I'm sure most folks here have read about Resident Bush strumming while New Orleans flooded (akin to fiddling while Rome burned) last Tuesday August 30, when country singer Mark Wills presented a guitar to him backstage following his visit to Naval Base Coronado, California. It's a mighty purdy cutaway with the Residential Seal on it. Hard to read the headstock from this photo but I think it's a Collings.

In another Mudcat thread, PoppaGator said he left behind his 1969 Martin D-18 when he evacuated New Orleans last weekend. Lord knows when he'll be able to go back home and check on his house and that guitar. If it turns out that his Martin D-18 has been crushed in the hurricane and/or filled with toxic sludge by the flood, he could always present it to Resident Bush as well. Bush could hang it on a White House wall next to the Mark Wills guitar. Just as a reminder, since he couldn't seem to remember on that day that hundreds (thousands?) of American citizens were in the process of drowning -- the ones who hadn't died the previous day -- or that more were going to die over the following two days before he quit playing and started working.

As a matter of fact, wouldn't that make a great display on the Washington mall -- kinda like the AIDS quilt: line up every crunched-up, sludge-filled guitar dredged up from New Orleans, all in rows across the lawn, with that cutaway-with-the-Residential-Seal right in the middle of them all. I want to see the satellite photo of that.

Yeah, I know, it'll never happen. At least not till we get a non-Republican President. Hey, I can dream, can't I?