Disaster Tours Of New Orleans: I’m unsure how I feel about this.
Pros:
– Like Mardi Gras, the business will bring tourists into the city and resultant money into our economy
– Heightens awareness of what happened in New Orleans after the storm. People can now see the devastation and the recovery firsthand and pass on real data, as opposed to hearsay.
Cons:
– “Hurricane Katrina Tour – America’s Worst Catastrophe!” sensationalizes the disaster, likens it to a t-shirt or those annoyingly ubiquitous wristbands, and markets to (and will invariably attract) the American voyeur
– Unlike Mardi Gras, the tour is designed to highlight the disaster aspect of New Orleans. It will go through the most devastated areas in and around the city, where locals are still picking up the pieces, in a manner of speaking. Would you like to be a stop on the safari of the Louisianan bush? Participating in Mardi Gras is fun; watching people rebuild or mourn while you just sit there in a luxury bus is not.
Let’s face it, New Orleanians have learned to treat tourists as a necessary annoyance. Is it really going to be any worse than the tourist who takes pictures of you raking leaves in the front yard of your Lower Garden District home (this happened to me) or the frat boy who pukes up his Huge Ass Beer on your front stoop? Let’s hope the tour turns out to be more of an informative experience than satisfaction for a bunch of mere Peeping Toms.
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Animation Of All 2005 Hurricanes: NASA has assembled a visualization of all storm activity that affected the Gulf and Atlantic coasts in 2005. It is worth downloading the ~50MB file to watch the year’s activity as storms form, grow and decrease in size, with tracks provided for all of the named ones. We think of hurricanes as these awesome and decisive forces of nature, when a few tracks look like the markings of a one-year-old who just found a pen. I found this video very educational and highly recommend it to teachers, scientists and generally curious people everywhere.
[Yes, I am currently experiencing a “Science Rocks!” moment.]
I share your “science rocks” moment. That animation is way cool!
Greetings,
On a recent web search we found your blog postings that relate to the recent hurricanes. We at the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank (http://hurricanearchive.org) invite you to upload your postings or stories to this public database as part of a nationwide memory bank that will help historians write the history of these storms. A collaborative project between George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media, the University of New Orleans, and the Smithsonian Institution the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank is collecting, preserving, and presenting the stories, images, and responses of the devastating 2005 hurricane season.
If you decide to contribute, your stories will be credited to you and you will retain copyright over that data. When we display images, blog postings, or podcasts, we also create a bibliographic citation as a reference for those using the memory bank for research. If at any time you change your mind, you may contact us (info@hurricanearchive.org) and we will delete your materials.
Still wondering who we are and what we do? This project builds on prior work by George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media, and other partners such as the Smithsonian Institution and the Library of Congress, to collect and preserve history online, especially through the ECHO (http://echo.gmu.edu) project and the September 11 Digital Archive (http://911da.org). Check out these sites and see what you think.
We are collecting all types of information, and we encourage you and your friends and family to submit stories, documents, images, or audio files through our website: http://hurricanearchive.org.
Thank you!
Hurricane Digital Memory Bank Staff
looking for combos of katrina and safari re: mardi gras indians and found your post. thanks so much. necessary nuisance is right now more than ever.