August 2006 Archives

...of motherfuckin' reading glasses.

Sigh...

First, the Emergency Blogcasting System is the creation of a bunch of Austin techie activists led by Chip Rosenthal:

The Emergency Blogcasting System (EBS) is an association of Austin-area weblog authors who will contribute to a regional disaster response through communication and citizen reporting enabled through blogging.

The EBS is under development. Official release is planned late August 2006.

Mission

The mission of the EBS for bloggers is:

* Educate the blogging community of the role they can play in a disaster situation.
* Identify and publicize primary sources of information that may assist bloggers in their task during a disaster situation.
* Establish and encourage best practices for bloggers during a disaster situation.

The mission of the EBS for the general community is:

* Publicize the constructive role that bloggers may play in a disaster situation.
* Bring attention to valuable blogging and citizen reporting during a disaster situation.
* Dissemenate information to people less connected to official and conventional channels, with particular attention to the diversity of cultures and languages in our community.

This work arose out of the experiences Austin bloggers and techies had with disseminating information during Katrina and Rita and with helping storm evacuees use the Internet while they were in Austin.

Second, Brian Oberkirch's HurricaneMind is an application of "hive mind" principles to quickly disseminate information about an upcoming storm based on patterns in large numbers of inputs:

For instance, last night I had a tough time sleeping, worrying about yet another super powerful hurricane about to enter the Gulf later this week. One thing that happens as a storm gets closer is everyone starts asking each other: What are you going to do? Ride it out? Board up? Nothing? Leave town? So I outlined a little Web app that asks people what they are planning to do. You type in your zip code and it tells you what your neighbors have in mind. Here’s a specific user behavior written large (and quickly) through the power of the Web. You have more info and can make a more educated decision based on the collected insights of the hive mind. Now, let’s take it farther and start gathering up recommended backroad evacuation routes. The main arteries pack up quickly, and long time natives know the best ways out. Let’s gather them. Mash them up with Google maps. Port in hotel availability in the cities that people typically go to — like Baton Rouge, Jackson, Birmingham, Houston, etc. Flow in the updates from the hurricane center in a pane. Suddenly, we have a little dashboard people can use to make better decisions for their families & neighbors. Much better than flipping through channels or pulling up a series of bookmarked sites, burrowing through forums, etc.

The Arabi Wrecking Krewe is rounding up volunteers for a house gutting this Saturday. We'll be doing the N.O. East home of master sax player Kidd Jordan:

Edward 'Kidd' Jordan is probably the single most under documented jazz musician of his generation. A fact that is even more remarkable when you consider that he is also one of the busiest working musicians in the world. The list of bands and artists he has performed with reads like a 40-year Grammy program....from Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder to Aretha Franklin and the Supremes. And the list of jazz musicians he has performed with goes even wider....from Ed Blackwell and Ellis Marsalis, to Ornette Coleman, Cannonball Adderley and Cecil Taylor. Fortunately, this fact has not lost on his appreciative European audiences and was recognized by the French government with a knighthood for his contribution to the European performing arts.

The man has a brass band classic named after him ("Kidd Jordan's Second Line") and he just needs help with his house.

If you're available this Saturday, contact Sheik from the AWK at sheik@arabiwreckingkrewe.com, or email me (address in the "About Me" page) and I'll hook you up. No experience or equipment necessary.

Pass the word.

[photo by John Rogers]

One year ago today, Vera Briones Smith was killed in a hit-and-run accident while walking to the store on the day after Katrina struck. Her body lay on the sidewalk near the corner of Jackson and Magazine for five full days, in a makeshift above-ground tomb made out of a sheet and some bricks from the collapsed building across the street.

Today there is a shrine on the site, built from the bricks that once held down her shroud. I took a few pictures this afternoon.

Vera's ashes have been spread at her parent's gravesite in Santa Rosa, Texas.

More on her story can be found here.

One year ago.

5:40am: Levee break in Lakeview
...
For perspective, the nola.com report would put almost everything on this map under still-rising water.

And while I'm reading this, somebody on MSNBC just said "As cleanup begins in New Orleans, all eyes turn to Mississippi". Christ, don't they read the fucking papers?

10:13: Baton Rouge update and family status

11:24: Times-Picayune evacuating

11:45: WWL update link

4:36pm: Some neighborhood updates and governor's news conference

5:11: Bodies

6:05: God DAMN it!

Not county. Parish. Say it with me. P-p-p-parish.

6:29: Thank you

Shep just said "reports coming in from Plaquemines Count...er, Plaquemines Parish...".

8:27: 17th Street: Levee repair has failed, pumps have failed
...
Right now I feel exactly the same way I felt on the afternoon of 9/11. Horror. Grief. Numbness. Completely at a loss of what to do.

I have nothing but despair to give. I should stop blogging.

Yesterday a small group of Rising Tide folks hooked up with the Arabi Wrecking Krewe to help gut a house and salvage belongings from it.

