When I was a boy and other dull stuff

Where I was born and edjumacated, they had 22 inches of snow over the weekend. I won't say "that's nothing: when I was a boy we had to trick or treat on July 4 to keep from getting snowed out." Because it ain't true. My town was the flatlands by New Hampshire standards. It was cold on October 31 evenings more often than not. It did snow once or twice, but nothing like 22 inches...nothing like two inches.

Watching the blundering utilities try to spin their third inept response to emergency in eight months does raise an intriguing question or two. First, is this their idea of lobbying against reforms that would enable communities to run their own municipal utilities? Second, is this supposed to be a GOP demonstration of the always-superior efficiency of the private sector? Or third, should we just say "thanks for the yucks?"

Speaking of yucks, there's Herman Cain's denial du jour. But seriously, I think the denial is more plausible than his tax plan.

In just a few minutes, I can ethically turn off the porch light and pig out on the remaining candy.

Was it a bust?

Apparently, Irene was a failure, as viewed from the exalted perch of media anchors, because they themselves are still alive and Wall Street is negotiable by taxi instead of boat.

Bullshit.

In the first place, the death toll is somewhere in the twenties*. Katrina was in a class by itself and warps our sensibilities. Irene's harvest is in the medium range of casualties from tropical storms. The New York media, with their city's limited experience of tropical storms, seem not to appreciate this.

Then there's the physical damage. It may not be impressive to the anchorfolk, but it is if you're in Bennington, Brattleboro, or Woodstock, Vermont, or Campton, NH, Westport, MA, or East Haven, CT, or any similar number of places further south. I mention these because I've been in them and can appreciate the damage. Many of them haven't seen tropical storm damage in over 70 years.

Here in New England, we also have an experience that is becoming normal during and after storms. Hundreds of thousands of customers of private power providers have lost electrical power, and are being told they won't get it back for days, maybe weeks.

By contrast, I live in a town with its own municipal light department. They buy most of our power in good times, but are capable when necessary of generating electricity. Public entity it may be, it has an eye on the bottom line. That may influence the speed with which the local light department responds to outages. The longest outage I can remember in the last 20 years was three hours. Granted, the light department's customer base is a tenth or less the size of that of a private power companies. But shouldn't the private companies' outages be in proportion? If it takes our guys an hour to bring a grid back on line, it should perhaps take private enterprise ten or twelve hours, not ten to twelve days.

So much for the efficiencies of capitalism.

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*As I published this, I heard the toll had risen to 38. No, it's not a bust, especially if you knew one of the victims.