In Austin:

Good list of resources and links to other local resources.

Outside Austin

Go Fug Yourself's excellent compilation of resources.

New Space Monkeys! comic, this one quick and homage-ful.

I'll talk about the hurricane aftermath later, I suppose, but what can I say about it? It's awful and not unexpected and chaotic and just a big fucking mess. It hurts my heart to hear about it and I've been avoiding the news, but it also makes me very angry and very frustrated and, you know, just ready to jump on a spaceship and get off this planet.

But that would be easy (though not technologically). More difficult is to make sense of it and to help. So let's do that even though it's more difficult.

My laptop dilemma has been sorted out, as is revealed here on Digital Savant, which has just been promised a new kind of promotion on Austin360 along with the other blogs housed therein.

This of course is like dumping Mountain Dew into a writer's veins. It gets your ass a do-in'. So expect more new entries over there in the next few weeks.

Because someone at the Associated Press took the time to budget the story, "Britney Spears Prays for Hurricane Victims" as news.

New Space Monkeys! comic today. This one's a near afternoon delight.

The "World of Nøøbcraft" series continues with Part 3: "Things I Learned on the Way to Level 15" on Videogamey.

In the inbox today:

Can anyone tell me how i can e-mail mr.Spike Lee the movie director.
Thank You.

The reply:

Sure. Open up your e-mail program, put Spike Lee's e-mail address in the "TO:" line, write something under "Subject:" and compose your e-mail in the large window below.

Then hit "Send."


You're very welcome,
omar

Now that is some great damn news right there.

One of my bad habits finally paid off.

Oh, like you weren't thinking that, too.

We lived in Biloxi for six months while my dad went to Air Force tech school for engineering.

I was about 10, I guess; it was before we moved to Germany and everything in my life changed and I became who I am.

The things I remember about Biloxi are just as hazy as a lot of the rest of my childhood. I sometimes worry about my abilities as a writer, because unless I'm in the act of writing, whole chunks of years of my life are cloudy when it seems there should be a Harper Lee-like clarity about it.

I remember Biloxi was humid so I was always wearing shorts and thin T-shirts. I played softball and kickball and whatever else there was to play out in the grassy ditch behind the base housing units.

That was when I got really into G.I. Joe. One of my friends had the G.I. Joe hovercraft and I ran downstairs with him to show it to my parents, carrying the molded plastic in my arms. I fell down the stairs and a piece of the toy broke off and I was so much more upset that I'd broken my friend's G.I. Joe vehicle than that I had just fallen the fuck down the stairs and hurt myself.

Hurricane Elena hit soon after we got there. We took all of our belongings, like my Commodore computer, and stuffed them into plastic trash bags that we put in the closets. We tried to get things away from the windows, knowing they'd be blown out.

We went to a huge dormitory that served as our shelter. The storm hit early in the morning so I woke up just in time to sit in a hallway and hear the wind howl around us.

We went back home and the windows had indeed gone. We swept and dried things and got back to our lives. The electricity was out for two weeks. We threw out everything in our refrigerator and sat outside with neighbors in the evenings. The MPs would patrol the area. They set up a curfew.

School started right after that and we still had no lights. We sat in classrooms with no A/C and the sunlight from outside streaming in on our wet, molding textbooks that began to smell worse and worse every week.

I had a teacher named Mr. Melvin, the only male black teacher I've ever had. I remember thinking he was the coolest man I'd ever met. He told awesome jokes.

We went to see Ghostbusters at a run-down dollar theater where you sat at tables and ordered food while you watched the movie. I would remember this place the first few times I went to Austin's Alamo Drafthouse until the good times I had here outweighed the memories of Mississippi.

Six months passed too quickly and then I was saying goodbye to friends I'd just made. We moved away and I would tell people about Hurricane Elena, which at the time everyone had heard of, and in a few years, Biloxi, Mississippi was a footnote to me, a strange little place I once lived, a place from which none of my friendships really survived.

My interview with Penn Jillette (of Penn & Teller and The Aristocrats) is up and online.

The phone interview itself was long and incredibly entertaining. He said a lot of interesting stuff about the Internet that didn't really fit in this article, but I'll probably come back to it in a future Digital Savant entry.