Roving reporter and East Coast Whybark California Gubernatorial Campaign Chairman Ken Goldstein was reached via newfangled wireless telecommunications device and filed this eyewitness report on the largest electrical blackout in history:

“The area I am in – It was sort of amusing to me at least – I actually left work early for a dentist appointment.” Goldstein recounts. He’d left work early. “I was at the dentist until 4, the blackout came at 4:10. I got in to my car and put in a tape, and didn’t realize anything was wrong until 5:10. There were traffic lights out, but I didn’t think ‘oh, the whole eastern seaboard is out.’”

“I turned on the radio and heard static,” he says, “But I just thought it was just a problem with the transmitter.”

Goldstein left the city without incident and made his way to Central New Jersey, where he stayed for a period of time. “Central NJ has power, so I was hanging around there with some people I know,” he notes, speaking from his car. “Right now I’m gonna head back to my place, which could be a problem, because I live right near the Holland Tunnel, and they had announced they were going to close the Tunnel.”

As he spoke, he noticed a sports stadium that was illuminated. “I’m passing by the minor league stadium for the Somerset Patriots – and the stadium lights are on! The crowd is pretty sparse.” Pausing, Goldstein continued, “Life appears in this area to be – ah – going on as per normal.”

The deceptively youthful-appearing copywriter had heard that “NJ Transit has sent every available bus into the city. I dunno how they are going to get back into the city. NJ Transit just stopped the trains, at the next station, so there’s a lot of people probably just standin’ around.” Again pausing for a moment, he continued, “I was gonna say, I should probably just swing by and see if someone needs a ride in towards New York.”

Asked about circumstances in the city itself, Goldstein reports, “Manhattan is – is – well, you can imagine. It’s just massive amounts of people with the vehicles tryin’ to get somewhere else. I mean, I saw some pictures of the crowd.”

Continuing, he then provided a layman’s explanation of the breakdown: “When that power plant went, all the energy went on down the line, like a circuit breaker.”

“People are golfing on the golf range,” he observed, passing the establishment. “In my area, I appear to be very fortunate. I haven’t heard any wild stories or rumors or anything interesting. You also have to remember the area I was in, it really hasn’t hit. Hopefully Jersey City is not affected.”

“I’m not gonna make a great on the scene reporter,” Goldstein concluded, “because I’m not really on the scene. It’s kind of like being in the middle of a massive power failure, except the lights are on and everyone is going about their business.

But my dental work went well.”

Mr. Goldstein may call in further updates as the situation progresses.

Power Outages Reported Along East Coast

Power Outages Reported Along East Coast

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

Power outages were reported today throughout the Northeast. Blackouts were reported north to Toronto, south to Maryland and west to Cleveland, Detroit and Toledo.

Guess it’s New York’s turn! I tried calling Ken but the lines are all busy. Also: DETROIT?! Geez.

I’d like to take this opportunity to note that as Governor of California, no further giant blackouts of the Eastern Seaboard would be permitted, as I would incorporate legislation against them in my state vehicular procurement requirements.

Dear readers:

I read the papers. I listen to the radio. Sometimes I even watch television. I even, God help me, read the blogs.

While it is true that my long-time residence in Seattle’s harmonious and bustling Capitol Hill neighborhood has kept me from spending as much time at my primary residence, in Laguna Beach, California, of late, I have never considered my dwelling in Seattle, as deeply connected to the place as I am, as my primary residence.

No, from the first day I stepped into my beautiful wife’s parent’s charming basement guest room, just blocks from the glory of the Pacific Ocean, I knew I had come home. Truly home. It is in the small, low-ceilinged room, modestly furnished but carefully tended with all the hard-working virtue that immigrant Americans bring to our great country, to our great state, that my true home lies.

Therefore, just as I can tell you my true home, I tell you that my true heart sings with the timeless truths of the obligation to seek public service.

Therefore, given the successfully mounted effort to recall Governor Gray Davis of California and the subsequently well-documented rush to run what will certainly be remembered as the California Marathon, it is my patriotic and sacred duty to declare my candidacy for the Governorship of California.

However, in an effort to demonstrate my fiscal probity, I have declined either to raise funds or to file as a registered candidate. I can declare that my current campaign warchest contains twenty-three cents, a Canadian penny, two green rubber bands, and the tattered remnants of my recently-washed telephone list, a circumstance that helped clarify my position on fundraising.

It should further be noted my current status as a permanent resident of California – that is to say, the California state of mind – has been called in doubt by virtue of my long-term physical residency in Seattle. I come before you on this day – this great and glorious day – to dispute, refute, and rebut these scurrilous charges. My argument presented a moment ago is sufficient to prove my legal eligibility for the position, of that I have no doubt.

