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Posts Tagged ‘New Orleans’

How Will Sean Payton's Injury Affect the Saints' Offense?

On Sunday, in a game against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, New Orleans Saints head coach Sean Payton tore his MCL and fractured his knee when one of his own players was tackled out of bounds and crashed into him on the sideline. You can watch the replay here if you have a thing for gruesome knee injuries.

Payton is the rare NFL head coach who still calls the offensive plays, so the injury presented a pretty big problem for the Saints, especially since it happened early in the first quarter. Rather than going to the training room, Payton gutted it out on the sideline and kept calling plays while trainers tended to his knee. By halftime though, with the Saints trailing 20-10, Payton had had enough and passed play-calling duties over to his offensive coordinator Pete Carmichael.

It’s tough to say what effect the injury had on the Saints’ offense Sunday; they lost 26-20. By the numbers, the Saints’ output was fairly even through the first to second half.


A New Series for the Thugz?

David Simon, creator of The Wire and Homicide, announced plans to shoot an HBO pilot of Treme, about the New Orleans neighborhood of that name. New Orleans is unfortunately rife with material for a crime drama. As Simon tells the Times-Picayune, the show would explore “political corruption, the public housing controversy, the crippled criminal-justice system, clashes between police and Mardi . . .


Our Daily Bleg: What Should I Know About New Orleans?

I’m moving to New Orleans in a month (and continuing as editor of this blog from there). I’ve gotten mixed opinions about quality of life from people who live there, but they all agree on two things: the food is spectacular; the weather is sweltering — and obviously, at times, extremely threatening. So for readers who live in the Crescent . . .


What Do a New Orleans Death Spike and a Study on Surplus Embryos Have in Common?

They were both widely reported this week, although not at ABC News. Gary Langer, who runs polling at ABC and also acts as its data cop, kept both stories off the air after kicking their tires and determining that they weren’t worth reporting. Langer was obviously not sufficiently consulted in the Paris–Hilton– gets-out-of-jail story.


Even Levitt Wouldn’t Have Proposed This Crime-Fighting Measure

The official murder rate in New Orleans has dropped to zero. The last recorded murder in the city occurred on Aug. 27, two days before Hurricane Katrina. It seems that Katrina, along with ruining a few hundred thousand lives, also dispatched most of the criminals, particularly the drug dealers and their customers. As N.O. criminologist Peter Scharf told the New . . .


Corpses

Much has been made in the media recently of the untended corpses in New Orleans, left on the street for days on end. Aside from issues of dignity, it certainly makes you wonder about health concerns. Especially when you read this BBC report about a supposed link between human remains and mad cow disease. I have to admit that whenever . . .


Disaster info in the modern world

An amazing website that the guys at Marginal Revolution blogged about. It is called www.scipionus.com. It is a map-based wiki where regular people can insert information geographically about the effects of the storm. There are thousands and thousands of entries. Surfing around, the devastation doesn’t seem as bad on the wiki as it does on TV. Houses a block or . . .


A few questions about Katrina, New Orleans, and terrorism

The readers of this blog seem to collectively know the answer to just about any question we can think to pose. So here are some questions: 1) How much of the damage/human toll is because of the hurricane per se versus the levees breaking? If we had perfect foresight, would 1,000 well-placed national guardsmen and some heavy machinery have been . . .