MoveOn members and others have offered over 150,000 beds to those displaced by Hurricane Katrina. But with more than a million displaced, those spots will be snapped up. If you have space available, even if you're nowhere near New Orleans, you can still help as survivors are relocated. If you have an extra bed or even a couch to offer, click here.

Even if you can't offer housing, you can still help by supporting the NAACP's efforts to match survivors to housing, and provide emergency supplies to and transportation from the devastated areas. Click here to donate.

Offer housing: If you can shelter someone in need, even if you're nowhere near New Orleans, you may be able to make a difference for someone who has lost everything. The need is most urgent in the following locations: all of Texas and Louisiana; Washington, DC; Philadelphia; Atlanta; Memphis and Greensboro, North Carolina. But victims are also being moved to cities further afield, including Boston, Chicago, and even St. Paul, Minnesota. Post your offer of a spare room, or a bed, or even a couch here.

Donate: We've also partnered with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). As part of their effort to help victims of Katrina, they're working to match victims to available housing, and providing additional transportation out of New Orleans and emergency supplies to those affected. They're strapped for funds to do this important work, and need our help. Donate online right now here....

Today's New York Times includes a story of a family that was placed through hurricanehousing.org. The Mixons, from a New Orleans suburb, have plenty to worry about with the mortgages on their home and a now uninhabitable rental property adding up and the possibility that their business won't survive. The offer by Shannon O'Leary and Alex McKinney in Cummings, GA, provided not just shelter near family members, but a new friendship for both couples and their 4-year old daughters in a time of trouble. To read the article, click here.
5:26:00 PM    comment []  trackback []  

He'll always be Maynard to me.

RIP Bob Denver.
12:22:18 PM    comment []  trackback []  

"A pair of engineers in London have come up with a "building in a bag" -- a sack of cement-impregnated fabric. To erect the structure, all you have to do is add water to the bag and inflate it with air. Twelve hours later the Nissen-shaped shelter is dried out and ready for use."
10:59:44 AM    comment []  trackback []  

We're all up long before the sun today. Well, everyone but BrotherB.

I awoke from vicious Mafia dreams that out-Scorsese'd Scorsese for graphic violence. And it seemed any transgression could result in bloody torture and death. I was constantly placating, keeping to the periphery, cleaning up at the edges as the most hideous crimes played out, pretending not to see. This went on for years. I devolved from an innocent who had stumbled on the situation by accident into a black-patent-leather-clad automaton, pawn of deranged bosses. In the last scene the FBI was in our midst, examining, questioning. I tried to slip away quietly while the bosses were preoccupied and inadvertently lead the authorities to the very evidence they required to prosecute and dismantle the ugly system. I woke up alarmed by the grisly scenes I'd witnessed, my belly tensed with dread and anxiety.

We pause now to notice the office frog brazenly hopping across the middle of the floor, right out in the open. What's he up to at this hour, I wonder? I thought he only came out at night. Now he's disappeared under the Big Soft Chair.

It was a strange computer weekend. From Friday morning through Sunday afternoon all my email was spam and mailing-list digests; nothing from any person. If I had TV reception I could join the collective viewership of the devastation and aftermath, but the radio suffices, probably. Except I have to keep turning it off when they get to the Bush part, and his Nominee, Bob Roberts ... er ... John Roberts. Which sickens me. America has misplaced its destiny, skipped out of one groove and into another reality, Twilight Zone-like. It will take a combined effort of will to get us back to where we once belonged.

And I wonder now if my turning off the radio in revulsion amounts to turning a blind eye to hideous crimes.
7:34:42 AM    comment []  trackback []