HARD 2 EXPLAIN

Halsey Minor, 12's co-founder and chief executive officer, announced to its staff late last week that it will shut down as soon as January and return money that it hasn't invested to its financial backers. Two of the start-ups funded by 12 will continue operations.

Experts say an adversary armed with anthrax in this form would have a host of possible targets for mass terrorism. Experiments by the United States in the 1960's showed that anthrax released in the New York City subway could spread widely underground, infecting large numbers of people. Federal officials used a benign germ related to anthrax to demonstrate the possible effects.

OK, so I was in the west village this morning. I work at a financial services startup there. My entire office was standing on 7th avenue watching it. When you're in the village (lots of low buildings) The world trade center sticks out of the landscape like jacks beanstalk.

We couldn't take our eyes off of it. I wished, out loud, that I had a camera. My friend Mike said "There will be plenty of pictures of this!". Oh, I half joked, but I wouldn't be in them. Then we started discussing how the Empire State building was hit by a bomber during the war and is still standing today...

Then the first tower fell. OK now it's serious... I started walking uptown. I knew the tunnels and bridges would be closed but hoped the ferry would be running. So I'm walking.... and walking because most roads are closed and the subways were shutdown. Seems I wasn't the only one with this idea, the longer I walked the more people seem to join me along the way. Where was the Pied Piper? There was an eerie unusual calm. Some stores even setup tables out front and poured cups of water for people passing by. There are some people that are still staring past us, downtown, frozen, as if waiting for the next shoe to drop.

Then I hear someone scream... I turn around and there the second tower is crumbling straight down. Like when you're watching one of those controlled explosions you see on TV all the time it just slipped down into a cloud of smoke. The spooky thing was that as it slipped down a part of the super structure seemed to stand up... like the bones of a fish... almost like the flesh falling away from a skeleton.