Weird Blackouts Sound Like a Movie

So recently there were blackouts in Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco. Tons of people were inconvenienced as subways, airports and trollies all came to a grinding halt. Yet officials claimed there was no connection.

Yet I am reminded of a line from the book Goldfinger: “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.”

Am I the only one who hears about this and pictures the opening ten minutes of a Michael Bay film? We cut from one stricken city to the next to the next, watch millions of citizens become stranded, and then we cut to a warehouse or office with a guy sitting in front of a computer, and he’s saying to the mastermind, “It worked perfectly. We were able to shut down all the power to the transit systems of New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. We did it.” And the mastermind says, “We did nothing. This was just a dry run. Now…now comes the real fun.”

And we cut to Bruce Willis as John McClane stuck on a New York subway, getting into a face off with a big, burly and pìššëd øff commuter before having to knock him cold. “I can’t wait to get my hands on whoever screwed things up this bad,” he growls.

Welcome to “Die Hard After Dark.”

PAD

13 comments on “Weird Blackouts Sound Like a Movie

  1. It sounds like you might have something there, Peter; though I think you might need to work on that title.

  2. Love the idea, but “Die Hard After Dark” sure sounds to me like the sort of thing that’d air at 1 a.m. on Cinemax…

  3. The “blackout” in NYC, while a pain (it totally disrupted my commute, so I had to work from home), only really impacted the subway. And only directly the B & D lines, although due to the way the NYC subway works, that also meant the A, C, E, and F lines. And probably a few other letter lines as well. The number lines were fine.

  4. “Die Hard After Dark” sounds like something with Ben Bailey. (And I have heard they’re bringing back “Cash Cab.”)

  5. Oooh! You know who should direct a Die Hard movie?

    MICHAEL BAY. He’d be AWESOME!!

    …sorry, Kevin McB. I couldn’t resist.

  6. There was a book, many years ago, probably titled The Day The Invaded New York [yep – Irwin Lewis, 1964}, in which creating total chaos and paralysis in NYC to divert resources was the prelude to an actual invasion.
    .
    To paralyze NYC, all it took was arranging for all traffic lights to go green in all directions, and arrange for subway tokens just a TINY bit too large to be sold.

    1. That one takes me back. Ah, the good old days of paranoid literature with the likes of One of Our H Bombs is Missing by Frederick Hazlitt Brennan (not to be confused with the documentary of the same name by Flora Lewis). They don’t make them like that any more. I guess life is scary enough and fiction has trouble keeping up.

  7. Power outages in New York City, San Francisco and LA.
    Major roads being damaged in Atlanta.
    Trams at OIA in Orlando shutting down unexpectedly.
    Train derailments happening all across the country.

    Almost all of them happening in April.

    Are we under attack?

    Sure seems like it. Make a hëll of a story (HINT) and one I would read…(HINT). Also would make a good movie.

    Imagine a girl genius being the culprit, plotting it out and implementing it all from her home. Blackmailing, bribery, subterfuge! Now I am really looking forward to this book you are going to write! Ah Hah! Maybe she is the reason that guy got elected over that woman. To bring down America. She manipulated those pesky Ruskies into doing it.

    Then again, maybe I should lay off the coffee.

  8. ARTFUL is a $1.99 Kindle Daily Deal at Amazon today. Good and cost-effective way to support PAD since my understanding is that authors get royalties on daily deal selections as if they were being sold at full price.

  9. Peter, if you want a conspiracy theory involving rolling blackouts go watch “The Smartest Guys in the Room”. It’s about the fall of Enron. Shod still be on netflix

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