- Extremely ominous warning from NOAA.
- 6 hour animation loop.
- Dollar declines amidst Katrina.
- Active New Orleans webcam from Bourbon Street: is this active?
- Jeff says this link’s better for WKRG.
- Is the Superdome a viable shelter? People other than management say different.
- Midnight CDT: Center of Katrina, 90 miles SSW of mouth of Mississippi River. Moving at 10 mph NNW.
Category / Katrina
Katrina Headlines I
- According to this live feed from WDSU, 10,000 people are at the Superdome with the National Guard and meals to spare. The Superdome management, which states that the walls will withstand 200 mph winds, claims that the Superdome will stand up. Others are not so sure.
- A first-person account from a local from Pat O’s.
- Dr. Jeff Masters: “This is an incredibly large eye for a storm with a pressure this low, and makes me very uncertain about what intensity fluctuations Katrina may undergo in the next few hours before landfall. I see nothing to change the label of “catastrophic” for Katrina at landfall.”
- Katrina has potential to leave 1 million homeless.
- Oil now shooting past $70 a barrel. Area that Katrina hits crucial to U.S. energy infrastructure.
- When Cafe Lafitte closes, “you KNOW its bad.”
- Phone post from LiveJournal user ZeldaKitty.
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Shorties
And the Whitbread goes to Mark Haddon’s The Very, Very Curious Incident of the Dog Who Was Let Out by the Baja Men in the Morning, Afternoon and Night Shortly After He Was Fed His Meal, which I’ve been meaning to read. Except I can never remember the exact title.
I didn’t realize the Alexander McCall Smith/Irvine Welsh thing had legs, but even in Scotland, they need their “bag of bones”/”entertainment not literature” Vidal/Mailer in-fights.
Andy Hamilton won’t write for BBC1. Hamilton claims that Auntie Beeb has pressured a writer to remove lesbian characters from a script to “incorporate the conservative tastes of focus groups.”
Modern Humorist: “Where are all the R’s? Is it a typographical error? Does the writer simply not like R’s? Or are there mysterious deeds at play, and are the R’s somewhow involved?”
Birnbaum talks with Jonathan Lethem. Birnbaum even gets Lethem to fess that Laura Miller is “making a contribution to literary journalism.” Birnbaum also shoots the goofy gale with Neal Pollack. Among the revelations: “[Eggers] said he didn’t want me along because my stuff was much more confrontational and in your face and aggressive and loud and profane. He wanted to take McSweeney’s in a more respectable direction. And then one day I woke up and my link was off the site. And I wasn’t a McSweeney’s guy anymore. Overnight. My main conduit for communicating over the Internet had been removed, so I had to start my own site.”
And The Chronicle has apparently reached a settlement with Henry Norr.
[1/23/06 UPDATE: It is quite likely that the Henry Norr story will be slipped under the rug. But I think it stands as a remarkable testament as to how a journalist’s outside activities are controlled to a great extent by his employer. As the newspapers continue to cut the coverage and eventually begin to drop, I am wondering if they’ll become even more controlling. Henry Norr, happily, is still writing — largely for online outlets. He can be found contributing reports for Macintouch and is still actively filing no-bullshit Macworld reports from the front lines.]