b.rox

Flattened Home by Joshua Miller / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
A friend of mine made a joke last week in an online discussion, and it really rubbed me the wrong way. It was a Katrina joke. I tried to play it off and make some jokes of my own, but ultimately I found, even after a couple [...]

That we even call this the post-Katrina era in New Orleans is somewhat misleading. Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast east of New Orleans, but it missed the Crescent City. What we experienced was the worst civil engineering disaster in the history of our country. Floodwalls failed without being overtopped. The Army Corps of Engineers has [...]

I got a press release about an interesting event coming up on the fourth anniversary of Katrina. My comments follow.
Gulf Coast Rally to Demand Speaker Pelosi Take Action on 4th Anniversary of Katrina
This Friday supporters of the Gulf Coast Civic Works Act (HR 2269) will gather for a noon rally and press conference on the [...]

It’s been three weeks since the Lutheran Invasion, but there’s still a pile of four-year-old flooded junk in front of the house next door.

Don’t blame the Lutherans for this mess. Blame the Preservation Resource Center. Blame Operation Comeback.
I was so excited when my neighbor donated his house to this program, so looking forward to some [...]

Back in the late ’80s I bought a dedicated word processor. My main criterion at the time was something that seems silly now: I wanted printed output that would be indistinguishable from a typewriter. So I got a Brother WP-500, which featured a daisywheel printer. This enabled me to produce documents that appeared to have [...]

I commented a year ago (to the very day!) that some sidewalks around our home were impassable, some friends recommended a stroller upgrade. They didn’t understand that our stroller wasn’t the problem. The major obstacle just around the corner was Gwen’s FEMA trailer, as pictured here:

I don’t think any stroller in the world could jump [...]

Rather than express my obligatory outrage over Bush’s remarks yesterday on Hurricane Katrina, I’ll simply link to Darwin Bond Graham’s rather excellent rebuttal.

This month’s Harper’s Index contains the following nugget:
Year by which New Orleans is expected to be rebuilt, at the current pace: 2028
Their source is listed as the RAND Gulf States Policy Institute but I can’t find the specific citation.
Anyway. 2028. That prediction sounds about right to me. The girl will turn twenty that year. I [...]

Today as I took the girl to school, I spotted a pile of furniture on the curb, on Iberville just past Jeff Davis.
Flooded furniture. The flood was three years ago. And it struck me the houses here are like patrons at a party where poison punch has been passed. They stand for a while. [...]

It’s gone. So that only took three years.

Check out the photoset.

Here’s a draft I’m submitting to the Data News Weekly (The People’s Paper) for their upcoming Katrina anniversary issue. I think this is about twice as long as what they asked for when they approached me, so this will probably see some serious pruning by the time it hits print.

Three years ago, I became aware of a collaborative poster project which made use of a couple of photographs I’d published under a Creative Commons license.

According to the krazy genius who put it all together:

This mosaic was made from 2500 individual photographs of circles, photographed by 542 talented individuals.
The mosaic was constructed algorithmically by Jim [...]

I’ve been keeping a journal long before I started this blog. I started in 1977 when I was a mere whelp, and I’ve been writing on and off ever since.
Unfortunately all my journals got soaked when the floodwalls failed and New Orleans was flooded. Like an idiot, I’d left them in a box on the [...]

I wrote a letter to the owner. I talked to him too. I made a video about it. I wrote an editorial about it. I talked to my City Council rep about it. I went on the evening news about it.
But nothing seemed to happen.
I’m talking about the infamous grocery at 3126 Bienville, just around [...]

Once again Mr. Magic writes with news of life in my former hometown:

I thought you might enjoy these pictures of the recent flooding in btown.
It was crazy here last night. I’ve never seen this town as wet in my life,
Maybe it can give you some comfort Katrina, as nobody is safe from flooding, even [...]

We’ve been slowly re-occupying our full house. We’ve been living all cramped up in half of it for two and a half years. The other half, the lower floor, was under renovation for waaay longer than I’d expected. But the flood that caused our renovation also disrupted the lives of everyone we knew, including my [...]

Xy and I were getting lunch at Minnie’s Catfish Corner (highly recommended) when we heard the news about the hurricane in Myanmar. Apparently the geography there is very similar to Louisiana. The reports are at least 10,000 dead with thousands more missing. This reminded us of the worst predictions immediately after Hurricane Katrina and the [...]

I notice I haven’t been writing about issues in the recovery of New Orleans nearly as much lately. That’s because my primary mission here is to write about what’s going on in my life, and my life has been more preoccupied by personal issues lately.
Nevertheless, I try to keep tabs on what’s going down in [...]

Doesn’t it seem ridiculous that our collective mood should rise and fall based on what this guy says in his speech?

Tonight, the armies of compassion continue the march to a new day in the Gulf Coast. America honors the strength and resilience of the people of this region. We reaffirm our pledge to help them [...]

This story in the paper made me feel ever-so-slightly vindicated about our decision to renovate.

A new study of home prices around the New Orleans area shows that buyers rewarded sellers who gambled and rebuilt in devastated areas like Lakeview, eastern New Orleans and Chalmette. Renovated homes in those areas recovered much of their pre-storm value [...]