The grid is down, now, go check out the gridlock

The phone lines were figuratively on fire, and the city was literally powerless.

That includes nearly every one of the 2,670 traffic lights in the county.

Gridlock had gripped Miami, with the most grinding halt hitting the Brickell and downtown areas.

I was the one who ventured into that fray. For more than an hour, I was stuck in the downtown morass, at times tempted to go off-roading through median landscaping, or turn sidewalks into my own personal expressways.

I'm sure everyone else riding in a vehicle with ground clearance was thinking the same thing (those millions of Miami Land Rover owners must have had their fingers hoovering over that button they have to jack up their air suspension and lurch over a few curbs).

But everyone was civil, most drivers even stopping their crawl and waving-in motorists trying to turn or merge. The law of traffic lights may have disappeared, but the fellowship of the road was alive and well.

Here is the bit from my feed that made it into the main story:

In downtown Miami and in the Brickell business district, gridlock trapped motorists, and as office towers lost air conditioning, employees streamed onto streets, filling up tables in sidewalk cafes.

Some parking garage attendants made the ultimate professional sacrifice: They raised the barricades and allowed cars to pass in and out without paying.

What better opportunity than a power outage to have a nice sidewalk lunch? Workers in office towers seemed to pack every available outdoor cafe table.
Photo by Dominick Tao

A flicker, a fritz and power is out for 4 million folks

The lights flickered off, my computer monitor fritzed, and then it all came humming back to life.

The generators had kicked in.

I looked around the newsroom, and it looked like everyone else was doing the same. Business as usual in an aging newspaper building? Or something unusual that should be in the news?

It was just after 1 p.m., and the brief power loss at One Herald Plaza seemed to be just a ripple in the grand scheme of things.

A few scattered comments went up from various cubicles around the office.

"That's not good."
"Oh god, the lights..."
"It was Fidel!"

The reaction from most seemed to be humor. The editors at their desks behind me didn't seem to flinch.

I took the cue to carry on my business, scribbling in the blanks of a Hearst Journalism Awards entry form. The J-school in Gainesville had just faxed it in; it was due yesterday, and it'd slipped their minds to send it any sooner.

By the time I finished the form, the sedate lunchtime atmosphere in the newsroom began slowly peeling away. With each passing moment, a nagging urgency was pressurizing. We're ok here, but what about everybody else out there? How widespread is this? What caused it?

And then, the calls started.

At first, off-duty reporters and editors were phoning in to report what they thought were isolated blackouts near their homes.

Pressure was building.

Next, a few concerned residents called in to report the same thing. They have no electricity, and the traffic lights in their neighborhood have stopped working.

The gauges were tipping toward the red.

And then, as if the collective mind of Miami had decided the power loss was not normal, that a bad, widespread thing had happened, the valves all burst.

Ten minutes after the flicker, the phone lines were blazing like a nuclear reactor gone critical -- and my god -- people were already speculating that could have been the case, that something was wrong with Turkey Point, the nuclear plant that serves millions in Florida.

What happened? When am I getting power back on? People need to stop using cordless phones, they're unreliable in times like these! The traffic lights aren't working!

Even the government needed some help from the fourth estate with wrapping their mind around the situation.

"I'm with Homeland Security -- do you guys know what's going on?" the caller asked.
"All we know is that power's out from Homestead all the way up to Palm Beach," I said.
"Any idea about what's causing it?"
"Trust me, we're as much in the dark as you are."
He laughed a genuine, raucous laugh.
"Alright. Thanks, partner.""
Click.

After the brief conversation, I thought up a handful of other quips I could have used.
But the calls kept coming.

One female caller asked the usual -- what happened, and when will I get my electricity back?

"We're working on that right now -- nobody knows," I said. "I just had Homeland Security call here asking us if we knew anything."

She laughed a genuine, satisfied laugh and shouted to someone on her end of the line.

"Hey, guess what -- Homeland Security is calling the Herald!"

To Be Continued...

The CSI vans hung around for a while

At an oceanfront condo on South Beach Thursday, I covered a robbery. I just happened to be there a half hour after it all went down, just as the ambulances left and the manhunt began.

