Big Trouble in the Big Easy

It's strange to think that by this time tomorrow, there may (for all intents and purposes) no longer be a city of New Orleans. I know the city went through all of this all last fall with Ivan, but at this point all of the meteorologists' "best-case scenarios" for Katrina are uglier than the "worst-case" ones that were associated with Ivan. It's bound to happen sooner or later, based on the geography of the city, but I didn't really think that it would be this weekend...

Between that and all the reading I've been doing in the last few days on the worrisome Avian Flu outbreaks in Asia (not to mention the monumental upheavals to be found in the last couple of hundred pages of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, although comparing that to real-world potential disasters is rather silly), I'm having rather a disastrous weekend. Not that it's been a bad one - it hasn't at all - it's just had more than its share of gloom and doom. I need to find something happy and cheerful to occupy myself for a while this afternoon.