Taking a quick work break has its own special flavour in New Orleans. Even though I was insisting that I needed to spend the night in the office, Mari very much wanted me to meet her boyfriend Ilya, and pushed until I agreed to head out for an hour (or two) with them down to Frenchmen Street for some music. As I had been told last year on my tour of New Orleans by former-high-school-student-now-local-novelist Nick, this is where the locals come for real music, leaving the French Quarter to the tourist crowd. So we ended up at The Spotted Cat Music Club, sipping drinks and dancing to a session by the Panorama Jazz Band, which was also recording the show live with some serious sound gear. These people can put fun in a bottle: best break I could have imagined, and a fun way to meet someone new and hang out casually.

And now I'm back in my office, where I've just noticed that the meager Wikipedia entry on Salvador Dalí's painting The Sacrament of the Last Supper is lifted (and butchered) from the intro paragraph to the paper I presented on the subject at Notre Dame in 2005. Nice!