Mabfan's Musings

Tomorrow, of course, is Christmas. If you're celebrating Christmas, may you have a merry one, full of happiness.

It's also Isaac Newton's birthday, something I always like to commemorate given my background in Physics.

And earlier in the month of December, I celebrated the festival of Chanukah. Let's take each of these in turn.

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So that's it. To all my Christian friends, as I said before, may you have a merry and joyous Christmas. To all my Jewish friends, I hope you had a happy Chanukah. To all my friends who celebrate some other holiday of the season, may it be for good. And for those of my friends who celebrate no holiday at all, may you enjoy a good start to the Gregorian New Year of 2010.

I just found out because I was recommending them to a friend that Arnold Hatters closed a few months ago.

Arnold Hatters was my favorite haberdashery, with Worth & Worth a close second. I discovered Arnold Hatters a few years ago when Nomi located an Ivy cap for me (my cap style of choice). We ordered it from them over their website, and the next time I was in New York City, I visited the store and met the owners.

They were a family-owned business. Father Arnold Rubin and sons Mark and Peter Rubin were true gentlemen. Many was the time Nomi and I would go there when on vacation so we could find me a new hat. You know those caps I always wear? Arnold Hatters. Those Fedoras that Nomi and I sport in the fall and winter, which make us look "fedorable"? Arnold Hatters. Even now, I can reach into my coat pocket and pull out the ear warmers that Mark sold us on one of the coldest Wednesdays in NYC that I can recall, back in late 2006. Any time someone in the Boston area admired my hats, I would send them to ahat.com and tell them to let the Rubins know that I sent them.

The last time I shopped there was in mid-2007, the summer after Mom died. I told Peter what had happened, and he offered his condolences. And then I bought another cap.

I hope the family ends up doing okay. Peter, Mark, if you're out there, drop me a line.

Jeremiah's Vanishing New York: Arnold Hatters

Lost City: Take Off Your Hats: Arnold Hatters Closes

Hat Life: Arnold Hatters Closes

My younger brother Joshua lives with his wife and three children in Eugene, Oregon. Earlier this year, he entered a writing contest sponsored by The Jewish Review, a local community newspaper that serves all of Oregon and southwestern Washington and is devoted to Jewish issues. The theme of the contest was “Why do community newspapers such as the Jewish Review remain important for their readers and for the communities they serve?”

Josh was one of the two winners of the essay contest.

In his essay, Jewish Review Extremely Relevant, he talks about our father's devotion to justice and how that shaped him, as well as the need for Jewish community newspapers in places where there aren't many Jews. If you want to learn a little bit about my younger brother's background (and my own as well), go read the article. I think you'll be glad you did.

And Josh? Congratulations!

Exactly eight years ago today, terrorrists attacked the United States of America. They flew planes into the World Trade Center in New York City and into the Pentagon near Washington, DC. They most likely would also have flown a plane into the Capitol building but were stopped by the passengers of United 93. Almost 3,000 people died that day.

Because I'm obsessed with exactness, I've made sure for a while now to know the exact times of certain events that took place on 9/11. The bare sequence of events at the World Trade Center was as follows:

8:46:26 AM: North Tower Hit
9:02:54 AM: South Tower Hit
9:59:04 AM: South Tower Collapsed
10:28:31 AM: North Tower Collapsed

I'm a New York City native, born and raised in Queens, and I grew up in a city in which the Towers always stood. On 9/11, I was a teacher at a private school in Newton, Massachusetts. The following comes from my journal, a hand-written one that I was keeping at the time.

"The second [staff] meeting ended early, and I went back to the Science lab to check my e-mail. I idly noted a message...which said that an airplane had hit the World Trade Center.

"I didn't really think much of it and I went back to the Information Center. Shortly after the meeting...began, [a colleague] walked in and asked if we had heard the news. He told us that two planes had hit the twin towers of the World Trade Center, and he set up the small TV to receive CNN. They showed pictures of two commercial jets crashing into the twin towers...

"I ran to the phone...to call [my younger brother] at work. At 9:35 AM I called and got him. He had just gotten in, and he said that he seen the smoke from the 7 train. I told him to stay in touch, but due to circuits being busy, I wasn't able to reach New York City again for a while.

"The rest of the day passed in a blur of rumors and news. I kept checking webpages; when I couldn't reach cnn.com, I checked the New York Post webpage and the Newsday webpage. I called Nomi...

