Ceci's cute but ...

Rob at realitique was fairly tee'd at The Washington Post for what he called their "snide" editorial about New Orleans, arguing that by not getting their facts right, they were actually performing a disservice.

I see his point. I'm getting a little hot and bothered as well.

I had to get my undies unknotted after reading a Washington Post article appearing on Tuesday.

I'm really sick and tired of out-of-towners trying to write quaint little articles from the perspective of a New Orleanian, while bungling cultural references, and just getting their facts wrong.

Hey, the Post's Ceci Connolly is cute and smart, but I just have to say, Ceci, there are no bayous to return to in the mistakenly-titled "Gradual Return to the Bayou," unless you're talking about Bayou St. John, which is now nothing more than a circumscribed urban creek.

I dare say, I don't think any hipsters "linger over chicory coffee on Magazine Street." Chicory coffee tastes like hot dirt, so there aren't any coffee shops that would serve it except the tourist traps in the French Quarter.

Ceci, it's true that "cars show off a now-ubiquitous bumper sticker: 'New Orleans, proud to crawl home' -- instead of the old favorite, 'New Orleans, proud to call it home,'" but they've been around for years now. I think the bumper sticker you should have seen if you spent more than an hour in the city is, "New Orleans: Proud to swim home."

I know some people will say it Ceci, but please don't repeat it when people say their house was ruined because "that's God's will." Would you say that it was okay to slaughter native Americans and drive them off their land because it was manifest destiny?

And Ceci ... Ceci, Fred Kasten is not "the cool voice of jazz on radio station WWOZ." He has a cheezy soft jazz show on the maddeningly-mediocre NPR affiliate, WWNO. WWOZ would never have him.

Thank you, Ceci, for mentioning it in passing, but the levees "that proved so fallible in Katrina" are not just the "singular obsession of the city's business leaders." The levees have become the MADNESS of EVERY citizen of this city and region. NOTHING IS MORE IMPORTANT than a PRESIDENTIAL COMMITMENT, NOW, to build CATEGORY 5 protection, and to build it soon. It would have been nice if you conveyed the absolute RAGE that every citizen utters when they think about how the president of the most powerful nation in the world has left one of the most culturally unique cities in the world TO ROT and get washed away in the Gulf of Mexico.

Ceci, check in with local bloggers. We'd love that. At least check your facts with a local on the street. If you're available, I'd be happy to take you around the city to a few of the places that only a person who's lived here for years would know about. That's New Orleans hospitality -- something else you missed in your article.