Survival of New Orleans bloggers
The whole blogging concept has become, for the most part, little more than a collection of unnecessary vanity sites cluttering up the web with personal journals, self-promoting ads, and mindless pap (this one included). But when Katrina took out New Orleans this summer, a group of local web geeks took blogging to a new level.
Chances are you heard about these guys. Michael Barnett who goes by The Interdictor online and his cronies at directNIC, a New Orleans webhosting company, decided to stay put when the hurricane hit and ride it out. They started posting about the storm and they kept their live webcam running when most others in the area blacked out. But it was the aftermath and the atrocities helped along by the gross negligence of various government entities that really put them on the map.
Barnett & company kept the world posted on what was really happening in NOLA, when help didn't show up and people were dying in the stadium, the convention center, and the streets. They'd go out on rounds of the area and report back about the dead, the dying, and those trying to survive. They told us unbelievable stories of horrors that only hit the news a day or two later. They told us when supplies finally started arriving along with soldiers who sounded like it was a warzone rather than a relief effort, and they kept their power on against all odds as they documented the big ticket news items along with the little details of their odd campout life inside their office building.
There's something fascinating about natural disasters and the havoc and devastation they can bring. It's a sick fascination, but it's very compelling for many of us. It reminds us that we aren't all that - no matter how big & strong we get, we still can't begin to stand up to nature when she gets upset; and when there's widespread destruction and death, it touches that place inside us that feels such things so hard, and it hurts. But when the disaster is compounded by a series of screwups by those who are supposed to help fix things - whatever the cause - it escalates to a new level of incredulity.
I hope that Michael Moore is on the case about the 2005 hurricanes and the bigger mess that the officials made of them, but in my opinion the guys behind the Survival of New Orleans blog are among the real heroes of the year. They're the Woodward & Bernstein of the disaster, and I hope they're going to become a book, movie, whatever they can get from it. They brought us truths that might not have come out otherwise, and they let us live through it with them from our safe havens far away.
There's always one pic that gets to you most in these things. For me it was this one, from the bloggers. When supplies finally started showing up, they had a series of shots showing piles of bottled water dumped onto the streets like garbage, and people gathering it up to take back to wherever they were staying. This shot is as heart-wrenching as the 1963 photo of little "John-John" Kennedy saluting his daddy's coffin. The caption reads "I never saw little kids get so excited about a bottle of water"
The bloggers were interactive and accessible, answering many emails and IMs and often chatting on IRC. A few times they turned their cam onto their monitors to show the amount of IMs coming in: it was like salt pouring out of a shaker, blam blam blam blam blam. Sometimes they'd hold up signs like "hey Dad" or show us what they were eating. Apparently someone asked this time if they had protection.. uhhh yep
Sleep dep was common for the guys: here's a quick dawn blog entry being made before a much-needed catnap, and one of the early relief convoys finally coming into the neighborhood
Check out the Survival of New Orleans blog - it's deceptively huge, with tons of photos and first-hand accounts of everything that went down. New Orleans and the other devastated areas are still in big trouble even though they've largely left the nightly news but people don't want to watch anymore now that the heavy drama's over, and that's a shame. Please do what you can to help.
11.25.05 @ 10:13 AM pdt [add 2 cents]
Fall '05
I have no excuse for not posting anything here since the end of October or so.
My summer project explained in the last entry way back on July 6th took off like a reality house afire. Hamsterwatch was getting 40-50,000 visitors a day all summer, which was very cool but it also freaked me out. I usually work up a page for a site, upload it, then proof & tweak as needed. With that many people coming I had to be a bit more careful that things were working before uploading, and I was more aware that people would be reading what I put up as opposed to more or less just amusing myself.
I also got quite a few donations from loyal readers which touched me more than I can say. As jaded as I can be sometimes, I was amazed by people's generosity - I mean, people were sending me money for something that was readily available to everyone for free. It was terrific and I appreciate each and every dollar. Beyond that, these kind folks really helped me stay plugged in to the project without having to stress quite as much on earning a living. So big ups to Hamsterwatchers everywhere.
I also became friendly with the mom of one of the contestants on the "Big Brother" show. Janelle Pierzina became affectionately known as the "buxom blonde bombshell of BB6" - editing didn't portray her as having half the personality and smarts that most 24/7 feeds watchers loved her for, and she lasted far longer than most anyone expected her to. She didn't win but she was definitely the star of the show, and her mom sent me a lot of pics and background info giving me some nice additions for my site as well as some definite "scoop" over the many, many other "Big Brother" sites in what has become quite a competitive arena.
Janelle's mom said she was printing out each day's episode of my site for Janelle's scrapbook when she got out of the house and that was a real thrill: for two summers now I've done this keep-up-with-the-feeds project along with my opinions on their personalities and actions, partly in hopes that the houseguests themselves would eventually find and read them along with interested surfers. Last year's non-winning star of the show Diane Henry referenced my tribute to her and her very nasty eviction on her own website, and this year I was assured Janelle would see everything I'd done. (Ironically, Diane and Janelle each finished fourth in their respective seasons - go figure.)
When the show ended Janelle visited her mom in Minnesota and wrote me how much she enjoyed my site, and she sent me some autographed shirts worn on the show and quite a few other signed goodies: what a wonderful surprise I found in my mailbox that day! It was really terrific and I'm ever grateful to her. I've auctioned a few of those items on Ebay to help make up for my lost income while forgetting to make a living all summer, but I'm keeping most of it.
I really hustled through October then, working my butt off and letting this site slide even further into disuse, and since then I have no excuse as I said for not updating. I'm going to try to revive it a bit now, finally, although I don't think I'll continue posting new cams and links daily: there are enough of them out there worthy of notice but it gets to be too much to update them that often, so they'll be more erratic.
So I'm back for now at least. Whoever's out there checking in here (hopefully to return again), thanks very much for visiting. Hope you like what you find here.
11.25.05 @ 7:56 AM pdt [add 2 cents]
VH1 ran the UK Music Hall of Fame show this weekend with some decent performances and some terrific archive footage. Unfortunately there were some glaring omissions in the tv version that are practically criminal.
The BBC website has a huge section devoted to Peel, a BBC DJ for 30 years who was as much a part of British music as any musician until his death last year. He championed indie and non-pop, non-mainstream bands & artists and helped make many of them far more successful than they might have otherwise been. He also presented live performances that often rival any band's best show or record - listen to selections from the Peel Sessions for a taste. To omit him from the VH1 version of the show just because he was a Brit DJ and apparently thought of as unknown in the USA is ridiculous and insulting to his huge contributions to music.
Ditto with Joy Division. They're brilliant, always have been, and they even performed at the London awards show earlier this month, doing their hit "Love Will Tear Us Apart" that any "I Love the 80s" fan knows. So why cut them out?
This is the mack daddy of webcams. It's a man-made watering hole in Botswana, Africa built by Pete Le Roux to give the animals a place to gather and drink where they'd be safe from poachers. National Geographic has given us a live stream of it that runs 24/7 and it'll blow your mind.
