Remembering Katrina

in better times - only one place this happens: the child and associates

 

That last phone call was not going well.  From 2500 miles away we were doing our best to convince (read: beg) our girl to leave the city ahead of the storm.  In the past decade since she'd made New Orleans her home, she'd stayed behind for every other hurricane, but to us this was different.  She was always an exceptionally stubborn child and this moment was no different.  She had yet to reach a conclusion about the impending Katrina.  But before we could talk again the circuits were overloaded and we only had the ability to communicate by texting - and even those were spotty.  

The moment we got a message that she was in a car heading west, with one of her paintings, two dogs, a cat (or two?) some small critters - I can't remember - various other treasures along with more people than there were seats, and  on her way to someone's grandmother's house in Texas, we breathed that first sigh of relief.  The hurricane hit New Orleans the next day.

But only a few days later she turned around, got on a bus and met up with another friend and drove back into the devastated city when most people were still holed up far away glued to their televisions watching Anderson Cooper.   When George Bush was telling Brownie that he was doing a heck of a job, my child was making her way back home.
They drove in through a back way with a carload of supplies including as much dog and cat food as she could find.  The Red Cross wasn't even fully set up and in fact, left town not much later when Hurricane Rita was looming.  The only support system aside from the National Guard that remained was the Salvation Army.

She would send me texts that the Salvation Army were the ones roaming the streets looking for residents and giving them MREs (meals ready to eat) and bottles of water, no questions asked.  It was the Salvation Army who stayed through Hurricane Rita and never abandoned the people who stayed behind.  For that alone, I never pass a ringing bell anymore without dropping something in that bucket just in gratitude for their silent willingness to go where no other organization would in those early days of Katrina.  And for providing my kid with water and yummy meals in a bag.

She found her apartment building still standing but the roof in perilous shape with gaping holes.  Her latest canvas, stored high on a closet shelf was the only thing dry.   Her camera was still on the table exactly where she'd forgotten it, untouched, but the remainder of the space was soaked and battered by the hurricane.  The building next door where an elderly man lived and did not vacate was also devastated.  She wrote that one wall was entirely gone, but the shelf across the room, full of papers and other stuff was not touched - it looked like a macabre diorama ready for viewing.  Yet he remained in his home.

She was able to charge her phone through the generosity of the firehouse next door and the various generators they were using.  They even gave the elderly man a little power so he could have a television in his newly ventilated apartment.
She roamed the neighborhood daily feeding cats and dogs.  Some she managed to free from the tie-ups that were used pre-storm in what was once a backyard.  She was there well before animal rescue could get into the neighborhood.  The animals were terrified and hungry.  It would be weeks and sometimes never before people were reunited with their animals.  She never stopped feeding those that were still left behind. 

When George Bush came to Jackson Square, some residents (including the kid) tried to get there to talk to him.  She said the National Guard was ordered to keep residents away.   Those residents included those who never left and those, like my daughter who managed to come back home to lend a hand.  But the President wasn't there to see them - he was there for a photo opportunity that fell flat.

Through all this time our only means of communication was short texting.  The cell towers that were destroyed in the both hurricanes crippled communication along with the overload.  
It would be a long time before we talked again.  But each day she faithfully sent a text just so we would know she was safe.  She didn't evacuate for Rita.  She just taped up tarps and hoped for the best which was what happened. 

It would be months before mail service was restored.  It would be weeks before those dangerous and smelly refrigerators were removed.  There all kinds of circles of hell within Katrina, but one of them - the fact that animals couldn't be transported with the half-assed public evacuation was inhumane, heartless and needless.  Thankfully it will never happen again to the extent it did with Katrina.  

I can only say that on this anniversary, a half decade already - that the face of the city is changed forever because of the devastation from Katrina's battering, but New Orleans, like my kid, is never one to give up and call it a day.  To that, I raise a glass and say Salud, and please pass me a beignet.

And the artist's collection is here.

The Aging of Meg Whitman: Campaign Fatigue is Only the Beginning

The ageless Brown and the aging Whitman

It's the end of August and the November 2010 elections loom large; time to take a minute to skewer a candidate.  That candidate, of course, would be gazillionaire Meg Whitman who is running for CEO Governor of California against the venerable Jerry Brown.

