Kranked on Katrina ...

OK, back in front of the ol PC to add a thought or two. Apologies for the sparseness of blogging, but the professional side has been a bit hectic the past few weeks - the past few days in particular.

Anyways, in my very brief post the other day ("Give"), my good friend Dale asks the following:

If there's not much more important this, why did you give top billing and 4 times as much space to college football?

Fair enough. As much as I truly am looking forward to UH kicking off the season tonight, the tragedy that the rest of the world faces goes on in search of resolution. But since I've had about 15 minutes to glance at news over the past few days, the chronology went much like this: wow, that's a whole lotta bad news from the Gulf ... and what's the latest on the Coogs? Since the Coogs ranked second and MovableType posts in reverse chronological order, there ya go. There's no social statement in the mix - just as if my pontifications about other weighty worldly matters below the fold now rank as less important than the latest post atop the blog.

Anyways, while at church last night, Marcos Witt abley managed the service at Lakewood and gave a bit of a news blip about what our response to Katrina would be as a church. Along these lines, we'll be collecting nonperishable goods this weekend (no turkeys, hams, or sacks of Big Macs, thank you). If you've pondered a visit to Lakewood and this gives a bit of a push to do so, make the most of it by bringing something. If anyone I know is headed there Saturday night, give me a shout out in the comments.

As a sidenote to Lakewood's work on this, Pastor Witt asked the Wednesday crowd if there were any attendees there because they were escaping Katrina. A surprisingly substantial number of people rose to identify themselves ... scattered all throughout the church. It was a rather awe-inspiring moment. As miniscule a representation as that was of people affected firsthand by Katrina, you just have to realize that if THAT many made their way to Lakewood Church on a Wednesday, there's some insane multiplier that ought to go off in your head to realize the enormity of those elsewhere. To say the least, it was a very moving moment.

There's loads of other opportunities to help (outside of the standard Red Cross, that is). The Harris County Citizen's Corps is also taking volunteers via online signup to help with the Astrodome settlement. As of this writing, the web server was having some issues due to the web traffic, but check back at a non-peak time.

SIDENOTE: due to a browser glitch, it looks like a graf or two got cut off from my original post. Technology for ya.