'Magnificent desolation'

Fellow space geeks will recognize those as the first words spoken on the surface of the moon by the second man to set foot on the surface of the moon, Buzz Aldrin.  Those two words also nicely describe the scene today around our building in Midtown Manhattan.  While I'm not quite sure why it is that a transit strike means the roads are blocked off to vehicular traffic, looking out at 49th street and 5th avenue, I don't see one moving car.  All you can hear at this moment is the lone siren of a fire truck in the distance.  During lunch hour, I did something that would normally be fatal during the noon hour: I walked down the center of 5th Avenue to go do some Christmas shopping. It's a virtual pedestrian mall. Our foreign news senior producer, M.L. Flynn, reported at our morning editorial meeting that she was struck by a strange sound while walking to work this morning down 5th Avenue.  She figured out quickly that the sound was chirping birds.  Normally in this city, a bird is a euphemism.

We will likely begin our broadcast with this story, by dint of its sheer scope and the number of Americans impacted by it.  We may broaden the story and talk about the shape of things to come for unions (and pensions) in this country.

Also tonight: Intelligent Design...and a court case that comes along during the debate over whether or not its an excuse to inject religion into the classroom. We'll have a look at what constitutes the definition of "spying" these days, and as part of our series on the lessons learned from Katrina tonight, we'll take a look at the re-building debate in Mississippi.  And we'll reach into the NBC News archives to see what we were up to the LAST time this city was crippled by a transit strike.

A bus just went by on 49th street.  This is getting exciting.

We hope you'll join us for our Tuesday broadcast tonight.