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.

My friend Sara Beth Williams wrote this.

September 2 2005 Home. It is where I am now, and it is where I have in some ways, never left. Whether you’ve spent only days or years, away from this river valley, you know what I mean. You know it when you cross the little bridge over some other creek bed in deepest, hottest July and the coolness rises up like an Alabama blessing. You know it wherever you are along the eastern migration route on a late fall day, when you look up to see the Canadian geese in their old formation against the cumulus clouds. You even know it when you’re in Florence (Italy) sighing over Michaelangelo’s David and the person next to you sighs too, and then says in an accent that turns out to be directly out of Florence (Alabama) “That’s so pretty I believe I’m fixin’ to cry.” You know it also when, in a dream, you come into a landscape that is green, and rolling, and so lush with shadow and promise that you first believe it must be a sort of paradise, but then you recognize it as the place beyond the No Trespassing sign where you once escaped with your giggling co-criminals, tearing your bellbottoms on the barbwire fence, carrying a few contraband beers and a pack of Salems, to share. You know that it actually exists, or did, somewhere out near a dirt road on Burningtree Mountain.” It actually exists!” you say to yourself. And you are amazed with this lovely dream that is really real. I suppose the right thing might be to use this space to apologize to whatever landowner I compromised back in 1973 when my friends and I broke the law on his land, but it is such a sweet recollection I can’t bring myself to say I’m sorry with a straight face. I will thank him here, though, thirty years late. I’ll tell him a lot of us trespassed, that we named his place Octopus Gardens, after the Beatles’ song, and that it was lovely, and that it did me a lot of good to sit in his meadows, under his trees, in the quiet and the warmth and the solitude. I don’t say it was right. I say it has stayed with me. Real beauty has a way of remaining. A lot of other things do not, and need not stay with you. How I know that today. I graduated from Decatur High School in 1974 and knew that late May night, in the deep way all of us experience that kind of certainty- not in our minds, but in our very marrow, that my adult future would not unfold in this valley. I spent my last season here that summer, in a little yellow house on 7th Street, impatient, bored, and convinced that life begins only after you leave your parent’s house for good. I was ready. I had a blue trunk filled with my college wardrobe: cutoff overalls and patched blue jeans, a yellow robe my mother sewed for me out of sale fabric from Brown’s, and several gauzy, embroidered peasant blouses bought that June from a hippie who sold them on the sidewalk in Panama City. I packed them away for school and didn’t wear them all that summer. When I opened the trunk, they still smelled of Coppertone, the sea, and Alabama sunshine. The last two months I lived in Decatur, I watched too much tv, talked all night with friends I’ve barely seen since, and mulled over what sort of college student I would be. I decided to be a deep-thinking, incense-burning, tea-drinking sort of serious and artsy college student. I gave up trespassing, and read the sort of literature I thought would ensure my success at the state university, beginning with Moby Dick, and The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Soon enough I took up Erica Jong, and finally (and most deliciously), purloined copies of Cosmopolitan magazine. With all of these wise words, I figured to be on my way to becoming an accomplished young woman of the world, someone who had her destiny, her whole life, in hand. Destiny, or life, prodded me into a lot of homes, and way past peasant fashions and trashy magazines since then. I moved to mid-city New Orleans in 1988, several months before I was to be married to a native New Orleanian. Like most city neighborhoods, the one I lived in for those months was wildly mixed both racially and socio-economically. I met my first friend and neighbor after a few daysÑa ten-year-old who caught me sketching with colored pencils on my balcony. “Whatcha doing?” she asked. I showed her. Her eyes widened when she came closer. Anyone who remembers me from my school days here can assure you it wasn’t my artistic ability that so mesmerized her. The child did not know pencils came in colors other than graphite grey. Later on, when I went to her house to fetch her for an impromptu run to the sno-ball stand, she told me she could not go because she had just washed her socks for school the next day and they were wet. She owned one pair, and dutifully washed them out each night in the kitchen sink so she could go to school in clean clothes. Her name is Kiera. She has a middle name, but it is a secret and I promised not to tell. I had to hold her hand at the zoo because the elephants scared her. When I used my turn signals, she was fascinated — she’d never been in a car and thought blinkers were the best part of the ride. By now Kiera is a young woman, maybe one you saw on television today. Maybe one with a baby, or two, on her hip. Though I gradually lost touch with her after I married, moved uptown, and had my own baby, I can assure you Kiera has probably still never left New Orleans. Not for a day, not for an hour. She has never bought peasant blouses on a sunny morning at the beach, and she has never read world history or philosophy or British literature at a university. She probably never owned another set of colored pencils after the ones I left with her were lost, used up, or stolen from her. Instead, Kiera almost certainly continued to live a life of grinding, unmitigated poverty and suffered the spiritual, and intellectual barrenness that breeds in that environment. Statistics show she probably did not make it through high school, and in case you wonder why, I can cite a dozen obstacles, each one bigger than she, any one of them probably bigger than any of you. The Times-Picayune, our daily newspaper, in one of its regular efforts to report on the appalling conditions in the city’s public schools, a few years ago told the story of one typical elementary school: there were great holes in the walls and offensive graffiti on the spaces that weren’t crumbling. No libraries. No air conditioning. Broken-out windows. Toilets that had not functioned in years–the children were escorted across a busy city intersection to use the facilities at a gas station. Who would stay in such conditions? Who would learn anything but disdain, disrespect, hopelessness, and yes, crime? It is of course redundant by now to point out that these conditions eerily foreshadowed the conditions my fellow New Orleanians have endured at the Superdome, that they are strikingly similar, albeit much milder than the ones in that sewage-rich, overcrowded hotbox. I don’t apologize or make any excuses for the criminal behavior going on there–just exactly not at all. Most of the people there don’t excuse it either. It is horrific, and terrifying- despair fallen to it’s most base expression. But I want all of my new neighbors to understand that these people have been my neighbors too. I want you to know that mother giving up her child to a stranger on a bus, or the one shouting obscenities to the camera may well be the little girl whose hand I held tight at the Audubon zoo. I want you to know I’ve eaten po-boys with these neighbors at the fairgrounds, and that I have listened to their melodic tones on the chromatic harp late at night, the sound unbidden, and doubly sweet for that, and rich as chocolate, coming through my kitchen window. I want you to try to understand that the only options many of city’s most disenfranchised people have ever had involve either walking away from the system, or fighting it. The option to walk away is now gone. I ask you to recognize what generations of poverty do to a people, and I ask you, while you pray for your loved ones, and your friends along the gulf coast, to also pray for Kiera, and for her sisters, and brothers. Kiera did not have a handsome bungalow just off Delano Park to come to when the hurricane warning came. She didn’t have an old Subaru to drive up the interstate, she didn’t have a mother waiting with a chicken dinner and apple dumplings and fresh sheets on the beds. She had nothing, and now she has a lot less than nothing. I so appreciate your prayers and good wishes for me and for my family, and for my property. But I am well, and my family is well. Even the dog is here, and already annoying some of you with her barking as you walk down the alley with your own pets. Please do call her name (Stella), and tell her to hush. If you yell it out like Marlon Brando did in “A Streetcar Named Desire”, she’ll feel at home, too. Well, of course that’s why we named her Stella. Home. I also have a home, a modest house, on a corner lot in uptown New Orleans. There’s such a magnificent water oak in the front yard–it takes three people with arms outstretched to circle it. From my living room there I can see my neighbor’s house with the Christmas lights up all year. I can hear one neighbor, the violinist, practicing a concerto, and on the other side, my neighbor who has been a singer a Pat O’Brien’s for decades now, competing, with her scales. What wakes me in the morning is the mournful horn of the lonely river barges, and the clacking answer of the carefree streetcar. I can throw a handful of seeds out the backdoor and be over-run in a matter of weeks with exotic vines and stalks that drip with cascades of ginger blossoms, moon flowers, saucy passion flowers, and lurid bougainvillia . The Peruvian lilies rise up out of the compost pile overnight. Just a few blocks from my house, along one of the most majestic avenues in the world, I can duck into a little bar and hear delta bluesmen play songs that drench with sorrow and rescue with love in the same refrain. The music of the city settles easy, and deep. When there’s a block party, contrary to some popular opinion about the Godlessness in my chosen city, there are indeed prayers before the feast–Catholic, of course, but Jewish, Hindu, Muslim and Baptist too. The Baptists bring congealed salads and fried chicken, the Indians bring samosas and naan, the Muslims bring hummus and good olives, the Catholics bring gumbo, doberge cake, bread pudding. The crawfish is boiled by folks you’d recognize as every inch, Good Old Boys. We share recipes, we swat mosquitoes, we agree and disagree, and go home happy, full, better people. New Orleans is a city of much tolerance, much contrast and contradiction, much richness and much poverty, and so much to bind us to the place, even with so much to deplore, so much that needs fixing. I live here now, but I live in New Orleans still too. I plan to return there someday, and expect fully that, like returning here, it won’t feel like a move, but a realization of having never really left. I don’t much worry over when it will be. It has taken me thirty years to again realize how much my home is here, has always been here, thanks to kind and generous friends in this city, and most especially to my mother, who has opened her heart and her space not just to my family, but to another refugee, and perhaps more to come. It is nothing more than, nor less than miraculous. It is friends, family, welcoming, caring. I can only hope my words here serve as some small antidote to the horrendous images we are seeing in the media. What comes to me this week is realizing it was in this quieter and more solid place that I learned much of what I needed to become a survivor in other places less quiet, less solid. I hope you won’t need to ask me why I intend to go back, why I believe I will return to New Orleans some day, or how I can be so calm in the face of losing every material possession I own to an improbable and vulnerable locale, to bad city planning, or to looters. The weather reminds me we humans aren’t in control. The looters remind me how much I have that I don’t need, and what’s really important. I think it’s all about what you learn to love early on, and it’s about loving the best things in the world: cool water in summer, landscapes so beautiful you dream of them your whole life, compassionate and loyal friends who come with you, stay with you, and greet you like they’ve been knowing you always, even when you’ve been gone for thirty years. Another valuable I took with me from here is an education, the one I received in the Decatur schools (where, like Kiera, I too qualified for a free lunch), but even more than the geometry I struggled with and the Shakespeare I loved, I took a grander lesson from a community that remembered to include everyone in it’s opportunities. I always had a place here. And I had fresh air, a majestic, wondrous space to explore, a river to swim in, and good climbing trees for a broader view of the world, even if I did sneak over a fence for some of it. I am so grateful for this valley, for the way it has stayed with me, all along the way, and for what it’s taught me this week: that a huge part of not being homeless is keeping your home in your heart. Sara Beth Williams
Decatur, Alabama
New Orleans, Louisiana
Copyright © 2005

