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AccessBlaster

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Eddie Haskell died from Leave it Beaver.

Anyone remember this old joke?

Gee Ward, don't you think you were a little hard on the Beaver last night!?

RIP Ken Osmond


1589829013658.png
 

The_Doc_Man

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Ouch - talk about a picture that one can never un-see...
🤮 :eek:
 

Micron

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I'm surprised you got a couple of likes on that one. While I don't have a lot of sympathy for people in that situation, I would just delete something like that if it were sent to me. In fact, I did.
 

Micron

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You're welcome. Now that one might have deserved a "ding" but I would probably be alone in that.
And no, I'm not overweight like that, so that's not the point.
 

The_Doc_Man

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And as well to those who served, including:

My father-in-law, SSgt Loyd Tabor, US Army, Normandy, 1944 - Infantry, returned home to family, now deceased
A family friend, CWO2 Leo G Huber, US Army, Vietnam, 1970s - Medevac pilot KIA
A cousin, Jack Smith (rank unknown), US Army, Korea, early 1950s - Infantry, POW, returned home to family, now deceased
An uncle, James C Hassell, US Army, Wildcat Division, France, 1918 - Signal Corps, returned home to family, now deceased

And many more.
 

ColinEssex

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I was listening to UK Gold radio, a 1960's song came on (it was 60's Sunday) and it got me thinking.

Question for Doc, is there a house in New Orleans they call The Rising Sun? If so, what is it? Or was it?

Col
 

isladogs

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Pardon me for answering
It was a brothel. The song was originally intended to be sung by a woman
 

The_Doc_Man

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The history of that name is disputed.

There was indeed a brothel in New Orleans starting in 1862 and ending in 1874 that could have qualified for the title. It was run by a woman named Marianne LeSoleil Levant (French for "Rising Sun"). Whether it was actually named "Rising Sun" in English is not at all certain. No one can say with any certainty where it was located, which probably means it WASN'T graced with a sign of any sort. But then again, as bawdy as the city has ever been, it was not the sort of business to "hang out a shingle." It was a kind of place that required you to be introduced so that you could find your way the next time you wanted to visit. You have to read the history of Storyville, a neighborhood in New Orleans, to learn of its customs. With a closure date of 1874, Madame Levant's establishment was not there during the crackdown that ended the bawdy reputation of Storyville. Among other things, a police captain was shot and killed and other violence ensued.

However, there is an equally popular origin story about a woman's prison which had a "rising sun" mural on the entrance. The lyric includes a line "to wear that ball and chain" which could be a reference to the prison. Also a line "Now momma, tell your children ... not to do what I have done ... spend your life in pain and misery ... in the House of the Rising Sun." Could EASILY be interpreted as prison. Further, if you ask him, Eric Burden of the Animals will tell you he changed the original lyric to include a gambler because he was concerned about radio censorship. Records of the song go back to the 1920s with a male singer but there is a dearth of records before that and the song was already considered "traditional" at that time.

Currently, there actually IS a House of the Rising Sun in New Orleans, but it is a Bed & Breakfast in the Algiers Point area - which places it at or near the banks of the Mississippi River.
 

ColinEssex

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Thanks Doc, I guessed it might be a story shrouded in mist and folklore. From the song lyrics, I guessed it may have been a house for ladies of the night, and possibly an area for gambling.
Apparently, the song sung by The Animals, has the rights and royalties going to Alan Price the keyboard player. The story is that he registered it in his name without telling Eric or the others, so every time it's played on radio, they get nothing, all royalties go to Alan. This led to a rift between Alan and the other members of the band, so Alan left the band and had a successful solo career with several top ten hits.
Col
 

Uncle Gizmo

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which places it at or near the banks of the Mississippi River.

I recall mentioning to you Richard, in a past thread that I spent a couple of hours driving around New Orleans on Google Street View.

If you recall, I said I couldn't understand why you didn't have any riverside apartments there were all these big mounds along the river bank. You told me they were the levees to keep the water back, the ones that didn't work in the hurricane debacle.

It occurred to me that any developer worth their salt would give their right arm to build a property next to the Mississippi River. It's also an expensive process, maintaining the levees. I was thinking, a clever architect could design a beech, a Wall and apartments, all in one go. The sale of the apartments I should imagine would go along way to fund the building of the flood defences.

