New Orleans Television Stations

Immediately after Hurricane Katrina, I did a post with a link to one of the local New Orleans television stations. I didn't remember the post, but I've noticed a lot of people arriving at this blog after doing a search for live feeds of New Orleans television stations.

The problem is, the link in the post doesn't work anymore. However, while reading some New Orleans blogs today one blog led to another and I found this link which allows you to see all four local New Orleans television stations on one page.

Click here.

New Orleans - Hurricane Katrina - Three Years

Lifted from Tim's Nameless Blog. Read his blog for a first hand look at New Orleans after Katrina.

FEMA Denies New Orleans Aquarium

One of my favorite places to visit in New Orleans is the Audubon Aquarium of the Americas. After Hurricane Katrina, I read everything I could find trying to determine the status of the fish, birds and animals there and was horrified to learn that most didn't make it.

In order to restock the aquarium quickly, the staff of the aquarium did what any sensible person would do, they went fishing. Now, however, since the aquarium was restocked the old-fashioned way, saving tax payers a half-million dollars by not buying the fish from commercial suppliers, FEMA is refusing to pay their $616,000 commitment to the aquarium. (You can read about it here.)

Ah, wouldn't it be nice if FEMA was the only government agency we had to be embarrassed about?

Hurricane Katrina Anniversary

From Tim's Nameless Blog

"We Are Not Okay"

On the one year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, here are some links and a Google search for you:

• Tim's Nameless Blog
• NOLA Live
• "We Are Not Okay"

When the Levees Broke

Spike Lee's documentary about Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans premiers on HBO this Monday and Tuesday 7:00 CT.

Blog Reviews

A few weeks ago, I noticed on my stat counter that I was getting a few hits from a blog called Frog My Blog. It's a blog that reviews other blogs. It was a new blog at the time and I was one of the first blogs they reviewed. I've given them a couple of weeks to get going before I give my opinion on their little endeavor.

Here's their review of my blog (unsolicited, by the way):

Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans? Uh…no. Not really.

I’m assuming this blogger was displaced by Hurricane Katrina. She appears to be in Texas but really wants to go back to New Orleans. It was my understanding that N.O. was being rebuilt fairly successfully, so if you really want to go that bad…

I don’t like the template. The notepad look is too…yellow. Damn, that’s a long sidebar, most of which is pretty unnecessary.

I wasn’t very high on this blog from first glance. The title and first post came across as kind of whiny, and a bad template will ruin a first impression. I was going to give 0 bugs, or just 1 for the Kinky Friedman ad.

However, I then came across the Hallsnark Cards and laughed in spite of myself. 2 more bugs for you. I think you should go into business.

It isn't a very nice review which is mostly based on the following: (1) she is indifferent to New Orleans and their plight, (2) incorrect assumptions about me (all she had to do was read the profile) and (3) she didn't like the yellow legal pad template. She laughed at the Hallsnark Cards "in spite of" herself meaning she had decided to not like the blog at first glance.

I don't expect everyone to like my blog or to care that it exists at all. However, that isn't the point of this post. The reason I decided to write anything at all is because of their reviews of other people's blogs. They seem obsessed with clean sidebars and fancy templates over content.

Blogs are a personal expression of what YOU want to put out there. Who cares if the grammar is lousy or if your interests are considered uninteresting by some people or that you like to put blinky things on your sidebar? Just keep writing and expressing yourself. Any act of self-expression is art and nobody has the right to suggest you change your self-expression in any way.

These people need to stop trying to sanitize the blogosphere and turning it into one big generic "clean" Wordpress template containing whatever they consider to be relevant writing on whatever they consider to be relevant subjects.

Whew. I feel better. Was that too whiny?

Edited to add:

Old Roses just left me a comment asking if the review had been removed. After checking, I find that the review has indeed been removed. I guess the reviewers didn't like being reviewed. Isn't that interesting?

New on the Sidebar

Support New Orleans musicians...

New Orleans Musicians Hurricane Relief Fund

New Orleans Aquarium Re-Opens

The Aquarium of the Americas in New Orleans reopened Friday. Very nice.

Have You Ever Robbed Somebody?

This is the picture we took at Pat O'Brien's Saturday afternoon.

Before our trip, whenever I would watch anything on television about Hurricane Katrina, whether it was PBS or Discovery Channel or Food Network, I would inevitably be crying by the end of it. We've been taking these trips to New Orleans once or twice (sometimes three times) a year for the last twelve years. When you go anywhere that often, you develop as much emotion for the people as you do for the destination.

