Day 732: Shooting At 1507 Magazine St.

[Update: After a small email flurry, Councilmember Stacy Head has offered to convene a Lower Garden District meeting "at which time we can discuss a variety of quality of life issues affecting the area." Councilmember Fielkow (fellow Wisconsin alum) has promised to attend as well.]

Arrived home at 5:45PM to hear four crystal-clear gun shots at the corner of Magazine & Race streets. My front door is not right on Magazine St., which prevented me from seeing anything, and my first instinct was to shut the door, lock it and call D and my neighbor. (Only to find out that our AC was out thanks to the lightning.) From the front window I saw nothing and, then a couple of minutes later, people milling outside Mojo Coffeehouse pointing at St. Vincent’s Guest House. Within a few more minutes, an NOPD cruiser and an ambulance were parked at the intersection, and a large black man was pulled out of the guest house on a stretcher. Good response time.

Since returning to town in early 2006, I’ve seen squad cars, with lights on and sirens blaring, at that joint almost everyday. Young, old, men and women are lined up for questioning, thrown out for makeshift meth labs and drug dealing and taken away after overdosing, but never have I observed someone carried out on a stretcher there following a shooting. Again, I’ve only somewhat freaked out about increased criminal activity in my neighborhood since people began to trickle back into the post-K city – drug deals on my block, D’s car’s hubcaps, mail and packages stolen, etc. – because there is a lot worse going on all over this city. Yet, there are few things quite as jarring and visceral as hearing the sequential firing of a gun not a hundred yards away from you.

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Standing outside with a lot of nervous energy, I called Brian Denzer and blathered at him non-stop for about five minutes, while he calmly listened. “Hope this makes the blotter … please record it for your crime map … is there a way to indicate hotspots on the map … I’m gonna write Stacy Head right now … sick of walking by that place all the time and being scared out of my wits … ” Brian advised me to talk to call the Captain over at Sixth District and discuss with him all I’ve observed about St. Vincent’s in the last year and also to find out who owns the property (one Peter Schreiber – can someone let him know I’d like a word with him?).

So, yeah, after standing in the rain for 30 minutes waiting for the Magazine St. bus (downtown traffic was all farkakte thanks to the first Saints home game), no AC and a shooting at St. Vincent’s this evening, you can say I’m looking forward to a long weekend of doing absolutely nothing.

August 30, 2007 | crime, new orleans | 13 Comments »

Day 732: Grab Bag

Who Killed Beethoven? - Dun dun dun duuuuuuun …

Examiners in the UK are asked to “make science easier” – Unintelligent design crosses the pond, thus making us not the only G7 nation with low expectations of our kids.  Or as England’s equivalent of the DoE(dumacation) responds,”Deliberately increasing the proportion of easier questions is a clear example of lowering the bar.”

Teachers, bypass NCLB and read your kids some Rilke!  In English or the original German?

All Your IP Are Belong To Teh Google – Google may own anything you work with in any of their services including Maps API, Google Earth, Documents, Calendar, GMail … and Blogger. 

Knowledge Is Priceless, But Textbooks Are Not – A mother sending her child off to college offers great advice on locating discount textbooks online.  Wait until girlie goes to grad school and sees the pricetags on Springer-Verlag and Elsevier journal subscriptions.  Yet another reason to support Project Gutenberg and fight the publishing industry’s daylight robbery.

Mysterious Fairyland Spider Web Found In Texas - Dang!  I was hoping it came from one Shelob-sized spider.  Why do “Texas” and “spider” remind me of the following bumper sticker?

| books, computing & internet, education, global, music, project gutenberg, science & technology | 1 Comment »

Day 732: An Inkling Of Hope

brimful, who lives all the way in California, gets it.  I still have a tiny bit of hope for America, as long as our national dialogue soon refocuses on how to make America better.

It is bad enough that the handling of Katrina was so deplorable. What’s far worse is the notion that the nation grew tired of talking about it. Or worse yet that, even now, knowing everything we know about how this disaster was exacerbated by flagrant mishandling, do people choose to talk about the looting that occurred during the hurricane. I know it’s wrong to make snap judgments, but when people find the first noteworthy topic about Katrina to be the looting, I immediately hold those people under deep suspicion and question their awareness about the world, the country, and the administration currently governing us.

