The latest hiatus is over! I’m back in time for Mardi Gras! Laissez le bon temps rouler! From what I’ve read, the tradition of college boys descending on Bourbon Street in New Orleans to get drunk while hoping to glimpse scantily clad women originated in 12th-century Venice, in what is now Venice. Celebrating the installation of a new pumping system that would enable them to have dry streets (See the New Orleans connection already evident?!), the Venetians began a tradition of annual revelry that eventually spread to Spain and Portugal and France and subsequently to northern Europe and the Americas. Europeans eventually tired of the beer cans and bodily fluids to be cleaned up afterward, and “carnival,” as the season came to be known, diminished in much of the Old Country. However, it continued in the New World and as a consequence is spreading still, even being re-introduced in some of its original venues. Sort of like communicable disease.

Today’s uncarnival-like classic A&J cartoon is meant to express solidarity with our friends in the upper midwest and northeast.