The house belongs to Mrs. Cora Foster, 84, who is a distant relative of Jelly Roll Morton and Buddy Bolden, and who has as uncles trombonist Honore Dutrey and coronetist Sam Dutrey. Miss Cora lived in this house in the Hollygrove neighborhood for 59 years; since Katrina she has been living with her daughters in Detroit. Both daughters, Regina ("You just call me Regina, not Miss Regina; I'm not that old.") and Miss Sandra, helped us sort through the stuff we took out.

We gutted the front two rooms down to the studs, until it became clear that the house was structurally unsound and would need to be demolished. More than one guy (including Oyster) fell through the floor, and we almost lost the refrigerator through a hole in the living room floor at one point.

In the afternoon we shifted into a mode of just trying to recover family belongings that could be saved. We were hoping to find some books from the Smithsonian about the Dutreys but could never locate them in the mess, but the sisters were amazed at how much we did recover.

I've got a flickr set of a few photos I took, and Scout Prime took some spectacular video, including the saga of the fridge.

The Arabi Wrecking Krewe is an amazing group and deserves your support. If you're local, go wrecking! And if you're not, send money. Every dime they take in goes directly to gutting and restoring houses.

You can tell they've got their heart in the right place when you see their tag. Every fridge that comes out gets the Arabi Wrecking Krewe tag on it: eighth notes with a peace symbol and a heart.

One year ago.

6:52 am: Katrina

The nightmare has come to pass.

9:25: Mandatory

I worry about my high school friends who are still there, and I worry about my city being gone when I wake up tomorrow. New Orleans is special like no other place. I can't imagine the French Quarter being wiped out, the trees of Audubon park being levelled. My immediate family will be out of harm's way, but you can't rescue a place. You can't pick it up and move it to safety.

11:02 Katrina Links

I worry about the people who can't leave if they wanted to. New Orleans is a town with much poverty, and your average housing project resident can't just book a hotel in Texas and scoot out of town. People without cars, people without money...where do they go? Shelters will definitely fill up.

1:37pm Katrina evacuee status of people you don't even know

I don't know why I feel compelled to blog this stuff, since y'all don't know any of these people, but it helps to talk about this.
...
Really, I'm not panicking. Just a little queasy is all.

I'm trying to imagine New Orleans as a third world country. This isn't like a flood anywhere else where the waters will recede naturally. The water there will stay put, stagnant, filled with sewage, snakes, rats and alligators, until pumping stations can be repaired to start pumping it out.

If you happen to be watching TV right now, switch over to CSPAN2. They're rebroadcasting this afternoon's Press Club of New Orleans event, "An Afternoon With Authors". Many post-Katrina book authors are on-hand, including some from Chin Music Press's Do You Know What It Means anthology.

Sadly, I had to turn down a panel invitation since I was already commited to the Arabi Wrecking Krewe today, but DYK authors Sarah Inman and David Rutledge are scheduled to speak.

Other folks have thoroughly blogged the Rising Tide conference already, and I'm too wiped out to add anything intelligent to the conversation. For details, see the Rising Tide Blog, Maitri, Scout Prime, Dangerblond, Adrastos, and the usual suspects.

My own pictures are in a flickr set here. I'm a shit photographer, though, so check out some of the other sets from, uh, the usual suspects.

Today a small group of bloggers helped the Arabi Wrecking Krewe gut a house in Hollygrove. I'll have more on that tomorrow once I'm feeling a little more human. Scout Prime documented the whole day in photos and video, so keep tabs on her blog for more on that too.

On this day last year, I was getting a rare weekend off from work, and just in time because I was nursing yet-another throat infection. The past few weeks had seen the Moronosphere get wiped out in a database crash, and after Karl got things back online, I was just finishing up restoring the last of my archives from my temporary home on Blogger.

I had just met Brett and Hiromi. Hershey had just bought Sharffen-berger. Work stress was killing me.

And the saddest thing going on in my life was that Randy "Biscuit" Turner of the Big Boys had just passed away and the entire Austin music scene was in mourning.

I planned to spend the weekend recuperating and reading in bed.

There was just one vague hint of excitement in my only post of the day:

Now I'm going back to bed for a little while, to finish up Feynman and keep an eye on this hurricane thingy that's threatening the Crescent City.

T-P:

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — The head of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers conceded Saturday that despite aggressive efforts to repair the levee system in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, it was unclear whether the system would hold up to a sizable hurricane this year.

Lt. General Carl Strock, the commander of the Corps, said the agency was carefully tracking Tropical Storm Ernesto, which was spinning in the Caribbean and projected to reach hurricane strength by Monday. It was on track to head into the Gulf of Mexico, though it was unclear whether Ernesto would strike the southern United States.

There's no place like home
There's no place like home
There's no place like home
...

Put 'em on notice.

It seemed like the perfect story. The perfect wacky New Orleans story. A regular joe from St. Bernard hauls his FEMA trailer up to D.C. to press the president for more rebuilding help, and to cook him some real food in the process. Get it, man! Go on!

But, jeez, Rockey, if I knew you were going up there just to suck the guy's cock, I wouldn't have paid any attention to you in the first place.

What an embarrassing little third-string GOP toadie.

