November 2005 Archives

Entering Phase 3 clinical trials now is PT-141, a powerful libido-enhancing drug which works on both men and women. There's a great article in New York Metro about it which explains how it works, how well it works, and also poses some interesting philosophical questions.

My main question, though, is how do I sign up for these clinical trials? Make me your lab rat, baby. I'll even wear whiskers and a tail if I can get some of this stuff.

Think again, then, about those moments when your sex drive stalled and your mind filled with anxieties that you ultimately managed to talk yourself out of. Now imagine that you failed, in the end, to talk away the anxieties; imagine you instead found yourself obliged to listen to them, and that they told you things about yourself, your life, that you hadn’t wanted to hear but finally had to acknowledge were true. Imagine that as a result of all this listening, you understood at last that you had to, for instance, leave your husband, your wife, the man or woman you’d first slept with on that third or fourth date, the one full of rich food, hard liquor, etc.; and that now that you thought about it, the voice inside you that night that had wanted you home watching television had sounded a lot like the one now telling you to leave your marriage, and that, all things considered, you probably should have paid more attention to it then.

Now imagine the whole story all over again, except that at the very moment these anxious voices start to pipe up, you find yourself with an inhaler of PT-141 and a decision to make: You can either take your sexual dissatisfaction seriously and learn from it, or you can take a hit of PT-141 and write off your anxieties as nothing more than fallout from the mild case of sexual-desire disorder the drug will soon have under control. Which do you choose? Self-knowledge or self-content? The awful truth or the convenient fiction?

Take your time.

"The Creole Tomato" is an Onion-style source of news for New Orleanians in the wake of Katrina.

This one is so insanely funny (if you're from there) it took me five minutes to stop laughing enough that I could read it to Gina.

Thousands Desperate To Know Where They “Got They Shoes”

Hurricane Katrina evacuees face a different world. Gone are the jobs; the houses; even the certainty of three hot meals a day; and as thousands poured into the Houston Astrodome, Red Cross volunteers became overwhelmed with the onslaught of evacuees demanding to know where they “got they shoes.”

Said one volunteer, “It’s true that many evacuees had their shoes ruined as they trampled through waist deep water, but we here at the Red Cross simply did not anticipate this level of desperation in regards to foot attire.

“Once their necessities were met, the evacuees kept demanding of us, ‘Tell me where I got my shoes.’ I would just try to reassure them that although they lost their footwear in the storm, we would do everything in our power to see to it that they received adequate replacements. But this never seems to appease them. They walk off giving us disgruntled stares.”

Our Disney trip is all collected in a Flickr set here.

At some later date I'll pull out a few that deserve anecdotes, but right now my own bed is calling me.

A long article from nola.com, in diary form, by Abdulrahman Zeitoun. A Syrian immigrant, resident of New Orleans since 1973, well-respected businessman and property owner with an American wife and American-born kids, who remained behind during Katrina, spent a week rescuing neighbors in his canoe and feeding pets in his neighborhood, and ultimately was arrested by military search and rescue teams for being a terrorist, held in a looter gulag for 23 days, charged with looting and held on $75,000 bond.

Link here.

I am often so ashamed of my country these days.

Not sure if these links will work, but they're from nola.com.

Somebody put up Christmas lights powered by generators, at the corner of North Robertson & Louisa Street in the Ninth Ward.

Here and here.

"Wow, that one was neat!"

"OK, get out of my bed. You're kicking your mother tonight."

"I like Animal Kingdom more than Epcot."

"Yeah. Too Disneyfied."

The nicest things about Epcot were the young women taiko drummers, and the Norwegian girl gift shop staff, and our lovely Italian waitress Valeria who very sweetly taught me to pronounce "salsicce alla griglia e fagioli".

Wild boar with fennel italian sausages on white beans.

Halfway through the meal, I realized that whoever put this particular menu item together has a sense of humor and was making a double reference about one character in a particular Disney animated feature, but it's buried pretty deep until it's pointed out to you.

Today I gave thanks for my family not fighting and in fact being very sweet to each other. For being able to play on water slides after sundown in November. For having a home and jobs and schools to return to, when so many others don't and many more never had it to begin with. For chocolate chocolate-chunk Haagen-Dazs. For having so many lovely friends who read my shit even when I'm just running off at the mouth, and who run off at the mouth themselves just so I can read their shit. And for the fact that I don't actually have to get out of bed to watch the fireworks in the Magic Kingdom.

Thirteen hours at the Magic Kingdom and I my feet are bloody stumps.

The kids behaved. Everybody behaved, in fact.

Some of the classic rides are still classics. The Haunted Mansion and Pirates of the Caribbean are still brilliant even if they've evolved slightly over the years.

Liam was so scared of Splash Mountain while we were waiting in line he was shaking, he was near tears, but when he finished, he wanted to go back and do it again. He wins the bravery award.

The gift shop at the Pirates exit now has primo swag, and not all of it is of the "I Heart Captain Jack Sparrow" variety.

But the disappointments: Mr. Toad's Wild Ride is long gone. 20,000 Leagues is gone. And the Enchanted Tiki Room is "Under New Management". Gone is the charming Martin Denny 60's tropical kitsch, replaced by Iago and Zazu and a bunch of hip-hop and Gloria Estefan songs and screeching Gilbert fucking Godfried and the typical modern "smart-ass insults as comedy" form of entertainment that Hollywood thinks we all want.

