Rita and Houston
The Houston Chronicle has a couple of blogs up pertaining to Rita: Hurricane Rita and Stormwatchers. The first is general info, the second is a group blog of people who are staying behind in the city.
Archive of entries posted on September 2005
Befuddled
So who watched “Lost” and now has even more questions than before the season started? (raises hand)
Personal library
Ok, book lovers. This may be the bestest thing yet on the internets. Go over to Library Thing and sign up. You can catalog your first 200 books free and pay $10 for a lifetime (!!) membership to add more than that. Forget those old Excel spreadsheets or Filemaker databases; this is the way to …
I got your priorities right here
Osama who? From a WaPo story: “Congress began funding the obscenity initiative in fiscal 2005 and specified that the FBI must devote 10 agents to adult pornography.” Public corruption is fourth on the FBI’s priority list. Hmm. Then I suppose it’s a good thing they managed to arrest the top procurement guy at GSA before …
God help us
FEMA still can’t perform its principal function on the ground, but by golly it’s gonna get its PR act together: FEMA, realizing the need to shore up its public image, has issued a call for help on the spin front. Butch Kinerney of the FEMA headquarters public affairs office has asked flacks at agencies around …
Locust posture
Is nothing sacred? Yoga positions are being patented as intellectual property. How weird is that? Indian gurus are angry, and who can blame them? “Yoga piracy is becoming very common and we are moving to do something about it,” says Vinod Gupta, the head of a recently established Indian government taskforce on traditional knowledge and …
Readiness
Since we have four storms headed in our direction, it seemed like a good time to update/consolidate the in-home survival kit. In one box I now have a single-burner propane stove with 3 cartridges a saucepan a skillet candles flashlights and batteries battery-powered radio a first-aid kit of sorts a can opener and church key …
Burke & Hare, call Sen. Sessions
This is mind-boggling. In an attempt to resurrect the cause of estate tax repeal, Senator Sessions of Alabama is looking for wealthy dead Katrina victims. Federal troops aren’t the only ones looking for bodies on the Gulf Coast. On Sept. 9, Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions called his old law professor Harold Apolinsky, co-author of Sessions’ …
Crisis of confidence
Drawn by Alex Gregory for the New Yorker. Thanks to Kuff.
And so it starts
Damn environmentalists get in the way of bidness, so let’s eliminate the rules when reconstructing New Orleans. The Environmental Protection Agency could suspend any law governing air, water or land in responding to Hurricane Katrina under a measure introduced Thursday by the chairman of the Senate environment committee. [snip] Mr. Holbrook added, “As Administrator Johnson …