Whether you need to restock your emptied fridge, remind yourself what fresh produce tastes like after a week of eating from coolers or just want to see fellow New Orleanians out and about, the Crescent City Farmers Market this weekend should be an especially fulfilling experience.

The market is resuming its normal schedule beginning this Saturday, from 8 a.m. to noon at the corner of Girod and Magazine streets, and will throw in free coffee to help get folks out early. Market staff are also planning to resume the Tuesday market on Sept. 9 at Uptown Square.

With characteristic farmers market humor, this Saturday’s event is being called the “Mother of All Markets,” a riff on the C. Ray Nagin brand of hyperbole. But it’s no joke that the community spirit that runs through the market will be in ample evidence as people come back to town and come back together between the vendors’ stalls.

Some of the market’s regular vendors live and work in areas that took much greater damage from Hurricane Gustav than New Orleans, and market staff are still trying to contact many of them to see how they fared and when they will be able to return to the market. Updates on individual vendors are being posted here.

– Ian McNulty

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I’m sad to say that the power is still out in my house and I’m currently leeching off my neighbor’s WiFi (with their permission, ofcourse). In lieu of the regular podcasts, off-the-wall player info and completely unrelated Hornets posts that come with a Saints game, I’m just gonna link to this preview I wrote for Deadspin.

 

We evacuated into the storm, leaving New Orleans Friday afternoon and heading to our camp on False River (a few miles up Island Road from Mike Gio). We had planned to spend Labor Day weekend on the river anyway, so the evac simply meant taking more “stuff” with us — including all the data processing hardware, servers, etc., from Gambit Weekly.

 

Things were fine until Monday, when, as the photos above show rather graphically, we narrowly escaped a 70-foot sycamore tree falling right on top of the room in which we were standing. We literally watched outside the back windows as the tree wobbled and then came crashing down — missing our place by a foot or two. Sadly, Mike Gio and his family were not so lucky. (Mike, I’ll lend you my rosary next time.)

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Or so the Republican National Conventioneers would have us believe. With the post-Gustav information blitz enlightening some formerly dark corners of New Orleans, I took the opportunity to catch a few hours of last night’s RNC, where I was treated to some of the most offensive rhetoric to come out of a major political party in my lifetime. The attacks, which mocked Barack Obama’s experience two decades ago as a grass-roots activist on Chicago’s South Side, came not just from Rudy Giuliani, the failed candidate for his party’s nomination, who spit out the term “community organizer” twice as if he secretly held Habitat For Humanities responsible for taking down the Twin Towers, but from the party’s vice presidential nominee herself, Gov. Sarah Palin. “I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities,” she said, referencing her previous job as chief executive of Wasilla, Alaska, population 7,028. The partisan crowd, waving signs that read “Prosperity,” ate it up. But I had to wonder how such insults — not just to Sen. Obama, but also to anyone who has ever worked for or benefitted from a neighborhood organization — were received by small-town Americans, for whose interests Palin’s nomination was supposedly engineered, or by citizens in New Orleans, whose own community organizers averted potentially substantial loss of life during the Gustav evacuation, allowing the GOP to proceed with their grand ole party as planned. A simple “thank you” would have sufficed. The “f**k you” they got instead is unpardonable.      

This is a long post and it’s early to be thinking about this,  but it could be good news. Hurricane Gustav Victims Qualify for IRS Disaster Relief

IR-2008-100, Sept. 3, 2008

WASHINGTON — The Internal Revenue Service is providing tax relief to victims of Hurricane Gustav in affected areas of Louisiana .

The IRS is postponing until Jan. 5, 2009 deadlines for taxpayers who reside or have a business in the disaster area. The postponement applies to return filing, tax payment and other time-sensitive acts otherwise due between Sept. 1, 2008 and Jan. 5, 2009. This includes:

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