“Louisiana…Louisiana…
They’re trying to wash us away,
They’re trying to wash us away.”
  – Randy Newman, Louisiana 1927

First things first. The news out of New Orleans and Gulfport/Biloxi gets worse and worse. You can do something. Give money to the Red Cross or any other charity that’s going in there and helping people. Donate blood. Urge others to do the same.

The entire city of New Orleans (and environs) is devastated. They don’t even know the death toll yet because they still can’t get to the dead. Biloxi and Gulfport aren’t a lot better.

Probably we should wait until the people still in danger are rescued and the bodies are buried before we start pointing fingers and blaming people, but the sad truth is, neither the bodies nor the survivors seem to be going anywhere anytime soon.

Some folks have been saying that President Bush needs to get his ass down there instead of holding rah-rah photo ops. I disagree. He needs to stay out of the way and let the people who are actually useful and good for something help people out. If he’s not planning on personally helping get people out of there, he needs to go someplace else.

It should be noted, however, that there used to be a time when the National Guard would be in there helping rescue people and stave off further disaster. Unfortunately, most of them are too busy fighting for oil in Iraq.

And why weren’t the levees shored up more to keep the water out?

Yet after 2003, the flow of federal dollars toward SELA dropped to a trickle. The Corps never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security — coming at the same time as federal tax cuts — was the reason for the strain. At least nine articles in the Times-Picayune from 2004 and 2005 specifically cite the cost of Iraq as a reason for the lack of hurricane- and flood-control dollars.

(Source: Did New Orleans Catastrophe Have to Happen? ‘Times-Picayune’ Had Repeatedly Raised Federal Spending Issues)

Yes, it’s possible that the “fiscally responsible” Bush Administration may have had a hand in the destruction of New Orleans.

But one also has to wonder why New Orleans, a city that knew it was only a matter of time before this happened, seemed to have no evacuation plan in place other than “Everyone get in their own car and drive to somewhere else”. Those who had nowhere to go and no vehicle to take them there were stranded in front of Katrina. Why are school and city busses sitting underwater when they could have ferried people out of the city on Sunday?

Mind you, I’m not blaming a natural disaster on short-sighted politicians. I’m blaming the lack of an entire city to respond to a natural disaster — one that was only a question of when rather than if — on short-sighted politicians.

And yet, what’s got everyone up in arms the most? Looters. Never mind the observation that apparently black people “loot” but white people “find things”. The simple truth is, so what if people are taking TV sets out of stores? Who gives a crap? Jesus, is there no worse suffering going on right now so that we have to be outraged about that? It’s just stuff while people stand on their rooftops hoping to be rescued. Can you read this email, allegedly from a rescue worker, and tell me that we really need to be caring if someone lifts a DVD player from a washed-out Best Buy?

So shut up about the damn looters and go give some money or blood. Right now. And if you think you can’t afford to, go right now and drink a glass of tap water and realize you’re doing something that many people there can’t do because they have no clean water or their home has been destroyed or they’re dead.

Not only can you help victims of Hurricane Katrina, you should. The Red Cross can always use cash to help disaster areas, and right now their funds are getting well tapped. Help them continue to help others.

Because Or Else #3 comes out Wednesday!

The Robot loves Kevin Huizenga! If he stops dancing, he may want to take a look at these samples from Kevin’s upcoming book, Glenn Ganges.

(The Robot and I would like to thank one Mr. B. Kevin for introducing us to the work of Kevin Huizenga.)

For my birthday, my in-laws got me volumes one and two (thanks guys!) of Fantagraphics’ series of hardcovers, The Complete Peanuts and I spent a goodly portion of this rainy, lazy weekend diving through them. It really is fascinating to see the early beginnings of the most famous comic strip in the world. “Good Ol’ Charlie Brown! How I hate him!” is the first punchline, setting the tone for the next four decades.

