Want to help?

See all those people on TV hurt and want to help? Here's one super-easy way you can, just by going to the grocery store with your loose change.

Take your spare change to any Coinstar machine. Those are the little kiosks in grocery stores where you dump all your spare change. Coinstar has teamed up with the Red Cross to accept donations. All you have to do is take your change to the machine, and press a few buttons. You can read all about the program here:

http://www.redcross.org/donate/coinstar.html

Every single penny will be counted! The Red Cross is a reputable organization that will help persons in New York and D. C. get the medical care and disaster relief they need. If you can't donate blood, or have little spare time in your life, this is a good way to do something about the horrific images of disaster playing across the television tonight.

Terrorist Attacks 9-11

Boston and Atlanta were not hit by terrorists driving airplanes today. New York and D. C. were.

My work building was evacuated; they emptied Harvard and the Boston Longwood Medical Area of all non-essential personnel around noon. This was because they expect to be sending supplies and doctors by helicopter to the scene of tragedy all day, and perhaps even life-flighting some wounded back. There's simply no way New York can cope with its own wounded right now.

All the colleges and universities of Boston are shut down. The trains have stopped and most of Downtown was evacuated, with the Hancock and Prudential Towers being the first to empty with the horrible news.

Two of the hijacked planes were from our Logan Airport. Those were people from Boston on the deadly flights. Everyone is understandably sort of panic-stricken. I can't believe Boston escaped without being bombed. We lost two planes full of people, but we weren't bombed. As I write this, the fires in New York are still burning so badly that emergency workers can't even search the wreckage for bodies. The actual crash happened eight hours ago.

Atlanta seems to have also escaped without being bombed. That's incredible, considering what a target CNN would be. I was just outside of Atlanta when the 1996 Olympics bomb went off. This is so much worse than that incident though that I hesitate to even compare the two.

After I got home from the evacuation, I talked to some friends back home, and then watched four hours of television coverage. Then I went into the bathroom and threw up. Then I sat down at my computer, and wrote this.