Deja Fu

Gary Gygax died yesterday at the age of 69. If you don’t know who he is, follow the link. I can almost guarantee you know his greatest creation.

There are eulogies all over the web, so I’m not going to attempt yet another one. I’ll just leave you with a humorous rendition of a group of guys enjoying his work.

-K

Oh, now this just takes the cake.

Going through and finding more stories about FEMA’s mismanagement after the hurricanes in 2004, I ran across this story. It seems some of the women of Homestead, Florida, decided to file a disaster relief claim, despite a complete lack of qualifications. The result? They’re all being sentenced to probation and community work, including one woman who received $24,755 for a sewer backup that occurred weeks before Frances hit Florida.

However, that’s not the worst of it. When interviewed by the South Florida Sun-Sentinal, Quiana Riggins (the woman described above), had this jewel of a quote:

“This is embarrassing,” Riggins said after her sentencing. “It’s like I’m a criminal, and this is my first offense.”

Hey lady, I’ve got some news for you. You are a criminal! You defrauded the government out of $25,000. You stole more money than most bank robbers ever get. You’re lucky your ass isn’t sitting in a jail cell.

It’s times like these I wish they’d bring back the stocks and flogging. Put her in the stocks for a day and let people walk by and jeer at her. Put up a sign with her offense written on it so everyone knows she stole your money. Let the people she lives with know her name and her face and that she isn’t to be trusted.

“It’s like I’m a criminal.” Delusion: it’s not just for crazies anymore.

Hey, don’t look at me. I didn’t say it. Michael Brown said it. On live TV no less:

“My biggest mistake was not recognizing by Saturday that Louisiana was dysfunctional,” Brown said. (He means Saturday, August 27, before the hurricane struck.)

Wow. You’ve got to admit, to say something like that took a lot of balls. Of course, he’s already resigned from FEMA (only to be hired back as a consultant to investigate what went wrong – more on that later), so he’s really got nothing to lose. The press has been trashing him for weeks, and rightly so. Katrina is Brown’s worse failure, but it was hardly his first. This one was just so big, no one could ignore it.

Brown wants to blame the governments of Louisiana and New Orleans for what happened. He’s not completely off the mark. Lousisiana once had a gubenatorial election where the choices between candidates were a former three-term governor everyone knew was a crook, or an ex-wizard in the KKK. And this wasn’t in the 1800s, either. It was 1992. So there’s a long history of graft and incompetence running through Louisiana politics, but Brown doesn’t get to escape that easily.

It seems that when Hurricane Frances hit Florida in 2004, $21 million was paid to residents of Miami in the form of disaster relief. There’s only one problem: Frances didn’t strike anywhere close to Miami. It hit far to the north, but FEMA just declared Miami-Dade a disaster area without even checking to see if it had been damaged. They even paid for a funeral in Miami, although no one died. (The effects of France on Miami were no worse than a bad thunderstorm.)

But wait, there’s more. It seems FEMA has paid for the funerals of at least 203 Floridians, despite having absolutely no connection to the hurricanes that hit Florida in 2004. Ten people weren’t even in Florida when they died.

Now, if that’s not dysfunctional, I don’t know what is. However, as Kevin Spacey is told in American Beauty, “Never underestimate the power of denial.” Michael Brown is absolutely convinced he did nothing wrong in his management of the Katrina efforts. He keeps it up, he might even convince himself he’s Jesus. Then we can see him climb up on a cross for real, instead of metaphorically as he testifies before Congress.

In times of crisis, people have widly different reactions: some will sit in front of the TV watching the reports, sometimes for hours; others may call their friends and family and talk about everything going on.

On occasion, there will be someone who starts making jokes. I’ve been known to do this. One of my mechanisms is humor. I’ve even been known to make jokes that border on the profane in my attempt to laugh at absolutely black situations. I love black comedy; it’s an under appreciated artform.

So when Lum the Mad, a programmer and blogger, got together with Ubiq and created Katrina: The Gathering, I just knew I’d have to mirror the site for myself. It’s aboslutely wrong in all the right ways. Poking fun not at the tragedy itself, but at the beureaucrats and pundits who left themselves wide open with their bumbling and incompetence. No one gets spared, which is good, because they all deserve their turn in the Dunking Well.

If you can laugh at the worst situations, click the link and enjoy. If not, then maybe you’re better off leaving well enough alone.

Note: This is a local mirror for myself and the few people who come to visit. It’s unauthorized and may on any given day be missing the latest cards. Check out Lum’s blog if you want to see the original site. On his page, the link can be found on the right-hand side.

I went to a Catholic high school in New Orleans. Of course, I graduated half a lifetime ago, but those memories stick with me and I still feel proud that I went through Brother Martin High. It was a tough school. About the only tougher school in the city was Jesuit, and you just can’t compete against a school that requires four years of Latin from its students. Seriously, the Jesuits are on a different level.

When Katrina hit, it was pretty easy to pick out my school, swamped with the rest of Gentilly in ten feet of water. That image became part of the sadness at seeing my hometown become part of the swamp. However, there’s good news. It seems the school has temporarily relocated itself in Baton Rogue and has started classes. (The website is hosted on a Cox subscriber’s website, leaving me to believe the webserver is also under a couple feet of water.)

Nice to see the alma mater back in action again. One bright spot in all this mess.

Now, if Rita would kindly move her ass back out into the Atlantic, I could breathe even easier.