The apartments would be sought-after high-end properties overlooking water. The development would pay to maintain the security of the flood defences to the benefit of the rest of the area, by keeping floodwaters at bay when necessary. Has this been done? Has it been thought of? Are there any problems with it that I can't see from these thousands of miles away?
 

The_Doc_Man

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@UncleGizmo

The problem with putting anything on the batture (that section of the riverbank between the levee and the river itself) is that when the river is at flood stage in springtime, you need something to handle high water that might be 19 feet over the normal winter levels. That is because that 19 feet is official "flood stage." The river at non-flood stage moves something like 593K cu.ft./sec. (=4.44 million gallons/sec) and at the foot of Canal St. in New Orleans (that's the "main drag") the flow rate is about 3 mph. That is 18,500 TONS (U.S.A. standard) per second of water. At that point, the river bottom is 200 feet deep. The stress factors are tremendous and nobody wants to risk any major developments on the batture. Part of the problem is that south of the lake, we have no bedrock for at least 1500 feet so you need some humongous pilings. With our water table, building something massive can be a disaster.

There is a story about the Louisiana Superdome. When it was being built, an out-of-town contractor won low bid on the pile-driving contract. But they had done no tests of the soil So the day of the first piling arrives, they set up their equipment, drop the hammer on the first piling. On ONE stroke the piling slides all the way into the ground. They move the crane to pick up the next piling and the first one starts to float back up out of the ground. The supervisor calls his boss, the boss calls the Superdome Commission offices, and they pick up their equipment and people. They forfeit the penalty clause and revoke the contract. They knew they would go bankrupt to finish the contract because it would have taken two or three times the equipment and maybe 5 to 10 times as many pilings as they had estimated.

When you drive pilings in our area, you need to have at least two pile drivers. One drives while the other sets up the next piling to put on top of the previous one. As soon as the first driver is done he rotates the rig away while the other driver rotates in with a ready piling. It is almost like a ballet to watch the coordinated efforts of two giant pile drivers down here. The goal here is not to hit bedrock (because you almost can't), but to put enough pilings down to "float" the heavy stuff based on the bouyancy of a vertical stack of pilings. And of course, the "soupiest" soil is closest to the river or the lake where the water tables are highest so that is where you need the most pilings.

For that reason, building a luxury apartment complex on the river side of the levee is highly unlikely, though some apartments do front the River Road on the outside of the levees. When I was a kid, my neighborhood abutted the levees. I used to walk about a half of a block to get to the levee and hike for exercise. (And to take wildlife pictures - lots of water fowl in the area.) At night I could hear the propellers on the ocean-going tankers and freighters. I could tell by the sound whether they were loaded or empty because the ones riding higher in the water made a "slapping" sound or "splashing" sound whereas the ones riding lower just hummed and rumbled.

You told me they were the levees to keep the water back, the ones that didn't work in the hurricane debacle.

Just for clarification, I would have said those levees were LIKE the ones that failed. No river levee failed with a major breach that I recall but a half-dozen drainage canal levees DID fail badly at a time when rainfall was extreme. One of the company's night computer operators had an apartment across the 17th Street canal that breached and flooded what we call the Lakeview subdivision. He said it shook his apartment like an earthquake and the noise was horrendous. (He lost no property though due to flooding he had trouble getting in and out of there for a while.) The link is to a Wikipedia article and it includes an aerial shot of that location.


Most of the time we pump water into the lake because it has an outlet to the eastern end, called the Rigolets Pass. No problem to put large amounts of water in the lake other than it screws up certain types of fishing. From Lake Ponchartrain any water empties into Lake Borgne, which some folks think should be called Bay Borgne. Me? Don't care, I'm not that picky and the maps call it a lake at the moment. From Lake Borgne, the excess water directly empties into the Gulf of Mexico. The drainage from Lake Ponchartrain to the Gulf of Mexico is thus unimpeded by land. But storm surge can (and in the case of Katrina, DID) reverse the normal flow patterns through wind pressure.

What happened in Katrina was a multi-whammy. Some drainage canals were under extreme stress and failed. In other cases, such as nearer my home, the drainage canals weren't working right because the pumps had failed. Nobody was there to restart them, because the employees were released to head to the north shore of Lake Ponchartrain, which is slightly higher. The drainage canals, being INSIDE the levee system, don't themselves have levees. So the water just rose up from the canals and flooded the streets. To a level that at our house translated to about two feet of water inside the house. Took them three WEEKS to get the pumps running and because of the levees, you can't drain the canals UNLESS the pumps are running to lift the water over the levees.
 

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