The Emmy Awards were handed out last week, so let’s talk TV:

When you’re traveling in a house on wheels, you can immerse yourself in a place by exploring at your own pace. So it is perhaps both ironic and appropriate that one of the best ways of exploring is by simply watching television.

Specifically, I’m talking about the local nightly news, which amounts to a half-hour synopsis of a day in the life of a locale. What matters to the folks who live there? Maybe it’s soybean prices in Sioux City… or a surf advisory in Santa Cruz… or soldiers returning home to Shreveport. Perhaps, as we discovered in Springfield, Massachusetts, over the summer, it’s big news when the local Brownie troop donates a couple of Wii consoles to the local children’s hospital. For me, that sort of information is a window into a city’s soul.

Consider, for instance, what plays in Peoria, Illinois. The last time that I was interviewed on WMBD-TV, I discovered that the station employed a full-time family farmer giving agricultural reports and also conducted regular interviews with the coach of local Arena Football team (at least until the league folded). Just by knowing that, don’t you feel like you’ve learned something about the sensibilities and scope of the city?

Everything about the evening news – even the people relating the news – tells me something about a place. It was Bob Dylan who sang, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” But a weatherman can provide insight into the magnitude of a media market. Consider the difference between Los Angeles and Lexington: In L.A., I recall a well-tanned meteorologist showily announcing a two-degree temperature drop from Pasadena to Pomona. His name was Dallas Raines (yes, really), and he was from Georgia, by way of Florida. In Lexington, it was a Kentucky native, T.G. Shuck, taking viewers across a regional map as if he’s been there his whole life, which he nearly has.

So you learn a lot in a half hour, even if it’s only a realization that there’s nothing more top of mind to sports fans in Cedar Rapids than the outcome of the minor league game between the Cedar Rapids Kernels and the Fort Wayne Wizards.

Still, there was one time when I turned on the TV only to be thrust into geographic confusion. In fact, it seemed like a surreal nightmare. I settled down for the evening in the dusty desert hamlet of Wellton, Arizona, and watched a newscast that sounded to me like Martians reporting their secret Earth observations:

“Dozens of humans were on hand to watch a flag football game between the police and fire departments.”… “Sixty humans attended a fiddling contest today.”… “Humans are in for nice weather this week.”

Humans? I felt like one of those unfortunate saps in “The Twilight Zone” who rolls into a sleepy small town and soon finds out that he has actually entered a different dimension. I half-expected Rod Serling to appear and announce, “You’re watching the Red Planet’s #1 nightly news!”

Then it dawned on me: Folks in Yuma call themselves Yumans. You learn something every day.

Here's a photo of Luke being interviewed for the Detroit nightly news:

On this day, the 5th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, I’d like to tell you about a town named Triumph.

This Louisiana hamlet is one of the last inhabitable communities along the Mississippi River, more than 2,500 miles from the waterway’s origins. It is located in Plaquemines Parish, a thin peninsula straddling the river for its final hundred-mile stretch. Over the years, the mud carried by the river has gradually extended the delta. Thus, the land surrounding the Mississippi here was in fact created by it. It is the amalgam of a great force binding a nation together.

But Triumph was born as the nation seemed to be falling apart. In 1862, it was the site of one of the most important confrontations of the Civil War, when the Union fleet fought its way past two supposedly impenetrable forts and gained control of the mouth of the Mississippi. So here, in the deepest of the Deep South, northern soldiers gave the community its name.

Over the next century, Triumph’s culture was all but inseparable from the river itself. But the Mississippi, creator of the fertile delta, has also been its destroyer. You see, this precarious strip of land is a hurricane magnet.

The storm of all storms arrived on September 9, 1965. It was given the name Hurricane Betsy, and it broke all Louisiana records, packing wind gusts up to 160 miles per hour. Betsy entered the delta against the current, and the river’s waters combined with the storm surge to form a massive tide of calamity.

Century-old oak trees were shredded. Homes were tossed into crumpled heaps. Boats were thrown inland; buildings were washed out to sea. Hundreds of dead cattle were entangled among snapped electrical poles and coffins that had floated out of cemeteries. Only nine of the 81 deaths blamed on the hurricane were Plaquemines Parish residents, but nearly 95 percent of the parish was flooded. It was no longer easy to distinguish between the gulf, the river and the land.

An estimated 4,600 homes, 700 trailers, 500 boats, 270 business establishments and 140 farm buildings were either damaged or destroyed. Total damage reached $1.2 billion, making Betsy the first-ever billion-dollar storm. And yet, soon after, a local newspaper editorial concluded, “Plaquemines will rise again.” And it did. Within three weeks, most of the water was pumped out. A few weeks later, schools reopened. By mid-November, 75 percent of the parish’s residents had returned.

And then it happened again. Just 47 months later, on August 17, 1969, Hurricane Camille came barreling up the river. Remember the sickening shock you felt when the second World Trade tower crumbled? For parish residents, the emotion was much the same. Oh, lord. Not twice.

