How to move lumber

or, when is a hurricane not a hurricane?

My dad, who essentially taught me how to be a bitter cynic, likes to refer to it as "selling lumber." It happens every year from June 1 to November 30: the endless drumbeat of fearmongering that engulfs Southern meteorologist types, The Weather Channel, and, scandal permitting, the 24-hour news networks. It's a classic example of modern "sticky" programming, a way to keep viewers glued to their TV sets (laptops, phones) in between commercials. Commercials that are, very often, for places which sell hurricane supplies. And Katrina gave this practice enough juice to keep it ramped up for another two decades. There are other examples of this kind of thing in modern news media, of course: every winter, the flu scare begins. But you can't track an approaching virus every four hours on a map. Let's hope not, anyway.

Of course, lumber's not as big as some industries, but in between moving plywood (to board up your windows, which is actually not all that necessary) or bottled water (which will probably gather dust in your garage) or batteries (which you probably already have, but why take a chance?) there are endless other ways to get the economy moving again. So here's a handy guide for all you budding media types, in order to maximize your potential to keep America's sphincter clenched in suspense, and move some product in the process.

DUN DUN DUN DOODLY DOO DOO DUN DUN

1. Give them The Big Picture.
Hurricanes are big. Whoa, they're big. The major Atlantic ones are sometimes big enough to fill up the entire Gulf of Mexico. Let's look at the current threat to America, Hurricane Irene:

Oh my God we're all fucked! Our Father, who art in heaven...

But wait. Maybe we should take a look at the actual winds of this hurricane, and see how bad they are:

Whew! The actual hurricane-strength winds of a hurricane do not extend out very far. In fact, on the projected path, the majority of the inland American continent wouldn't see any hurricane-force winds at all. Not Category 2 or 3 winds, any hurricane winds. At all.

At. All.

Let me further prove my point. Here is a map showing the entrance point (red target) of Katrina, the Worst Hurricane of All Time. And the black target to the left? That's where I was during the storm.

Looks bad, doesn't it? And it was. But not as bad as you were led to believe. As the handy scale at the bottom has no doubt informed you by now, I was approximately 50 miles west of the eye. And yet, I watched the storm from my family's back porch. With about 15 other relatives, some of whom were old. Why? Well, the power had been out for a while at that point, and it was much cooler outside. We were also behind a section of the house. But my point is this: unless you're within 50 miles of the eye of a hurricane, you're not actually in a hurricane. You're in a tropical storm. 

Here are the actual wind speeds for Katrina all over the area it affected.

Now, Atlantic storms tend to be strongest in their NE quadrant, due to circulation and other factors. So being to the East of the eye would have been a somewhat different story. And Katrina was a King Kong championship motherfucker of a weather event, legendary and historic. It eventually caused tropical storm-force winds in Ontario. Yet you can still see here that the gusts (and this map represents gusts, not sustained winds) only made it to Category 1 strength where I was. So we brought the plants in, and tied everything down. But we didn't die.

The lessons of Katrina were actually about decaying infrastructure and the threat of storm surge anyway, at least in New Orleans. Not about wind. But that is for another day. Storm surge can be a concern, especially for a big, powerful storm that's come a long way. But it has to do so over deep water, like in the Gulf. A storm zipping up the coast, like Irene, doesn't have much water to churn up.

So for God's sake, don't tell your public any of this. 100 miles of Southern backwater is no kind of target audience to have. Show them the satellite image. Because Hell is coming, and Irene is her name.
  
2. Take a trip to the Islands.

Aruba, Jamaica, ooh I wanna take ya.

For all its problems, America is still a first-world nation. For the moment. However, our brothers and sisters in the Caribbean are not so lucky. Largely because of colonial imperialism. (Practiced by America. Let's leave that one there for now, too.)

They get hurricanes quite often, passing right over their tiny island dwelling. And when they do, because they don't have our infrastructure, the power goes out there's massive flooding and people die and buildings collapse. So be sure and use this to scare people. Give 'em statistics, see if you can get some video. People will think that the homeless children in Jamaica will soon equate to homeless children in America. They'll lose their minds. And keep obsessively watching for updates.    

