Thoughts turned back into randomized electrons

S!@#$%^&*+T!!!

I lost about a third of today's post when the damn multi-plug adapter fell out of the wall at the coffee shop.

Working on a recovery to come later in the day.

In the meantime, if you haven't seen it already, the Los Angeles Times has been kind to New Orleans, continuing to report the daily Katrina slog with stories like this one by Ann Simmons, profiling local bloggers Ray, Ashley, and Mark (thanks for the tip Ray and adrastos).

And thank you Los Angeles Times!

When you're finished reading that article, try this one by Charles Mann for Fortune magazine which details "the biggest management disaster in history" ... "[a] surreal tale of incompetence, political cowardice ... and rebirth" (hat tip YRHT):

The levees could be rebuilt from the ground up, [Civil Engineer Bob Bea] says, "but someone in the federal government would have to ram through the solutions, and I'm not seeing that person." In a 6,000-page report released June 1, the Corps formally admitted its mistakes were responsible for the levee failures.

"When that happened, I didn't see the President get up and say, 'We're not going to let this stand,'" Bea says. "Did you?"