Campaign fatigue is taking a toll on Whitman.  While Jerry Brown is aging well, Meg Whitman is rapidly aging; the stress of seeking a political office for which she offers no credible experience is showing.  Brown is 72 and Whitman is 54.  Side by side, one would have quite the time discerning that almost 20 years separate the two.  Important?  Not at all, but perhaps it is a fleeting look of how well each holds up under stress.  

My money is on Brown.


Recent polls show that both candidates are tracking evenly; about 34%(Whitman) to 37% (Brown) with about a quarter of registered voters undecided.  No one should be anxious about the numbers that favor either candidate at this point.  The undecided numbers are more compelling.  Brown will woo them with his pragmatic pitch about experience and public service.  Whitman will woo them with her undeniably slick brochures and eBay experience, and the love from Romney, Gingrich, Cheney and her best pal, McCain.  Some say Palin endorses Whitman, but she isn't listed on the candidate's website.   Kudos to Whitman for avoiding the mama grizzly.

And speaking of wooing - Whitman just dropped another $13M into her campaign bringing her self-funded total to a grand $104M, just a few million short Michael Bloomberg's landmark total.  It seems quite likely that she will surpass Bloomberg in the Guinness Book of Idiots who spent entirely too much personal money on their political campaigns.  Jerry Brown has a hot $23M at his disposal and is saving most of it for late fall.  His assist comes from the unions who are currently spending their own funds on several advertisements supporting Brown which counter the argumentum ad nauseam that is the Whitman television, radio and print barrage.

Whitman's campaign has printed up another booklet/brochure/pretty book with pictures, the sequel to her first attempt at telling voters what she is all about.  Both publications are mostly graphs, charts and pictures.  They give the reader sound bites that encompass a travelogue of what a good politician ought to be doing.  Both editions while slick and pretty, are poor substitutes for conveying actual knowledge and experience.  We know that Meg has had a steep learning curve with regard to the California constitution and general civics; she had trouble getting her private citizen self to the polls to vote in past years and made public gaffes while on the campaign trail that a 12th grader who studied civics would not make.  No one should mistake the Whitman candidacy for anything but a facade of what a politician ought to look like.  Like many Silicon Valley businesses and real estate during the boom years, bricks but no mortar. 

Divided on Prop 8, and with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals requiring all briefs to be filed before the election, it is likely that both candidates will reach out to both sides to seek support.  In Brown's case, as the current Attorney General for California, he is already on record siding with overturning Prop 8 on the merits of the law (not to mention general fairness).  Whitman was an understated supporter of Prop 8.  Her campaign may reach out to Prop 8 supporters with message that a Whitman government would not support overturning the prop.  However, even the conservative Orange Country registered slammed Whitman when she naively gave her opinion about the matter to the press after Judge Walker's ruling, parroting the right wing/religious message that marriage should be between a man and woman.  Too bad she didn't follow the court case which was not about that.  

Perhaps next time one of her campaign staffers might actually give her a more reliable soundbite; that is, something that is prepared for her to read since she is proving to be as clueless as ever about what it takes to run a state like California.  If only she and current Governor Arnold were on speaking terms - he might give her a hint about how fickle employees citizens can be.

Whitman, a thousand years younger in 2009

Obama, the Mensch at Recovery.Gov

Your Money at Work from White House on Vimeo.

I just received another missive from Professor/President Obama tonight in my email. Not a day goes by that I don't hear from him. Much like my children, I am glad he keeps in touch.

I am sure that many of you received the same peppy note too. But this one was a bit of a jaw dropper because it is the very first time I have seen the mega billion money trail. Or the full stimulus bill. Or the information for how the money will be spent and tracked. The website is easy to navigate.

While the monkeying around to get the bill out of the house and senate seemed like a poor excuse for a root canal, it is finally signed, sealed and almost delivered.

It is, of course, not a perfect solution by any means, but it is a start. A good start. The frolicking up until the last minute by the Bickersons was worthy of a telenova. He said. She said. They said.