The Tiki Room sucks now. Lifetime boycott. I will never set foot in there again.

After having read Cory Doctorow's Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom, I see this place in a whole new light, and I'm probably gonna reread it again as soon as I get home. And if anybody knows of any other Disney-oriented cyberpunk/sci-fi, please let me know (Doxy?).

Pictures coming soon, but I forgot my USB connector for my camera.

On our way to Orlando, we're flying directly over Lake Pontchartrain. It's a beautiful clear day, I can see for miles and miles. Very far off in the distance, I can make out the tall buildings of the CBD, and with a little guidance, I can point out to Liam the white roof of the Superdome, no bigger than a little tablet of aspirin from here. I can almost make out the 17th Street Canal, the London Canal, I can clearly see the Causeway, the Intercoastal Canal through the Ninth Ward, and its continuation south of Algiers.

And to the east and south, as we pass over the Twin Spans and towards Lake Borgne, I can see the wetlands down the parish, down St. Bernard, and I can see the sunlight glinting off the river as it threads its way through the marshy finger of Plaquemines Parish.

I've never seen the city from this angle before, and so I don't know how to compare what I'm seeing to what it looked like before Katrina, or what it looked like 20 or 30 years ago.

But my first thought, taking in the whole scene, was "Where the hell is all the land?"

My God, the Gulf of Mexico isn't a parish or two away. It's right there. It's knocking on the doors of the city.

Where the hell did Southeastern Louisiana go?

Like I said before, I've never seen it from up here before, but I never thought it looked like this. New Orleans is not, contrary to popular belief, a coastal city. Or it's not supposed to be. It didn't used to be.

We're headed for Disney World for the next few days, so blogging may be spotty during that time.

Two kids, two grandparents, lots and lots of family drama.

May God have mercy on our souls.

See ya!

In New Orleans last week, I saw lots of shirts with lots of insignia. NOPD was very visible, even when not in uniform. New York State Police were doing security in the quarter. Lots of National Guard.

I did not see a single person out in public wearing anything that might identify them as a FEMA rep, though, even though FEMA must have thousands of people in New Orleans by now.

I did notice an odd phenomenon, though.

Gina's brother Larry is a career diplomat with the US State Department, and one of my favorite things to get as a Christmas gift from him is a t-shirt from whatever embassy he's posted to that year. Well, on Monday evening I was wearing the shirt he got me from the embassy in Dhaka, Bangladesh. And I was getting strange looks. People everywhere would do a double-take. People in the coffee shop would stop and turn and read my shirt in a not very friendly way.

And after a while I figured out what it was.

The shirt has the emblem of the Department of State on it, with a big eagle which clearly screams out "Federal Agency". And everybody was seeing the shirt and thinking I was from the Federal Government and they were reading it to try to figure out if I was somebody who they could vent at.

Because if there's anything more despised in New Orleans than federal workers, I don't know what it is, unless it's Al Qaeda or something.

I imagine FEMA workers change into civvies before they leave their posts, just so they don't get pulled from their cars on the way home from work.

The t-shirt shops on Bourbon Street have the usual "Shuck Me, Suck Me, Eat Me Raw" shirts back in the back. The prime front displays are reserved for shirts that say "FEMA: Federal Employees Missing Again", or "Don't tell my mom I work for FEMA. Tell her I'm a piano player in a whorehouse."

Home Slice, the new NY-style pizza joint on South Congress opened this week, and Liam and I got a chance to try it last night.

Executive summary: As good as Saccone's, and it's right here in Austin. Saccone's was the only reason to ever drive to Cedar Park, which means now there is no reason to ever drive to Cedar Park again. (Sorry, Gregg, ya gotta move down here.)

The crust was flawless. Hand-thrown dough. The only very slight fault I could find is that the sauce lacked "oomph"...I like a lot of oregano in my pizza. The waiter agreed, but he said the owner was from upstate New York and she liked a sauce that was more tomato-y. Such is life. We'll just ask for extra oregano next time we order.

Liam and I sat at the bar, so we got to watch everything being made. The caesar salad was made to order, right in front of us, anchovies and everything. We saw some meatball subs going into the oven that looked unbelievable.

Check it out soon, it's already crowded and as word gets out, it's gonna be impossible to get in there.

They're starting to line up the experts to buttress the case for abandoning New Orleans.

This editorial by St. Louis University earth sciences professor Tim Kusky appeared in the Boston Globe last week, advocating that levees not be rebuilt and that remaining residents and businesses be moved out of the city gradually over the next few years.

Kusky is scheduled to be a guest on "60 Minutes" tonight.

So here's the problem: According to the Times-Picayune, Kusky is a total unknown in his self-proclaimed field and has no expertise in the area of coastal erosion or levee management. Judging from the article, he seemed to even be unfamiliar with the alternatives to levees that were debated within the Army Corps of Engineers in the early part of the 20th Century, as documented in John M. Barry's Rising Tide, a book that any layperson can read and understand.

The State of Louisiana has protested the airing of this inflammatory and inaccurate reporting:

In a letter to CBS, Andy Kopplin, executive director of Louisiana Recovery Authority, asked the network to reconsider airing it.

"We are very concerned about the preview of your story on New Orleans' future posted on the '60 Minutes' website and hope it is not an accurate reflection of your work," Kopplin wrote.

"We know of many scientists and engineers who have spent considerable parts of their careers becoming experts in addressing coastal land loss in Louisiana and who disagree fundamentally with Prof. Kusky's purported comments."