I've been avoiding all the discussion about Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke the past week or so, since most of what I'd read involved a bunch of people who hadn't seen the movie yet chasing down lines of reasoning like "Spike Lee is a 'black filmmaker', he makes 'films about black people', so this film will ignore the white people in New Orleans and therefore I doth protest."

I dunno, I figured I might watch the movie first, and comment on it afterwards. I'm a rebel like that.

And I'm glad I did. Because this movie is the most moving, eloquent, and complete summary of what happened, why it happened, and where are we now than anything I have yet seen.

Why some people didn't evacuate. Why some people couldn't evacuate. How people died. How people saved each other. Why people looted. Where people ended up, and how they got there, and are they coming home again. Black people, rich and poor. White people, rich and poor. Gentilly, Uptown, Lakeview, the Lower 9, St. Bernard, Mississippi.

Yes, he addressed the issue of the levees being blown. To do otherwise would be to leave a major part of the story untold. Whether or not you believe that the levees were blown up, it is a fact that a significant number of people do believe that they were, and you need to understand the socioeconomic, racial, and historical background of why they believe that in order to understand what really happened in the flood and how it affected people. He doesn't ask so much "Were the levees blown up?" as "Why do people believe that the levees were blown up?" And this is an important question to the future of New Orleans, if, like me, you want everybody who left to come back some day.

Finally, the last hour of the special details the failings of government at all levels, before, during, and after the storm, with special and repeated emphasis on the fact that this was a manmade engineering disaster, that wetland restoration and category 5 levees are required to protect the city, and that our share of oil revenues could easily pay for this protection.

If you are from here and you've been paying attention, there will not be a ton of new information, but to see it portrayed as artfully and compassionately as Spike Lee has done is still important. And if you're not from here and maybe have not been following the story so much since it retreated from the headlines, you must watch this. It should be required viewing in high schools across America.

HBO will rebroadcast When the Levees Broke on August 29. Please watch it.

What: Councilwoman Stacy Head's Town Hall meeting

When: Wed., August 23rd, 6-7:30 pm

Where: Sophie Wright School, 1426 Napoleon Ave.

Who: Councilwoman Stacy Head will be joined by the following :

Colonel Terry Ebbert of the Homeland Security & Public Safety office

The quality of life officers from the 2nd and 6th District Police Stations

Veronica White of the Sanitation Department

Representatives from the Councilmembers at-Large offices

Sandra Gunner, Director of Intergovernmental Relations and Community Affairs

(thanks to Liz for the heads up.)

I liked it better when their favorite word was "dissipate".

A VIGOROUS TROPICAL WAVE HAS EMERGED OF THE WEST COAST OF AFRICA. THIS SYSTEM IS SHOWING SIGNS OF ORGANIZATION AND ADDITIONAL DEVELOPMENT IS POSSIBLE OVER THE NEXT COUPLE OF DAYS AS THE WAVE MOVES WESTWARD AT ABOUT 15 MPH.

I woke up with a craving. I've been OD'ing on po-boys since I got back in town. Parasol's, Parkway Bakery, Guy's, Ye Olde College Inn, Monica's...all are tired of me darkening their doorstep every damn day.

I needed something different.

I needed a bánh mì.

Ever since I first got introduced to these Vietnamese po-boys last year, I've been in love with them. Pork, onions, cilantro, daikon, carrots, and raw jalapenos, on good French bread; it is something to behold.

Based on recommendations from the New Orleans LJ community, I headed out to to the Vietnamese community in New Orleans East, to Dong Phuong Bakery on Chef Menteur Highway. I brought my camera, since it's been a while since I've done any food porn, and since I'd passed through N.O. East a few times and wanted to try to capture some of the images out there. 'Cause it ain't pretty.

Dong Phuong reopened last month, and it's all new and shiny and sparkly clean. I got the #5, Vietnamese pork bánh mì, to go. $2.38, plus tax. I wanted to buy everything in sight, the cookies were to die for, but I resisted. Snapped a few pictures, thanked the lovely bakery ladies, and headed out to see the neighborhood.

Most of N.O. East is very unlike the other flooded parts of New Orleans. Built on landfill since the 60's, it's much more like the typical suburban sprawl you see in any other city. Cookie cutter developments, apartment complexes, and strip malls for days.

And unlike the older parts of the city where residents and business owners are saying "fuck you" to Katrina and fighting the good fight, in N.O. East, it looks like the businesses, the chain stores and strip malls and department stores and apartment managers, are all saying "fuck you" to New Orleans. Nothing is open. The only signs of life are a few mom-and-pop places like Dong Phuong, and single family homes in Village De L'Est. Everywhere else, the old school stench of Katrina refrigerators and mold and garbage prevail.

I took some pictures of an apartment complex on Chef Highway, and the apartment manager chased me down. He claimed to be worried about looters, but I got the sense that he didn't like the idea of somebody taking pictures of the pitiful state of his property one year after the storm. Only partially gutted, still with refrigerators lined up in the parking lot, surrounded by chain link fences so that nobody can have access. I wonder if former residents are allowed access.

