Babies at Bars and Kings in Cakes
Plus: Books & Football
GETTING CAUGHT UP W/ BOOK REVIEWS
Football For a Buck: The Crazy Rise and Crazier Demise of the USFL, by Jeff Pearlman.
Incredibly detailed look at one of my favorite eras of football. Super cool stories from tons of people that you’d hear about in later years. Including the person responsible for the downfall of the league. I’ll let you read the book to find out who that was (hint: he is currently ruining something else these days.)
Darla the pitty mix.
King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa, by Adam Hochschild.
Did you know that in the 19th century, the monarch of Belgium, King Leopold, essentially annexed the entire territory of the Congo…for himself? Not even the people of Belgium knew that he had effectively enslaved the entire population, murdering millions and robbing them blind. And oh yeah, he did this all under the guise of being a humanitarian. I shit you not!
Maverick the beagle.
The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze that Captured Turn-of-the-Century America, by David Baron.
If you want to understand just how nuts this book is, look no further than a New York Times headline from December 9, 1906. It wasn’t meant as hyperbole. It was meant as fact:
If you are a sports fan and didn’t check out this week’s SilentPunt Podcast yet, you can find it HERE. Really interesting interview with Brian Fowler, who recently completed his goal of securing two Guinness World Records. (Our next interview will be in a few weeks when we talk with a Major League pitcher…just in time for pitchers & catchers to report. Here comes spring baby!)
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Babies at Bars and Kings in Cakes
Last week we spent three days in New Orleans for a cheer competition. I’ll spare you the gory details of that, aside from these two crazy-awesome photos of my daughter (Newcomers to SilentPunt: My daughter is 16 and would tar and feather me if she knew these were in here, so mums the word, capiche?)
In addition to watching my daughter perform for a total of 5 minutes over 3.5 days, I was able to check out a really cool museum. The National World War II Museum was literally across the street from our hotel. It was amazing!1
Along with lots of educational exhibits, there were some impressive full-scale planes:
🚬 I was strangely fascinated by Hermann Goring’s cigarette box for some reason.
Earlier this week, I chatted with Substacker Joshua Jericho Ramos Levine about the fact that comparing anything to Hitler is usually verboten (see what I did there). For some reason, that, coupled with the Luftwaffe Commander’s cigarette box, made me think of this scene from Forgetting Sarah Marshall…
There was also a reasonably new exhibit:
This section of the museum was strangely captivating.
It is fairly well known that the Nazis plundered the heck out of the countries they invaded. Especially artwork. Which was discussed in a different part of the museum. And I’ll tell you, the curators of this place did a much better job telling that particular story than these yay-hoos…
As bad as that movie was, the story is incredible. I hope to read the book one of these days. It’s essentially the story of the people who tried to save art from the Nazi war machine.
The cherry on top of my museum experience was our hotel. It was called The Higgins Hotel and was military-themed. The hotel was named after the Higgins boat, one of the most important vehicles in the entirety of WWII. The boat is the reason this museum is in New Orleans in the first place. Higgins boats were named after Andrew Higgins… whose shipbuilding operation was based in The Crescent City.
The effectiveness of these boats was incredible. In fact, after the war Eisenhower said, “Andrew Higgins is the man who won the war for us.”
While these boats, designed for troop transport in amphibious landings, were famous for their effectiveness in the war, you may remember them best from the opening sequence of Saving Private Ryan.
Here are some cool photos from our hotel:
We also visited Jackson Square….
….where of course I found plenty of these…
And lastly (I’ll spare you Bourbon Street 😷), any quality trip isn’t complete without a visit to a cool dive bar. The Corporation Bar & Grill was just that. Shout-out to our bartender Crystal, who did five shots of Jägermeister in the hour we spent in the bar.
Lots of quality signage in the joint, but these two take the cake:
And, speaking of cake…do you know what a King Cake is? These cakes are usually only available in New Orleans during Carnival (Jan 6th until Fat Tuesday). They are super colorful and feature a tiny little plastic figurine of a King inside. The story goes that if you get the slice of cake with the king in it, you are king or queen for the day.
Just so long as you don’t choke to death first.
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As we were sitting in the Corporation having a cocktail, I received a text from my friend (and occasional Podcast co-host) Jason with a picture. He was in a bar himself back in Wisconsin. Longtime SilentPunt readers will remember that I told you a while back that children were allowed to sit at bars in Wisconsin as long as they were with their parents.
But this is just downright ridiculous….
👑 Merci de lire SilentPunt! 👑
The National World War I museum in Kansas City is also fantastic by the way.
The use of art and architecture in political spheres is so fascinating. Like making government buildings extra tall and large to convey the importance of the government. Or the flooding of Nazi flags in WW2 Germany just constantly reminding you to think about the existence of the Nazi party and what it means to Germany. Iconography in general is a rewarding deep dive
I think I would have so much anxiety watching a cheer competition!