remember

11 September 2001.

when is too much too much?

$133,000,000,000 -

Federal emergency funds and tax credits to the Gulf Coast post-Katrina.

$9.5 billion and climbing -

price tag for ongoing levee repair and new levee builds.

virtually 0% -

local authorities' interest in assisting the reversion to natural wetlands in the most vulnerable areas.

virtually 100% -

local authorities' interest in development, repopulate, rebuild

3 quadrillion dollars -

sum total of Katrina damage claims filed in suit against the Army Corps of Engineers by New Orleans homeowners, businesses, and city entities.  In January of this year the Corps was ruled immune from these claims, rulings from the Supreme Court of  1986 and 2001 being cited by U.S. District Court Judge Stanwood Duval:

[the law] "provides immunity where, as here, a flood control project fails to control floodwaters because of the flood control project itself."

Wow.  And, what?  What's being said here is that an entity can freely squander endless taxpayer dollars on boneheaded slipshod misguided attempts to alter and control that which in the end is not controllable, in this case the Mississippi River and the ocean.

Duval's ruling removes the Corps from the hook, leaving the New Orleans Sewerage and Water Board and the Orleans Levee District as defendants to the damage claims. Meanwhile, the Corps continues on down there building . . . more levees.

Hurricane Gustav showed mercy and the horrors of Katrina were still alive enough in all minds to ensure an admirable change in how things were done this time.  But because Gustav turned out to be the kind of storm people on the coast routinely ride out without evacuating, it's inevitable that the Big Easy will be somewhat more inclined to take it easy when other storms bear down.

One of the first levees the Corps dumped our collective money into was down on the Lower Ninth Ward, which is still largely deserted, never should have been built on to begin with, and doesn't look much different from how it did after Katrina.  Yet the Upper Ninth Ward, which is in part a historic area, remains vulnerable to an old and rickety levee.

So, what are we doing?  Is it still local and state corruption and graft, rampant during the establishment of the present levee system following Hurricane Betsy in 1965?  Or is it now simply a human compulsion to beat Nature at her own game?

No one wants to see New Orleans, one of the last genuinely colorful cultural bastions the U.S. can boast, disappear.  But there is higher-ground New Orleans, and then all the rest.  If they continue to park houses on places where they shouldn't be, an action akin to populating the side of an active volcano, this cycle of madness will go round and round with no end in sight.  The magical quality of life on the coast has been altered irretrievably by the levee system.  The coast itself loses more wetland, more beach, more land itself per year than any other measured place in the world, even in seasons when no hurricane makes a direct strike.  The Mississippi is unable to behave right because, hemmed in by levees, silts and sediment pile up in its bottom and enable flooding.  What then does all this spent money preserve?

* click on title link for more on this from Forecast Earth.

Momofuku Ando

You can click on the title link to know more about him, but Mr. Ando (who just died last year at the age of 96) created Ramen Noodles, those darlings of dorm dwellers everywhere.   How he identified the need for noodles is a moving story.

Well, they're my darlings too.  Eight for a dollar!  You can't get a single item of anything for a dollar anymore, let alone eight of something.  And they weigh next to nothing.  Short on fiber, but long on carbs and salt, wiggly and cheerful and ready in 2.65 minutes over a hot fire.  Genius.

if you say

to people that you're a Trail hiker, they tend to attach a sheen of glamour to it.  They offer help, rides, munchies, assistance.  They want to hear stories.  But if you say you're walking because you're homeless, no such offers are forthcoming, and people turn quickly away.  It's a most telling social experiment, to try either version and see what happens.

Off the road, on the Trail, where judgments are not made and passed with the blink of a wary eye.

--------------------

Today in 1969 the first ATM machine went into service at the Chemical Bank branch in Rockville, New York, and Star Trek aired its final tv episode.

In 1946 Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh opened on Broadway.

And in 1945 on the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, the Japanese foreign minister and the chief of staff of their army signed the "instrument of surrender".

Today is VJ Day.  

pumpkin field

Lie down under the stars in a pumpkin field, near the top of the gentle slope by the treeline, and you will hear at least one owl, more if you're lucky, and see the foxes on their nocturnal prowl.

The weather has been perfection, clear and dry.  Destination: Appalachian Trail, where no one looks at you funny if you have a pack on your back.  Not that the animals do that. Only people do.

------------

While things could not be more peaceful here, the Gulf Coast is far from it.  May all be well through the storm.

communing with the dead at the grocery store

Those of you with families doubtless require a grocery cart when you go food shopping. Yes, I know - I too was once like you, and those little carry baskets which have an irredeemably silly aspect to them were out of the question.    They're much too small, they look absurd, and can lead to dangerous singing bouts of a-tisket a-tasket a green and yellow basket if you're not careful.  And just what the hell are tiskets and taskets anyway?  See?  No one knows. 

