Alexis Gilliland, South Arlington, VA
A couple of days ago Challenger #22 blew in, if you will excuse the expression, and I figured your mailing had gone out just ahead of the powerful Katrina.
After expressing concern to Lee, I looked ona map tto find Shreveport tucked away in the northwestern corner of Louisiana, pretty much out of harm’s way, while she went on the net to check out the satellite pictures of your neighborhood, pretty much confirming what the map had suggested. We hope that this is in fact the case. Katrina missed us completely; all we felt was a breeze and depthless heartache.
Locally, there were some tornados touching down in suburban Maryland as Katrina blew past, and spectacular cloud formations, but the news coming out of the Gulf Coast is simply appalling. Because of subsidence, New Orleans sits in a levee-enclosed bowl that is 80 percent below sea level, and when the levees broke the day after the storm, N.O. was 80 percent under water. Sigh. The mayor had ordered the evacuation of his city of 485,000, but a lot of people stayed because they had no money, no car, and no place to go. Now they are collecting the survivors (a headline guesses “thousands” dead) and moving them out, too, but it will be a long time if ever before those people can return home.
Why? New Orleans is, or used to be, two cities, one rich and mostly white, the other poor and mostly black, and it is dead certain that the rich white city will be rebuilt before the poor black one. Given N.O.’s site below sea level, a case could be made for not rebuilding the white city, either, as suggested by Dennis Hastert, GOP Speaker of the House who has been doing some serious backpedaling.
The cover art [to Chall #22] was striking, though I would have done the font and placing of the title differently. As it is, it looks almost like an afterthought.
Charlotte and Jerry Proctor are entertaining on end of the world games. When I was at the Bureau of Standards in the late ‘60s, I took a course in radiochemistry from Dr. Charles Schwab, the Bureau’s radiation health officer. In those days, building fallout shelters and stocking them for four weeks, as urged by the Administration, was all the rage. Since the class had all been cleared for Secret or better, Dr. Schwab gave us the official data on fallout, and had the class calculate how long it would take before one wuld have a 50-50 chance of surviving upon leaving the shelter. The class average was four months, not four weeks, so the Proctors weren’t the only ones playing end of the world games.
Your own “Monster’s Brawl” was excellent, probably my favorite piece in the issue, though your “Symphony of Books” was well written. Alas, I am not enough of a bibliophile to find the discovery of first editions in a yard sale or huckster room to be a thing of drama.
After expressing concern to Lee, I looked ona map tto find Shreveport tucked away in the northwestern corner of Louisiana, pretty much out of harm’s way, while she went on the net to check out the satellite pictures of your neighborhood, pretty much confirming what the map had suggested. We hope that this is in fact the case. Katrina missed us completely; all we felt was a breeze and depthless heartache.
Locally, there were some tornados touching down in suburban Maryland as Katrina blew past, and spectacular cloud formations, but the news coming out of the Gulf Coast is simply appalling. Because of subsidence, New Orleans sits in a levee-enclosed bowl that is 80 percent below sea level, and when the levees broke the day after the storm, N.O. was 80 percent under water. Sigh. The mayor had ordered the evacuation of his city of 485,000, but a lot of people stayed because they had no money, no car, and no place to go. Now they are collecting the survivors (a headline guesses “thousands” dead) and moving them out, too, but it will be a long time if ever before those people can return home.
Why? New Orleans is, or used to be, two cities, one rich and mostly white, the other poor and mostly black, and it is dead certain that the rich white city will be rebuilt before the poor black one. Given N.O.’s site below sea level, a case could be made for not rebuilding the white city, either, as suggested by Dennis Hastert, GOP Speaker of the House who has been doing some serious backpedaling.
The “whitest” section of New Orleans, the Garden District, survived Katrina and the flood without much damage, as did the French Quarter. On the other hand, some “white” neighborhoods caught hell (see “Survivor”, infra). All a matter of which levees broke, where. Of course New Orleans must reopen; as Don Markstein says in his Guest Editorial, it’s a natural site for a port.
Charlotte and Jerry Proctor are entertaining on end of the world games. When I was at the Bureau of Standards in the late ‘60s, I took a course in radiochemistry from Dr. Charles Schwab, the Bureau’s radiation health officer. In those days, building fallout shelters and stocking them for four weeks, as urged by the Administration, was all the rage. Since the class had all been cleared for Secret or better, Dr. Schwab gave us the official data on fallout, and had the class calculate how long it would take before one wuld have a 50-50 chance of surviving upon leaving the shelter. The class average was four months, not four weeks, so the Proctors weren’t the only ones playing end of the world games.
Your own “Monster’s Brawl” was excellent, probably my favorite piece in the issue, though your “Symphony of Books” was well written. Alas, I am not enough of a bibliophile to find the discovery of first editions in a yard sale or huckster room to be a thing of drama.
posted by ;-p at 12:29 AM
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