What can ya do? Katrina's everything Lionel Barrymore described. But not quite. A couple months ago I mumbled some hurricane hummenah with the suggestion that interest in such catastrophes wanes (that word again) over summer. Well, not when one as cataclysmic as this comes along! Hoo-boy, we got us a category 5 coming right at ...wait, make that a category 4, category 2... shucks, it's getting smaller, and with it, all the excitement. Besides, all those people drove out of town. Dangummit, where's the high death count (apparently numbers are relative)? All that NPR and CNN, (well, Yahoo! News) wasted on nothin'. Meanwhile I'd like to know why they keep NOLA there in the first place. Shouldn't they hang their heads in shame?

Guess 300 years ago the French didn't think much about sea levels and such. They built their little slave port on that ugly ol' swamp as a gateway to the browner Americas and to ease trade with the West Indies. Not unprecedented. Where would Amsterdam be without drainage and reclaimed wetlands? "Reclamation," after all, implies that it belonged to the people in the first place, and engineers and city planners are just official repo men. All land belongs to us, and a hurricane is just another of nature's brutal tactics to wrestle it out of our hands, like a nighttime mugger going for our money. The city needed, economically, to remain even after it burned down, and so the occupying Spanish rebuilt it all pretty like. How can you sell kidnapped Africans without a place to do business? Need to carry the cargo on ships, gotta dock them ships somewhere nearby. Might as well have a lot of shiny hotels and entertainment so the buyers will feel generous at the auction. And after that, well, after a Civil War made the whole big-money reason irrelevant, there was no turning back. The town had so much old world charm.