Let The Good Times Roll

Going on six months ago, we were addicted to the New Orleans Times-Picayune online; to Gulf Coast web cams; to images of caravans of buses leaving their flooded city behind... Hard times; and hard times aren't over.

But for the moment, it's Mardi Gras. The parades have begun. (Parade schedule.) Nola.com is offering a parade cam (and others).

Yes, it's true: all our guides for the whole Gulf Coast are out of date, for Louisiana and for the media-forgotten swathe of destruction all along the shore and deep into the forests of the South. Put on your Mardi Gras beads to keep in mind all those folks whose lives are going to need a lot more than six months to be put back together.

P.S. The 2006 Annual Conference for the American Library Association will take place in New Orleans as scheduled at the end of June. This is an enormous convention, as many as 20,000 attendees; only a handful of cities have facilites and hotel accomodations which can handle it, and the venues are booked years in advance. It would have been a considerable financial blow to the city if ALA had cancelled, or scaled it down; and the decision to proceed full tilt with planning was made very soon after Hurricane Katrina.