So, when I would see something on television about the destroyed homes and lives interrupted, I would think of all of the people we've met there who were so kind and funny and full of life. We're the kind of patrons who, as often as not, enjoy the people who work in the stores and restaurants and bars and hotels wherever we happen to be and develop very nice and meaningful one or two hour superficial relationships with whoever happens to be helping us at the time.

The reason I won't be crying anymore when I see those programs on television is because of the sweet restroom lady who we've talked to in the bathroom at Pat O'Brien's a million times and who was still there. She lost everything and is living with her sister but her faith and resilience were palpable and it felt like each time she told her story that maybe the support she felt from everyone who goes in there might be making her a little stronger each day.

I came across people like her throughout my visit: the lady singing as she was straightening rooms in our hotel (I asked her if she was happy cleaning that room as I passed her in the hall and she said with a smile, "Sure am. I have to be somewhere. I just as soon be here."), the ladies who made us toast and English muffins every morning in the hotel restaurant who made you feel like it was your mom asking you what you wanted for breakfast, the people in the parades who I can only imagine what they must be living through.

So, no more tears. If they can suck it up, so can I.

Oh, about that title to this post, tomorrow's New Orleans tale:

Laurie and Melissa go to a strip club and almost join a gang.

Stay tuned.

Quarter Crawlers

My sister, Terry, wrote this extended limerick in honor of our upcoming New Orleans trip:

There once was a storm named Katrina
And then there was one name o' Rita,
But we'll go back to Pat's
And we'll all sing at Cat's,
'Cause the Quarter, you know, you can't beat 'er.

Thirteen years, it is now we be goin',
Through the ice and the rain and the snowin',
The risks we'll keep takin',
New friends we'll keep makin'
So, fuck the big winds that come blowin'!

To mutha nature, our nose, we'll keep thumbin',
To Mother's Poboy's, you know, we'll keep comin',
And we'll walk Bourbon Street
'Til we can't feel our feet,
A Lucky Dog, late at night, we'll be gummin'!

In a New Orleans State of Mind

Last night, I finally watched the highlights of the Grammys which I had DVR'd from Wednesday night. The program, evidently, went on past 10:00 p.m. so my DVR cut off the recording before the end of the New Orleans tribute which was at the end of the Grammys. As I was surfing the internet trying to find a clip of the rest of the program, I decided to check and see if the Cat's Meow on Bourbon Street had re-opened, yet. I found out that they will be re-opening in mid-February which means they will be open when we go in mid-March.

The Cat's Meow is a karaoke bar on the corner of Bourbon and St. Peter and it's one of our favorite hangouts. I love to watch people sing karaoke and this is a great place to do that. When we get tired of watching people sing, there's a nice quiet bar upstairs with a balcony that overlooks Bourbon Street. The Cat's Meow is where we always start our evenings and I was relieved and delighted to hear it is finally going to re-open.

There was a link on that site to a place to buy some New Orleans t-shirts so I bought a couple of those. I'm not sure if any money goes to Katrina relief, but the shop that makes them is in Covington. So, that's good enough for me.

While I was in a New Orleans mood (as though the mood is not always right below the surface of my many other moods), I decided to watch a DVD I ordered from PBS titled Hurricane Katrina: The Storm that Drowned a City. Particularly poignant is an interview with the man who created the Hurricane Pam simulation a year before Katrina. He speaks of how some public officials mocked their presentation showing the catastrophic results if a Category 5 storm were to hit New Orleans. He tells about his frustration because he knew it was going to happen and how painful it is to see the reality of his predictions in the aftermath of Katrina.

I'm going to work on my taxes now. I wonder if I can claim my eating and drinking expenses for my March trip on my 2006 taxes as a charitable deduction toward Hurricane Katrina relief.

Penny Lane is in My Ears and in My Eyes...Very Strange

Sometimes several coincidences occur in my life that make me stop and wonder what the meaning might be. Most of the time, I can't find a meaning and this is one of those times.

When I was about 12 years old, my mom’s step-sister and her son lived in a duplex in Beaumont. The people who lived next door had a daughter named Penny. I remember her name because, that summer, Penny Lane was a big Beatles hit. I also remember that she loved the Cowsills which I found odd. I never knew anyone who was obsessed with the Cowsills.

Many years later, I got a job in Beaumont and the building I worked in was in the same neighborhood where I remembered my aunt and Penny’s houses to be. I always wondered if I could find those two houses. I knew I would recognize them because my aunt’s house was a brick duplex and Penny’s house was a wood frame house with a little porch on the side facing my aunt’s house.

Several months ago, after working in this building off and on for the last twenty years, I was looking out of my fifth floor window and it hit me like a bolt of lightning. There were the houses. I had a direct view of them from my office window. I had always thought the houses were on Liberty or Laurel when they were actually on Broadway. I've had this office with this view for about three years and never noticed the houses until sometime late last summer.

