As some of you will recall I live in Montgomery County, Maryland, among the finest of America's 3,100-odd counties (yes, I'm being serious) in so many ways. Except for one thing. Power goes out like every other week.
Yesterday morning, we had frightening electrical storms. Our power died on us two or three times, but miraculously each time came back on. This morning, however, we weren't so lucky. Around 9:00, while I was on the train coming in, Sarah called me to say that the power went pffft. Odd, because there was no storm brewing at the time at all.
Loads of power lines are tangled up in large old trees throughout the county, and in addition to that, these electrical storms seem to be increasing in frequency. Global warming again? Anyway, it's a drag. We already lost power about three weeks ago for two days and had to chuck maybe $300 worth of food out of the freezer.
All of which leads me to TBD.com, the new local news web site started by the Politico people to compete on the local scene with the Washington Post. It just launched this week. I haven't studied the site extensively yet, but I can tell you this much.
When I went to check it out today for the first time, the headline on the lead story was MoCo power outages may end tonight. Good. That's sort of all you need to know, right there in six words in big type. As a comparison test, I went to the Washington Post home page. Nothing about the power outages at all that I could see. And this is affecting a lot of people, around 33,000, in a high-income county where the Post has probably the largest single chunk of its readers (the kind of readers the advertisers love anyway), so it's certainly news.
So there you have it. The Tomasky Five-Second What Can You Tell Me Test was passed with spangles on. A more rigorous analysis will be delivered in the future. And be careful if you're consider moving to this neck of the woods. The power outages are the worst thing about living here by far, in my view. How does it work in England there, are most of the lines buried?