"At 10:15 AM, the...students returned from their physical education class...and...we told them the news...

"When the meeting with the students ended, I collapsed in tears..."

There's more, of course, but to summarize, I spent the day trying to get news of family and friends, making sure they were all safe. The drive home was surreal, knowing that fighter planes and battleships were protecting New York City. Nomi was already home, as her office had sent everyone home early. The rest of my family was safe, but my older brother, an emergency medicine physician, had been called up to report to New York City. Nomi and I took a walk at 5:30 PM, which included browsing at Brookline Booksmith and getting ice cream at JP Licks. Everything on TV was the news; we watched C-SPAN, which was running a feed from the CBC, so we could get the Canadian perspective.

The next few days, the events were fresh in everyone's mind. On Wednesday, I flinched at hearing an airplane in the sky, then remembered that all commercial flights had been grounded, so it had to be one of our military aircraft, protecting us. I bought my regular comic books that day; Adventures of Superman #596 had an eerie panel of the twin towers of Metropolis being repaired. A friend came over that evening after attending a local religious service.

On Thursday, Nomi and I were sick of the news, and Animal Planet had gone back to regular programming. We watched a documentary about moose to help us get our minds off things.

And life went on. Today, I'm no longer teaching, but editing textbooks in Boston; my younger brother no longer lives in New York City, but in Eugene, Oregon with his wife and three children; and my older brother is still an emergency medicine physician in the Boston area, specializing in disaster management.

And as all my friends know, there have been other changes in my life. In 2007 I lost my mom, and just two months ago Nomi and I welcomed two precious and adorable girls into our lives. I've discovered that being a parent changes your perspective on a lot of things, and 9/11 is no exception. When the attacks happened, I was worried for my mom and my brothers; if something were to happen today, my first priority would be to make sure that my children were safe.

I probably don't need to tell anyone this, but today's probably a very good day to remind your loved ones, familes, and friends how much they mean to you.

Nomi and I get both the New York Times and the Boston Globe delivered every day except Sunday, and given the lateness of the news reports about Senator Kennedy last night, I wasn't expecting either paper to have the story of his passing.

Indeed, the New York Times had nothing about Kennedy. But the Globe managed to put the news on their front page, with a large banner headline. Via Universal Hub I found the article Globe Stops the Press for Kennedy Death at the Editor and Publisher magazine website. Apparently the first two editions of the paper had already been printed when editor Martin Baron was woken with the news, and he gave that famous clichéd order to stop the presses so they could include the obituary, which presumably was already set to go.

Nice work, Mr. Baron, and kudos to the night crew.

I'm a little less impressed with the Times, but not for the reason you might think. I find it perfectly understandable that they wouldn't have the news in the hard copy today, and I think it's fine that they're running it on the front page of their website. However, they're also running a link to the article from their "Today's Paper" webpage. Given the fluid nature of the web, I rely on that page to be something of a "snapshot" of the actual hard copy for the day. I think of it as an unchanging daily archive of the articles that the Times ran in that day's paper. So I'm disappointed that they would place a link to the article about Kennedy on that page under the heading THE FRONT PAGE, as if it actually appeared in today's paper. I've written to the Public Editor to express my disappointment.

saxikath and I were just in one of the office kitchens, where someone had not yet taken their toast from the toaster. The smell of the toast was fresh and crisp, and it reminded me of this little diner around the corner from my childhood home. The diner, at the top of the subway stairs, was run by Jack, a Greek-American with a mustache and an accent, and he used to make these delicious grilled cheese sandwiches. I remember when I was a kid, Mom used to take my brothers and me there, where we would eat the grilled cheese sandwiches and drink these frosty, thick, vanilla milkshakes.

Years later, Jack retired and sold the place, and it became one store after another. Jack found out that he didn't like retirement, so he took a job as a doorman at one of the neighborhood apartment buildings. Eventually he passed on.

I miss the diner. And now I'm craving a grilled cheese sandwich.

As a Brookline resident I don't get to vote in Boston municipal elections, but since we're surrounded by Boston on three sides I tend to try to stay plugged into Boston's politics as much as I can. (Also, six days a week I find myself in Boston.)

Over the years, I've come to be impressed by Mayor Thomas Menino (although I will note that I do have friends who disagree with me). In my humble view, Menino presents himself as a caretaker mayor who wants to make sure that life is made as easy as possible for the residents of his city. He's not someone who has a grand political vision and wants to push it through; his vision for the city is to make it a place of simple livability.