When I got back to work after the evacuation for Hurricane Rita, I saw that a tree had fallen through the roof of Penny’s house. Sometime around Christmas, I watched as they finally hauled the tree away and this week they removed the blue tarp and repaired the roof.

Along with my revelation last summer that the houses were right outside my window, here are the other coincidences which really started piling up this week into one surreal moment:

1. For my birthday last September, my sister found an old Beatles poster we used to have hanging in our bedroom when we were teenagers and she had it framed and gave it to me as my birthday present.
2. For Christmas, Cory and Jamie gave me the two DVD set of the Concert for Bangladesh. I had been looking for it for years and I didn’t even know it had finally been released and Cory didn't know I had been looking for it.
3. Cory and Jamie also gave me the new Beatles biography for Christmas and this week I read a passage about Penny Lane (the actual street in Liverpool, not the song).
4. That same night, my cousin Zina sent me an e-mail telling me that one of the Cowsills died in New Orleans sometime during Hurricane Katrina and his body was found this week.
5. The next day, after reading the passage about Penny Lane, I came to work and as I watched the workers patch the roof, the song Penny Lane played on my satellite radio, which I had bought for myself for Christmas.

Penny Lane playing on the radio, as I watched the men work on the roof of Penny's house, after reading about Penny Lane the night before, was strange enough, but then I suddenly remembered Penny's fascination with the Cowsills. When I had received the e-mail the day before from my cousin, I hadn't thought of Penny. I was only thinking that it was another sad story from New Orleans.

Weird.

The Way We Were?

Tim's Nameless Kitchen

If you haven't been there lately, please pop over to Tim's Nameless Blog and read about day to day life in post Katrina New Orleans. He has posted pictures of his house which are heart breaking.

Silly me, as I read the post and looked at the pictures of the place he used to call home, I was thinking, "I wish he would have posted some before pictures so people could more deeply understand the extent of his loss." Then I realized that there probably aren't any before pictures. They were probably destroyed along with everything else that was left behind when Tim and his family evacuated.

Our government promises to rebuild the levee system in New Orleans back to the way it was. Obviously, that isn't enough.

Tim's Nameless Bedroom

Angels, Evacuees and French Fries

The Friday before Christmas, my sister and I headed out to finish our shopping. The traffic around the mall is always bad. However, at Christmas, you can't leave home without a strategy. Our plan was to do all of our shopping in the stores that share a parking lot with Target. This would save us about thirty minutes (valuable nap time before going out that evening) by not trying to cross from one parking lot to another. The lunch part of our plan included Jack-In-The-Box.

However, much like Tim in New Orleans who cannot find a Popeye's since Hurricane Katrina, most of our Jack-In-The-Box restaurants in Beaumont are still closed because of Hurricane Rita. We soon found out that this was the case for the restaurant in the Target parking lot. As Bonnie and I passed the still closed restaurant, we spoke of one of the last times we ate there. It was the Saturday before Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans.

I remember the day exactly because, as Bonnie and I sat there eating our lunch, several families walked into the restaurant. As the smaller children ran around and played, the older children spoke in more hushed tones but were still teasing each other and goofing around. The parents, however, had the unmistakable look of adults who are worried but don't want their children to know the extent of their concern.

Because of our love for New Orleans, we had been obsessively tracking Hurricane Katrina. I looked at Bonnie and said, "I bet those people are evacuating ahead of the hurricane." This was later confirmed when we looked at their cars in the parking lot. At this point, no one had any idea of what was yet to come for New Orleans and, a month later, for Beaumont. Yet, our hearts went out to them and I can still feel the sadness I felt for those poor people. I often wonder what happened to them and to their families and homes.

Little did I know that, three weeks later, we would also be evacuees. At one of our stops in Shreveport, after being on the road for a total of seventeen hours over two days, we stopped at Burger King. I know we had the same battle worn looks on our faces that we had seen on the faces of the New Orleans evacuees in Beaumont. All along the way, as we traveled through Louisiana and Arkansas, people were especially kind to us when they noticed our Texas license plates, toilet paper rolls peeking from behind pillows in our rear windows and the four dogs with their nine humans trying to make their way to safe harbor.

Although we encountered many angels on our two-week evacuation odyssey, the strangest angel story occurred in Shreveport. After we left Burger King, we stopped at a gas station to fuel up again. We were so shell shocked from trying to find gas earlier along our evacuation route that we became compulsive about filling our tanks if the gas meter needle fell below half a tank.

