Gamesiteonline.com will be streaming live video to your Window’s Media Player 24 hours a day starting Friday 02/16/2007 at 8pm (CST) and ending Ash Wednesday morning 12:00am (CST). The stream will be broadcast LIVE from a balcony overlooking Bourbon Street which is the scene of the most fantastic party in the world.

You’ve heard about it; now, see what everyone is talking about. Uncut, uncensored, Mardi Gras. The beads, the parades, weird sights and sounds. See it all happen here.

The feed will be broadcast using a high resolution camera with both, high bandwidth, and low bandwidth available. Using the technology of wireless high-bandwidth data streaming, and the Microsoft Windows Media Player, the Mardi Gras will come alive on your PC as it’s never been seen before. Raw, uncut, uncensored and live as it happens.

The event is being web cast free of charge by the www.gamesiteonline.com crew and will be web cast for 5 consecutive days. In addition, a special chat application will be provided to allow for conversations during the hours the web cast is live.

Masks, music and tossed trinkets have been moving through New Orleans for weeks, building a carnival crescendo to Mardi Gras on Feb 20 in a city still recovering from a devastating flood.

Little more than half of the city’s 480,000 residents have returned to the main Orleans parish since the 2005 hurricane, officials estimate. Much of the hard-hit ninth ward has not been rebuilt due to bureaucratic snafu and doubt over its security from future flooding.

But the number is still larger than the one-third who had returned by Mardi Gras last year. And it includes newcomers such as actors Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, who recently bought a $3.5 million home in the jazz-saturated French Quarter for their family of five.

In another symbol of rebirth, the notoriously bad New Orleans football team, the Saints, made it to Super Bowl semi-finals last month in a season hailed as their best ever. Fans say the 2006 rushed restoration of the Super Dome, symbol of Washington’s inability in August 2005 to rescue tens of thousands of New Orleans residents, propelled the team with psychic energy into the playoffs.

All of this bodes well for good tourist crowds at the colourful celebrations culminating with the most famous Rex and Zulu parades on Shrove Tuesday, says Lea Sinclair, director of communications for the New Orleans Tourism Marketing Corporation.

Last year, many critics charged the celebration insulted the memory of more than 1,300 people who died when Hurricane Katrina ploughed across New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast. Mardi Gras 2006 was muted, with only 500,000 revellers.

This year, the city is anticipating 600,000 to 800,000 tourists by the time Mardi Gras, or Fat Tuesday as it is known in English, arrives, she said - nearer to the one million tourists who showed up in past decades.

Carnival started in the ‘Big Easy’ on Jan 6, the 12th night after Christmas that traditionally marks the beginning of European pre-Lenten partying. Dozens of krewes, civic spirited parade organizations with mythological names like Druid, Sparta and Pegasus, have been gliding floats and dancers through the streets, tossing candy and symbolic trinkets to the crowds.

Each krewe has its separate king and even queen, but all are subservient to Rex, King of Carnival, usually a civic leader who arrives on Mardi Gras Tuesday in a boat on the Mississippi River.

Rex goes back to Mardi Gras’ origins in 1872, when the Rex krewe adopted the official Mardi Gras flag of green for faith, gold for power and purple for justice.

Decades of racial segregation gave rise to a black krewe, Zulu, founded in 1916 by the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club. The club’s first king allegedly poked fun at the white-dominated celebrations by wearing a can as a crown and carrying a banana stalk as his sceptre, historian Arthur Hardy wrote.

The late jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong was the most famous Zulu king in 1949.

Symbolic of racial integration and growing African American influence in the city, Zulu is the only other krewe that performs on the finale of Mardi Gras. Through the civil rights movement of the 1960s, activists protested the Zulu krewe for its caricature of racial stereotypes - for wearing grass skirts and throwing coconuts from the float.

The coconut - the Zulu ‘trinket’ - has provoked injury suits from onlookers hit by the flying orbs. But the Louisiana legislature, in keeping with the fun-loving tradition, passed a law in 1988 to exclude the coconut from liability suits.

In 1992, New Orleans city government required the private parade clubs to open to the public, a move that forced racial integration. While some krewes dropped out in protest, ‘Rex opened its membership to Blacks,’ Hardy wrote.

Mardi Gras decorations and beads hang on a balcony in Bourbon Street in the French Quarter of New Orleans. 

  Thousands of spectators gathered along New Orleans streets to catch colorful strands of plastic beads, scramble for tossed cups and cheer on marching bands as the first parades of the city’s annual carnival celebration rolled around.

This year’s carnival season, which culminates with Mardi Gras on February 20, is the second since Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans August 29, 2005, killing as many as 1,300 and leaving much of the city in ruins. More than 17 months later, New Orleans is still struggling to recover.

