Thursday, April 22, 2010

Happy B'Earth Day John Muir!
~El Capitan~
This beautiful black and white photograph is hand made from Ansel Adams' original negative, and available exclusively from the family-owned Ansel Adams Gallery.
~Please also see: Sierra Nevada: The John Muir Trail
~And, for the gender-challenged who wonder about the stance of our Earth Mother in these harrowing times, we offer Urban Dictionary's Word of the Day: Buy-Curious

~Tiger Pass, just south of Venice, 1995
~Nyman characterizes Pass a Loutre in the 80s as “verdant tunnels of black willow.” When I first went to the coastal wetlands in 1995 I found stands of black willow at Tiger Pass, assuming I located myself at the correct place on the USGS maps I always carry with me. When I went back ten years later I found no willow south of Venice, again assuming I located myself in the correct place on the USGS map. ~Quinta Scott, wetlands photographer and author of the wonderful new, must-have, book The Mississippi: A Visual Biography.

Dr. Ian Malcolm: God help us; we're in the hands of engineers.
Dr. Ian Malcolm: I'll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you're using here: it didn't require any discipline to attain it. You read what others had done and you took the next step. You didn't earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don't take any responsibility... for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could and before you even knew what you had you patented it and packaged it and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now...
[pounds table with fists] you're selling it,
[pounds table again] you want to sell it!

StoryCorps New Orleans debuts with tale of Memorial Medical Center nurses in aftermath of Katrina (the Man-made Flood)
~Editilla threads the needle~ We are trying to figure out if Bruce Nolan, one of the baddest and last of the Katrina Shorthand Journalists is smearing his meme on the Witness Accounts of this Man Made Disaster: "On the Saturday after Hurricane Katrina destroyed her home, her job and her community, Pam Mathews stood in line in an Old Navy store in Baton Rouge, owning not even the clothes on her back."
He links to the Story Corps page, yet of those on that page with their Stories, you will find that they are well aware that it was Not Katrina which devastated their city, killed friends and family.
And in the actual accounts in the article, Nurse Mathews makes a vibrant distinction between the storm and the levee failures.
Nolan is one of the last of the wiley'waskles of bastards when it comes to Katrina Shorthand blaming the Flood on the Hurricane. So we are wondering if the Black Tag of Misnomer applies here, as it is one thing to carry the Lie for the Corps of Engineers, but another sin altogether to put words into the mouths of those who suffered at the hands of the Corps Bad Engineering. For many of these Witnesses, they did not know that the levees had failed because of Bad Corrupt Engineering by the Corps. For so many it was Katrina Writ Large. But the Truth is so much more important.

~Since we were asked, this song is for my friend who worked at Charity during the Flood, and told me she thought of it often as things just got worse and worse.

Man-made reefs to protect Grand Isle from erosion
~Mark Schleifstein


New Orleans before and after Hurricanes Katrina/Rita:
A Quasi-Experiment of the Association between Soil Lead and Children’s Blood Lead


Green groups press council members for promises
~Brentin Mock, The Lens


Big Easy to restore hurricane-damaged green space
~Michael Keating


Coastal restoration priorities urged~Amy Wold

Nutria burrowing in area levees
~Katherine Schmidt

Quote of the Day
"To some in NFL circles, the former Florida State star's decision to put football on hold for a year while studying at one of the world's foremost academic institutions — not to mention his plans to become a neurosurgeon — indicates a lack of commitment to the game..."

~Courtesy of the Big Molluski
Let’s talk multi peril insurance and NFIP reauthorization as Slabbed updates the Washington front

NAHB addresses NFIP
~While requiring mandatory flood insurance purchase is one option (NFIP), another option may be to require that structures meet federal residential design, construction and modification requirements. NAHB is strongly opposed to expanding such requirements to new classes of structures, including those found behind flood protection structures and those affected by any programmatic change to the SFHA (Special Flood Hazard Area).
These requirements would substantially increase the cost of new home construction and severely impact housing affordability. For example, on the Gulf Coast, elevating new structures could add $30,000 to the cost of the homes, depending on the estimate source and size of the home.

NAHB has conducted research that shows that a $5,000 increase in housing price in New Orleans would eliminate 6,089 households from the housing market. It is easy to see the tremendous impact that such reforms would have not only on nation's home builders, but on the nation's home buyers. NAHB urges Congress to soften the impact of any programmatic changes to the NFIP by ensuring that construction requirements remain tied to the 1% standard.

Court throws out $35 million settlement of a class action against Louisiana Citizens Property Insurance

Blogging Treme, the Comic Book
~Editilla Hotellas~ We apparently Do Not Fit In with this Club of Nola Bloggers as extra'd in the TV Show Treme, so they don't post our comments on their Treme Blog when we think they get a little Poodle Cheese with their Baseball Card trading on what constitutes the Story of New Orleans post-Flood.
Sinn Mfkn Féin, Gleichschaltung Bitches.
This is what they think is so campy for the next plot twist:
~A suicide note in the pocket of a man who jumped off the Omni Royal Orleans Hotel late Tuesday led police to the grisly scene of his girlfriends murder, where they found her charred head in a pot on the stove, her legs and feet baked in the oven and the rest of her dismembered body in trash bag in the refrigerator, according to police and the couples landlord.
The man, Zackery Bowen, a tall man in his mid 20s with long blond hair, claimed in the note to have killed his girlfriend, Adrian Addie Hall, on Oct. 5, according to police. Hall was also in her mid 20s. In the five-page note, Bowen claimed he strangled Hall in the bathtub, then dismembered her body before taking it in pieces to the kitchen, police said. An autopsy conducted today shows that Hall was in fact manually strangled, police said. It also appears that Halls body was cut up after she died, police said. He appeared to clean up the bathroom a lot after he did it, one officer said. Police found the victims head burned beyond recognition in a pot on top of the stove, and her legs and feet in the same condition in pans inside the oven, police said.
But they blog it as just another episode of Leave It To Cleaver.
I sure hope David Simon is not so filled with Bourgeois Naivete.
I think the Adrastos at Creme' calls it "Cattitude".
How about Krewe d'tude, Assitude, Rattitude, Flatulentude?

Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival Poetry Writing

The lefty history of New Orleans' iconic po' boy~Francis Lam
~Hat Tweet~pbodenheimer (via @curechef)

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