Jim Varagona

>I have been watching the Hurrican Katrina coverage as much as possible. It’s a bad addiction, but I don’t have much of a job, so I watch. It is a surreal feeling to see a place that I just saw in perfect shape not too long ago. I haven’t been incredibly emotional about the whole situation, besides the occasional bouts of incredible anger that our government would allow such a thing to get to such a chaotic point.

This morning on the Today show on NBC, though, I saw Harry Connick Jr. go back to his father’s house, which was in a flooded area. Normally, I would think sending a celebrity in to cover a major news story would be silly, but this was different. His emotions were raw and very real. Imagine how it would feel to take a boat through your old neighborhood. Luckily, his father’s home was spared, compared to the devastation we have witnessed from afar on our television sets. As they left the neighborhood, one of the people in the crew spotted a resident who did not look too good. He looked like someone straight out of a third world country, except in our land of freedom and liberty. How messed up is that?!

(the above from the AP and Houston Chronicle is of Connick Jr. as he says a prayer at a body he came upon in New Orleans)

Harry and his crew carried the man back to the boat, where they took him to receive medical care. It was the first time the news of Katrina brought a tear to my eye. Everyone is doing their part I guess. It is a shame that Connick Jr. was at the Convention Center before the head of FEMA, Michael Brown, even realized there were people there.

Something is happening here, and you don’t know what it is…do you, Mr. Brown?

The New Orleans Times Picayune wrote an open letter to President Bush asking for Brown’s head to roll along with the rest of FEMA. I realize that the levees were only built to withstand a category 3 hurricane, and we are dealing with a strong category 4 here, but that gives no excuse for people to suffer for three to five days, living in piss, shit, gas, oil, and amongst the dead scattered around them.

On today’s Oprah, I witnessed the kind of coverage that the news was not even showing. Usually you think of going to the BBC or NPR for that meaty type of information. She went insidethe Superdome after the mayor and the military tried to talk her out of it. She described walking through human waste and the horrible smell that the building emitted. She heard stories of children being raped there in the bathrooms and people having to walk over bodies to use the facilities. I hadn’t heard this on the news.

The police chief told her of two of his officers that commited suicide. One went back to his home and assumed that his family was dead. Abandoning all hope, he took his life. They turned out to be alive. He had seen some horrible crap though, so how do we know how we would react in such a scenario?

Oprah’s resident doctor, Dr. Oz, went to Louis Armstrong International Airport in New Orleans, where a makeshift hospital was treating the suffering. Many people who could not be saved were moved to the morgue to die in peace. This is very fucked up, and it is happening in our own country.

The doctor then walked through the streets, where he found a shooting victim in the middle of a street. He moved chairs around him and put a blanket over the man to keep people from disturbing the body. He found a woman on the side of the freeway dead. She was white and fairly young, it appeared, which is unusual compared to the face people are painting this with. (And why is it that the national news nevers shows people dead in our own country, but they have no problem with showing bodies in overseas countries. Oprah doesn’t mind showing it.) Every type of person in every class was affected. The poor were just more affected, because they didn’t have the resources to be as prepared.

NBC Nightly News did a piece tonight on the residents who refuse to leave. They are in denial over the awesomeness of this event. Even as rescue workers come to save them from this wretched hell that has become of their once beautiful city, they refuse to leave. Don Teague, who reported for NBC, ended the piece with a poignant statement, “Residents here pledge to stay come hell or high water. Tonight, they are living in both.”

It is a time for our country to come together or fail miserably. By the look of the government, it isn’t looking so good. We need to focus on the terror here that Katrina caused, and not that supposed terror overseas (not to say that it does not exist, but I believe this takes priority over an endless war).

To those living in that wasteland down there, I don’t know what it is like to be homeless, but I don’t know what it is like to live in hell either. I do know which I’d rather have though. We can at least make a home out of helpful people around us and being surrounded by some kind of caring environment.

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>Last night, my fiance and I decided to take the dog for a walk. It was just a normal jaunt around the neighborhood…not really. We were about a block and a half from our place, when I looked over at an apartment complex that we were walking adjacent to. The door to a unit was open and right there in plain view was a man, at least in his 60s, standing stark naked in front of his television. I said aloud, “He’s fucking naked!” My lady looked over at him and his almost invisible twig and berries, and we all made eye contact. As we stood amazed, he looked fairly calm. He simply walked away slowly like he intended this all to happen. We stared a bit longer, astonished. It is not everyday that something like this occurs, and while I do not get off looking at naked old men, I had to take in one of the most odd and random occurences to happen to me as of late.