3. Ignore Nature.
Did you know that when hurricanes pass over mountains -- or any kind of land, actually -- they get severely damaged? It's true! Hurricanes need open water to survive; that's why Iowa doesn't get any. They also need warm water, the warmer the better. Katrina went from a Cat 2 to a Cat 5 in a matter of hours because it hit a pocket of superheated water. But if you live in New York, they usually don't have to worry about hurricanes. Because the water's not warm enough up there to keep them potent. So when that hurricane heads up the East Coast, just tell them how strong it is now, not how much it'll weaken. Also, when the storm passes over Cuba or the Yucatan peninsula, concentrate on the damage it's causing, not how weak it's getting -- and always, always assure the public that the storm could strengthen. Speaking of which...    

4. Speculate, Speculate, Speculate!

Karl Rove and David Frum must really
admire the phrase "cone of uncertainty."  

Who knows what will happen in the future? Criswell, maybe. And perhaps God. Not even those geniuses at the National Hurricane Center, however, know for sure, leaving a giant hole for you and your team to march right through. There could be massive flooding, structural damage, and loss of life. The Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man could also turn out to be real and march right down the streets of your fair metropolis. Of course, one is more likely to happen than the other. But not that much more. The terms "could be" and "possibly" are your best friends; use them.

Here's a classic example of how to do it, straight from Reuters.

Irene Could Spell Disaster for New York

In the annals of natural disasters, it doesn't get much worse than a major hurricane directly striking New York City and Long Island.

Hurricane Irene is on a course that will take it up the East Coast from the weekend. While there is still uncertainty about where it will hit and when, the forecast models increasingly suggest some parts of the greater New York area will face some type of storm or hurricane impact.

According to New York City's Office of Emergency Management, the last hurricane to pass directly over the city was in 1821 - and it caused tides to rise 13 feet in one hour, flooding all of lower Manhattan to Canal St.

But for Long Island, the threat is much worse. People still talk about the Long Island Express of 1938, a Category 3 storm that the U.S. government has said would cause $40 billion in damage if it hit today.

I've highlighted the bullshit to make it stand out. 

Notice that the article assumes that Irene will be a major hurricane (Category 3 or higher) "when" it hits downtown NYC, a statement it immediately backs off of, replaced by the more vague "some parts of the greater New York area." It then raises the specter of a hurricane hitting Manhattan, while glossing over the obvious takeaway: this happens about once every two centuries. And the massive flooding of downtown in 1821 was perchance somewhat exacerbated by the fact that it was the early 19th century.

Manhattan in the late 19th century looked like this:

That '38 hurricane? It mostly missed downtown NYC. It hit Long Island, though, causing $4 (not, as the article incorrectly states, $40) billion in damage in 2011 dollars. And about 800 people were killed, which was not uncommon for a major hurricane in those days. Most of those deaths, however, occurred in Rhode Island. Which apparently does not merit a story. 

5. Generate the Cycle of Fear.
This is an easy one. People, as Howard Beale once informed us, think like the tube. So when you scare everyone half to death, be sure and send a local camera crew out to show everyone freaking out, lining up to buy gas, stocking up on water and bread, eating each other's babies, etc. That makes the fear seem justified, which frightens people even more, and then you can show that. It's a great scam. (Bonus points if you film old ladies crying. That's always a winner.)

People lining up for gas in Miami.
Which Irene did not get near.

6. Pretend you're helping. 
Yeah, I know. The station sent you to meteorology school for some six-month course. You don't actually know a lot about the weather. You get the latest updates and probability estimates from the National Weather Service, you read them on the air, and then you head to the bar downstairs and knock back a few before the next hourly update, which will find you saying the exact same things over and over again, because the next real update doesn't happen for three hours. It's exhausting.

So spice it up! Read some report of a farmer who thought he saw some rain. Send some poor bastard out to the beach to show how the waves are slightly higher than normal. Take the stray aberrations in those spaghetti models and spook your audience with a "what if." Talk about what would happen if that high pressure system moved away, which you already know it won't. Above all, remind the viewers that you're only doing all this to protect them, and that they can never be too safe with this kind of thing, and that you're mere tireless public servants. And now a word from Home Depot.