I found an absolutely huge FEMA trailer camp in the Vietnamese neighborhood on Dwyer Road. Again, I got lots of attention from the rent-a-cop doing security. In the city a certain amount of disaster tourism is the norm, but out here, in the very farthest reaches of civilization before you hit the lake, the level of paranoia seems very high. Strangers taking pictures are an unusual and unwelcome occurrence.

Once again I thought I might be able to capture the scope of the desolate landscape, and once again, after taking a few pictures, I got frustrated and gave up. It's so hard to explain. It feels worse even than a lot of the City. You can get a sense of the size of it if you drive east on I-10, from the high rise to 510, and stay in the right lane so that you can go slow enough to look around. Mile after mile after mile of suburb and apartment building and commercial development, all with dark empty windows looking out over overgrown lots. I can't get it on film. You just have to see it.

I doubled back to Lake Forest Mall, where no businesses in the neighborhood are open. The mall parking lot entrances have all been blocked by piles of rubble to keep out looters and squatters. The nearby office buildings are damaged, blighted, and abandoned.

Many have said before that the Lower Ninth Ward reminds them of Hiroshima. Out here in the East, it feels different. It feels like Chernobyl.

I sat at the entrance to the mall, in my car with the AC running and the radio on, and I ate my bánh mì. It was fucking good.

I finished my sandwich, and then it started to rain. I crumpled up the sandwich wrappers and tossed them on the seat next to me, and navigated my way past the debris and the broken traffic lights back onto I-10, back to where I live in the Isle of Denial, back to my telecommuting job for a company based in Austin, a city where everything works, where everything is open and where the most stressful thing anyone can imagine is wondering whether we'll ship this software release on time.

I live and work in one world, and a completely different world is right down the road. And honestly, I don't know which one is the normal one and which one is the surreal one. I just don't know any more.

Dr. Jeff Masters speaks:

Peak hurricane season starts about August 18 and runs through October 18. The worst part of hurricane season is in front of us, and I do anticipate that conditions will get active. Witness 1998, when only one named storm occurred prior to August 19, and 10 named storms and 7 hurricanes formed by the end of September. A similar pattern of activity occurred in 2000, with only two named storm by this date, and a season total of 15 named storms. So, those of you who doubt NOAA and Dr. Gray's predictions of 15 named storms this season need to put your skepticism on hold.

The Weather Underground rocks. Be sure to check out his graph mapping date of origin to number of named storms over the past hundred years.

T-P: City fire department in a crisis

...

“I don’t know how much longer I can hold the men and women together,” Felton said, adding that “the stress level is past critical mass” and that pay is so low that fast-food chains are offering new workers higher per-hour wages than the Fire Department.
“Your Fire Department is whittling away to nothing,” he said.

...

To compensate for the loss of personnel, the number of firefighters per engine has been reduced from four to three. With two firefighters needed to direct water at a fire, that means the first company to arrive on the scene has only one person to go into a burning building to try to rescue trapped people, although normal procedure is never to go into such buildings alone, McConnell said.

In that situation, he said, firefighters must either violate procedure and go in alone; leave only one person at the engine, reducing its ability to pour water on the blaze; or ignore the pleas of bystanders to rescue possibly trapped friends or family members.

...

During a five-alarm blaze Saturday that injured four firefighters in the 300 block of Baronne Street, McConnell said, the first man to fall through a hole on the second floor radioed a warning to others, but because of a shortage of radios and batteries, some of his colleagues did not hear him and two more fell through the floor.

...

Although the news media ignored it, Parent alleged, “not one firefighter left his post during the storm,” even though 22 of the department’s 33 firehouses were flooded and damaged.

...

Eighty percent of firefighters lost their homes, Parent said, and many of their families remain displaced. Of the 31 remaining engine houses, just 15 are in their pre-Katrina buildings; the rest are operating from trailers.

August 25-27, 2006, there will be a convention for all people who care about New Orleans.

The Rising Tide Conference will be a gathering for all who wish to learn more and do more to assist New Orleans' recovery from the aftermath of the natural disasters of both Hurricane Katrina and Rita, the manmade disaster of the levee and floodwall collapses, and the incompetence of government on all levels. We will come together to dispel myths, promote facts, share personal testimonies, highlight progress and regress, discuss recovery ideas, and promote sound policies at all levels. We aim to be a "real life" demonstration of internet activism as the nation prepares to mark the one year anniversary of a massive natural disaster followed by governmental failures on a similar scale.

The Rising Tide Conference is hosted by New Orleans Bloggers on the weekend before the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and the failure of the federal levees. We will meet at the New Orleans Yacht Club on Friday night, August 25, for registration and a chance to meet each other. Saturday at the NO Yacht Club will be a day full of informative panel discussions and presentations. The objective is to leave bloggers and other attendees with more of the real story of what is going on here one year later than they have ever heard before. Saturday night, there's a party, and Sunday is a work day for those who want participate gutting and debris crews.

The Rising Tide Conference is now taking registrations. Please visit the website, register, and contribute to the Rising Tide Blog. There is an opportunity on the registration page to opt in or out of the Sunday work day. Lunch will be provided. The fee is $20.00. Please consider donating more to help with expenses.

