A Hurricane Party on the Bayou

It’s unfortunately become a familiar routine. I just emptied everything out of my refrigerator and freezer and put it all in the dumpster.

If you don’t perform this ritual prior to evacuation, your olfactory senses will remind you of what a dope you are as soon as you come back home.

I want to apologize in advance if the tone of this piece is somewhat abrasive, but as many of you have probably surmised, my long-awaited LSU season-opener is practically ruined. Governor Bobby Jindal leaned on the new LSU athletic director, Joe Allleva, to move the kickoff of tomorrow’s game up to 10 a.m. CDT. 

That basically means an extremely truncated tailgating schedule, a sleepy crowd, and a historical trend of underwhelming performance that seems to plague the Tigers whenever they kickoff before noon.

By the way, there is a potential Category Three hurricane named Gustav that is threatening to make landfall on the Louisiana coast in about three days.

I can assure you that I’m not alone in my anger, though. When the announcement came out this morning about the adjusted kickoff time, my cell phone melted. People were talking about issuing a recall petition for Jindal.

"This is tantamount to canceling Christmas!" they said.

I guess we sound quite demented. A potentially deadly hurricane is heading our way, and nothing less than life and property are at stake, but all we can do is complain about being inconvenienced for the football game.

Don’t get me wrong, Jindal has been a great governor so far (being considered a “great” governor of Louisiana pretty much means he has never seen the inside of a federal prison cell), but he didn’t go to LSU, so we don’t expect him to understand.

Here is a great example of how sacred LSU football is to the folks here in Louisiana. In 1998, Hurricane Georges was about 24 hours away from making landfall in New Orleans, and a sellout crowd was watching LSU play Idaho in Baton Rouge, about 70 miles away. That wasn’t a typo, I said Idaho.

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