1. I’ve been invited to guest-blog on Sepia Mutiny for a month! The illest Hindu contacted me recently:

You would bring something fresh and important to the conversations on the site, in all your capacities, including scientist, knowledge-disseminatrix, and New Orleans resident. Of course, the point on Sepia is to work from desi angles, but as you may have noticed, we interpret this quite broadly. With the Katrina anniversary coming up, it would be, I think, valuable to have your voice and your perspective.

*squeee* This is a real honor, y’all. If it goes sans hiccup, coconuts that are not thrown at me will be offered to Ganesh. Incidentally, Siddhartha and our very own Lolis Eric Elie know one another. Of course.

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2.  It’s shaping up to be a busy week.  Between a deadline at work and the Rising Tide conference this weekend (and being joined at the hip to Mark Folse until our panel discussion is over), I may need an occasional pat on the head with a There there, it’s ok.  How about recruiting Kalypso as Junior Alternate Conference Coordinator to cover for Oyster and me in case we both go insane simultaneously?

Here’s the latest list of Speakers and Panelists. I want you to go to the registration page NOW and sign up NOW even if you don’t pay online. We need a headcount and will gladly accept cash at the door the day of.

$20 for an entire day of hanging out at the Yat Club with us and all of the fine New Orleans reporting talent we worked hard to get together, with a boxed Dunbar’s lunch, is the best deal I’ve seen in these parts yet. It’s worth saving up for. Of course, if you’re feeling especially generous, please feel free to donate some more to the cause. We’ll need it for post-conference meds.

Ashley Morris: Why You Should Come To The Rising Tide Conference

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3.  The “very strong tropical wave [that] moved off the coast of Africa” yesterday is freaking me out. The vibes ain’t nothin’ but the vibes, but they are all we have to go on in post-deluge, pre-probable-next-deluge New Orleans. Pete assures me that there is a lot of dust coming off Africa north of the winds, which should help smother them before they aggregate into something large, snarly and … large and snarly.

The internet is alive and well in the nation to our north, but who wants to sit at a computer when there is Toronto to see, food to eat, pictures to take, a wedding to attend, and more food (delicious Greek food) to eat?

A vote of confidence for Toronto is that it is a city in which I can live. Truly multicultural to its core, Toronto doesn’t flinch at the appearance of new cultures or the marriage of disparate ones, and welcomes all with open arms. The Indian, Chinese and Greek food are like eating at mom’s or an aunt’s kitchen and even the littlest of taverns have the best beverage selections. When Nepalese, Chinese, Vietnamese, Jamaican, French, Arab, and mixed-culture families rush down the street loudly conversing or arguing in their native tongues and a South Indian restaurant boasts its name and menu in Tamil and no other language, you know you’re in the real.

I missed and was missed at Geek Dinner 2: Loki’s Revenge. But, D, a bunch of Wisconsin compadres, and I Greeked (and Chinesed and Jamaicaed and geologized) out at the wedding celebration of our dear friends, Tim and Helen, instead:

• Oot And Aboot In Toronto
• At The Chinese Lantern Festival In Ontario Park
• Shaking Our Moneymakers At The Big Fat Greek Wedding Reception
• Staring At Horseshoe Falls (and arguing with D over the usage of the term escarpment)

It was great to see the Lee clan and members of the old Wisconsin gang – Tim, Helen, Mike, Katya, Andy – make new ones and get busy on the dance floor with Dave and Machelle. Helen’s dad, Demetrios, is a wizard with a mean cut of the rug to Zorba The Greek.

The mission of VatulBlog is as follows: To leave behind a free, searchable repository of data, research, and a somewhat coherent set of my thoughts about geoscience, computing, the internet, free books, disaster, diaspora, culture navigation, and, lately, living in New Orleans.

In 1991, this high schooler, who didn’t foresee weblogs, began to write long emails to friends on the topics of politics and science education. The ones that resembled essays were translated into HTML/XML/PHP and archived on older incarnations of my website. Proto-blogger here then found Blogspot in 2002 (reluctantly) and, two years ago, WordPress (eagerly). Each discussion of import that dozed in the annals of my various email Inboxes was funneled into a Maitri post and out it went.

Why the painful details of my blog-volution? Information is power. Knowledge is power. When I find potentially-useful information and create it through discussion or thought, I share it so that many learn from it (including me, mostly me, who always learns more from further discussion).

In a recent email, Michael Hart of Project Gutenberg said, “One believes knowledge is power means don’t share it and I remark that this leaves a world filled with darkness. The other believes that knowledge is power means share it, and I remark that this leaves a world filled with light. ‘Tis better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness.” The power of my knowledge is in giving it away so that we all know that much more, the world is that much better to live in. For me, there is no money or personal power to be gained from information archival and dissemination. VatulBlog is the online manifestation of that ethic.

This philosophy was underscored during and after Katrina. A displaced resident of New Orleans and a loud civic voice, I had no stomach for superficial news and what Christiane Amanpour describes well as “happy-camper war-and-disaster-zone travelogue” (HT, Ray). I was confused and frustrated from not knowing what was going on with the city, so I pacified myself by stepping in as a reporter and turning VatulBlog into a bullhorn in the NOLA PA system network. This was my catharsis and each time I received an encouraging comment, letter or phone call from an anonymous emigre, it reminded me that I was not alone, others were suffering a lot more and I had to keep writing.

My blog was a single candle. Soon, I found other lights like WetBankGuide, GulfSails, and Gentilly Girl, and the beacon that is Think New Orleans, which shares a lot of my own standards on knowledge work, information, content, archival, and sharing. The fire caught from there. Writing about New Orleans over and above their jobs, not as their jobs – the woes, the recovery, the administrative blunders from the federal government on down, and our own exploration of identity and the nature of self in a city hit by an unnatural disaster – all of the NOLA blogs linked to from my site share that conscience and that personal touch. A greater free, searchable, linked repository of news, data, research and a somewhat coherent set of thoughts on the re-discovery of ourselves.

It was also through this blog that I found Sepia Mutiny, the vibrant and thoughtful salve to that within me which is Indian, Kuwaiti, American, and everything in between.

As I told someone yesterday, “One cannot talk about the truth of anything unless one has lived it, and I cannot for the life of me begin to see the truth [in New Orleans] even while going through this for almost a year now.” Sixteen years after fleeing Kuwait, I don’t know its truth. VatulBlog is not here to give you the truth. It is here to provide information so that you make your own choice. Having a sea of options and viewpoints makes a more enlightened human being. What you make of it is the truth, your truth.

I don’t suggest that one ought not to make money from writing, even if it is using the blog medium. After all, Chris Cooper and Robert Block are Rising Tide‘s keynote speakers and they are making money off a book which we support. In fact, I’ve purchased the book, as I did those of Brinkley, Ray (yes, our Ray), Codrescu, Rose, and Piazza.  But, these people are professionals, the children of New Orleans, its writers and ambassadors even before the storm, those providing a lasting chunk of wonderfully-written and researched information heretofore unseen.

New Orleans is not my domain, anyone on this planet can write about it, but I would encourage those who know it the most and can offer original perspective and news that really helps, whether it makes them money or not. VatulBlog and my principles are completely within my jurisdiction, however, and I cannot give space within it to those who wish to make money from what has already been done and will continue to happen here.

A deep bow to Project Gutenberg, Sepia Mutiny, Think New Orleans, the New Orleans bloggers, and every real information seeker and giver on earth.

Last night, Loki, the lovely Alexis, and I ventured downtown in my trusty grey steed to attend the premiere of Spike Lee’s documentary When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts. All yesterday long, Loki and I tossed around the idea of attending only two hours of the event to not going altogether. Out of some sense of duty to New Orleans, reporting, and abject curiosity, drive to the center of the action we did.

We got our first inkling of This Is A Bad Idea when we arrived at the corner of Loyola & Girod to find NOPD directing traffic and signs everywhere blaring “Event Parking $10.”  It was 7:25pm, the movie was to start in five minutes, and hundreds on foot were just descending on the New Orleans Arena. That’s when Loki and I looked at one another, decided that we were not in the mood to be herded, and promptly donated my (free) tickets to a group of college students standing outside the parking area and broke free from premiere orbit. Wow, I’ve never seen a crowd like this at a Saints game.

The three of us had approached the movie with a feeling of dread, trepidation and responsibility. Did we really want to spend one-sixth of a day watching a documentary on the destruction of New Orleans with ~5000 other people suffering from the same post-traumatic stress? Did we want to watch a child, a hapless flood victim, get buried? Were we in the mood to watch a very intense Spike Lee documentary with a legion of people just itching to blame Katrina on one set of people or the other? Did we want to entertain more theories? No. We are angry enough.

Molly’s in the Market it was, and off we went.  Talking about Scottish tartan, MOM’s ball, Under Odysseus, and Midsummer Mardi Gras (and watching Siren Mae, Charlotte’s chihuahua-dachshund-terrier diva-dog, slurping down frozen coffees) was a lot more fun.

WDSU‘s News at 10 showed footage from the red carpet and interviews with Al Sharpton and Cynthia Hedge-Morrell. HBO will show the movie in two parts on Monday and Tuesday nights; those of us who don’t get HBO can watch it online at a later date.

No offense to Spike or his documentary, but four hours of Katrina and event-logistics misery was just something in which I wasn’t willing to invest.

Update: A short yet more upbeat review of the movie by Spasticrobot