KATRINA & THE LOST CITY OF NEW ORLEANS by Rod Amis New Orleans is the Lost City of America. New Orleans has disappeared as surely as the lost city of Atlantis or the lost city of Pompeii, which former mayor Marc Morial and Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA.) have compared us to in their statements. That New Orleans, the New Orleans I mean to tell you about, that will never, ever, exist again--that city of love, lust, death and sex--will never exist again. A portion of the proceeds of this book will go to the New Orleans Hospitality Workers Fund. The cooks, servers and restaurant workers of New Orleans have provided fabulous times and memories for millions. Now we must remember them in their time of need. Buy the book or get a downloadable PDF Copy now! To order on Amazon.com, go here! A small, independent and outspoken magazine like this one can't reach you every week without the support and patronage of its readership. As our way of thanking those who have committed to keep your World's Magazine here on your desktop through their generous donations, we feature their names and cities here in our Roll of Honor. SUSTAINING PATRONS RON DIENER, Wendell, NC, USA DARHL STULTZ, Largo, FL, USA TIMOTHY MEADOWS, Anaheim, CA, USA CHERYL HILL NATION, West Fairlee, VT, USA DRAGAN & DRAGANA VICANOVIC, Belgrade, SERBIA LESZEK MICHAELWICZ, New Orleans, LA, USA MARIE SINSABAUGH, Granville, OH, USA TERRY TERRIAN, Sebastopol, CA, USA BECKY ALTEMUS, Houston, TX, USA Supporting Patrons BARBARA ATWELL, Berkeley, CA, USA MATT STOWELL, New Orleans, LA, USA LARS KEFFERSTAN, New York, NY, USA MEREDITH TUPPER, Tampa, FL, USA NGOZI RAZAK-SOYEBI, Jos, NIGERIA NICK ALLEN, New Orleans, LA, USA RIC WILLIAMS, Austin, TX, USA ROBERT PURVIS, Montclair, NJ, USA IAN CRYSTAL, Ph. D, New Orleans, LA, USA STEVE VIVIAN, New York, NY, USA STUART ALTMAN, ESQ., New York, NY, USA We encourage you to add your name to this Roll of Honor. GENERATOR 21 cannot continue and thrive without your support. Thanks in advance. To support G21, please send checks or money orders to: G21: The World's Magazine Attn: Rod Amis 1116 Crestline Road Wendell, NC 27591-9245 USA To donate by credit or debit card, please go to the Western Union website by following the highlighted link. Should you donate via Western Union, please notify us via e-mail. Please make all remittances payable to Rod Amis. Again, thanks. CURRENT MOON lunar phases

Rod Amis - Unbound

SMOKE & MIRRORS: SATURNALIA - ROD AMIS's column, called the Father of the Blog when it was MY GLASS HOUSE turns bifurcated in this form. This week, in his "Smoke" section he looks back at 2005 and in "Mirrors" he makes announcements about the future.

SMOKE

"Where there's smoke, there's fire ..." Popular Adage.

15 December, 2005: When you've been writing for a while, there are two staples for your end-of-the-year column. You can either look back at the year that is coming to a close, taking stock, or you can look forward to the coming year, listing your predictions. That latter is always a risky business because people can go back and see how wrong you were about so much. This year, I'm taking the safe choice.

The most definitive thing about 2005, in the minds of many, is that it was a year of great loss.

Record numbers of American and Iraqi lives were lost in a ginned up war for which another round of elections are being called a "turning point," as was the last round. Oddly, at none of these turning points has America been in the position to cease being an occupying power.

In 2005, we lost Johnny Carson, Hunter S. Thompson, Anne Bancroft, Luther Vandross, Gretchen Franklin, James Doohan, Marjorie "Mo" Mowlam, Robert Moog, Rosa Parks, Sheree North, James King, Pat Morita, Link Wray, Richard Pryor, Stanley "Tookie" Williams and William Proxmire (as I write this).

We lost coastal cities in Southeast Asia to a killer tsunami, central Pakistan and much of Kashmir to killer quakes, cities on the coasts of Vietnam and south Ch ina to additional typhoons, much of the population of Malawi to starvation with half the population of that benighted country still threatened by same, parts of Guatemala to hurricanes and mudslides, part of the Gulf coast of the United States to hurricanes; we lost New Orleans.

"Oh, come on! Rod, we didn't lose New Orleans."

I can see how you'd say that but the evidence is still questionable. If you were reading the editorial page of the New York Times on Sunday, 11 December, you might have reached the conclusion that America hadn't decided whether it wanted New Orleans back or not. You might have decided that President Bush's speech in Jackson Square of that city in September had been merely another Rovian photo-op; all picture and no substance. More smoke and mirrors. As Paul Krugman commented in his column on the same day, we're doing as much to rebuild New Orleans as we have to rebuild Iraq.

If we characterize years by the measure of their human joy or sadness, celebration or suffering, than 2005 was one Hell of a year.

At this time of year, while most of you are celebrating one holiday or another in the bosom of your loved ones, while the spendfest of America reaches orgiastic proportions, some of us continue to go about our daily grinds.

Cicero, with whom I've taken common cause in this space before, retired to the country during the Saturnalian holy days; Pliny the Younger retired to his rooms.

It is not by accident that I reference these two particular Romans. Both readily identified themselves as rhetoriticians. In our time, we have - unfortunately, in my view - come to take the words rhetoric and bullshit as being synonymous. The ancients had an entirely different view. For them, rhetoric was not simply words used to persuade and present arguments, it was inextricably tied up with the gravitas and credibility of the person using the words. Good rhetoric, they understood, is contingent upon establishing trust.

Part of this project has been - first with "My Glass House" and now with this column -- to establish trust and credibility wth you, my dears, if not always and necessarily gravitas. Only you can let me know if I've succeeded.

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19 December, 2005: I only have one news item I'd like you to consider in this section of the column this edition.

The Independent (UK) on 4 December - " What planet are you on, Mr Bush? (and do you care, Mr Blair?)" by Geoffrey Lean and David Randall reported:

GLOBAL MELTDOWN

The catalogue of disasters that are happening right now

Across the planet, rising temperatures are taking their toll

CARBON DIOXIDE

New research has found that levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere - the main cause of global warming - are higher than at any time in the past 625,000 years. HOTTEST EVER

This year is expected to be the warmest ever recorded; 1998 was the hottest so far, but the past three years currently occupy the next three places.

DESERTIFICATION

The giant Kalahari desert, already four times the size of Britain, threatens to become larger still, covering farmland in Namibia, Botswana and South Africa.

EXPANDING OCEANS

The level of the world's seas and oceans is rising twice as fast as in the past, as their waters expand in rising temperatures and glaciers melt.

OCEAN EXILES

The people of the Carteret Islands, a scattering of atolls off Papua New Guinea in the South Pacific, have started to leave as their homes succumb to rising seas.

HURRICANES

Hurricane Epsilon - the 14th of the year - is forming in the Atlantic, even though the worst recorded hurricane season by far formally ended on Wednesday.

GLACIER MELT

Greenland glaciers have suddenly started racing towards the sea and melting. Much the same is beginning to happen to glaciers in the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.

WATER SHORTAGE

Areas such as the western USA, which depend on mountain snows for their water supplies, are running short as less snow falls - and what does fall melts earlier.

DISAPPEARING SPECIES

Sealife and birdlife have declined catastrophically this year along America's north-west Pacific coast, after a similar meltdown in the North Sea.

CORAL REEFS

Corals on the Great Barrier Reef are bleaching out and dying as sea temperatures rise and scientists fear that the whole reef may perish by 2050.

And all I have to say is: "Thank you SO MUCH for purchasing that SUV or driving your car down that freeway alone.

"Thank you SO MUCH for NOT supporting public transportation."

The G21 READERSHIP POLL

With year's end, we continue our annual tradition of seeking your nominations for the G21 PERSON OF THE YEAR.

POLL QUESTION: What individual do you feel made the world a better place, made a significant contribution to human advancement or left the most indelible mark on the year 2005?

DEADLINE for your nominations is 1 January, 2006.? The results will be published in our first edition of 2006.