I would like to really plug the Sunday work day. I am coordinating with the Arabi Wrecking Krewe for any conference attendees to spend Sunday gutting a house. It's hot, sweaty, dirty, stinky work, but you get to wreck stuff, you get to do something really wonderful for somebody, and if you're not from here, you get to get up close and personal with what this disaster has really done to people's lives so that you can go home and tell the world what you saw.

You haven't lived it until you've smelled it. And the AWK is a fun loving bunch, all musicians and music lovers so a post-gutting jam session usually breaks out at some point.

Maitri spells it out.

From the LA Times:

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration is scrambling to assemble a plan to help rebuild Lebanon, hoping that by competing with Hezbollah for the public's favor it can undo the damage the war has inflicted on its image and goals for the Middle East.

Administration officials fear that unless they move quickly to demonstrate U.S. commitment, the Lebanese will turn more fully to the militant group, which has begun rolling out an ambitious reconstruction program that Washington believes is bankrolled by Iran.

See, that's the key. New Orleans lacks a militant group, and apparently the only way to get a Republican to spend money is to make him shit his pants with fear.

Sinn Fein. As always.

Last week, I posted my initial take on the Missionary Bloggers and their valiant quest for truth. Later in the day, I was IM-ing with my work colleague Keith, one of the few co-workers (I hope) who reads my blog, and he laughed and called them "carpet-bloggers". (As far as I know, Keith doesn't have a blog and has never been to New Orleans, but he instantly grokked the situation. He's shmart that way.)

Later I emailed the joke to Maitri, she blogged it, and since everybody who's everybody reads Maitri it's since become Meme of the Week.

Credit where credit is due: thanks Keith!

Clayton's fantastic Operation Eden blog is back online after a long hiatus. I hope he keeps posting.

For those of you who aren't familiar with him, Clayton is a New Orleans native currently residing in New York who came down in the immediate aftermath of the storm to help out his family in Pearlington, Mississippi, which was essentially wiped off the map by the storm. The photos and stories in his archives from last fall are haunting even now.

He's here now working on a post-Katrina anti-suicide ad campaign and is looking for photo subjects. As we all know, the topic is a critical one right now, so if you or someone you know are willing, please get in touch with him.

Clayton walks the walk. He's no carpet-blogger. He's one of us.

Geek Dinner I at Alan's French Quarter abode was a smashing success.

Now get ready for Geek Dinner II, this Saturday night, hosted by Loki of Humid City.

When: Saturday, August 19th, 2006 at 7:00 pm.
Where: 4617 S.Claiborne Ave, Broadmoor Nature Preserve, New Orleans, LA

This is by far the best party in town, and the easiest way to finally put a face on all the lovely New Orleans bloggers you've been reading all this time. Don't worry if you're geek enough; if you're reading this, you're geek enough.

Out-of-town bloggers are especially invited to attend.

RSVP at the Geek Dinner Wiki.

See you there.

One of the last things I did before I left Austin was to finally get my tattoo finished. I was supposed to get it wrapped up on August 30 of last year, but, well, something came up. You may have read about it in the papers.

Chris Trevino of Perfection Tattoo did the design and execution. These are the "official" photos taken at his shop.

And I'm on his schedule to start the other sleeve in February.

I've got four tickets to the New Orleans premier of Spike Lee's documentary, When the Levees Broke, and I'm kind of torn about what to do with them.

Originally I was going to take the whole family. But now Gina is out of town on business, and so it would just be me and the two kids, and I'm starting to wonder if this is a good thing to take the youngest to see. He's nine, and it's only rated a modest TVPG, but the more I think about it, the more I think that it's TVPG for some random kid in Ohio who has never been to New Orleans, doesn't know anybody here, and whose only reaction would be "whoa, look at the wrecked houses!" and "wow, that lady sure cusses a lot!"

What would the effect be on a nine-year-old boy who is so far adjusting to life pretty well in his new home? Would I be doing harm, subjecting him to four hours of The Passion of the Crescent City, when I know he sees those debris piles and empty houses and search team X's on so many houses in his own neighborhood? Would he think of the movie every time his parents started talking about the latest tropical depression in the Atlantic?

I want him to understand what happened here. But there is such a thing as too much reality for a kid that age, and although thousands of kids his age have suffered a whole hell of a lot in the past year, there's no point in inflicting worry on him needlessly just because I'm a big fan of Spike Lee.

But if he can't go, and I don't have a sitter, then I can't go and my teenage daughter can't go. In which case I should just give these tickets away to somebody who can go.

Or am I making a big deal out of nothing?

What to do, what to do...

While waiting on our dinner at the Ye Old College Inn the other night, Liam decides to entertain himself.

Ray: I'm going to need another Barqs.
Liam: I'm going to need another Barqs.

Ray (looks at Liam)
Liam (looks at Ray)

Ray (leans back in chair)
Liam (leans back in chair)

Ray (folds arms)
Liam (folds arms).

