Frankenstein has tagged me to participate in some sort of internationalist conspiratorializing involving the internets. What does he think, that I’m made out of time?

OK, so I’ll give it a shot.

Perusing the predictably long MetaFilter thread on Katrina, the Category 5 hurricane currently bearing down on New Orleans, I thought it might be worthwhile to stripmine it for links. Current projection has the storm, reportedly sporting 175mph winds, making landfall late Sunday night and hitting the city dead center. My thoughts are with the city, a unique American treasure.

I linked to these live webcams in NOLA already, but they are worth another link.

Weather.com’s map of Katrina’s projected path, and for comparison, this stormtrack map from
stormtrack.org.

To get an idea of the seriousness of this impending event, skim though this academic paper evaluating what might have happened had hurricane Ivan made landfall at New Orleans.

A Times-Picayune roundup of local resources for the storm. The Daily Lush has weighed in from Pat O’Brien’s, well written and worth a read.

Featured among the disaster’s predicted excreta are floating balls of fire ants.

Nova’s look at hurricanes includes a simulation of the tidal surge’s effects on the city basin.

The Hurricane Watch Network will be broadcasting on local radio beginning at about 2pm local time Sunday. A kind soul has whipped up a live stream for the Hurricane Watch Network’s broadcast.

Mark Kraft is providing some community resources on LJ for those affected by the storm, and a MetaTalk thread has opened for offers of couches and the like to the displaced denizens of New Orleans.

Bart doesn’t “like the looks of this.”

Meanwhile, Matt has driven through a midnight lightning storm while serenaded by dead bluesmen to spin some platters in the Crescent City. Looks like he’s just missed the mandatory evacuation. If you’d like to keep an eye on things, here is the bourbocam.

Danelope passes on the welcome news that Gmail has added “From:” cloaking to their featureset.

However, I have been unable to access the dialog item in my settings panel, making me suspect that this must be one of those features that Google is deploying to a subset of users in advance of a full-scale rollout.

Years ago Viv’s dad excitedly pointed at a bottle of red wine in the wine-cellar of The Spanish Table. He was interested in it becasue it was branded as “Marques de Caceres,” and his Spanish ancestors hailed from that locale. We bought the wine, a ’94 rioja, not expecting anything and in ignorance of riojas in general.

The wine was magnificent, huge, amazing.

A few months later the same vintage began appearing in Costco, and I bought a bunch. I turned my dad on to it and he bought a case. Since then, we have often picked up vintages of this wine.

Yesterday, I realized that rioja is supposed to be a relatively volatile wine, with a limited and somewhat short shelf life. We have a couple bottles of that ’94 still hanging about. I’m happy to say that my palate is sufficiently ignorant to remain happy indeed as I drink it.

Samantha is back, it appears, from her first international trip. From the gleanings, I gather it was satisfactory.

At Daymented’s going away party, we talked a bit about the at-that-time-upcoming trip. I sort-of told her about trying to let my parents know about Tienanmen Square back in the eighties – they had flown to China and were in the air when the Army began the crackdown. In the end they did not get any of the messages I left for them. I had started to tell this story, and realized that it was really fairly inappropriate to share with someone who had just told me that this was her first trip outside the country.

My own first trip outside the country must have been in 1968, leaving the US on the way to live in Chile. I was two.