Readers will doubtless be glad to know ...

...that scyllacat made it.  She has been seen in New Orleans since the storm passed over.

Others weren't so lucky.  65 deaths have been attributed to Katrina, 54 of them in Mississippi (50 of them in Harrison County, 30 of those in a single apartment building that collapsed near Biloxi).  There is extensive flooding in Mississippi and in New Orleans, with a 200-foot-long breach reported in the Lake Pontchartrain levee along the 17th Street Canal.  80 percent of New Orleans is reported as under as much as 20 feet of water, and 1.3 million homes and businesses in Louisiana and Mississippi are reported without power.  Much of Mobile, Alabama was also flooded by the storm surge.

"The president was expected to authorize at least a loan of some oil from the nation's Strategic Petroleum Reserve, said administration officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly."

The light, it BURNS usss, Precioussss

The alarm function on the clock radio we unearthed from the moving boxes a few days ago apparently no longer works.  So, yesterday, I went to Wal-Mart and bought two new alarm clocks, one for each bedroom.  The one for the girls' room works fine, but I happened to see one on the shelf that had a blue, rather than red or green, LED display.

"Ooh, pretty blue LEDs," I thought.  (Yeah, I like blue LEDs.)  And I picked it up without a further thought beyond checking to make sure it had battery backup.

The damned thing uses high-intensity LEDs.  In an ALARM CLOCK.  Four digits' worth of seven-segment high-intensity blue LEDs in an alarm clock that's going to be in a bedroom where people are trying to SLEEP.  That's thirty-three high-brightness blue LEDs, counting the indicators.  I don't know what on earth they were thinking.  Bright?  This thing is excessively, ridiculously, absurdly, insanely bright.  You could READ by the light of the damn clock...  from across the room.  This thing isn't an alarm clock, it's a damn airport beacon travelling incognito.  It could give the Eddystone Light an inferiority complex.  I ended up putting my heavy black cotton pajama pants (which are almost gi-pants weight) over the damned clock AND I COULD STILL READ THE DISPLAY THROUGH THE PANTS.  When I got up and moved the pants to turn the alarm off, the uncovered display was so bright in a not-all-that-dark room that it hurt my eyes.

That's frelling ridiculous.  It's going back to the store today to be replaced by one with a sane, standard, night-vision-safe, low-intensity red display.

Nothing's ever simple

So, I exchanged yesterday's vision-protection-required blue-LED Walmart-house-brand alarm clock for a Westclox model with a red LED display.  That, one would hope, would be the end of alarm-clock issues.  Alas, it is not to be.

To start with, the instruction sheet says, "To set the alarm time, press and hold the ALARM SET button and..."

Uhhhh..... pardon me if I'm missing something, but ... this clock doesn't appear to have an 'ALARM SET' button.  There are five visible controls on the clock: an alarm on/off switch, and four buttons labelled TIME, HOUR, MINUTE, and ALARM zZz.  (This latter button is described on the instruction sheet separately from the ALARM SET button.)  No visible ALARM SET button exists.  How on earth is the alarm set on this clock with no ALARM SET button?

(My only speculation is that the alarm snooze and alarm set buttons are, in fact, one and the same button, and the instruction sheet is just badly written.  I'll test this theory in a few minutes.)

Then, a little further down the instruction sheet, it talks about battery backup.  About two thirds of the way down this section, the instruction sheet says, "If you have a long power failure, the clock uses an internal clock which is less accurate than line frequency."  (Emphasis mine.)

My GOD ...... it's 2005, people.  Quartz oscillators cost pennies.  You can buy PENS with built-in quartz clocks accurate to a few seconds a year.  You can buy alarm clocks for only a few dollars more than this one that synchronize themselves by radio to the NIST atomic clock, and are accurate to thousandths of a second per year.  And Westclox is relying on LINE FREQUENCY for the time source for this alarm clock?!?  Line frequency isn't even guaranteed to be fixed at 60Hz!  It's constantly fluctuating as load on the electrical power grid changes -- 60Hz is just the average!  This is why old-style line-synchronous electromechanical clocks were accurate to, at best, a few minutes per week.

Hastur on a flaming diesel-powered pogo stick, Westclox, catch up to at least the 1990s, even if you can't join the 21st Century along with the rest of us!

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Update:

It does, after experiment, prove to be the case that the 'ALARM SET' and 'ALARM zZz' buttons clearly described on the instruction sheet as separate and distinct controls labelled as just noted are, in fact, one and the same button, labelled 'ALARM zZz'.