Extended power outage also in St. Louis

I noted this in the news last week but didn’t write about it. St. Louis is also suffering an extremely large and long power outage. I wrote a bit about New York’s situation yesterday and I read a post on St. Louis’ outage over on Gateway Pundit. In 2 major cities in the US we have significant power losses to huge numbers of people wherein the local power companies appear unable to restore service and unwilling to communicate what happened.

Why am I getting suspicious, now, that there’s something a bit more nefarious going on in these 2 places and the companies are covering up what they know?

Tesla Motors and the Instalanche – marketing made easy?

Back on Friday I took note of this 1-line post on Instapundit regarding the Tesla Roadster and went to have a look. This does sound cool, as Glenn Reynolds said, and I would also love to get a real look at it. (Glenn later points you to note on the unveiling of the Roadster by Mickey Kaus. Scroll down and you’ll find it.)

Now, having never been the target of an Instalanche I can’t speak from experience. However, the anecdotal evidence seems to indicate that a mere mention of a “cool” item on Instapundit tends to draw literally tens of thousands of eyes in a day. As they say, you just can’t buy publicity like that. Here’s my recommendation for the marketing guys at Tesla:

Show up at Glenn’s place with fully-charged Roadster, an invitation to take a road trip, and a smile. If I were on the marketing team there, the only strings I’d tie to this one was that Glenn would have to write about the experience on his blog (and a fairly complete report, too, not a 1-liner) and that the car was a loan, not a gift. (Sorry, Glenn.) If the Tesla Roadster is all it’s claimed to be, I can’t imagine that Glenn would write a bad review and his good review would be seen by over 100,000 people in a day. Those readers are usually highly educated, professional, and motivated. You could do a lot worse than get the attention of people like that.

Santa Ana, CA airport terminals shut down due to security breach

I’m no road warrior but I do travel relatively frequently by air. Having worked in that industry before getting into information tech, I have some pretty decent insight into airport operation. So when I read stories like this about people getting past security checkpoints without being screened, I have to ask how the hell that happens? I know when I go to the airport the passengers are herded like cattle into the queue lines ahead of the security scanners. There is literally no where else to go and in order to get around those scanners without walking through them, I’d have to bump some TSA guy out of the way.

In short, in all the airports I’ve travelled in during the past year, there is just no chance that I could have walked around the security checkpoints without being seen. The only way it could have happened is inattention by the TSA guys or they simply let this passenger through and had to own up to the event later.