The gold standard post on Metafilter, and arguably the post that defined the shape of Metafilter as we see it today, was the September 11th thread. With its frantic mixture of up-to-the-second news, rumour, speculation and reaction, it displayed for all a phenomenon everyone in North America must have gone through in microcosm, in their living rooms and their offices: a group of people struggling to comprehend catastrophe.

Since then, there have been other such posts—the blackout of 2003 was probably a lot of fun for anyone who actually had power. Unfortunately, another such moment is on its way, and the effects will be more devastating than just a couple of days without power. Hurricane Katrina has been upgraded from a Category 1 all the way to a Category 5 in the space of three days, and the mayor of New Orleans ordered a mandatory evacuation—an unprecedented move because of the difficulty, especially for those without transportation, of getting out of the city before the storm. Metafilter readers are offering shelter to anyone who needs it, perhaps the most obvious shade of the 9/11 thread. People have started joining Metafilter for the express purpose of asking for a couch to stay on.

Someone from the government offices handling the levees in New Orleans advised television viewers to take an axe with them to the attic if they have to bunker down, because in all likelihood they’ll have to chop their way out after the flooding. Because 20% of domestic oil production passes through New Orleans, oil prices have already shot up to over $70 a barrel, and are likely to continue their rise in the coming days. The more dire predictions suggest that when it’s all over, New Orleans will simply cease to exist, crushed by a resurgent Mississippi River, diverted around the city for so long. Nearly everyone expects the city to be 20 feet deep in water come Monday, heavily polluted because of leaked tocins from destroyed industrial facilities. The National Weather Service in New Orleans is saying “most of the area will be uninhabitable for weeks, perhaps longer… power outages will last for weeks… water shortages will make human suffering incredible by modern standards.” And then there are the casualty projections: one source guesses 50,000 dead, one million homeless.

Up-to-the-minute updates on the Wikipedia entry on Hurricane Katrina.

Cripes. At least he got to see the first copies of his book, but cripes. I had no idea. A message from his wife.

From a discussion on cheap body disposal on Ask Metafilter: “My uncle was left to science. When science was finished, they returned him to my cousins, who were really quite surprised.”