New Orleans update

by philg

The Cirrus Vision Jet is a great machine, but one thing that it can’t do is go non-stop from South Florida to Denver against a winter headwind. We decided to stop at Flightline KNEW for fuel, muffulettas, and beignets in “The City That Care Forgot”.

After a 15-minute drive over falling-apart roads, we hit Cochon Butcher for the muffulettas and they were everything we dreamed they would be. It is counter service like Panera, but the staff check up on tables periodically, e.g., to make sure that water glasses are full and to see who wants more booze (not us!). This seems like a good system for a country where labor is scarce/expensive.

How about the vaccine papers check that resulted in a family trip cancellation? (see Karen orders two dozen beignets and a three-gallon Hurricane and “Children as Young as 5 Now Under New Orleans Vaccine Mandate” (U.S. News, 12/17/2021) and “New Orleans residents prepare for school vaccine mandate for kids as young as 5” (NBC, 1/22/2022)) It was done with a similar degree of precision as refugee screening during the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. My friend was ordering while I was parking the crew car. Prior to ordering, he was asked to show a photo of a vaccine card, but not a photo ID. So the restaurant had no way to know whether the card had any relationship to the customer. I walked in from the street directly to the table and never went to the counter, so my vaccine status was never investigated.

We proceeded to the French Quarter to walk off the sandwiches and build up our beignet appetite. “Most of these people look like they’re on meth and haven’t bathed,” said my companion. The buildings and infrastructure in general seemed to be in rough shape. It was a Monday, admittedly, but the streets did not seem busy enough to sustain the shops and restaurants. Café du Monde is operating in a degraded COVID-19-safe fashion. There are no waiters. You order and pick up beignets and coffee from some ladies working behind a counter, then carry them to a table.

Nearly every shop had a significant amount of signage regarding masks. Following CDC guidance, virtually any piece of fabric qualifies as PPE. An official city poster for businesses, downloaded 1/27/2022:

A saliva-soaked bandana not only qualifies as PPE, but is officially recommended. Alternatively, if you’re visiting from New England, pack a scarf to block aerosol Omicron.

Here’s an example of some disrepair and, if you click to enlarge then zoom in, you’ll see that all of the people walking on the sidewalk are wearing masks of various types:

Voodoo is powerful enough to heal or kill people, but its magic isn’t effective against SARS-CoV-2 without cloth masks:

Hot sauce was powerful enough to propel Hillary Clinton to the forefront of American politics (BBC), but it is also insufficient in the fight against Omicron:

The physical shop behind https://www.themaskstore.com/:

How well have these orders from Covidcrats worked? From the NYT, 1/27/2022:

Cases have decreased recently but are still extremely high. The numbers of hospitalized Covid patients and deaths in the Orleans Parish area have risen. The test positivity rate in Orleans Parish is very high, suggesting that cases are being significantly undercounted.

How does this compare to our home of Palm Beach County, Florida, which is not under any vaccine or mask orders?

#CurveFlattened? Our impression was that “The City that All Recent Economic Booms Forgot” would be a better sobriquet for New Orleans than its trademark “Care Forgot.” Yet median household income does not seem to explain the mournful condition of the city:

(Is the Broken Windows Fallacy actually a fallacy? Katrina (2005) seems to have resulted in an income boost.)

Income in the New Orleans metro area is lower than in the U.S. overall, but higher than in Louisiana overall and it should still be sufficient to keep public infrastructure, such as roads, in decent condition.

Our take-away from the visit: “Covid is the least of this city’s problems.”

See also, OpenTable data from 1/26/2022 back to 1/6/2022:

The tourism-dependent cities of Miami Beach, Naples, and Orlando are much more active, relative to 2019, than New Orleans.

Related:

23 thoughts on “New Orleans update”

  1. You can’t just drop in the fact that you were in a Cirrus jet like it’s nothing. More details, please!

    • Paul: I would be flying it right now if the owner didn’t defy established jet tradition by always locking it! (I did manage to go to Key West this week in the SR20: “my jet has 6 pistons”.)

    • You’ve answered my primary question: it’s not your jet. (I assumed not; surely you’d blog about going to the Cirrus training center to do that kind of training.)

  2. I spent a week in NOLA last month and had a fabulous time, travelled commercial because my significant other refused to spend two days, if the weather was accommodating, travelling in my jet with four pistons.

