This Guy‘s birthday was yesterday, so: HAPPY GODDAMN BIRTHDAY.

“Look, Honey! It’s our first chinese food as man and wife!”

So far, marriage rocks. Thanks to EVERYONE who came and helped us celebrate!

Probably time to go to bed. Out of ginger ale, and Tony’s drunk as fuck.

Our friends Mike and Anne got married secretly at the Cambridge, MA courthouse years ago.

As things get more complicated and less done and the zero-hour looms larger, we think of Massachusetts courthouses as much more romantic locations than we did previously.

Today is our friend JoAnn’s birthday. Click the pick to hassle her.

Well, not literal crooks, but these folks, who were amused by this entry from last October enough to link directly to OUR local copy of the ten megabyte video.

The good news is that our server didn’t blink at all about serving out all the extra traffic, and blithely served out 700 copies overnight.

The even better news is that our Colo people noticed the wildly out of pattern bandwidth usage (70GB overnight vs. about 30 for all of September) and contacted us this morning, first thing. It didn’t take long to figure out what the problem was, especially since the first thing we did was take down Apache to see if the pain stopped, and lo and behold it did (thanks, by the way, to all those folks who emailed us about the apparent Heathen outage; even though it was under control, it’s good to know folks are paying attention).

The file’s been removed, but the original copy is still available. I’m told that the nice folks at C&L will be hosting a copy themselves soon, so if you’re here looking for Cheney being more vulgar than usual, wander over there. (They really are nice; they offered to cover our bandwidth overages, which we’d certainly have if we hadn’t moved last month.)

We now have a marriage license.

Bag limit is, apparently, one.

We will not be serving any of these.

Mike points out that a naive Google search for our wedding site produces first a link to a certain almost certainly awful romance novel, blurbed thusly by a quasi-literate Amazon reviewer (all punctuation original):

In [Jacqueline Diamond’s] latest release The Stolen Bride Erin Marshall, the heroine has had an accident and can’t remember one particular day. The day she accepted a proposal from Chet…her fiance.

Update: Links fixed.

It appears the Bachelorette Shindig thrown by chromosomally-appropriate IBP types included “strippers,” and was, er, documented.

Longtime Heathen Danno turned thirty fucking five yesterday, which means it’s been five years since this happened. If you’re in the Louisville/southern Indiana area, drop me a line and I’ll tell you where he lives.

(Yes, we know that there have been significant personnel changes in Team Danno and Team Heathen since these photographs. That doesn’t make them less funny, though.)

In case you’re curious, this is the band playing at our reception.

I have resisted, to at least a couple of approximations, talking about Mississippi in the wake of Katrina. What my friend Steve has just sent me, though, has me weeping in a hotel room in Kentucky.

My home state’s coastal fringe is destroyed. It is a place I’ve been more times than I can count. I played my first putt-putt games with my long-dead father in the shadow of the Broadwater, with the sound of the waves in the background. That putt-putt is gone, and so is most of the Broadwater. But fuck the putt-putt; whole towns on the coast are gone. So is much of the work of Walter Anderson, and in all liklihood the homes of most of the people I knew who lived in that precarious wonderful place.

My brother’s best friend has hosted his in-laws for weeks, as they have no home anymore. This is not a rare story. Christ, it’s commonplace. This is good, but it’s terrible that it’s needed.

My own mother, nearly 90 miles inland, had trees aplenty fall on her home. She watched an aged pine — with a 15+ foot taproot — become uprooted in Katrina’s winds even that far north. She’s fine, and so is my stepdad, but he — at 70+ — spend days with his chainsaw clearing other peoples’ yards and driveways. These were days his own home had neither power nor water. John is like that.

I grew up in hurricane country. They’re a fact of life. A formative memory is dozing, fitfully, through Frederick in 1979. Ol’ Fred was a Cat 4, and was quite neutered by the time he hit Hattiesburg, but the damage was still astounding. The vast oak my mother watched sway during Camille in ’69 finaly fell during that storm, but somehow didn’t destroy the home it shadowed. Even so, the next day we all saw that tree as the fate we avoided.

Now, this past weekend, Erin and I spend a sleepless night watching a puny pecan swing over our own townhouse. We remembered our parents and our friends closer to the storm, and the stories they’d given us from before we were born — or from earlier that month — and we were far too cavalier.

Just now my friend Steve sent me this site. I think these photos say what I cannot.