Ray (scratches nose)
Liam (scratches nose)

Ray: La-de-da...
Liam: La-de-da...

Ray (puts elbows on table)
Liam (puts elbows on table)

Ray: Hey, check out the cute girls at the bar!
Liam: (whips head around) What? Where?

Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk...

Habitat for Urbanity scores Funny of the Week embedded in a thoughtful piece about the practical downsides of full transparency:

Within the context of individual neighborhood planning meetings, the issue of transparency and openness is equally muddy. In the past months I have probably attended 100 such meetings, at which I have encountered the following outspoken regulars: Sustainable Energy Man, Submergable House Guy, Army Corps is Made Up of Alien Hybrids Dude, Unhumanly-Slowtalking Lead Poisoning Lady, and Enraged Jazz Fest Shirt Guy, just to name a few.

After my long vaguely self-congratulatory post about the physically exhausting gutting work I did yesterday, Da Po Blog brings us this Houston Chron article about a 94-year-old woman who gutted her house herself. Consider me duly humbled.

We need more bad grass in this town.

And we need the world to know that 60% of the homes in this city still have no electricity, even as people move back into them. Or that many homes are only occupied on the second story, because the first floor is still gutted.

But we're like bad grass. We aren't going away.

Today I finally got the opportunity to do what I came to this city to do: get dirty. I gutted a house with Common Ground.

It's one of those things that is both rewarding and fucking awful at the same time. You're basically knee deep in the wet, slimy, moldy, toxic muck that used to be the stuff of somebody's life. We were in a house on Andry Street in the Lower 9, and if I had to guess I would say this house probably belongs to grandparents raising a small child or two. There were retirement plaques and Jesus stuff and Sunday church hats everywhere. There were also stuffed Snoopy dolls and Little Mermaid videos and coloring books.

Imagine taking a three-bedroom cottage, filling it with water, and shaking it like a snowglobe and then letting all the clothes and books and pictures and appliances and furniture settle back down on top of each other in random piles. Then drain most (not all) of the water out, seal it up, and leave it out in the sun for a year.

Beds on top of dressers with more dressers on top. Sometimes you have to climb through a pitch-black room full of damp moldy debris to find the window so that you can open the blinds to let light in to see what you're doing. Head to toe in mold suits, with respirators and safety goggles and work boots. Temperature and humidity in the mid-90's outside, but much worse inside.

I tried to put myself in the owners position. If something is salvageable (and anything water-permeable is not salvagable) you want to set it aside for them. So you'd look at a glass bowl or a candle-holder or a coffee mug and you'd think "Is this just crap for the debris pile?" And then I'd think like a father and think "If my kid gave me this for Father's Day, I'd want to save it" and I'd set it aside.

Most of the furniture came out in pieces. It would literally fall apart when you picked it up, all rotted moldy decomposing wood, so you'd bring out a dresser and its contents in multiple wheelbarrow loads.

There were six of us. A few college students donating several weeks of their summer vacations. Two people who were in town for the APA conference and decided to play hooky one day and gut houses instead. Afterwards I drove them back to the W hotel where they were staying, and we got out of the car in front of all the rich tourists heading out for dinner in their finery...all of us in our bare feet (mucky boots were in the trunk), filthy dirty, one guy with his shirt off. The valet looked at us appalled and a hotel manager ran over thinking we clearly didn't belong there, until the APA folks flashed their room key and told him we'd been gutting in the Ninth Ward, and then he was all smiles. Thanked us repeatedly. I think he would have hugged us if we weren't so clearly disgusting.

I was a little nervous about meeting the Common Ground people, because after my experience in the early days of putting KOOP Radio on the air I have a real serious aversion to certain kinds of pathological political-correctness that can infect progressive activist groups. I am happy to report that what I saw today was free of any hint of hippy annoyance. These people are energetic and sincere and completely focused on the practical aspects of the jobs they have to do, and refreshingly free of bullshit attitudes. I hope to join them again down there in a few weeks. They fucking rock.

That being said...I don't know. It's so huge. So much work by so many people, but the list of houses seems endless. I'm trying to keep either a can-do attitude or at the very least some righteous anger going, but fuck, man. It's hard to keep out the little voice in the back of your head telling you that this is futile, that these people can never come back, that a year from now we'll still be gutting and shoveling muck while New Orleanians get more and more settled into new lives in Houston and Memphis and Atlanta.

I don't know. Right now I'm tired, I guess. Tomorrow I'll want to do battle again, I hope.

But fuck.

Christiane Amanpour of CNN, via Harry Shearer:

"I reject and try to hold the line -- my line at least -- against the inclination by some to turn news reporting into a 'happy-camper war-and-disaster-zone travelogue.' I am uncomfortable watching deadly serious places and moments treated as the latest in extreme-adventure playgrounds for your own heroics or Petri dishes for examining your own feelings! Reporters notebooks are great, until they start replacing hard news."

Oh fuck me hard:

...{W]e have a silent majority here that really believes in violence and believes that America's against them. You remember the ramifications from New Orleans, that a lot of dissatisfied people here could ultimately join up with the Muslims or sympathize with them. It's a scary thing here as well as in the UK.