    • Anon: What did you actually do in order to have a fabulous time? I’m past the age where I should be eating multiple gourmet meals every day. I don’t need to drink a 64 oz. hurricane. If I got sick and needed healing cannabis, it would be simpler to go to Maskachusetts and follow the directions from the billboards on the Mass Pike. Were you listening to a lot of live music?

    • Well, Phil, the Big Easy may not be for you. We landed in New Orleans with the Simpsons food tour, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLFpTLEnrqU&t=38s. We walked, or used the gym in our AirBnB to earn the calorie deficit each day that would allow us to eat the food. I think you need to enjoy food, drink, and music to really enjoy the place.

    • Daniel: I did appreciate the music that we heard in Jackson Square (named after “the most aggressive enemy of the Indians in early American history” and “exterminator of Indians” (Howard Zinn; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Jackson#Indian_removal_policy ) who was also a slaveholder (see https://www.whitehousehistory.org/slavery-in-the-andrew-jackson-white-house )).

      But we can get food and drink at restaurants here in Palm Beach County! No vaccine papers required. And no need for a monster SUV to get to the restaurant over broken pavement. (Yet everyone except us seems to have a pavement-melting SUV…)

    • Phil, for a guy who does as much travelling as you do and, heck, owns his own plane, you seem to have every reason never to leave the paradisical free state of Florida.

    • Daniel: With an SR20 as the primary aircraft, leaving Florida is an extended project (two hours to Georgia; Bahamas requires elaborate COVID-19 testing protocols on top of the already elaborate customs and immigration protocols (on the U.S. side)).

    • @philg-

      “pavement-melting SUV”

      If you’re not melting the pavement with that vette, you’re not driving it right…

  3. Question – Why do people buy the Cirrus jet? Isn’t a a TBM or Piper M600 going to go about as fast but with greater range, payload, and have significantly more flexibility vis-a-vis runway length?

    • I wrote about that to some extent in https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2021/02/16/cirrus-sf50-vision-jet-impressions/

      For anyone over 6′, the seats alone in the Vision Jet make it much better than a Piper. It is quieter inside and smoother than a turboprop. It is a FADEC engine. You’re right that the turboprops will land shorter, but people who grow up with the SR22 and have plenty of $$ (the $10 trillion pumped into the economy via coronapanic seems to have been unevenly distributed) like the Vision Jet.

    • Anon: I think the alarming hull loss percentage is for all PA-46s, going back to ones produced in 1984 (so those initial planes, of which roughly 400 were made, have had nearly 35 years of potential bad luck). The M600 is a fairly new design, so I hope that 9% haven’t crashed!

  4. “Covid is the least of this city’s problems.”

    According to bestplaces.net:

    Violent crime index: NO = 49, Naples = 9, US = 23

    According to census.gov: NO has wildly different demographics from Naples.

  5. Those marinated Brussels sprouts look better than any I’ve ever seen, or have a right to be. They are “mind and taste changers” in the Brussels sprouts dimension. Interesting how only one of the “sides” on the menu is fried: the House Chips for $2. The rest of the menu is not that expensive if you’re selective. And the way they do the labor, it sounds like it holds the costs down while also keeping the table service at a….serviceable level, so you can leave a real tip without thinking: “I’m here picking up the food right where it was made. I am delivering it to myself and serving myself. Why am I tipping?” That’s a cool place, I like it.

    • It’s also neat because if you remember the old McDonald’s Big Mac ads from 1975, their Butcher Burger is a bit of an echo:

      “all beef patty, American cheese, lettuce, tomato, dill pickles, onion, mayo & mustard on house made sesame bun”

      rings like that old McDonalds ad:

      “two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun”

      But maybe there’s zero connection and it’s just coincidence.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dK2qBbDn5W0

      In the mid-1970s, you could enjoy a Big Mac for around $0.65, which is around $3.37 in today’s money. The actual retail price of a Big Mac – just the sandwich – is $3.99, and the Butcher Burger costs 3x as much. Let’s be charitable and say that the experience plus the taste and quality plus the personal service makes the difference. For poor people though, I think the Butcher Burger is out of reach. They’re going to McDonalds.

  8. French Quarter is the essence of tawdry. Can’t imagine going there after dark.

  9. We need a video of Greenspun flying the cirrus jet. Basically, the lion kingdom has derived 3 uses for general aviation: eating lunch, transporting turtles, & manetaining proficiency at general aviation.

Comments are closed.