Only about half the 455,000 people who lived in the city before the storm have returned, and many families remain housed in travel trailers furnished by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Louisiana’s Road Home program, a federally funded buyout plan for underinsured homeowners launched last year, has reached settlements on only a fraction of nearly 100,000 applications for aid. And in recent months the city has seen a resurgence of the violent crime that plagued it before the storm.

Friday’s parades offered an opportunity for many people, however, to put aside such troubles and take part in a local tradition that has roots in the early nineteenth Century.

“We usually come out to see the bands and the floats,” said Arthur Lewis, who is living in a travel trailer while restoring his flooded home in the Gentilly neighborhood. “It’s something to do. You get tired of sitting in a trailer at night.”

Lewis expressed confidence in the city’s progress so far. “I think it’s coming back slowly but surely,” he said. “Everybody on my block is back.”

This year’s Mardi Gras arrived without the controversy that surrounded the 2006 celebration. Last year, city officials were criticized for hosting a scaled-back carnival only months after Katrina, when most of the areas that flooded during the storm, about eighty percent of the city, lay in shambles.

Some parading organizations, or krewes, that sat out the 2006 carnival season have returned, and last year’s truncated parade schedule has been restored to its normal twelve-day length.

In all, 29 parades were slated to roll between Friday and Fat Tuesday, some featuring celebrity guests such as James Gandolfini, of HBO’s “The Sopranos,” and actor Patricia Clarkson, a New Orleans native.

Although this year’s carnival festivities are expected to draw smaller crowds than those the city enjoyed before Katrina, it could nevertheless provide a much-needed boost to the lucrative New Orleans tourism industry. About 29,500 of the city’s 38,000 hotel rooms have reopened, and hotels were reporting up to 90 percent occupancy rates.

Friday’s crowds along oak tree-lined St. Charles Avenue, the traditional parade route, were mostly made up of local families, with children scampering to catch trinkets tossed from colorful, papier-mache floats.

Steve and Jennifer Miller drove into the city from suburban River Ridge with their two toddlers and infant daughter, who was making her Mardi Gras parade debut. The Millers staked out a parade-watching spot where the famed St. Charles Avenue streetcars roll, but which are still largely out of service due to heavy storm damage to the tracks and overhead cables that power the cars.

The Millers said they were at times frustrated by the city’s halting pace of recovery and struggle with crime. “We may not live in New Orleans, but everything that happens in New Orleans affects us,” said Jennifer. For the remainder of carnival season, however, festivity will outweigh such concerns. “We will be out here every night,” said Steve.

Mardi Gras gears up > Made your Mardi Gras plans for February? New Orleans is ready to roll, promises Arthur Hardy, publisher of the Mardi Gras Guide. If you prefer partying in snow, Burlington, Vt., boasts the biggest Mardi Gras in New England.

Find other Fat Tuesday celebrations at www.mglinks.com

Mobile’s Mardi Gras parades couldn’t be staged without float builders like Stephen Mussell, who has built a career on the carnival’s demand for rolling showpieces of splashy colors and lights.

His year-round work was seen by an apparent record number of Mobile Mardi Gras revelers last year, an uptick attributed partly to Hurricane Katrina. The port city, with more than 30 parades over the weeks culminating on Fat Tuesday, may benefit again this year as coastal Mississippi’s festivities in Biloxi will remain cut back to one parade due to Katrina damage.

New Orleans, which has long enjoyed the nation’s largest carnival, is also trying to revive its celebration and expects a parade schedule comparable to pre-Katrina levels.

Leon Maisel, president and CEO of the Mobile Bay Convention & Visitors Bureau, said police estimated more than 1 million attended carnival here in 2006, an apparent record attributed to the Katrina damage to the Mississippi coast and New Orleans. Locals hope many of those visitors will return in February.

Whatever the numbers, Mussell’s 10-member team is turning the floats, most averaging 35 feet in length, into pastel perches for the Mardi Gras organizations, known as krewes, whose members ride them and throw heaps of trinkets, candy, beads, Moon Pies and stuffed animals to thousands lining the streets for two weeks of parading.

Major parades begin Feb. 2 and run through Mardi Gras Day, Feb. 20, giving businesses an economic bonanza. Many reap an entire year’s profit during carnival, if the weather is good.

Historians say the carnival was born in Mobile among the French colonists in the 1700s, but it didn’t really catch on until 1830, when a group of rowdies hit the streets with cowbells and rakes taken from a hardware store. They called themselves the Cowbellion de Rakin Society.

Mobile has about a half-dozen float builders and designers like Mussell whose teams twist chicken wire into dragons, tigers, goofy characters and scenery. Each float has a lighthearted theme.

