Hard Times for the Big Easy

I have been to New Orleans twice. First for the 1991 STOC conference which overlapped the Jazz and Heritage festival. Then again in 1994, one last fling when my wife was pregnant with our first child. We went to the French quarter for crawfish and listened to Jazz at Preservation Hall, took the trolley down St. Charles Avenue, got our baseball fix with the New Orleans Zephyrs AAA team (the major league teams were on strike) and saw the Mother's Day Parade ("Mother" being a famous New Orleans transvestite).

Now this famous city lies mostly flooded, one of the victims of Hurricane Katrina. A major city, which has hosted many Superbowls and the biggest party in America in the days before lent, lies devastated by the hurricane, not to mention the tremendous damage in other Gulf Coast communities. With the tsunami last December, nature has not been kind to us this year.