K-Blogging Is Soooo Three Weeks Ago.

For the past 48 hours, tabloid copy editors, bloggers, and late-night joke writers have been combing popular culture past and present for references to the name "Rita" that could make sense (however marginally) in the context of a hurricane*. In one sense they lucked out with the "Waves" associated with last month's Katrina, but on the other hand they soon ran out of other Katrina pop culture references. (I guess Rush Limbaugh and company called it "Hurricane Katrina vanden Heuvel" for a while, but that was way lame.)

Look for headlines, jokes, throw-away lines, etc. having to do with:

• Rita Moreno
• Lovely Rita, Meter Maid
• Substitute Stooge Joe DeRita
• The non-Rita-specific "I was born in a class five hurricane"
• "Houston, you have a problem"

* Before doing a little Rita-Googling, it would never have occurred to me that there might be an entire site devoted to famous actresses wearing opera gloves.

Update, 11:58 PM, 9/22/05:

I swear, I didn't cheat and look at this NYT article first:

Houston, You Have a Problem

By VIKAS BAJAJ and CLAUDIA H. DEUTSCH
Published: September 23, 2005
Facing a potentially devastating hit from Hurricane Rita, the Houston-area economy ground to a halt yesterday as more than four million residents evacuated the city and other nearby coastal areas on clogged highways, which were made worse by motorists stranded as gasoline ran short...