But in the end, it is about us. Our jobs. Our ability to obtain jobs, and the ability of the credit markets to start loosening up some so that lenders feel they can loan out money again.

And this time, it is quite clear that this President will make accountability a priority. We will know where the money is going. From the website they've set up we might even be able to talk about how well, or how badly it is working.

No matter what anyone thinks of the Bickerson's partisan tantrums, it is quite clear that the President is taking the high road. What a mensch.

Can We Get a Little Ethos with Our Bailout?

a little roast pork.....

Daschle, Geithner, Killifer. The list goes on with countless invisible others whose tax issues are not so much in the cross hairs of the media limelight at the moment. If you google "back taxes and elected officials" there are so many hits it can make your head spin.

Daschle knew in June about his tax problem and it only recently came to light by the Obama people? What happened to the 65-ish page application? We were under the impression that everyone applying for employment in the Obama adminstration would have to fill it out with full disclosure or risk being eliminated. Guess some people ran out of ink before they ran out of disclosures.

In 2008 Rep. Rangel, chair of the House Ways and Means owed 5k plus penalties in back taxes.

In spring 2007 it is alleged that over 450,000 federal employees owed back taxes. The total? About 3B. That is a pretty good chunk of change.

And just toss into the pot the number of other elected officials who owe back property taxes and personal income taxes. Factor that into the rest of the country.

Where's the ethos?

Never mind Wall Street. We've known for years and years that greed is a large part of that ethos. Let us look at the banks, primarily the larger banks who are failng rapidly and insist on blaming the consumer. They still refuse to look to themselves as the larger source of their problems. Never mind that they lent money like crazy to anyone who had a pulse with regard only to the how quickly they could make money on that loan by selling it, shanking it, or just by legal usury. The consumers kept up with the changing payments the best they could until they couldn't. The divisions of the banks were so badly managed that they actually didn't know that each was competing for the limited dollars from the same consumer. They never looked. They didn't care. One division could win. The other could lose. And it didn't matter until there were so many divisions failing that they began to rot the exterior and the bricks and mortar crumbled.

In order to make up those losses, the banks took on another practice. They decided that they would bleed the taxpayer/consumer from both ends at once. First, they would ask for a governmental (taxpayer) bailout and beg that they were only trying to help the consumer. Second they would send notices to thousands and thousands of those same consumers who owed them money through personal loans or credit cards and demand a hike in the interest rates just a tiny hair's breath from the legal definition of usury. And they are getting away with it so far.

Consumers, stretched to the limit with rising costs and shrinking paychecks, for those lucky enough to have paychecks, are coming home to find these notices in their mailboxes telling them that their interest rate increases will double and sometimes triple their payments. Multiply that and I do believe we might be able to fashion some $5 money chains around the globe and back again.

Taxpayers are paying the banks a double remedy. The mega remedy is the giant billion dollar bailouts - that the banks just sit and negotiate and swallow whole, through our governmental talking heads, and the other remedy is our nickel and dimes up their asses by our already depleted wages through their legal usury interst rate hikes.

Ethos? I think not.

Long live denial. It gets some through the night, and apparently through the day. We see it all over. Some people shop like they dropped in from another planet and didn't read the news. Merchants advertise and offer merchandise that makes you actually wonder who the heck is buying that stuff these days. Catalogs, while diminishing, still arrive with 3000 thread count sheets for $1000. The chances are more likely that the catalog itself will be used for bedding v. anyone ordering those sheets.

Even some Superbowl advertisers are still in the dense fog of denial. Yes, talking to you, Monster et al. Bored with your job? More like blessing the stars for being able to hang onto your job. Dead end job? Paycheck, and lucky to have one. Do your homework for crying out loud. And fix your websites. More than half the jobs you list are not even real jobs anymore. The don't exist except on paper. Those companies have shut the doors to new hires and aren't even entertaining resumes. They don't reply, they don't answer questions, and they aren't looking. Much of the recruitment teams are in the unemployment lines.

