brykmantra.com

1) Today on NPR, All Things Considered had a story on a Mississippi couple that, because their house was the only one in the area with a generator and air conditioning in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, were asked to take in a newborn baby. Then they took in more injured people, and medical technicians started coming by to help take care of them, and before they knew it, their home was the center of medical care for their corner of the state. What little medical equipment and supplies were available were routed there, and a doctor, displace from his home by the storm, took up medical residence.

Like I’ve said before: Disaster is the mother of invention.

Listen to the interview with the homeowner, and read the whole story here.

2) Speaking of the recovery effort: We have met the terrorists, and they are our own government.

The Libertarian Party would really blow a golden opportunity if they didn’t exploit this fact in the 2004 election. They can just argue that we only put up with our huge, intrusive federal government, because someday we might need them and all their power …

And now we DO need them. And they’re useless.

Yes, another Katrina post — but this time it’s pet-related, especially doggies. I snapped this picture off of TXCN last night; I just couldn’t resist those beautiful eyes and that smile, just like Molly’s.

Here are more groups and resources fighting the good fight to help the most helpless victims:

Noah’s Wish, appropriately enough, specializes in rescuing pets stranded by flooding and other disasters. Their website isn’t working right now, probably because they were just mentioned on at least one of the news networks, but keep trying to get in. In the meantime, here’s a news article on the group, and here’s another — and both articles have pictures of doggies!

AnimalConcerns.org keeps a constantly updated list of news items on the ongoing rescue of pets in Katrina’s wake.

North Texas Humane Society and the Houston Human Society (and other local agencies, I’m sure) are taking in hundreds of the homeless pets from the hurricane’s path. Even cities at far away as Boston, Chicago and Buffalo are pitching in.

Last but not least: The director of The Humane Society of the United States is keeping an online journal of her organization’s efforts, and their site also includes video of pets rescued from the Superdome, other rescue stories, banners (like the one on the right) that you can use for your own site, and of course, several convenient methods for you to donate to the good cause.

Today on CNN there was an excellent live shot of a backhoe operator piloting an unpowered barge down the Mississippi, by pulling the rig’s scoop along the river bottom. It was fascinating to watch — the operator seemed to have perfect control, positioning the barge under the bridge to receive the sandbags for repairing the levee.

I’ve been trying to find video on the CNN website, but apparently they don’t think it’s important enough to post. Anyway, here’s a shot of the screen; click on it for a bigger view.

You’ve probably heard by now about Kanye West, during a Katrina relief telethon on NBC, going off-script to spout off about racism in America in general, and George W. Bush in particular.

If you’d like to download a video of that, you can find it here. The best part is seeing Mike Myers, with whom West was sharing the screen, looking totally stunned, and trying to bottle up his reaction and keep on-message.

Personally, I though Kanye’s outburst was a refeshing little change from the scripted inanities of network TV. I don’t totally agree with his opinions, but they needed to be heard, and free expression of views seems to be an endangered species these day.

Stranded musician watch: The Neville Brothers are the latest well-known New Orleans artists who are just now get evacuated from the city. Allen Toussaint is still apparently stranded.

I spent part of yesterday buying food donations at Sam’s Club, and part of today dropping them off at our Presbyterian Church. Also, the fine folks of Budget Suites in our suburb are hosting over 100 refugee families, including one extended family with 27 members, so yesterday I stopped by the Walgreens, which is right by the Suites, and picked up some soap that was on sale, some 99-cent toys and a few packs of playing cards, mainly so I would have an excuse to go by and see what was going on. Only a few of the evacuees were out and about, but there was a sizable pile of donated items in one of the courtyard. I handed the small sack of items to a woman in a wheelchair, who said that they were in the process of sorting everything.

It’s good to know that our town gets a chance to help out locally …

Here’s how you can mess with your co-workers’ minds: Next time somebody mentions Hurricane Katrina, just say, “Which one? 1967? 1975? 1981?”

Because yes, there were Hurrican Katrinas in all of those years.

There probably won’t be any more.

Here’s former Presidents Clinton and Bush’s relief fund website: BushClintonKatrinaFund.org.

In almost three years of blogging, I don’t think I’ve post as much about any current event as I have about the recovery process of Hurricane Katrina.

I guess I’m just fascinated by seeing what happens when the normal trappings of civilization that we take for granted — food, electricity, water, communications — are knockedout from under us.

