• McSweeney’s: “Unlikely Disasters”

Example: “All eyeballs turn to wood”

Proof that I’m not alone on this wavelength.

This wavelength of awesome.

I just had to share.

• A love letter to cookies — The Sneeze: “Tough Cookies”
• Nothing like teasing big-box electronic stores — Consumerist: “Best Buy Pranked By Blue Shirt Whorde”
• The Clash! Live! — Bedazzled!: “The Clash On Fridays” (via Boing Boing)
• Do I have to admit that I once won a talent show by lip-synching Corey Hart’s “Sunglasses At Night”? — Slate: “The neglected art of lip-syncing”
• Next up! Warn homeowners about arson by leaving charcoal briquettes throughout their home! –Coolz0r: “PickPocket Guerrilla” (via Consumerist)
• Shakespeare lovers rejoice! School-matinee-attendees look forward to unprecedented amounts of sleep! — BBC News: “Ambitious Bard festival under way”
• I have yet to win this game — rrrrthats5rs.com: “Don’t Shoot the Puppy” (via Boing Boing)

Here are a LOT of posts relating to Katrina. Some are very angry. Make your own judgements.

This isn’t an attempt at a canonical list of Katrina sites. This is just what I’m seeing on the sites that I check regularly. This is, in effect, the mood of the web as I get to see it.

Let’s begin.

From Metafilter:

• Ray Nagin lays it down: you must hear this

… New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin has a message for politicians: “I don’t want to see anybody do any more goddamned press conferences… put a moratorium on press conferences, don’t do another press conference until the resources are in this city, and then come down to this city and stand with us… Don’t tell me 40,000 people are coming here – they’re not here; it’s too doggoned late. Now get off your asses and let’s do something…”

• Photos from Katrina’s wake
• Photographers respond to New Orleans racial bias photos
• KatarinaHelp Wiki
• “It doesn’t make sense to me.“

Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert weighs in on rebuilding New Orleans during an interview by the Chigago Daily Herald. “It doesn’t make sense to me, and it’s a question that certainly we should ask. . . First of all your heart goes out to the people, the loss of their homes . . . but there are some real tough questions to ask about how you go about rebuilding this city. We help replace, we help relieve disaster . . . (Rebuilding) is certainly the decision the people of New Orleans are going to make. . . But I think federal insurance and everything goes along with it and we ought to take a second look at it. . . How do you go about rebuilding this city? What precautions do you take? . . . It looks like a lot of that place could be bulldozed. . . But you know we build Los Angeles and San Francisco on top of earthquake fissures and they rebuild, too. Stubbornness.” Dennis Hastert was a sponsor of the legislation that cut the funding needed to upgrade New Orleans levee system to withstand category 5 hurricanes. He also failed to vote on legislation this year which would’ve provided additional funds for the Army Corps of Engineers.

From Boing Boing:

• Uncensored audio of NOLA mayor interview
• Katrina: anecdote on civil defense in Cuba (often sans phones, power)
• NOLA rescue worker email #2
• KatrinaHelp wiki needs bandwidth help
• FEMA points Katrina aid $ to Pat “kill Hugo Chavez!” Robertson

Quotes found by Blogbites:

“For the first time in memory, a huge social welfare issue is pressing against a network of state governments heretofore disinclined to respond constructively.”
- MaxSpeak, You Listen!

“Any attempt to flag down police results in being told to get away at gunpoint.”
- interdictor

“When the dead are counted, most of them will have been poor. Count on it.”
- The Doc Searls Weblog

From MonkeyFilter:

• Katrina: Amerca’s Shame. “New Orleans as we have known and loved it is gone. It didn’t have to be so, and our administration had ample warning of how severe it would be. PLEASE DONATE AND HELP, OUR GOVERNMENT IS NOT.”
• “I really CAN’T go home again. So, my friends, family, and I are in search of a new hometown. I don’t think we really even intend to look back or return if we can possibly get away with it.”

