It just gets worse and worse

New Orleans will be a completely abandoned and uninhabitable city for months. Unbelievable. A couple of particularly sobering reports, some personal experiences of the CNN reports on the scene and one from CNET on the extreme difficulty of the cleanup.

Governor: Refugees must leave New Orleans - Hurricane Katrina - MSNBC.com

Governor: Refugees must leave New Orleans - Hurricane Katrina - MSNBC.com
Wow, just when you thought the worst was over, large sections of the city of New Orleans are slowly flooding due to levee breaks. You can only hope the levee can be repaired quickly, but even then I wonder how difficult it will be to get the floodwater cleared back out.

It also seems certain that the death toll will be much higher than the 50-80 already reported. It's sad that the majority of the victims appear to be the poorest of the poor. You have to question whether enough efforts were made to evacuate those areas.

Katrina and the waves

Yeah, real smart, especially the guys in the photo with their heavy-duty bath towel protection system. I guess all those advance warnings from officials along the lines of "we could witness the total destruction of New Orleans as we know it" weren't enough to get these bozos moving. And no, they're not homeless types -- a quick Google search reveals that one of them is a Bourbon Street DJ. "Dude, all my gear's inside there...we can't just, like, LEAVE." Or possibly they're just waiting for their ride out of town from that chick they met the other night who totally swore that she'd swing by.

Not thayut there's anythin' wrong with thayut

Texas cowboys in love. With each other. A fairly daring choice of movie roles for Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal. "Young Guns" it ain't. Larry McMurty (Lonesome Dove) wrote the screenplay for Brokeback Mountain and Ang Lee directs, so it should have some class, but the trailer still seems odd on the verge of humorously odd. But don't listen to me, I'm just a lunkhead who's probably just seen the old SNL "Schmitt's Gay" commercial too many times. It really will be interesting to see how it the movie plays here in the Midwest.

The Internet is just a world passing around notes in a classroom.

The above quote is from Jon Stewart. Here's a good interview with him and Daily Show executive producer Ben Karlin talking to Wired.

Back to the hobby at hand...

Oh yeah, the blog. Hi everybody!

Hey, isn't it great that we won't have to deal with Pat Robertson's influence anymore? Since after this latest episode, he's pretty much lost whatever access he may have had to mainstream media. I thought this commentary from a Latin American missionary summed it up pretty well, but I got a particular laugh at one sentence: "Chavez may be unstable and erratic....", because at first I thought he was talking about Robertson.