Send your nominees for the G21 PERSON OF THE YEAR 2005 to rod@g21.net with the "Subject" line "PERSON OF THE YEAR". Thank you!


MIRRORS

BECOME A SPONSOR OF THE WORLD'S MAGAZINE. WHY should you advertise here? We'll tell you. VETERAN? Need to know how to access more of your benefits? Need help buying a home for your family? These folks can help: VA LOAN INFORMATION and VETERANS' MORTGAGES KATRINA & THE LOST CITY OF NEW ORLEANS by Rod Amis New Orleans is the Lost City of America. New Orleans has disappeared as surely as the lost city of Atlantis or the lost city of Pompeii, which former mayor Marc Morial and Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA.) have compared us to in their statements. That New Orleans, the New Orleans I mean to tell you about, that will never, ever, exist again--that city of love, lust, death and sex--will never exist again. A portion of the proceeds of this book will go to the New Orleans Hospitality Workers Fund. The cooks, servers and restaurant workers of New Orleans have provided fabulous times and memories for millions. Now we must remember them in their time of need. Buy the book or get a downloadable PDF Copy now! To order on Amazon.com, go here!

20 December 2005 My patron, DC, sends me all kinds of books, most of them are popular American fiction. I got The Da Vinci Code from him, for example. (I hadn't even heard of the book at the time.) Since then, he's educated me to such best-selling authors as W.E.B. Griffin ("the poet laureate of military novels"), who has grown on me, and the recently-late Ed McBain, not to mention a slough of female mystery novelists.

When I lived in New Orleans, I considered these books part of my "income." I could sell them at used bookstores to get extra cash for food, booze and cigarettes. I have not been so lucky here in North Carolina. Because my mobility is limited, I can't shop around for stores at which to sell the books. The pile up in my bedroom is creating a wall. I don't know what I shall do about this last circumstance just yet.

But during this education, I have learned something else. I now know why I do not like popular American fiction and why I have such a scant chance of being a popular American fiction writer during my lifetime.

The commonality I notice about these books is that no one - none of the characters portrayed for us, the readers, to follow -- is EVER ugly, poor, disabled, sad, crazy (in other than a funny way,) etc. There is no Dickenesque or Twainesque here. Everyone is beautiful and rich and fulfilled and - in most cases - only threatened by the vagaries of the outside world.

The people who live in popular American fiction are perfect and never face internal challenges, challenges of conscience or deficiency. They are perfect and it is the imperfect and often brutal world that intrudes on their Story Book lives. That is American popular fiction today and that is something I would rather take arsenic than write.

I could devote this entire section of my journal to what I loathe about how popular American fiction is at variance with real American lives. But I shan't. I suspect you already know what and how I feel.

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I have reached a conclusion about certain types of people. I know a number of them who fit into this category. I've mentioned it to my pal Matt before, more than once. People who are constantly talking are telling you (me) that you (I )have nothing of value to add to the conversation.

What amazes - or insults -- me, depending on how many cocktails I've had, is that they fail to realize how they are denigrating the humanity of the rest of us. They have effectively said that we are the scenery in their lives.

LIFE OF ROD

A LOT has been going on. I feel almost as if I have to be in Announcement Mode.

The idea is that, as we celebrate our tenth year on the Internet, we offer you many and multi-faceted new views of your World's Magazine. (Did I sound enough like a Flak then?)

As you can see from the sidebar on all the pages of the magazine this edition, I've finally got the G21 AFRICA anthology, AFRICA FRESH! New Voices from the First Continent available for your purchase and encourage you to check it. After the Holiday Season, the Promotional Machine goes into full force.

Today, (okay, well, maybe TONIGHT, since Tom has family in town) Wednesday, you can actually hear Rod's voice - in case you are wondering, yes! I'm actually a real person -- in a podcast that talks about working up to our tenth anniversary here at your World's Magazine. I get to talk to Tom Parish, a great guy from Austin, Texas.

What I love about Talking Portraits is the music that they use to introduce and provide background for their podcasts - but that's just me. You should go there, often, for the content.

Tom's blurb claims that I'm an Internet pioneer and visionary. I certainly wouldn't go that far, but am flattered that he and his team did.

