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Media hound and NFL referee Ed Hochuli poses for a local paper.

While we’re on the subject of football, let’s take a moment and bow our heads in remembrance of Ed Hochuli’s usual ball-busting bluster while he mutates into a whiny little figurehead demanding sympathy before our very eyes. Ed Hochuli, the man with guns of pure titanium who is constantly referred to - for reasons I’ll never understand - as the NFL’s best referee blew a gigantic and arguably game-deciding call during last weekend’s game between the San Diego Chargers and the Denver Broncos.

Now I’ve already gone on record as saying that no one needs a flashy referee, but let’s be honest. If any other ref had made the same mistake, would the entire NFL Referee Association have issued a press release about what a great guy he is? Why shouldn’t the NFL’s least deserving attention whore get a taste of his own whistle after such a colossal blunder? Ed will tell you why. Because what those refs do is hard. It’s really haaaard-duh! They have to take tests and everything! Ed even went on ESPN to bemoan the travails of having one’s performance taped and then reviewed by his boss, asking “how many” people are exposed to such scrutiny? Uh, that would be most of us Ed. But it shocks no one here at the Basement to hear that you think you’re the only guy in the world who has accountability on the job. After all, what are those massive arm muscles for, if not to hold the whole world on your own shoulders?

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Nothing says NEW ORLEANS like the crossroads of adversity and humor;

A house in the Uptown District of New Orleans posts a “No Wake” sign on the second story to prepare for hurricane flooding.

Every cataclysmic event adds new terminology to the common lexicon. For the 2000 presidential election, it was chad. For 9/11, it was box cutter, burka and ground zero. For Katrina, it was contraflow.

For Gustav, we have The Cone. The 5-day cone, the 3-day cone, the cone of anxiety!

In his recently blogged essay “The Cone of Insanity,” my friend Mike Gio tackles this vocabularic phenomenon:

“The National Hurricane Center calls it the Forecast Cone, that unsettlingly familiar graphic depiction of the projected path of a storm and the surrounding area representing the margin for error,” Gio writes.

“Meteorologist Carl Arredondo referred to the Forecast Cone as the Cone of Error, stressing the variations and inaccuracies that are possible. His colleague, Jonathan Myers, went a step further and called it the Cone of Uncertainty, which certainly isn’t helpful. The Palm Beach Post puts an ominous spin on things by calling it the Cone of Probability, as in: ‘It’s anybody’s guess right now, but hey, it’ll probably hit somewhere inside that Cone!’

“OK, most of us don’t have degrees in meteorology and certificates in storm prognostication, but you don’t have to be Nash Roberts to know that when something is simultaneously referred to as the Cone of Uncertainty and the Cone of Probability, something ain’t quite right. What’s next? The Cone of Confusion? The Cone of Contradiction? The Cone of Complete Cluelessness?”

I know the storm is imminent when the house up the street posts the sign. So here we go.

I’d say here we go again, but I wasn’t actually around for Hurricane Katrina. We moved to New Orleans almost exactly a year after that fateful storm passed through. A lot of people asked us: “Why would you want to go there?” It is a reasonable question. After all, the entire country watched as this city struggled and drowned. As the government later opined, “mistakes were made.” But New Orleans is in our family’s history, which means it is also in our blood. We wanted to come here for the simple reason of solidarity; we couldn’t bear to watch from afar, we had to come back. You see, the national news covered the storm, and it covered the devastation that followed. What it didn’t cover was the Rebirth. Unless you’re a New Orleanian or a serious Saints fan, you probably weren’t a part of the overwhelming spirit of a community that simply could not call any place else “home.”

We flatter ourselves that we have been a part of the Rebirth efforts here, which is what makes this new storm Gustav sting so badly. We want to stay. If you’ve never seen an entire city in the throws of post-traumatic stress disorder, maybe you don’t understand. Maybe all you see is an industrial center or a port. Maybe all you see is a city which has one of the highest poverty rates in the nation. Maybe all you see is boarded up windows and low-lying streets, just waiting to be flooded. But if so, New Orleans is more than what you see. Today I saw families boarding up windows. Today I saw people buying canned fish and batteries. But today, I also saw a young man pasting the only bumper sticker on his new car - a sticker that simply said “New Orleans.”

More than any place I have ever experienced, New Orleans is a community. It is a city where the words “friend” and “neighbor” mean something more than their dictionary definitions. It is a city where the word “porch” is a verb. It is the kind of city that could birth an entire musical genre (we’re talkin’ ’bout Jazz) out of sheer tenacity and strength of spirit, and probably no small amount of red wine. It is a city that gets into your soul, makes a nest, and settles down for the long haul. To us, it is home in every sense of the word.

Tomorrow, I will have to leave my home (Chris Rose leaves when Nash leaves*, I leave when the Saints leave). I will pack my family and my pets in a car, and drive to Kentucky where our nearest family members wait to literally shelter us from the storm (the nearest vacant hotels are in northern Arkansas anyway). We will drive all night, and we will arrive alive and safe. We will leave our home behind, and if Gustav does its worst, our home will flood, and struggle, and maybe drown once again. But there will be no dead in our attic, no need for the National Guard to paint an ugly number on our wall. We’ll head out, so that we can come back all the sooner.

Being a New Orleanian is kind of like being a pet person - either you get it or you don’t. If you do, I - we - want to say “Thank You.” Thank you to all the people in all the states who are preparing to help out our worst case scenario. Thank you to everyone who isn’t leaving it up to President Bush or FEMA to pull us through. Thank you for your care, your consideration, your generosity, and your help. But most of all, Thank You for understanding. We love our home, and no matter what Gustav or any other storm brings, we’re prepared to return. So tonight, as we’re clearing out our freezers and filling up our gas tank, we will eat our perishable foods, and we will drink our non-perishable wines, because this is New Orleans. We live it. We love it. And no matter what happens, we can’t wait to come home.

*Chris Rose never leaves.

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