Overwhelming

There have been so many things this week that have struck me that I have not written anything.
I am prone to write about random items of interest like the NYT article on carving Princess Kay of the Milky Way in a 90 pound block of butter. But mainly my week has been focused on thinking about New Orleans and the devastating events of Hurricane Katrina. Butter sculpture vs. heartbreaking loss, which should I talk about? The deprivation in NOLA, a city that I love and visited just last December, has put into sharp contrast the luxuries that we live with everyday. Let's just take the butter sculpture. What makes this possible that they don't have in New Orleans right now:

• Electricity
• Food
• Buildings

And yet in the same country we are going about wasting hundreds of pounds of a luxury food item for amusement. Gotta love America.

At the same time I have been keenly interested in how technology is being used in this disaster. There is already a listing for Katarina in Wikipedia, Craig's list is turning into an amazing resource for people offering and looking for emergency housing (providing you can get computer access), and places like Google Earth Community and Google Earth Hacks are just two of the many places offering images of the damage.

I'll close out with a message from my friend from NOLA. I wish everyone the best.

STILL ALIVE IN 2005!!

Thanks so much for your thoughts and concerns. In
short, we raced the hurricane and made it out of New
Orleans before impact.

We’re lucky to be alive. It took us 26 hours of
straight driving and we eventually ended up in Austin
Texas, where we’ll stay for at least a week.

It appears as if flooding of roughly six feet affected
areas within a seven block radius of our apartment and
we don’t know if our building is still there, or if
the roof is still intact. Everything may be lost. We
probably won’t know for at least 2-3 weeks. We might
not be able to get back into the city for a couple of
months – who knows!

So, not sure what then plan is going to be. We may
head down to the boarder of Mexico and set up a tent
on the beach or we may go back in Wisconsin for a
month. All depends on incoming information.

Thanks so much for your thoughts. I’ll send out
another email when I know more info.