Among some people I know, barbeque grills were fired up for the first time in six or so months. Good times.
But what was that? There was a bomb scare in Times Square? Oh.
I only found out about that on Sunday reading through earlier Twitter posts.
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“I am visiting New York after the world cup, should I be worried?” I was asked by a fellow user.
How to respond?
Um. Well. No. Maybe. Possibly. Probably not. I dunno.
“The only thing to fear is fear itself,” I replied, borrowing a line from former US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, trying to sound profound.
The truth is, besides effectively crashing planes into tall buildings, one sure way for any serious terrorist to escalate fear in a city is to detonate bombs in cars or garbage bins.
Just ask residents of Baghdad today or even London during the 1970s, '80s, and '90s (in the early 1990s, I missed a London pub bombing by 15 minutes – this did not put me off beer).
Though it turns out I'm not the only person who had been thinking how terrorists could take things up a few gears if they really want to.
But it also turns out that one reason such a campaign has not kicked off in New York City is because it's actually more difficult to execute than you might think. Apparently.
“They haven't been able to do anything, and the reason is quite simply, in the US they have not had the access to the training to put together a sophisticated bomb,” Michael Sheehan, the New York City Police Department's top counterterrorism official from 2003 to 2006, told the New York Times.
Knowledge aside, surveillance technology currently employed – or planned to be installed anyway – in Manhattan may thwart the success of any attack.
The NYPD is developing a network of surveillance cameras, licence plate readers, and chemical sensors to record and track every vehicle moving between 34th and 59th Streets, river to river.
The licence plate readers are already in use and can detect whether a vehicle is circling a location or behaving suspiciously.
This may be seen as a good thing but not everybody is so sure.
The New York Civil Liberties Union is suing the Department of Homeland Security over the Lower Manhattan plan and a “refusal to disclose public records about the massive surveillance system it is helping the NYPD develop in downtown Manhattan.”
“Throughout U.S. history, 'national security' has often been used as a pretext for massive violations of individual rights,” the organisation's website states.
“In the past decade, the fight against terrorism has served as the pretext for serious attacks on civil liberties in New York State and nationwide,”
Already, there's debate over a poor quality surveillance video that shows a man changing his shirt on the street near the abandoned vehicle's location on Saturday night. Suspect? Or a guy taking off a jumper in the hot sun?
In the meantime, street vendors, like the man who first spotted the suspicious vehicle, are now the first line of defence.
