New Orleans: It's fucked, no, wait, it's fine, no, wait, it's-

So I spent a couple days in and around New Orleans over the holiday, and yeah, it's an eye-full. You've seen the footage, so I'll spare you. Large tracts of it look quite normal, and then you see large tracts that are totally fucked up, as per the footage you've seen, and then more normalcy, and so on. Katrina definitely had that irrational here-I'm-windy-here-I'm-not, tornado on a really large scale kind of thing going. Many neighborhoods that were not flooded feature rows of houses that look untouched right beside rows of houses of identical construction that were nearly blown to pieces.

Much of the French Quarter actually smells better than it used to, after being nearly blown down and flooded with nasty-ass contaminated water. The cleaning up that was required for re-opening after the hurricane was the only cleaning that most Quarter restaurants have seen in fifty years. Functionally, most everything is back to normal. The twin spans over the Lake are down to one span. They cannibalized the more seriously damaged span to repair the one that's open. There are times when the other span just disappears.

The thing about the recovery is this: New Orleans has always been a nasty, shitty town. My apologies to NO-lovers, but it really is a nasty town for the most part. Blame it on geography. So there's a lot of relatively simple cleanup that could have been done already, but will probably never be done, because for the most part, NO-ians don't clean or organize anything. Abandoned cars remain in the drainage canals, continuing to contaminate the runoff. Trash lays around everywhere. Meanwhile, middle-class New Orleans sits at home watching television, their unscathed, full-size Ram Hemi Super-Hauler Dick-Compensator trucks sitting in their driveways when they could get their lazy asses out in the street to pick up some crap, or tow those abandoned cars out of the way. Or at least repair their own fences or set their overturned garden furniture upright.

But no, that's not the citizens' job. That's the government's job. And don't you even think of raising taxes to do it-- grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. I'll try not to get started. So yeah, NO will continue to look like shit for a long time because that's just how the people are. People who choose to live in swamps generally aren't that fastidious.

Cafe du Monde is up and running, and that's really the best part of the city. Apparently, it came through pretty well untouched, though there's a tarp on the roof. Most of the wait staff was Chinese, which seemed like a change, so there may have been some personnel shuffles. But the beignets are still divine.

The huge downtown towers with boarded up windows are a little surreal, but they've still got nothing on Sarajevo.

Most of the poorest people are still gone, by all appearances. Few street performers. Fewer street vendors than there used to be, even though the Quarter is full of traffic as usual. Lines at restaurants are longer most of the time, as there are fewer restaurants open. Many can't re-open because their barely-living-wage employees haven't returned. And yes, the Burger King down the street from my in-laws' place is offering $6000 signing bonuses.

If you've ever wanted to flip burgers in a swamp, there's no time like now.