It seems to be a common impression, and now I know why. It's because that really is how Menino does his job. And here are two pieces of proof.

Firstly, there's this column from today's Boston Globe: Mayor Menino, at your service by Yvonne Abraham. I highly recommend that people interested in local politics read the whole article.

(Aside: speaking as a writer and editor, I find Abraham's article a delight to read.)

Apparently, Menino holds regular receptions for new homeowners, during which he shows genuine interest in his citizens' lives and looks for ways to help them out. Abraham presents one specific case in which Menino connected a new homeowner who just lost his job with a city housing expert working to stop foreclosures. In another case, Menino actually knew one homeowner's father, a Boston cop, and details about her new neighborhood.

(Another aside: columns like these present most eloquently the reason why we need newspapers to stay in business.)

Menino may not be a great orator, Abraham points out, but he clearly cares about your problems.

Which leads me to the second thing.

Some of the members of our synagogue, Kadimah-Toras Moshe, have been dealing with the issue of Boston College's expansion plans into their neighborhood. Originally, a public hearing and presentation to the Zoning Commission had been scheduled for the evening of April 8, which this year is the night of the first Passover seder. Members of the community wrote to Mayor Menino and other politicians, pointing out this conflict and imploring them to take action. This resulted in a letter sent yesterday from Menino to Robert Fondren, the chairman of the Zoning Commission, in which Menino asks him to postpone the meeting to a later date. And that led to an announcement today that the hearing will in fact be postponed.

I grew up in New York City, and I understand that the mayor of New York has a much bigger job to do than the mayor of almost any other city in the United States. But I never got the feeling that any of New York's mayors had the same personal connection with his city's residents as does Mayor Menino of Boston.

As I mentioned earlier today, I haven't had much time to blog because we've been very busy. In brief, last month Nomi and I moved to a new apartment. We're still in Brookline, but the move has been both busy and stressful. (We're actually still in the process of moving some of our possessions out of our old apartment.) Our new apartment still isn't completely set up, and is unlikely to be set up for a while, which just adds to the stress.

But overall, we're quite happy.

I'm hoping to get back to a more regular discussion soon of the usual things of interest: writing, science fiction, conventions, history, politics, science, and all those other things I like to talk about. But with deadlines at work, Arisia coming up, and new stories to be researched and written, my presence here may be sporadic at best.

In the meantime, here's some things I want to share:

My high school has been in the news recently, which always interests me. The New York Times reported on The Big Cram for Hunter High School, in which they profiled groups of sixth-graders taking the test for admission. Of course, there's a reason you might want to go to Hunter, as it could help you one day get appointed Solicitor General of the United States (class of 1977).

My friend Michael Marano is a fellow Grub Street instructor, and he's teaching what looks like a fascinating class on "The Art of Genre" on how to give your genre fiction a more literary bent. I wish I had the time to enroll, but if you're a local writer, you might want to check it out.

The Hugo nominating ballots are being sent out, and people are posting all over the Internet about their eligible work. I'll be doing the same soon.

More to come...

As many of my friends know, my father had five sons. The first two, David and Daniel, were with his first wife. Then he married my mom and had three more sons, Jonathan, Michael, and Joshua. David and Danny were somewhat older than the rest of us, so at the same time I grew up as a middle child but with the sometimes presence of my two older half-brothers.

Danny Burstein My half-brother Danny Burstein. Photo copyright ©2008 by Michael A. Burstein.

I have a lot of stories I like to tell about Danny. He spent many years as a paramedic working the midnight shift out of Harlem Hospital, so he has plenty of stories to share. He once came to my school to give a talk on drugs, in which he made it absolutely clear what a paramedic could and couldn't do for someone who had overdosed. He was a union treasurer and a rabble rouser who pushed for better emergency medical care for all New Yorkers. And he was once arrested under suspicion of being Son of Sam. (I'll tell that story later.)

Like me, Danny has sometimes run into other people with the same name. When he was in college, the members of the Columbia University Science Fiction Society found a wedding announcement for some other Danny Burstein, and they posted it on the wall of their office, with a note asking, "Why weren't we invited?" (The announcement and note stayed on the wall well into the 1990s.) Danny has occasionally also been mixed up with Dan Burstein, a writer who focused on economic current events for a while but more recently has become known for his books on blogging and on the questions raised by The Da Vinci Code.

And then there's Danny Burstein, the actor, and the new story I have to tell.

