I cracked today, finally had to turn off the TV. What follows is several shortish blog items, heavy on the frivolity and non-storm related. Ready?

I knew there was a reason I haven’t upgraded my cell phone nor replaced my battery-failing iPod: Apple’s finally releasing a combination phone/MP3 player, or so rumors say. I intend to set mine to play “Family Affair” when the call comes from home, “Take This Job and Shove It” when work is calling, etc.

Oh, wait. I don’t have a job. Scratch that. But you get the idea. Cool idea.

(Crickets, katydids.)

OK, I can’t stand it. Got an e-mail today from Deb in Milwaukee:

brett favre was on tv at noon. his wife and kids, friends and extended family are all living in his 2500-square-foot house in hattiesburg at the moment, because most of them have nowhere else to go. FIFTY PEOPLE are living there, with no electricity — including a woman who’s eight months pregnant and terrified she’ll go into premature labor, in a town where a hospital no longer exists. brett’s spoken to his wife a couple of times. she told him they ran out of bread yesterday and the kids are hungry. hell, i’m sure they’re ALL hungry. brett favre’s money and power mean nothing at the moment. he’s in no better position to help out his family than any of the rest of us. and this is just what’s happening to one guy’s family — can you imagine the other stories that aren’t getting told?

i am just in shock every time i turn on the tv. now they’re moving people from the superdome to the astrodome? holy fuck.

Yes, indeedy. This is what I’ve been thinking today: For the last four years, we’re supposed to have been preparing for this sort of thing. We’re supposed to be ready for a terror attack on a major U.S. city, or if not exactly ready, at least with at least one or two clues in our possession. This is what we’ve been laying in supplies of plastic and duct tape for, correct?

And yet, we’ve been caught flat-footed. This morning CNN showed video of the USS Shreveport creaking slowly out of port in Norfolk. This morning. Not yesterday morning, not yesterday afternoon, but this morning. This is why that picture of Bush playing his toy guitar sent my blood pressure up. I know he can’t wave a wand and make everything better, but do you think he could maybe muster up a little shred of urgency, of gravity, of cluefulness, if you will? Most other people in America can figure out what’s going on, what it means, and why this has dire, dire portents for the health of the rest of the country, of the economy.

Oh, but the hell with that little twerp. What about the Department of Homeland Security? FEMA? The National Guard? Why is the security of New Orleans left up to a bare handful of overstressed, freaked-out cops, many of whom likely lost their own homes? No wonder they’re waving looters through the doors — they can put things in perspective.

And now we’re moving refugees from one football stadium to another. The Texas relief coordinator was very welcoming, said their stadium offers hot showers. Wonderful! And only 300 miles away from home.

If I were Osama bin Hidin’, I’d be rubbing my hands together in glee. Don’t throw me into the briar patch, indeed.

DetNews blogging on the problem of looting.

Stipulated: Photos lie. They show but one moment among millions. They rarely encompass the context of the moment. They’re taken by human beings, famously flawed and agenda-driven. Years of work in journalism have taught me to distrust them, even as I respect their power.

OK? Everyone read the stipulations? Great.

All I want to ask is this: Why do George Bush’s handlers, all of whom presumably know the power of a single image, on a day when a major American city is descending into chaos, allow him to appear in a photo like this?

Vince posts in the comments below:

If it’s permissible, pasted below is an item from another blog. I think it’s reliable and accurate:
———————————–

Sandra Mims Rowe distributed this note to the Oregonian staff at about 4:30 pm on Tuesday, FYI

(remember that the NO Times-Picayune is, like the Oregonian, a Newhouse paper):

Everyone:

I talked to Jim Amoss, editor of the NO Times Picayune, several hours ago when he reached Houma, La., newsroom. From there the editing crew was going to Baton Rouge, where they will continue to publish online, mostly via sending stories to Newhouse News Service by e-mail.

He said that the national media wasn’t even coming close to grasping the scope of the story. The city is utterly, utterly devastated and uninhabitable.

They evacuated the newspaper building late this morning loading about 300 employees into delivery trucks and heading southwest. Most of those employees do not know if their homes survived, and Jim said many certainly did not. He assumes his is among those. As you have heard, to add to the pain, the looting in the city in increasing.

