Oh. My. God.
But I’m very sorry to say I’m not at all surprised. 
Just got off the phone with my mom who lives in Birmingham. She said that the University of Alabama opened a building on their campus for the evacuees. She said they have rocking chairs and tv (I know the rocking chair thing sounds trivial, but for some reason I had to add that since she felt compelled to tell me that). She also said that the state parks have offered to let the evacuees stay there for free and several locations throughout the state have done the same.
The Student Rec Center. It’s housing 500 evacuees. And can you believe there are actually students bitching about it because “my tuition keeps that place open and I need to work out!”.
Sampiro:
Ole Scylla is gonna help you out here, buddy.
What you need to do is concentrate and get in your most elitist, snobbish persona possible.
Then you call your brother.
“You’re going to stay in a hotel filled with refugees? Ewww.”
“Your gonna sleep in a bed some dirty grimy sweaty evacuee slept in? Yecccch!”
He’ll cancel just like that.
Good plan, but it would require talking to the bastard.
This is a guy whose mother gave him three cars before he was 21 (one of them brand new), paid for his education and a nice apartment while he was in school (he didn’t have to work for a single day), loaned him money to set up housekeeping with (which she never got back) and gave him her 2 carat diamond engagement ring when he proposed to his fiancee. A few years later when she had lost most of her property, creditors were hovering over the rest (and eventually got it), and she didn’t even have a telephone, he made her feel like such a bum when she called him to once to borrow money that she later sold her wedding band and her deadh husband’s wedding band to a scrap gold dealer for $20 to buy gas for her car rather than ask him for money again. (He also promised my father he’d pay half of my tuition in exchange for my parents paying his [see above] and then said “Deal’s off” after my father died, which meant I graduated college at 28 because I ha
Ah well, the point is, to quote Miss Coco Peru, “But am I bitter? Absolutely”. But I can honestly say I feel sorry for him more than anything else. He inherited our grandmother’s complete selfishness and I think that CATS IN THE CRADLE will be the anthem of his old age.
Hmmm, so do you think your brother will end up grossing out his grandkids one day with his old, hairy, wrinkled ass hanging out of a window?
Thank you so much for that image, Guin… must now go gouge out my right eye…
What’s so weird about his kids is this- they look just like him and my sister and me and my mother (blue eyed blondes with fair skin and blonde fuzz all over their body), they’re so obvioiusly related, but they’ve grown up small-town rich and have no concept of batshit crazy exhibitionist old relatives or cows or isolation or Civil War songs at the dinner table or the smell of cheap whiskey and cheaper cigars or shooting rattlesnakes on the patio or bottlefeeding calves or castrating pigs or packs of stray dogs everywhere or coming home to find your pyromaniac grandmother has set fire to the woods again or the other things I hated about my childhood (well, I have to admit I rather liked the Civil War songs and most of the dogs), but… it doesn’t make them better people. I suppose it’s because they have nothing to contrast it to so they just take for granted everybody’s upper middle class Sega-Genesis {or whatever the state of the art video game system is now- my last video game system was an Atari) playing shiny car driving normal. They’ve never set foot in a house that rocked back and forth when they jumped up and down or helped ancient women make brooms out of dried weeds or seen anybody use a rusted tin cup to cut biscuits or drawn water from a well or had to hold down a goat and force her to nurse her kids or anything like that, and the one time they visited the one (1) person left in Weokahatchee (where I grew up), my crazy lay chiropracter aunt, they joked and complained about her house being “OVER 89 DEGREES inside! Why would anybody keep it that hot!”, having no clue that 1- not all houses are centrally cooled and 2- not everybody can afford to keep the window units running, and even though I can’t stand that old woman I found myself siding with her against them!
I wonder how on Earth Vietnamese war brides or refugees from wartorn countries can tolerate their Americanized spoiled children where the gap is even wider.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to go off on a tangent.
I don’t suppose you remember the name of the hotel so that I can make sure to avoid them like the plague-rats they are?
Just yesterday, I received an e-mail from a lady I know from my tennis club. Seems her tennis team, which consists of 10 women who do not work outside the home (some even have nannies and/or housekeepers because their home obligations interfere with their tennis) have made it to the national U.S.T.A. tournament. Quite an honor.
But get this. They are holding a fund raiser to “defray the significant travel costs” associated with this tournament. $25/couple. Bring your own drinks and a snack to share.
