The coronavirus pandemic has forced the cancellation of many much-loved events and traditions but the good people of New Orleans were not going to let it ruin their annual Mardi Gras. When the mayor of the Louisiana city announced that the raucous, crowd-filled street carnival parades would not be going ahead, residents decided to turn their houses into floats instead.Thousands have been transformed for the two-week long carnival that runs until Ash Wednesday on 17 February. In the picture below, you can see The Queen’s Jubilee House. A special project was set up encouraging home-owners to hire the many artists who would normally have months of work preparing for the event. René Pierre’s company usually looks after 75 floats during Mardi Gras and he has managed to get contracts to build 53 house floats. “My wife and I were trying to sleep one night, and we kept hearing notifications coming from the website. It was like instant success. It was incredible,” he told CNN. There were a variety of themes such as this reference to the Bernie Sanders meme from last month’s presidential inauguration.(BBC)…[+]