. . .

"I am dismayed by the advance report on the scheduled story on sinking of New Orleans which apparently is based on the perspectives of 'a natural disaster expert,'" he wrote. He also noted he's spent his career working on coastal environmental issues around the country and "until now, I have never heard of Prof. Kusky."

Boesch's letter indicates that Kusky's expertise is in ophiolites — rock sequences that formed on the oceanic edge of tectonic plates in the Archean eon about three billion years ago. He questioned an op-ed piece written for the Boston Globe in September suggesting it's time for New Orleanians to move out of the city, which Boesch said was "replete with serious errors of fact and logic."

"The op-ed reads like an undergraduate paper — a little bit of truth but with a lot of important information missing and not much deep thinking," Boesch wrote.

"I am extremely disappointed that the widely viewed and well regarded '60 Minutes' would base a story on such an incredibly important issue on an 'expert' with so little standing on the subject and not seek the best scientific perspectives available," Boesch wrote.

My fear is that this is part of the Republican playbook. They don't want to pay for rebuilding New Orleans, so they are beginning to make the case for abandoning it they way they made the case for tax cuts and the Iraq war. Fear and misinformation. They claim to be the party that will protect America, but the truth is out there, the evidence is in their actions...when an American city comes under attack, they will gather up their gold and cut and run, like the greedy cowards they are.

Your city may be next. And you'll be on your own. The Federal Government under GOP control will abandon you. It'll be your own damn fault for living near water, or near a faultline, or in a tornado zone.

In my retirement, I plan on spending a year driving around in an RV, visiting cemeteries, for the sole purpose of urinating on the graves of the GOP. Thirty years from now, Bush, Rove, Rumsfeld, Delay, Scalia, Brownie...all will receive a posthumous golden shower from me.

So will Kusky.

A Times-Picayune editorial, reprinted in its entirety, which I hope I can be forgiven for.

Pass it on to everybody you know.

The federal government wrapped levees around greater New Orleans so that the rest of the country could share in our bounty.

Americans wanted the oil and gas that flow freely off our shores. They longed for the oysters and shrimp and flaky Gulf fish that live in abundance in our waters. They wanted to ship corn and soybeans and beets down the Mississippi and through our ports. They wanted coffee and steel to flow north through the mouth of the river and into the heartland.

They wanted more than that, though. They wanted to share in our spirit. They wanted to sample the joyous beauty of our jazz and our food. And we were happy to oblige them.
So the federal government built levees and convinced us that we were safe.

We weren't.

The levees, we were told, could stand up to a Category 3 hurricane.

They couldn't.

By the time Katrina surged into New Orleans, it had weakened to Category 3. Yet our levee system wasn't as strong as the Army Corps of Engineers said it was. Barely anchored in mushy soil, the floodwalls gave way.

Our homes and businesses were swamped. Hundreds of our neighbors died.

Now, this metro area is drying off and digging out. Life is going forward. Our heart is beating.

But we need the federal government - we need our Congress - to fulfill the promises made to us in the past. We need to be safe. We need to be able to go about our business feeding and fueling the rest of the nation. We need better protection next hurricane season than we had this year. Going forward, we need protection from the fiercest storms, the Category 5 storms that are out there waiting to strike.

Some voices in Washington are arguing against us. We were foolish, they say. We settled in a place that is lower than the sea. We should have expected to drown.

As if choosing to live in one of the nation's great cities amounted to a death wish. As if living in San Francisco or Miami or Boston is any more logical.

Great cities are made by their place and their people, their beauty and their risk. Water flows around and through most of them. And one of the greatest bodies of water in the land flows through this one: the Mississippi.

The federal government decided long ago to try to tame the river and the swampy land spreading out from it. The country needed this waterlogged land of ours to prosper, so that the nation could prosper even more.

Some people in Washington don't seem to remember that. They act as if we are a burden. They act as if we wore our skirts too short and invited trouble.

We can't put up with that. We have to stand up for ourselves. Whether you are back at home or still in exile waiting to return, let Congress know that this metro area must be made safe from future storms. Call and write the leaders who are deciding our fate. Get your family and friends in other states to do the same. Start with members of the Environment and Public Works and Appropriations committees in the Senate, and Transportation and Appropriations in the House. Flood them with mail the way we were flooded by Katrina.

Remind them that this is a singular American city and that this nation still needs what we can give it.

The fate of greater New Orleans' levees lies with the committees and lawmakers below. These leaders won't know how you feel about the need to upgrade greater New Orleans' flood-protection system unless they hear it from you.

Making contact can take a little effort. While some members have public e-mail addresses, others only accept e-mail via forms on their Web sites. However you communicate, use your own words, and speak from the heart.

. . . . . . .

SENATE MAJORITY LEADER

Sen. Bill Frist, R-Tenn.; 509 Hart Senate Office Building, Washington, D.C. 20510; (202) 224-3344; Web site: www.frist.senate.gov.

SENATE APPROPRIATIONS COMMITTEE

Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss, chairman; 113 Dirksen Senate Office Building, Washington, D.C. 20510; (202) 224-5054; e-mail address: senator@cochran.senate.gov.

Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., ranking member; 311 Hart Senate Office Building, Washington, D.C. 20510; (202) 224-3954; e-mail address: senator_byrd@byrd.senate.gov

Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska; 522 Hart Senate Office Building, Washington, D.C. 20510; (202) 224-3004; Web site: www.stevens.senate.gov

SENATE BUDGET COMMITTEE

Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., chairman; 393 Russell Senate Office Building, Washington, D.C. 20510; (202) 224-3324; Web site: www.gregg.senate.gov

Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., ranking member; 530 Hart Senate Office Building, Washington, D.C. 20510; (202) 224-2043; Web site: www.conrad.senate.gov

SENATE ENVIRONMENT AND PUBLIC WORKS COMMITTEE

Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., chairman; 453 Russell Senate Office Building, Washington, D.C. 20510; (202) 224-4721; Web site: www.inhofe.senate.gov

Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., ranking member; 511 Hart Senate Office Building, Washington, D.C. 20510; (202) 224-2651; e-mail address: max@baucus.senate.gov

SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE

Rep. Dennis Hastert, R-Ill.; 235 Cannon House Office Building, Washington, D.C. 20515; (202) 225-2976; Web site: www.house.gov/hastert

HOUSE MAJORITY LEADER

Rep. Roy Blunt, R-Mo.; 217 Cannon House Office Building; Washington, D.C. 20515; (202) 225-6536; Web site: www.blunt.house.gov

HOUSE APPROPRIATIONS COMMITTEE

Rep. Jerry Lewis, R-Calif., chairman; 2112 Rayburn House Office Building; Washington, D.C. 20515; (202) 225-5861; Web site: www.house.gov/jerrylewis

Rep. David Obey, D-Wis., ranking member; 2314 Rayburn House Office Building, Washington, D.C. 20515; (202) 225-3365; Web site: www.obey.house.gov

HOUSE BUDGET COMMITTEE

Rep. Jim Nussle, R-Iowa, chairman; 303 Cannon House Office Building; Washington, D.C. 20515; (202) 225-2911; e-mail: nussleia@mail.house.gov

Rep. John Spratt, D-S.C., ranking member; 1401 Longworth House Office Building, Washington, D.C. 20515; (202) 225-5501; Web site: www.house.gov/spratt

On our way back from driving around the lower Ninth Ward on Monday, we were held up in stopped traffic on St. Claude for about ten minutes or so. It soon became clear why, as a motorcade of police and army vehicles and one tour bus with tinted windows blew by us on their way into the Lower Ninth. We figured it was some touring mandarins from DC wanting a first-hand look.

A couple of hours later, we stopped by the Redfish again for lunch, and the same damn bus was parked outside. The visiting dignitaries were huddled in a private dining room, but the main dining room was crowded with other minor functionaries, Army photographers, and the like.

Here's the news story on the event.

For some reason, Gina and I got seated at the table closest to the second private dining room where the press was setting up for the post-lunch press conference, so when everybody came out and mingled before the press bit started, I got to do some eavesdropping. Senator Mary Landrieu was standing not five feet away from me, and I tried and tried to approach her...I wanted to just hug her and tell her to keep kicking ass and get Gina to take my picture with her, but she was deep in conversation with some guy who I later learned was Rhode Island Senator Lincoln Chafee. I didn't want to push it too much since somebody who was dressed remarkably like a Secret Service agent was giving me the evil eye, so I went back to my pecan catfish meuniere.

While I was hovering, though, I was standing behind some army brass...couldn't see any rank, but his name tag said something like Doorfman or Dooley or something. He had a local accent, and he was saying in a low voice "A decision has to be made about the Ninth Ward, and there's only one decision that can be made, but nobody wants to be the first one to step up and say it." And then he turned and noticed me listening in and moved farther away where I couldn't hear the rest.

I can think of a lot of interpretations of that statement, but none of what I'm thinking feels a whole lot like he had in mind a decision that might benefit the people and families and culture and neighborhoods of the Ninth Ward. It sounded to me like he was wishing somebody would just hurry up and pull the trigger so that the bulldozers and developers could move in. Just make the problem (and the problem people) go away.

I also notice that Sen. Chafee's web site trumpets his visit to the Ninth Ward. The picture caption makes it sound like it was just the Republican Chafee and the Republican Vitter on the tour, but you can clearly see Landrieu's shock of blonde hair in the photo, and she was much more visible at the Redfish function...I didn't see Vitter at all.

Liberal-shmiberal, Chafee's still a craven little GOP toadie.

But Mary Landrieu rocks my world.

Hiromi also wanted to know if I could find some before and after pictures of these houses. I don't have "before" pictures of the specific houses I took pictures of, but I found some pictures from before Katrina of typical Lakeview houses, so that you can understand what the neighborhood felt like.

The thing you need to realize, looking at all the dead grass and trees and brown muck everywhere, is that normally New Orleans is one of the greenest cities you can imagine. Its climate is near-tropical most of the year. Lush St. Augustine grass grows like a weed there.

Anyway, here are some comparisons. Remember, the before and after pictures aren't the same house, just similar style houses in the same neighborhood. I hope they help.

And this is before and after of Parasol's, in the Irish Channel neighborhood which escaped serious damage compared to other areas:

Hiromi asked me what the big X markings on the houses meant. These markings are left by urban search and rescue teams when they search a house. Here's an example, taken in the lower Ninth Ward:

When a team goes into the house, they paint one diagonal of the X, and where the northern quadrant would be, they put the date, and in the western quadrant, they put some indication of who searched it. So in the picture above, the team that did the purple X entered on September 10, and was from the DEA (I don't think the drug enforcement agency, there is some other DEA involved). After they're done searching, they put the other diagonal of the X. They fill in the southern quadrant with any people they found, living or dead (here they found nobody), and the eastern quadrant with any hazards that future teams should be aware of (such as unstable stairwells, missing floors, etc.)

