Island USA. Tickets to the party are $45 and they'll give you entry to Applebee's "comfortable air-conditioned dining room" for drinks and an all-you-can-eat buffet in the "ambiance of the hottest new restaurant" in Coney Island.What is wrong with this picture? Coney Island, wild child of the city's fringe, is suffocating in national chains. Applebee's has plenty of company, including Johnny Rockets, Red Mango, Dunkin Donuts, and Subway, with Hooters and Outback Steak House on the developers' wish list. As Amusing the Zillion said six months ago, the park "famous for its quirky authenticity" is "about to look and taste more like Anyplace USA."Zane Tankel, CEO of Apple-Metro, Inc., the Applebee's franchisee for New York City, sees it another way. He told the Daily News, “Coney Island’s time has come. It’s the renaissance of the neighborhood."What kind of a renaissance is this?The image on Applebee's Mermaid Parade Party ticket provides a clue--a photo of gals (and guys) who look nothing like the scrappy, freaky, iconoclastic artists that epitomize Coney's mermaids and men. The young women in the foreground are air-brushed stock-photo princesses better suited to a Disneyland float than a little red wagon pulled by a bearded drag queen on a three-speed bike. And while the Mermaid Parade was originally meant, in part, to pay tribute to Coney's old Mardi Gras parades, the colors and beads on this poster seem just a little too Mardi Gras and not enough Mermaid. Maybe the poster was re-purposed from a Fat Tuesday Riblets Feast. Can a multi-national corporation truly get the Mermaid Parade, or the spirit of Coney Island? I asked Zipper director Amy Nicholson her thoughts. She told me, "The Mermaid Parade embodies the spirit of Coney Island: wild, chaotic, creative, unfettered and free-spirited--words that I am sure do not appear in Applebee's brand guidelines. I wonder what will happen when pictures surface of topless women (or a guy with a shark on his penis) with their logo in the background."(For more on that, check out Laurie Essig's essay on how the source of the Mermaid Parade's popularity is "bared breasts and the age-old question of whether or not the mermaid has a vagina.") supertouchart: Big Dick MermanWe know that Bloomberg likes his luxury city to be clean and in uniform--everything gritty and chaotic, from newsstands to whole neighborhoods, has to be systematically rezoned and renovated to fall in line with his vision. Since Coney Island had the misfortune to get on Bloomberg's radar, it's been under siege by developers who aim to profit by cleaning it up and making it palatable for mainstream audiences (for the whole tragic story, you must see Zipper).Applebee's is now selling the Mermaid Parade as a family-focused event: "The Mermaid Parade is all about family! Enjoy the largest art parade of the nation and join us at America's favorite family friendly restaurant." But the parade is not, and never was, "all about family." I'd say it's all about art, yes, along with: transgression, activism, crossdressing, freakiness, and tits. Lots of tits.Applebee's FacebookFrom the beginning, the mermaid activists and their friends fought back against the developers and city planners. At the 2008 Mermaid Parade, in the window of Coney Island USA, the Qu

@rachelstayshigh, @K00LJ0HN, @TheBrother_Hood, & @DaveSteezy gon let the Dollaz Hit The Floor on this bangin @YPOnTheBeat produced track! From Choppa $tyle & YPOnTheBeat's joint mixtape, "Mardi Gras" MIXTAPE DOWNLOADCHOPPA $TYLE & YPONTHEBEAT - MARDI GRAS

By Byrne Harrison Photo of Roi Escudero by Valentin Ewan Production photo by James Ewan Name: Roi Escudero Show: Artaud...mon mômo Relationship to production: Producer/performer/writer/designer/director Website: http://planetconnections.org/artaud-mon-momo/ Conceptual performance artist Roi Escudero was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Her award winning inter-media work, as designer, songwriter, dramatist, and director of documentary-visual theatre and video, is internationally known. She is the creator of performance-art-cinema™. Her vision paved the way for new media-theatre through her Connected Series BUBULINOS’ DREAMS. In the USA her work has appeared at The Art Museum Council Gallery, at Los Angeles County Museum (LACMA), Los Angeles International Open Festival, at The Charlie Chaplin Space L.A., The Contemporary Museum, Baltimore, The New York International FRINGE Festival, The New York Musical Theatre Festival (NYMF), The Midtown International Theatre Festival, FRIGID New York, and other cultural and artistic events. Escudero's performance-art productions B=Essence, (2012) The Matra India (2011) and 11 seconds of ecstasy!(2010) presented at Planet Connections Theatre Festivity, won the PCTF 2011 and PCTF 2010 Awards for Outstanding Performance-art, Multimedia Event, Use of Projections and Special Effects. Escudero's plays received a total of 14 nominations. This includes Outstanding Overall Production of a New Play. Quotes Playwright/Critic Mario Fratti hailed Roi Escudero as “a director of the third millennium” Martin Denton of nytheatre.com wrote: “Roi Escudero —"Bubi" to anyone she's ever met and anyone who's ever seen one of her extraordinary shows—doesn't believe in walls. She's against barriers of any kind: artistic ones that would attempt to put any of the multitudinous disciplines that make up her work—music, dance, poetry, mime, mask, puppetry, fashion, architecture, video, and others…” Alfred Weiss of The Italian Voice praised the “Convincing ensemble guided by Ms. Escudero’s masterful direction…” Producer and Entrepreneur John Chatterton calls Roi the “Ultimate visual-dramatic artist.” Artist Sue Grillo said: "On the imaginary canvas of the stage, Roi Escudero paints with light." How did you first get involved in theatre? I was involved in theatre since I was a little girl. I grew up in a creative family. My parents constantly gave theatrical "tertulias" at home. My aunt, my uncle, and my parents were amateur performers. My father was a extraordinary comedian and my mother a ballerina and designer, as a designer she became well known. My mother made the most amazing costumes and accessories. Who are your biggest influences? Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Antonin Artaud, Jean Genet, The Instituto De Tella, The Living Theatre, Maria Fux, Guliano Vasilico, Prem Rawat, Salo Vasochi, Lucille Ball, Federico Fellini, Luchino Visconti, Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock, Quentin Tarantino and everyday life. What is your show about? In the final period of Artaud's life, he is living in an abandoned pavilion in a park convalescence clinic at Ivry-sur-Seine, surrounded by 406 school children's notebooks. The pages are covered with drawings and cutting edge text: "a body without organs". The drawings depict sexuality and terror, screams and gestures, and the paper is scarred with strokes of piercing knife-blade incisions. Artaud 's radio play To Have Done With the Judgment of God has been banned. It is Mardi Gras, Jacques the poet, masked as "el Diablo", brings chloral to Artaud. The drug transports Artaud into an imaginary transitory zone in his mind that materializes the assorted places of his memories. Artaud's hallucinations and flashbacks bring him to his mother's womb, his childhood next to the sea, Paris, the silent cinema, the Surrealist movement, Genica, and The Théâtre Alfred Jarry. Artaud also flashbacks to his journey with the Tarahumaras pe

