Clean Up Time
Some flotsam and jetsam from Hurricane Katrina, now heading north after leaving at least 50 dead along the Gulf Coast:
An excellent one-stop to read blogs about the storm is a special Truth Laid Bear page. It tracks the latest and most-linked pages - 963 in all. (via Tattered Coat)
Some facts distilled from those pages: Martial Law declared in the Big Easy. 1,600 Miss National Guardsmen called up. 2.3 million-plus without electricity. Red Cross mobilizing its biggest effort for a natural disaster. Monday the New Orleans Times Picayune staff ate red beans and rice. Tuesday they were evacuated.
Tom Tomorrow came upon an ad for storm items on EBAY. Too soon? Too tasteless? No way. This is what he found in the marketplace:
Those of you seeking souvenirs of the destruction and human tragedy left in Katrina's wake can choose from several versions of "I survived Hurricane Katrina" t-shirts; shirts with the satellite map image which extol survivors to "Prepare, Endure, Rebuild" (20% of profits donated to relief funds!); numerous Katrina & the Waves items which may or may not have been posted in reaction to the hurricane; several seashells washed up by Katrina; the seemingly ill-conceived "NOReliefFund" .net, .org and .com domain names (10% of selling price donated to the Red Cross!); the HurricaneKatrina.BIZ domain name (no mention of any donated percentages); hurricane photos on CD; containers of real Hurricane Katrina rain; Atlantic Ocean coral from Hurricane Katrina; a keepsake described as "HURRICANE KATRINA ENGRAVED TAG < BLING BLING!!> HOTTT!"; a Segway-knockoff called an Electric Chariot, described as "Fast & strong like HURRICANE KATRINA"; and one apparently genuine offer of shelter from someone in a small house with one spare bedroom.
A Boston Globe op-ed piece reveals Katrina's real name. Classical Values calls foul.
With no electricity, a leak in the newsprint storage area and no phone service, the Biloxi Sun Herald needed help telling its stories. It's sister paper in the Knight Ridder chain, the Miami Herald, sent a couple dozen staffers to help. News types left from Charlotte, N.C., Columbus, Ga., Macon, Ga., and San Jose, Ca., stood ready in Montgomery, Al., with chainsaws and generators. Page designers and editors traveled to the Columbus Ledger Enquirer, where The Sun Herald was to be composed and printed. The Biloxi paper's blog, Eyes on Katrina, continued to pump out reports as power permitted. The New Orleans Times Picayune published only electronically Tuesday.
Looking for another recap of the disaster? I mean the fashion disaster at the Video Music Awards. (Delicious, but slightly risky for work.)
Looking for something completely different? Peter Ash, a 16-year-old Brit, pulled only a C for his science project, but it's making him a lot more famous on the Web than his teacher would expect.
His project: a hamster-powered cellphone charger.
"THE HURRICANE that struck Louisiana yesterday was nicknamed Katrina by the National Weather Service. Its real name is global warming." That is truly pathetic. This jerk (and Will Bunch at Attytood) are falling over themselves to make political points from a catastrophe - when just about any hurricane expert would tell you that we are in an up phase of a long-term hurricane cycle. I wish everyone would SHUT UP and stop making political points until everyone is out of harm's way. This is bad, folks - horrific. We thought New Orleans had dodged a bullet. But the levees are breached and they have to get 100,000 people out of a flooded city.
thanks for posting that Globe article. Would never have found it otherwise, and thought it very interesting.