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[Note: Although the Gregorian calendar anniversary of my father's death is November 2, on the Hebrew calendar that date was 15 Heshvan. I'll be observing Dad's yahrzeit starting tonight.]

Eighteen years ago tonight, by the reckoning of the Hebrew calendar, my father Joel David Burstein died.

I tend to think Dad was a fascinating person. He was born in December 1929, in the wake of the stock market collapse, and so grew up during the Depression, which affected his outlook for the rest of his life. When he was almost ten years old, he attended the 1939 New York City World's Fair, and fell in love with the visions of the future it presented. He graduated as valedictorian of DeWitt Clinton High School (which was in Manhattan at the time, I think) and started college at Columbia, where he was editor of the college newspaper, The Spectator.

But while he was in his teenage years and World War II was raging, news of the Holocaust came to the United States. My grandfather was a rabbi, and my Dad grew up in a religious household; but the Holocaust caused him to lose his faith in God and to break away from religion.

On the other hand, he felt a strong connection to the Jewish people. In the 1940s he ran guns to the nascent Jewish state of Israel, and then he dropped out of college, never finishing, in order to smuggle himself into Israel and fight in the 1948 War for Independence.

Dad was dedicated to journalism and newspapers. He used to like to quote Thomas Jefferson, who once said that he would rather have newspapers without government than government without newspapers. Dad spent his life working at a whole variety of newspapers in New York City. In the midst of all this, he married his first wife, Evelyn, and had two sons, my half-brothers David and Daniel. Eventually, Dad and Evelyn divorced. He met my mother Eleanor, married her, and had three more sons: Jonathan, Michael, and Joshua.

By the time I knew him, Dad had been working at the New York Daily News for many years. In 1990, the Daily News unions were locked out and so once again went on strike against the owner of the paper, the Chicago Tribune Company. Dad was in the Newspaper Guild union office eighteen years ago when he collapsed of a heart attack and was pronounced dead at St. Claire's Hospital. My brothers and I were in the Boston area at the time -- Jon in medical school, Josh and me in college. Jon and Josh were on a train home already because my father's mother had just died the day before, and they were going to NYC to be with my Dad for her funeral. We had no way of knowing that on Sunday, November 4, we would attend one funeral after another, with print and TV reporters gathered with our friends and family, the media there to report on my father's death as another tragic story.

My father was a strong believer in justice, in supporting the powerless against the powerful. Two months before he died, I marched with him in the NYC Labor Day Parade. The Greyhound bus drivers were on strike, and Dad – who always kept an eye on family finances – donated money to their fund without blinking. After he died, I found among his personal papers articles he had clipped about a Mohawk tribe in upstate New York struggling to get a piece of land back from the federal government. Dad always shared stories like that with us, to remind us that the fight for justice was a neverending battle.

Dad had been a reader of science fiction and comic books when he was growing up; by the time I knew him, he mostly read mysteries. But he inculcated in me a love of science fiction, and my one regret about my own writing is that he never got to read it. But his spirit infuses every word I write.

Copyright © Michael A. Burstein

As I noted a week ago today, life is busy and will continue to be busy for a while. We're still in the midst of the Jewish holiday of Sukkot, I've got deadlines at work, a publication party to plan, and Guilder to frame for it. I'm swamped.

A few quick notes, though:

• Those of you who saw me feeling ill at shul on Wednesday, I just want to let you know that I'm feeling much better. Thanks to everyone for their offers of assistance.

• Nomi and I went to sleep last night thinking that the Sox had lost the game, thanks to this (now edited) post at Universal Hub: That's All She Wrote. My reaction to the win this morning: the Sox are playing Mets baseball. Or, at least, they're playing the way the Mets did in the 1980s when they would pull it off at the last minute.

• We've managed to catch some new TV. I'm glad to be watching Pushing Daisies again, and I liked the first episode of the American version of Life on Mars. (Maybe growing up in NYC has something to do with that.)

• Thanks to the Brookline TAB article, I was recognized in the Brookline Post Office as I was buying stamps. Maybe that'll help turn my book into a New York Times bestseller.

• The holiday of Sukkot really allows me to see what a cool Jewish community we've got. Nomi and I have been enjoying the hospitality of many families.

• The Carole and Paula in the Magic Garden DVD set is finally out! But I couldn't find my favorite song. ("I'd like to shake your hand, shake hands, I'd like to shake your hand, shake hands and how are you?") Anyone know if it's in any of the episodes they chose for the DVD?

