If you're wondering where Howie has been today, his house has been blacked out!

I spoke to him while he was driving to a mall where there's an Apple store with lots of Macs, so he could at least get caught up on his e-mail. But it turned out that the mall was mobbed, and so was the Apple store.

He actually got on a computer, but the next I heard from him was an e-mail that said: "All these mall people who wanna use this computer are giving me dirty looks."

(His power company, drawing on its crack expertise, estimated that he either [a] would or [b] wouldn't have power back today—or tomorrow, or whenever. They expressed a high level of confidence that he would have power back sometime.)

Meanwhile, I just wanted to commend attention, if anyone hasn't already read them, to the sensational "think" pieces my old e-pal Mags has been sending DWT in rapid succession:

• one she called "Meeting My Demons," written from her perspective as someone who was brought up in the most benighted right-wing fundamentalism;

• one on the appalling leadership and curious affinity of GWB and Tony Blair;

* and the most recent one, offering a commonsensical perspective on the grimness in the Middle East.

I was especially struck, in that most recent piece on the seemingly insoluble insanity in the Middle East, by the observation that "the very people charged with fixing this are the very people who benefit from it." I've been thinking about this, and want to come back to it soon.