When the newspaper employees left the city, they were told it might be several weeks before they could return. Meanwhile, the journalists staying in NO are trying to do their jobs without the ability to move around much and with intermittent and difficult communications.

It’s horrifying and humbling thinking of what so many communities and individuals, including our colleagues, are going through now and will have to endure in the weeks ahead. We have offered our help and resources to assist at any time and in any way, but right now there is nothing we can do from here. That will change as they get a better handle on the scope of this and have greater ability to move. It could be days or weeks before they can publish on newsprint or deliver — and at least that long before people are back in the city.
Keep them in your thoughts.

Maybe it’s just me, but when a public official responding to a civic emergency is asked what people can do to cope, and she suggests that they pray? I get pissed. I want to stand up and say, “NOT HELPING.”

Sure, there’s a place for the spiritual, the clergy, in a disaster that encompasses fire, flooding, hunger, thirst, raw sewage, looting, death, dismemberment and old people drowned in houses filled to their rooftops with fetid water. But those clergy better be wearing hip waders, and if you want to pray, make sure your hands are busy doing something useful.

Oh, and what fresh hell is this? A prison riot in Baton Rouge. Lovely.

This is pretty much all I did today, so I’m cutting this short. Best single news source: The Times-Picayune website. This is the end — or at least a profound, no-going-back change — for one of America’s greatest cities.

Share your thoughts/memories/impressions in the comments, if you wish.

Longtime NN.C reader and commenter Ashley Morris checks in. He’s been in Prague the last year, but I knew his year abroad was coming to an end, and he had plans to relocate to the American south. So I e-mailed him, because I knew where he was heading. He replied:

I got out of New Orleans on the last AA flight that left the city. I’m now in Prague, wondering if I have a car, as it was parked in the airport garage. We’re all healthy, but who knows what there is back in NOLA. I was supposed to close on a house in New Orleans this week. Don’t know if it exists any more.

Good thoughts for Ashley, please. Last he heard, his new neighborhood was under 1-3 feet of water. Which means…well, let him tell it: I guess I have to go through inspection again.

Yes, I guess you do.

I guess I’d be more concerned if I had a relative “buried” in one of the city’s famous cemeteries. No, I wouldn’t. Dead is dead, but a contract to purchase real estate is a living thing.

And we know floods, after nearly 20 years in the place laughingly called the Summit City. Even in an empty house, they’re no fun.

Courage, Ash. And a quick dry-out.

UPDATE: We are displeased by CNN. For the DetNews.

I’m watching CNN as I write this early Sunday evening, wondering how much of the coverage of Hurricane Katrina is TV hype-ola and how much of it is on the money. Time will tell, and pretty soon. So it would probably be in very poor taste to mention that our own weather today was, in a word, glorious. Clear, warm, with a sustained 15-knot wind blowing out of the southeast. Best sailing day ever.

It capped a truly pleasant weekend, the details of which I’ll spare you. OK, except for Saturday, when I tried to show just how tough I could be, running errands by bicycle in these days of $2.60 gasoline (post-hurricane price: $3.60). I stuffed the dry cleaning into the bike bags, dropped it off, and set off for the farmer’s market. It started to sprinkle. I’m too tough to turn back for a sprinkle. It turned into a shower. I’m too tough for a shower, too. The shower became a downpour, which I am tough enough to endure, but it sort of makes your trip pretty miserable. But by then I was soaked. Turn back? Errand undone? I’ll still be wet, but I won’t have my vegetables.

So I rode on. Boy, did I feel stupid. My shoes filled with water. My windbreaker became sodden, as did everything underneath. I stopped at the ATM, which got my billfold wet. On to the market, where I bought a bunch of wet vegetables. Loaded them into the saddlebags, which then got…wet inside. Long story short: I made it home, peeled my clothes off in the kitchen, dried myself off with a dish towel, and took inventory. Long story shorter: Everything was wet. But the day was warm, and a little water never killed anyone. Hours later, dried off, I headed out for another errand, car-based this time. I hit the little button that pops open the switchblade-action key.

Water dripped out.

Oh, well. You know what my dad used to say when I complained about going out in the rain? “Don’t worry, you’re not made of sugar. You won’t melt.” My dad: Always sweet-talkin’ his little girl.

Bloggage: Another in our continuing series, Detroit: It’s a tough town.

