What a mess we have in New Orleans. I mean a literal mess- of trash and debris. It took my Kenner city garbage pickup crew two weeks to collect trash from the time of the storm until that date. And debris wasn't collected for a month. My sofa, dining room table and chairs, chimney (it blew off the roof) remains, the carpet from my living room and more at on my lawn for a month. But I am not complaining.
The amount of trash the storm left is mind boggling. One need only look at any street curbside to see mounds of personal belongings ruined by rain or flood. Some houses have debris stacked as much as 8 feet high, and it covers the enter view of the once pristine but nor wrecked home. In fact, my newspaper reported that it will take almost 2 years to clean it all up. And that's not including the 350,000 automobiles that were ruined by flood water and will be towed by independent towing services.
This storm was so destructive it left five times the amount of trash that faced by Miami in the horrible Hurricane Andrew in 1992. It is estimated that about 50 million cubic yards or 22 million tons of trash in the New Orleans city limit alone must be picked up..any way possible. That means huge backho and super sized trucks to accept the mess. My front yard has two craters about 1/2 meter deep and 1/2 meter wide from the backho that scooped up my once dear, but now departed personal possessions.
Problems in picking it up quickly include; impassible roads, bags of rotting food and other foul smelling materials that are piled indiscriminately, glass shards shattered on roads, roofing nails and nails from fences that litter the streets and cause flat tires and on and on. The disposal companies hired are charging about 500 million dollars to pick it up, sort it, and dispose it in huge landfills here.
Some of the material can be recycled, but it takes time and is expensive to do that as well. Then there are the termites! We can't dispose of the material elsewhere because New Orleans is rife with termites that would be exported to other areas that received any of the mess. Sigh. I guess I should just hold my nose and wait until it all goes away.
Know any married people who like erotic chat with someone other than their spouse? If so, they may want to stop cooing on the net. It seems that in Belgium the courts have ruled that erotic talk with a virtual partner in chat rooms on the internet is an offense bad enough to be grounds for a spouse to file for divorce. The Belgian legal publication De Juristenkant said the other day that the Brussels Appeals Court ruled that although transcripts of the erotic chat room conversation do not prove adultery, they do constitute proof of "grossly insulting behavior" which is sufficient grounds to file for divorce. That's a new basis for divorce.
What do you think? Is erotic chat being "unfaithful" and grounds for divorce?
Saturday, February 28, 2009
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