As the waters continued to rise in New Orleans, four Navy ships raced toward the Gulf Coast with drinking water and other emergency supplies, and Red Cross workers from across the country converged on the devastated region. The Red Cross reported it had about 40,000 people in 200 shelters across the area in one of the biggest urban disasters the nation has ever seen.

The death toll from Hurricane Katrina reached at least 110 in Mississippi alone, while Louisiana put aside the counting of the dead to concentrate on rescuing the living, many of whom were still trapped on rooftops and in attics.

A full day after the city thought it had escaped Katrina's full fury, two levees broke and spilled water into the streets of New Orleans on Tuesday, swamping an estimated 80 percent of the bowl-shaped, below-sea-level city, inundating miles and miles of homes and rendering much of New Orleans uninhabitable for weeks or months.

"We are looking at 12 to 16 weeks before people can come in," New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said on ABC's "Good Morning America, "and the other issue that's concerning me is have dead bodies in the water. At some point in time the dead bodies are going to start to create a serious disease issue."

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... 12 to 16 weeks? That's three to four months.

Help: links to the Network for Good hurricane relief efforts and the Red Cross's Disaster Relief Fund donation site.

I worry that as these cyber-conveniences stream through our lives, they atomize us. I worry that in their magnitude and pervasiveness, they hasten our transformation from social actors into solo consumers. Finally, I'm concerned that this growing exclusion of serendipity from our lives and learning could leave us short of the sort of broad knowledge of how things happen, the way things work — in our neighborhoods and the world at large — that citizens of a democratic republic require.

We live in a country founded on principles of individual choice, individual responsibility, and individual freedom, but we live in an economic environment which conditions us to think and behave like a herd of sheep. A mass market economy needs mass market thinking to make masses of money. It promotes a mentality that buys into an array of false concepts which it can then package, make generic, and sell to the largest possible audience. How are we to nurture the individual creative spirits of our young people when a large part of our culture promotes conformity, seducing us with the security of the well fed, distracting us with a vast web of superficial electronic entertainment.

Another Franklin County jury might still hear about McCoy’s crimes.

Miami lawyer Jack Thompson stood beside Brent Knisley yesterday and said he plans to file a wrongful-death lawsuit on behalf of the family against the makers of violent adult video games, the kind that McCoy often played in the basement of his mother’s home.

Many of them involved shooting at cars and innocent victims; some were confiscated from McCoy’s Las Vegas motel room.

As part of the plea, McCoy has agreed to talk with an FBI profiler and members of the central Ohio task force that hunted him to discuss his crimes and the effect, if any, the video games had on his conduct.