King cake season

It's carnival season in New Orleans, which means king cakes keep showing up everywhere! At work, at parties, pretty much every social event has one or more. There are all different kinds and everyone claims that theirs in the best. (Kind of like po-boys, I guess). I entered king cake season on January 6, with Epiphany, never having tried a King Cake. Since that time and without any effort on my part, I've sampled maybe 15 different cakes. (They are kind of addictive.)


I have not, however, gotten the baby, though I'd really like to. My brother, on his first visit to New Orleans, without knowing what a king cake was or that there would be a baby inside, cut a large piece of two different choices and after a couple of bites, walked over to me - holding a tiny, plastic baby, 'Why does this cake have toys in it?' He inquired. I didn't know the answer and neither did anyone else. That's just the way it is. I looked it up since, and I think it means that he was the queen of the ball. I haven't told him that yet though. http://www.gumbopages.com/food/dessert/king-cake.html

Some articles I read this morning...

Poverty Creates Toxic Stress for Young Children

With nearly one in three of Louisiana’s children under the age of five living in poverty, and an 81 percent increase in abuse and neglect cases in this age group over the past six years, the question of how to improve the lives of Louisiana’s youngest citizens is an increasingly pressing issue, says Geoffrey Nagle, director of the Tulane Institute of Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health.
Read More: http://tulane.edu/news/newwave/020309_child_poverty.cfm


New Orleans struggles to find compromise on trash

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and City Council members appeared to have reached an agreement late Monday on how to pay for washing streets and emptying litter cans in the French Quarter, but they were confronted with a separate smelly issue: garbage bags piling up throughout the historic neighborhood and the Central Business District.

The new front in the sanitation battle had little to do with the long-running feud between the executive and legislative branches that prompted Nagin -- claiming a $7.5 million shortfall in the 2009 city budget -- to pull the plug during the weekend on street sweeping and flushing and round-the-clock litter collection in the city's premier tourist destination.

Instead, the sudden accumulation of garbage along sidewalks in the Vieux Carre and CBD was the product of a surprise decision by the city's Sanitation Department to start enforcing a long-standing law that says owners of large businesses and residential properties with more than four units must hire private contractors to collect their trash. The law applies citywide.
Read more: http://www.nola.com/timespic/stories/index.ssf?/base/news-7/1233642021239700.xml&coll=1