Cars and Beer

Therese was in a car wreck today. Luckily nobody was hurt. The car suffered some damage though:

All of this reminds me that I need to keep drinking beer. By the way, I've been making progress on my Katrina Anniversary ESB. Here is the wort from last week:

Here are the ingredients I used:
3 lb liquid amber malt
3 lb Mutons Light dried malt extract
.5 lbs Crystal 80, .25 CaraPils, .25 lbs CaraRed, .1 lbs Chocolate (steeped 20 minutes)
Kent Goldings Hops 1 0z 4.5% average alpha (last 15 minutes)
Nugget Hops 1 Oz AA 13.7% Full boil 60 minutes
Nottingham Brewing Yeast

Today I transferred it from the primary fermentation glass carboy to the secondary one.

In one week it will be ready for bottling.

America: The Greatest Show On Earth

Bill Moyers has some very erudite comments on the current health care debate: (link).

A First Amendment Weekend

This weekend in Louisiana, while we still pay 9% tax on items such as food and school clothes for our kids, there will be no sales tax collected for guns (including assault rifles), ammunition, and even ATVs if you can show that you'll use it for hunting. What is even worse, the legislation is called "Second Amendment Weekend." We have State Senator Rob Marionneaux to thank for this remarkable legislation, and Governor Bobby Jindal, who signed it into law in July.

The second amendment reads "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." It says nothing about Jindal's right to recruit political support from northern Louisiana, or how to be the National Rifle Association's bitch.

Perhaps they would consider a "First Amendment Weekend," where Jindal refused to use tax dollars to pay for his helicopter trips to distant Lousiana churches on Sundays. James Gil brilliantly sums up this breach of the separation of church and state.

80% Recovered at Xavier

This story reports that enrollment at Xavier University of Louisiana is at a post-Katrina high. We now have 3,330 students. Before Katrina we had 4,190. That's just under 80%, but seems like a healthy number. Next Spring we'll have the smallest graduating class I've seen in my 9 years here.

Dry House Preferable, But Not Too Dry

Four years ago today, this is what our house looked like.

Our house is much better today, though the past four years have been difficult for so many of us.

I'm sorry to hear about the fires in California. Hope not too many lose their homes, and those that do, I wish them the best as they rebuild their lives.

Evil?

Evil or not, the mayor gave a pretty good speech today on the 4th anniversary of the levee failure. I'll always remember his radio interview with Garland Robinette while the city was underwater. I remain grateful that the mayor was angry and emotional that day.

Making Beer on Katrina's 4th Anniversary

I spent quite a bit of time researching planned commemorations around New Orleans to mark the 4th anniversary of Katrina this Saturday. I'll bike with the kids to the annual event at the Katrina memorial on Canal Street, it's not too far from our house. Bells ring from 9-10:30 AM to symbolically memorialize the moment when the various levees broke. After that, I thought about going to the Hands Around the Dome or the Second Line in the Lower Ninth Ward. I though about making a sign and standing in front of the Army Corps of Engineers headquarters. Instead, I think I'll stay at home and make some beer.

I used to be an avid home brewer. I made a wicked IPA, a great nut brown ale, a solid ESB and some fun seasonal beers like pumpkin stout and Cubbies Curse (only my sister Chris knows about this). I also made batches of beers based on recipes from the ancient Near East. I published a few articles on the topic of ancient Near Eastern beer, the best two of which were "Beer and Its Drinkers: An Ancient Near Eastern Love Story in Near Eastern Archaeology and "Baking and Brewing Beer in the Israelite Household: A Study
of Women's Cooking Technology" co-authored with my friend Jennie Ebeling in the book The World of Women in the Ancient and Classical Near East.

But all of that was before the flood. I haven't made any beer since. Come to think of it, while New Orleans was flooded and I lived upstairs during the chaotic weeks of late August/early September 2005, the most dominant part of my diet consisted of warm beers that I had previously brewed. I even thought about living for a month with ancient homebrew as my only food source in order to prove that beer was a super-food, which it is and was, of course. I thought I could use the tragedy to benefit my academic field. My mind was a bit scattered back then. It wasn't too much home brew. It had much more to do with listening to the radio and hearing people panic because they were trapped in their house and soon to die. It had much more to do with seeing drowned people whom I had known and seeing families pulling elderly relatives in flotation devices to higher ground. It had much more to do with the complete breakdown of civilization, to seeing the Causeway Concentration Camp. That place could have used some home brew, to be sure.