However, I feel strongly that a case should be made to my beloved constituents – my fellow Californians – that I am sufficiently acculturated to the California lifestyle and way of thinking to provide the quality of leadership that the Golden Bear state has always sought. I lay before you two arguments. The first is the simplest.

California has always been synonymous with change, with creativity, and with doing things your own way. Is not declaring my unfunded candidacy from the keyboard of my computer in Seattle consonant with these values? To paraphrase the campaign for the presidency of Barry Goldwater, in your hearts, you know I’m right.

My second argument, is, I think, the most elegant. I will conclude my remarks to you this evening with the pithy words that express it as succinctly as it can be said.

Dudes, hang loose.

Cynthia Doyon dead at 48: She hosted KUOW’s ‘Swing Years’, notes the P-I.

I’m really bummed out. Ms. Doyon is an apparent suicide.

She was the Saturday evening host of a retro radio show, “The Swing Years and Beyond,” and I have spent many Saturday nights happily learning about that era of American popular music in this gracious and knowledgeable woman’s virtual company.

Each Saturday, she opened the show with a slightly cheesy, deliberately old-fashioned audio montage of the sound of waves lapping shore over the show’s theme.

“The Swing Years and Beyond” was the only radio show devoted to music in the region that I responded strongly to. Ms. Doyon’s encyclopedic knowledge of her subjects and the self-effacing sense of humor that she brought to her broadcasts filled my home with joy on many Saturday nights.

I also noticed over the years that when I was up overnight, so was she: her voice was by far the most likely to host overnight shifts at KUOW, and without realizing it, I guess I had begun to consider her a part of my life – just a voice on the radio, but a friend, someone else who knew how to greet the dawn after a night of work, reading, or the black black.

I should note that I more-or-less never watch any television but nearly always have a radio on. Radio fills the same place in my life that the tube does for the great majority of my fellow inhabitants of the United States.

I am posting this before I go to sleep. In my certain sleeplessness I will envy her current peace. There’s a hole in my life. I’m sure it will close quickly for me. May it heal with speed for those closer to Ms. Doyon.

UPDATE: a few days later, I posted this entry, and both draw comments, so I’ve decided to link them.

UPDATE II: In January, 2004, the Seattle Weekly published a piece on suicide and led with Ms. Doyon’s last moments. There’s a lovely phptp of her accompanying the article, and that photo is also the magazine’s cover for the issue.

I also received official notification from Smilin’ Eric Reynolds, Director of Schmoozing for Fantagraphics, that there’s a warehouse sale in the offing.

It’s Saturday, June 28, noon to five.

Chez Fantagraphics Warehouse
3667 1st Ave So. (100 yards south of S. Spokane Street)
Seattle, WA 98134

(206) 467 4940

Discounts range up to 30% for big orders and damaged books are on the block at half-off, so pray that the forklift guys are drunk.

Scheduled guests include Hate‘s Peter Bagge (2-4p), Scary‘s Ted Jouflas (1-3p) and Rebel Visions‘ Patrick Rosenkranz.

Reports of dancing girls and male strippers could not be independently confirmed. I belive this depends, again, on the level of intoxication among the forklift crew.

Palm Announces Acquisition of Handspring (Palm press release, via Dvorak in his BoingBoing guestblog).

Huh. I’m thinking this is probably not such good news for Palm users, and of course it’s bad news for Handspring peeps.

(See the NYT’s AP story Simulated ‘Dirty Bomb’ Attack in Seattle Tests Preparedness)

SEATTLE (ASP) — A national economic terrorism drill for hundreds of technology workers, press and other underemployed workers began Monday with the mock meltdown of a highly-hyped “dot-com” in a south Seattle industrial warehouse space, converted into startup-style loft offices.

Meanwhile, volunteers at Pacific Lutheran University near Tacoma, about 40 miles to the south, simulated a second, simultaneous attack. The attack on the city government of Tacoma unfolded with events set in motion by the parking lot murder-suicide of Crystal Brame by her husband David Brame, at the time of his attack on his wife Tacoma’s Chief of Police.

Over the course of the five-day drill embarrassing revelations about repeated failures by the highest levels of Tacoma city leaders to heed danger signs concerning Brame will be made public. As the scandal mounts, a wholesale paralysis of the executive level of Tacoma city government will be observed.

The attacks, which combine the Seattle disaster with a mock bioterrorist attack in Chicago, are aimed at testing the readiness of local, state and federal authorities to respond to large scale failures of leadership at the federal, state, and municipal levels. It is the nation’s first large-scale economic terrorism exercise since the December 2000 judicial appointment of President George W. Bush, and the ongoing dismantling of the America economy being carried out in the name of ‘readiness’ by the Bush Administration.

Democratic Seattle officials were quick to point out that the Bush Administration initiatives are not, technically, exercises, but instead actual federal policy.