The credit markets are still as tightly locked up as they were when they put the padlocks on. The chains are still there. Just try to buy a car without a FICO score over 725. Don't even think about going to the bank for a loan. Venture Capital Richie Richs are sending around a fun little note to one another saying "oh oh, times are bad, sit on it, sit on it". Which makes them scared and over the top scrooge-like. So many small start-ups which are the heartbeat of new technology are folding their tents. Unless they got signed, sealed and delivered letters of funding, they aren't getting any. And there is cash money there. Billions of it, but like the banks, it isn't going anywhere.

Always in an ecomony that is sinking, and in a visibly stressed and depressed society, there are those who will always come up from bottom feeding for a bite of fresh meat. Those who can afford it the least, the poor, the elderly, the marginal who possess little common sense, these are the most vulnerable to these phishers. The numbers of letters, emails, phone calls from crooks is far surpassing the number of "change your phone service" solicitations ever recorded. People are getting all kinds of odd solicitations to "lower" their interest rates, "fix" their mortgages, "repair" their credit, "get" that car loan and more. This is the stuff that goes beyond greed to immoral in the worst way. But it is there, just like the roaches that take over when the lights are off.

Some recent articles have been saying that we Americans are quitting. We are giving up, mailing in the keys, shuttering the businesses all too soon. We aren't giving any remedy a chance.

How about it if we start with an ethos that ushers in integrity as the first layer? In the meantime I will take my 9 year old fat ass car in for another fix and tune.

We Will Pee On the Chaussure, Madam

The Pretend French Girls visiting Notre Dame

Not everyone is up on dog breeds. I do not mind at all when people ask what kind of dogs Lulu and Phoebe might be. Bostons are not all that common and outside of the United States, less so. It is fun to listen to people pronounce it - in France they would be Boostn Terreea, the last letter a long A. At least in France people had perhaps never seen a Boston and were very curious. Most of them. More on that later.

But as time goes by, back home, I am somewhat convinced that the dumbing down of Americans is getting worse than ever. Seriously. Let me begin with what Lulu and Phoebe are not:

• Pitbulls
• Nor twins (dogs are littermates, humans are twins)
• Bulldog Francais (although at least they also have smushy faces)
• Dalmations
• Pugs (seriously?)
• Minature Boxers (again, seriously?)
• Brother and sister (take a good looky there!)
• Mother and son (again.....)
• Chihauhaus (too many Taco Bell commercials)
• English Bulldogs

Sure, lots of people don't know much about dogs because it isn't high on their list of interests. I don't mind curious questions much. I just mind when they insist that we must be wrong and they are totally correct.

Phoebe is bigger than Lulu by about 5 pounds so people insist she must be the older one, and/or in fact, Lulu's mother. I would not have to worry about money if I got a nickel for every dropped jaw when I tell them that (little) Lulu is older than Phoebe by two years and both are spayed and will never be "mommies".

My other favorite is the Pitbull. Really? A 10 pound pitbull? Watch those ankles people!

In France there were several older citizens who had stories about Boston Terriers, or in their case, C'est Bulldog Francais that they might have had when they were children. Next up would be to exclaim how ugly they are and how much prettier poodles are. After the third comment like that I worked with Lulu who would already pee on command, to pee on their shoes. She did a masterful job of coming close to her mark. That sent them scurrying on their way. Nice? No. Necessary? Oui.

There are lots of dog breeds out there that I don't know anything about, and often identify them incorrectly. I have lots of sympathy for people who try and guess wrong. I don't, however, have much sympathy for people who insist that I am wrong and they are right - about my very own Lulu and Phoebe.

So to the lady today, who insisted they were Pitbulls and looked concerned for her very safety, I have this to say. Run. Run like the wind. Lulu just had a very big latte and she is looking at your shoes!

Don't Hate Me Cause I'm Beautiful

Don't hate me cause I'm beautiful. And do not ever touch my eyeball again woman. Tapioca, my tush.