For the small houses like this, they probably just painted the whole thing all at once. When you're searching a large structure like an office building, you do the one diagonal going in, one diagonal going out, and you'd also put time in and time out in the north quadrant. That way if the SAR team itself gets in some kind of trouble in the building, the marking on the outside of the building lets other searchers know that there is still a team inside, possibly needing rescue themselves.

The team that made the orange markings put "NE" in the hazards quadrant, which I think means "No entry". This may have been a preliminary search team that was looking for survivors, banging on doors and looking in windows but not going inside. The second team came through at a later date during a more thorough search and likely broke into the house to look in the attic, look under furniture.

Some houses had lots of markings, since the animal rescue teams adopted the same system, so you'd see X's where the team was marked as "SPCA" and the bottom quadrant might say "1 dead dog" or "1 cat under house, left food 9/18".

I would hazard a guess that the animal rescue folks may have annoyed the people rescue folks a bit, since sometimes it was really hard to decipher what the markings on a building said. So you'd look at a house with an X and if the person who marked it wasn't very clear, you wouldn't necessarily know if it had been searched for people or just animals. I bet there was lots of confusion on the ground.

You might wonder why I took a picture of this house, since it didn't really show much in the way of spectacular damage and is pretty much an uninteresting shot:

This is the last known address of somebody who I was trying, without success, to locate for a person at the Red Cross shelter. Her status has haunted me all this time, so I drove by her house in the lower Ninth Ward just to see the SAR markings on her house. I needed to see if there was a 0 in that lower quadrant. There was.

I walked around the house a little while. The windows are broken, and the inside reeks of mold, like a damp cellar. The furniture inside looks like somebody picked the house up and shook it. Couches upside down on top of chairs. Everything covered in mud and mold and muck.

I saw pictures of this hilarious graffiti on the net last week, but we happened to drive by it on Monday so I took my own pictures.

What I didn't know was that it continued on the next window and got even funnier:

His ugly woman left him and he had to eat his mean dog. Stirring the roux with the shotgun, no doubt.

What's even more hysterical is that if you pull back a little, you discover that this guy is Emeril's next-door neighbor:

But then you get to thinking about Emeril, and you start losing your humor.

Where the fuck is Emeril?

According to his own website, Emeril is "coming soon". But this article from the Times-Picayune from a few weeks ago paints a less flattering picture.

All of Ralph Brennan's restaurants are now open...the Redfish Grill has been open for weeks. Dickie Brennan kept all of his 400 employees on the payroll while his places were closed, even the waiters. The Brennan family announced only a week after the storm "The matriarchs have directed us that we will re-open Commanders Palace".

During this time, Emeril fired most of his employees and spent his days on a book-signing tour. And despite what his website says about his Homebase staff still being employed, friends of Gulfsails report that they were let go without notice and are still unemployed.

The Brennans are in New Orleans. Chef Paul Prudhomme is in New Orleans, and K-Paul's is open. Hell, the po-boy guys at Parasol's are in New Orleans. Tommy Cvitanovich had Drago's open before he could even get oysters.

Where the fuck is Emeril?

Travelling the world selling his cookbooks.

I've always had a liking for Emeril, since he and I are both Massachusetts transplants...he moved down there to become a famous chef, I moved when I was a kid because the Coast Guard transferred my dad, but still. We both have equal roots in lobsters and crawfish, quahogs and oysters, steamers and blue crabs, haddock and catfish.

But where the fuck is he?

I haven't lived there in twenty years. The streetcars haven't rolled in three months. Nothing about driving in New Orleans is normal.

But still...every time I made a left turn off St. Charles, my reflexes kicked in and I did that little check-over-the-left-shoulder thing to make sure a streetcar wasn't coming. The leftward flick of the eyes that tourists don't know they're supposed to do, but that natives do as instinctively as breathing.

Craig wants to bring back the clatter. I'm with him on that.

Leo is an oyster shucker at the Redfish Grill. He's also an oyster shucker at Bourbon House.

He was also, for four days in September, a medical professional.

Leo's mother worked on the cleaning staff at Touro Infirmary, and during the hurricane he stayed with her there. She wouldn't leave her post because the hospital staff was needed, and he wouldn't leave the city without his mama. And as the situation in New Orleans declined, Leo was pressed into service. As an orderly. As an assistant nurse. And at the end, when they were evacuating patients by helicopter off the roof of the hospital, he would carry patients up the stairwells, because there were no working elevators.

For four days. With no food.

The doctors were doing triage, thinking that one 260 pound man just might not be able to be evacuated because he was too heavy to bring to the roof.

Leo got him to the roof.

He'll tell you that he's always been the best shucker in the French Quarter, and I couldn't tell you if that was always true, but with the diaspora of New Orleans restaurant workers scattered to the winds, it is most definitely true now.

We ordered our first two dozen, and while he was loading up our platters, he'd slip us a few freebies across the bar to tide us over. And then he handed us a platter and said "there's your first dozen...my math skills ain't too good though" and he winked at us and laughed. There were nearly twenty oysters crammed on that tray. And the next tray.

We ate a lot of oysters that night.

