Happy 59 years of independence to the land of my ancestors!

Between poring over tons of new data at work and Rising Tide preparation all while feeling like roadkill, I wish I had a tail.

From Channel3000.com, Madison, WI’s CBS news affiliate: Several FEMA Trailers May Open With Same Key

The Federal Emergency Management Agency will replace locks on as many as 118,000 trailers used by Gulf Coast hurricane victims after discovering that the same key could open multiple mobile homes.

The agency said some keys could open as many as 50 different locks — causing a security risk in heavily populated trailer parks in Louisiana and Mississippi.

A security risk? You think? Entire households along the Gulf coast have been reduced to one postage-stamp chunk of metal, their last refuge from the elements and others, and they have been given trailers without unique locks?

This isn’t just a risk in highly-populated trailer farms but also in cities like New Orleans, where burglary is a large problem. And all FEMA can do is issue trite statements.

This is one of the reasons the Rising Tide Conference is proud to host as its keynote speakers Chris Cooper and Robert Block, authors of Disaster: Hurricane Katrina and the Failure of Homeland Security. The latest post to the Disaster blog underscores DHS’s responses as “purely reactive,” i.e. not on the ball prior to the emergency.

The conference’s registration page IS UP. Please put yourself down for this conference which takes place on the weekend of August 25-27, 2006, with talks and discussion on Saturday the 27th and work/trip day on Sunday the 28th. We hope you join us!

In other news, I’m happy to see my icecream man back, but it looks like this person wasn’t.

I like this map.  Here’s the Virgin Islands, here’s Anguilla, here’s Antigua and, oh, the fierce patch of red-blue-white spectrum is the Big Ass Storm, which somehow warrants delineation with a giant yellow arrow.

Tropical Storm Chris

[The National Hurricane Center] forecast the storm [heading west-northwest at nearly nine mph], packing winds near 40 miles per hour, would reach the Bahamas by the weekend and Florida by early next week.

Although the storm will strengthen over the next five days, it will not turn into a hurricane before reaching the Bahamas, the NHC predicted.

If the storm crosses Florida and gets into the Gulf of Mexico, energy traders said it could disrupt U.S. oil and natural gas production and refining facilities located there.

Must these things happen when I am to leave town for a long weekend?

Update: “The Hurricane Hunters found much stronger winds than expected in Chris this afternoon.”  The best online weather source is Weather Underground, where Jeff Masters runs the Wunderblog.  Link to it, learn it, live it, love it.  Meanwhile, I repeat the Litany Aagainst Pre-Hurricane Freakout as first taught to me by Dave S.: “Stop worrying.  You know this happens every year about this time and you moved here anyway.”

This is too wacky not to share with the internet, given that it was the internet that caused it. A few hours ago, I received an email from a woman who lives in Abu Dhabi (that’s in the Middle East, for you geographically-challenged).  Sifting through the Kuwait forums on orkut (which I haven’t touched in ages thanks to work, New Orleans-related work, and MySpace), she came across my profile and remembered me as the girl who acted in a middle school play alongside her little sister back in 1987.

“Did you act in Othello with Seema?”

It was the Taming of the Shrew, but … nineteen years later, someone who watched me in her kid sister’s school play, all of us in full costume and makeup, remembers me enough to ask if I was the Maitri who lived in Kuwait and attended school in the same area.

Now for the true punch: Seema and I loved Wham! in middle school. Listening to an old George Michael song a few days ago, I thought of her, smiled and wondered what she is up to. Spooky.

The phrase “small world” is misused and abused in this country. If you meet someone who knows someone who knows your brother and all of you live in Greater Metro New Orleans, it’s not a small world, it’s a small city. When you live in New Orleans and your bartender’s best friend went to school with one of your best friends in Illinois, it’s a small country, not a small world.

An email from a woman in Abu Dhabi who stumbles across you online and informs you that your old friend, her sister, now lives and works in Kerala (southern India) … that constitutes a small world.

And, now, to annoy one and all (because the stupid song is stuck in my head and you must suffer with me), I give you:

It’s a world of laughter
A world of tears
It’s a world of hopes
And a world of fears
There’s so much that we share
That it’s time we’re aware
It’s a small world after all