Diddakoi Walt Whitman
Take me home...St EmilionHey, what's a Diddakoi??Cast of CharactersThe Saga Continues...  kay@diddakoi.com

Updated: 12/29/04



Other places to visit

The Bleat
Iron Chef
Spaceflight Now
Japanese Engrish
Eric Conveys an Emotion
Netflix
Epicurious
Free The Grapes
Tim Blair's Blog


What's on the nightstand

"Islandia"
by Austin Tappan Wright

"War and Peace"
by Leo Tolstoy

throw away

tsunami


Wednesday, 29 December, 2004

Eighty Thousand people dead - that's the recent count, with new estimates at over 100,000. Before disease and starvation take their tolls. This has only just begun.

Amazon has put an American Red Cross donation link on its homepage. If you've bought anything on Amazon and they have your credit card info, it's easy to just click and give a few dollars. Fifty bucks or so means very little to most Americans - ultimately it ends up in some super huge number that is even more incomprehensible than the number of people killed. "$1 billion in aid . . ." or something like that. Who knows where your money actually ends up, but at least if there is a large enough number it might do someone, somewhere some good.

James Lileks writes:

I tossed some money to the American Red Cross tonight (Amazon makes it very easy) and did so with a small amount of self-disgust. At least now I know the death toll that gets me to open up the wallet. From now on my guidelines will be “earlier” and “more.” It’s not for the dead we send the money, of course – it’s for those whose lives have been scoured down to the bone, but you can’t help but think that your contribution somehow mitigates the awful numbers. It doesn’t. And if your money makes its way to a small village, and ends up as a box of clean underwear and toothpaste and batteries and aspirin dropped in the lap of a man who watched his entire family scraped off the face of the earth and swallowed by the brutal, implacable and mindless hand of nature, well, know that it probably won’t make much difference. It can’t. But someone has to get him clean underwear and aspirin. You there, with the drawers full of Jockeys and Bayer: cough up.

It's true that it's the sheer size of the loss of life that is getting attention, but having been to some incredibly poor, primitive countries, it's the ones who are trying to live on through this tragedy who need the help.

It seems that our friends Pale Male and Lola have decided that they liked the remodeling job done to their pad:

NEW YORK (AP) -- Two red-tailed hawks whose temporary eviction from the ledge of a luxury apartment building sparked angry protests were seen roosting in their restored nesting area, the New York Audubon Society said.

Scaffolding that was used to install a new specially designed nest was removed Tuesday, and Pale Male and Lola were spotted sitting in the Manhattan structure at about noon, the organization said on its Web site. They were then seen taking twigs to the nest.

I guess humans, like hawks, will continue to show their resilience, and will rebuild their lives and homes in South Asia too.

[It's going to take longer, though.]

And on a happy note, I have posted pictures of THE HOUSE taken on the day we moved the furniture in. It's a mess, but we've managed to clean up quite a bit since then - I'll try to post some new pictures over the weekend.

Speaking of rebuilding things, here's a before and after comparison:

The Warehouse - Before

The Warehouse - After

[Yikes!]


Quote du jour:

"In faith and hope the world will disagree, but all mankind's concern is charity."

-- Alexander the Great (356BC - 323BC) Macedonian ruler

previous ~ home ~ next