What’s interesting is the mixture of the familiar and the strange. The artwork is different, though it’s obvious who’s who. The initial cast of characters (apart from Charlie Brown and Snoopy), instead of the familiar ones, are Violet, Shermy, and Patty (not “Peppermint” Patty), who I think most people would kindly regard as second-stringers later on. Schroeder soon shows up (as a toddler) and soon Lucy, Linus, and Pig-Pen (who appeared much earlier than I thought) follow.

There are other interesting oddities. Charlie Brown, while still the object of derision in the first strip, has a playful, mischievous streak to him in the early strips. It’s unclear from the outset that Snoopy (who is more dog than person) is actually his dog. Adults are sometimes heard, and in one famous sequence, are actually seen.

It’s also fun to see the characters gradually metamorphose into the ones we’re all familiar with. One of the first instances of character development comes with Schroeder discovering the toy piano and Beethoven. Lucy turns from an innocent toddler into the three-time winner of “Fuss-Budget of the Year”. Snoopy gradually becomes more “human” and by the end of volume two we’re already discovering the wonders of his doghouse (which he doesn’t sleep on top of yet.) Likewise, volume two ends before Linus is speaking aloud to others, but not before he gets his blanket. Baseball was almost non-existent in volume one, but is starting to play a bigger role in volume two.

You can also see Schulz’s style develop. The strip moves from a collection of disjointed gags to running themes and complete characters. Schulz is always in total control of the art, so that’s not surprising, but seeing the craft go into the characters and their development is really amazing.

Plus the strips are just plain funny. Sure, there are some that aren’t so good, but reading them all in a row like this smooths through rough patches and gives one an appreciation for the pacing and the tone. There’s a reason everyone knows Peanuts.

And finally, it’s fun to hit each “first” as it comes up. First appearances by characters. The first football gag. Snoopy’s first thought balloon. First uses of certain phrases.

I heartily recommend this series to anyone interested in comics and newspaper strips. This is a master of the form creating a legendary strip. The books are gorgeous, inexpensive, and packed with all kinds of bonus material, but it’s the strips themselves that shine through. I don’t know if I’ll need to get all the books in this series when they come out, but I know these early ones are fascinating and well worth getting.

(As a bonus for straight-up comics fans, this is interesting. Several times comic books are mentioned, though they’re almost always crime or war comics. This is the early 50s, and superheroes are never found. The other types of comics mentioned are when Lucy trades Charlie Brown some of hers and they turn out to be funny-animal books.)

There’s a reason that the stereotype of geeks includes having them quote Monty Python incessantly. It’s because they do. And I used to be able to quote with the best of them.

Geeks have an innate ability to find humor in unusual, absurdist places — and then run that humor into the frickin’ ground. No slaves to subtlety are they, if something is funny once, then you can easily make it a thousand times more funny by…well, you know.

And it doesn’t just have to be reciting comedy sketches. No sir. Surely there can be a t-shirt. Maybe several t-shirts. A bumper sticker? Wallpaper for your computer? How about a stuffed animal? The possible ways to turn humor into tedium are limited only by your imagination!

The latest target of the de-humor-fication process involves the Flying Spaghetti Monster. If you visit that link and stop about a tenth of the way down you’ll see how it started. It began as a satirical letter to the Kansas School Board arguing that to teach “Intelligent Design” as an “alternative theory” opened the door up for several other alternative theories, including one in which a Flying Spaghetti Monster created the universe. Funny, with a good (if a little flawed) point.

A lot of people, including myself, found this amusing, and posted or passed along the link. And then a brave band of geeks looked at it and said, “This is funny, sure, but certainly there must be a way to make it less so!” And thus was born the other 9/10 of the page.

The “religion,” now dubbed “Pastafarianism” (ho HO!) is now all over the internet. The linkblog BoingBoing, usually trying to play hipper-than-thou, has been pimping any and all FSM-related sites. The good news is, like the “All Your Base” phenomenon, at any moment the Mainstream Media might take notice and there will be a frenzy of new interest followed by the fad burning itself out. And the point of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, the absurdity of declaring anything unknown as “God”, will be lost amid a bunch of FSM Photoshops and gee-gaws.