According to neighbors and witnesses, here's how it happened:

A (probable) drug dealer, a young guy with long hair and multiple girlfriends, had his door kicked in by a man with a gun. Rather than face the armed black guy, he jumped out of his third story window.

As the guy lay on the ground moaning in pain, the robber stole something (drugs? money?) and ran away with a black bag.

The whole south end of Miami Beach was closed down for an hour as police dogs and search helicopters did their thing.

Strange awakening, pt. II

Rods and Cones. This image isn't art. It's an explanation.

Explanations raced through my mind.

In my dazed state, the explanations weren't the most plausible -- then again, neither was the strange filter I was now seeing the world with.

Could the landlords of all the buildings on my block have been extorted by some gang, forced to change out every light bulb to show their compliance to unjust demands?

Was this a natural phenomenon? I knew there was a lunar eclipse was coming up, but green light splaying out into the night?

I looked at the door sill, and from the crack I could see the fluorescent light splintering in from the hallway. It, too, was green.

This was madness.

My apartment was completely dark, save for the red glow of my alarm clock, and the already green light of my Apple Airport Express router steadily beaming somewhere in the blackness.

I had to run a test.

I jumped out of bed, in my underwear, and stumbled to my desk. My MacBook Pro was sleeping on the tabletop, it's hibernation light softly strobing in the darkness. Normally, that light is a stark white. Now, it was a sterile green.

The problem was me, not the world.

What could have done this? Am I going blind? Too many hours spent staring at a monitor? Was I in The Matrix?

Wait. Then I realized. I was reading for about an hour before I fell asleep -- and I was using an LED headlight to illuminate the pages. For kicks, I decided to use the red light setting, used to preserve night vision. Essentially, I had stared at a red light for a long time.

After reading about how color and night vision works, my strange vision didn't seen so mysterious.

Because the rods in my retina were exposed to red light for a long time, they became fully activated. Rods, the visual sensors responsible for night vision, are virtually blind to red light. The red lamp tricked them into thinking it was dark. This explains why as I read, the glow on the page appeared a pale orangish pink, as opposed to a bright red.

When I was startled awake a few minutes after falling asleep, my eyes were still in full-on darkness mode. I was essentially blind to red light, so all I picked up was green wavelengths.

I don't know if my hypothesis is correct, but it's a start. I should run a test -- sit in the dark for an hour and see how my eyes adjust. When I come out and everything looks green, I'll know I'm right.

But there are still holes in my assessment: why don't we all see green when we wake up every morning? Do rods and cones shut down and reset when we sleep?

I would appreciate any help in fully solving this mystery.

Surreal awakening, pt. I

I awoke, but kept my eyes shut and my body still.

The noise was drawing closer. It sounded like a fear-addled baby in pain.

If the source had been any nearer, I may have been startled up out of bed, fists clenched and ready to strike. Instead, the slow approach of this early morning disturbance left me lying in wait, straining to identify the horror-movie cries coming from outside.

As the wails drew nearer, I decided to open my eyes. Through the darkness of my bedroom, I see the glowing red numbers of my alarm clock. They hung in the blackness, like disembodied digital ghosts.

It was 3:18 a.m. I had been asleep for no more than five minutes.

In the rattling transition between consciousness and not, my mind had lost its bearings. After hearing the noise once more, its origin became clearer.

Feline.

A moaning cat was all that kept me paranoid in bed. But I had to see for myself.

I rolled over and parted the blinds behind the headboard of my dark cherry four-post bed.

I looked out. My god.

Before any cat caught my eye, I was forced into a strange realization, a mild panic, followed by furious blinking and a moment of disbelief.

Every light on the street, dozens of them, were glowing green. The plaster of pale green light over everything -- the cars, the houses and the trees -- was surreal. It was as if I had drifted off for a moment, then awakened in a different place. It was as if someone had replaced every porch light and street lamp with a ghoulish green filament.

To be continued...

You are what you eat, not what you read

The cashier had a tall bouquet of elaborately braided hair rising from her scalp.

She was a fast scanner, and polite to customers, even telling them how much they saved today by circling that special area of the receipt after each transaction.

