Frozen Decay: Your Guide to the Specialty Drinks of the French Quarter

There is going to be a point this weekend when you’re feeling weak. Off your game. Looking to bide some time until you can break through the weariness and get your fastball back. It's time to throw some junk. And that means frozen drinks.

Thankfully, the French Quarter has got ‘em. And not just your standard strawberry daiquiris and margaritas. The classics are tasty, but there’s a bigger frozen frontier to be explored or avoided at all risks. This is a brief guide to what’s out there waiting for you.

Frozen Irish Coffee

Molly’s At The Market

1107 Decatur Street

Rise and shine, kiddos.

Ingredients: Ice cream, coffee, Jameson, Kahula and the tears of fallen Irish angels.

It’s the only Christian way to start the day, sprinkled with a dusting of coffee grounds. And at $4.50, the Frozen Irish Coffee is one of the more affordable frozen cocktails, served 24/7. Because down here. it's entirely possible your body clock might become askew, and you never know when the craving is going to hit. It's the perfect salve for dousing the fires after a night of Flaming Dr. Peppers from the Gold Mine. The Sub-Zero to Gold Mine's Scorpion. 

Musical Accompaniment: When you order this, The Pogues's classic "Fairy Tale of New York (Christmas in the Drunk Tank" will probably be playing...either in reality or just within the last blinking gasps of sensory function you've got left. 

 Voodoo

Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop (not to be confused with Lafitte's in Exile)

Go until the men dance on bars. And then keep going a little further

It's dark, cold, dangerous and delicious. 

 Ingredients: Purple, alcohol and drank...then frozen. 

It tastes like purple. Not to be confused with grape. There's nothing grape about it. Made from the fermented juice pressed out of purple skittles, mixed with grain alcohol and frozen in a pirate's forge.

Music: "Beat It" wheezed by the last honest bar matron piano busker in the city.

Hand Grenade 

Tropical Isle 

Several locations along Bourbon

Ingredients: Grain alcohol and off-brand lemon-lime Gatorade...either frozen or on the rocks. No need to shout. Just take a look and you know what he's holdin. And you know what you need. We got that WMD. Just take a taste. Oh no, he don't handle no money or product. But he'll point you in the right direction. Just tell 'em you know the green pineapple.

On the rocks, it tastes like everything good about white trash. Frozen, it tastes like yellow snow from a Polar Bear with a diet of nothing but key limes and Eskimo virgins. 

Music: "Fortunate Son" covered by a live band fronted by an overweight, shoeless, 50 year old man. A snake skin strap desperately clutching a Squire Stratocaster close to the protruding beer belly.

Oh, he sees you. He knows what you need. It'll make the pain go away.

Don't. Sleep.

The Jester

Jester’s Drinks and Pizza

At Bourbon's beginning and again at the end.

Ingredients: Off-brand Everclear, Off-brand 151, kiwi strawberry mix and Freddie Kruger's backwash.

Boldly, it claims to be the strongest drink on Bourbon Street. They will get no dispute from me. Famously, after tasting The Jester for the first time, it was noted that by a hardcore Louisiana deviant that this frozen drink "Tastes like Night Terrors." Again, no disagreement here.

It's the Baked Alaska of the French Quarter sidewalks. You wouldn't think something frozen could also be flammable, but this is a place that's all about pushing the boundaries of science and sense.

The Jester always has the last laugh, and it's a laugh of pure, hateful evil. 

Music: Black Eyed Peas from wall-to-wall. All day. Every day. It's the soundtrack to Night Terrors and flaming ice.

190 Octane

Mango Mango Mango

Outposts of a dying empire. 

Tried to paint with all the colors of the wind and got blown over by the breeze.

Ingredients: "Diesel" is the off-brand grain alcohol used by many of the illustrious frozen-drink mongers. Here, it's mixed with Sunny D and other flavored beverages of the inner city.

The empire is dying. It was once proud and strong, overseen by the legendary Pochontas. But Pochontas spent the night under a small pox blanket, and it's been downhill since. Half the automated mixers were still and barren. The upstairs balcony was deserted, with only mis-matched executive furniture and an empty bar sitting in the corner, like the office of a small-time 1980s hedge fund after an SEC raid. 

