thank God for small things

Years ago I heard the then-mayor of Jacksonville tell a group of Methodist men that he believed God answers small prayers - like, for example, an empty parking space in front of the courthouse when you are about to be late for a hearing. I've never bought that, because God usually acts like the Cosmic Clockmaker. . .wind it up, turn it loose, sit back, and see what happens. But, tonight, I am thinking of a few things to be grateful for. Whether God had anything to do with it remains to be seen. In no particular order:

* A lawsuit against my city that I am defending has been dismissed by a federal judge. The plaintiff gets another chance, but for the moment, the pressure between my eyes has eased considerably.

* Representative Tom DeLay (R) has been indicted. He is accused of conspiring to violate a Texas ban on the use of corporate money by state political candidates, by funneling thousands in corporate contributions through the Republican National Committee. He is innocent, he says, of course. The prosecutor is described as a partisan (read: Democratic) fanatic, which the prosecutor denies, of course. I'm always happy to see pompous, self-righteous fat cats do the "perp walk."

* My fantasy football team, which I did not actually select, is 3 - 0 and leading the league, due to no talent or skill on my part, absolutely none.

* The Bucs are 3- 0 due to the talent and skill of several rookies and second year players.

* The Devil Rays have lately discovered they are a major league baseball team. Since the All Star break, they are winning more than losing. News of their breaking .500 for half a season actually brought tears to the eyes of Lou Piniella, who unfortunately will be either fishing or managing a better team next year.

* The Seminoles are 3 - 0 (2 - 0 in the ACC).

* The Gators, Seminoles, and Hurricanes are ranked 5, 6, and 9 in the AP Top Ten.

* The old Romans were correct: If the citizens are restive, distract them with sports. Federal litigation and the indictment of politicians are "sports."

* I've found a pair of earbuds for my iPod that fit my ears. Jeez, what a difference in sound quality. Anybody want the earbuds that came with my iPod, which are designed for the ears of a mule?

* We got some rain today. Tough question: If God gets credit for rain, which he usually does, who gets credit for Hurricanes Katrina and Rita?

cartoonists get it, part 2

I'm becoming a big, big fan of Steve Kelley of the New Orleans Times-Picayune:

look, Ma, I'm flying!

I've learned a new way to view the world, right here on my home computer.

Google Earth.

At first, it looks like one of those screen savers with an Earth photo. Zoom in, and it begins to look like MapQuest using satellite photos. Then you discover "tilt," and suddenly you are flying. Land features rise up in 3-D. So do buildings in major cities to a limited extent, not as dramatically as hills and valleys.

I found our house in Clearwater and saw a large oak tree that became history about 18 months ago, dating the picture. I typed in the first address I had to memorize as a five-year-old in Louisville and it took me to the right block. I think the house with the brown roof was where we lived. Somebody's added a detached garage. Next, I tried various family addresses. The 3-D effect is very good in Boston and San Francisco.

But, I had to fly. I flew up and down Zion Canyon, where I once spent a summer pumping gas, and the Grand Canyon, which I've seen from the north rim. I found the town in Germany where I was stationed for two years. The resolution is too low to make out buildings but the hills and valleys are wonderful. Naturally I had to fly over the Alps and on to Venice, back through France, and up to Scotland.

I'm going to be flying in my dreams tonight.

doomed to repeat it

You've heard what happens to people who pay no attention to history.

CNN's web site has a list of the ten deadliest hurricanes in U.S. history. Two of them hit Louisiana. The "Grand Isle Hurricane" of 1909 had a death toll of "at least" 350. It came ashore between Baton Rouge and New Orleans with a 15-foot storm surge that inundated much of southern Louisiana. Six years later, another storm caused Lake Pontchartrain to overflow its banks, inflicting a death toll of 275 people. CNN's comment includes this observation, obviously written before Katrina: "That scenario is one that hurricane experts don't like to ponder because if the city, surrounded on three sides by water, is hit by a major hurricane, the storm surge might inundate the city."