And we listened to Leo's stories, his jokes, his non-stop line of chatter that all good shuckers know. He's got nothing now. Car is gone, house is gone. He's got a place to stay with a friend, working a full shift at one restaurant and then going across the street to work a full shift at another restaurant, trying to save up enough money to buy a pickup truck so that he can drive around salvaging stuff from his mamma's house, and from his house.

Go to New Orleans and let Leo feed you. And tip him well. He's a fucking hero.

Chris Rose of the Times-Picayune sums up beautifully what I was unable to say the other day. Please click through to read the whole article.

My wife questions the wisdom of my frequent forays into the massive expanse of blown-apart lives and property that local street maps used to call Gentilly, Lakeview, the East and the Lower 9th. She fears that it contributes to my unhappiness and general instability and I suspect she is right.

Perhaps I should just stay on the stretch of safe, dry land Uptown where we live and try to move on, focus on pleasant things, quit making myself miserable, quit reliving all those terrible things we saw on TV that first week.

That's advice I wish I could follow, but I can't. I am compelled for reasons that are not entirely clear to me. And so I drive.

I put my pictures up on a server here at work for people to look at, and one guy commented that judging from the food pictures, it looks like at least progress is being made, some things are getting back to normal.

And that is exactly the impression I don't want to give.

There is an island of civilization called Uptown. There is a corridor of normalcy centered on Magazine Street, over to St. Charles. There is business being done in the CBD. There are bars on Bourbon Street.

So if you look at my pictures of po-boys and gay bars and coffee shops, you think, "well, rebuilding seems to be ramping up. That's good news, right?"

And you would be missing the point entirely.

I want all of you, if you have the means, to take a three-day vacation to New Orleans some time in the next couple of months. If you go, I'll try to drive over and meet you there and I'll take you on a tour. I want you to see this. I want you to understand.

We're back in Austin, and I've uploaded the last of my New Orleans pictures to my flickr account. I'll try to write down a few thoughts on them later on.

It's definitely weird being back in a city where debris and refrigerators don't line every road, where stoplights work, where stores are assumed to be open, and where National Guard humvees don't slow down to look at you if you're sitting out alone late at night.

Driving alone late at night is very creepy. You can stick to certain main roads and feel like things are normal...Magazine, St. Charles. S.Claiborne is at least mostly well-lit, even if half the traffic lights are out-of-order. But if you look to the right or left, it's like looking into the wilderness. Utter blackness. No streetlights, no house lights, nothing. I was trying to find a shortcut to get over here to CC's again to upload some pictures and check email before curfew, and I started to turn right off of Claiborne onto what should be a major street...maybe Broadway, I'm not sure.

I turned, and I saw what was in front of me, and it was the stuff of nightmares. No light at all. Maybe no people. Maybe not. Maybe the devil. Just utter complete blackness, like the Congo at night.

I put it in reverse and backed back out, and kept going til I found a street like Jefferson that I knew was safe.

The French Quarter tonight was eerie. Bourbon Street has some light crowds, lots of noise, live music. But the rest of it is absolutely desolate. Cafe du Monde is closed. We ate at Tujague's...at 8pm it was only one-quarter full. Walked around Jackson Square, down Chartres, back up Decatur. We were the only people. You could stand in the middle of Decatur Street and look in both directions and see no cars at all. Napoleon House closes at 6pm...the menu on the window said "MRE: Muffallettas Read To Eat".

Random thoughts. Gotta go, I'm at a sidewalk cafe and curfew is in 10 minutes, and I don't want to test how lax the National Guard or NOPD might be, 'cause they're all pretty tired and justifiably cranky, and I've got out-of-state plates.

Tomorrow we drive home and I hope to write something more coherent in the next day or so.

Some more pictures. The upload speed at CC's is slow so I still haven't got all the Sunday pictures up yet, but I've got some of the neighborhood right next to the 17th Street Canal breach which are pretty awful.

Later today I'll put up some happy ones. We got roast beef po-boys at Parasol's, and then a few dozen oysters at Redfish where we heard some great stories from Leo, a bad mother shucker.

We're gonna try to do some business today, then head to the Ninth Ward in the afternoon.

More later.

We drove around Lakeview and Gentilly and a little bit of Mid-City and N.O. East today.

I don't have the words. I just don't. I only cried once, on Milne Boulevard in Lakeview, completely wrung out right now, posting from the outside of the CC's Coffeehouse on Magazine which is closed but still has their wifi up.

We took pictures all day today, and when we got back to the room, we dumped them to the laptop and looked at them and we thought, "It's not there." What we saw is just not in the pictures. I just don't know how to capture it on film. A picture captures a destroyed house and you look at it and you think, "oh, wow, that house is wrecked." But the camera only shows the one house, and if you weren't there you can't imagine that the next house was wrecked, and the next, and the next, and if you stand in the middle of the street you can see to the horizon, block after block after block of destroyed houses and piles of debris and utter desolation and emptiness. Outside of the CBD and parts of Uptown, the rest of the city is utterly desolate. No traffic. No pedestrians. Just...Armaggedon. The Stand. Omega Man. Nagasaki.

I don't have the words. I'm not a good enough writer and it hurts me that I can't put this down and make you understand.

I've been turning over in my head all day how to write this and I can't. I've only uploaded about half my pictures, I'm on too slow a link and the rest will have to wait because it's late. But if you want to try to understand this, take any one of the pictures from my flickr page, and then imagine an entire city block where every house looks like that. Then go get a map of your hometown, a town that you know well, and mark off a 40 square mile rectangle superimposed over your town. San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, wherever. And imagine that every single neighborhood, every single block, every single house and business inside that rectangle looks like those pictures...and there are no people there.

