I've gotten a few things to work (the CNN hourly roundup), but most dont'. With this clip, I get pnly sound and a black screen.

A couple friends of mine live in Metairie. They're not there now, thankfully, but I just saw the footage of the area their house is in.

Sometimes I find that Firefox does a better job of playing video that's "inline" in web pages. Your mileage may, as always, vary.

Of course, they have a sunken livingroom...

I wonder if they managed to get any of their stuff out.

I've posted a before & after comparison here.

30d01m07s N 90d07m17s W

And that looks like a 200-foot breach, similar width to the canal.

My work PC coughed up blood yesterday, and I'm using a Sun with the browser equivalent of a crystal radio, Netscape 4.73 on an old Sun.

I'm surprised it can handle pictures of any sort.

My thoughts are with the people & others affected by this - across what must be a huge area now. We can hope there may be some good consequences from all the destruction & suffering.

This sort of thing hasn't happened in America in a long time. The closest I can think of is the Chicago fires. Except in Chicago, people could still say: "we will rebuild this goddamn town. We will start over on the smoldering ruins." You can't rebuild when the ruins are under 6 feet of water. So it's a real refugee situation.

(Well, ok, without building a multi-square-mile elevated mound on the present site.)

If the current administration were halfway able to find their asses with both hands sewn into the back pockets of their pants, they'd be making the public question of where the new city goes -- can the historic site be saved?, etc. -- and how it's going to be paid for front and center in the national dialog.

That would violate the neocon rule about never doing anything that benefits anyone who isn't you, so I don't expect anything like that to happen, but it's some of what's needed.

Yeah, Graydon, you're right. There is the distinct possibility that they can't rebuild at all on the present site of the city. Also the distinct possibility that even if they do, this will all get replayed verbatim in another year. Or two. Or... maybe even in the next two months, before they've even finished patching the levees, because this hurricane season isn't over yet.

And on the idea of replacing New Orleans, rather than rebuilding it, I did some brainstorming on that in my own blog earlier today.