blacksundae

The children and teachers of Louisiana are being used as pawns by the Louisiana Family Forum and, most likely, the Discovery Institute, about which I have written so extensively. These people will assuredly not be around to clean up the wreckage they will leave in their wake if we don’t stop them. We have to stop them.

Link!

Well duh. But, more to the point, duh according to the 2008 Frommer’s Guide to New Orleans, which opines thusly:

Go, because everything in life is fragile and precarious, and we can take nothing for granted, and some day it really will all be gone. Go, because it’s not gone, not at all. Go, because the things you wanted — the beautiful architecture, the majestic oaks, the river wind, the quality of light that makes even the most mundane just a little bit magic — all remain. Go, because there are people there, and as long as they are, there will be music and food, and it will be some of the best of your life. Go, because perhaps you’ve wanted to help in any way you can, and now the best way you can is to help a historic city regain its economic feet. Go, because every brick in the French Quarter has a story to tell, and so does the damaged ground of the Ninth Ward, and you should bear witness. Go, because there is much to celebrate, and this is still the best place there is to do so.

The Frommer book also has a good introductory article on New Orleans. (Thanks to the branch manager at the Hubbell Library, who blogged this at the NOPL MySpace page.)

Mother Jones:

There is perhaps no more fitting backdrop for a production of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot—whose main characters, Didi and Gogo, spend two acts waiting for a man who never arrives—than New Orleans, where some residents died waiting for rescue after Katrina struck and others still have yet to see their neighborhoods rebuilt.

Earlier this month, the Classical Theatre of Harlem, together with Creative Time, a New York-based art collective, wrapped up a two-week run of Beckett’s most renowned work with a final production in the Gentilly neighborhood. The play’s organizers had to turn people away the weekend before, when Didi and Gogo did their waiting in the still-decimated Lower Ninth Ward.

Read on. [via MeFi]

The New Orleans Public Library now offers downloads of audiobooks and eBooks, via OverDrive, which apparently has library “partners” from New York to Los Angeles. Download stuff from NOPL here, if you have an NOPL library card. This is apparently funded by the New Orleans Public Library Foundation, according to a nola.com blog post.

One of the drawbacks? Not for iPod. Per OverDrive:

Our audio titles use Windows Media DRM copyright protection technology from Microsoft Corporation. Unfortunately the iPod does not currently support copyright-protected Windows Media Audio (.wma) and video (.wmv) files. OverDrive, along with hundreds of online music and audio book providers, is hopeful that Apple and Microsoft can reach an agreement that would enable support for Microsoft-based copyright-protected materials on the iPod. To repeat, OverDrive would love nothing more than to provide content for your iPod. We urge you to contact Apple and request that they open the iPod to other copy-protected formats or license their propriety copy-protection method to third-party vendors.

Now, I’m bored to exhaustion by the whole DRM issue, so I’ve lost track of whether this falls under “it’s Steve’s fault” or “it’s the (rest of the) establishment’s fault.” I do know, however, that the whole Greater New Orleans FreeNet / NOPL on-line history starting in the early 1990s has been of hard core digi-nerds who had to be hauled kicking and screaming into the Windows era, for chrissakes, and who wouldn’t be caught dead writing any code that might be readable by an Apple product.

My only coherent thought about this is that perhaps one of NOPL’s branches with its own independent Web site could provide, if only through a raw link, access to one or more of the free audiobook services… which are compatible with that obscure “iPod” device.

Yes, it’s me, the elusive Non-Shannon, offering up another lukewarm plate of 2005’s leftovers. Yay, everybody! It’s more old horoscopes! Shannon’s contributions really shine through in this one:

Wednesday the 16th (March 2005):

TAURUS: Just because it’s “cool” to drink Corona doesn’t mean it won’t give you the “green apple splatters.” Tonight: Don’t drink the Kool-Aidâ„¢.

PISCES: You may want to revise that text message. Your numerical abbreviations are unclear. 2NITE: U8 the Q8T!

ARIES: Please step away from the vehicle, hands on your head. And don’t make any sudden onomatopoeic utterances. Tonight: Don’t forget the safe word.

CAPRICORN: Shine on, you crazy diamond. Tonight: Make a deal with Satan. I mean, make a meal with seitan.

SCORPIO: Good ‘eavens! This is a sticky wicket! Tonight: Very good, then! Sporting trousers!

CANCER: You may feel like a paper tiger with feet of clay, jousting with straw men. Don’t worry, though. You’ll come out on top. Tonight: Beware of awkward mixed metaphors.

SAGITTARIUS: In the parched outback that is your cranial capacity, an errant wallaby traverses the red wasteland, dreaming of litchis and popsicles. Tonight: Didjeridon’t.

LIBRA: You overhear a friend pluralizing a genera name (i.e. “velociraptors”). You kill them for this transgression. Tonight: Combine the Suzuki method of acting with the Suzuki method of music. This will cause the world to end.

