Blog Day Afternoon.

Here it is the middle of August, and the days qualify as dog days, both for the steam heat of the air, and the position of Sirius. I haven't checked the sky lately, but it's a safe bet that the Dog Star is where it should be. As for the air, it's steamy, but not outrageously hot, not really (high 80s F). Nothing like my family and friends in Texas are experiencing, but hot enough.

When word of the Eastern blackout drifted into my office yesterday, I called the New York office, but only got a busy-circuit message, as you'd expect. This morning I was able to talk with one of our company's editors at his home in Long Island. He said he had gotten home, from his office in Midtown, at about 3 a.m. Another editor's boyfriend had managed to drive in during the wee hours of this morning -- the roads had cleared out by then, apparently -- and picked up several Long Island-bound employees of Real Estate Media, including the one I spoke with.

I also talked to a writer I know in suburban Detroit. He had simply driven home, through worse traffic than usual. It is Detroit, after all, where everyone drives.

The whole thing leaves me asking: what, no civil disorder? Not even in Detroit? Not like the good ol' days of '77. See my April 28 blog for a previous discussion of blackouts; maybe that meant I had a premonition that this was coming. Not just me either. With some creative interpretation, I'll bet you can find something about this in Nostradamus:

"In the third year after oh-oh-oh/
A great cascade from Canuck-land/
Will render a Great City dark, dark, dark."

Chicago didn't go dark, but if I know ComEd (our local power monopoly), they're pea-green with envy about now. Why does New York get all the glamorous blackouts?