The Redneck Riviera!

Summer is here in full force! I mean it is really freaking hot outside! When I was a lad, my family used to escape the New Orleans heat and humidity and head to the Gulf coast, or as some affectionately call it, The Redneck Riviera.
New Orleans is located in the south, but it is not culturally typical of a southern city. Places we used to visit like Biloxi, Mobile, or my favorite, Panama City, Fla, really are southern cities, culturally speaking. These were the places we would visit where the locals would remark to us in their thick southern drawls: "Ya'll talk funny."
The three Polaroids above are putt-putt courses from Panama City Beach. I had no interest whatsoever in playing the game. I only wanted to see the plaster dinosaurs that adorned the course, much to the chagrin of my family and miniature gulf enthusiasts who just wanted that annoying little kid to stop blocking the holes.
After I threw many a tantrum to get the over-priced rubber dinosaurs and monsters that were sold in the gift shop, we would leave such places and dip in the clear green waters of the Gulf of Mexico, all the while keeping an eye open for the occasional stingray or jellyfish. Lots of people want to go to Pensacola or Destin, and while those places might have pretty beaches, Panama City has more amusement parks, putt-putt courses, and other tourist traps in addition to public beaches.
My last visit at 21 killed the romance, however. The water was all full of thick green seaweed that looked like spinach and smelled like briny rotten eggs. The only clear water was at an over-crowded jetty, and it was freezing cold. Not only that, but I had clearly out-grown all of the junk that used to fascinate me as a kid. In recent years, Miracle Strip Amusement Park , a major attraction in Panama City closed down. I guess it's the same story pretty much everywhere else in America.
Here in New Orleans, we do have Lake Pontchartrain, which was re-opened to swimmers a couple years back, but you still might come out of the water with a thick, chitinous shell forming over your genitals. I wouldn't recommend it.

Saturday!

With the recent passing of The King of Pop, we lose an important icon from the decade of my childhood, the 1980's. I have a love/hate relationship with the 80's. I love them because Jeanne was born in 1982; because I had some pretty respectable collections of Lego, M.U.S.C.L.E. , Transformers, and Masters of the Universe toys; and also because in 1987, I first started collecting comic books, a hobby that would continue until 2002, thus stunting my development as a productive member of society.
But I also hate lots of things about the 80's. Even as a child, I used to hate the way people looked back then. Everything was ridiculously ugly, all poofy and pastel. I hated a lot of the popular music of the time (I had no way of listening to punk and all that stuff) , and while I did enjoy watching Michael Jackson videos on MTV, exposure to all of the cheesy hair metal like Poison and soft-rock wussies like Richard Marx used to make me hate music altogether.
Cold War paranoia was still going on, and along with other Reagan-wrought propaganda like "The War on Drugs", there was a lot to scare little kids. Add this to my being in Catholic school for most of the decade, my parents divorcing, living on government cheese for a couple years, and my uncle killing himself, and you might understand why the 80's were not my favorite decade.
There were things that sucked about the 90's too, of course, but I always felt like that was my decade. I was comfortable with the way things looked and sounded back then, and it was a noticeable change around 1989 when the Soviet Union broke up and the Berlin Wall came down. I was too young to really understand the politics behind the first Gulf War, and was too interested in comics, girls, and Nintendo to care much about anything else. Most of what I knew about the world came from Mad Magazine.

That's why I say that the 80's are like the new 60's, because retro style just works that way. You don't want things to be the way they were when your parents came of age, because after all, they are the people who fucked you up! So you look to the decade before your parents were your age, and marvel at how awesome things seemed then. That's what we did as young people in the 90's, and that will be what the youth of the 2010's are going to do.

But then, what do I know? I just run off at the keyboard sometimes...

Here we go again!

This is the relaunch, yo! Now that the Internet is all new and better, it's time for WoofOink to follow suit and upgrade to WOOFOINK 2.0! Not that I had much of a choice in the matter; Google practically forced me to do it, and at first I was a little pissed, but then I decided to make lemonade out of it.

Followers of the old WoofOink ( I just want to give a shout out to all three of you!) will no doubt remember my bitter, cynical rants about being trapped in a world I never made, much like a hapless, physically deformed Marvel Comics character from the 70's. Well, cranky Old Man Reggie will always have a home here, along with all of your cartoon pals like Pepto-Bear, the Man-Eating Turkey, and of course our beloved mascot, WoofOink, The Mystical Pig-Dog!

But WOOFOINK 2.0 will also take us further into the wonders of this bold new electronic age we are all a part of - that is, barring some nuclear Armageddon, in which case I will be too busy foraging for food and fighting off mutant rats to write a blog post or concern myself with anything other than my own survival and that of my loved ones.

If you like the obscure, then you'll love this blog! What could be cooler than an updated version of a blog that had a following so ultra-exclusive that only a few cutting-edge, super- hip graduate art students from Houston (Shout out to H-town!) even knew it existed? Don't you feel so totally hip and in-the-know right now? Like one of those people who listened to (insert name of popular band here) before they became popular, and who always shit-talks their latest album because it wasn't as good as (insert name of any of that band's previous albums here), but really it's just because they can't stand how accessible that band has become, and how it makes them lesser hipsters now.

God, I hate hipsters.

Anyway, a fresh start is always a good thing, even if it is forced on you by a massive corporate entity whose cafeteria actually serves the very sandwich that killed Luther Vandross! A hamburger whose bun is a glazed Kripsy Kreme doughnut! Have they no decency?!