Well, it’s that time of year again, when I challenge you to use knowledge or reason to identify an old photograph. Is there a climate link? Maybe, maybe not. It kinda depends on how deep down the rabbit hole you want to go.

I can’t remember how the points were allocated last year, but never mind; you will have to be the judge of whether your efforts have earned yourself a nice Christmas cocktail. This year, I am making Hemingways and Piña Coladas. With Cuban rum, of course. We’ll see how they go down. I would be interested to hear of Clisceppers’ Christmas tipple of choice.

The answer to the picture quiz will appear in a day or two.

In the meantime, season’s greetings to all. Things may seem bleak in the UK. We seem to be governed by people who do not have our best interests at heart, and I do not fling that accusation lightly. Their policies augur a slide towards still bleaker times; but all is not lost. As I may have mentioned, there is I think a Russian saying that translates as “Hope dies last.” Which is to say, however bad things are today, there is always the hope of a brighter tomorrow.

Here’s the challenge pic:

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Quiz answer

“The New York skyline and Brooklyn Bridge during Wednesday night’s power failure. A building on the left is lit by emergency power.”

-The Times, Friday 15th July, 1977

The photo was widely distributed in the newspapers at the time. I could not find a better version, but the poor quality seems in keeping somehow.

Here’s how Time described the blackout, under the headline NIGHT OF TERROR:

It was a crisis of light, and of darkness—the kind of event that brings out the best and the worst in people. Certainly the 1965 blackout could never happen again, or so New Yorkers had thought. But something very much like it struck Wednesday the 13th, only this time it was frighteningly different. Through the long, sweaty night and most of the following day, the nation’s largest city was powerless, lacking both the electricity on which it depends so heavily and any means to stop a marauding minority of poor blacks and Hispanics who, in severe contrast to 1965, went on a rampage, the first since the hot summer riots of the 1960s. They set hundreds of fires and looted thousands of stores, illuminating in a perverse way twelve years of change in the character of the city, and perhaps of the country.

Archived version – link should take you to page 1 of 10 – worth reading the entire thing.

Is there a climate connection? Well, maybe. The ’77 blackout is an illustration of what might happen on Day 1 when the lights go out. There was no Day 2 on this occasion, or Day 20, or Day 200. Let’s hope there never is.

Also, it is worth noting the hot weather in NY at the time, and that the proximal cause of the blackout was lightning strikes. I can certainly see a similar confluence of events in 2025 being blamed on our old friend, “climate breakdown.”