Friday, August 15, 2003

Fair and Balanced Sunburn

I've been unable to sleep through the pain of my sunburn, and my writing and thinking skills have now deteriorated to the point that I don't trust myself to cover any web news. I was up at 2:30 am this morning, surfing the web aimlessly, when I heard a soft sound to my right, like someone setting down a piece of paper or something. When I looked, there was the biggest brown spider I'd ever seen, looking right at me, from his perch on one of my books. He turned, crud, he's fast and I decided it was time to go to bed. I carefully navigated my way around the spider... it didn't move, and to bed. But it was no use. Between the pain, terminal itching, and a new nightmare of giant spiders crawling over my skin I was utterly unable to fall asleep, and instead restlessly lay there until hubby-Eric woke up and I could turn on the news.

I was surprised to learn that the power was still out on the East coast. From what I know of the power industry, most of the power should have been restored, I thought. Until I learned that whatever caused the outage had triggered certain failsafes... generators shut down to protect themselves from it. Whoa. That's pretty serious. While listening to the various theories on what happened, I formulated my own sleep-deprived theory of some mad scientist in Canada turning on his power-hungry device and draining the grid by accident... wait, didn't that happen in a Superman movie?

Anyway, for a first-hand account of the events, once again Elayne Riggs has the goods. And she's even fair and balanced about it.

Update: By the way, if you wanted a list of all the Fair and Balanced websites, the best list is here at Blah3.com.

Update: Incredible first-hand account of being stranded in a subway train. Read it. Wow.

Update: READ THIS ARTICLE, it tells about how power gets to your house, in an easy-to-understand way. It also explains why the power is still out in parts of New York. I knew all the information in this article, but I still found it a very good read.

0 comments: