Blogging with a generous splash of Zatarain's

The Rude Pundit (normally X-rated) has turned his blog over to bloggers from New Orleans this week. You can learn a lot more about this place from them.

How about the NOAH scandal and the Nagin administration?

Or "Katrina fatigue"?

Maybe this nasty slice of reality on oil revenues in the Pelican State:

Consider how preeverted and fucked up things are down here: we're actually giddy to spend these oil royalty dollars on rebuilding our coastal wetlands-- the same coastal wetlands that were sliced and diced and killed (in large part) by the oil infrastructure that supplies the rest of the country with oil and gas! Here's the arrangement, simplified: the nation gets energy supplied through Louisiana, the oil companies make ginormous profits, and Louisiana sacrifices its coastal ecology and natural hurricane buffer so that it can get pennies on the dollar back from Big Oil, to address the billion dollar problems that Big Oil helped exacerbate.

This is what constitutes "boom times" in da gret stet. Maximum risk, minimum recompense. It seems delusional, and it is, but not as much as you might think. (More on that later.)

And the tidbits one can learn:

Some things about people from New Orleans:

We don't care what you think. We've been doing our own thing for 300 years.

We don't want to go to your parades, ya'll don't throw anything.

100% humidity is the best moisturizer they ever came up with.

It's "New A'wlins," not "N'awlins."

I hope I whetted your appetite and you'll read more.

So far I have been providing photos - details, mostly, of buildings. I think I will begin to focus more on what moves me, the details of damage showing how far things still have to go. You cannot drive far without seeing devastation. Very few neighborhoods escaped. But I cannot give you the story. You need the locals for that and we can thank the Rude One for inviting them to blog this week.

Oh, and about that humidity-moisturizer thing? It's true. My hands have become incredibly soft again without a drop of moisturizer in three months.
--the BB