I don’t mean to rant, but then again, maybe I do. It bothers me that there isn’t still widespread ranting about this. It bothers me that elected officials can discuss that the war in Iraq was one mistake after another and claim it is now of paramount importance to fix that and turn the tide. Yet, those same officials are dodgy and shuffle their feet, and would be all too happy to pretend there is nothing left to be done in New Orleans.

| family & friends, government, new orleans, recovery | 3 Comments »

NOLA Recovery Czar, Ed Blakely, is skewered by locals and a reporter in this CNN’s Keeping Them Honest segment.  Ha!  When the cameras and fabu reporter hair are far away, however, will this media exercise in calling his “penchant for phony bullshit” have prompted Blakely to do his promised job?

| blurbs, government, new orleans, recovery | Comments Closed

Day 732: Second Anniversary Media Roundup

Jeffrey Buchanan of the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial – Bush Administration Misleads On Gulf Coast Rebuilding – “Despite the Bush Administration declaring to have done its job by sending the ‘big check’, a purported $116 billion, for rebuilding Gulf Coast communities, the article finds less then $35 billion available for rebuilding. Less then 42% of this money has been spent to date despite overwhelming continuing needs.”

NPR: Much Long-Term Recovery Aid Unspent – Another must-read (listen) for those taken in by the “$114 billion in aid” number, which Bush and Donald Powell continue to bring up as the completion of federal obligation in this area.

New Orleans Councilwoman Shelley Midura also sets the record straight at Daily Kos – New Orleans: Mission NOT Accomplished

CNN presents Katrina: Two Years Later – Features Karen Gadbois, Laureen Lentz, Squandered Heritage, PRC‘s Michelle Kimball and the City’s erroneous demolitions. Makes me want to help Idabelle Joshua move into Penya Moses-Fields‘s home.

CNBC’s Against The Tide: The Battle For New Orleans – Features the Citizens’ Road Home Action Team and Shell. My dad liked it, so it must be good.

NPR: New Orleans Suffers Crisis in Mental Health Care – This made me pull the car over to weep. “Family members of the mentally ill plot ways to get their loved ones put in jail, because the parish prison has 60 adult psychiatric beds where patients can get consistent care.”

Anderson Cooper: No Right For Us To Feel Fatigued

NPR’s News & Notes: Bouncing Back From Katrina – Farai Chideya interviews our very own Cliff, Eban and G-Bitch.

Chris Johnston talks about Rising Tide and rebuilding with Christopher Penn of Financial Aid Podcast.

Alan Gutierrez makes a guest appearance at HuffPo in When The Saints Go Marching In.

Dave Zirin, winner of Most Entertaining Rising Tide 2007 Speaker, gives us a high-five at The Houston Chronicle.

Last but not least …

Their money?! – Speaking at a New Orleans school, our Headless Of State makes an insensitive and divisive comment.

The citizens of this country thus far have paid out $114 billion in tax revenues — their money — to help the folks down here.

Never mind the blatant lie of the $114 billion payout (see first and second articles in this list) , did your president just say “their money” to us? Funny, I don’t recall not paying federal taxes to the United States government on moving to Louisiana, and didn’t get a note that a tax discount, much less a reprieve, was proffered on Louisianans for being storm/flood victims. No, we paid our taxes like all good Americans. Therefore, a portion of that $114 billion is mine and, horrifyingly enough, that of the thousands who died here during the storm and the subsequent flood because the federal money promised to further shore up our levee system was busy being spent elsewhere. Calling it “their money” divorces us from the American family, while New Orleans and Louisiana are very much a part of the Union. That Bush and his idiotic supporters think we are not – or, even worse, that we are second-class citizens – is the crux of the slow recovery.

As goes New Orleans, so goes the nation. Mark my words.

Updates: A.M In The Morning – Katrina, Bush’s New Orleanian Betrayal and The American Way

BBC: In Pictures: New Orleans’s Brass Bands

| federal flood, government, louisiana, media, new orleans, recovery, we are not ok | 1 Comment »

Day 731

August 29, 2007 | federal flood, hurricane katrina, louisiana, new orleans | Comments Closed
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