Just about every small town newspaper I looked at yesterday had the equivalent of a “man bites dog” story in it. Finding one is a highlight of my day. Make it three or four and it’s like a frosty margarita right here next to my computer, tip tip typing across the keyboard all on its own. So let’s get down to it.
First of all from the Eunice News comes the story of a man who decked an off-duty officer. Mr. Semien claims he only hit officer Frank with his fist, not with a beer bottle. What was officer Frank doing at the time? Selling hot dogs of course, in a local bar.
Head down to Houma and the headline in the Houma Courier is that a local police dog named Django has been suspended from his drug sniffing duties for escaping from his kennel and biting a woman, says Terrebonne Sheriff’s Office Maj. Malcolm Wolfe. Ooowwooo!
Over in St. Martinville, the front page of the Teche News looks like the table of contents for a new Harry Potter novel. Here is a catalogue of the headlines: The Bronze Laver, Doing things after hours in the glow of a kerosene lamp, Attack of the giant crawfish, and The 10-foot alligator under Porkchop Guillot’s boat trailer Or ‘The Monster of Duchamp Road.’ All in one day, mind you. Could it be the pull of a full moon?
This is not a funny story, a boy drowned in Lake Peigneur and sheriff’s deputies were dragging the lake. But what was this planet-struck reporter for the Daily Iberian channeling when he wrote this paragraph? “Shortly before 10 p.m., a boat equipped with a generator and a computer centered in on an area not far from Jefferson Island. A banana-shaped image registered on the computer in a rust-red circle that resembled a picture of the planet Mars.” (The banana shaped image turned out to be a wooden board.)
What could turn every local paper into The Daily Prophet? Only a major celestial event, and it turns out the night of July 22 was a doozy. A total solar eclipse blacked out the sun over Asia two days ago. It seems to have made moon puppies of every reporter in Acadiana. And to think we thought only a journalist of Mark Twain’s caliber could come up with a story like this.
Is it a crime for citizens to photograph, video, or take notes of a police officer in the line of duty, or a right protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution? Locally, such activity, as witnessed recently, will at the very least result in a night spent behind bars.
David Calhoun and Elizabeth “EB” Brooks are the first two employees of Lafayette Central Park Inc., the nonprofit charged with turning Lafayette Consolidated Government’s 100-acre Johnston Street Horse Farm property into a passive public park. Calhoun was named executive director, and Brooks is director of planning and design.
At Thursday's State of the Economy luncheon, LEDA President and CEO Gregg Gothreaux said PXP has already quietly hired 180 people for its Broussard expansion.
Episcopal School of Acadiana’s Dr. Joshua Caffery, chair of the school’s English Department, is headed to Washington, D.C., and the Library of Congress as the latest winner of the Alan Lomax Fellowship in Folklife Studies.
This year’s Cool Town issue is all about people who are not native to South Louisiana but made a conscious decision to be here, to be among us, to participate in our culture and contribute to it.
A shelved ordinance transferring $200,000 from a northside drainage project to a south Lafayette development may not break any laws, but it stinks to high heaven.
An effort to restore a shuttered dancehall and document other vacant or razed honky-tonks could serve as a model for saving an endangered species of entertainment.
Lafayette’s gene pool has been host to a long line of eccentric characters who have blurred the lines between crazy, genius, disturbed and curiously entertaining.
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