the following people are to be poked with pointy sticks:

associated press writers allen g. breed, marilynn marchione, erin mcclam, matt sedensky, and vicki smith. and here's why:

After Storm, Survivors Learn to Improvise
September 18, 2005 1:37 PM

In devastated Chalmette, La., at Lehrmann's bar and seafood restaurant just across the street from a refinery, pool tables were converted to beds for those who lost their homes but refused to leave flooded St. Bernard's parish.

In New Orleans, mattresses became life rafts and plastic storage bins were floating baby strollers.

...

"That's called the ingenuity of survivors," said Joanna Dubreuil, standing outside what used to be [a] Waffles Plus restaurant in Bay St. Louis, Miss., a gulf-front town that is basically gone.

there's some discussion of people fashioning makeshift showers out of found piping and mixing various cleansing agents to use as laundry detergent and denture cleaner, which are, technically, examples of ingenuity. but then there's this:

After Katrina, even death required improvising. In New Orleans, a woman's body lay outside for days. Eventually, bricks were stacked to form a makeshift grave. A bedsheet became a tombstone. "Here Lies Vera," it said. "God Help Us."

Xavier Bowie died while his common-law wife was out looking for help. No one would come get his body, so Evelyn Turner wrapped a sheet around him and floated him down to the main road on a raft of two-by-fours. A truck finally stopped and its driver was persuaded to carry Turner and her dead companion to Charity Hospital.

There, doctors had enlisted bystanders and relatives to squeeze portable air bags for patients - a demanding and tedious job - who had been on ventilators that gave out when the generators died. Boats became gurneys, transporting the sick out of the damaged hospital. "The patients were being treated with not even what you'd have in a field hospital," said Dr. L. Lee Hamm.

these are not laudable examples of ingenuity and the determination of the human spirit, they are the desperate acts of people with no resources, no assistance, and absolutely no idea of where to turn for either. and don't even get me started on the description of the act of keeping ventilator patients alive as being demanding and tedious. learn to improvise? this isn't fucking boy scout summer camp, these are the living conditions of citizens who have been hung out to dry by their government, and these writers lack either the sense or the balls, or maybe both, to report it in the serious and outraged tone it warrants.

update, 10/3/05, 7:06 p.m.: AP writer deborah hastings may be primarily responsible for the wording of this article, the facts of which were gathered and submitted by the writers named above. her name appeared nowhere in the article i read on september 18, but it is on most of the still-viewable internet copies of it, including the one i have updated this post's link to. since i don't know for sure i'm going to stay on the poke-everybody track, but i'm starting to think that she deserves the most heartfelt jabbing. at the very least, she should get the pointiest stick.