Hurricanes are ranked on a scale from 1 (minimal) to 5 (catastrophic). Betsy had been a Category 3 hurricane. Camille was a Category 5, its top recorded wind velocity exceeding 200 miles per hour. The tidal surge left a 138-foot barge blocking the main highway. A trailer was found wrapped around a tree, crushed to a height of one yard. A church steeple was discovered half a mile away. A pay telephone was found, but not the building to which it had once been attached.

Though only seven parish residents died, hundreds of people across the South lost their lives to Camille and the floods that followed. The damage to Plaquemines alone was estimated at $500 million. Most of what had been rebuilt after the first hurricane was annihilated by the second. But once again, the people prevailed. Within four months, 85 percent of the parish’s residents returned, more than 1,100 building permits were issued, and 7,500 students were back in school.

I visited the hamlet of Triumph about 14 years ago, and I found a town changed by disaster – the homes that weren’t mobile were built on stilts, and the residents were experts at evacuation. But the town was still there – defiant and resolved – along with a local church marquee declaring, “Sometimes God breaks us so he can remake us.”

Then five years ago, Katrina arrived. You can guess what happened to Triumph. But I’m confident that we’ll be seeing the town on the map as long as we keep making maps. Jack Kerouac once compared the Mississippi River to a torrent of broken souls. But I don’t think so. Not this part of the river. Bent, perhaps, but not broken.

Here’s a number for you: 42. That’s how old I am as of today. But I’m not alone. Happy birthday to Sean Connery and Gene Simmons and Elvis Costello and my old pal Regis Philbin. Quite a motley crew.

Remarkably, today also happens to be my fraternal twin brother’s birthday. His name is Brian. He was born a whole 12 minutes before me. My brother became a certified public accountant and is now the co-owner and chief financial guru of a corrugated box manufacturing company in Chicago.

So he became a number-cruncher.

Me? Well, math and I don’t get along too well. We used to have a comfortable relationship, back when I was about seven years old. In fact, when I was in second grade I was accomplished enough that I was using a math textbook designed for fifth graders. Alas, by the time I was in fourth grade I was in… a fourth-grade math book. And that well describes the evolution of my mathematical abilities.

So I became a writer.

And, if you’ve been reading this blog for a while – or if you’ve read any of my books – you know that I have a soft spot for writing about geographical quirks. In fact, I’ve chronicled towns named after writers – like Poe (West Virginia), Thoreau (New Mexico) and Dickens (Iowa). And towns named after Shakespeare characters – like Othello (Washington) and Desdemona (Texas).

But now I’d like to get back to math. In fact, I’m going to take a deep breath and write about numerically lyrical towns. For instance…

If you’re driving through the Southwest, you can plan a stop at the California town of Twentynine Palms (near Joshua Tree National Park) or the Arizona hamlet of Two Guns, an abandoned ghost town about 30 miles east of Flagstaff. Interestingly, the latter town was named after a guy named “Two Gun Miller”… whose real name was Henry Miller… which is also the name of a famous writer, of course… who once wrote a travel narrative about a cross-country journey.

But Henry Miller – the writer – was a cynic of the highest order. He called his book The Air-Conditioned Nightmare. And Henry Miller – the Two Gun guy – was apparently an eccentric hermit who lived in a cave and was hostile to visitors. So let’s get back to happier geography:

A bit further east of Arizona, you can point yourself toward Texas and the town of Seven Sisters. Located south of San Antonio, it was likely named for the seven daughters of an important local landowner.  Then again, there’s also a town named Three Brothers – in Arkansas, deep in the Ozarks.

There is also Two Egg, Florida. And Three Notch, Alabama. And Four Forks, Louisiana. And Five Points, North Carolina. And Six, West Virginia. And Seven Trees, California. And Section Eight, Ohio. And Nine Points, Pennsylvania.

And then there are the more numerically ambitious hamlets – places with names like Sixteen (Montana), Forty-one (Oklahoma), Seventy Six (Kentucky), Eighty Four (Pennsylvania), Ninety Six (South Carolina)… and, of course, Thousand Oaks (California).

I can’t say I’ve been to any of these places – yet. But I have visited one little hiccup on the map that sort of belongs on this list. I was heading to an Arizona town named Bagdad, and I took a brief detour into absurdity when I realized that Bagdad is 22 miles from Nothing.

Literally. It’s called Nothing, Arizona.

It was nothing more than a turnoff (from Highway 97) featuring a ramshackle service station surrounded by several rotting vehicles. When I visited (eight years ago), the population was 4. I heard recently, from a woman at a book signing who randomly brought up the story of that very same town, that Nothing no longer exists. But I saw it while it did.

“Nothing Towing” said the sign. Nearby, there was a scrawled proclamation of sorts, something along the lines of a nihilistic pledge of allegiance: “Town of Nothing, AZ… Founded 1977… The staunch citizens of Nothing are full of hope, faith and believe in the work ethic. Thru the years these dedicated people had faith in Nothing, hoped for Nothing, worked at Nothing, for Nothing…”

Here’s a photo from there, starring the self-proclaimed sheriff of Nothing (and he showed me the badge to prove it) – a survivalist who called himself “Jim Outback.”

“Why do you call yourself that?” I asked him.

He pointed deep into the sagebrush. “Because I live out back.”