Hurricane
It's reported, without an official link, that federal officials are closing shelters in North Carolina, threatening that if families don't have a "safe place to go" by Friday they will take the children to government-run shelters. In what way could that possibly be helpful or profitable to anyone? It's a threat. Funding is not bottomless. Some money must be saved for any fresh disasters that may arise. Hurricane survivors who don't have places of their own to go to must appeal to friends this week. If you know people who have been staying in shelters, or if you have a trailer or spare room or even a time-share in Florida and feel moved to get to know them, make an offer now.
To offer a room, e-mail Airbnb.com. Their plan is to make some sort of compensation to people who lend out rentable rooms at no charge to survivors.
To arrange for official compensation for offering flats, trailers, or houses at no charge to survivors, contact FEMA through the web site sam.gov.
Property owners may not have known about FEMA's flawed, but possibly useful, offer to fund repairs to property in exchange for using it to house refugees from this or future weather disasters. This is unlikely to get your rental property ready to use by Friday and, presumably because FEMA doesn't want to be sued for things that don't work out, the program will not make spare rooms in your home rentable, no matter how many disaster survivors you take in. It has to be a rental property (they sound as if they prefer those awful apartment buildings we really need to start pulling down) and you have to agree to let survivors of verified, usually large-scale, natural emergencies stay in the place at no charge to them. Details are at sam.gov.
If you don't have a rental suite fit to post on Airbnb but are willing to share your home, as in "one person can sleep on the couch" or "large warm dry basement where a family can put sleeping bags on the floor," which may well be necessary, there's no official web site for that. E-mail people you know in North Carolina or eastern Tennessee.
Music
Digital music fans don't even remember backmasking, the fine art of embedding words or tunes into other words or tunes so that you could play a record backward. Well, if you had the right equipment. Most record players would not cooperate. Most people didn't want to pay for devices that would play records or tapes backward, since most of them weren't backmasked and, even if they were, the backmasked content didn't usually sound like much. (This web site refuses to link to the song that had the infamous backmasked lyrics about singing because he lived with Satan. Instant parent triggers were supposed to mean instant sales. Bah humbug.) But those who had a device that could play music backward sometimes encountered secret jokes, like this one of Pink Floyd's:
And here's the video...Yes, we expected that sort of thing in movies, at the time, though I think most people missed the movie and listened to the song on a plain old one-way record or tape player. Some may want to leave the song playing in the background and quickly open a different tab. Cartoon flower porn!
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