April 2006 Archives

My ability to write has completely left me. Between the boundaries that I've had to put on what I can write here, and important real life events that are taking all of my energy (which, naturally, I can't write about), there's not a lot left to say.

I read Karl and Hiromi and Miss Snark and DailyKOS obsessively. I check all my New Orleans links every day. But I'm not in New Orleans, and right now I feel like a fraud writing about it when there are people there actually living in it who have much more to say than I do. I have nothing to say about Austin, so I've kind of wandered away from Austin Metblogs. I don't think they're happy with me. I still read it, though, which is more than I can say about The Austinist.

I wouldn't be posting anything at all today, except that Clint Hagen tagged me with this meme. I like his blog. Even though I don't consider myself a Christian so much as a guy raised as a Christian who still believes there is a God, I enjoy reading the sermons he posts.

Anyway, memage follows (slightly modified). Apologies to those of you who think blog memes are trivial and stupid and not something that real bloggers do. Bite me. I'm tired, and it beats silence:

I AM: stressed out over the important choices I have to make, some of which are life-and-death.
I SAID: I wanna watch cartoons!
I WANT: all my loved ones to be healthy and safe from harm.
I WISH: I was nine years old again, eating an orange sno-ball, without anything to worry about except maybe schoolwork, which is easy.
I HATE: Republicans. Yes, even you.
I MISS: New Orleans as it existed in 1982.
I FEAR: death.
I HEAR: my son playing Runescape.
I WONDER: if I am doing the right thing, or if I am just being selfish.
I REGRET: not being able to talk to anybody about what I regret.
I AM NOT: as cool as you think I am.
I DANCE: in public if it will embarrass my daughter.
I SING: in the car. I sing along with Davell Crawford's "Gather By The River" at the top of my lungs when I'm sad. I sing along with the Polyphonic Spree when I'm less sad.
I CRY: once every couple of years, for about a minute, and then I squash it again.
I AM NOT ALWAYS: err....fuck, I got nothing for this one.
I MADE: a ton of pretend money in the Internet bubble. Then I lost it all again.
I WRITE: eh. I don't. Not lately.
I CONFUSE: eh. Not even going to touch this one.
I NEED: more hugs. And more money. And more free time.
I SHOULD: take a shower. I'm taking my son and my dad to brunch at Threadgill's in a little while and it's nice to be clean.
I START: lots of things that I don't finish. Remember guitar lessons?
I FINISH: the ice cream. Seriously, don't leave ice cream in my freezer and expect it to be there in the morning.
I TAG: Karl, Hiromi, Maitri, Whirly, Darkneuro.

Bay Buchanan: "I think Katrina has worn its welcome.- I think the American people are tired of it."

Video from Crooks and Liars.

Back in the fall of 2002, six months before George W. Bush sent U.S. troops rumbling across the Kuwaiti border into Iraq, a Time reporter noted to Scott Ritter that some right-wingers were calling Ritter “the new Jane Fonda” and wondering what he’d call his new exercise video.

“If they want to have an exercise video,” snorted Ritter, “then why don’t they come here and say it to my face and I’ll give ’em an exercise video, which will be called, ‘Scott Ritter Kicking Their Ass.’”

Confrontation comes easily to Ritter, the former Marine officer, advisor to Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf during the first Gulf War, U.N. weapons inspector and unflinching critic of Bush’s misadventure in Iraq. You want a fight? No problem. He’ll give you one.

Read the whole thing. It's long, but it's fascinating, it's energizing. It's what every Democrat candidate should be saying.

Too full of sushi and tempura ice cream for a real post, but they pegged me pretty well. I got fairly familiar with the job and real estate market in Vancouver in November-December 2004.