As I stood filling up my car, I noticed an odd old African American woman who was talking to herself and walking toward the gas station. She would wave at cars on the busy street as they passed and loudly speak to no one in particular. As she got close to me, I turned my head toward the gas pump because I wasn't sure what kind of crazy she was. When she got right up to me, she looked me in the eye and said, "Dry land." I looked back into her eyes and didn't see crazy. I saw love and concern and a light in her eyes behind the concern. She said again, "Dry land."

She then walked up to each of our cars and spoke to everyone in our group saying over and over again, "Dry land." "Don't you worry." "Everything is going to be okay." "Dry land, darlin's. Dry land."

She then continued on her journey down that busy street waving to cars and talking to no one in particular. We all looked at each other and got in our cars and drove away. When we discussed it later, we were unable to account for her ability to know we were all together or that we were concerned about the coming rains and floods on their way to our homes which were now so far to our south. If anyone had been at the station and had been watching us for a while, they could have easily discerned the nature of our trip and that we were all together. However, I knew that this lady had just walked into the station from far up the road because I had watched her as she was walking up.

When we got home, we found that her words had been oddly prophetic. Although, we didn't exactly come back to ideal living conditions and undamaged homes or dry land (my aunt had three feet of water in her Port Arthur home and the rain did a number on my sister's badly damaged townhouse), Beaumont only got about eight inches of rain from the hurricane. That's about the amount we get occasionally from a bad summer storm. Also, if Hurricane Rita had made a direct hit on southeast Texas instead of southwest Louisiana, my aunt would have had about fifteen feet of water in her house rather than three feet.

The strange lady in Shreveport with her dry land prediction still haunts my thoughts as do the faces of the New Orleans evacuees we saw at Jack-In-The-Box that long ago Saturday in August. I hope they're all okay. To all the nice people we met along the way in Arkansas and Louisiana, we're doing okay, too.

Current Situation in New Orleans

My new blogging friend Tim has posted a link to a very good article about how things are right now in New Orleans.

Tim and his family are back living in New Orleans and his blog gives you a really good sense of what it's like living day-to-day in today's New Orleans.

Hurricane Katrina - Governor Blanco's Documents Online at NOLA.com

A large portion of 100,000 pages of emails, notes and other information submitted by Governor Kathleen Blanco's office for ongoing congressional hearings regarding Hurricane Katrina are online at NOLA.com. The Louisiana attorney general's office announced on December 8, 2005 that it will eventually provide access to these documents via internet to the general public.

Welcome to the Sidebar

I've added a couple of people to my sidebar.

The first is Tim who is a friend of Sleepybomb of The Wreckroom. Tim is in New Orleans and has some amazing stories about everyday life in New Orleans right now in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

The second is Pete Townshend of The Who fame. I learned about his blog from Sleepybomb also.

Reading Sleepybomb and Tim's blogs made me realize that all post-hurricane disaster zones have several things in common:

• Months (Katrina) and weeks (Rita) after the storms, there are still as many tarped blue roofs as there are roofs without tarps.
• Huge piles of debris still line all the roadways.
• Small plastic signs line the streets all over town advertising roofers, mold removal, carpenters and flooring companies ,but you still can't get anyone to come to your house and repair anything.
• Help wanted signs can be seen at almost all of the restaurants and most of the retail stores. (I can understand this in New Orleans but where is the Beaumont workforce?)
• There is horrible traffic everywhere because some of the traffic signals are still not functional.
• Where the street lights still haven't been repaired, it's amazingly dark even in the middle of the city. I can't imagine what it was like right after the storm.
• There are long lines at restaurants and most restaurants still aren't serving their full menu.
• We have all learned to appreciate the little things like door-to-door mail service, traffic signals and street lights, grocery stores and gas stations.

Party Criteria

Last night I went to my sister's house for my 19 year-old nephew's belated birthday party (chicken and sausage gumbo!) which had been postponed due to Hurricane Rita. As usually happens, the children (age range 16 - 25) and grandparents (ages undetermined) went their separate ways around 9:00 p.m. and the middle generation had a party of our own.

We mostly swapped hurricane stories but, as always, the conversation turned to our upcoming trip to New Orleans in March. We half-heartedly threw around suggestions for alternate locations for the March trip because of possible problems since Hurricane Katrina. We spoke of New York City, Cancun, Las Vegas, Key West, Galveston, Austin and Houston and many others.

Each location had its attractive features and we would love to go to all or some of them as a group one day. However, the question that kept coming back up each time we spoke of a fun city to take our rowdy crowd was this: Can we drink in the street?

We're going to New Orleans.

Four Words

Four words I hope we've heard the last of, at least until next summer...

catastrophic

devastation

hunker down