The actual National Weather Service probability forecast
for Hurricane-force winds hitting New York City.

Decadence on Ice: The New Orleans Snoball Culture

damn yeah.

Like so many other things about New Orleans, it's easier to define a snoball by what it isn't than what it is. Notice is served: a snoball is not a sno-cone. Nor is it an ice. It is not a Slush Puppie or a Raspado. It is uniquely of the Crescent City, although its influence has spread throughout the South and somewhat beyond, in part due to the Katrina diaspora, which had the unintended but pleasant effect of introducing America to the really weird things we eat and drink (and listen to) down here. So in case you were wondering...

Many countries across the world served chopped, cracked, crushed, or just plain big chunks of ice with sweet syrup on them. It's an inexpensive way to cool off in the summertime, especially in tropical or subtropical locales where cooling off can be essential to one's health and well-being. New Orleans being New Orleans, we somehow found a way to make that process unhealthy. But more on that later.

The snoball differs from the more widespread snocone in that it is built on a cup full of very finely shaved ice. Although New Orleanians (and others) have been eating flavored, finely shaved ice since the 19th century, it was an Uptown machinist named Ernest Hansen who kicked snoballs into the modern, mass-production age by inventing and patenting the first motorized ice-shaving machine in 1934. Modern devices shave the ice even thinner, so thin it actually looks like snow when the modern metal monster blows it into your cup. If the ice isn't shaved this fine, it isn't a snoball.

The other thing that makes a snoball uniquely New Orleanian is the flavor. As befits the city's culinary heritage, the sweetened syrups that soak the ice (usually bottles bought from a regional distributor, but sometimes made in-house) are equally reminiscent of early-20th-century kiddie candy -- the hard, pennycandy stuff -- exotic alcoholic beverages, or rich pastries and desserts. In fact, a real New Orleans snoball stand is simply not complete without the following flavors:

what real snoballs look like.

Wedding Cake: Almond and coconut, sometimes with pineapple.
Silver Fox: Almond and vanilla.
Pink Lady: Sort of a pink lemonade with berry flavors.
Blue Bubblegum / Pink Bubblegum: Only the syrup manufacturer seems to know the taste difference between these two; to most snoball fans, they simply taste "blue" or "pink," much like their cotton candy counterparts.
Nectar: Vanilla, peach, and nectarine.
Popeye: Spearmint and peppermint, like a doublemint gum. And colored spinach green, naturally.
Tiger's Blood: Coconut and strawberry (sometimes with orange added).

In addition, a real NOLA stand will offer fruit flavors, especially tropical ones, which always work best -- you can never go wrong with a pineapple, banana, coconut, or even watermelon flavored snoball. And it's also a tradition to have flavors based on kids' cartoon characters. At almost any stand, you'll see Ninja Turtle and Batman flavors, sometimes a Smurf, or even a Pac-man. Usually these flavors merely replicate the color of whatever the character is, so a Batman is black and yellow (that is, black cherry and banana) and a Ninja Turtle is green and yellow (lime and banana). There are endless variations. And endless other flavors. If you can think of something sweet, or even cool, or even snacky, it's been done: Strawberry Shortcake. Iced Tea. King Cake. Hurricane. Dreamsicle. White Russian. Tiramisu. Pina Colada. Dill Pickle. Buttered Popcorn.

it should be juicy all the way through.

But even if you find a stand with the right flavors and shaved ice machine, you won't necessarily get a great snoball. Believe it or not, there's actually an art to dumping syrup onto ice -- with flavors this sweet and rich, too much syrup will make you sick on a hot summer's day, while not enough and you start to see the color go out of your drink about halfway down. If you wanted to be left with a flavorless iceberg, you'd just have yourself a snocone, wouldn't you?

Getting the mixture right actually involves layering the ice and the syrup bit by bit -- layer of ice, layer of syrup, layer of ice -- until the cup is full, then adding a giant cone of ice on top, packed down by an inverted steel funnel. The final step is to punch five flavor channels, like points on a imaginary star, all the way down into the snoball with a straw, then pour even more syrup in, to make sure every last bit of ice is soaked. The proper snoball should be completely saturated but have no residual syrup floating around the top or sides.