The Expatriate Achtung! You are 15% brainwashworthy, 36% antitolerant, and 33% blindly patriotic

Congratulations! You are not susceptible to brainwashing, your values and cares extend beyond the borders of your own country, and your Blind Patriotism does not reach unhealthy levels. If you had been German in the 30s, you would've left the country. One bad scenario -- as I hypothetically project you back in time -- is that you just wouldn't have cared one way or the other about Nazism. Maybe politics don't interest you enough. But the fact that you took this test means they probably do. I'm gonna give you the benefit of the doubt. Did you know that many of the smartest Germans departed prior to the beginning of World War II, because they knew some evil shit was brewing? Brain Drain. Many of them were scientists. It is very possible you could have been one of them. Conclusion: born and raised in Germany in the early 1930's, you would not have been a Nazi. The Would You Have Been A Nazi? Test - it rules -

Since I guess the secret is out, yeah, yesterday was my birthday. 42. The answer to life, the universe, and everything. What you get when you multiply six times nine. Women half my age can get into bars now.

Life being as hectic as it is, the celebrations are happening in fits and starts. Post-Little-League ice cream with the 'rents last night, opened my first present ("Kids in the Hall" season 1 on DVD) and had some fake champagne. Tonight I get cake and maybe another present. Friday I get sushi. No word on whether the sushi will be served on a naked chick half my age who is old enough to drink, but one can always hope.

The other day I posted a link to a video that Tim's daughter made to document the damage to their New Orleans house.

Yesterday, Tim reported that the flooded and soon-to-be-demolished home has burned down. Pictures of the new devastation in the link.

And he's so calm about it. So utterly sensible. The house was going away anyway, and hey, the Fire Department showed up in a hurry, which bodes well for the neighborhood.

The emotional stalwartness of folks over there continues to amaze me.

It's uncanny.

Ron Forman:

Grim Grinning Ghosts:

Couhig was just making an interesting point about the tourist industry and mentioned Dickie Brennan, and Matthews interrupted him to ask, "Who's Dickie Brennan?", and then got the whole debate off track.

See, if this was Hardball, that would be a fair question, because Hardball's national audience doesn't know who Dickie Brennan is.

But this is not Hardball. The only real meaningful audience for this debate is the voting populace of New Orleans, and every damn one of them know who Dickie Brennan is.

Matthews is not qualified to be there, and he's trying to play the debate to a national audience, which is wholly inappropriate.

Watching this right now. I am struck by Chris Matthews' hostility towards Mayor Nagin. He's supposed to be an objective non-partisan moderator and he seems to constantly forget and lapse into conservative pundit bulldog mode. It's like he's there to make Nagin and New Orleans look bad to the rest of the nation.

Matthews has no business on this program. He's a partisan hack, a rabid attack dog, and he's just muddying the waters.

Outstanding. (Banzai Bill, maybe you could get hired on as a game warden.)

The big green dot that Mayor Ray Nagin's Bring New Orleans Back Commission put on post-Katrina maps of Broadmoor stirred anger and controversy. But the suggestion that the deeply flooded neighborhood might best be turned into green space also seems to have inspired an instinct for political satire.

"Green space? We'll show you how it's done," resident Carey Herman said recently as she escorted a visitor to the Broadmoor Green Space Migratory Bird Refuge and Wetlands Reclamation Project.

Or did you think the yards-long puddle at Upperline and South Miro streets was just a pothole? That's what it started out as, about six months before Katrina.

Picture courtesy of Shokufeh:

We dyed Easter eggs today. Or at least, the family dyed Easter eggs. I was feeling impatient and lazy, so I took the road less travelled.

Three videos that give a human dimension to the disaster. Two of which were directed and narrated by kids.

1. This 26 minute film chronicles the hardships faced in St. Bernard Parish which, although smaller in population than New Orleans, suffered much more complete devastation, including toxic spills from the nearby Murphy Oil site. [Thanks to Poppy for the link.]

2. The charming wife and daughter of Tim from Tim's Nameless Blog take us on a tour of their flooded home. Tim is a civil engineer and will only rebuild if he can raise the house above the floodplain.