She wore a pale, pleasant green vest. This was Publix, after all, where shopping is a pleasure.

The next customer stepped up in line, chic and healthful items lining the conveyor belt, ready for takeoff into a sack and on into some unknown walk-in pantry or stainless steel Fridgidair:

A carton of soy milk, two packages of tabbouleh, a bag of pita, a half-gallon of pre-brewed green tea, two trays of sushi (one the Publix special, the other salmon and yellowfin sashimi) and an US Weekly.

Before the cashier began running barcodes over the laser, she picked up the US Weekly and removed it from the lineup. She reached around the counter and slid it back into the magazine rack, next to Reader's Digest and some forgettable tabloid with Heath Ledger's face montaged on the cover with his ex girlfriend and an Olsen twin.

The customer protested.

"No, that's mine. I'm getting that too."

"Oh, I'm sorry," the cashier said.

She was earnestly unaware of the mistake. In her mind, she was doing her customer a favor.

If a 96-pound soccer mom with bug sunglasses and a Range Rover were waiting on the items to be scanned and bagged, the celeb gossip mag would have made it through security no problem. If a pert college girl with an iPod and gym shorts were the one asking for paper, not plastic, no questions would be asked.

But the purchaser of this stuff was a man. He had been gender-profiled, even though his look and food selection hardly coincided with your typical He-Man truck-driver steak-grilling man's man.

The man was in his early 40s, but styled himself half his age, to mixed results. Shoulder-length hair, vintage t-shirt, camo cut-offs, flip flops, scruff beard and gold-rimmed Ray-Bans.

It would have been a good look, if not for his balding crown, hair treated with Just for Men, white flecks in a graying goatee and the fact that he still had the sunglasses on top of his head at 8:30 p.m.

In reality, he was either gay, going through a midlife crisis or a normal guy who is young at heart and getting dinner and some light reading for his girlfriend waiting back at the condo.

Note: There's no moral here. Just a case-study in stereotyping. Nine times out of 10, the cashier would have probably been right and saved a customer the trouble of having to return an unwanted magazine. But this time, the stereotype fell through. A man wanted to buy a pink magazine with Britney Spears on the cover along with a foldout poster of 10 Diets That Work, or something like that. So what?

Due to the graphic nature of this week

Due to the violence, kick-ass boats and mudslinging in the news this week, my blog incidentally reverted to "The Weekly Muse."

But as a result, it's given me a great example of why I enjoy my profession.

The week began with me covering the case of a church deacon accused of raping a 15-year-old girl inside a Miami church during a baby shower. It doesn't get much more sordid than that.

I ended up taking a high school intern with me to the accused rapist's house, to take a pot shot at getting some comment from his wife, and gathering reactions from his neighbors. What a great welcome to journalism.

Over the next two days, I roamed around the Miami Beach Convention Center, covering the behind-the-scenes aspects of the Florida International Boat Show. And man, getting up-close and personal to a go-fast boat with more VROOOOM than two Ferraris put together... I love it.

And then today, I wrote about a messy situation involving two state lawmakers, angry unions, a shady food service deal and the department of corrections. Whoever said there are two sides to every story wasn't looking hard enough. In this case, there were at least four.

In no other profession could I do all that, write about it, and get published and paid at the same time. Amazing.

An hour in a DMZ, or if you will, DMV

The line stretched on 50 people long. Most of them were clutching passports in their hands, an array of muted blues, reds, greens and black.

Before they were let in to the waiting area, the masses had to make it past the black woman in a red vest at the main entryway.

She held a clipboard. My, how much authority a clipboard can confer.

As each person in line stepped out of the sweltering morning sun and into the shade of the doorway, the red-vested woman would ask in the same monotone voice, "Resident or citizen?"

Some passed with ease. Others showed papers from courts, proof they had paid up to the government.

In this place, the government knows your name without you even saying a word.

Once past the entryway, a faded tan antechamber held rows of plastic chairs, the kind formed from a single mold, with skinny buglike steel legs extending down onto the dingy matte tile floors.

