Wednesday, August 31, 2005

Well, things just keep getting worse and worse in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast. You know it's bad when even Crackbass is encouraging people to donate their hard-earned money (or in the case of some of my friends, hardly-earned money).
Here's the Red Cross site (although the actual donation page was apparently overburdened and unloadable at the time of this writing):

We had Crack practice last night, and Sigmund and I spent a lot of time staring at CNN and talking about how meteorologists and disaster-assessment experts had been predicting this kind of disaster in New Orleans for years. Unfortunately, any kind of real fix to the potential problem would have cost millions upon millions of dollars (i.e., stronger levees or flood gates and better pumping stations), and no one wanted to spend the money to fix a hypothetical problem. Well, obviously the problem is no longer hypothetical.
Good ol' George W. gave a speech which was something in the neighborhood of 45 minutes long yesterday in order to try to drum up support for one of the dumbest wars in history (see my earlier rant about comparisons between Iraq and World War II), and out of that 45 minutes, he managed to spend about a minute and 20 seconds addressing what is turning out to be one of the biggest natural disasters in American history. The president is, however, cutting short his five week vacation (his most recent since his last vacation in April) by a day or two in order to be available to help address some of the problems created by Katrina. To call this president out of touch is like saying that Marie Antoinette might not have had her finger on the pulse of the French people.

Crack practice was good. We actually did a little bit of rehearsal and worked on one of Andy's songs called "Hey You". We also did some uber jamming so practice wouldn't feel like work. It's nice to have some kind of song structure to fall back on, but Crack's true strength will always be the savant-garde, jazz/punk odyssey.

Not too much else to report. Court this afternoon. My damned ACL tickets still haven't shown up, and I'm starting to worry about them.

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