The idea, said Mayor Greg Nickels, is for regional and national agencies to see where strengths and weaknesses lie.

“In the past, we’ve seen the region repeatedly fail to successfully combat economic terrorism on a variety of scales,” he stated. “From the blackmail that led to the construction of not one but two unwanted sports stadiums to the inability of city and state officials to do anything that will keep Boeing here, it’s long been clear that we have absolutely no idea how to prepare and maintain a stable business environment in Seattle or Washington state as a whole.”

He continued, pointing out how glad he was that Chicago would face a large scale infestation of SARS, exclaiming at one point that perhaps that would “bring Phil home,” thought to be a reference to Boeing CEO Phil Condit.

City officials settled on the “dot-com” scenario after having considered, and rejected, a simulated meeting of the World Terrorist Organization in downtown Seattle.

“We just felt that our ninja-stormtrooper cops had really already had a sufficient amount of urban training experience,” stated an unnamed but supposedly well-informed source. “Plus, we think that running a large-scale urban-unrest scenario again might result in even more criticism of poor executive-level leadership than we already get on a day-to-day basis.”

The ‘dot-com’ scenario was also selected due to a near complete absence of representatives of the once-flourishing local economic sector in the local political contributors’ pool. “There’s no-one left to piss off,” the official noted. “We even blamed the dot-coms for the endless Enron-derived price hikes for local utilities, and nobody ever complains!”

The exercise is expected to contribute markedly to local and national fear and insecurity, while not actively reducing unemployment or increasing business-environment stability in any way.

City officials in nearby Vancouver, Canada, applauded the effort, and noted that they have had to face few of the challenges that Seattle and Tacoma have weathered in the past few years. “Yeah, we even still have jobs for internet-oriented marketing people up here. We ran a few test-case dot-com terror scenarios a ways back and found that our local economy just wasn’t as prone to distortion and outright dissembling as yours appears to be. Oh, and Seattle? If you need a place to stay this week, come on up. Always room for our poor American cousins.”

Reports of black helicopters in the region and the preparation of suburban internment camps for the displaced dot-com workers, who vote disproportionately Democratic, could not be substantiated.

Six Apart Milestones is MT parent company Six Apart’s public announcement of a hosted blogging service based on MT, to be called TypePad..

The very first trackback notes that FOAF will be a part of it.

The new venture also brings Ben and Mena VC money, which translates into bodies, all of which also appear to be bloggers (Joi Ito’s VC fund is the cash, Anil Dash is the new hire).

Interesting. I’ve been nursing the strong suspicion that venture captial is poison to good software. This could be great for MT (it certainly will be for the Trotts) or it could be the beginning of the end. While certain engineering problems centered around communty-building features are certainly most easily addressed by centralizing, the revenue-producing reason to do so is probably audience aggregation and remarketing, an inevitable consequence of large user-bases.

All those email adresses are a natural resource, just waithing for a marketing department to strip-mine ’em. I have to say I anticipate that the polish, craftsmanlike devotion to detail, and strong user orientation that MT – and the Trotts – have demonstrated to date is likely to suffer.

Shifting Six Apart’s focus to the design, development, deployment, and support of a hosting service is also a big change in direction, one that appears to challenge some of the thinking behind the current incarnation of the MT project. I know I adopted MT because I don’t trust hosting providers to do a good job with user support even when the subscription fees are astronomical.

There’s been so much VC-driven instability in the ISP and hosting markets that I just decided i could do a better job, with more accountability, if I bought a junk laptop on ebay and went to work. I’ll tell you this – I sure don’t have to worry about storage space anymore. Backup and bandwidth, well… I’ll burn that bridge when I come to it.

I certainly do hope I’m wrong, and God knows, if the Trotts want to buy some toys and a big old house, they’re entitled – MT is already a far superior product to many, many things that made huge piles back in our days of tulip-mania.

Chicago Tribune | Daley rips up Meigs runways in surprise raid: Chicago’s Mayor took backhoes and bulldozers to the small lakefront airfield in downtown Chicago in a nighttime suprise strike intended to bring the doctrine of shock and awe home to the Gold Coast, multiple sources report.

I thought this was some wildly excellent April Fools joke when I saw it on a link from the just-bought-by-Google MetaFilter.

Chicagoans, what do you have to say for yourselves? This is political ridiculousness of a scale that can only be described as, well, Chicagoan. As such, I congratulate you for continuing to uphold the great tradition of high entertainment value in political news from your fair city.

Oh, the recriminations will be a thing of beauty! Destroying an airfield in wartime! The airfield that just happens to be the place that the really, really rich use to visit Chi-town! Hilarity will ensue!

Meteor Chunks Crash In South Chicago Suburb, Light Up Night Sky – [NBC5.com, via MeFi]

Does this mean that the end of Da Machine is in sight? Maybe it’s more evidence of the End Times.