So today I learned that there is a homebrew shop called Brewstock that has opened on Oak Street. I used to frequent Brew Ha Ha on Magazine Street but they haven't been open since the flood. My home brewing equipment was on our second floor 4 years ago, and it survived, but has been packed away and stored under our house. Here is a picture of it taken minutes ago:

So Saturday I plan on going to Brewstock and making a beer to commemorate a tragedy. Of course there is a long history of alcohol used to acknowledge death and disaster, from "Eat and drink, for tomorrow we die" (Isaiah 22:13) to gang bangers pouring out a 40 oz beer for dead homies. I think it will be healthy to commemorate the levee breach by doing something that will return my life to the way it was before the flood, to what people here call a "return to normal." I'll make beer and in about a month drink it, but still, not an hour of my life since August 29th, 2005 has transpired without thinking about Katrina and its tragedy. I remember so vividly after a windy night standing outside my house on August 29th at about 9 AM and speaking with my neighbors on a dry street about how we had "dodged the bullet." I'll make sure to give those neighbors one of my Katrina memorial beers.

New Health Care Commercials in Louisiana

As an avid viewer of the national evening news, tonight I noticed a substantial increase in advertisements relating to the health care debate. I deduce that this is due to the announcement that "moderate" Democrat Mary Landrieu will play a large part in the final decision. The most disturbing angles in the commercials advertised that with the proposed health care reform, so many new people will need health care that there won't be enough doctors, so everyone will have to wait longer and old people will die. Then they advise people to contact Mary Landrieu and tell her to vote against health care reform. The other angle is to tell people that the country is going through hard financial times and we should wait to reform until we are more stable.

I often am angry with this country, but sometimes I really detest it. The same people who brag about how this is the best country on earth vote against giving health care to all children. Most people are stupid, all people are greedy, insurance companies are evil, and many physicians and pharmacists chose their vocations due to economics and not empathy. But still, perhaps foolishly, I hope to live in a country where families don't have to declare bankruptcy due to illness, and where children born into poor families can still have preventative health care.

Running Out of Time

Classes start tomorrow for the Fall semester, and emotionally I am not yet ready to teach. I am not excited about this semester, I am not looking forward to seeing hundreds of 18 year olds who don't want to be in my class but have to because it is part of the core curriculum. I am dreading an 11:00 class where after 11:30 I'm sure I'll have plenty of student enter wearing headphones and sit in the back and then text for 15 minutes and then line up at 11:50 when the class is over so that they can ask me to count them as present and then they'll be angry because I'll tell them I only take roll at the beginning of class.

But somehow between now and tomorrow I believe I'll find a better attitude and actually be enthusiastic about teaching. I continue to believe, perhaps naively, that teaching students at Xavier University of Louisiana about biblical studies and ancient Near Eastern religions is pretty important stuff.

Rising Tide IV Highlights

I had a very good time at the Rising Tide IV Conference on Saturday. Thanks to everyone who worked so hard to make it a success. There were two highlights for me. The first was during a discussion about food and culture, and how food impacts us more here than it would in other cities. The panelist Susan Tucker was talking about obituaries, and how they often mention food here in New Orleans. One obituary in particular spoke about a resident's Muslim devotion and it went on to say that he never ate pork, unless it was in a Muffuletta sandwich. I thought that made quite a bit of sense and it made me proud to live here.

Second, Harry Shearer spoke eloquently about how we in New Orleans lost the media battle about what happened here in August 2005. Four years after the city flooded, the rest of the nation and world believes that 80% of the city flooded because of a giant storm named Katrina, and not because of crappy levees built by the army corps of engineers. Shearer talked about how the modern news focused on emotion and not information. His talk was insightful but also depressing in that it doesn't seem New Orleans will ever have a quality levee system, one where we learn to live with water much like the system the Dutch have developed.