The Greatest Generators

I would have written sooner but we're in the middle of the latest California fad - a rolling blackout. Rolling. It sounds so gentle. Like the soothing swells of a calm sea. Except a rolling blackout is more like a gigantic tsunami in a perfect storm - BAM! Suddenly you're swept away, drifting in a sea of technological nothingness. No computer, no phone, no juicer, no lights, no elevators, no answering machine. Not even the darn electric pencil sharpener. It’s just like “Survivor” except everyone gets voted off the island. And the whole randomness is terrifying. Like, what if I was having Lasik eye surgery, and zap, the machine goes dead, and I end up with vision like one of those crazy mirrors at the haunted house? Everyone's gonna look either like Danny DeVito or Shaquille O'Neal. The worst part is the timing. Rolling blackouts usually hit during my afternoon zone-out when the only thing between me and a complete coma at work is a jolt of piping hot java and a microwaved bag of popcorn dripping with the primordial ooze of an artificial butter product. No juice, no java, no work. Sometimes it'll hit during the ironically named 'rush hour' when there's no rushing happening on any highway in this time zone. Whoever said that people in Los Angeles are mellow just has to visit one of those malfunction junctions when the traffic lights go out. A voltage void at rush hour turns my blessed City of Angels into the Devil's Demolition Derby.

A R.B.O is a colossal inconvenience even thought it only lasts 90 minutes. That's just enough time to wreak havoc and not long enough to have fun. Not like, say the blackout of 1965 when I was a kid growing up in New York. Ah, the good old ohm outage days, when blackouts struck at the appropriate time. When it was a black outside. When there was plenty of darkness to have fun with, as evidenced by the surge in the birthrate nine months later. Not that I would know first hand, I was five at the time. I do remember the spectacular time my sisters and I had belting out continuous choruses of Happy Birthday each time my Mother lit a candle so we could see; finishing each chorus by blowing out every candle my Mother lit. When my mother finally gave up my three-year-old sister made a big splash with an accidental death defying dive butt first into the toilet. It was that night she decided to start her own toilet training. But, it all ended on a happy note with the consumption of seven of the 31 flavors slowly liquefying in the freezer. There was no telling when the energy meltdown would be over and it would have been an absolutely tragedy to have rancid Rocky Road and putrid Perils of Pralines. Oh the humanity. Meanwhile, my father was busy fulfilling a childhood fantasy of being a policeman by standing in the middle of the mean streets of Manhattan directing traffic. Of course this being New York City, no good deed goes unpunished. His car was broken into, ticketed and towed. Good to know that even when the city couldn't generate power, they could generate revenue.

So why are we in this mess today? The Democrats and the Republicans are doing their usual Push-Me Pull-You finger pointing. Nevermind that the population of California multiplied faster than the Love Bug Virus. Forget about the fact that they forgot to build enough power plants to fire up all those hot tubs, liposuctioners, and George Forman grills. On second thought I blame Claude Shannon. He's the guy who created what some say is the first computer. He had that cockamamie idea that you could get a machine to figure stuff out faster than using all your fingers and toes. Plus you could put nifty levers and buttons on it and voila! Seventy years later everyone's powering up a Claude clone: their own PC sucking the state dry of it's lifeblood - power. By the way, Claude's also the guy who invented the rocket-powered Frisbee. At least he came up with something useful.

Enough with the kvetching. What we need are constructive ways to deal with our failure of currency (without calling Alan Greenspan). What we need is alternative power. Not that sissy stuff like nuclear or windmill or solar. That's alternative power like that band blink-182 is alternative music (blink and you missed them). What we need are some really creative ideas. Right now, just sitting here in my sweltering 124-degree house (rolling black out attack so no fan, no air conditioning) I can think of a few. Give everyone one of those Dick Cheney jump-start heart devices. You need a little power boost? Just plug your cell phone charger into your chest. What about all those wasted watts from hours of spinning classes? They spin they spin they spin and they get nowhere. Why not run a cable from each machine to say - an ice cream factory or bakery. Have your cake and burn it off too. How about harnessing the hot air from one network executives' office. According to my calculations it could power televisions across Indianapolis through an entire season of Lucy re-runs. Wow, I'm brilliant, I can just see it now, Tom Brokaw writing about my fabulous ideas in his latest bestseller - The Greatest Generators. I could see it now, if only I had some power here.

by Stephanie Becker, Mass Distractions columnist for BestStuff.com