I think it is a shame that it takes a catastrophic event to remind us how critically important it is for everyone to have an emergency kit at home. I guess the problem is that people are either complacent, they don't know what to get or, they wait until the very last minute and do not have the time to go to all of the stores to get what they need. Yesterday, a DECA business high-school student knocked on door and told the family about the fundraiser for their high-school club. They were selling a 72-hour emergency kit called the Ready Kit from American Family Safety. I don't remember everything that the kit had but, it was designed by the department of homeland security and had three days of water, food, radio, flashlight batteries and a first aid kit and a lot of other stuff all in an orange backpack. Talk about convenient. The student was selling it for $49 and a portion went to the neighborhood DECA club who was raising funds for Red Cross. The product gets shipped right to the house from UPS too. I think it is a great idea to educate everyone about the need for these products. The fundraiser is from www.americanfamilysafety.com and it's a lot better than buying the chocolate bars or cookies.

I have a pool and it is my understanding that water-heaters also hold large volumes of water. Would one of those Brita pitcher filters be effective in making the water drinkable in case of an earthquake?

Kitty, thank you for letting me get my question on the air during Monday's show (re how poor folk are supposed to amass the needed emergency supplies given that they're, well, POOR). I don't think that your guest was what a lawyer in a courtroom wd call "responsive," but she does have the hopeless task of representing a governor who wants -- in the name of the Republican sacred cause of "fiscal repsonsiblity" -- to further squeeze those barely getting by. (I was apparently not alone in thinking this, as a later caller asked the guest the same question.) Her suggestion that people in the situation I described shd put a little aside every month until eventually they cd assemble a few days' worth of food, when these are people who actually regularly go hungry -- usually it's that "last week" of the month -- would be risible were it not so cruel. (My guess is that when the month arrives when they have gotten those few days' worth of food together they might be unable to resist the temptation to eat it, instead of ignoring the pangs in their belly until the the next month's money has come in.) It really ranks with the First Mother's now-notorious contribution to the "alors qu'ils mangent de la brioche" hall of shame, uttered when she appeared in Houston to offer further affliction to the already quite afflicted. (Someone needs to explain to her family that the proper, decent thing to do entails "COMFORTING the afflicted" and "afflicting the comfortable." OK, maybe the latter is too much to ask from the pearl-draped old battleaxe, but if she can't manage the former, I did think people of her class were taught at a minimum that when you have nothing nice to say, you ought to say nothing. I don't recall anything in the code of noblesse noblige about pouring scorn and vinegar into the wounds of the broken and bleeding. Sorry, but I did need to get that off my chest.)

I wd have liked to have asked the governor's point-woman on disaster preparedness the timely follow-up question of how her boss's plans to veto the proposed increase in the minimum wage (paltry as it is, and as far as it is from creating an actually LIVABLE wage) will contribute to enabling the one-third or more residents of Los Angeles county who live in poverty -- most of them WORKING poor, mind you -- to do their part to take repsonsiblity for themselves and their families in the event of a disaster here.

To pass onto Crystal Smith, for use in preparing the program you indicated you would produce to follow up on the continual, ongoing disaster of poverty here in LA, I suggest going to the Weingart Center's website. The Weingart Center houses a research organization called stg like the Center for the Study of Poverty and Homelessness in Los Angeles; on whose website appears a report on Food Insecurity in Los Angeles. Someone from the Center wd make a good guest, so, I think, would someone from the LA Food Bank, and someone (Madeline Janis Aparicio or Vivian Rothstein) from LAANE (the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy). I'm sure you can round someone up from the Existing Republican Order to try to (keep a straight face and) defend their position w/out my input! Somehow I can't write about that Existing Order w/out Bob Dylan's "Times They are a Changin" -- you know: "admit that the waters around you have grown and accept it that soon you'll b e drenched to the bone . . . then you better start swimming or soon you'll sink like a stone, for the times. . . ." -- running through my mind. Pity it took such a cruel cataclysm for the collective scales to finally fall from the eyes of the formerly somnolent American public, but I take some comfort in thinking that not only does it seem to be becoming clear that the best response to disaster wd be to evacuate the current occupants of the White House, but that here too in California, your guest's boss can now, thankfully, be nicknamed the "One-term-inator". . . . Yesterday's news told us that NASA wants to send someone back to the moon. Not sure if this shd be a high priority right now, what with the internal migration of destitute delugees to deal with, and the mess in Iraq, and so much else, but then I think, well, why not send George Bush. (You know, if they can send one man to the moon, why not send all the Republicans?)

Besides Dylan's words, the radio in my brain keeps playing a couple of snippets from the great LA punk band X, which seem apt in light of the sudden paroxysm of attention being paid to the vast entrenched poverty in this great land of ours: "only think about in once in every twenty years/see how we are" (from the song "See How We Are" from about yes, twenty years back), and from another song of theirs, whose title eludes me, "I believe that the meek will inherit the earth, but by then it won't be worth much." It does seem that the hope engendered by the sense that great political pendulum is about to make -- at long last -- a mighty swing in the right direction has to be tempered by the sobering realization that the years of wanton pillaging and waste of the nation's human, fiscal, and natural resources leaves those who would rebuild after Hurricane "Government-Is-the-Problem" with precious little means to do so. (Those billions spirited away into Cayman Island banks aren't coming back, neither are our eroded wetlands, the wasted childhoods of the deprived, and so much more than I can list here.)

I ought to have said this earlier, Kitty and TofTT producers: Great job and keep it up!

-- "Genise from Santa Monica"