The day had just begun, the doors only unlocked and unchained for less than an hour, but the room was alive in an organic clamor of voices from every corner of the earth.

Old men from across the Americas shouting into cell phones in Spanish. Big mamas scolding squirming babes in Haitian Creole. A Korean girl explaining to one of the red-vested attendants her wrinkled grandfather does not understand English.

And I sat amongst it all, waiting for my name to be called.

Welcome to the Miami Department of Motor Vehicles and Highway Safety.

Note:
I eventually got my license renewed. It was the last possible day to do it, my 22nd birthday. At least I won't look like a 5'8", 135 lb 15-year-old anymore.

The address is, like, four addresses removed. Don't try anything.

Long-distance hanging out

With iChat, long-distance hanging out is actually possible. Kim (left), Dominick (center), Andrew (right). Photo/Dominick Tao

I logged on to iChat this evening.

My friend Kim sent me an invitation to video chat.

Despite being 350 miles apart, we had a great conversation that played out like we were sitting across a table from each other. Good times at the ole' Alligator, new haircuts, and ah, of course, the big scary future.

We were later joined by our good friend Andrew. We joked around, and I grabbed a beer. It felt like I should have grabbed three from the fridge instead of one. Too bad Apple has yet to invent a device that allows for Dutch beer to be handed through its iSight cameras.

Gainesville is closer than this map may suggest.


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Dining with strangers, pt. III

I don't know why the fat man got his fries before me, considering I ordered first and he didn't order at all.

After the fat man left, three minutes passed before my combo arrived. The food was placed hastily on a small Wendy's tray by the employee from the back, who quickly darted away into the safety of the kitchen.

"Thanks," I said, as he slinked toward the drive thru window.

I took my food to the condiment counter. There was a ketchup pump there, but no tiny paper cups in the dispenser -- only two of the little receptacles nested and lopsided on the greasy countertop.

Rather than asking one of the employees, even the bright girl at the register, I improvise. I glop four or five pumps worth of the crimson ketchup onto a dyed-yellow napkin. I wonder how much Wendy's would save if the company decided to just leave its napkins white, or better yet, un-bleached and brown.

Usually, I sit in the corners of restaurants, my back to the wall and face toward the front of the store, preferably with a window nearby. I like to watch people and cars while dining alone.

But tonight, I felt like sitting front and center - my right side to the serving counter, my back to the main entrance and my left side exposed to the rest of the dining area.

However, I couldn't help but remember: the one time Wild Bill played a game of cards with his back toward the door, he was shot in the back of the head.

I took the seat anyway.

After exactly two bites of my spicy chicken sandwich and one handfull of fries, I could feel more than one pair of eyes reconnoitering my position. Maybe anonymity would have been the better location.

I looked up.

It was the two formerly starved men with the pile of food in front of them. They were both looking at me.

By now, they had reduced the array of dollar menu delights to a pile of bun crust, burnt fry niblets, and soggy croûtons.

I made eye contact with one of them, a pale, wiry redneck, with a goofy do-it-yourself fade and hazy blue eyes, the kind that look like they're accustomed to being glazed over, and often half-shut in a drunken stupor.

He immediately made his move.

"Hey man," he said, "you wanna buy some chains?"

Before I could deliver a curt "no," he lifted a small Manila envelope, its flap propped open by a finger with grease stains in the creases of its knuckles.

"For real, man, I've got some top-quality gold chains -- real, real cheap," he said, looking at me with a trying-to-be-earnest expression.

His friend, a scrawny black man wearing a tattered, over-worn black fitted cap with a generic auto parts logo stitched onto it, just nodded in agreement. He was also grinning, showing me just how many missing teeth he had.

"Naw, man," I said, trying to play it cool. "I'm good."

He thought I was playing the game.

"For real, these are legit -- check it out," he said. He reached into the envelope and pulled out a tangled mass of gold chains. They looked real enough: glittery, golden chains, the kind high school boys with short-cropped over-gelled hair wear, on top of their double-layered no-pocket plain white t-shirts with cargo shorts and basketball shoes.

"I'll give you these for real cheap, like a third the price," he said.