Warren Ellis points out this:

(No word if he’s somehow kin to this guy.)

An aid convoy is finally in New Orleans.

Via Wonkette; Sen. Landrieu spouted one too many platitudes, and Anderson goes off:

Senator, I’m sorry… for the last four days, I have been seeing dead bodies here in the streets of Mississippi and to listen to politicians thanking each other and complimenting each other — I have to tell you, there are people here who are very upset and angry, and when they hear politicians thanking one another, it just, you know, it cuts them the wrong way right now, because there was a body on the streets of this town yesterday being eaten by rats because this woman has been laying in the street for 48 hours, and there is not enough facilities to get her up. Do you understand that anger? LANDRIEU: I have the anger inside of me. Most of the homes in my family have been destroyed. I understand that, and I know all the details, and the President — COOPER: Well, who are you angry at? LANDRIEU: I’m not angry at anyone. It is so important for everyone in this nation to pull together, for all military assets to be brought to bare in this situation. I have every confidence this country is great and strong as we can be do to that, and that effort is under way. That effort is under way. COOPER: Well, I mean, there are a lot of people here who are kind of ashamed of what is happening in this country right now, what is — ashamed of what is happening in your state. And that’s not to blame the people that are there, it is a terrible situation, but you know, who — no one seems to be taking responsibility. I know you say there’s a time and a place for kind of, you know, looking back, but this seems to be the time and the place. There are people that want answers, and people want someone to stand up and say: we should have done more.

Video

You can read the WWL radio interview with NOLA mayor Ray Nagin at Wonkette, or listen here. Do one of them. Listening is better.

This is ridiculous. I don’t want to see anybody do anymore goddamn press conferences. Put a moratorium on press conferences. Don’t do another press conference until the resources are in this city. And then come down to this city and stand with us when there are military trucks and troops that we can’t even count.

TPM has a post up about how Mike Parker was forced to resign as head of the Corps of Engineers because he had unkind words for the administration’s budget cuts.

From ThisModernWorld:

For the past couple years, critics of the administration have been trying to point out a couple of things: (1) Iraq is diverting resources from actual homeland security and (2) the situation in Iraq is almost certainly a complete cock-up. Well, the first point has been proven at far too high a price, and as for the second–they can lie about Iraq and plenty of people will believe them. Iraq’s a long ways away. But this is New Orleans, Louisianna, and we’re all watching the biggest fuckup in history play out in real time. Just think about this: we’ve all made a lot of jokes about the Department of Homeland Security over the past four years. But apparently, the Department of Homeland Security has absolutely no plan for dealing with devastation on this scale, which is supposedly the thing we’ve all been worried about for four years. Neither do they seem to have given much thought to the transportation of refugees after a catastrophic event. In this case, we had 24 hours notice and the vast majority of the population got out on their own. If a terrorist attack of this magnitude were to occur, it would occur without warning, and the refugee problem would be exponentially greater. But right now, they can’t even get in enough busses to get those people out of the Superdome. It may turn out that that stupid color coded chart really is Homeland Security’s proudest achievement.

A later entry points out that FEMA head Michael Brown admitted on CNN to Paula Zahn that the Feds “had no idea” about the convention center situation until yesterday. Quoth Tom:

If you live in a major American city, you better pray there’s never a terrorist attack of this magnitude. Because this is the best these fuckers can do with several day’s notice before the disaster hits and 90% of the city having had time to evacuate beforehand. So unless the terrorists are kind enough to give advance notice, you are well and truly fucked.

Sweet Lord.

Fred has a great roundup post on Katrina and related issues. Read it.

Electrolite points us to Belle Waring, who says:

Say what you like about casting blame for the unfolding tragedy in NO, the bare facts of the matter are these: America suffered a serious attack on Sept. 11, 2001. That was four years ago. I think we had all assumed that in the meantime a lot of wargaming and disaster-mitigation planning and homeland security gearup had been going on. If this is what the Federal and State governments are going to come up with when the suitcase nuke goes off in D.C., then we are well and truly fucked.