From Dan Gillmor:

• Lost and Found in a Grim New Sense

From Link Bunnies:

Dave: This is the LiveJournal of the manager of a web firm based in New Orleans. They are currently trying to keep approximately 800,000 websites live using a diesel generator whilst being barricaded into their office surrounded by looting.

Dave: “To save bandwidth they had to take down humour site Something Awful.” MSNBC Story

Marcus: Something Awful is definitely down at the moment. Cripes.

Marcus: From the journal: “Any attempt to flag down police results in being told to get away at gunpoint.”

justin: Bloody hell. Read that Real News entry for Sept. 1st. I sounds like there’s a lot of hardcore sh*t happening.

Marcus: One guy predicted the devastation a hurricane would wreak on New Orleans in a 23rd May 2005 article. (Via)

Marcus: And “New Orleans faces doomsday scenario” from January 2001!

Marcus: “In the face of an approaching storm, scientists say, the city’s less-than-adequate evacuation routes would strand 250,000 people or more, and probably kill one of 10 left behind as the city drowned under 20 feet of water. Thousands of refugees could land in Houston. Economically, the toll would be shattering. Southern Louisiana produces one-third of the country’s seafood, one-fifth of its oil and one-quarter of its natural gas. The city’s tourism, lifeblood of the French Quarter, would cease to exist. The Big Easy might never recover.”

Marcus: Poppy Z. Brite’s Livejournal – she’s a New Orleans resident. (Via)

Marcus: “No word on our house or cats. The situation in New Orleans is dire, what’s left of us.”

From glassdog:

• glassdog: “Bush : America :: Water : New Orleans”

The two biggest one-day disasters of the Bush presidency — of the past fifty years — and the collective response of the President and his advisors is: “Well, goll-lee!” Thousands lay dead, hundreds of billions of dollars in property is destroyed and the people charged with our protection and safety can only tell us that, well, we never really gave it much thought.

From kuro5hin:

• Hi, my name is Roger and I am a New Orleanian

From Pretty Fakes:

• Baton Rouge Update

From Help the victims of Hurricane Katrina

37signals will match up to $5000 in total donations for SvN readers who donate to the Red Cross Hurricane 2005 Relief fund. Just forward your donation confirmation email to me (jason at 37signals dot com) and once we’ve received $5000 in total donations we’ll make a donation for $5000 in the name of “Signal vs. Noise Readers.”

UPDATE: You did it! We hit $5000 in just a few hours. Thanks so much for the generosity of these fine folks. Unfortunately I couldn’t make a donation in someone else’s name unless it was a tribute (which didn’t seem appropriate), but the $5000 was donated with the 37signals corporate card. Thanks again.

From Working Smart:

• Thomas Nelson’s Disaster Relief Efforts

Realizing we need to act quickly, I asked Jim Thomason, our HR Director, to form a “Disaster Relief Committee” and make a recommendation to me by the end of the day. He and his team met and then made two proposals. (For Jim’s account, please click here.) I immediately approved both.

First, we will donate 100,000 Bibles to the relief efforts. Why Bibles? This afternoon, an official in Baton Rouge said on Fox News, “We need water, food, … and Bibles.” This is something I knew we could help with. Samaritan’s Purse, an organization headed by Franklin Graham, one of our authors, has agreed to distribute these for us. We will begin shipping them to Louisiana as soon as we get instructions from Samaritan’s Purse.

(Yup. Bibles. 10,000 of them. Maybe those are those liquid bibles that people can drink. Or maybe the edible ones.)

From The Rude Pundit:

• “Totally Black” in New Orleans
• Even Mr. Bill Knew the Levees Wouldn’t Hold (wmv clip)

And I can’t keep up. Already, Boing Boing has over 10 Katrina posts since I last checked.

Donate.