It is more horrible than anything I have described, anything I have seen described. And we haven't even been to the Ninth Ward yet.

More tomorrow. Right now I've got nothing.

Update: the Flickr set is here.

Our travelling companion is a little stuffed creature that Cassidy made for us. We named him Ignatius.

I've driven this stretch of I-10 a bazillion times and it gets more boring every time. Houston to Lake Charles is especially dreary even on the most beautiful days. Except for the lack of kid noise in the back seat, it felt just like any one of dozens of holiday drives I've made. Until just before Beaumont, when we saw a twisted and shredded highway sign by the side of the road.

A half mile later, we started seeing pine trees snapped off halfway up the trunk. Missing gas station signs. Old oaks uprooted, lying on their sides. Toppled billboards. Then a blue tarp roof. Then another. Then a half dozen.

And then I remembered the reason for this trip, and it wasn't a holiday. And I started getting a little knot in my stomach.

We passed about a dozen Waffle Houses with signs in various conditions, including one sad little "FF E HO". I want to eat at the Ff e Ho on the way home.

Passing through Vidor (once known as the "Klan Capitol of Texas", and the originator of the "Nigger Don't Let The Sun Set On You Here" sign) , there is a stretch of I-10 that is Fundamentalist Alley. Maybe eight or ten churches within a half mile, right on the feeder road, all Baptist or Church of Christ. And if anybody wanted to draw any conclusions about hurricanes and God's wrath based on the condition of Vidor, Texas, they'd have to conclude that he is mighty pissed at the Fundies. Waffle House? Open for business. Denny's? Looked fine. Auto repair? Not a scratch. But First Baptist had a big old blue tarp roof. Church of Christ had most of its brick facade lying in a pile in the parking lot. Church after church after church, smited.

But as Gina pointed out, "this part of the country is so ugly and in such disrepair, it's hard to tell what's hurricane damage and what was just like that before".

It's always happier when you get past Lake Charles and can tune in the Cajun music on KBON, 101.1 FM, and we got inspired to stop in for dinner at Cafe Des Amis in Breaux Bridge.

I had crab-stuffed drum topped with crawfish brandy cream sauce.

Gina had a crab-stuffed portobello mushroom with grilled shrimp.

We finished with a Gateau Sirop. "What's the finger for?" "For scale!"

I love Breaux Bridge. It's like the anti-Vidor.

Sunday we head into New Orleans.

NOLA.com says the first post-Katrina oyster harvests started on October 24, and New Orleans restaurants which are open are starting to serve them: Bourbon House, Desire, Cooter Brown's and the Metairie location of Acme Oyster House.

A new Felix's just opened on Prytania and will serve oysters starting Tuesday. (Guess where I'm having lunch before we get on the road?) Drago's and Redfish Grill will also have oysters starting this week.

First disappointment of this trip (and we haven't even left yet): The original locations of Felix's and Acme in the French Quarter are still closed due to hurricane damage.

On a related note, last week I stopped in at Quality Seafood in Austin to pick up a family pack of fish & chips, and the hottie working at their brand new oyster bar charmed me into getting a dozen while I waited. I don't know if it has something to do with Katrina or if it was just the usual excellent product you get at Quality, but these were the biggest, juiciest, briniest Texas oysters I've ever had. Definitely check out Quality Seafood if you haven't been there in a while. Austin has never really had a decent place to get beer and raw oysters (you could never get both quality product and a shucker that knew was she was doing), but it sure as hell does now.

Burnt Orange Report has an Excel file with the per-county totals for Prop 2, and they slice and dice it to come up with some Top 10 lists.

Travis County topped the list of counties against the initiative, with 59%. Sadly, Travis was the only county to vote against the initiative. A shrinking blue speck in a sea of red.

My own precinct had a 35% voter turnout, which puts its turnout as high as those in the top 10 counties, and we voted 88% against.

I love my neighbors. I still mostly like my town.

But let's say it again one more time: Fuck Texas. Just fuck 'em. Cracker-ass crackers.

I'm going through one of my phases where I'm counting the days til I can leave this shithole state.

On Saturday Gina and I are leaving for a quick four-day visit to New Orleans.

Since she's redesigning Mark's house, she needs to take a look at the site and also meet the contractor in person. She also wants to chat up a couple of architecture firms there just to scope things out. There is also a town hall meeting next Monday sponsored by Nagin's Bring New Orleans Back Commission and the Urban Land Institute, which may be a good place to make connections and figure out if it's remotely possible for her to help in the rebuilding.

I'm going in my capacity as navigator, bodyguard, and restaurant tour guide. Assuming I don't just cry the whole time.

We're staying Saturday night at brother Bill's house in Baton Rouge, then heading into New Orleans for two nights, staying Uptown on Napoleon in an apartment owned by the woman whose bed-and-breakfast we stayed at for Mardi Gras a few years back. She's got a few of her properties back online, although more of them still need lots of work.

I'll take lots of pictures for y'all. Hopefully some happy ones, although I fear a lot of the other kind too.

Chris Rose writes this hysterically funny piece on nola.com about the new Xanax generation in New Orleans. On what passes for sane and rational when your city has a bathtub ring.

Here's one for you: Some friends of mine were clearing out their belongings from their home in the Fontainebleau area and were going through the muddle of despair that attends the realization that you were insured out the wazoo for a hurricane but all you got was flood damage and now you're going to get a check for $250,000 to rebuild your $500,000 house.