You can listen to the podcast (play it on your iPod or stream it to iTunes while you're running around.) Tom's Web site, which you should visit even when I'm not there, is called Talking Portraits. I enjoy it.

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AND, oh yeah, I've gone back to be a columnist on technology. Some of you met me while I was doing that. Quite a few of you met me while I was writing for IT Manager's Journal, while I worked for a company known as Andover News Network. Today it's known as Open Source Technology Group (OSTG.) You can read my "new" premiere column here

So, if you're into reading about technology, or just into reading me, you can now find me at itmj.com.

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SATURNALIA. This season is different for me than it is for you.

Because I am - for reasons that I don't fully comprehend - attached to the Old Ways, I look at things unlike most people. The moons mean something more to me. I find it difficult to sleep. The words of the ancients resonate for me and have real meaning. And when I talk to you, I am talking into a long conversation, a stream of words that have flowed, sometimes I feel, for thousands and thousands of years ...

When I look at our "modern" problem, too often all I see is mistakes that I have already seen made before.

So I relish this time when the Old King must pass ... pass away ... so that the New King may stand for an instant. But I also remember those words, that the Romans were smart enough to whisper during the Triumph, "All - all Glory is fleeing."

Like Cicero, I find myself in an empire that calls for me to be gone.

Then the Twainesgue Rod pipes up and he says: Remember when people used to say, "America: Love it or leave it!"

Well, as you probably know by now, my response has always been: "Where's my fuckin' ticket? You're buyin', my flyin'."

Thanks for coming back this week. Keep me in your prayers as I keep you in my own.

THE HOLIDAY ROD IS

1 - Working on multiple projects.

2 - Hopeful that the new year will be better.

3 - Tired of being lonely.

"Work like you don't need the money,
"Love like you've never been hurt,
"Dance like no one is watching ... "

Love,
Rod

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ROD AMIS has published this magazine since 1990. It first appeared as a hardcopy 'Zine. In March, 1996, he launched it here on the Web. Rod was a Contributing Editor at Suite101.com, where he wrote the " 'Net Publishing" feature. His work has been featured in the San Francisco Bay Guardian Online, NRV8, and at the (U.S.) Public Broadcasting System (PBS's) WebLab's Reality Check site. Rod was a contributing writer on technology for Faulkner Information Services. He wrote on Web issues for MethodFive.com's Hyper newsletter.

Rod was a columnist for the Andover News Network, where he wrote over two hundred articles on web design and development issues. He was principal writer and Editor for IT Manager's Journal, where he reviewed technology issues weekly, producing 383 editorials. He became the Managing Editor for Electronic Mail/Newsletter Publications at Andover.net at the end of February, 2000, and left in September of the same year. He was a contributing writer for ACCESS Internet magazine, which appeared both on- and offline for 10 million readers in 100 newspapers like the San Francisco Chronicle, New York Post, Boston Herald, Austin American-Statesman, Denver Post and Orlando Sentinel, among others. Rod was the US reporter for Silicon.com, a division of Network Multimedia Television in London, UK, r eaching 3.5 million European readers, un til May, 2001.

In 2002, he worked as Assistant to the General Manager of a Big Easy company that does restaurants and nightclubs. He did stints as the Resident Philosopher at three separate gin mills in that city in the French Quarter and the Marigny, earning his stripes during two successive Mardi Gras seasons. Oh yeah, Rod's had Day Jobs working construction. Mostly renovations of old New Orleans structures, houses and a bar. Sometimes he designs Web sites for other people so that he can get his creative juices flowing the way he can't at a staid publication like this one. And he's been the instructor in Editing for Internet Publications at the Novi Sad School of Journalism in Yugoslavia. When he's not busy here, he writes technology columns for IT Manager's Journal. Rust never sleeps.

Our Resident Philosopher has exchanged his legend mobility for a means of keeping your World's Magazine. Now he must become earnest about gaining a financial underpinning for this enterprise. (Read: Buy back his freedom and then go home.}.

In his spare time, he chases women in the manner that a fly pursues a spider.

He continues to be committed to integrity, chastity and a dose of humility.

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E-mail your comments. We always like to hear from you. Send your kudos, brickbats and suggestions to rod@g21.net.