Michael Miner's European Vacation

Mystery solved! ‘Scoops” Miner’s column was Katrina-free last week because, like a certain somebody in the White House, he was on vacation when the levees broke. The Reader editors could have saved me a lot of confusion had they taken a moment to explain:

Michael Miner is on vacation. This week’s column is just some crap we found on his hard drive. We mean, besides all that tranny porn.

So now that Scoops is back from flouncing around Europe, he’s on the case, right? Well, not really. Though he devotes the whole column to Miss Katrina, the only actual research he seems to have done was to read two op-eds. Beyond that, the rest of the column consists of gaseous emissions and badly-worded restatements of the obvious. So we learn that (and I quote):

Europeans tend to believe in government.

And that:

New Orleans was a disaster waiting to happen.

Thanks, Scoops!

We also learn that Miner’s sense of humor was not improved by his European Vacation. The first third of the column is given over to Miner’s waggish speculations on what a funny bathroom book on Katrina would look like. I won’t say more, because it’s too horrible, except to note that Miner’s notion of a funny title for the book is: “Easy Does It: Drowning in Incompetence in New Orleans.”

Get it? Easy, like the Big Easy! And "Drowning" because people, like, drowned, in the Big Easy! Because it was flooded! See, it's funny because, oh never mind.

Miner also believes such a book would make a "quick fortune." Yeah,with a title like that, what could go wrong?