A couple of days ago, we had a big black out that stretched from Ohio to New York, all the way up to Toronto in America Jr. Naturally, people freaked out and pulled their hair and gnashed their teeth. You'd think it was the worst thing that had ever happened in the history of the world, a great disaster, costing America billions, blah blah blah.

As I watched all of it unfold on my comfortably powered TV, I could only think that one such blackout every 30 years isn't that damn bad. If my car broke down once every 5 years, I'd be ecstatic. If the Internet worked for 6 months straight without DoS attacks, a new virus outbreak, or some other temporary outage, I'd piss myself. So what if a couple of people get a Friday off work on account of darkness? My heart bleeds.

But that's not the purpose of this particular rant. No, the blackout will go down in history as essentially inconsequential, but the human stupidity it revealed will stay forever. I'm not talking about the power companies (again, one blackout a generation is a pretty damn good record) or those caught in the blackout (who seem to have reacted pretty well, all in all). No, I'm talking about all of the pundits who proclaimed there would be a baby boom 9 months from now.

Allow me to clarify something before I go on. By "pundit", I'm referring to the faceless, disembodied authority that somehow convinces people that insanely stupid shit is true and that they should spread it to whomever will listen. I don't recall seeing any demographers or sociologists or obstetricians predicting a spike in baby production in the second quarter of 2004. The only predictor is the mysterious "they". You know who they are. "They're saying <insert insane and wildly improbable factoid here> will happen because of <hopelessly mundane event>."

Well, the Mayor of Toronto ALMOST counts as an authority figure, and he's predicting the biggest baby boom in the city's history, but he's Canadian. He was probably drunk when he said it.

So anyway, I'm predicting that there will be NO baby boom, mostly because somehow I don't think most of the people were in any mood to have sex. After all, it struck in the middle of the workday, wiping out traffic lights and public transportation in many cities, particularly New York. If you're stuck in the middle of New York with no way to get home except by walking, how horny are you going to be when you get home? Or if you do have a car, how will you feel after 8 hours in gridlocked traffic? Maybe that turns some people on, but not me.

The other problem comes down to simple math. According to the CIA, there are 14.14 live births per 1,000 people in the US. That means there are over 4 million every year, or 11 thousand every day. Keeping that in mind, we turn to the people involved in the blackout. There were 50 million people (roughly) getting a quick peek at life in the eighteenth century. Of those 50 mil, let's say half are chicks and of those, half are of child bearing age (CIA to the rescue again).

That leaves us 12.5 million potential moms. Let us then generously assume that 25% of those are ovulating on that exact day. That leaves 3 million. Some quick research on some fairly reputable web sites indicated that even at peak fertility, a chick has on average a 20% chance of conception.

Therefore, if every chick of baby-brewing years had sex with a reasonably fertile guy and none of these chicks were using any form of contraception, you could expect a maximum of 600,000 larval humans to come screaming into the world in about 9 months. Gee whiz, that would be impressive alright. Yep, a mini-baby boom. Even with the births spread out over a month, most obstetricians would note a mildly busy couple of weeks.

Of course, not all chicks will be having sex with a fertile guy that particular night. Then there are the lesbos, nuns, and miscellaneous man-haters. Furthermore, it was rather hot that night in most of the affected areas, and being deprived of air conditioning when it's humid and sticky also tends to ruin fun. Most chicks use some form of contraception (especially those in New York). Since these by definition these will be unintended pregnancies, quite a few my fall prey to the fetus' natural enemy: the coat hanger.

With all that in mind, MAYBE they'll squeeze out a couple hundred little surprises. Spread over a population of 50 million, that won't even be a blip. It'll be just like that blizzard a couple of years ago. "They" said there would be a baby boom, and there wasn't.

"They" are pretty stupid.