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July 9-10, 2013 San Francisco, CA Tickets On Sale Now More than half of Americans now own smartphones, but as an industry, we’re still figuring out how to design well for the limited screen sizes and the sometimes flaky connections. Designing for mobile requires extra attention to detail. Over the next few weeks, I will be taking a close look at some design features that work well and some that fail. First up is HotelTonight, one of my favorite mobile companies. It offers easy access to same-day hotel reservations using iPhone, iPad, and Android devices. It provides a fair value to consumers and hotels. And it has a business model that makes sense. (Sell things for more than it costs you.) I consider it one of the best designed apps out there. It excels at the details, even something many companies ignore: error messaging. A while back, I wrote about how Square did a poor job of error messaging. Today, I want to take a look at how HotelTonight responds to error conditions. (To be clear, some tech people wouldn’t consider these “errors,” but users do.) HotelTonight makes inventory available at noon local time. If you check the app before noon, you get a counter that shows when rates will be available and an option to get notified. The background is keyed to your city, making it obvious that you’re in the right place. When I tested this, I got a notification at just the right time and I was able to pull up the hotel rates. I asked HotelTonight CEO Sam Shank about the performance of the notifications, i.e. is it worth the design time to implement such a feature. Although he didn’t give me specifics, he said, “We only keep things in the app that are additive to our goals, so, yes, it leads to more transactions. With our business it’s interesting to note that revenue and user happiness are aligned — users are happy when they get a great hotel at a great rate, and hotels are ecstatic to fill an otherwise empty room — which is also the moment in time where we generate revenue to pay for and grow our service.” That brings up a related point: even if you’ve built something, if you find that it’s not additive, don’t be afraid to take it out. Every button, every control is something that a user has to think about. Another error case is when the user is checking for rooms after the 2 a.m. cutoff: Again, the messaging is clear. When I was in Istanbul recently, I launched the app and saw this message: In other apps (for example, Uber), the app doesn’t seem to be cognizant of the fact that it doesn’t provide service in a particular market. Just as important as it is to show users the right message is capturing data on where people are attempting to use your app. This can help prioritize new markets. “We look at customer request data in aggregate and prioritize our sales efforts so that we have hotels where people need them,” Shank said. San Antonio and Minneapolis were two markets that were re-prioritized based on the data. “They were not high in terms of room nights booked vs. other cities we hadn’t launched, but there were more people opening the app in those cities. We created a heatmap and used this to prioritize.” Another important use case is when hotel room rates are especially high during a special event, such as New Year’s Eve or Mardi Gras. Although this isn’t an error, it’s definitely something many users don’t expect. Most travel sites don’t explain the reason; HotelTonight does. (This screenshot is a mock up HotelTonight made; Shank will be speaking at VentureBeat’s upcoming MobileBeat conference. But it reflects the type of messaging seen on the app.) Error messaging doesn’t have to be all serious, either. If you go to an invalid page on the HotelTonight’s mobile site, you get this: Designing error messaging certainly isn’t the sexiest thing in

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — The singer and dancer known as Big Freedia is taking his hypersexual, booty-shaking moves from the streets of New Orleans to cable television with a reality show in the Fuse network. The performer’s real name is Freddie Ross but his Big Freedia stage persona is a woman. “Big Freedia: Queen of Bounce” will focus on Ross and the New Orleans music scene known as “bounce” — a fusion of hip-hop and quick, repetitive dance beats with heavy bass. Bounce music often includes call-and-response vocals, a nod to early rap and New Orleans Mardi Gras Indian roots music. Big Freedia is one of the few bounce artists with international exposure, having toured in the United States, Europe, Australia and other countries. He says he’s thrilled with the opportunity to expand his audience and share his story about his rise to stardom in the largely underground genre. “I’m very excited to have the spotlight on bounce music and culture,” Ross said. “I won’t lie though. Having cameras on you all the time is stressful, and this show is not short on drama.” The eight-episode series premieres Sept. 18. Big Freedia is also scheduled to tour this summer with the electronic pop music group The Postal Service. That tour launches in Vancouver on July 16. Copyright 2013 The Associated Press.

Support for Lexie Miller still welcome