Any questions?

Once again, I defer to Nomi if you'd like to read about our recent trip to New York City. (I'm still working on my post about meeting the other Danny Burstein.) So follow the link for New York Trip Day II: Friday.

Nomi seems to have more time than I do this morning, so here's her New York Trip Report Day I: Thursday. (I'll have my own, more detailed report, later on this week.)

As Nomi notes here, we are back from NYC and had a fantastic time. We're going to need a while to catch up, although I definitely want to tell you all about the fun we had. In the meantime, it seems that we have some major Rebecca Luker fans reading here, so for the two of you I share this photo of two Tony Award nominees whom I apparently can now consider family:

Danny Burstein, Rebecca Luker Photo copyright ©2008 by Michael A. Burstein.

(Other NYC photos can be found in my NYC September 2008 Gallery. Note that the gallery is across two web pages, so be sure to click through.)

I had scheduled weeks in advance to tape my Hour of the Wolf interview at the WBAI studios in New York City, which happen to be located on Wall Street.

Today, as I was taping my interview...apparently, President Bush flew into the city, gave a speech at Federal Hall, and visited the New York Stock Exchange, mere blocks from where I was.

Coincidence? I think not.

I will have more details later, but I just wanted to note that last night Nomi and I had a great time seeing South Pacific, and we met the actor Danny Burstein and his lovely wife Rebecca Luker.

And oh yeah, we met Michael McKean as well. :-)

Today: I tape an Hour of the Wolf radio interview, and Nomi wanders the seaport.

For those of you following the arrival of the Nomi & Michael show in New York City, here's the current schedule. Feel free to skip to the relevant part for yourself.

Thursday:
Thursday we seem to be pretty much booked up. popfiend, you're on our list to try to stop by and see in the late afternoon. dianora2, if you're around, we'd love to see you too.

Friday:
Michael will be taping his radio show interview in the early afternoon, while Nomi and running_girl4 wander the seaport. I'll meet up with them after my interview. Anyone else want to join us?

Saturday:
Shabbat. Booked.

Sunday:
Nomi and I plan to drop our stuff at Penn Station and then wander around New York is Book Country in Central Park from about 10 am to 12:30 pm. Anyone is welcome to join us there.

Following that, we plan to have lunch at Mr Broadway, a kosher restaurant at Broadway and 38th Street, at 1 pm. So far, it seems as if jjbaker, mamadeb, ennienyc and nojojojo are interested in meeting us, as well as a few others. Anyone else who wants to join us, reply here or email so we know the number of people.

If you need our cell phone info, drop me an email.

Exactly seven years ago today, terrorrists attacked the United States of America. They flew planes into the World Trade Center in New York City and into the Pentagon in Washington, DC. They most likely would also have flown a plane into the Capitol building but were stopped by the passengers of United 93. Almost 3,000 people died that day.

Because I'm obsessed with exactness, I've made sure for a while now to know the exact times of certain events that took place on 9/11. The bare sequence of events at the World Trade Center was as follows:

8:46:26 AM: North Tower Hit
9:02:54 AM: South Tower Hit
9:59:04 AM: South Tower Collapsed
10:28:31 AM: North Tower Collapsed

I'm a New York City native, born and raised in Queens, and I grew up in a city in which the Towers always stood. On 9/11, I was at my teaching job in Newton, Massachusetts. The following comes from my journal, a hand-written one that I was keeping at the time.

"The second [staff] meeting ended early, and I went back to the Science lab to check my e-mail. I idly noted a message...which said that an airplane had hit the World Trade Center.

"I didn't really think much of it and I went back to the Information Center. Shortly after the meeting...began, [a colleague] walked in and asked if we had heard the news. He told us that two planes had hit the twin towers of the World Trade Center, and he set up the small TV to receive CNN. They showed pictures of two commercial jets crashing into the twin towers...

"I ran to the phone...to call [my younger brother] at work. At 9:35 AM I called and got him. He had just gotten in, and he said that he seen the smoke from the 7 train. I told him to stay in touch, but due to circuits being busy, I wasn't able to reach New York City again for a while.

"The rest of the day passed in a blur of rumors and news. I kept checking webpages; when I couldn't reach cnn.com, I checked the New York Post webpage and the Newsday webpage. I called Nomi...

"At 10:15 AM, the...students returned from their physical education class...and...we told them the news...

"When the meeting with the students ended, I collapsed in tears..."

