I don’t follow business news that closely, especially when it involves the dread Elon Musk. But this headline on the local rag’s web site caught my attention: Elon Musk’s Boring Company picks New Orleans as possible site for underground tunnel loop.

April Fool’s Day approaches so I doublechecked to see if this is a hoax. It is not. It’s preposterous on many levels but true.

Repeat after me: I am not making this up.

Elon Musk is many things: a white nationalist, a ketamine abuser, a bad father. But I’d never considered him boring before. His dubious DOGE dodge brought way too much excitement to our lives including this Lundi Gras moment in 2025:

That’s a Tesla trashcan cyber truck being booed and pelted with beads. It was a localized high point of the former Reich Chancellor’s reign of error. The truck was eventually removed from the Orpheus parade. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

The word boring in the company refers not to the owner but what they do, dig tunnels. Say what? In New Orleans?

Cue longish excerpt from the Picayune article:

“New Orleans’ historically high water table and deltaic soil deposited relatively recently by the Mississippi River have made tunnels in the area extremely rare. 

“For years the people of the Deep South shrugged off the thought of having tunnels because they were sure you couldn’t build anything through the muck that is Louisiana’s channel beds,” Times-Picayune reporters wrote in 1958 following the completion of the Harvey Tunnel.

“There’s an adage among engineers that, ‘If you have a choice between building a tunnel or a bridge, build a bridge,'” Tulane University historian and geographer Richard Campanella said Tuesday in a phone interview.

Though the project is technically possible, Campanella said there’s a good reason there are only a few functional tunnels in the region. 

“It is a challenge here, you’re not dealing with hard earth, you’re dealing with recently deposited sand silt, clay water and organic matter,” Campanella said.”

I is for idiotic and impractical both engineeringly and politically. Why is the deep blue city of New Orleans hopping into bed with a fascist owned company? It was only last year that Musk did this:

I supported Mayor Helena Moreno, but she should take off her booster beanie and put on her politician’s hat. Why associate the city with Elon Musk on a project that’s unlikely to come to fruition? It’s the opposite of boring, it’s downright dumb to irk your supporters over stupid shit like this. Instead of submitting a tunnel proposal, the city of NO should have just said no.

I’ve resisted the temptation to use the obvious cliche until now: Mayor Moreno has tunnel vision if she thinks this fakakta tunnel plan is a good idea.

The last word goes to former French Quarter resident Lenny Kravitz: