What is a blackout good for?

It could be that at the age of 48 I've lost a youthful sense of adventure. How else to explain my complete bewilderment upon seeing tourists chirping happily to Katie Couric on the Today Show last Friday morning about the exhilarating experience of last week's blackout. It was all so cool: sleeping in the streets, bonding with stranded commuters, sharing cab rides, getting stuck in elevators and searching for toilets.

My first reaction, while watching a Bosox-A's game on ESPN last Thursday afternoon, was of course the possibility of terrorism and worrying about friends in our former residence at Duane and Hudson Sts. Like many people in the Northeast who were unaffected by the power outage, we stayed glued to the tube waiting for new developments. One of my sons thought it'd be neat to be in Times Square at that moment, to which I replied, "Yeah, for about five minutes."

Newsweek's B.J. Sigesmund, filing a "web exclusive" for the magazine on Aug. 15, positively glowed with the epiphany that the blackout "has permanently changed the people of this city." Brilliant: This reporter might have what it takes to be the next David Brooks.

A sample: "Here's what stunned me most of all. With the traffic lights out across the city, you'd think there would have been massive gridlock. [Never mind that the aerial shots on tv showed exactly that.] Policemen were managing traffic at every intersection they could, though there weren't enough cops to handle every corner. So instead, plain-clothes New Yorkers [as opposed to Newsweek journalists] took it upon themselves to join the effort. Guys with tattoos and cargo pants were standing out in the middle of the street with whistles, stopping and starting traffic...

"And as I got closer to my apartment, at around 7 p.m., I noticed something else as well. People were positively spilling out of bars. Manhattanites stood on the streets, drinking, smoking, talking and laughing with each other...

"It was a gorgeous weeknight in the city, and it was Miller time. You gotta love New York."

Lost in B.J.'s rhapsody is the fact that because of Mike Bloomberg's economy-busting tobacco policy, New Yorkers "spill" out of bars every single night to have a smoke, and they're not laughing about it. Nor are the small businessmen who lose money every day?including proprietors of delis, restaurants and bars?because Mama Mike is trying to rid one of the country's most polluted cities of secondhand smoke. Oh, and "noise pollution" from nightclubs as well.

Blackouts suck.

Last summer I remember returning home from Yankee Stadium and getting a creepy feeling upon seeing all the traffic lights out in Lower Manhattan. That was when the Con Ed building on 14th St. suffered a fire or explosion and knocked out power south of the plant. The boys and I got home, walked up 12 flights and found Mrs. M in a complete tizzy, concerned about our safety, calling hotels and wondering when the bathrooms would function. Then she was peeved that we hadn't left the game immediately, unaware that while Ugueth Urbina was blowing a key contest for Boston, the stadium scoreboard wasn't functioning as a news channel. Although our power was restored about five hours later, I'm not embarrassed to admit that I repaired to our rooftop garden several times to take a leak, plants be damned.

I was 10, and living on Long Island when the "Where Were You When the Lights Went Out" blackout of '65 occurred on Nov. 9. Man, was I in the wrong place at the wrong time. It happened that for months before the incident I'd occasionally, while watching I Love Lucy reruns on tv, melt candles and toy soldiers in the playroom fireplace. My parents and brothers were upstairs, unaware of these pyro-activities, and I figured that in time the stock could be replaced by my wad of dough earned from shoveling snow from the driveways of our neighbors.

(I'd always had a fascination with fire as a kid, which fortunately has at least skipped a generation with my own children. This is how stupid I was. At the age of five, one night I was lighting books of matches right under my parents' bed, while they were quietly reading. Recalling this now, I'm flummoxed to understand how a boy who showed off at kindergarten by reciting the complete list of U.S. presidents, in order, could make such a tactical error while engaging in mischief.)

Anyway, when my mother realized that the electricity was down for who knew how long?eventually, 15 hours?she frantically searched the closets for candles to illuminate our split-level house. After about a half-hour of stonewalling inquiries about the stash, I fessed up and received the most severe lecture, tinged with panic, of my childhood to that point. The older boys were pretty pissed too, but as usual took me under their wing in a show of solidarity against parental authority. My father spent most of his time trying to calm down Mom, who'd gotten downright wiggy, while giving me the hairy eyeball every hour or so.

The New York Times, for its part, demonstrated that it'd take more than the mere banishment of Howell Raines to alter its ingrained institutional bias against Republicans in general and President Bush in particular. What readers, and the media, don't understand is that people at the Times had no ideological problem with the paper's slanted coverage. They just hated Raines. Now that he's gone, they think the problem is fixed.

Elisabeth Bumiller, the paper's White House reporter apparently hired when the doddering Helen Thomas was unavailable, wrote a willfully inaccurate lede to a blackout story for last Friday's paper.

Under the headline, "Bush Doesn't Let Blackout Upset Lunch With Troops," Bumiller began: "President Bush was having lunch with troops at the Miramar Marine Corps Air Station when Joe Hagin, his deputy chief of staff, told him of the massive blackout on the East Coast.

"But unlike the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, when news of another New York catastrophe [Is Bumiller equating the two events?] sent Mr. Bush on an odyssey on Air Force One, today he continued his lunch and went ahead with plans to attend a $1 million political fund-raiser here this evening. Still, he spent the rest of the afternoon on the phone trying to sort out the damage and the cause of the power failure with his top national security aides."

Bumiller's dispatch the next day, also filed from California, had the astonishing headline, "Aides Say Bush Waited for Facts Before Commenting on Blackout."

Gear up the impeachment machine: The president of the United States actually "waited for facts" before commenting on the blackout. What in the world did the Times expect him to do?

Maybe wipe some mustard off his lip, call a press conference and say "I just learned 30 seconds ago that much of the Northeast and parts of our ally Canada are without power. I have no idea what caused this failure, nor does anyone else at this time. It could be a natural disaster, an overload of power or, God forbid, terrorism. But no one can say with any certainty, except perhaps CNN, which will broadcast any rumor just to irritate Fox News. Still, my friends at the New York Times have suggested that a statement from me will calm the nation. So, of course, everyone ought to stay calm until we can rule out foul play. Did I get that right, Elisabeth?"

Michael Cooper's metro report of Aug. 15 on Bloomberg's handling of the crisis was a jarring contrast to a Times editorial two days later. Cooper wrote that Bloomberg, mixing with "the people" on a walk across the Brooklyn Bridge in the first hours of the crisis, wasn't exactly met as the Second Coming of Rudy.

Contrary to Newsweek's Sigesmund's party-hearty report, Cooper said: "A mass of perspiring New Yorkers, many of them cranky after walking down numerous flights of stairs to escape their office towers, found themselves squeezing through a bottleneck to get onto the bridge. The crush was only worsened by the mayor, his security staff, and the dozens of reporters and photographers who were there to watch him."

Cooper observed that at first the mayor received words of encouragement but then the throng grew "grumpier," with one person shouting at him, "Let us smoke in bars" and another, "Where's the power?"

Two days later, a Times editorialist beamed: "With the blackout, Mr. Bloomberg had to manage a crisis not of his making and only marginally within his control. But for the duration of the mess, the mayor's own supply of energy kept the city going."

Mike the Commoner was, by all accounts, a steady-Eddie last week and does deserve praise for his calm demeanor. Good thing he wasn't in Bermuda. But his round-the-clock monitoring of the blackout, and using a flashlight to take a shower, doesn't mitigate his disastrous stewardship of the city's economy.

A High Time at the Voice

I've never had the pleasure of meeting Village Voice editor-in-chief Don Forst, and don't care for the product he publishes each week, but there's little doubt he'd be an excellent dining companion. At least that's the impression I got after reading Sridhar Pappu's story about the latest Voice "troubles" in the New York Observer.

Writers at the Voice, according to Pappu, are apoplectic about the paper's redesign, which limits its arts critics to 900 words. Pop music columnist Robert Christgau is "definitely upset." Theater critic Michael Feingold upped the ante, telling Pappu: "There are things that the majority of readers pick up The Voice for. Nobody's kidding himself, or herself, into believing that he or she is one of those things. But each of us has a readership that's unique and brings something to the paper. They've taken New York down a peg culturally."

Please. Most people pick up the Voice, or New York Press, for its display ads, classifieds and listings.

Senior editor Brian Parks, a union shop steward at the paper, was unsuccessful in convincing Forst to meet with the staff. (Parks also claimed the Voice, which recently laid off several employees, has a pre-tax profit margin of 27.2 percent, a figure he gleaned from an "internal management source." As New York lags behind the rest of the country in an economic recovery, you find any industry analyst who'll believe that number.)

"I told [Parks] I don't do pep rallies," Forst said to Pappu. "I said I would be willing to meet with five or six representatives of their choosing, but I do not conduct pep rallies. I told him if he needed a pep rally, he should get a hold of the Dallas Cowboys cheerleading squad."

Of course, that's assuming the arts critics know who the Dallas Cowboys are.

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