Number one and number ten on the list were hurricanes that hit Galveston, in 1900 and 1915. Galveston had constructed a seawall after the devastation of the 1900 hurricane. Still, 275 people died when the 1915 storm hit.

All four of these hurricanes were Category 4. Katrina was a Category 4 storm. Rita, a Category 4 storm, is headed for Texas.

Why do we not take these things seriously during normal weather? Why don't we remind ourselves that it wasn't raining when Noah built the Ark?

Hurricane season ain't over yet

Just when I was hoping this year's season might give Florida a break we have Rita, a tropical storm that's likely to inflict damage upon Cuba and the Conch Republic, a/k/a the Florida Keys, in the next couple of days. They don't need this. The rest of Florida could use some rain in the worst way and this is the worst way. In September we've had something like 0.000001 inches of rain, way below normal. My front lawn looks like the underside of my car. You can find where Rita is by doing a Google search for any weather site that keeps up with tropical weather. Monroe County, Florida, has a good one - and they need one. Their hold on life is precarious enough without a storm taking out the Seven Mile Bridge between the mainland and the Conch Republic. In fact, as we speak, they have issued a mandatory evacuation for everybody below the Seven Mile Bridge and our governor, Jeb Bush (smarter than his brother but no less a political whore) has already declared a state of emergency so they can saddle up and ride when needed. I'm tired of it already. I'm going to go to bed and set my alarm clock for November.

TV news gets it, accidentally

A picture is worth a thousand words:

putting the "D" back in D-Rays

From the perspective of the morning after, our Devil Rays look better than they did at bedtime last night. Maybe it was the shrieking girls that threw me off, but I do have to give the Rays' defense a lot more credit than I felt they deserved last night. The Yankees left 9 runners stranded on base. That's the good news. Bad news: The Yankees scored all of their runs when they had two out. As the old saying goes, a good offense will beat a good defense. The Rays' offense didn't give up, though. Every time the Yankees scored, the Rays came back and tied, right up to the end when they finally ran out of gas.

It is time to add the obligatory, "This is a young team. They should look great next year." May we all live so long.

baseball, ho-hum

I haven't written much about baseball this summer. The Yankees are in town, so we went to see if the Devil Rays could exact revenge for being pounded 17 to 3 last night. Alas, no. A score of 6 to 5 sounds like it should have been an exciting game, and I suppose it was mildly exciting for Yankees fans, but it was more like watching two wrestlers trying to get a grip on each other. I don't mean Saturday Night Rasslers. I mean real wrestling, Greco-Roman or collegiate style. Real wrestlers can look immobile but every muscle is straining for some advantage and a three-minute round feels like forever. Tonight, nine innings felt like forever.

The game featured no home runs and several attempted but unsuccessful double plays. The double play is the prettiest athletic move in any sport -- when it works. The Devil Rays shortstop, Julio Lugo, committed two errors and brought the game to a fitting conclusion when he was thrown out at second base in the bottom of the ninth with Carl Crawford at the plate. Was he stealing, or was he just told to run with two out and got caught? I hope some fool of a manager flashed a steal or a hit-run signal because if Julio thought that up on his own, he's history or ought to be. The game highlights consisted of a few doubles and a Carl Crawford triple earlier in the game. Back to my wrestling analogy, it was a few take-downs and a few escapes but no pin. They just ran out of time, thankfully.

I can't decide if the Rays deserve praise for keeping the game so close or if the Yankees really are that bad this year. The Yankees pitcher, a Korean with a fan club sitting behind us, kept a tight lid on Rays batters. By the time he'd thrown 47 pitches our guy had thrown 85 and should have come out. The Rays went two for three in their last trip to New York and the Yankees are returning the favor here at home, with the possibility of going three for three.

Here's an interesting side note: For the entire game we had two pubescent girls screaming their heads off three rows behind us. I'm glad to see girls so excited about baseball but their voices didn't wear out until the ninth inning. All night long it was, "Go Yankees, go, WHOOOOOOOOOOOO." "Go, Matsui, you can do it, WHOOOOOOOOOOOO." I can't spell that whoop at the end the way it came out of their throats but it was primal and it was tiresome, another argument for staying home and watching the game on TV. But, the Red Sox will be in town next week. That should be more interesting, or at least the possibility of bench-clearing brawls should be greater, and duty will call us back to one more live game before the season wears down.

cartoonists get it

From the New Orleans Times-Picayune, a Steve Kelly cartoon:

you pay 'em for what they know

Once again, I've had an $85 lesson in plumbing. . . for fifteen minutes of the plumber's time spent wrapping a "ratty looking piece of string" (my wife's description) around the threads of the pipe I was trying to install, then adding some joint compound to make a leakproof connection. Part of that time was spent writing out the bill.

I have a great idea for a book. All of us home handy-man types should get together and compare notes about similar lessons learned from plumbers. We could charge what it's cost us to learn those secrets - about $85 per page should do it. Would they get after us for giving away trade secrets? Do the plumbers have carefully guarded secrets like the Masons? Was there a plumbers guild back when the Masons were getting organized?

My favorite lesson so far is how to unclog a stopped-up drain after somebody (not to mention any names) ran too many potato peelings through the garbage disposer. I couldn't reach the clog with the "snake" so I called a plumber. His solution: Use MY ladder to get up on the roof so he could run MY garden hose down the vent pipe that comes up through the roof, then have ME turn MY water on so he could jam MY garden hose up and down, breaking up the potato peelings. That was cheaper than 85 bucks but this was years ago when everything was relatively cheap.

This time, at least the plumber had to provide his own string. (I haven't looked to see if he included the cost of string in the bill.) I am not sure whether he used his own joint compound or the tube I had sitting out on the bathroom counter. But at least the danged thing is installed, operational, and leak-free.

chess nuts

I started a simple plumbing project the other day. That's a contradiction in terms; plumbing projects are never simple and this one has me stumped. It is good that the family is far way from me when I attempt a plumbing job because the air turns blue and my negative aura can bleach hair at fifty feet. This simple job is a replacement of a shower head. That entails replacing a perfectly good pipe because this shower head needs a new, longer pipe with a 90-degree bend at the end. Problem: The threads inside the connection at the end of the water supply pipe behind the wall look like they have been beaten with a wrench, and I cannot get a watertight connection. Solution: Admit defeat and call a plumber. I am hoping that he (do you know a female plumber?) knows some plumbing magic that does not require cutting a hole in the wall for access because that will be a helluva mess to repair.

For escape, I've started playing chess lately. We have a chess club that meets on Friday nights, and today they are sponsoring an all-day tournament. Last night I was this close to signing up, but I'm not ready for tournament play yet. The chess club regulars can beat me with their eyes closed. Let me tell you that chess club regulars are the geekiest geeks you will meet anywhere, in a whole different league than computer geeks. Once you accept that, they are not a bad lot. Of the ones who talk, some have a sense of humor. They are obnoxious in a passive sense but I can deal with that.

So I stayed home from the tournament, made a few more attempts at the shower head, and have concluded that I should have gone to the tournament instead. Better to lose to a better chess player than lose to a piece of brass that hides behind a bathroom wall.

yes, a helluva job

A week ago yesterday, George W. Bush praised FEMA chief Michael Brown, saying "you've done a helluva job, Brownie." Today, Brownie was relieved of command of the hurricane relief effort and shipped back to Washington to "return to his duties as overall FEMA chief."

This raises a few questions.

If George W. Bush cannot tell a helluva good job from a job that deserves sacking, can we trust his judgment on other issues?

If George W. Bush meant to say "a helluva bad job," why did it take a week to sack Brownie? Is there anything else he's said lately (i.e. since his election) that sounds like one thing but means the opposite?

What are the "overall duties" of the FEMA chief, if not to supervise relief efforts following the single most devastating disaster since the Chicago Fire and the San Francisco Earthquake?

Inquiring minds want to know.

fall in Florida

Fall isn't here yet, not by a long shot, but summer is beginning to show some sign of releasing its tight, sweaty grasp. There is a slight (very slight) coolness in the mornings. The temperature has dropped a couple of degrees and the humidity is down a few percentage points. It doesn't feel like Hell's entry chamber but more like Hell's front porch, with a breeze coming off the bay. This year the breeze smells like the aftermath of Red Tide.

In a few weeks I will tell my wife that there is a touch of fall in the air which only us long-time Floridians can detect because it's so subtle. She, a Michigander, will tell me to shut up. This has become an annual ritual.

I know better, because we lived in Louisville when I was a kid and I associated the name "September" with back-to-school, the smell of burning leaves in the air, and something called "Autumn." In our county, school started last month, nobody burns leaves in their back yards, and we have to drive north to find autumn foliage. Worse, we don't see cool air until Halloween, sometimes later. All we are feeling right now is the reminder that fall will be here in a month or two.

bureaucratic bungling has become criminal malfeasance

We've been hearing these stories all week. A manufacterer of bottled water has hundreds of thousand of bottles of water ready to ship to the disaster zone but is told no, send money instead. Money? To buy water, I suppose. A military unit has ice and water ready to ship but can't get clearance from FEMA.

Tonight, CNN's web site is carrying this AP story, from Baton Rouge, which points blame at Louisiana state officials:

Volunteer physicians are pouring in to care for the sick, but red tape is keeping hundreds of others from caring for Hurricane Katrina survivors while health problems rise. Among the doctors stymied from helping out are 100 surgeons and paramedics in a state-of-the-art mobile hospital, developed with millions of tax dollars for just such emergencies, marooned in rural Mississippi.

A surgeon, Dr. Preston "Chip" Rich of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said, "We have tried so hard to do the right thing. It took us 30 hours to get here," he said. That government officials can't straighten out the mess and get them assigned to a relief effort now that they're just a few miles away "is just mind-boggling," he said.

While the doctors wait, the first signs of disease began to emerge Saturday: A Mississippi shelter was closed after 20 residents got sick with dysentery, probably from drinking contaminated water. Many other storm survivors were being treated in the Houston Astrodome and other shelters for an assortment of problems, including chronic health conditions left untreated because people had lost or used up their medicine.

The North Carolina mobile hospital stranded in Mississippi was developed through the Office of Homeland Security after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. With capacity for 113 beds, it is designed to handle disasters and mass casualties. It travels in a convoy that includes two 53-foot trailers, which as of Sunday afternoon was parked on a gravel lot 70 miles north of New Orleans because Louisiana officials for several days would not let them deploy to the flooded city, Rich said. Yet plans to use the facility and its 100 health professionals were hatched days before Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, doctors in the caravan said.

Dr. Jeffrey Guy, a trauma surgeon at Vanderbilt University who has been in contact with the mobile hospital doctors, told The Associated Press in a telephone interview, "There are entire hospitals that are contacting me, saying, 'We need to take on patients," ' but they can't get through the bureaucracy.

My prediction: Before the end of this calendar year, we will see class action lawsuits, criminal indictments, or both.

a modest suggestion

I can go for weeks without blogging, but the destruction of New Orleans and other coastal communities has really grabbed my attention, for a variety of reasons. I think I've finally discovered the real purpose of a blog - it is a place to vent, like a letter to the editor, but it won't be used the following day to wrap old fish and coffee grounds.

New Orleans has grabbed my attention because we went there for our honeymoon. I see U.S. Highway 90 torn up and I think, that's the road we took from Tallahassee. I think of the French Quarter and I think of Preservation Hall, where we saw old jazz musicians whose careers started back in the 1930's (this was 1972). I hope the current crop of jazz musicians were able to save their musical instruments as well as their lives. The fortunes lost in the flood included ancient instruments and old sheet music and old photos of the jazz greats in their prime. Good news: Fats Domino has turned up alive and well, after being unaccounted for.

