This is an email I sent my family on Sept 24, 2005. The hurricane hit on Aug 29. For a good while after Katrina, a cloudy day made for the weathermen take over all frequencies and nothing else happened.
I could not enjoy the Bama game as our local cBS affiliate interrupted the ENTIRE STINKING GAME, and are still at it, prattling endlessly about...rain, and it wasn't even raining until I went out to get something to drink after the Bama game ended, whereupon the heavens opened in grand deluge. Now that I am back home it is sunny. (almost) Lucky for the cBS affiliate, the Bazooka Shell store was closed today. They have been jibbering since at least 11AM when I tuned in, it is now 3:30. I called the station, asked them if they had any idea how aggravating it was to listen to people talk who had run out of things to say HOURS ago... they said, yes, in fact they did know how aggravating it was, and no, they were not planning to do anything about it..they admitted that they had gotten over 1,000 complaints about it, the announcers were both hoarse and jibbering idiots, as I imagine anyone would be who spoke for 5 hours straight on live TV...about rain somewhere else... Does AOL own cBS? I did at least get to partially watch the game, they had it on spilt screen with the all-important talking head. As they were playing Arkansas, and I didn't know where the game was being played, it took 15 minutes just to figure out which insects had the ball. Moving very close to the screen only revealed fuzzy insects. The talking head took up half the screen horizontally, with two seperate crawls about the non-weather rolling ever in repitition across the bottom, not to mention the big yellow box, warning me yet for the 3rd time about the same non-events that the other two weather bullletins were earnestly providing... The game was afforded about 5% of the screen. The sound was on the talking heads for the entire game except for a 2 minute span in the 3rd qtr, where nothing happened but a couple of punts, and one set of weathermen being interrupted by even more weather alerts from unseen people with party buzzers and fuzzy robot voices..."We now interrupt the weather report to give you another weather report, saying the same exact thing you were just listening to.".I thought I was going to go insane! (assuming of course I was not already there) I changed to ABC, to watch and actually listen to a different game that I cared nothing for, instead of trying to watch the Fla/KY game on cBS. I was happy and content for about 3 minutes, until that game was erased by important weather updates..."It is still doing nothing, but it might, in maybe a couple of days, if the storm goes north for a while and then turns due east, which they never do, but we absolutely HAD to interrput the game!" It's a conspiracy!!
Since Katrina, the weather guys have staged a coup, and taken sole command of the stations! It's anarchy! Now the sound is back on, but I have forgotten who was playing, and am confident the game will be interrputed again before I figure it out...
I tried to explain to the unhappy soul forced to answer the phones at the TV station, that we are weary of the weather, most especially of the deadly variety. It is somehow against the rules to have two massive storms strike the same place in less than a month. I guess the folks in Florida would call me a wimp. We would rather not hear about the weather just now, we would rather escape into the bliss of football, even if your team is losing.
The bulletins advise us to stay inside, stay where you are, don't move...so how much good is the news? We can only sit and wait for our doom to arrive, and it is only made worse by constant reminder that it will arrive any minute but there's nothing you can do about it but sit in the bathtub, until next Tuesday, but you cannot even amuse yourself with a bath, as we should conserve water...
New Orleans is again under water, and the mayor has yet to make up his mind about the evacuation order from the first disaster...I think they should just leave the levees alone, they will squander all the money we send to fix them up anyways, and rebuild N.O. as the Venice of the South...canal boats on Canal street is not a big stretch for the imagination, I rectum. You might have some drunken drownings, but they would probably walk out in front of a streetcar too. The Cajun restaurants could advertise the freshest of seafood, catch your own even! It would really bring meaning to the word "float" for their parades. (How can something dragged along a street be called a "float"?) You could even speed up the reconstruction by following this plan, as the environmentalists would not be a constant obstruction, how could they object to more "wetlands"?
It is now 4:45, and we have finally had our first real tornado spotted, somewhere near Pismo Beach, I think. We have been waiting in our bathtubs for it since at least 11AM, when we foolishly thought Saturday was sacredly reserved for football.
