To those who have been looking for the audio clips from the radio shows… sorry it’s taken me so long to get them online. Here you go:

From the Jay & Kevin Show in Spokane, WA, on Tuesday: you can listen to the streaming audio from their website here (my portion goes from 1min45sec to 10min30sec), or download an MP3 version here. Be sure to listen all the way through to the end, because they say some pretty funny stuff about me after the interview ends. (This photo is mentioned.)

From the Hugh Hewitt Show on Thursday, you can view the transcript here, listen to a WMA version here or here, or download an MP3 version here.

Also, I just recorded an interview for a podcast from Shire Network News in Australia, which is supposed to be available here sometime tomorrow.

P.S. If you do a Google News search for “brendan loy” OR “irish trojan”, you’ll find a few things, including an article that mentions Mike Wiser and (albeit not directly by name) my dad. Heh.

Geraldo is holding a little baby at the New Orleans Convention Center while yelling (a few inches from the baby’s ear) about how bad the conditions are there. The baby looks utterly terrified. Poor thing — after all that it’s doubtless gone through over the last few days, being hoisted into the air by a deranged, screaming news anchor with a scary moustache must take the cake…

Some folks in St. Louis are willing to open their homes to Katrina refugees, and they are trying to organize a trip to Houston or Baton Rouge to pick people up. But they need information on how to get to the people that need their help. (More here, and more generally, here.)

You’ve heard of hurricane babies? Well, Matt Drachenberg’s cat just had hurricane kittens!

(Much more importantly, Drachenberg has located his mother-in-law, safe and sound — and snoring. YAY!!!!! And it was made possible by the blogosphere.)

But back to the cats. Tiny is raising money for hurricane relief. The Oubliette’s cats weathered the storm, and were oh, so concerned about it. Lastly and importantly, here are some tips on cat evacuations, to keep in mind for future storms.

There’s much more at Friday Ark.

Cajun Ken Wheaton has information about how to help some St. Landry refugees by sending various needed supplies, rather than just cash.

Also, via e-mail, LSU grad Cameron Maddux points out that “almost all airlines offer programs for you to donate your airline miles to charities such as the American Red Cross. These disaster relief volunteers are often scattered around the world, and need to be sent from location to location. These airline mile donation programs help take that expense away, and allow the charities to focus on other areas.”

In a related story, Martin’s on South Bend Avenue has set up some donation bins for hurricane relief.

Oh, and that reminds me, unleaded is down to $2.99 at Martin’s today. Same deal across the street at Speedway. That’s down from $3.19 yesterday and the day before.

UPDATE: Here’s a heart-rending story.

Gail Peshel, Assistant Dean for Students at Notre Dame Law School, sent out the following e-mail this afternoon:

I know that the thoughts and prayers of the entire Notre Dame Law School community are with all those affected by the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. Together with many other law schools, Dean O’Hara, the associate deans and I have been working since Tuesday on the logistics of how we might offer concrete assistance to students from Tulane Law School and Loyola, New Orleans, while still respecting the wishes of those schools and their efforts to regroup and reopen.

The American Association of Law Schools has created a master web site of the many law schools that are offering to accept some visiting students from Tulane and Loyola. The emergency web sites for Tulane and Loyola contain links to this master web site. We are included on the AALS list, and we have also posted information for students from Loyola and Tulane on our home page.

We have offered to accept up to 15 students from these two institutions as visiting students for fall semester. While we are accepting requests to visit from 1L, 2L or 3L students, we have indicated a preference for 2L and 3L students. The dean of Tulane has just asked deans nationally to give Tulane another day to respond before granting visitor status, not to take 1L’s and to give priority to 3L students.

We will be reviewing requests for visiting student status as expeditiously as possible. We hope that any students whom we accept will join us as soon as possible, but in any event by next Friday, September 9th.

We look forward to helping students who join us feel fully part of our community during their time with us, as well as to helping them transition back to their home institution. Consistent with our normal policy regarding visitors, students admitted to visiting status will not be eligible to transfer.