The drinks are still decent, however. The 190 Octane (Sunny D and Diesel) is probably the closest any of the New Orleans stunt drinks (drinks that only exist for someone at peace with the possibility that they might not make it all the way over Snake River Canyon) come to being enjoyable. 

Music: Silence. The silence of desertion and decay. Like Chernobyl or Detroit. Somewhere, you hear the sad song of a woman's voice breaking the air...but then it disappears. You wonder if it was ever really there.

Honorable Mention

(DQ'd for unfair use of actual, naturally-grown food substances)

Dirty Banana

French Market

Ingredients: Whole bananas, ice cream, amaretto, dark rum and nutmeg, blended freshly before your eyes. It'd be blasphemy if it weren't so damned tasty. 

Your Friendly Neighborhood Pharmacists

For a quick side note, let's discuss the highly trained class of individuals who will be serving you the above-mentioned poisons and remedies. There is no doubt you will find yourself conflicted on several levels throughout your journey of drinking in the Quarter.

For a true New Orleans dining and drinking experience, you should be both aroused and intimidated by your server. It's a Praying Mantis mating instinct-- attraction mixed with impending doom. Tattoos will almost always be involved. Just be prepared. 

And whatever you do, never, ever, ever, buy anything sold to you in a vial. No matter how colorful it may be.

And Finally, A Word About Liquidity, The Gold Standard and Cash Reserves

 

New Orleans is a cash only town. Nothing personal. It’s just, you never know what tomorrow’s going to bring, so

it’s best for everyone involved to keep outstanding accounts to a minimum. The condemned aren’t good candidates for giving or receiving credit. New Orleans sees both itself and its customers as potential flight risks. Even for the places that will grudgingly accept a credit card, do you really want to commit yourself to a relationship here?

So, you need to carry cash. Knowing this, your friendly money lenders have conveniently placed ATMs throughout the greater French Quarter area with fees anywhere from $4 to $10 per transaction. There is one, and only one, honest man on Bourbon Street. Hidden behind the faux Mardi Gras masks and just below the “I got bourbon faced on shit street” t-shirt, is an ATM with a 99 cent fee. Find the Traders Emporium and use it often. It's the only upright usurer on the pilgrim's highway.

7th Ward Roosters, Flightless Angels of Death

"Run, chicken, run. Don't you lose your breath. Chickens don't get no life after death."

The New Orleans Times Picayune was covering a murder and a news story broke out. Apparently, there is a substantial population of feral chickens across several New Orleans wards that has grown post-Katrina. Blown out of their coups during the storm, and then afforded plenty of places to hide and squat amongst some still un-recovered parts of the city, they apparently have thrived.

From the Times Picayune, Michale DeMocker

Here's a short chicken lesson, brought to good residents of New Orleans by the wise musings of one Frank Costanza: 

"You got the hen, the chicken and the rooster. The rooster goes with the chicken. So, who's having sex with the hen?"

"They're all chickens the rooster has sex with all of them."

"That's perverse."

Hens are largely docile creatures. They cluck, but generally don't crow. They lay delicious eggs for omelets and, once captured, they can be fried, smoked, baked, stewed or broiled into delicious bits and pieces. 

Roosters are the tweaked-out redneck boyfriends of the fowl world. They're over-caffeinated 7 year old boys with razors strapped to their wrists, and they will put a blade in you for even the mildest of perceived offenses. If they are captured and cooked, they taste a bit like a well-oiled softball mitt. What they lack in size, taste or intelligence, they make up for in wily, fluttering, kamikaze spastic fury. They take no notice of friends nor foes or hands that feed them versus those that wring their necks (though, historically, these hands have been pretty interchangeable).

Given the opportunity, the uptown coyote may eat your baby. The rooster will cut him just to watch him bleed. 

There's this urbanite perception of the noble cock climbing triumphantly to the top of the hen house, puffing out his brilliant chest and issuing a single proud reveille to start the day, silhouetted by the rising sun. Then, clearing his throat, hopping down and going about his business of makin' the love (and more tasty chickens). 

This is a lie. Roosters are sick sadists who engage in a U.S. Panamanian campaign against the unjust oppressors of their brood. From the earliest cracks of morning light till well into the brunching hour and even then sporadically through the day, they let loose with this psychological warfare. You've never known true pain until you've had a hungover morning begin pre-sunrise with incessant, unstoppable crowing. Every shrieking syllable finds its way into the parched cracks of your abused brain and then explodes and reverberates against the membranes...that should go over well in a place like New Orleans.