I haven’t heard any of the news outlets admit this, so I’ll just say it: This is a bigger story than the World Trade Center attacks (or as the politicians mindlessly call it, “9-11″).

I suppose it could be argued that New York is the most important city in the entire universe, and therefore anything that happens there is infinitley more important than whatever it is that happens anywhere else.

That of course is rubbish. The WTC attacks had a bigger death toll — initially, at least — and obliterated a landmark, but the flooding from Katrina has emptied out an entire major city, and total rebuilding and recovery could take decades. Hundreds of thousands of refugees are on the move, probably more than ever before in American history. A huge chunk of a state’s population has been displaced to other states, and a lot of them might not be coming back. A major port is shut down for several weeks. Places of employment, and thus jobs, have been wiped out.

Sure, there might not be any country western songs or patriotic bumper stickers or invasions to come out of this disaster, and it won’t result in you and I being treated in an even more humiliating manner in airports, but the stumbling early response could easily hurt the Republican Party, especially in 2008, which would be a shame if they actually nominate somebody good.

It could be that the destruction of New Orleans could be one of the two biggest stories of my lifetime, right up there with the fall of Communism.

Anyway, here are some things I’ve run across:

Information is one of the most valuable commodities in a crisis like this, but with local New Orleans media and infrastructure devastated, the area radio stations have banded together to form the United Rado Broadcasters of New Orleans, pooling what few resources are left to get information to people still in the area.

You can listen to live streaming audio of this barebones emergency network.

This is an opportunity unique to the Internet Age, that you and I can eavesdrop, unfiltered by the national news media, on the survival process inside a disaster area.

Also: Geraldo Rivera reported on Fox News that there is a group of Vietnamese evacuees at the Super Dome who are not only waiting patiently — they’re insisting that everyone else be evacuated before them, because they don’t want to “get in the way”.

Wow. That kind of patience and selflessness is rare these days. Fox interviewed another woman (Caucasian, for the record) who complained of being treated like an animal, because her husband was one of thousands of patients moved to a safer location and nobody took the time out from saving lives to come personally tell her about it.

Also: The Humane Society has launched an effort to help pets left homeless by the hurricane, so please visit the site and help out if you can.

Also: (You’ve noticed that I’m using “also” instead of bullet points, because I can’t find a suitable graphic …) The New Orleans LA post-Katrina Intel Dissemination Wiki has been set up as a central clearinghouse of information about the evacuation and rebuilding efforts.

Also: Fats Domino and Irma Thomas have been found, alive and well. Domino, 77, had been stranded in his home in the flodded 9th Ward; Thomas (who is probably best known as the person who recorded “Time is on My Side” before the Stones), had escaped the flooding to stay with relatives.

As for Allen Touissant, he’s still stuck at the Superdome.

Here’s are some fascinating drawings I ran across on Flickr: Featherbed’s Sketchbook.

Very creative, very compelling. Check it out.

We watched Monster-In-Law tonight. The Wife keeps insisting it was “cute”, but I kept having insurmountable problems with two aspects of the film: 1) The stupid script, where people kept repeatedly doing stupid things; and 2) Jane Fonda and her vile character, and her excruciating overacting, and … well, the fact that she’s Jane Fonda.

But the movie was not irredeemable: It was rescued by Wanda Sykes, who is so funny and so real that I’d like to see her take over as host of Big Brother; maybe maybe she could breathe back into the show, after it was sucked out by Julie “Only Still Employed Because She’s Married to the Presdient of CBS” Chen.

If you’re not familiar with Wanda (or even if you are), check out her her website; even the minimal Flash intro is hilarious.

I’m getting the video bug again, since I’ve spent most of the past couple of days doing edits on our training videos (among other things, we have a new bottle feeder, so I had to edit out one of the line positions — but don’t worry, most of our line people rotate their tasks, so she was moved to another line).

Anyway, I need to caputre the video of our family party from two weeks ago. I wasn’t able to do it until now because I only had six gigs of drive space on my relatively new C: drive. As it turns out, I had 28 gigs of other captured video on that drive, so this week I moved it to one of my other four active drives, and now I have 34 gigabytes of sweet, sweet storage-space elbow room.

So now I need to work on personal projects, starting with the Bronze Star presentation, then moving on to some short clips I can upload to Archive.org and otherwise try to get circulated on the net, just for fun.