• Online coverage of Hurricane Katrina (via Dan Gillmor). A wiki aggregating a wide variety of Katrina links.
• New York Times: “The Storm After the Storm”
• Guardian Unlimited: “Unrest Intensifies at Superdome Shelter”
• Wired News: “Craig’s List vs. Katrina”
• Airbag: “Levy”. Heavy discussion going on in the comments.
• Instapundit.com: List of aid agencies (via Dan Gillmor). Very detailed list of agencies to contribute to for Katrina relief.
• Aaaaaaand… here’s the Rude Pundit here with more to say about George Bush and Katrina. Rude. Very. (You’ve been warned).

I was this close to closing up shop here for a little bit, a la kottke, but I realised that I still want to share. Just don’t expect a lot of zombies and Lego today. It doesn’t really feel right at the moment.

(However, if I get too depressed by Katrina, I may need to throw a blast of jello and tinkertoys around, just to lighten the place up. We’ll see.)

In the meantime, here are a bunch of links dealing with Katrina. These links aren’t canonical. They are just the ones that I’ve seen most recently and have jumped out at me. If I see more, they’ll get posted too.

• NOLA weblog. Heartbreaking messages from people desparate for help and from people that want help.
• The Interdictor. Someone caught in the middle of New Orleans. Stories about the loss of order in New Orleans. Chilling and scary.
• Boing Boing: “Watch out for phony Katrina aid scam websites”.
• Boing Boing: “New Katrina sat pics from NASA; more coming via Google”. Lots of satellite imagery links collected at BoingBoing.
• Dan Gillmor: “Gulf Coast Disaster: Please Help”. Further agencies accepting donations for Katrina relief.
• WIL WHEATON dot NET: “Saint Genevieve”. Wil Wheaton and PokerStars.com are organising charity poker tournaments for Katrina relief. Good on ya, Wil.
• PrettyFakes: “Everyone’s okay in Jaxxon”. Gorjus, losing power, is reduced to posting via the comments by Blackberry. Really honest reactions:
  

  I almost had a fucking breakdown at lunch today when Tony DiFatta mumbled glumly that we may have lost so much of Walter Anderson’s art to Katrina.

  I know I should be worried about the loss of life, but all I can think about are his originals, the walls of his house,the wood blocks; unless the family somehow got it out, it’s all gone. All of Shearwater, their glazes and molds, as well.

  Today at work my bosses started playing guitar and singing up in the front of our office, and I drank Maker’s & Coke and stared at my computer, wishing the goddamn internets worked. I swear to God, I have everything in the world and I’m so terribly greedy.

  I just feel so guilty that there’s nothing I can do to help anybody. I’m not a doctor or a nurse and I can’t help anybody. I can’t even donate any towels to the Salvation Army because I’m always behind on my laundry and they’re all dirty, along with every other thing I own except for ten French-cuffed shirts and about two dozen pairs of tube socks.

  I mean, I’ll be out of pants, but tube socks? I’ve got those for days.

  I just hate it so much when people die and I can’t do anything at all to stop this.

  I know it’s dumb to feel guilty over natural disasters. I’m thankful my friends & family are okay. Maybe it’s just because this is like a weird enforced vacation where all the rules are sort of relaxed, and I don’t know what to do with all that.

  Seriously, though: if you’re reading this, and you’ve been hurt by the storm, please know that people are worried about you and that we love you.

• The Rude Pundit: “The Hurricane Exit Strategy”. Scarily plausible. And — of course — rude.
• Repent America: “We’re a bunch of turds and we like to eat our own turds”. Okay, they really didn’t say that. They actually say that Katrina was sent by God to punish New Orleans for allowing a “homosexual celebration”. It amounts to the same thing. Turd-eaters.
• CNN.com: “Ostrich breaks free on Golden Gate Bridge” (via The English Guy). (Okay, so this has nothing to do with Katrina. But I think we all need a laugh.)

Lastly, I’ve added a button on the sidebar for donations to the American Red Cross. It links to Amazon’s one-click donation page, as the Red Cross site is getting a little overwhelmed.

Remember. Donate.