Between the coyotes, foxes, feral chickens and wild parrots, New Orleans is turning into the model for the modern urban ecosystem. The greatest menace, without a doubt, the rooster.

It's Rush Hour in Cumberland County, But They Ain't Heard The News (Travelogue Part 2)

I spent rush hour in Cumberland County, Tennessee, somewhere between Nashville and Knoxville. Rush hour arrives in Cumberland with about as much fanfare as the Muslim Hajj. Maybe sometime, someone heard something about a bunch of people moving around at the same time for some unknown purpose. But nobody really understood why or believed that such a thing went on in the world. It passes unnoticed. Needless to say, this was good timing on my part.

Loosely translated, this sign reads "Next Exit, Cool Springs Mall."

Look at this Pho-to-Graph! While I did not have time to explore and experience the important historical sites passed along the way, I'm certainly not above pulling over to the side of any road in any vehicle for unexpected photo opportunities that present themselves on the side of the road. Traffic, pride, parking accommodations be damned. 

Unfortunately, in what was a major oversight, my camera was packed somewhere in the madness of the back of the Uhaul. Given the questionable structural integrity of my packing at the beginning of the trip and the possibility of contents shifting during flight, I thought it best not to attempt to recover it. 

Along the Interstates, everything basically looks the same. But once I pulled off south of Nashville onto highway 45...there's stuff. As part of the as-yet-unplanned return trip where I will take in the wonders of the Natural Bridge and Rock City, a ready camera will be a necessity. Somewhere outside of Jackson, Tennessee, I passed by a burned-out shell of a house with a swimming pool slide still standing behind it. With the right angle, it could've looked like a slide that let out directly into the doorway of the house. It was almost enough to get me to tempt unleashing the chaos of the truck cargo bay to get to the camera.

Green and White Jesus. They started appearing somewhere around Nashville, gained strength outside Jackson, but persisted throughout most of midwestern Tennessee. Green yard signs that just said "JESUS" in white block lettering. No context, no further information. Just "JESUS." There's some political campaign yard sign company that has come up with a brilliant gimmick for keeping up business in the off season. It'd be like a a heart-shaped candy maker replacing "Be Mine" with "Get Saved" in an effort to keep the factory running all year. 

During the mid-90s in Mississippi, there was a fad of PVC signs with mini-marquee letter slots. People would put them in their yards with excerpts from scripture. It was the early predecessor to Tim Tebow's eye black (which never made use of the darker side of the Bible. For Tennessee weekend or an away game into Death Valley, you gotta break out the Revelations). But at least that made sense as a statement of faith. You had to actually crack a Bible and pick out a verse and a passage. "This is something that means something to me, go check it out." The JESUS signs are just lazy tokens that come dangerously close to using the Lord's name in vain. It's just blunt, meaningless space-filler put into the world for lack of anything else to say; the yard decoration equivalent of hitting your thumb with a hammer and muttering "Christ" under your breath as you grab your hand. 


Green and White Houses. At the opposite end of the green and white yard sign blasphemies are the green and white houses. And they are also all along this stretch of road. Green roof, white trim, double chimney houses. The white brick or wood or stucco show age, but not in a cheap way. It's a classic deterioration, like silver hair behind the ears. It's more establishment than neglect. It's that aging that sets apart the true estates from the cheap vinyl siding imitations, which just end up looking like unbrushed teeth after 2 years. 


Green and White Vegetation. If there hasn't been a country song to use the phrase "like a dogwood in the pines," it's for sale for a low, low royalty. In rows and rows of green roadside pine trees, the sparse blooming white dogwoods are brilliantly conspicuous. 


"I saw her there at the 7th grade dance like a dogwood among the pines." It's got Tim McGraw megahit written all over it. Perhaps "Evergreen Love" could be the title. It's the next "Don't Take The Girl." This  isn't meant derisively. I have a sad, soft spot for bad country. I just want to contribute to the genre.

Or, if you could even go Southern gothic edgy, "The line of blow laid upon the piles of cash like a dogwood in the pines and his ears filled with the roar of an I-20 log truck."