“To do five parades takes all year,” Mussell said, wearing a paint-splattered sweatshirt while putting the decorative touches on 11 floats parked in a huge warehouse near Mobile’s waterfront.

Mussell, who has been building floats for 29 years, buys gallons of latex house paint, then tints it to “kick it up” before it’s sprayed on. The electrical lighting comes last and is needed because some parades roll at night.

His 22-year-old son, Nathan Mussell, is part of the team. With a history degree from Auburn University, the younger Mussell leaves in June for the Peace Corps. But when he’s home, he’s float-building, a family obsession. “I was born on Mardi Gras Day in 1984,” he said.

High school French teacher Will Edmond has worked part-time with Mussell on the floats during holidays and school breaks for the last eight years.

“It’s unique, that’s for sure,” said Edmond, 33, who says his family has attended Mardi Gras events for 30 years, standing at the same spot to view parades. Another Mussell worker, 17-year-old Greg Thornton, said he works on the Mardi Gras floats “so I can be around it all year long.”

After Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005, Mobile advertised its “family-oriented” carnival in markets within a 150-to-200-mile radius, including Jackson, Miss., Hattiesburg, Miss., Baton Rouge, La., Birmingham and Montgomery, to counter reports about damages. Mobile was largely unscathed by Katrina.

Neighboring Biloxi, Miss., will have only one parade on the afternoon of Feb. 20, said Nancy Rogers, a spokeswoman for the Gulf Coast Carnival Association. Biloxi trimmed its parade schedule last year to one 2-hour parade because of Katrina damage. The U.S. Highway 90 bridge between Biloxi and Ocean Springs, damaged by the storm, still hasn’t been repaired, so this year’s plans weren’t increased, Rogers said.

New Orleans, devastated by winds and flooding when Katrina struck on Aug. 29, 2005, has an Alabama connection to its carnival this year: American Idol winner Taylor Hicks of Birmingham, Ala., will reign as the Krewe of Endymion’s grand marshal. Endymion will roll down New Orleans’ historic St. Charles Avenue on Feb. 17, the Saturday before Fat Tuesday.

And New Orleans’ officials are hopeful attendance will be strong. “A number of factors, including weather, affect overall attendance, but we are hopeful that with the hotel room inventory continuing to come back and other tourism-related infrastructure in place, we will have strong visitation for Mardi Gras,” marketing director Ernest Collins said in a statement.

The Louisiana city has about 30,000 of its 38,000 hotel rooms back in service. Collins said attendance was “surprisingly strong last year given the inclement weather and the status of our recovery. With the absence of controversy regarding the appropriateness of the celebration, we expect that we’ll have incremental improvement on attendance from 2006 to 2007.”

You can be a part of Nevada City’s “Fabulous Fifties” Mardi Gras Parade on Sunday, February 18.

The Nevada City Chamber of Commerce is now accepting entries for the 1950s-themed midwinter celebration. Entry fee is $25, plus the crowd expects entrants to hand out beads.

Marching units, floats, equestrians, vehicles, bands, other groups and individuals may enter the parade, a rain or shine event that begins at 2 p.m. at the top of Broad Street.

The parade caps a two-day (Feb. 17-1 Mardi Gras celebration in historic downtown Nevada City. The Mardi Gras Cajun Dinner and Masquerade Ball will be held at Miners Foundry on Saturday night.

For parade entry forms and other weekend information, contact the Nevada City Chamber of Commerce at (530) 265-2692 or see the chamber’s website, www.nevadacitychamber.com.

The first parade of this years Mardi Gras season hit the streets of New Orleans this past weekend. The Mardi Gras tradition goes back all the way to the year 1699  older than the city itself.

New Orleans officials say this carnival season will be one of the best ever. Those thinking about being part of the 45 day celebration will be happy to know that most hotels in New Orleans still have rooms available and room rates are reasonably low.

Some of the celebrities who will serve as monarchs of the big parade this year will be James Gandolphini from the HBO Sopranos Show, Broadway Actress Patricia Clarkson, a native of New Orleans and American Idol Taylor Hicks.

Mardi Gras usually attracts one million visitors from around the world. The season continues from now until February 20th, which is known as Fat Tuesday, the day before the Christian observance of Ash Wednesday.

You can book your spot at Mardi Gras in New Orleans this year by going to www.neworleansonline.com.

Taste of Mardi Gras arrives Saturday afternoon at the Sheraton Four Points Convention Center in Fairview Heights. It’s a benefit for the Epilepsy Foundation of Southwestern Illinois with food, music and more.

Plus, enjoy a heart-healthy recipe for Three-Pepper Cajun Shrimp Stir-Fry.

It’s all part of Suzanne Boyle’s Stir Crazy column on the food page Wednesday in the News-Democrat or on Wednesday go to www.bellevillenewsdemocrat.com.