I just upgraded MovableType (the software I use to maintain this blog) to the latest version, 3.2. I had been leaving comments and trackbacks turned off on my posts, due to spam. Now, I’m going to turn them on with new posts, since the new version of MovableType offers several options for catching spam messages and pings.
Feel free to comment away!

This Washington Post article gives some insight into why many poor people didn’t evacuate New Orleans before hurricane Katrina hit.
In particular, this comment caught my eye:

“It’s hard to just get up and go when you don’t have anything,” Jermaine said. “Besides, everything we know is in New Orleans.”

Many years ago, Katie was a semester-long substitute teacher in a high school special ed class. Many of her students were bussed from the poorer parts of Austin. After spring break, she asked her students where they had gone. She was shocked to learn that not only had most of them not gone anywhere, but that many of her students had never been outside Austin.
Guess I should add that to John Scalzi’s ‘Being Poor’ list: Being poor is never having been outside your hometown.

Rafe Colburn’s mother tells of relief efforts for Hurricane Katrina refugees in Orange, Texas. Also, make sure to read her update in the comments.

The news is all over the people who got stranded (or chose to stay) in New Orleans, but let’s not forget that they’re just the tip of the iceberg.
There are tens (or hundreds) of thousands of others who did get out before the hurricane hit. In the best of situations, these people are displaced from their homes and jobs for weeks to come. In the worst case scenario, their homes and/or jobs are gone for good. They have nothing but the clothes on their backs, and they won’t be going home for a long time if at all.
In Pflugerville, St. Mary’s Baptist Church is dealing with seventeen refugee families, and Katie is helping our church and the greater Pflugerville community to get involved in aiding them.
One of my coworkers said that the parents of one of the children on his son’s soccer team had 12 displaced relatives show up on their doorstep.
And those are just the stories I’ve heard about directly.
Imagine if a bunch of your relatives showed up on your doorstep and needed a place to live and other aid for weeks or months: you wouldn’t want to turn them away. At the same time, you’d be hard pressed to serve their needs yourself.
By all means, give to the Red Cross and other charities, but also see how you can help directly in your own community. With the devastation that this storm has caused, I’m sure you can find refugees in pretty much every community in the US.
Update: Katie heard from a neighbor who works in the middle school that a family in our subdivision had twelve displaced relatives show up on their door. This weekend, we’re going to try to get ahold of the family, make sure they’re aware of relief efforts that are already starting up via St. Mary’s Baptist Church, see what their needs are, and do what we can to get them help.

In Japan, a company is marketing nonalcoholic beer to children. Awesome!

Over at Defective Yeti, Matthew Baldwin has invited his readers to offer dating truisms. One commenter advised, probably wisely: If the guy can’t remember how many girls he’s slept with, that is a good sign that maybe he’s not the one for you.
As someone who has had a very limited number of sexual partners in my lifetime (sorry, no details), this got me wondering about people who’ve slept around a lot: at what point do you quit counting? And if you do remember, how to you decide to answer a new date’s query: to lie and say you don’t remember or to be truthful with a large number? Well, if you’re concerned about the size of the number and decide to lie about it, I imagine you might as well lie and say a much lower number rather than claiming not to remember.
Boy, life complications that I’ve never even considered.

This is so cool. This guy got photos of a praying mantis that had just caught a hummingbird.

Following on my recent good experience with Sony’s repair of my camera, I just had another very good support experience. I’ve worn a FreeStyle Shark Mako watch for several years, and I have been very pleased with it. I’m hard on watches, so that fact that I’ve worn it pretty much daily for several years is a positive indication of its durability. The only problem is that the plastic band has split two times. A couple of weeks ago, I sent it back to FreeStyle for its second new band and a battery ($24). On Friday, it arrived home. Only it was a new watch! No indication why they replaced the whole watch instead of just the band and battery, but I’m not complaining.

Gelf Magazine has a regular feature where they pair up reviewers’ quotes used in media advertising with the full reviews from which they were taken. Not surprisingly, the entire review is often not as flattering as the short quote used.
For instance, advertising for the HBO movie The Girl in the Cafe uses this quote from The Oregonian:

An endearing romantic comedy!

But here’s the paragraph from which that quote was pulled:

This new offering from HBO Films is at its heart a bit of political propaganda wrapped into an endearing romantic comedy that starts losing its laughs when it gets to Reykjavik and decides its teachable moment has arrived.

This is awesome!

I just ran across this great quote by Eleanor Roosevelt:

I once had a rose named after me and I was very flattered. But I was not pleased to read the description in the catalogue: no good in a bed, but fine up against a wall.