Happy Día de los Muertos

I got a funny email earlier this week. From the Company that hosts this website. Their Primary Data Center is located in lower Manhattan (who would have guessed?—humans can’t afford to live there anymore, but data can…) and, when Hurricane Sandy hit the East Coast and lower Manhattan lost power, so did the Primary Data Center. The Company had planned for such eventualities and had a backup generator at the ready with enough fuel to last a few days. But the building in which the Primary Data Center was located (I can’t get over it: they live in buildings!) “began to take on water,” the email said. The ship was sinking. The building’s basement flooded, and with it the fuel pumps and tanks, such that they could no longer pump fuel into the fiery maw of the Primary Data Center. So, the email warned, the Primary Data Center would soon, with a whimper and not a bang, run out of power, and with that my website and all its kin would go offline, silent, dead. And though I had been attempting all week to post a very important photograph of a pumpkin—I carved it myself—in time for the Halloween holiday, I wasn’t so upset. This website not being crucial to, well, anything. But it was a delightful peek into the perhaps not-so-distant future. This is how things will go: water rising in a basement somewhere, a generator shuddering to a halt in an otherwise empty room, and, without a blink or a flash or a single satisfying pop, this vast weird web goes absent. And I still haven't been able to upload the damn pumpkin.