(click to enlarge)

Meanwhile...

"An enormous pink bunny has been erected on an Italian mountainside where it will stay for the next 20 years."

update

untitled: "my first meme" snow got slapped by somebody else, so I'm now choosing.....no, Jo did her....um...Ginny!

my first meme

Rules:
1. Go into your archive.
2. Find your 23rd post.
3. Find the fifth sentence (or closest to).
4. Post the text of the sentence in your blog along with these instructions.
5. Tag five some other people to do the same.

“I got the call waiting feature AND, it seems, the DSL."

Ah, the quotidian. once again, the indefinability, the complete unsearchability of the picture blog. perhaps my tagged friends can do better.

So now I’ll tag: Ted, snow, 'mouse', bake, and jackie o. wait, not 'mouse, he only has 3 posts. how bout...merc! and just for good measure: Scrine! (squwaaak?)

Meanwhile...

a summer cold is a different animal.

Meanwhile...

Halliburton Gets Contract To Pry Gold Fillings From New Orleans Corpses' Teeth

all together, now...

meanwhile...

Bush allows Katrina contractors to pay below prevailing wage - Sep. 9, 2005: "The administration is using the devastation of Hurricane Katrina to cut the wages of people desperately trying to rebuild their lives and their communities,"

via ted

The Fragile Society

Walgreens sends me an email that my regular asthma prescription will be ready to pick up this week. Yesterday I saw on WWL-TV a story about a young man named Paul who got off his shift at a New Orleans Walgreens a week ago and didn't get to go home, but was instead evacuated from New Orleans in his Walgreens uniform, to Baton Rouge. He, of course, lost everything but his Walgreens uniform. He walked into a Baton Rouge Walgreens, I believe the company had told their employees to do that, and he told the manager there that he was a Walgreens employee from NO--when I saw him on TV yesterday he seemed rather in shock still, so he probably wasn't his most presentable when meeting that manager--and the manager took him in the back. The manager tried to give him money but he didn't want it, he wanted to go to work. The manager made him take the money anyway, perhaps Walgreens had directed their stores to do so, I don't know. And then the manager said when do you want to start and the man, whose name was Paul, said right now. And Paul began to work for Walgreens in Baton Rouge right then.

Later on, Paul was sitting out in the parking lot, presumably in the dazed state he remained in even yesterday, and a customer saw him and asked him if he needed a place to live and so now Paul lives with her and the 17 others who are now living at her house in Baton Rouge and they look fine.

I remember the Walgreens on St. Charles and Felicity, near where I stay in NO. I have heard that the place where I stay is in process of recovering, they have a web page message out, but of course who knows what will happen to any of us in the long run. Maybe the Walgreens on the corner in New Orleans, which fixed my prescription so quickly for me when I was there, is the one where Paul worked, I don't know. But today I got an email from the Walgreens on the corner here in Tampa. My regular asthma prescription is almost ready.

the thing is...

I'm going to have to take some time off from my time off. I'm going to have to clean up this house, for instance. Haven't unloaded the dishwasher for over a week and the dishes ready to be washed have piled up. When I mentioned this to a friend, she said enviously "you have a dishwasher!" Be that as it may, I still have to start at one end of the house and pick through the rubble, there is no reason for ME to have rubble, and sweep through all the way to the back of the house. maybe that will straighten my mind, too. I learned yesterday that the Red Cross won't take me anyway because I have asthma--oh, Merc, I have a link for you, I think I forgot to send it?--and that makes some sense as it's probably the mold. Email tells me this morning that Bakerina has helped get word of the wikipedia project out to the greater New York area. I'm not meaning to make myself so self-important that I neglect the necessities. So I'll see you later today, when I recognize myself again. Right after I find this link I had for Merc...

The Irish Trojan's blog - Brendan Loy's homepage: "ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?!?!?!?!
"

It Matters!

I have been keying data on the Missing in Wikipedia as detailed below and it is so discouraging. Many posts don't have email addresses or contact info at all, the material is days old, it seems pointless. IT'S NOT POINTLESS! I was putting in a post from a missing forum on NOLA.com that recorded that someone was safe in a hospital, and I checked back to the post it referred to to get the stats on the person. On a whim I decided to call just to make sure they had gotten the info; I wasn't going to, it was two days old, they were probably exhausted, I was a stranger, but I decided to do it anyway...

They hadn't gotten it. They didn't know they had gotten a response two days before. I was able to tell them their loved one was okay, and give them the phone number to the hospital. The person who had responded had provided a paragraph of good information that I read to the guy. He didn't sound excited at all; he must have been in shock. I, on the other hand, am shaking.

I contacted Belo Corp, on the line they put up for their employees to call in, and asked them to get the message out to be announced on the air on WWL-TV (I think I was talking to the benefits guy so who knows? He called me back, though, so maybe...) People, check back on the fora frequently once you've posted your plea!! Ted says they're like messages in bottles tossed into the sea. But sometimes they work!

Unbelieveable. Unbelieveable that it's me doing this, too, from my bedroom which I haven't yet left today. It's not Armageddon, Grace; it's just the breakdown of civilization as we thought we knew it.

Keep stuffing those bottles. Keep typing.

PeopleFinderVolunteer - Katrina Help Wiki

PeopleFinderVolunteer - Katrina Help Wiki: "All you need to help is an internet connection and the ability to copy data onto a form. No other fancy tech skills are required."

Mary Landrieu: I'll Punch Bush, 'Literally'

Just in case you were thinking about it, too, this guy's timely public service consists of reminding us that "it is illegal to threaten the president with physical violence."

"Broussard: 'We have been abandoned by our own country.'

Here is the video of Aaron Broussard on Meet the Press today. Watch it all the way through to the end. Watch it while the Charmaine Neville Mardi Gras music is playing. Hell, watch it with the Neville video playing in the other window AND the music playing. Watch it all and weep. Nobody's coming to get us.

Item One: When the saints go marching in

Ted has posted a link to the Charmaine Neville video, in which she unburdens herself of her escape from New Orleans. For Charmaine in a prettier mood, go here. If these things can happen even to American music royalty, isn't it time for all artists at the very least to rethink?

Metroblogging New Orleans

Metroblogging New Orleans: "T'row me sumthin' mistah! Like a chance to go back.

Today is a MUCH brighter day than yesterday. And thank all of you for your kind words."

the stupid broad

on whatever morning "news" show that's looping back into the WDSU feed via Orlando just said in voiceover for some NOLA footage: "the calvary is coming!"

Too late, honey. It's obvious that Calvary is already here.