where y'at?

That's how locals answer their cellphones in New Orleans.

And it's sort of what one of my dear readers was asking when she caught me doing everything but posting:

did you: -slip on leftover mardi gras beads and are now in traction -get kidnapped by rogue voodoo ghosts -oversleep ?

Well, Mardi Gras beads and ghosts of some sort did sort of grab me and, yes, I spent too much time sleeping.

But I've had some lucid waking moments, including:

• time spent at the recent Congressional Field Hearing in New Orleans on the housing crisis, chaired by Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Ca.), at Dillard University. It was marvelous theater, a good example of democracy in action, and will matter only if the draft legislation now working its way through both houses of Congress amounts to something. (For a good account, and audioclips of the hearings, look here.)

• a chance to sit in on a meeting on the ten-member committee setting goals for a nascent "New Orleans Jazz Advocacy Task Force." Bethany Bultman (of the New Orleans Musicians Clinic), who hosted the meeting, was half-joking when she called the assemblage a "Traditional Jazz Anti-Defamation League." You'll here more on this group soon. And should you arrive at Louis Armstrong Airport soon and find a brass band playing when you land, along with flyers promoting the real-deal gigs, you'll have these folks to thank.