In Twitter literature, there's no need to put in the work of doing complete novels. Just catchlines, similes and metaphors sold separately to fill out whatever existing framework you already have in place. 99 cents per phrase. 


Holly Springs Swamp Land. Speaking of bad country lyrics, I've got some good swamp land for sale in Holly Springs. There it was, a "For Sale" sign on the roadside from ReMax claiming an investment opportunity. It wasn't just mildly moist land or some seasonal flooding. This was swamp. Probably at least hip deep, cypress knee dotted swamp. I assume you'd buy it to hunt ducks or farm crawfish or dispose of bodies, but I couldn't think of anything but Monty Python's Holy Grail, because I'm a British teenager from 1975.

Betty Davis, Whore of the Free Market. Bette Davis had eyes that were song worthy and is a symbol of early Hollywood beauty. Betty Davis is a shack right on the Marshall County line, marking the course to Oxford like the edge of the Holy Land. It's a monument to the fact that people will drive for cold beer and warmed-over ribs. In Oxford, where cold beer is illegal and no beer is legal on Sunday, Betty Davis, slut that she is, has made a comfortable living picking up the needs that can't be filled in proper incorporated society. 

The debate stretches across generations, disciplines and social strata of Ole Miss attendees and still remains unsolved. Hotly and passionately debated among scholars and slackers, everyone with a strong, unrelenting dogmatic belief one way or the other-- If one group of foresight-lacking college kids buys a case of warm beer in Oxford and puts it in ice and another group of kids drives out to Betty Davis to purchase a cold case, which one will get to the baseball outfield with the coldest beverages before first pitch? Like the enigma of the Tootsie Pop, we may never know.


Take Me Back, To Oxford Mississippi. I see her. I know she's there. She probably doesn't really remember me. Probably doesn't care or wouldn't notice, if I just zipped by without a second glance. She's moved on. I, sadly, haven't. 


And so, I have no choice but to swerve a little out of the way to stop in and gawk for a while at the sundress in the breeze that is the Oxford Square. I meet up with an old friend who still is lucky enough to maintain an honest and productive existence in Oxford and we head to lunch. There are some who don't believe in the legend of the fat vegetarian. It's understandable. I mean, not everybody's been to Ajax Diner. 


The meatloaf is good. The catfish, better than average. All manner of sandwiches and chicken fried steak and burgers and they're all solid, classic comfort food selections. But the star is the veggies. Fried eggplant, fried okra, cheese fries (veggie? sure), squash casserole, hash brown casserole, cornbread dressing, butter beans, turnip greens, mac and cheese, fresh tomatoes with homemade mayonaise (sadly, not in season at the time of this visit)...oh man. It's food coma-inducing vegetation and starch and clearly outshines the proteins. Fewer animals would need to die if more places did vegetables like Ajax. We have sweet tea and catfish with extra tartar sauce and talk about times just far away enough to sound like lies. And then, it's time to load back up into the Uhaul. 


New Orleans is the end of the road. There's still a little way to go, but the rest is familiar and could be done on autopilot. Treebeard had it right. I like going South. Somehow, it feels like going downhill.

Pray to God I See Headlights... Traveloge Part 1

The late night commercials were wrong.

Despite a love for the freedom of the open road. Despite a desire to be my own boss, set my own hours and earn a good wage. After two days and 1300 miles in the cab of a truck, I now know that those commercials and my woozy, pre-dawn delusions of diesel-fueled grandeur were wrong.

My future is not in the exciting industry of long haul trucking.

I thought I was well prepared. After all, I had at one time owned a C.W. McCall cassette tape. I brought sleeveless shirts, loose-fitting canvass pants. An iPod loaded with new music, as well as podcasts. A sturdy soul, BP powder, three bags of pop rocks and a box of Girl Scout cookies (It's just you and me, Shortbread. One of us isn't going to make it across the Mississippi). It wasn't enough.

What I lacked was a spring-loaded spine and an ass like a bean bag chair. Short of that, the only salvation would've been a bottle of muscle relaxers waiting at my destination like the quaaludes-packed carrot on the end of the proverbial stick (as used in the filming of "The Lost Boys"). 