So much will never be the same.

TMFTML has the best snark on the meth-driven life development.

On September 26, 1983, the USSR’s new early-warning-system falsely reported a US nuclear launch, i.e. an unprovoked first strike. Stanislav Petrov, then a 44-year-old lieutenant colonel, made the judgement call that kept us from nuking each other back to the stone age. (Via MeFi.)

Aloysius got an email begging him to vote for the gay marriage ban come November. He have the sender both barrels. Rock on.

So it blew and blew and blew — and in fact is still blowing — but the most dramatic event was a drunk driver hitting the power pole down the street about 11 last night. We — obviously — have power, and still have running water, so we seem to have gotten by just fine. The TV talking heads, though, seem somewhat disappointed they couldn’t do their typical storm-coverage bullshit.

BoingBoing points us to this rant about high-end home audio and the troubles DRM introduces, which triggered this response from John Gilmore, wherein he quite correctly points out that audiophiles who buy into DRM schemes are suckers:

It’s really simple. It’s because DRM is designed to break compatibility. The whole point of DRM is restrictions. The point of all previous audio formats was compatability. CDs play on any CD player. Cassettes play or record on any cassette player. Neither one cares what you do with the audio that comes out. By contrast, DRM is designed to prevent the audio from coming out in any way that the oligopoly objects to. […] Rather than calling for everybody to implement DRM, which would be uniformly terrible for most musicians, most equipment makers, and all consumers, you should be calling for nobody to buy DRM. We can’t stop them from building it — there’s no law against companies selling painful products. The only cure is education — of their customers. Make it an expensive mistake for anyone to sell a DRM product. Because, as you have discovered with your iTunes music, it IS an expensive mistake to BUY a DRM product.

Vote with your dollars, people.

Heathen Agent Triple-FFF reports that his dinner at some Chicago joint included the apotheosis of desserts: Cantelope sorbet. Sprinkled with black pepper. And bacon.

Awesome.

“The sky […] was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”

CNN reports Rita is down to a fun-loving 125MPH Category 3 storm, and is projected to hit ground between Galveston and the TX-LA border. Not quite champagne-popping goodness yet, but definitely more relief.

Heathen has been uncharacteristically quiet about the approach of Rita; we apologize. Yes, it got scary looking for a bit, and we’re not totally out of the woods, but we’re still staying put. Most of my time has been taken doing disaster prep for my company’s servers; we realized last week that the “NOC” we’d been paying $100 per U per month to host in has no redundant power, no real disaster plan, and was planning on SHUTTING DOWN COMPLETELY for Rita.

Um, no. We’re pretty sure that makes you a “server closet” and not a “network operations center,” especially considering that another server I manage (which also hosts this site) is colocated up at a real, no-shit five-nines facility owned by Level3 Communications, sublet to local provider iLand, for which we pay only a little bit more than that. And they have a fer-crying-out-loud GENERATOR on hand. So corporate backups are in place on that machine (which is actually part of an ongoing reciprocal backup agreement between Spacetaker and Adaptive RFID), and our backup server is actually on my dining room table. The main corporate box is still online, but I’ll probably have to power it down before dinner time due to the lack of any real disaster prep at the HTC NOC.

Now: gotta go write documentation and put batteries in things. It’s starting to get windy outside, and Mrs Heathen To Be is getting antsy.

More to come, certainly.

JWZ sometimes marks his posts with “grim meathook future.” In response to many queries, he’s posted a bit of the piece that phrase is from, written by Joshua Ellis. It’s fanTAStic. And true.

Feeding poor people is useful tech, but it’s not very sexy and it won’t get you on the cover of Wired. Talk about it too much and you sound like an earnest hippie. So nobody wants to do that. They want to make cell phones that can scan your personal measurements and send them real-time to potential sex partners. Because, you know, the fucking Japanese teenagers love it, and Japanese teenagers are clearly the smartest people on the planet. The upshot of all of this is that the Future gets divided; the cute, insulated future that Joi Ito and Cory Doctorow and you and I inhabit, and the grim meathook future that most of the world is facing, in which they watch their squats and under-developed fields get turned into a giant game of Counterstrike between crazy faith-ridden jihadist motherfuckers and crazy faith-ridden American redneck motherfuckers, each doing their best to turn the entire world into one type of fascist nightmare or another. Of course, nobody really wants to talk about that future, because it’s depressing and not fun and doesn’t have Fischerspooner doing the soundtrack. So everybody pretends they don’t know what the future holds, when the unfortunate fact is that — unless we start paying very serious attention — it holds what the past holds: a great deal of extreme boredom punctuated by occasional horror and the odd moment of grace.