When I was a teenager, I used to visit my friend Paul at his family’s summer cottage in the Upper Peninsula. In the Les Cheneaux Islands, to be specific. If you click that link, you’ll see on the mini-map that the Snows, as they’re called, are an archipelago of three dozen separate islands in northern Lake Huron. Les Cheneaux means “the channels,” and their geography gives them an in interesting characteristic — protected, inland-type boating waters in the second-largest Great Lake.

Of course you could stay entirely inside the channels, but we liked to visit the “big lake” outside the land mass. We’d ride rollers and otherwise screw around in the various boats at our disposal. We rarely announced that we were planning this, because it was likely to set off a stock speech from Paul’s grandmother, Cornelia, whom we all called Cor:

“No, you’re not! Don’t you remember when the car broke down last month, and it turned out to be a 75-cent part? What if that happened in that boat? You’d be dead in the water, and there’d be nothing you could do about it. You’d be swept into the freighter lanes! And swamped!”

(I’m sorry I can’t do Cor’s very distinctive voice for you, too, because it added considerably to our amusement at all this.)

In the manner of large bands of drunken young people everywhere, we seized on “swept into the freighter lanes” and made it one of our many catch phrases and inside jokes. Someone was late arriving? Obviously she’d been swept into the freighter lanes. Heading out for a beer run? Don’t get swept into the freighter lanes. Skinny-dipping at midnight? Help, help, I’m being swept into the freighter lanes!

So maybe you can see why the passing of large ships always tickles me.

Today we came fairly close to the freighter lanes, as you can see here. That’s the ore freighter Presque Isle, which Boatnerd tells me is bound for Two Harbors, Minn., to pick up a load of taconite.

She made a big wake, but we weren’t swamped.

I don’t know if you can pick it out, but there’s a tiny boat between us and the Presque Isle with one guy fishing in the forward chair. Just outside the frame is a pleasure boat of considerable size, which came between the fisherman and the freighter. The passengers were all standing on deck and woo-wooing about something — presumably the freighter. The fisherman waved his arm disgustedly; they were way too close. They took this as an endorsement of their high spirits, and woo-woo’d more. They were probably imitating someone’s grandmother. What goes around comes around.

Photo bonus: Me, en route to the freighter lanes, c. 1980? ’81? Around there.

Bloggage:

I never came up with anything interesting to say about Robertson and Wildmon. Ultimately I think it’s a story I’ve heard and read too many times: Lunatic Christian Says Crazy Things; Film at 11. However, Matthew Yglesias and the commenters over at TPM Cafe have some interesting points, if you’re interested.

And a funny piece on a show I watched once, found strangely compelling and was forbidden to watch again, thanks to my grumpy spouse — “Brat Camp,” which Sam Anderson at Slate liked even more.

Have a good weekend. I’m tapped, and plan to let the well refill.

Alan is on vacation, and we are going sailing today. (Psst. Don’t tell Kate. She thinks sailing is TOTALLY BORING and will run away from home if they thinks we’re going to force her to go.) People laugh at Detroit, compare it to Beirut and Baghdad, say, “Wow, you’re moving up in the world. What’s next? Fargo?”

(Many of these people live in such garden spots as Indianapolis and Dayton.)

All I can say is, it’s 10 minutes from my front door to our dock, and 10 more from the dock to the lake.

“Which lake?” they ask, puzzled.

“Lake St. Clair,” I say.

“I don’t know that one,” they reply.

No one knows Lake St. Clair, it seems. I often see newspaper graphics of the region — the last one was about watersheds in the Great Lakes, of all things — that leave it out entirely, and just show a river running between Michigan and Ontario. And this was the New York Times.

True, it isn’t a Great lake, but it’s not exactly a subdivision retention pond, either. It’s very shallow — essentially a very large river delta — but 26 miles across, capable of handling freighters and about a zillion recreational boaters. And yet, it gets no respect. You know what every single person who has visited us this year says when they see it? To a person: “I didn’t know it was that big.”

Lake St. Clair — the Rodney Dangerfield of lakedom.

