Here's hoping that those of you who lost power in that eight-states-plus-part-of-Canada blackout last Friday managed to survive without resorting to excessive cannibalism. Personally, we managed to emerge unscathed-- seriously, not a scathe on us. Reportedly some parts of the Boston area were affected, but we didn't even know there was a blackout until family members started calling to ask if we'd devolved into mole people yet, which we initially assumed was some sort of code that addicts use over cell phones when asking about scoring some crack. Meanwhile, despite the fact that parts of New Jersey also got popped, AtAT's Jersey-dwelling server somehow dodged the bullet, too. We'd say our luck had changed if it weren't for, you know, that whole PowerBook-dropping thing.

But even if you weren't forced to fend for yourselves without the benevolent bounty of The Outlet, is there a chance that you might still be indirectly affected by the outage? Faithful viewer Joe pointed out an eWeek article which reveals that, yes, that super-cool new IBM chip-pumping plant in East Fishkill (the one that Apple touts so often in its G5 propaganda) was indeed shut down by the blackout, "affecting production as key products for Nvidia and Apple ramp up." Reportedly the production lines stayed down for "about two days." So considering that Apple's given its word that dual G5s will ship by the end of the month, which is only thirteen days away, is losing two days' worth of production going to change things?

Well, no. For one thing, Phil Schiller's reiteration of the "end of the month" ship date was published three days after the lights went out, and you'd think he might have changed his mind if Fishkill going dark were actually going to affect anything. IBM reports that the Fishkill plant automatically shifted into "maintenance mode" when the power failed, "halting the line and slowing down the production tools so that critical components in the semiconductor lithography tools weren't affected." Nothing in the $2.5 billion plant was damaged, so basically, aside from the annoyance and expense of losing a couple of days' worth of product, no harm, no foul. Which means just one thing: nice try, Intel!

Oh, come on-- you didn't seriously think that it was a coincidence that the plant cranking out G5s got taken offline just before Apple promised to ship its Pentium-butchering Power Macs, did you? We figure Chipzilla (with or without Microsoft's help-- depends on whether you like your conspiracy theories to involve actual conspiring or not) was behind the whole thing, engineering a blackout as a last-ditch desperation play to try to keep the G5's scorching power out of the hands of the public. Considering that officials are apparently still puzzled over just how the whole thing happened, the whole thing smells like corporate sabotage to us. What's next, floods? Earthquakes? Killer bees? Do your worst!