The comments on that post include another fine acronym: TSOR, or Thirty Seconds of Research. Excellent and useful.

Sloths. Where? At the sloth preserve, duh.

Some truly fine people threw me a tremendous three-day bachelor party last weekend. They know who they are. It was really an amazing, wonderful weekend full of excellent food and too-much-is-not-enough fine-ass booze. It was also pleasantly devoid of scary Galvestonian strippers, for which we are eternally grateful.

So: again, heartfelt and profound thanks to Eric and Frank, my Best Men, for helming the whole deal, and to Carl, Carlos, Chris, David, Joachim, Peter, Thunder, and Tony (and Chelsea) for making the trip past the following sign, which sane people would view with sincere trepidation:

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First, we were an Eagle Scout.

Second, this makes us downright ashamed of our answers to this pop quiz over at Accordian Guy’s place very much at all, and will strive to improve. Take a look; it’s worth your time. Something on the scale of Katrina could happen in literally any location. Safe from hurricanes? You’ve got something else to worry about, so don’t get smug. Just be prepared.

Now: we’re off to stock up on food, batteries, and finally get that fire ladder Mrs Heathen-To-Be keeps hassling us about.

From an IM just now with a Spacetaker co-conspirator:

This is a fucked up world we live in when you see p. diddy on the martha stewart show making chinese dumplings.

Indeed.

The Axis of Nielsen-Hayden points us to Ship of Fools’ The Laugh Judgement, an effort to find the ten funniest and ten most offensive religious jokes. We are amused. A sample or two:

One, from the Funny list:

A man ran through a crowded train looking very agitated, calling out, “Is there a Catholic priest on board?” When he got no reply, he ran back up the train shouting, “Is there an Anglican priest on board?” Still no reply. By now becoming more desparate, he ran down the train shouting, “Is there a Rabbi on board?” Eventually, a gentleman stood up and said, “Can I be of any assistance, my friend? I’m a Methodist minister.” The man looked at him and said, “No, you’re no bloody good. I need a corkscrew!”

Another:

I was walking across a bridge one day, and I saw a man standing on the edge, about to jump. I ran over and said: “Stop. Don’t do it.” “Why shouldn’t I?” he asked. “Well, there’s so much to live for!” “Like what?” “Are you religious?” He said, “Yes.” I said, “Me too. Are you Christian or Buddhist?” “Christian.” “Me too. Are you Catholic or Protestant?” “Protestant.” “Me too. Are you Episcopalian or Baptist?” “Baptist.” “Wow. Me too. Are you Baptist Church of God or Baptist Church of the Lord?” “Baptist Church of God.” “Me too. Are you original Baptist Church of God, or are you Reformed Baptist Church of God?” “Reformed Baptist Church of God.” “Me too. Are you Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1879, or Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1915?” He said: “Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1915.” I said: “Die, heretic scum,” and pushed him off.

And finally, one from the Offensive list:

An Indian man dies and arrives at the Pearly Gates. “Yes, how can I help?” asks St Peter. “I’m here to meet Jesus,” says the Indian man. St Peter looks over his shoulder and shouts, “Jesus, your cab is here!”

It appears French Quarter icon Big Daddy’s will be among the first to re-open. If you don’t know which club we mean, this should clear it up for you:

NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) — There’s no water for the “wash the girl of your choice” service and there aren’t any girls either, but Big Daddy’s strip club on New Orleans’ Bourbon Street is getting ready to bring back erotic spectacle to the devastated city. Friday night on Bourbon Street, usually a throbbing artery of the party-going French Quarter, was pretty grim this time around in what has become a foul-smelling ghost town partly covered with a swamp of filthy water. Police patrol cars and military Humvees made up most of the traffic on the street. But Big Daddy’s general manager, Saint Jones, and a band of helpers defied an evacuation order by arriving to clean up their premises in the historic French Quarter, which escaped largely unscathed from the floods. Jones told Reuters he would open for business as soon as he could get electricity, water and dancers. He already had electricity from a generator, which was moving a pair of robotic woman’s legs, in stockings and pink high heels, waving invitingly on the street by the sign for Big Daddy’s.

