Askye? My cell # insent. If you're still about.

Coolish thing: my firm is matching Red Cross donations for Katrina.

The Chicago Tribune is doing the same (if you want to make your donation stretch farther, they're matching 50 cents to the dollar up to $1 million).

Good news:

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Canal breach update

Wednesday, 1:40 p.m.

By Jan Moller

BATON ROUGE - Water levels in Orleans Parish have crested and are beginning to slowly recede as the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers prepares to begin an unprecedented effort to fix a 200-foot breach in the 17th Street Canal that has inundated the city, state and federal officials said Wednesday.

State Secrertary of Transportation and Development Johnny Bradberry said Lake Pontchatrain has receded by two feet since yesterday as water levels equalized between the lake and the flooded city interior.

"The good news here is that we've stabilized. Water is not rising in the city," Bradberry said.

Maj. Gen. Don Reily of the Corps of Engineers said flood levels are now receding at a rate of one inch per hour, but that it's likely to take at least 30 days before all the water is gone from New Orleans. "Lake level has equalized with interior water inside the city,. which means that it won't be any more flowing into the city except for a high tide," Reily said.

The Corps and the Louisiana National Guard are planning to use Chinook helicopters to drop 1,200 bags of sand into the breach weighing 20,000 pounds each, and 250 concrete highway construction barriers. In the meantime, they are using smaller bags of sand, weighing 3,000 pounds apiece, to try to stem the deluge.

Fixing the levee breach has been the Corps' top priority, as the lengthy process of pumping water out of Orleans cannot begin until the canal walls are secure.

State officials announced the operation Tuesday and spent the night getting equipment into place, a process that was complicated when officials could not get enough slings that are needed to drop the material into the breach.

"The issue that we had was not enough slings," Bradberry said. "When you release a 3,000 bag of sand the sling goes with it."

Reily said the corps is also working with the Orleans Sewerage and Water Board and the Orleans Levee Board on efforts to close the entrance to the canal from Lake Pontchrartrain. In the last day three barges of rock have been brought into the lake to help with that effort.

I don't have a book and am inclined to agree.

Bookless freak!

I want to eat something, but now I'm thinking I should hold out a while and have an early dinner. Damn, I'm totally wasting this whole day like a lazy lazyhead.

I'm not sure it's fair to group those two sentences. I live in the bluest of blue state (and we're flyover, too!) and I've heard nothing of the sort. Jackassery knows no color.

What Brenda Said.

Bookless freak!

Yeah, well, it happens. I have books just not a book. In fact, I'm kinda overwhelmed with books.

ATTN ALL: Please note, everyone should feel free to use the phrase "in my book," whether or not there is an actual book related to things in which they believe.

I'm not sure it's fair to group those two sentences. I live in the bluest of blue state (and we're flyover, too!) and I've heard nothing of the sort. Jackassery knows no color.

I think I'm more sensitive to it because I live on the Left Coast and grew up in Flyover-Jesusland. And I know many, many Flyover-Jesusland sorts would love to see all them Democommie queers in San Francisco swallowed up by the earth. It's just that I hear the hating on the Red States up here all the time. And my family, in the world capital of freakshow televangelism at the heart of the reddest of red states, has nothing against San Francisco or its fine, hard-working LGBT population.

Maybe "a" book is the book you are currently reading. In that case mine is "The Extravagant Universe" by Robert Kirshner

Can it be an address book? Or a oh, what were they called? From the Ramona series, that book of her sister's she defaced? It wasn't a diary, was it?