We know that we can count on your tremendous spirit, your wonderful tradition of hospitality and your sense of compassion to welcome our visitors when they arrive. In the meantime, if you have questions or comments, please contact Peter Horvath (horvath.50@nd.edu) or me.

There was a meeting of interested students at 5:00 PM tonight “to discuss how we can best help these students settle in at Notre Dame.” Unfortunately, I didn’t become aware of this until just now, so I didn’t go. But if anyone was there, please leave a comment or e-mail me and let me know what happened! Thanks!

UPDATE: Christian has a report.

“Numerous dead bodies” at the convention center, according to the New Orleans police chief, being interviewed by Geraldo.

“At least 30,000 people” at the center, chief says. (I’m not sure how credible I think that number is.) “When dark comes, it’s going to be a very volatile situation. We need some relief immediately. … We need buses now.”

Also, according to O’Reilly, the Navy found 80 people dead in a nursing home today, probably because they all drowned when the flood waters were initially rising.

UPDATE: The 159th fighter wing out of Bell Chase, LA is coming in now with medical supplies, according to Geraldo.

“This is Dante’s Inferno, Bill. There’s no way to sugar-coat it. This is the worst thing I’ve ever seen in a civilized nation.”

Mayor Ray Nagin is getting a lot of positive press for berating federal officials yesterday, saying they need to “get their asses moving,” stop calling “goddamn press conferences,” and help his drowned city.

Well, bully for you, Mayor Nagin, way to talk tough. Unfortunately, you are the one who had the power to save the people of your city — before Katrina struck — and you failed miserably, as I noted at the time. And now, here is yet more evidence of your inexcusable negligence.

Because your plan (ha! like you had a plan) didn’t involve actually evacuating the people you “ordered” to evacuate — even though you could have evacuated them, or at least a whole hell of a lot of them, if you’d, well, had a plan — you’re out 205 buses, and perhaps 10,000 people.

“Too many cooks in the kitchen“? How about, “one too many idiots in the mayor’s office”?

Did I say it’s too early to play the blame game? I take that back. I blame you, Ray Nagin. Maybe not just you… but definitely, definitely you.

P.S. Take that “10,000″ figure with a grain of salt. As I noted before, “wild early estimates of death tolls, formulated when everything seems utterly bleak and based on guesswork rather than facts, are sometimes wrong.”

Readers of this blog have now contributed $8,934 toward the Hurricane Katrina relief efforts, according to TTLB. Woohoo! Good work, everybody, and thank you!! (Also, $43.35 and counting in Google AdSense revenues will be going to the relief effort as well.)

If you donated already, be sure to log your contribution on TTLB if you haven’t already done so. And if you haven’t donated yet, here’s the Salvation Army link again (or, you can give to another charity of your choice).

P.S. You’ve helped bring the whole blogosphere’s total contribution to $386,252 and counting (and probably quite a bit more than that, since not everyone has been “registering” their dnations with TTLB).

UPDATE, 2:43 PM: Now at $9,334.

UPDATE, 5:00 PM: We just broke $10,000! Now at $ 10,184. Yay!

We’re ranked #5 in the blogosphere for total donations, BTW. :)

Fellow NDLS 2L Brian sends along this heart-rending first-hand account from a friend in Pass Christian, Mississippi:

i’m alive! thank you everyone for your concern during this catastrophe. i stayed in my mother’s friends house in long beach - between pass christian and gulfport - for the hurricane. they only lost parts of their roof but of course no one has running water or electricity. i drove around and found that my mother’s house was fine but my father’s is completely gone. pass christian where i grew up is gone, seriously no more. everything i loved and had fond memories of is absolutely gone… kinda surreal. at least everyone i know, so far, is alive and safe.

my sister and i drove to baton rouge yesterday where we’ll stay a few days because i really needed a shower and enjoy the air conditioning (such a luxury).