3. Finally, 10-year-old Kalypso shows us Mardi Gras, her family's evacuation home movies, and the devastation in the Lower Nine and in her own family's Mid-City home, all with a breathless narration that reminded me a little of those "Penny" cartoons from "Pee-Wee's Playhouse". [Thanks to Gina and Humid City.]

I recommend all of them, but if you're short on time, definitely watch the two kid ones and then click through and leave them comments on their YouTube pages.

Thanks

Learn something new every day.

Where does it get the name “shotgun”?

Although often people say these are called shotgun houses because a bullet fired through the front door would go right out the backdoor without hitting a wall, evidence suggests that this name is actually a corruption of the word “shogon.” In West Africa, “shogon” means “God’s House.”

Apparently, the shotgun house came to New Orleans from West Africa via Haiti. More on shotgun houses here, from the wonderful Greater New Orleans Community Data Center, where you can spend days and days getting lost in the very detailed maps, history, and demographics of the city.

I had no idea that the tiny little triangle between St. Charles, Audubon park, and the river was called Black Pearl. Now I know. I also know that it's 37% black, 55% white. That Mahalia Jackson used to sing at the church there. That the average household income is $43,120, but that 26.4% of the 900 households there live in poverty. That 100% of them are native English speakers and non-immigrants. That away from St. Charles, most of the homes are shotgun houses, (OK, actually, I knew that), but that one house is a geodesic dome (never seen that before).

I could geek out all day with this stuff.

FEMA flood maps are out.

Last weekend got off to a great start when I managed to get a picture of the DYK anthology on display in the airport bookstore. Right below Rising Tide, right next to River Road Recipes, and if you look closely at those blue books on the top shelf, that's A Confederacy of Dunces. Fine, fine company I keep now.

Chin Music's Voices blog has a summary of the book signing at the Barnes & Noble in Baton Rouge, here. (With pictures of myself and Jette.)

And they talk about the Tennessee Williams festival events, here. (More pictures.)

The rest of the weekend, I ran around looking at real estate, only half seriously. And looking at schools, slightly more seriously. And being taken on a tour of every Irish pub in the Quarter, with complete and utter seriousness and focus, by the charming Maitri, who knows every bartender and chef in the neighborhood, and who scored us some amazing cajun curried duck thing at Asian Cajun (goofy name, unbelievably good food) on Decatur Street, and then took us to Dante's Kitchen on Sunday night where I had escargot, and black drum on a bed of truffle grits in a something-something brown butter sauce. I came. Twice, in fact.

Most of my other meals were all of the sandwich variety. You could eat nothing but sandwiches for a month in New Orleans and never get bored. Had a smothered duck po-boy at Crabby Jack's, a muffaletta at Napoleon House, a roast beef & horseradish po-boy and a Barq's at Domilise's. Wuz good, I miss it all.

Spending my entire weekend on the Sliver and in the Quarter, it was almost possible to forget about Katrina. Til Monday, I did some driving around through Broadmoor, Gert Town, and Gentilly. Seven months later, and these once dense and thriving neighborhoods are ghost towns, piled with debris. Broadmoor residents are clearly fighting the good fight, but it looks like it will be years before it will be the kind of neighborhood you want to bring your kids to. Same in Gentilly. It's just overwhelming, still, seven months later. Progress, where it exists, is moving at a crawl.

Thanks to everybody who helped out or expressed concern for my well-being. You know who you are and you're the sweetest and bestest.

I had several different real life events converge on me from different directions and collide with my blog world all on the same day, all while I was on the way home from a fun but overwhelming trip to New Orleans, so I asked Karl to take the blog offline while I sorted things out in my head.

I've made some adjustments to the archives, made some apologies to loved ones who I inadvertantly hurt with some thoughtless entries, and now I think I'm back. There are certain aspects of my life that are no longer going to be discussed here. Such are the consequences of blogging non-anonymously, I guess.

So, uh...nice weather we've having, eh?