Photo du Jour: San Antoleans

At least 100,000 New Orleans/Louisiana KTMB-displaced citizens are currently residing in Houston and other Texas cities. Essentially, the federal government is subsidizing significant portions of our population to not return back to Louisiana by providing rent-free housing for a year in Houston. They have no incentive to ever come back to New Orleans and all the government-sponsored incentive in the world to remain in Texas. And in some cases their New Orleans homes weren't impacted by the flood waters, but in their eyes they'd be absolutely stupid not to take advantage of a rent-free apartment in Houston. Not only do we lose population and potentially federal representation because of this policy (Louisiana will likely lose another electoral vote/U.S. Representative after the 2010 Census--which may or may not have happened anyway, but the KTMB exodus won't help), but we lose a vital part of our heritage and culture as our citizenry is dispersed from our city and state.

So what does all of this have to do with the above picture of the traffic signals at the South Carrollton/South Claiborne Avenue intersection taken this morning? I just thought it was ironic that we give Texas our people and for some strange reason we get their goofy sideways traffic signals (except for the turning arrow ones). These were installed since KTMB as I think its safe to say the old signals were probably damaged in the floodwaters and the horizontal Texas standard was applied. Whats next--we refer I-10 as IH-10 now???