As they pondered this dismal circumstance in the street, their roof collapsed. Just like that. It must have suffered some sort of structural or rain-related stress from the storm and now, two weeks later, it manifested itself in total collapse.

Now I ask you: What would you do if you watched your home crumble to pieces before your eyes?

What they did was, realizing their home now qualified for a homeowner's claim, they jumped up and down and high-fived each other and yelled: "The roof collapsed! The roof collapsed!"

Our home is destroyed. Oh, happy day. I submit there's something not right there.

Thanks to Leveetation for the link.

I found this map in Ernie the Attorney's flickr pages. It shows the results of home inspections by city building inspectors, marking safe homes as green, partially damaged homes as yellow, and uninhabitable homes as red.

What's interesting are the areas that are not color coded at all. Algiers has only a few flecks of yellow, presumably because inspections are not even necessary over there since it didn't really flood. But vast stretches of Gentilly, N.O. East, and the Lower Ninth aren't color-coded either. I don't know enough about the Ninth Ward to know how much of that uncolored area is residential vs. industrial. But I know there are plenty of houses in N.O. East that have no designation on this map. Are these the neighborhoods that are lost causes? I don't know.

That little cluster of dots in the Lower Ninth is where many of the people I met at the shelter were from. I have a list of names in my head of people who were still missing when I last visited the shelter, last known address a big crimson dot. There was one young guy, a budding stand-up comedian, who was frantic with worry over his girlfriend Ishanti and her small child. Her house is under one of those dots, but whenever I've tried to find her on the net all I find are his distraught missing persons ads. I don't know where he ended up, or if he ever found her.

Sometimes I wonder if years from now, I'll still google Ishanti Freeman every once in a while, wondering if she is OK and if her boyfriend ever found her.

The book in which my New Orleans piece will appear now has a working title: Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans?

Craig Mod from Chin Music Press is doing the book design, and is blogging the design process at the Chin Music blog. It's fascinating reading, especially considering how well-received the design of Kuhaku was (which I hope to get a copy of real soon). The Chin Music folks are book geeks, design geeks, music geeks, coffee geeks, Japan geeks, and now, God love 'em, budding young New Orleans geeks.

I've also got a PDF of the DYK press packet, with my bio in it.

My bio. Is that like the dorkiest thing ever, or what?

Front page of the Times-Picayune today shows two maps.

The first is a map of New Orleans in 1878, with all populated areas clustered along the banks of the river, from the Marigny through the Quarter, downtown, the Garden District and all the way up to Carrollton. Areas farther from the river and up towards the lake or out east of New Orleans were largely swamp and uninhabited.

The second map shows the flooding from Katrina.

And lo and behold, the area which was already built-up in 1878 matches almost exactly the area of the city which stayed dry after the levees failed during Katrina. The swamp and landfill which was developed and populated in the 20th century was reclaimed by Mother Nature in 2005, if only temporarily.

It's like Karl says...something wants that area to be under water.

This is an interesting article in Mother Jones (forwarded by Brett & Hiromi):

Gentrifying Disaster: : Ethnic Cleansing, GOP-Style

I'm not sure I agree with all of its conclusions, but there are some good insights, including the notion that well-meaning planners who want to use the latest in urban-planning thinking might be unwittingly contributing to an economic "ethnic cleansing" of the region.

This morning Gina got a frantic call from FEMA, telling her they were faxing her paperwork and she needs to start right away and can she be in Orlando by Monday to start training. All very excited and rushed and needing immediate response.

And Gina said, "Well, wait a minute. I haven't even seen a job description or an offer or anything yet."

They were surprised by that, so they gave her the number of the person to call about the offer.

Jayzus, what clueless dorks.

Now, I had seen job ads from a year or so ago for FEMA Mitigation Architects to work out of DC offices for 85-110 K annual salary with full government employee benefits.

But that's not what they're doing for Katrina. No, for Katrina, the salary is half that, with no benefits. For architects with 10-20 years experience. You get called up for a month, you stay the complete month, you don't get to leave the job region to visit home, you work seven days a week with no overtime, and at the end of the month they might either require you to stay another month or terminate your employment and possibly call you back two or three months later with little notice.

And I'm thinking, the only architects who would want to work under those conditions are ones who are unemployable in their home job market, who have no job prospects and no business of their own to run. In other words, the last people you'd want to have to work with under those kinds of conditions. The last people you'd want to be in charge of rebuilding a major metropolitan area.

Needless to say, Gina turned them down. It would be way too hard on the kids for not enough in return, and all to work for an organization as badly run as FEMA.

Somewhere out there, there might be a way for small businesses to get rebuilding contracts, but apparently you need to be sucking Halliburton's dick to be privy to the bid information.

People are getting beaucoup rich off this rebuilding, but it's not the small businesses and it's not the people who want to get in there and do the right thing for the city. It's the usual suspects, the cronies and the carpetbaggers.

So we sit in Austin, and we wonder what to do. Can't move back...no place to live and no schools, even if we could find jobs in our chosen fields. But they desperately want people to move back. It's a bitch of a chicken-and-egg problem.

Most of you don't know her in person, but only know her through her very smart comments she leaves in my blog, but this is too cool not to pass on.

Sarah the sexy physics professor has, in the past few weeks, become both married and pregnant! Like magic!

Woohoo!