Historical Markers. Despite all the pain and persistent audible creaking every time I rotate my neck, I would like to do this drive again. With a loser schedule and a more comfortable conveyance, I've discovered something I kind of already knew-- they got stuff in this plucky stretch of America. Stuff that tickles the little ironic snark-happy hipster traveler who nonchalantly squats on the couch of everybody's brain. But also stuff of actual historical significance that reaffirms a connection with our country's past. And there are more than a few sites that artfully straddle the fence between the two.

The Davy Crockett Tavern, Davy Crockett Birthplace. The Davy Crockett Travel Center-- where there are six different flavors of Cappuccino, including Rabid Coon (extra foam), the Bear Grinner (with a dusting of ground Yellow Jacket), Alamojo (chicory and horny goat weed) and Wintergreen. 

Casey Jones Museum, National Bird Dog Museum, Rusty's Historic TV and Movie Car Museum, The Natural Bridge (Damn you, Natural Bridge, haunting my travels. I can't tell you how many times I've passed by this place and, despite my curiosity, never been able to stop), Luray Caverns, the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library, the Stonewall Jackson House and the George C. Marshall Museum (which share a highway exit...possibly more?).

These are things that need to be seen and can only be truly appreciated by someone without anywhere else in particular to be. 

Gasoline. I contributed heavily to the Jugheadistan country coffers. There were initially plans to drive at a constant, conservative speed throughout the trip in an effort to maximize fuel efficiency. That went out the window about 10 miles into open interstate when I encountered my first '89 Lincoln Continental doing 72 mph where I wanted to do 73. Three gallons of rapid acceleration later, and I'm scanning the truck stop signs pricing unleaded.

The variation is staggering. In one 30-mile stretch of highway I passed 10 different gas stations with prices ranging anywhere from $3.16 to $3.69 a gallon. And there was no rhyme or reason to any of it, turning the entire experience into a rolling version of Deal or No Deal. Do you want to take the $3.29 a gallon at the Exxon at exit 18B or would you like to play on? I've got the banker on the line right now...and he's offering an additional hot rollers-cooked meat product and a free bottle of water with a 10 gallon purchase.

Surely the app already exists where your GPS/iPhone scans the road ahead and displays the gas prices for your shopping convenience. And once that becomes standard equipment, things seem like they'd have to even out. Until then, it's just Howie Mandel in my head tempting with cheeseburger rollers and the fear of things unseen.

iPod Kills The Radio Star. This shit is going to happen. Instead of blindly scanning the Eastern Tennessee airwaves, I chose my own destiny of podcasts. No Taylor Swift. No local drive-time political rabble. No "Today's Hits" or "Yesterday's Favorites." No commercials. I ran through hours of podcasts and caught up on everything from the air gun assaults of English Premier League soccer players to a brief history of the fall of the French Bourbons. I listened to my favorite wrestler (The Heartbreak Kid) talk about his religious rebirth and how that meshed with his work in a generally crude profession. And Real World Star "The Miz"proclaim that he had ended the city of Cleveland's title drought by winning the WWE Championship Belt. He then more or less challenged LeBron James to a fight. Finally, I took in Oscar recaps from a variety of sources, including the screenwriter of "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" proclaiming Will Smith to be the only true movie star of the current film industry.

And then...at 9:38 pm 21 miles outside of Nashville, the iPod battery died. I was tossed back, scared and screaming, into the unmerciful abyss of the airwaves. Like Adam and Eve tossed out of Eden and into Bob's Country Bunker. I found a local ESPN affiliate that sustained me with Brian McKinney inanely taking calls from a national audience on the value of drafting defensive or offensive players. Because I care what some lonely trucker in Peoria thinks about NFL draft strategy.  But, by boiling it down to a meaningless 50-50 coin flip of offense vs. defense, you enable the lowest dominator to engage. I whist-fully daydreamed about the halcyon minutes prior when I was able to listen to an Oscar-winning screenwriter discuss a subject on which he had interesting ideas and thoughts and tried once again for any last scrap of juice in my iPod. Unless you're claiming responsibility for an act of arbotoreal terrorism on a rival school, I really could not be less interested in what's coming off the radio phone lines.  At least it wasn't pre-teen romance from a persistently slack-jawed 20 year old relationship masochist who clearly made a deal with some unholy entity for tunes that stick on your brain like Alzheimer's plaque.

Satellite Tether. It's honestly not hard. You hit the interstate and go until you see a sign telling you to go somewhere else. When in doubt, just head south and west. But still, there's this doubt. Did I miss a sign? Where EXACTLY am I and how does that relate to where I need to go?