Yeah, maybe if we were all terrorists we'd do something evil like blow up the levees and flood the whole city or something.

Oh wait, I forgot. The levees FUCKING FELL DOWN ON THEIR OWN.

grumble....

I knew about the police altercation in front of the JCC the other night, but assumed it was some drunk they'd cornered. Still, it happened in my neighborhood so I was mildly interested in the story. Then the next morning, I was reading the Times-Picayune and drinking coffee out on the front step, and I read this. And when I saw the words "McCusker" and "photographer" in the same sentence, a light bulb went on in my head in that weird way, when your brain makes an instant connection between 30 years ago and the present.

I dug out my yearbooks and flipped through until I found it...Edna Karr Jr. High, 1978. John McCusker, photographer and yearbook editor.

Karr was kind of a rough place in the 70's, not a magnet school like in recent years. Racially mixed (including a lot of newly arrived Vietnamese kids who didn't really speak much English), lots of fights, lots of bullies. And I remember McCusker as being one of those rare older guys. Creative, funny, confident, and one of the ninth graders who didn't pick on us younger kids. And he always had a camera practically welded to his hand. You never saw him without it. I was always in awe of somebody like him who could understand all that gear, not to mention somebody who could always get a hall pass because he needed to take pictures of something.

I haven't seen the guy since junior high. I went to Franklin for high school, and I'm guessing he ended up at Walker. I know he wouldn't remember me, and I guess it's weird that I remember him.

The fact that he could do such heroic things after the storm and then want to take his life after all that is really bothering me. I've had some recent experience with a friend contemplating suicide and so I understand a little of the mindset, but it still upsets me, even if it's a relative stranger.

Anyway, there is something you can do. Maybe not much but something. Donate to the Friends of the Times Picayune fund and earmark your donation for John McCusker.

The expected tsunami (sorry) of media coverage of "Katrina: One Year Later" has started. In its August 21st issue, Fortune provides a very detailed and honest account of the state of New Orleans today, from a political, planning, economic, social, and environmental standpoint.

It's a really well-done piece of journalism. One can only hope that the next few weeks will provide more like it.

Thanks to Gentilly Girl and Oyster for the link.

This Saturday starting at 9:00am, Common Ground is having a house gutting block party in the Lower 9. They want to see how many houses they can gut in a single day.

If you're gutting, you should wear sturdy shoes (construction boots if you got 'em) and light clothing that you're not afraid to get dirty. They provide tools and gear.

Since it's a party as well as a work day, they ask that every participant bring some food or drink...meat for grilling, chips, that sort of thing. And bring along friends and family.

The location is the 5400 block of Urquhart (between Andry and Flood).

See you there.

Mark, Ashley, Gina and I are quoted at length in an article in today's LA Times about New Orleans expatriates who are moving back. Check it out.

Apparently the print copy may have a picture of the lovely Folse family if you can get your hands on one.

Thanks to Mark for planting the seed on this one. We'd been getting bloody sick of the constant drumbeat of stories about people moving away, and we wanted the opposing viewpoint to be heard.

My daughter and I had this conversation the other day, sitting in the park across the street from Tee Eva's munching on some crawfish and sweet potato pies, and she enthusiatically agreed that as battered and as dysfunctional as New Orleans is right now, this is the coolest place on the planet to be.

Update:

Thanks to Stan for snapping a picture of the picture:

Lisa of Irks and Delights mentioned in some comments the other day how becoming a reform Kiwi may someday be her way of making like Einstein and getting the fuck out of here if the current national madness takes a turn for the worse.

I admit that New Zealand has always been near the top of our list as well, behind Vancouver and Montreal. That plane flight seems awfully daunting, but this may make up for it:

Topless porn star parade in Auckland gets OK

Unless the local rollergirls start shedding their sports bras, I'm finding this hard to pass up.

I must confess when I first read about the Blog Herald's Team New Orleans effort (thanks to Mr. Melpomene for the link), I was pretty torqued.

What fucking balls. The east and west coast blogerati are finally going to bring civilization to us ig'nant natives down on the bayou. As if there aren't over a hundred local and ex-pat bloggers already down here, some of whom (including myself) have been blogging about this disaster non-stop since Katrina first entered the Gulf of Mexico.

I have taken part in many online communities during the 20+ years I have been on the internet, and I have never seen a group of people who are tighter and more focused and more passionate than the people I have met through the NOLA blogosphere since the storm.

I hope that once the Blog Herald folks really do their research and really engage with the people down here that some great things might happen. But first thing out the window has got to be the missionary approach.

Don't come down here to educate us. Don't come down here to "finally get the ground truth". Come down to help.

The event and its coverage have been happening for almost a year. We don't mind that you're a little late, and we're happy for you to join our story already in progress.

The Big Easy Rollergirls are holding a garage sale and bake sale this Saturday, August 12, from 8am to 1pm.

Come uptown to 2418 Calhoun St. Shoes, clothing, music, books and more. All of it sexy. And say hi to Little Miss Ruffitt and tell her Ray sent you. She wants more blogger geek fanboys.

