Mardi Gras, Madame Web, Valentine’s Day, CPI

Festivities marking Mardi Gras, the climactic day of New Orleans’ Carnival season, hit full swing early Tuesday, with costumed revelers gathering on the narrow streets of the French Quarter and families and tourists lining major thoroughfares to watch parades.

The Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club handed out its signature gift — hand-decorated coconuts — to adults and children as it moved down St. Charles Avenue. The procession of Rex, King of Carnival rolled along another route later in the morning but would ultimately follow Zulu through the city’s streets.

In the French Quarter, morning crowds were not as thick as in past years, but bars and restaurants still were doing a brisk business on Bourbon Street.

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There is a lot of pretty niche comic book mythology swirling around “Madame Web,” the inspiration for the newest of Sony’s “Spider-Man” spinoffs.

This is a character who goes back to 1980 and whose powers of clairvoyance helped Peter Parker at some point. She’s elderly and blind and sits atop a web throne that keeps her alive. But to be honest, reading about her didn’t help give any more meaning or urgency to the Dakota Johnson movie that’s heading to theaters Wednesday. You’ve been warned.

“Madame Web” is striving to be a classic superhero setup movie, about how the future Madame Web — now just single gal paramedic Cassie Webb — comes to terms with her newfound power that allows her to see the future. Well, sometimes at least, when it involves a death or something extremely violent.

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Esther Howland isn’t a household name for most Americans. But those who’ve studied the history behind the intricate, hand-crafted cards she started making some 175 years ago argue that she should be.

“She was the Martha Stewart of her day. She would have killed it on Etsy,” says Vanessa Bumpus, exhibit coordinator at the Worcester Historical Museum in Massachusetts.

Howland lived in Worcester and built a business in the central Massachusetts city that brought fame and fortune in her lifetime, and a nickname that lasted long after her 1904 death: “The mother of the American valentine.”

Howland didn’t invent valentines or bring them to the United States. But she’s credited with sparking the spread of the ornate cards that became a staple of Valentine’s Day celebrations here and eventually blossomed into a multi-billion-dollar industry.

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