There's more, of course, but to summarize, I spent the day trying to get news of family and friends, making sure they were all safe. The drive home was surreal, knowing that fighter planes and battleships were protecting New York City. Nomi was already home, as her office had sent everyone home early. The rest of my family was safe, but my older brother, an emergency medicine physician, had been called up to report to New York City. Nomi and I took a walk at 5:30 PM, which included browsing at Brookline Booksmith and getting ice cream at JP Licks. Everything on TV was the news; we watched C-SPAN, which was running a feed from the CBC, so we could get the Canadian perspective.

The next few days, the events were fresh in everyone's mind. On Wednesday, I flinched at hearing an airplane in the sky, then remembered that all commercial flights had been grounded, so it had to be one of our military aircraft, protecting us. I bought my regular comic books that day; Adventures of Superman #596 had an eerie panel of the twin towers of Metropolis being repaired. A friend came over that evening after attending a local religious service.

On Thursday, Nomi and I were sick of the news, and Animal Planet had gone back to regular programming. We watched a documentary about moose to help us get our minds off things.

And life went on. Today, I'm no longer teaching, but editing textbooks in Boston; my younger brother no longer lives in New York City, but in Eugene, Oregon with his wife and three children; and my older brother is still an emergency medicine physician in the Boston area, specializing in disaster management.

Ever since 9/11, Nomi and I check in with each other every morning when we get to work. I'm very grateful that she's around to be a part of my life. I probably don't need to tell anyone this, but today's probably a very good day to remind your loved ones, familes, and friends how much they mean to you.

Unless the world comes to an end tomorrow, Nomi and I will be heading down to New York City on September 18 and returning to Boston on September 21.

The main impetus for the trip is that I'm taping an interview for the radio show Hour of the Wolf as part of the book tour for I Remember the Future. However, Nomi suggested that we turn it into a long weekend, and so we have.

Our schedule is a busy one. On Thursday night, we have tickets to South Pacific, and Friday of course is the radio interview. We're staying with our friends chaos_wrangler and G. over the weekend, and for shabbat, we're supposed to be visiting sdelmonte and batyatoon for lunch.

However, we do have some free time, and we'd like to invite people to join us if anyone's interested. Here's the deal.

Thursday afternoon:
Nomi and I are still trying to figure out what to do during this time. Our default is to catch the exhibits at the New-York Historical Society, but we're open to any other museum exhibits or anything else going on. Any suggestions? Anyone free to join us?

Friday afternoon:
During my interview taping, Nomi expects to be free, and she's looking for something to do or people to see. Then, after 2 pm or so, we'll be free together, with the only stipulation that we have to get back to our hosts' place before shabbat. Any ideas welcome. If nothing else comes to our minds, we'll probably hit a few bookstores...

Sunday lunch:
Nomi and I have decided to have lunch on Sunday in midtown Manhattan, as our train doesn't leave NYC until about 4 pm. We'd like to invite any and all who wish to join us to do so, but please let us know in advance so we can make an appropriate reservation. We're still working on which restaurant we want to patronize that day, and we're open to suggestions there too.

Can you believe it has been exactly five years since the Great Blackout of 2003? The blackout hit much of the northeast United States and parts of Canada. Where were you?

I was at home (in Brookline, Massachusetts, which did not lose power) on the computer when the phone rang at 4:33 PM. It was my younger brother, Josh, in New York City, calling to ask me if I knew what was going on. As I had left the TV news on in the living room, and the TiVo was recording its buffer, I was able to start describing the news to him in real time. I learned of the blackout as I told him what was going on.

I served as the point person for my younger brother, my sister-in-law, and my mother for the next few hours. Josh had to sleep overnight in Manhattan. Rachel had to care for their new baby daughter, and I gave her information on New York City emergency lines and hospitals. And my Mom stayed home.

I recorded NBC Nightly News that evening and the Today show the next day, and a few months later I gave the tape to Josh so he could see what he missed.

As I mentioned above, Massachusetts (and pretty much most of New England) didn't lose power. After one of the major blackouts a few decades ago, the people in charge in New England had decided to set up a series of switches that could be opened should there be a power surge that might lead to a shutdown. Thanks to their foresight, I was able to help out my family as I described.

And as for today, the AP is reporting that the problems which led to the blackout have been resolved, but that increased electricity demand may lead to blackouts in the future unless the infrastructure is upgraded. (cf. 5 years after a giant blackout, are we better off?)