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> It was only 3 months ago that my fiance, Shannon, and I decided last minute to go to New Orleans to celebrate our 4 year anniversary and my graduation from college. It was a great experience, and now considering the events that are transpiring there due to Hurricane Katrina, we will cherish that trip even more.

Instantly I compared New Orleans to my hometown of St. Louis, MO. They have more of a reverence for historical landmarks and buildings there. The blocks are covered in old buildings, especially in the French Quarter. Their river walk is amazing, covered with things to do and things to see, like sculptures and other various works of art, not to mention the Audubon Acquarium.

St. Louis doesn’t have an acquarium or a river walk.

The French Quarter itself contains more to do than the entire downtown area of St. Louis, with its eclectic mixture of restaurants, shops, countless bars, and voodoo related spots (apparently New Orleans is the voodoo capital of the U.S., if not the world). Bourbon Street is only a small part of the quarter, and I found it actually kind of annoying, because all it is is bars and strip clubs, with balconies overhead filled with horny middle aged men hoping that one female will show her breasts to them. Such a sad world we live in.

That however, was one of a few drawbacks of this beautiful place. The streets are inhabited by more homeless people than any other city I have visited. Most keep to themselves, which I appreciate as sad as it sounds. I tend to give money to the ones that don’t beg. I wonder how many of them survived this disaster.

There already was a horrible stench to the area, reeking of trash, which is left curbside for pickup because of no alleys, and of sewage. Add several feet of water to that and god only knows what the smell is like.

They are saying that 80% of New Orleans is flooded now, with at least several feet of water. What we saw only a few months ago may never exist again.

One creepy aspect of the whole situation is the dead. The city has numerous historical cemeteries with people buried above ground in various types of vaults, sometimes very simple, sometimes very elaborate with statues and columns. There has been speculation that the remains from these cemeteries may get lose in the flood water along with the gas and oil that already contaminates it. An AP photo showed a body of someone that died in the storm surge floating in the water. Imagine remains of the already dead mixed with that already disturbing image. Those people were buried above ground because of fears that underground burials would not be secure due to the city being below sea level. It’s ironic that all of that may have been done for nothing if the cemeteries like St. Louis #2 is laid to waste.

New Orleans…I may have only got to know thee in a few short days, but I feel for you and your people.

I only hope the casualties were kept to a minimum, and this great city can recover from this mess.

For photos of the Hurricane’s effects in N.O., go to NOLA.com.

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I thank Tom Tomorrow for this. I don’t even read him much, but I stumbled upon his site. Thank the lord, because otherwise this would not have been brought to my attention. This is very disturbing.

Why do kids need to learn such things at an early age and with such bias? Why not “Help mom, there’s terrorists under my bed!” with illustrations of foreigners under the bed? Or “Help mom, a very stupid, evil man has taken over our country!”

I liked it better when we were just teaching kids about poopingand fartingin their picture books.

I have a female boxer puppy at home named Sadie. She has a thing for humping my fiance and me, but has taken a real liking to my leg as of late. I thought only male dogs would hump like that, since it is their sexual position. How does a female learn such things and why do they even want to do that?

First off I should say that some have asked why I allow her to do it. I don’t let her continuously do it, but for a moment it is hell-arious. For instance, yesterday she humped my leg and I allowed three thrusts. Why? With each one she farted loudly, and that is the best laugh I had all week.

So I asked Jeeves about this, and he lead me to some answers. The best site, Vetinfo.com, said this:

Spaying a female dog will sometimes result in an increase in testosterone influence, if they produce androgenic (testosterone-like) hormones at higher levels than most females and then the suppressing effect of estrogen is removed due to spaying. This can cause an increase in aggressive or dominance behaviors and that can mean that mounting (humping) behaviors will occur.

That all makes perfect sense, because she was spayed a month or two ago, and happens to be very dominant over other dogs, and she’s very non-discriminant about it as long as the other dog isn’t toering over her.

The article also said this though:

Whether or not you should be concerned is hard to say. This is actually relatively normal behavior unless it does get so prevalent that you have to consider an obsessive/compulsive or anxiety based cause. In those cases, there are medications that can help, such as fluoxetine (Prozac Rx) or clomipramine (Clomicalm Rx).

Whoah…give my dog Prozac…share my precious prescription. That’s crazy talk. Or is my dog crazy? Or is my leg just really attractive?