When that's done, it's time for the topping. Any real vendor will offer, for about .75, the option of having condensed milk poured on top, which sounds strange but is actually super delicious. (In Baltimore, the only other American city with a similar snoball heritage, they like to use marshmallow fluff.) You can also sometimes get chocolate syrup, or an extra flavor on top, or "sourness" added, or even a stuffed snoball, where ice cream is inserted into the middle of the ice for an extra treat. The high-end, Uptown NOLA shops will use real fruit and fruit juices in their creations, and real creams, but usually you're dealing with syrup and ice.

topped with condensed milk.

There's nothing like coming upon a snoball stand on a blisteringly hot day, leaning into the tiny window of the prefab shack, and feeling the blast of the AC window unit, not to mention the effect of all that ice, smacking you right in your sweaty, tired face, mixed with what seems like the culmination of every sweet, fruity, tart, creamy, candylike flavor there ever was. I once had the good fortune to visit the headquarters of SnoWizard, the machine-and-flavoring empire built up from Hansen's original small Uptown shop, and entering the cool confines of the syrup warehouse was like walking into Willy Wonka's snoball factory.    

So! Let's review. Very finely shaved ice. Absolutely soaked in some decadent flavor. Possibly topped with something even richer. Served with a spoon and a straw. This is a New Orleans snoball. And you can get a super large, "garbage can" sized one (32 oz.), with all the add-ons, for about $4. Because eating like a king for next to nothing is a large part of the culture, too.

They're Not Actually Trying to Wash Us Away

The 2011 Mississippi Flood and the flood of bullshit

If there's one thing both sides of the new American Civil War can agree on, it's that old media no longer serves our needs. For the intelligent among us, anyway. The movie Network was prophetic in the extreme: once news became taken over by the profit motive, people spouting crazy shit has always proved more newsworthy than people spouting truth. So now what we have is a nation that goes to their anchors/pundits not to find out what has happened -- the internet does that in a much more direct and timely and cost-efficient manner -- but to ponder what might happen.

Right now, that means the Great Southern Flood of 2011.

I'm going to go into detail here about what's actually going on in Louisiana, since I'm here on the scene and have been my whole life. But first, because I know you're busy, I'm gonna give you the bullet points on the bullshit media storyline, so that you can use this against your aunt in Illinois who thinks Anderson Cooper makes the world go round. I had to become a one-man disinformation cleanup service for about three years after Katrina, so I figure I'll get a jump start on this one.

Here's what you need to know:

• New Orleans is not about to flood, much less flood "worse than Katrina."
• The Morganza Spillway is not being opened to save New Orleans. 
• Poor people are not being drowned or losing their homes to save New Orleans or Baton Rouge.
• The people who live in the possible path of the floodways have always been aware that this could happen. It's happened before.
• This is not a controlled levee demolition, like the recent one in Missouri.
• The levees in question, the ones on the Mississippi River, are not the same levees that broke during Katrina. They're not even the same kind of levees.
• "Flood stage" does not mean a town is flooding, or even that a levee is leaking or being overtopped.

Okay, now the backstory.

The 1927 flood inspired some creativity in Memphis.

If you've ever heard Led Zeppelin's "When The Levee Breaks"* or Randy Newman's "Louisiana 1927," or read Faulkner's short story "Old Man," you know that there was a catastrophic flood in this region of the country in that year. My grandmother was five and never remembered much about it, but her family lost everything they owned, and were lucky to get away with their lives. The US government had an interesting method of Federal Disaster assistance back then: none. Or, as I like to call it, The Fuck You Method. Or as Randy put it in his famous song:

President Coolidge come down in a railroad train

With a little fat man with a note pad in his hand.

President say, "Little fat man, isn't it a shame

What the river has done to this poor cracker's land."**

The flooding was historic, to say the least. The rising river broke through the levees in spots, spilled out 50 miles wide and 30 feet deep on either side at some points, and claimed some 3,000 lives. Take a look.

The natural state of the river (left) and an approximation of how it looked after the 1927 flood (right).