Now, my modest suggestion: Is there anybody who doesn't like Dixieland jazz music? You can be down, your car's broken, your dog's run away, your mortgage and your girlfriend are overdue. . .but five minutes of Dixieland will have you tapping your feet and realizing the sun will rise tomorrow like it always does and life will go on. So -- what if everybody went to the music store and bought up all the Dixieland jazz recordings? The musicians should get a royalty. The record stores will make money. Here's the challenge to the industry: Wouldn't it be great if the music industry, inspired by the sudden sales of Dixieland jazz, pumped money into the recovery efforts to help bring New Orleans back on its feet? Yes, it would be great. Why should that not happen?

where IS the Cavalry?

I took a break to watch CNN a few minutes ago, which is always bad for your mental health. They were interviewing a sheriff in Virginia who put an emergency response team of 22 deputies on the road, with all the gear they needed to be self-sufficient, and he spent hours on the phone trying to get authorization. He was finally told by some dimwit at the Louisiana state police that they weren't asking for help, so he called his deputies back (they were three hours down the road).

The bureaucratic mind is an awful thing to behold.

(a) After saddling up to ride, why spend hours trying to get "authorization?" He didn't say so, but I'll guess he was worrying about his budget and whether he would get reimbursed (or be required to pay the expenses out of his own pocket), and who would cover the liability for any damages they might cause, or injuries to his deputies, or loss of property. Under these circumstances, this is like a fire truck barred from a fire by a picket fence. When that happens, the picket fence becomes history.

(b) Who in Louisiana with an IQ above room temperature would dare tell a sheriff from out of state to keep his troops at home? I hope that imbecile has already lost his job.

WHERE is the Cavalry?

From this morning's edition of the Times-Picayune:

Jefferson Parish President Aaron Broussard called the lack of federal response "a disgrace."

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin was equally blunt. Federal and state officials need to stop having "goddamn press conferences" and get the relief effort rolling, he said in a late-afternoon radio interview, an angry flare-up out of character for the popular, generally easy-going former cable TV executive.

And from CNN's web site:

Even Republicans were criticizing Bush and his administration for the sluggish relief effort. "I think it puts into question all of the Homeland Security and Northern Command planning for the last four years, because if we can't respond faster than this to an event we saw coming across the Gulf for days, then why do we think we're prepared to respond to a nuclear or biological attack?" said former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

spammers should be dragged out and shot

I apologize to my four or five regular readers of this blog, but I had to activate "word verification" for anyone leaving a comment. That's the thing that shows you a picture of a word and you, a real human being and not a spam-spewing computer, have to type it in. I did this because my last posting got tagged with comments from three spammers, all anonymous.

WHERE IS THE CAVALRY?

In the immortal words of Kate Hale, the Dade County emergency management director,

"WHERE IS THE CAVALRY?"

That was in 1992, after Hurricane Andrew wiped out the City of Homestead and nearly obliterated southern Dade County. What have the feds learned since then?

It has been three days since Katrina made landfall on New Orleans, Biloxi, Gulfport and other coastal communities. As I type this there are thousands of people stranded where they can't get out. People are dying by the minute. The hospitals are running out of supplies.

The government has helicopters, boats, amphibious craft, big trucks, and armored personnel carriers which can be used to bring food, water, and medical supplies and to carry people out. Where are they?

The impetus to take immediate action could have come from our Commander in Chief. The poor guy had to cut his month-long vacation short two days so he could fly over the disaster area on his way back to the White House. Meanwhile, whole dragoons of bureaucrats seem to be waiting for somebody to give them a request for help (the official excuse for non-action after Andrew), or orders, or authorization, or something.

Congress, which came back to town on a weekend to enact legislation for Terri Schiavo, might come back in a day or two to make a decision about Katrina. Fortunately for them, it is not necessary for all members of Congress to interrupt their vacations to return to Washington for this. They can approve the appropriation by a simple voice vote. The absentees are probably writing the statements they will insert in the Congressonal Records whenever they go back to work. You and I should have such jobs.

p.s.: After initially posting this, I watched CNN's reporting of successful rescues by emergency response teams from California. Imagine that: Rescue guys could bring boats and other gear from California and go into action faster than the federales. But I will give credit to one heroic group of federal officers - - the Coast Guard. The USCG is the most under-rated military branch we have. They have been heroic during and after Katrina, pulling people to safety.