GEMINI: Sorry, but stirrup pants are not going to “come back” “in a big way.” Tonight: Suddenly scabies!

AQUARIUS: Only wussies use turn signals, right? You shitcock bitchfucker!!! Tonight: Easy come, easy go. If you know what I mean.

LEO: ROAR? Tonight: Maintain your image as “King of the Jungle” while at the same time being a thieving, scavenging savannah-dweller.

VIRGO: Combine your love of poetry with your skills in applied robotics in order to create a Frankensteinian, verse-spewing automaton. Tonight: Stop. Hammer time.

I didn’t know that Mr. Bill had a blog. He does, and it’s on the New Orleans Times-Picayune blog site. His recent “Space Station N.O. To Mission Control” post does an interesting blend of two popular arguments. The first is the nowadays-discredited “we put a man on the moon, surely we can ——” line; the second is that “we’re doing more to fix —— than we’re doing to fix New Orleans.” Interestingly, he a) doesn’t mention the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and b) doesn’t complain about dollar amounts, instead pointing up America’s “talent, intellect and ability” in fixing (other) problems.

Study bust[s] myth that New Orleans is sunken city

“Contrary to popular perceptions, half of New Orleans is at or above sea level.”

And Monkey Hill is not the highest ground in the city. This is according to Tulane and Xavier’s Center for Bioenvironmental Research and their LIDAR light imaging detection technology. The article discusses the need to prioritize land use, but also mentions that land height is “not the last word,” as seen after Katrina.

Georgia company planning to redevelop Mid-City area

A Georgia development company has been quietly working to assemble a vast swath of Mid-City, including the Lindy Boggs Medical Center, to create a nearly contiguous 20-acre site for 1.2 million square feet of retail space for national chains that until now have been unable to find a home inside the city.

File under love/hate. This would be the area bounded by Liuzza’s, Parkway Bakery, American Can and supermarket row on N. Carrollton. In the past I’ve dissed megadevelopments like this and the car traffic they cause, and wished people could walk through pleasant neighborhoods to shop at independent little stores and so on… but I find it significant that national-level investors are interested in this area that’s huffing and puffing to come back. According to one of the marketing people quoted in the Picayune article, “‘New Orleans has been on the radar (of national retailers) for a long time,’ and the storm has made land available.”

It took 6,000 years to build Louisiana’s coast.
It took 75 years to destroy it.
We have 10 years to save it.

Three-day series in the New Orleans Times-Picayune starts with today’s article. The animated graphic thing takes about seven minutes. Basically, land loss in southeast Louisiana is increasing exponentially. If it’s not reversed within ten years, it’ll be too late. Oh, and it’ll take more than the $14 billion figure we’ve been reading about.

Greetings, blogiverse, and welcome to my parlor. Now quiet down and let me introduce myself. You there, get off of that parapet! That’s better.

I am the one known variously as Non-Shannon, Leila Louise Henley of Austin, TX, Your Personal Earth Mother, Busty Saint Claire, and a host of other titles known only to the howling winds. And you are…?

Things are about to get freaky around here, man–real freaky. That’s because I have, after much gnashing of teeth and trembling of limbs, decided to bestow upon each of you a kernel of knowledge about…YOUR FUTURE! Well, actually, it’s more like what would’ve been your future, in the past, about 2 years ago. Yes, you, the faithful reader (all one of you) shall be privy to the secrets of the Lost Scrolls of Rue, mystic parodies of the New Orleans Times-Picayune’s horoscope section. Let me warn you, these start out pretty awful and get better over time, in proportion to how much influence Shannon had on the writing. So this first installment, well, let’s just say there were a lot of spent whipped cream cans laying in its wake…

Thursday the 10th (March 2005):

ARIES: You da shit. Tonight: Bananas might come in handy.

SCORPIO: You shall feast on the blood of the innocent. Tonight: More of the same.

CAPRICORN: Don’t leave the house! Tonight: Booty call.

PISCES: Go to Capricorn’s house 2-nite!

AQUARIUS: Tonight: Burn an effigy.

LIBRA: Sell your soul to Shannon (looks like a Jew). Tonight: Let a Scorpio feast on your blood.

GEMINI: Tonight: Go spelunking!

VIRGO: Don’t forget the spellcheck. Tonight: Break out the daisy dukes for that speshul summwun.

LEO: ROAR! Tonight: Dismembering yesterday, eating tomorrow.

TAURUS: Don’t bring your cell phone with you on the water slide. Tonight: Take out the trash. If you know what I mean.

CANCER: Try the doberge cake. No need to thank me. Tonight: Girls gone wild.

SAGITTARIUS: Don’t worry! It’s only a flesh wound… Tonight: Ride the snake to the ancient lake. If you know what I mean.