It was decided to blow a levee in nearby St. Bernard Parish to save New Orleans, but it turned out to be unnecessary: nature had already, um, relieved itself all over the basin.

After this disaster, a massive federal infrastructure project was created -- you know, those bureaucratic thingies that waste taxpayer's money -- and the world's largest levee system was built. In addition, two spillways were created to a) keep the River from flooding anywhere in South Louisiana, and b) keep the River from shifting course, as it naturally would, and flowing directly down the left side of Louisiana's boot, bypassing the Port of New Orleans entirely.

This is the controlled demolition of 1927, much like the one in Illinois recently.

The first of these, the Morganza Spillway, was finished in 1954 and, before now, was only opened once, in 1973. The people who bought homes in those floodways were well aware of the project -- they couldn't not be, since they'd gotten the land cheap due to land grants. That is, the federal government knew there was a risk, informed the buyers of the risk, and helped lower prices accordingly. Why would anyone want to live in a floodway, you ask? Because the natural tendency of the areas to flood results in a rich "bottomland," or soil that grows just about anything. And farmers knew it. 

Only problem is, there are few small-time farmers any more, and not many in the area. So every year, the Corps of Engineers sends out a letter that essentially says, "Hey, don't forget, you're living in a floodway. Be prepared in case we need you to get your asses out of there." But a few of the people who live there, bolstered by the attitude and ignorance of the national media, bitch anyway, even though many of them were living in the area in 1973, when the last major flooding occurred. "I guess they're gonna flood us poor people to save New Orleans," said one elderly resident on the local news, apparently forgetting all this, as well as the fact that the Morganza sits 45 miles upriver from Baton Rouge. 

Even so, the Morganza does not exist merely to save Baton Rouge. The river doesn't know where cities are. It rises to a certain danger level, called a "flood stage," at which point measures are taken to prevent the next stage, "minor flooding," which means that some water starts to leak over the top of the levee. Opening the spillways reduces the level of the entire river, thus easing pressure on the levees up and down the entire corridor known locally as the "River Parishes." 

The Bonnet Carre Spillway is the spillway which saves New Orleans. It has been opened six times since 1973. It floods a small stretch of land with nothing on it, then quickly enters Lake Ponchartrain. It does disturb the ecosystem, introducing fresh water into a salt water environment, which is bad news for the oyster crop and good news for the crawfish harvest. And that's about it. Teenagers used to routinely go to "The Spillway" to cut donuts in the land with their pick-up trucks. That's how much nothing is there.   

Finally, all levees are not created equal. The levees that run along the river at New Orleans are some 23-25 feet high and some 60 feet wide in spots. They are giant piles of earth that are fortified with trees and, in some places, concrete, and the natural flow of the river compresses them, making them stronger. They were begun in 1879, and greatly reinforced after the '27 disaster. They are safe. 

Also a good place to make out, brah.

The infamous Katrina levees protected the city from canals, and were begun in 1965 after the worst 20th Century hurricane, Betsy, ravaged the city. These were simple concrete floodwalls, not really levees in the proper sense, and part of a federal project that was never completed -- several Presidential administrations passed the buck, refusing to commit the amount of money necessary to fortify them properly. When Katrina hit, the massive rush of water from the city's Gulf outlets simply overtopped them and washed out the supports that held them up.  

Very much not a place you want to be making out.

The levees at New Orleans, the real ones, can handle 20 feet of water. This historic flood has caused the river to potentially crest at a safe 19.5. Opening the Morganza allows it to rise only to a even safer 17 ft. There is no second Katrina here. 

That's not to say tens of thousands of people have not been displaced by this flood so far along the Mississippi River from Missouri on down, or that the 14 who have already died from it should be written off. But 1927 this is not. Despite the media's worst intentions.

* Originally written by Memphis Minnie, a native of the New Orleans suburb of Algiers. Zep's added line "If you're going down South and there's no work to do, then you don't know 'bout Chicago" refers to the disintegrating race relations after the flood that started many blacks on their Midwestern diaspora. 

** Aaron Neville's version replaces "cracker" with the more politically correct "farmer." Which sort of undercuts the point.