We just happened to be watching our local library's DVD of The Perfect Storm during the late horrific assault of Katrina. New Orleans is one of the hemisphere's great cities, in a great region, the US South. Our prayers and hopes for the swift return of stability go out to the now-dispersed residents, and our condolences will be but small solace to those who have lost loved ones.
New Orleans will come back. I hope to pursue a small side campaign here over the next few weeks to ascertain, long distance, the condition of the well-know landmarks — you know, something the newspapers won't think of doing, since they'll be so busy pimping the hottest non-news about global warming, and trying to plant the thought that Supreme Court-nominee John Roberts is a racist because he once employed the word combination "war between the states."
I've been to N'arlins, and will go back again someday.
The city, though, will likely be totally transformed and in major ways; the character of it may change completely from the free-wheeling den of cheerful debauchery it's always been, to become, say, a future center of pious Mormonism. You can never tell. These big natural events can cause big changes, sweep away the past and allow a whole new present to sashay in. We hear tell that San Francisco was quite the conservative stronghold before the Earthquake and Fire of 1906.
The Perfect Storm stars the totally outmatched and outclassed George Clooney. Outmatched because in the film George "big-dumb-ducks" Clooney, not himself in possession of the ability to act his way out of a half-full wading pool, is pitted against a monster weather system in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Outclassed because, somewhere in there, Karen Allen has a small late-starting part in an apparently pointless and confusing subplot, pointless until you realize that it is there to bolster the main theme of the film, kill off the men, and totally humiliate the ones who remain.
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