DETROIT: It did not take long for some savvy folks to dream up merchandising for the blackout of 2003.

Take a quick surf through the Web and you can find just about any type of memorabilia from T-shirts and coffee mugs to baby bibs and thong underwear - even advice on how to handle the next big outage.

"We had a laptop and we started working on it straightaway," said Jonathan Cornish, 25, of Toronto, who sells T-shirts emblazoned with the phrases "New York, the lightweight city" and "Did buffalo pay their bills?" on the site blackedout2003.com.

Blackout merchandise started popping up on the Internet within hours of the outage, offering everything from mugs with a list of all the affected cities, to tote bags with a tasteful black-and-white design - "Blackout 2003" along with the date.

Several Internet sellers are using Cafepress.com, a San Francisco-area Internet company that sets up online stores and prints the merchandise for sellers. More than a dozen stores are selling blackout memorabilia on the site.

"On our service, everything seems to pop up as soon as it happened," said Maheesh Jain, spokesman for Cafepress.com. "In some ways, (it) tends to mirror what people are thinking and what's going on."

Cathy Johnson, 40, borrowed a phrase from television broadcasters for her merchandise, which includes T-shirts, beer steins and thong underwear.

"They just kept talking about 'Black Thursday' and I thought, 'Hey!'" said Johnson, who runs a photography business in Newport News, Virginia. "We actually put it up shortly after the lights went out."

The catch-phrase on Johnson's merchandise is "Black Thursday 2003," and includes the Canadian and US flags. She said she did not know exactly how much had sold since the storefront went up about two hours after the outage.

Cornish said on Monday that in the last 36 hours, 500 T-shirts have sold and blackedout2003.com has had about 4,000 hits. The freelance graphic designer, who lost power for more than 24 hours, sells 18 different kinds of T-shirts.

At the Woodward Dream Cruise, a classic car celebration in suburban Detroit, T-shirts for sale on Saturday commemorated the blackout. The T-shirts read: "The Great Blackout of 2003. No power, no problem. Woodward unplugged. Cruise on!"

Sellers also capitalized on the surge in interest in emergency preparedness, like a US$39.95 flashlight that operates without batteries, hawked with the line "A blackout is no problem now!"

After power returned to Michigan customers, Steven Harris spent 16 hours on Saturday writing an e-book on the blackout.

"Surviving the Blackout of 2003" sells for US$9.95 on his website at Knowledgepublications.com.

Agencies via Xinhua

(China Daily 08/20/2003 page6)