Perhaps Pastafarianism will live on like the Church of the Sub-Genius, amusing the hell out of those into it at the expense of everyone else. And its followers can convince themselves that, rather than running a joke past the point of utter tedium, the people who wish they’d shut up about it “just don’t get it” or “have no sense of humor.” The truth of the matter is, no joke is funny when told ad nauseum by a chorus of thousands. And there’s certainly no joke funny enough to withstand the legions of geeks determined to show the world how funny they think it is.

(I bet I’m the very first person to come up with that!)

Back in the 70s and early 80s when I was growing up in New Orleans, the weatherman whom everyone respected was Nash Roberts. No matter what newscast you regularly watched, when a hurricane cast its eye on the city, everyone turned to Nash. In fact, even after Nash retired, Eyewitness News (featuring Garland Robinette and Angela Hill) would bring back Nash just for hurricanes. Bob Breck could get you through a thunderstorm or a heat wave, but when the hurricanes came, Nash was the man.

I recall quite a few times we’d leave early in the morning, before the sun came up, to head up to our relatives in Vidalia to flee an approaching storm. Hurricanes Betsy and Camille were still very much in the public mind and nobody wanted to be around if one of those hit again.

Many people who don’t live in the South don’t seem to really understand hurricanes. Either they think, “What’s the big deal? It’s just a nasty thunderstorm!” or they think “Oh my god it’s right on top of you, get out! Get out for God’s sake!” The reality is, when hurricanes are a regular part of your life, you respect them. You don’t go running at the first sign of one, but nor do you screw around if things start looking bad. For every hurricane that had us charging up Highway 61 there were several we just stared down until they went to Gulfport or Galveston, or rode through as they battered but didn’t break New Orleans. New Orleans is as prepared for such storms as a city in a basin below sea level, surrounded by water, can be.

Katrina’s one we would have run from. It’s already a killer, and is still a mean one. The few people I know in New Orleans these days are now with relatives in Baton Rouge and the mayor has ordered everyone out (except for many weather reporters who seem to think that nobody will believe there’s really a hurricane going on unless the camera shows them getting buffeted with rain and wind.) People who can’t afford or have no means to leave are taking shelter, 30,000 of them in the Superdome, which has lost its main power and now has no air conditioning. They were told to bring three days’ worth of food.

It looks like Katrina has turned a bit to the east, which may give New Orleans some breathing room, but of course isn’t so hot for Biloxi.

The thing is, New Orleans knows it’s only a matter of time. Maybe it won’t be Katrina, but one day some storm is going to break those levees surrounding the city. But New Orleans has been flooded before. It’s been burned, too, and it’s always sinking. It’s a terrible place for a city, but it gets by.

People who know me know that I don’t miss New Orleans. Apart from landing at the airport, I haven’t set foot in the city in maybe ten years and don’t care if I never do again. I grew up there, but I don’t have any particular affinity for it. Still, I don’t want to see it scrubbed from the Earth. I wish the people there (and elsewhere in the path of Katrina) the best of luck.

You know you’re listening to an 80s tune when you’ve got at least one (usually more) of the following:

• one-fingered keyboard melodies
• a saxophone solo
• that harmonica-sounding synth sound
• referee whistles
• and, of course, talking parts

80s music was full of talking parts. Part of this was people trying to incorporate rap into pop music (”Chaka Khan, let me rock you, let me rock you Chaka Khan”) but not all of it. Some of the greatest talking parts ever are in 80s tunes. Some of my favorites:

“Oh, Sheila” (Ready for the World): “Like I always say, what’s good for the goose is always good for the gander. Hello sailor!”

“Rock Me Amadeus” (Falco): “1986: Austrian rock star Falco records ROCK ME AMADEUS!”

“Caribbean Queen” (Billy Ocean): “She’s simply…awesome”

and my personal favorite, which just came on the mp3 player and inspired this posting, Madonna, saying simply, “Crazy for you.”

Oh there are plenty more. What are your favorites?

If a crappy comics store goes out of business, the owner dies immediately from starvation.