Work in a cube farm? How about a work blind?

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We are, as of this moment, caught up on Thank-You notes.

Many were not allowed to leave and, in fact, were herded back into the squalor and danger of the city when they tried to walk to Gretna. There’s a first-hand account here; excerpt:

As we approached the bridge, armed Gretna sheriffs formed a line across the foot of the bridge. Before we were close enough to speak, they began firing their weapons over our heads. This sent the crowd fleeing in various directions. As the crowd scattered and dissipated, a few of us inched forward and managed to engage some of the sheriffs in conversation. We told them of our conversation with the police commander and of the commander’s assurances. The sheriffs informed us there were no buses waiting. The commander had lied to us to get us to move. We questioned why we couldn’t cross the bridge anyway, especially as there was little traffic on the 6-lane highway. They responded that the West Bank was not going to become New Orleans and there would be no Superdomes in their City.

See other coverage, via the first linke, at SF Chron, UPI/Moonie/Right-Wing Times (!), and St Louis Post-Dispatch.

Hunter Thompson’s final note was made public today:

Football Season Is Over No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun — for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax — This won’t hurt.

“You know, this many people haven’t slept in the Astrodome since the Oilers’ last season.”

An anonymous bystander gave Cheney a piece of his mind during a CNN photo op — echoing his comment to Sen Leahy.

Presented without additional comment:

The Interdictor is a former Special Forces guy who works for DirectNIC in New Orleans; since before the hurricane, he’s been blogging his status pretty frequently. From his perch, he’s seen looting, fires, and finally the arrival of real aid. Thanks to a big-ass diesel generator, his servers are still up, and they’re still on the net. It’s an interesting read (start at the beginning for a better narrative).

Add to the narrative the pictures they’re getting — like the excellent one at right, taken by DirectNIC’s CEO Sigmund Solares — and you get a pretty fine man-on-the-ground view of Katrina in NOLA. Click the picture for a full-size version.

From CNN:

WASHINGTON (CNN) — Defending the U.S. government’s response to Hurricane Katrina, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff argued Saturday that government planners did not predict such a disaster ever could occur. But in fact, government officials, scientists and journalists have warned of such a scenario for years.

So is Steve Gilliard. It’s a hell of a rant.

With good reason. The Times-Picayune ran this open letter ripping the Feds new assholes for their slow response and continued incompetence. Other outlets are covering it as well.

Step 1: Be an estate lawyer, not someone with any emergency experience.

Step 2: Take a job running the International Arabian Horse Association.

Step 3: Be forced to resign from said job for gross supervisory failures.

Step 4: FEMA, here I come!

Jesus Wept.

From the Chronicle:

Houston officials announced plans to open Reliant Center and the George R. Brown Convention Center to shelter hurricane evacuees after the Astrodome reached capacity. Mayor Bill White announced today that Reliant Center will hold up to 11,000 evacuees from Hurricane Katrina. […] “We want this exhibition hall open right now,” the mayor said. “If it entails someone suing us, then OK.,” the mayor said. “Then (they can) explain to the American public why.”

Go here, and watch the Fox (!) people on the ground slap Sean Hannity around about the situation at the convention center. Did you realize people are not being allowed to leave?

PNH has more.

Bush said, on Good Morning America Thursday, that “I don’t think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees.”

This must be the same sort of “anyone” who also didn’t anticipate the notion of people using airplanes a missiles. Actually, this statement is even more absurdly false, since every study of what a Cat 5 storm would do to New Orleans included levee failure.

What a jackass.

As noted in a previous entry’s comments, Gridskipper editor (and longtime Heathen) Chris Mohney has a Letter to New Orleans running that you should read.

This didn’t take long, did it?

I grew up going to New Orleans. The very first time I ever went to New Orleans was my 6th birthday. I was obsessed at the time with “cities.” Hattiesburg didn’t count; I wanted to see tall buildings and concrete like on Sesame Street, so as a birthday surprise my parents took me to New Orleans. Mom and I took the train down, and dad followed after work a day or so later. I don’t remember a lot about the trip — I was, after all, only six — but I do have mental snapshots. Riding the streetcar with my mother, who was then only a little older than I am now. Walking down Royal and seeing all the “neat stuff” in the antique store windows with my dad. My first trip to Cafe du Monde. Feeding pigeons in Jackson Square. The zoo.