Yes, folks, we have thousands of people in this country who just lost every possession they own, not to mention their homes, their jobs…and this lady has the audacity to send out an e-mail asking for money so she can play tennis. :smack:
I dunno - she sounds like the kind of person I’d pay to get rid of.
I was all prepared to come in here and wag my finger at Sampiro. “Now, now, remember what Jesus said about thou shall not judging!” I was gonna throw something in about beams and splinters in thine eye, followed by the requisite stone throwing parable.
But fuck all that.
In any other situation, I’d probably advise you to just forget it and let karma handle your brother’s assholery. But this time people may have to suffer because of his hypertrophic sense of entitlement, so I say you gotta pull him aside and at least attempt to guilt him into doing the right thing. Appeal to his church-centeredness. Is he into appearances? If so, tell him that it will look bad for an elder of his fine chuch to displace the poor and lowly like this. If that doesn’t work, use extortion. Tell him that if he does it, you’ll make sure everyone in his congregation finds out. Threaten to tattle to the pastor.
If none of that works, maybe you can talk some reason into his wife?
I would just call his pastor right off the bat. Or call the church secretary and ask her to list in the church bulletin, “Housing needed for two families displaced by SampiroBro from their evacuation hotel rooms so he could go to a football game.” Clearly Bro is not going to listen to Sampiro. Guilt him where it hurts.
Not if it was the Hyatt and Mayor Nagin has anything to say about it. This scumbag actually halted the evacuation of Superdome refugees so that he and his peeps (along with their luggage) could move to the front of the line. From CBS: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/09/03/national/main814625.shtml
You have to read the article closely, though…it seems as if they are downplaying somewhat the actions of the mayor.
*At one point Friday, the evacuation was interrupted briefly when school buses rolled up so some 700 guests and employees from the Hyatt Hotel could move to the head of the evacuation line, much to the amazement of those who had been crammed in the stinking Superdome since last Sunday.
Mayor Ray Nagin has used the hotel as a base since it is across the street from city hall, and there were reports the hotel was cleared with priority to make room for police, firefighters and other officials. *
Nagin is really not impressing me at all with his “leadership” during this crisis.
One other thing: I agree with the above posters that housing flood refugees is a bit more important right now than any football game (unless it’s the Patriots 
), but, playing devil’s advocate here, why exactly would be a good time to, uh, kick the refugees out? I imagine that many of them will not be able to find housing for quite some time, and at some point the hotels will have to start about making money again.
And with ‘why’ I actually meant ‘when.’
How about when relief efforts have progressed to the point that the displaced refugees have someplace else safe to go? And some of the relief money ought to be earmarked for people who contribute their homes and hotels to house refugees to help defray their expenses.
Kudos to my sister. While she hasn’t opened any of her surplus houses, she has volunteered her time at an evacuee shelter being run by a black church where she lives and she’s donated money to the shelter and to the Red Cross. She also attended services at the church and plans to in the future because she’s furious at her own church for “settin’ on their fat asses”.
Her story about the louse transport: “…and this family came in, Mama and girl and two little boys, and they had lice on them. Well, the church found a place for them” (the church itself is full) “but wouldn’t let them be transferred in their own van cause the kids had lice and they didn’t want the eggs to get in the van. So I went to (the pharmacy she used to own) and pulled some pesticide shampoo off the shelves and had them bathe with it, and they still wouldn’t take 'em, and nobody would take 'em in their car. Finally I got fed up and just said, 'Hell, I drive a convertible and drive it like I’m being chased by Jeff Gordon, I’ll take 'em- the wind’ll blow the damned lice away if they get to acting up” and she did.
She also used her contacts with Pfizer and other drug companies to get medicines sent down. I am truly thrilled to have to recant my earlier pitting of her.
My brother, on the other hand, still hasn’t done a damned thing other than use up two rooms for a football game.
Good on your sister and her lousy car.
Sampiro I officially like your sister now. Please be sure and let her know. I’m sure she’ll be thrilled to know some complete stranger on the internet :eek: likes her.
Seriously, good on her for jumping in and helping. We’ve got displaced people here and I’m helping with getting clothing, personal hygiene stuff and other items together cause, hell, at least I feel like I’m doing something.
Out of the ashes rises yet another phoenix.
Wow, Sampiro officially unpitting a close relative! Looky, there’s a flapping of porcine wings out my window!
Seriously, good on her for actually helping.