Regardless what you think of Dallas sportscaster Dale Hansen, you have to respect his sense of perspective. Earlier this week, when the news was first being filled with the grim news out of New Orleans and Mississippi, he remarked to the anchor people, You know, sometimes I feel kind of stupid sitting here talking about sports, with everything thing else that’s going on.

That’s a gutsy thing to say in a football-crazy city like this, so my opinion of him went up.

I’m not one of those bloggers who feels compelled to comment on every big news event that comes along — with everyone else putting in their two cents, most of what I say would be redundant — but there are a few notes I feel compelled to list here:

The Wife and I both visited New Orleans in the late 80s — separately, we hadn’t met yet — and neither of us were impressed. But I had also been there at Christmas when I was 16, and again the next summer when I was 17, and I remember that as a wonderful time. I was visiting cousins in a suburban housing development, and we hit the French Quarter a few times. This was the first time I had spent any time in a city bigger than Lubbock, and this was the tail-end of the hippie era, so my small-town brain was overwhelmed.

Upon my return as an adult, of course, none of this was new to me, so I was just bored and a bit put-off by the smell.

But I’ll always have the Cafe du Monde in ’71.

Anyway, I’ve recently mentioned Wikipedia’s coverage of Hurricane Katrina, now check out the updated listing on New Orleans (“This article documents a current event. Information may change rapidly as the event progresses.”), and Effect of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans. These articles serve as a central repository for all the information available, something you won’t find on the news sites.

Also: Offers for aid and free temporary housing on Craiglist; Ryan Youtz has registered the domain name NewOrleansKatrina.com, and is auctioning it off on Ebay to donate the proceeds to hurricane relief; Mission Fish‘s centralized Katrina relief page; and lots and lots of satellite photos of the hurricane and its aftermath.

A couple more: A blogger is somehow still operating inside New Orleans, reporting on the looting, devastation, and glacial recovery efforts, and a proposal to turn the Astrodome — a major refuge center for those fleeing New Orleans — into a telecommunications hub to help the victims try to get their lives back in order.

I had good response to the previous post, so here are some follow-up items:

ILuvNUFC at Look at This didn’t like the official coverage of the Newcastle Tall Ships race earlier this year, so he became a reporter and posted his own coverage, plus a gallery of photos on Flickr.

It’s hard to imagine how “professionals” could have done it any better.

Pamibe tells us of Slide, a new Flickr-type photo-sharing service by one of the founders of Paypal.

The URL is Slide.com, but I didn’t link it here because, for now, it’s by invitation only. I emailed them to attempt admission, but I’m not hopeful. (Hey Pam, got a spare invite you could toss my way? Huh, huh, huh, huh, huh?)

Next: More proof that Joe Averagecitizen is poised to supplant the Old Media operatives can be found in coverage of recent flooding (Wikipedia, Flickr) and “Camp Casey” (Wikipedia, Flickr).

One more thing: If I could have limited a post to just talking about the hurricane, I could have used a punny, 80′s-music-referencing title like “Katrina and the (28-foot) Waves” or “(Not) Walking on Sunshine”.

Oh well, maybe it’s for the best.

Blogs have been touted as the new “Media” to replace the newpaper-and-TV news monolith — but they’re really not. When bloggers “report” on the latest events, they’re just thousands of disconnected, babbling voices; you can land on them one at a time, but you have no idea if they have actual insight (e.g., live near the scene of the event, or have expertise in the field), or if they’re just spouting off to make themselves feel big.

A clearer picture of the REAL New Media has been emerging the past few months with the ascendancy of two “open source” media outlets: Wikipedia and Flickr.

For a great example, look at the coverage for the still-unfolding Hurricane Katrina: On Wikipedia , people can furnish updates as they happen, without being filtered through several layers of editors; the readers serve up any necessary swat-down a particular post might require. You can even view the article’s History page to see everything that has been changed in the 27 hours since coverage started.

As for Flickr, every area resident with a camera becomes a photojournalist. Instead of waiting a week for ten or twenty pictures in Newsweek, you can now get hundreds of shots while they’re still hot.

For another example — and one of the first, best uses of both of these new tools for reporting –
see last month’s coverage of the London subway bombings on Flickr and Wikipedia.

So remember, next time something big happens close to you: You’re a reporter.

Get to work.