Lots of families have arbitrary markers for their kids for when they’re “grown up” — as tall as this shelf, for example. One of ours was when I was old enough to go with my parents for dinner in the Quarter. Hattiesburg’s only about 85 or 90 miles from Galatoire’s, and neither of my parents were really drinkers, so down-and-back for dinner wasn’t so absurd. I guess I was probably 12 or so before I saw the inside of that dining room, fleur de lis wallpaper and career waiters and more butter than ought to be legal — and a line outside of well-dressed folks waiting to get in. Back then, Galatoire’s had no upstairs, took no reservations, required coat and tie or “appropriate dress” for women, and accepted payment only in cash (or the rare house account). Tourists almost always asked the line “what are you guys waiting for?” I almost never heard any answer but a vague “dinner.” The tourists would shuffle off, blissfully content with Lucky Dogs and street-vendor cocktails.

Galatoire’s has been a special sort of thing for my family since before my parents even married; my grandfather used to take my grandmother there starting in the forties. She’s 90 now, and won’t be with us much longer, but on her 85th birthday my brother and I drove her down to have lunch there one Friday. I’m not sure, but I think that may be the best thing I’ve ever done for anybody — my aunt tells us that she talked about it for years.

As far as I know, 209 Bourbon is still there. God willing, it will be open again in a few months, and I’ll eat there as soon as I can.

The trips themselves are innumerable, but there are memorable ones. In 1989, there was a trip that was memorable only because we didn’t make it past Slidell. Two years later, I led another college expedition of Mike Dorman and Joy Brown for their first trip to the Big Easy. I used my upbringing well, and booked the whole thing ahead of time. We drove down and parked in the side garage entrance to the Monteleone, and then went through the whorehouse-red corridor to what is probably still one of the more impressive lobbies in the Quarter. I still remember Mike and Joy kinda gasping, but the rate was good, and there we were. I took them to Galatoire’s, and to hear real Dixieland, and we made friends with an old widower who told us stories of coming to the same bar with his new wife fifty years before. Anywhere else, the stories might’ve been maudlin, but there, that night, for some reason they just made us all smile. And drink.

Years later, Dorman and his wife Anne and I made a habit for several years of meeting in New Orleans during ALA conferences. Those were all fine, fine trips, but perhaps the most memorable of them involve a terrible faux-Goth bar in the Quarter — where, it should be noted, we were typically somewhat out of place, as we’d dressed for dinner. Anne’s sister took us there one year when our group also included my brother and his college girlfriend, and that night we saw an amusing and impromptu floorshow. Another year in the same bar, it was Mike and I at the end of an epic bender, most of which spent at a dive on St Peter being served by a bartender who insisted her name was “Shelley from Hell.” By the time we got to Goth central, I was still sipping Dixie, but Mike had graduated to tonic and lime (fortunately, he’s an amiable drunk). It was a slow night, and the bartender and I talked about obscure music while Mike pondered his fizzy water. When we left, Bourbon was empty — except for the joggers we saw as we slinked into the lobby of the Monteleone.

Still another year, our friend Sara joined the group (Frank was there that year, too) for drinks at the Columns and dinner at Galatoire’s. That night, Mike and Anne and our girlfriends turned in early, but Frank and I stayed up late drinking Johnny Walker on the upstairs balcony of the Columns.

My last trip to New Orleans, I’m ashamed to say, was nearly two years ago; I went for my friend C—‘s bachelor party. He’s from there, and his best man Chris went to law school at Tulane (in which capacity he did something I’ve always wanted to do: gone to Galatoire’s for a late lunch, and stayed with your party at the table drinking until time for dinner). You’d think having locals with us would have kept us out of the Quarter bars, but nooooo. After a fine dinner (at . . . oh, you know), we changed and headed out. First stop: Tropical Isle, home of the lethal hand grenade. C— had two, and devolved before our very eyes. Had it been any other night, or any other participant, we’d have put him to bed, but as he was the honoree, we kept him up and fed him Cokes until he re-emerged a couple hours later. C— is missing a few bars from the middle part of the evening, which is good, as in one of them he vomited into a urinal.

I could tell more stories about New Orleans, of course. So could we all. My hope and prayer, though, is that there are more happy, silly, funny stories to tell, stories that haven’t happened yet, or even stories for whom the principals are yet unborn. God save New Orleans.