In other boring news at this hour, we (which is to say, Alan) painted Kate’s room this week. It is no longer pale celery, but Northern Cascades, a rather cool lavender. Darker than the kitchen, paler than the purple plum she was hoping for. But she likes it. She has a new ceiling fan, a white closet door and, soon, new details that will take her decor further from little-girlhood and closer to insufferable-tweenhood. I cleaned out her closet and hauled out a garbage bag full of crapola, weeded the dresser drawers and swept off the top of her desk. She’s ready for school, and I’m ready for fall.

(Cleaning out Kate’s room is my new fall ritual. The passing of years in childhood marks more than it does in adulthood, which is to say, I ought to clean my own closet, but it’s too depressing to face pants you have, ahem, “grown out” of.)

We were discussing what to hang on the walls. I suggested some framed posters; she agreed. Alan suggested Wallace and Gromit; she wanted Puss in Boots making the big eyes. Kate considers the lack of a real cat in her life child abuse. We get those eyes a lot.

I should round up some tasty bloggage for you, but I haven’t the time — I’m off to DetNewsLand to talk about current events. Probably something on the twin fatwas of Mullas Robertson and Wildmon. Stop by later; I’ll try to think of something that hasn’t been said a million times already.

Oh, OK. Here’s Jon Carroll on how complicated it is to enjoy dinner these days. Later.

OK, I watched “Six Feet Under” again, and I decided I was wrong. (Good thing for that last 15 minutes, though, or I would have been right.)

The last montage, I’m now convinced, takes place in Claire’s imagination — hence her starring role in much of it. Not that it matters. Whether the characters end up the way Claire thought they did or some other way, Alan Ball made his big points and drove them home with a sledgehammer: Everything ends. Life surprises. Things never work out the way you think they will, but the way they work out usually works. Best to stay nimble.

Also: Gay men can make wonderful parents.

And did you see the obits? Brenda’s was my favorite: “She developed research methodologies to conclusively prove the link between deviant human behavior and fetal alcohol exposure.” For those who don’t know, Brenda spent several seasons struggling with urges toward promiscuity that were well-nigh pathological. About three episodes ago, her mother had a throwaway line in a scene where she offers Brenda a shot of vodka to “take the edge off” after Nate’s death. Brenda is pregnant and refuses, and her mother says something like, “Oh, one drink won’t hurt anything. Back when I was pregnant all we did was sit around drinking martinis and smoking Parliaments for nine months.”

Layers of inside jokes there.

And nice synchonicity there, HBO. I have to give them credit for the way their shows are supported on the web, particularly the dramas; a day-after visit is almost always worth your while. “Six Feet Under” has/had a great “Inside the Script” feature I liked. “Deadwood” has an interesting feature on costume design. And for “The Wire,” that Russian-novel-of-a-TV-show, has a very useful organizational chart.

While we’re on the arts-and-culture beat, here’s more DetNews blogging from yours truly. The subject: the Stones bring their jillion-dollar road show to town.

Remember the story of a few weeks back, about the memorial to the local soldier who died in Iraq, and the wrangle over how to word it? Ahem:

Unlike earlier wars, nearly all Arlington National Cemetery gravestones for troops killed in Iraq or Afghanistan are inscribed with the slogan-like operation names the Pentagon selected to promote public support for the conflicts. Families of fallen soldiers and Marines are being told they have the option to have the government-furnished headstones engraved with “Operation Enduring Freedom” or “Operation Iraqi Freedom” at no extra charge, whether they are buried in Arlington or elsewhere. A mock-up shown to many families includes the operation names.

Well, I’m glad it’s not just me who thinks “Operation Enduring Freedom” is a stupid way to say “military operations in Afghanistan,” and that it was coined basically to give the war a shiny, Hollywood-ready name. More than that, I’ll just keep my mouth shut, other than to note that in my brief stint as a copy editor, I routinely changed the marketing names to more generic descriptions. In nothing else, I bet most people have forgotten which one Operation Enduring Freedom is.

Lordy, but summer is slipping away. Kate goes back to school in two weeks (muffled huzzahs from her mother), and we’re eagerly awaiting the mailing from the school that will reveal all — who her teacher will be, how many spiral-bound notebooks and boxes of Kleenex she needs to buy. In the meantime, we’re thinking we might make one more trip before it all starts. Details, as they say in the news biz, t.k.

(“t.k.” is AP-speak for “to come.” Makes sense, don’t it?)