New Orleans   After four days with no power, which of course means no internet, erratic to infrequent newspaper delivery, and it turns out no working radio in the house and only weather and disaster news on the truck radio, it is somewhat wild to be thrust from the light of the full moon into modern day America.

The first head scratcher was about the chair.

Everywhere I looked there were pictures of an empty chair and captions about cats having a beer with President Obama or people standing next to an empty chair asking what they should say to the President.   I was clueless here.  What were they talking about?

Eventually even the New Orleans Times-Picayune, a right-Republican house organ in recent years (except on the issue of hurricane recovery money!), ran a wire piece in their slim, Houma press “high school” size edition about Clint Eastwood have “jumped the shark,” as they say in Hollywood.  Hilarious!  How could the Romney people have not known that Clint was an actor first and foremost, which means hambone, which means, “Katie bar the door!”  What a hoot!

We also were treated to a picture of Romney in Lafitte, Louisiana with Bobby Jindal, Louisiana’s governor and ….Young, the Jefferson Parish President.  Big grins all around, which would not have seemed like the gravitas to meet a disaster, but I assume the point was to seem like not-George-Bush-after-Katrina.  Getting a newspaper for the first time and seeing the picture it all seemed so random and WTF?  We had missed the entire convention, proving no doubt that there is always some silver lining in the darkest rain clouds, but then we have the dude parachute down on us and be beamed out before we even knew there was an alien invasion.  God knows?

This morning at 3AM, the New York Times hit the front door, so we were more firmly grounded in reality that we understood.  The lead editorial made it clear there was still no plan on home mortgage modifications and foreclosure relief and those banks were still not being held accountable.  There was no alien invasion after all it seems.  We had simply been caught in a time machine over the last four days and woke up in 2008!