My eyes tend to glaze over when people talk about coastal restoration. I realize how critical it is to the protection of the city, but it just bores the fuck out of me.

I.D. Reilly over at Third Battle has managed to make it fascinating. Go read this summary of the basic problem and what needs to be done. It has pictures so that even somebody like me can understand it.

That's all I got today. Work continues to suck all the life out of life so I have nothing of my own that's blogworthy enough to post. Take a look at all the New Orleans links to the right over there; people are writing some great stuff.

If Chris comes this way, this will be the first real hurricane evacuation of my life.

Yeah, that's right. The whole time I grew up here, we didn't evacuate once. We didn't really spend the whole summer thinking about hurricanes and watching the weather every night worrying about hurricanes, either. They were just very rare distractions from the long summer heat. They hardly ever happened.

The most drastic thing we ever did was during Hurricane Carmen in 1974 (?), when my mom tried to drive my brother and I to the shelter for Coast Guard families at the Belle Chasse Air Station. We'd waited too long to leave, though, and after sitting in line for an hour in the driving rain at the drawbridge over the Intercoastal Canal behind the Schwegmann's, my mom realized that the bridge was closed and we were pretty much stuck in Algiers, so we went home. When I woke up the next morning, Dad was home and the sun was shining; Carmen had turned and whacked Morgan City in the middle of the night.

But that's it. I haven't been threatened by a storm since I was 10 years old. Now I have kids, I have pets, and I need to have a plan.

We're staying for tropical storms. For anything category 1 or above, we're heading to Baton Rouge. For a category 4 or 5, we're going to Texas. Playing it very safe, I know, but I don't trust that either the levees or the social order will hold together around here, and if I have to depend on being armed to feel safe, I'd rather just be somewhere else. Like I said, I got kids.

So what's your plan? When do you bug out, and where do you go?

This is a violation of fundamental fairness. Fair play. Good sportsmanship. Good taste.

This is kind of like World War II soldiers stumbling across bodies from World War I.

We just should not have to be thinking about soon-to-be-hurricane Chris on the same day that we are finding another body from Katrina.

It just ain't right.

The Milan Neighborhood Association will be hosting its annual Night Out event at the Pocket Park at 4320 Dryades St.

There is also an Uber-Night Out on the Napoleon neutral ground between Constance and Laurel hosted by the Bouligny Riverside, Faubourg Marengo, and Faubourg Delachaise groups.

Both events will run from 6-9pm tonight.

The kids and I will be at the first one early, and then will walk to the big one later. Say hi if you see us.

Got this from UNOP today. Pass it on:

Thank you for registering for the Unified New Orleans Planning (UNOP) process. For those of you who attended the meeting on Sunday at the Pavilion of Two Sisters in City Park, we are especially grateful for your patience and hard work.

The meeting tonight will be held at the same location, but with several adjustments to allow for the larger numbers of people who are interested in the process. The purpose of the meeting is to offer an opportunity for people to greet and interview the pool of professional planners who will be made available to districts and neighborhoods to assist them in the planning process. These teams will be in addition to planners who have already been working in some neighborhoods, but ALL work previously completed will be integrated into the final Unified New Orleans Plan.

For those who cannot attend the meeting tonight, videos of the individual planning teams will be available on line beginning on Thursday morning, August 2, 2006. So please send this email to anyone you know who may wish to learn about these on line resources. We are especially interested in reaching those persons who may be infirm or who may be living outside of the city at this time.

IT IS IMPORTANT TO NOTE THAT ATTENDANCE AT TONIGHTS MEETING IS NOT REQUIRED IN ORDER FOR YOU TO SUBMIT YOUR PLANNING TEAM PREFERENCE

Planning Team Preference Sheets are available online at http://unifiedneworleansplan.org or at the meeting tonight between 4:00 pm and 9:00 pm at the Pavillion of Two Sisters in City Park. Registration, which is also available online at unifiedneworleansplan.org is required in order to participate. In order to accommodate the large numbers of people who have responded to date, registration has been extended until Monday, August 7, 2006 at 12:00pm.

I'm also told they have tweaked some of the facility issues such as installing carpeting to dampen ambient noise and a few other things, so hopefully at least some aspects will be better than Sunday.

All week long I've been watching this tropical wave at the NOAA web site. It's been crossing the Atlantic along with a steady soundtrack of "conditions are unfavorable for development...conditions are unfavorable for development...conditions are unfavorable for development."

Last night before I went to bed it changed to "conditions are unfavorable for development, but only a slight change would upgrade this to a tropical depression".

A reminder that shit happens, even when you're asleep: I present to you Tropical Storm Chris:

The past couple of weeks I've been working on the hurricane supplies, feeling like the safety fascist rescue hero wannabe that I am, and vaguely pleased with myself for being such a good daddy. This morning, sitting at my computer, I can see the big pile of bottled water and canned peaches and Ritz crackers and all I can think about is what I haven't done yet.

My first storm since Alicia in 1984.

Welcome to New Orleans.