But give life enough time, and one might gradually begin reaching for those stupid little baskets instead of taking a cart, without even realizing it's happening.  Get a divorce, shave off a spouse, there's one food and toilet paper consumer knocked off the grocery list.  Children do that growing-up thing, off they go, unless they're living in your cellar till they're 35 or so.  People expire, relatives and friends move away, and by golly one day you're selecting a basket instead of a cart because suddenly it's only you and one roll of Scott t.p. is going to last nearly forever and no one's using your toothpaste and one box of laundry soap will still be going six months from now.  Also, not having money helps.  

And so, because I am now a basket case, as it were, it's easier to use the self-checkout stations in the big grocery stores.  No live human need ring me out anymore, since my net purchases are pitiful, and clear social indicators that I have been single A Really Long Time.   Who buys one little tomato, one lonely avocado, one can of soup?  Only the Lonely, that's who.  dumdumdum dumdedoowaahhhhhhh. oh yeah yeah yeah yeahhhhh.  Thank you Roy Orbison.

Since I have no car, I walk to the nearest grocery store.  It's huge, clean, lovely and pricey, so I pick my way carefully through the landmines of the budgetary landscape, which are everywhere.  And then I approach the self-checkout, where I shall commune with the dead.  When whoever invented these things invented them, they made them talk.  Why?  Any fool can follow the visual prompts, even I.  

I want to know who talks like this.  The voice is female, and speaks in Robotic, one of the dead Romance Languages I believe, resurrected for telephone auto-replies, airport announcements, and all things impersonal.  I want to know who these women are, what they look like, and how they learned to speak like that.   That disembodied echo-chamber monotone telling you over and over to Please don't be an idiot is enough to make you bring a hatchet on your next visit and go on a computer hacking spree, thus giving computer hacking what should in fact be its proper definition.

In my store there are five self-checkout aisles.  My favorite one has a woman inside it whom I call The Crypt-Keeper.  She has something wrong with her, so that her voice comes out as if she's speaking from the beyond, and you're quite sure you're in a cemetery, not a store.  I amuse myself by beating her prompts whenever the scanner will let me, cutting her off in spooky mid-command.  Here's how our conversations go:

Crypt-Keeper:  Please swipe your store card.  If you don't have a store card please -

swipe.  Hahahahahahhaaaaaaaa!!!!!!!!!!  Shut you up, didn't I.

C-K:  Please scan your first item.  Please scan your first item.  Please scan your first item.

Me:  I just like to irritate you.  Keep your pants on.

C-K:  Please place item on -

swipe

C-K:  Please don't mess with me like that.  Please place item on the belt.  

Me:  I'm already way ahead of you, lady.  Look, I know you're dead and stuck in this crappy minimum-wage afterlife job.  But you shouldn't take it out on the customers.  Take it up with the Big Employer upstairs.

C-K:  Please shut up, please shut up, please shut up.  Please press Pay Now and Method of Payment.  Please take your mile-long receipt which is basically a novelette for five items and get away from me.

Me:  You do realize what a waste of paper and ink these receipts are, right?  

C-K:  Please remove your items from the bagging area.  Please go away.

There's an attendant who looks after all the people wrestling with the self-checkouts, and there's a lot of wrestling to look after.  He's a nice young guy, and he says I'm the only one who talks to the machines.  He also says there's a way to shut the voices off but the manager won't do it and he doesn't know why.  Sometimes he gets to feeling a tad schizophrenic when all five checkouts are talking at once, and sometimes he is spoken to by them in dreams in the dead of night.

excerption

I'm in a grateful, surprised daze caused by the interest being shown in Under the Rhubarb.  I can't believe it.

I want to explain that this isn't an e-book, nor PA nor anything like that.  It's not on amazon, it doesn't have an agent to love it and shepherd it along, it's just me making individual copies by hand at home by myself.  Very old-fashioned.  Lonely, but happy work.  Back when I had a real life, far far away and long ago, I was in commercial printing, so crafting my own little books is not daunting at all.

I'm like the guy who handcrafts chairs one by one in his workshop.  Same thing.

Now, in keeping with life's enjoyment of dealing out its endless hand of weirdness cards, a friend the other day handed me a free used scanner out of the blue.  I've wanted one for years but couldn't spend on it.  Naturally, just when I'm packing and moving things out, a scanner wanders in from nowhere.  Well, from a basement.  

Today I'll try to get the thing to work and put up some excerpts here and an illustration or two from Rhubarb, since people should be able to see those.  Normal people I am sure would accomplish this in a split-second but I'm teaching myself as I go, so please bear with me.  I am Olde and LowTech.   Hope to have it up by the end of today.   If I blow up the scanner I can probably do still camera shots of some of the book pages and put those up.

adding - the Table of Contents and one excerpt can now be found all the way at the bottom of this page.  Still working on getting one or two illustrations up, and another story excerpt.

To say that your interest is appreciated would be understatement at its zenith.