Share a Slice of the Inaugural Luncheon Dessert

Thomas Hill painting, Yosemite Valley, 1865

Courtesy of the New-York Historical Society, Gift of Charles T. Harbeck

"The backdrop for the luncheon will be this painting, chosen for occasion, and borrowed from the New York Historical Society. The painting, "View of the Yosemite Valley," by Thomas Hill, reflects the majestic landscape of the American West and the dawn of a new era. The subject of the painting, Yosemite Valley, represents an important but often overlooked event from Lincoln's presidency—his signing of the 1864 Yosemite Grant, which set aside Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove of Giant Sequoias as a public reserve."

Yosemite Valley 2006

Happy inauguration! Today's foodie treat is courtesy of the new President's luncheon. It is a complicated, only a pastry chef would love type of dessert, called Cinamon Apple Sponge Cake. Our version is a bit easier, gluten free, and you can have it ready in about an hour.

In keeping with the Abe Lincoln theme for this inauguaration, the Yosemite painting is a nice touch. This painting, on loan from the New York Historical Society is in the room where the luncheon will take place. Abe was the one who in 1864 set aside the Yosemite Valley and surrounding Mariposa Grove full of sequioas, tall then and much taller now, as a public place. Thank goodness! Yosemite is one of our favorite places to go. The time between Thanksgiving and Christmas is a well kept secret. No one is there. Truly. It is cold, but there are no crowds anywhere. It almost seems sometimes like you are there alone with the majestic rocks. The photos that we took show Half Dome and the long stretch down the valley that is pretty much the scene in the painting, but about 160 something years later.

half dome, Yosemite 2006

Inauguration Day Apple & Pear Sponge Cakes

For our dessert, we used pears because we had them on hand, but apples are perfect too. We used gluten free waffles instead of Brioche, but both are tasty.

our gluten free easy verision

cast of characters

(adapted from the official inauguration luncheon

dessert, Apple Cinnamon Sponge Cake)

Serves 4

Butter and coat 4 large ramekins with white sugar, set aside

Preheat oven to 400 degrees

Ingredients

• 8 gluten free waffles
• 2lbs of apples or pears or a mix with enough leftover for the finish sauce
• 6 tablespoons butter
• scant 1/4 sugar (less is good)
• pinch salt
• pinch cinnamon
• pinch nutmeg
• pinch lemon zest
• 1/4 cup applesauce
• pinch of vanilla
• bourbon
• your favorite caramel sauce

Thaw the waffles and cut to fit ramekins. The remainder can be used for the sides if you wish. Melt 4 tablespoons of butter and brush on the thawed waffles. Insert one disk into each ramekin butter side down.

waffle side pieces

cutting the disks and side pieces

Set aside.

Melt 2 tablespoons butter in a medium sauce pan. Add the thinly sliced fruit and caramelize. Add the sugar, lemon, nutmeg, cinnamon, salt, and applesauce and let it cook until most of the liquid is evaporated about 10 minutes depending on the ripeness of the fruit. You want it to be soft but not mushy. Add a touch of vanilla when you set it aside to cool.

cooking the apple pear mixture

If you are using the leftover strips of waffle, fit it in the ramekin after you brush it with butter (butter side out). Push it down to make it solid and then fill the remainder with the apple/pear mixture, heaping it a bit on top. Add the top waffle and butter it too. Grate some fresh nutmeg on top with a bit of cinnamon and bake them on a baking sheet for about 20 minutes.

spoon in the filling

festive patriotic cakes baking

Be sure to save about a half to one cup of the filling for the finish sauce!

Cool for about fifteen minutes and if you used waffle sides, then run a knife around the edge and invert on a plate. If you didn't use the waffle sides, just serve in the ramekin. Either way is just as delicious.

Patriotic Cakes, cooling

Take the remaining apple/pear mixture and reheat. Add a bit more applesauce, a dash (large dash) of bourbon and heat it up until it reduces a bit. Spoon in about a cup of your favorite caramel sauce and melt it all together. Reheat gently and top the finished cakes with the sauce.

mixing in the caramel

Bourbon is a food group

Top with the caramel topping and either add a side of vanilla ice cream or a bit of whipped cream. Or none. Your choice.

Happy Inauguration and Bon Appetite!

Apple Pear Sponge Cake Voila!