Let's drink to our NYC friends who are sitting in the dark and sweating tonight

(See, toldja.)

i reallly want to extend this wish to all the Toronto and Montreal ilxors too of course, i mean isn't slutsky from there? and well everyone else..possibly lurkers...from detroit to buffalo to cleveland to joisey.. it's a wonder my parents in pittsburgh weren't hit but it's cause it's on a different grid, the maryland-west virginia one

i mean just imagine the no water problem, ugh

(It's weird, but there's a large part of me that's envious of anyone in a non-lethal "race-against-time" scenario, wtf?)

(woah x-post like 2 posts ago!)

Oh, you gotta know some bars are still open. Hell yes.

Hella people couldn't get home, and the beer had to be sold quick before it went warm------->DRINK SPECIALS!

i really hope no one is still stuck in a subway somewhere..what about those people who live in them ?

A dollar a pint, the way I heard it.

Why aren't people ransacking all the high-dollar fashion stores on Manhattan?

It probably says too much about me that my first thoughts after hearing the news were about possible looting.

a small crises

I imagine they're pretty sober

unlike myself

Gerard Dis, the owner of Chez Suzette on Ninth Avenue in Hell's Kitchen, said he was staying open until the ice ran out. He was letting customers run bar tabs and pay by I.O.U.

"When we all found out that it wasn't terrorism, there was a big sigh of relief and we said, `Ah, so what, a blackout we can deal with, let's have a cocktail.' "

Crawling out of the darkness.

http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2003/08/14/national/14cnd-power2.slide4.jpg

Good morning, New York!

*hugs New York*

i was at work when it happend, and they didn't let us leave until a good half hour into it. so i missed the early train by 2 minutes! grrr.

i don't think i can go to work today, becuase none of the trains are running, the phones are down, and i don't think there's power in my office. but power is back in my 'hood. so, no work and internet all day! woohoo!

"All our meat was going to waste, so we decided to barbecue," said Peter Chernin, 39, a marketing executive. "We're taking advantage of a bad situation. I've done a lot of things, but I've never barbecued on 47th Street."

Ah.. the human spirit...

*sniff*

Long story short. Arrived at work at the TIME News Desk at 4:00 pm for my usual 4pm to 4am shift. At around 4:25 pm, everything closed down, prompting a communally expressed "WTF??" Collective shuddering ensued as we glanced out the windows to see the same thing happening in neighboring buildings and smoke rising above the horizon to the Southeast (from the 14th Street Con Ed plant, as it turned out -- though not an explosion). When news broke that Detroit and Hoboken and parts of Pennsylvania, Ohio and portions of Canada were also out, a rather disquieting pall fell over the proceedings. Phones were still working, so we scrambled our correspondents we could reach (Washington remained unaffected). Through the dark night, kept abreast of developments via a transistor radio tuned to 1010 Wins and, through the good graces of our Chicago bureau chief, we were able to hear CNN (she taped the phone receiver to her television). Huge relief to hear continued reports that rule out terrorism (but, I mean, how do they know?) Lots of conjecture, precious little fact. The TIME/LIFE building's generator kept a few paltry lights in hallways on, but those crashed at 1am, plunging the building into total Blair Witch Black, which was most chilling (thank god for Duracell batteries and Mag flashlights). The thick, black night took its sweltering damn time trudging by. At 4am, bits of midtown lit back up. At 6am, a neighboring building suddenly burst into brilliant light ----> scaring the bejesus out of me. Our power didn't return until about 8am (when I posted the above message). Came home around 9am to find the Southern end of Manhattan still dark. Around 3pm, we flickered back on.

There ya have it in a sweaty nutshell.

MY PARENTS AND SISTER ARE IN TOWN.

We had plans to meet @ 7pm in Battery Park. After walking down 50 flights of steps down to street level (= 1000 steps), the whole time pretending that I'm not thinking about the World Trade Center, which used to be directly across the st from my building, after passing several pairs of panties on the street (I guess some ladies just got too hot, stepped out of them, and kept on walking), after overhearing Quiznos deli girl say to her co-worker "yeah so I was like 'where's the flashlight in this place??' and he's like 'in the basement'" "no he DIDN'T!!!", after realizing I couldn't buzz my friend Alice who lives in the neighborhood because door buzzers don't work, after realizing I had zero cash and zero way to get it, I got to Battery Park and tried to convince a push-cart guy to give me a cold soda in exchange for a magic trick. No fucking dice, man. I thought we were all in this together! Anyway my prents didn't show, Emma didn't show, they figured all plans were off. I figured we were the luckiest people in NYC because we had miraculously made plans for a specific time and place that was totally independent of electrical vicissitudes. But no dice. I thought we were all in this together, man! What Ally said on the other thread is absolutely true: it was all fun and games for awhile, roughing it in New York, whatta concept, until le crepuscule started creeping in and long shadows enveloped whole blocks at a time and you noticed some policemen were carring M-16s or some other kind of wicked assault rifles. I threw away my filched New York Post - yesterday's news, so weird - I NEVER read that rag by the way, but I needed something to focus on (did you know that Justin Timberlake and Cameron Diaz were holding hands two nights ago?) and as the clock inched towards eight and the last rays of a dying blah blah blah I realized I'd better fucking book it home.

Somebody had the wise idea to open up some car lanes on the Brooklyn Bridge so we all jostled and hustled along, small groups stopping occasionally and looking back shouting "FLORENCE WHERE ARE YOU!!" Smack in the middle two guys had set up a card table with CDs and DVDs and were shouting "blackout special! Two for five!! Blackout special! Get it right here!" As we poured off into Brooklyn, Marty Markowitz (Brooklyn Borough President) was handy with a megaphone: "Welcome back to Brooklyn! You're home! Welcome back to Brooklyn, USA! I just started my re-election campaign and I wanted to draw a crowd but frankly I never expected anything like this! Welcome back to Brooklyn USA!" We all applaud and say THANK YOU!

Now it was truly dark and the way home was through Fulton Mall, which was lit with flares, and occasionally supplemented with the strobe of ambulances and police cruisers. A few blocks from Flatbush, though, the flares had given out or had never been placed, so it was black enough to where I almost bumped into people right in front of my face. Once on Fourth Ave, there were citizens simply directing traffic themselves in the heat, one of them shirtless, wearing a cowboy hat, a stogie clamped form in his lantern jaw, waving a glo-stick and shouting at his partner across the median whenever he decided the other cars needed a turn.

All the shops were like "New Yorkers on Parade." You got to see everybody who works in New York: the Guatemalan dishwashers who you never see, comic-book store owners, cleaning ladies, all standing in front of their businesses, guarding their storefronts and just seeing what's going on. It was too dark to do anything else, and shit, SOMEBODY had to figure out how to roll down the corrugated security door that ran on electricity.

Midtown Manhattan down?

in San Francisco too

emp bursts from the first bombs dropping i'd gue

--SIGNAL LOST--

Midtown Manhattan down?

don't know - just heard about power outages in LA and NYC in addition to the big one in SF.

Hackers