no one really knows what to do now, there is no where to live or work. at least for a long time. not quite sure what to do with my life because i was suppose to have 4 interviews in new orleans this past week. guess those won’t happen for about a year. need to find somewhere to live and work soon.

baton rouge is pretty scary because the lsu field house is a morgue and many thugs from the 9th ward have been moved here. 3 girls have already been raped on campus, there have been cars stolen from the college walmart as well as shootings in the area. [NOTE: I have no idea whether these reports are true. Many rumors of crime and civil unrest in Baton Rouge have apparently turned out to be just that, rumors. More here. -ed.] sounds like fun, huh? life as we know it is… gone =(

love you all and thanks for keeping my family in your thoughts and prayers.

I can’t even imagine how I’d feel if Newington was wiped off the map. The football field where I watched many a glorious NHS loss… the swingsets at E. Green where Jen and I would go to swing on the swings and talk… the front yard where I played “10-catch” with my dad… Carvel, where all the “cool kids” would hang out in middle school… we all have countless miscellaneous memories like that, countless places we hold dear, like Brooks & Dunn’s “Red Dirt Road.” It’s heartbreaking to think that people all over the Gulf coast have lost all of the places where their memories were made.

As for the comment “at least everyone i know, so far, is alive and safe,” this editorial cartoon sounds a similar theme.

State Rep. Karen Carter, D-New Orleans: “Don’t give me your money. Don’t send me $10 million today. Give me buses and gas. Buses and gas. Buses and gas. If you have to commandeer Greyhound, commandeer Greyhound. … If you don’t get a bus, if we don’t get them out of there, they will die.”

I think Representative Carter can be forgiven her hyperbole, under the circumstances. I just hope no one takes her suggestion literally. The last thing we need, amidst this national crisis, is piracy on the highways…

UPDATE: In comments, the consensus is that Rep. Carter meant her statement to be directed at governmental officials, not private citizens. It didn’t read that way (to me, at least) in the NOLA article, but yeah, that’s probably what she meant, and that makes a lot more sense. :)

Can I please request that we have a moratorium on statements along the lines of, “Why aren’t [foreign countries | oil companies | Hollywood celebrities | greedy corporations | etc.] offering any help to the victims of Hurricane Katrina?” Or at the very least, for heaven’s sake, don’t say this sort of thing unless you’ve really researched it and you’re quite sure it’s true. It’s rather unseemly to use a faulty assumption that people aren’t giving as an excuse to advance a grudge against your pet villain, and for the most part, the facts I’ve seen suggest that pretty much all segments of society are indeed offering help to Katrina’s victims; it’s just that their offers are (understandably) not getting a huge amount of press, because there’s much bigger news going on at the moment. (That’s unlike, say, the tsunami, where the media went quickly into “aftermath” mode and thus boilerplate aftermath stories like “so-and-so offers aid” got much bigger play.)

Thank you, that is all.

CNN is reporting a delivery of supplies to the New Orleans Convention Center. Looking for confirmation — and any word on whether they’ll take anyone out on their return route.

Update: Yes, seems like buses are there to evacuate people.

Brian (Briandot)

“The results are not acceptable,” President Bush said of the relief effort so far. “We’ll get on top of this situation, and we’re going to help the people that need help.”

According to the New York Times, 15 airlines are joining to evacuate 25,000 refugees from New Orleans. They will fly out of Louis Armstrong Airport under VFR — which means weather will have to remain good so that pilots and controllers can see — and ferry evacuees to Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio. Note this is part of a Department of Homeland Security emergency plan, which some of the airlines were apparently not aware of (although how that is escapes me).

They claim to be able to do nine flights an hour (every 6.5 minutes or so); however TSA will be conducting security checks as it would at any airport, which might slow the process down somewhat. This does have the benefit of creating passenger lists, though, and should aid in determining who is still alive.

The participating airlines are: Alaska, American, United, ATA, AmericaWest, JetBlue, US Airways, Southwest, Northwest, Continental, Delta, and American.

Hat tip to Rob1855.

Brian (Briandot)