"Sorry man, I don't wear anything -- check it out," I said, showing him my un-adorned wrists.

This guy was a salesman. His friend was a cheerleader.

As the black guy nodded, the redneck untangled one of the gold bracelets and bounced it in his hand.

"No, here, see for yourself," he said. He slowly pulled his arm back - universal body language for, "get ready, I'm going to throw something."

Is this guy serious? The black ladies and their babies in the back corner are looking over now, a puzzled look on their faces.

He tosses the gold bracelet. As it undulates through the air, I think, "I better catch this."

I do, with my left hand. This was a subconscious choice. I will need to carry on eating after this with just my right hand. I don't want just-stolen gold with cocaine residue on it even possibly mixing with my french fries. And I don't want to look like a mark, who trips all over himself to catch some hot jewelry like it's a baby falling from a balcony.

I used the recoil motion from catching and cradling the bracelet to cock my arm for the return pitch. As my arm slowly swung backward after the catch, I made myself clear.

"No, thanks," I said, and tossed the gold back at him. He caught the chain between his right hand and his chest.

"Oh, come on man, your girl wouldn't like a nice necklace?" he asks.

"Actually, no," I said. "She's not really into that."

And seriously -- my girl wouldn't be caught dead wearing anything remotely resembling this guy's gaudy bling.

The scrawny black guy decided it was his turn to enter into the sales pitch, injecting a bit of jive into the pair's now last-ditch drive.

"What kind of girl don't like jewelry? Come on! You telling me your girl don't like no jewelry?"

He was grinning wide. I counted at least three missing teeth.

"That's why I like her," I said.

"Oooohhh! Haha!"

They both laughed. More missing teeth.

My comment ended their play.

"Thanks, though," I said, to let them know I had no hard feelings. "Good luck."

I finished my meal (with my right hand only) and left.

As I was walking back to my apartment, I thought, "Shit. That shit was stolen. And now it's got my prints on it."

The End

Dinner with strangers, pt. II

Unlike her co-workers, who shuffle instead of walk and shovel french fries with slow-moving downcast eyes, the girl behind the counter is alert.

She seems to care about her job, and even more about the people she's serving.

She's not the kind to gossip with the other employees in Haitian Creole while taking orders, like they do at the McDonald's down the street. Here at Wendy's, especially when she's on watch as shift supervisor, customers are people, guests, not jobs that need to be finished with as little effort as possible.

After leaving the fat man and his burbled come-ons, the girl behind the counter returned with a to-go bag. She sets it next to the register and places a drink beside it.

The food belongs to the young man with wise-yet-weary eyes. The drink is mine -- a large iced tea, unsweetened.

Before I could go for my drink, the young man steps forward and reaches for both.

The girl behind the counter catches him before he touches either item.

"The bag's yours. The drink's his," she says without criticism or contempt.

"Oh," he says, with the quickness of someone who knew he was making a mistake before he even moved to make it.

He took the bag and quickly turned and grabbed a napkin from the nearby condiment counter. Then, he made a line for the door.

The girl behind the counter watched him as he went, ignoring the stares of the fat burbler, and just as the man with wise-yet-weary eyes was within arms-reach of the door, she called to him.

"Did you want a drink?"

He stopped and turned to her. They made eye contact, she transmitted something to him, and he received the unspoken message.

"Yeah, I would," he replied.

"What do you want?"

"Could I get a coke?"

"Sure."

She scooped the ice into a medium cup and dispensed the fountain drink.

'Thanks," he said.

She nodded a reply. He quickly exited.

I had taken my drink and was sipping on the bitter brew when the other employee came up from the back of the restaurant and handed a large fries to the loitering fat man, who was still not moving away from the obviously disinterested girl behind the counter.

As the exchange took place, she spoke up in a quiet, even tone.

"Don't be giving away fries in front of my customer," she said.

The employee acted like he didn't even hear her. He made the hand-off and skulked back to his greasy assembly line of square patties and sesame seed buns.

The fat man gave the girl behind the counter one last unrequited glance, shoved off, and made his lumbering exit, pushing the glass door open and walking through before it bounced back to close.

And then I waited.

To Be Continued...