I haven't had a car, much less a GPS, in four years. But the cars I've ridden in, and occasionally driven, in that time almost all had either a GPS unit or smart phone constantly updating, reaffirming your place on the planet.

Being without it creates a constant, nagging anxiety. There aren't a lot of landmarks and what landmarks there are don't mean much without some kind of further reference. It's a loss of instinctual swagger that's a little troubling. I'm going this way because I know it's the way I need to go. I've seen the maps. I've been watching the road signs. I don't need this constant affirmation that every step along the way is correct, some metallic matronly voice behind an LED screen constantly providing positive reinforcement. And this is from someone who's only used these devices in the periphery. I can only imagine what it would feel like to an every day owner-operator.

TBC...

Life In Central Time, And Other Moments Of Joy In a Lost Season

Central Time is God's time. Just spending time in the comfortable daylight where early isn't so bad and dark loses just a touch of its edge makes me feel like a more balanced soul. It's proof that the Lord resides somewhere in the strip of America between Chicago and New Orleans, riding his circuit in an '86 Fleetwood Fiesta with blue Astroturf flooring and a peeling "Eat a Peach" decal from the previous owner. Doin' deeds and eating gas station breakfast biscuits.

It gets a little white knuckle in the Fiesta on the Pig Trail, but I have no doubt he wheels it into Fayetteville on occasion. Once you peel back the ever-growing layers of four-laned strip mall build-up, you've got a core that is one of America's under-rated college towns. Aside from Ole Miss bringing along our Golden Flake early morning kick-off curse, this is the kind of weekend you should use to experience a gameday road environment for the first time. There's not an awful lot on the line, so nobody's chewing glass in anticipation. But, it's still an SEC West game, which  brings with it a certain level of intrigue and an enjoyable level of excitement. Energy without spilling over into meltdown.

Ole Miss/Arkansas games have a weird rhythm to them. It's a series that has a hard time finding its beat. Before the Houston Nutt shotgun rivalry was born, it was more like being set-up on a date with a girl who's lived across the street from you your entire life. We've got sort of parallel history, and it seems like there should be some kind of spark between us. It just never seems to catch. Even the Houston Nutt fire has started to dampen, and we've fallen back into our routine of nodding politely on the walk out to grab the morning paper.

Arkansas is a team with deflated aspirations of making the jump (they got double-bounced by Auburn, it appears) and is coming to terms with non-BCS success. Ole Miss is a team trying to find a foundation for whatever's coming next in moral victories and pride. What happens when they get together? A five hour teenage grope fest with Crimson and Clover playing in the background. The threat of electricity hanging in the air without a lighting strike ever actually finding the ground.

Other programs have rings of honor where they remember the greats from their championship teams. Ole Miss is quickly developing quite a ring of martyrdom. Great players who played their asses off stuck on bad teams. Upon induction, they will receive a pastel Vineyard Vines hairshirt and have their names engraved on the train tracks outside of campus. Jerrell Powe is earning his place in this illustrious grouping with his play this year, trying to pull whatever he can out of an underachieving defensive unit that was supposed to carry the team. However, being in the backfield on every down only means so much when there's no containment on any other part of the field. I don't know that Jeremiah Masioli will qualify with only one season. But as Rick Cleveland points out,  running for his life behind an offensive line of walk-ons while watching his former team compete for a championship is the steepest punishment for petty theft this side of Saudi Arabia.

But like I said, this was a day for small victories, including good timing to avoid the rain and the generosity of friends with shelter, whiskey and televisions. And a good Saturday night college town band with no cover charge at Grub's playing Gillian Welch's "Miss Ohio" featuring a male singer and a 3/4 time pace. And $2.50 beers and greasy late night food. And feeling amused superiority at the young novice drinkers puking doubled over trashcans with exposed undergarments...only to end up in the same position yourself later in the night.



And one guy in a studded black leather jacket, a portable amp and a worn guitar on the street banging out Ronnie James Dio solos, non-ironic mullet flowing in the wind, while drunken frat boys cheer and toss dollars in his case.

It doesn't matter if nobody's listening. Or if the people who are listening don't get it. It's all about keeping the faith. And that's easier to do in a good, Christian time zone.