[BRIEF NOTE] Blackout!

When the power went out at my place just bvefore 11 o'clock, I thought that something was wrong with the electricity. This morning, as BlogTO tells us, I found out that entire neighbourhoods had been blocked out.

Toronto's west side is currently going on 5 hours without power. The Star (the only major media outlet to get the full story out early) reports that the blackout started around 10pm when there was a flood in a power facility at Dufferin & Bloor. A short-circuit there managed to leave a massive chunk of the city without electricity. We're talking Queen West to St Clair, Jane Street to Spadina, almost completely in the dark.

With temperatures dropping to nearly -30 with the windchill overnight, it was hardly the kind of evening you want to go without heating either.

Apart from being concerned for Shakespeare (Jerry's picking him up), this impacted me most directly in that the TTC was so snarled that I got to work an hour late. On the plus side, I found that my laptop screen can make a serviceable nightlight.

[LINK] Some Friday Links

First off, I'd like to announce the additino of Andrew Barton's blog Acts of Minor Treason. A published science-fiction writer and amateur photographer, Andrew has already come up with some great posts.

• Cabalamat's Phil Hunt notes that Israel has banned two Arab parties from the election on the grounds that, instead of supporting Israel as a Jewish state, they want Israel to be a state of all its citizens.


• The Lounsbury at 'Aqoul argues that the global financial crisis, by wrecking Dubai's economic boom, will help discredit liberal economics in the Persian Gulf region.


• Charlie Stross suggests that the genre of horror is driven by the distortion of the human condition beyond recognition.


• Crooked Timber's Kieran Healy argues, drawing from cognitive scientists and from Georg Simmer, that cities can overload the minds of humans. We evolved in groups of a hundred or so, after all.


• Pogge.ca reiterates the argument that people talking about "clashes of civilizations" are just trying to justify ex post facto their actions.


• Windows on Eurasia reports that three-quarters of the population of the Urals supported secession from Russia in the early 1990s, and notes that a majority of clergyman qualifying to vote for the next patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church don't hold Russian passports (most are Ukrainian).

[MUSIC] "Lady GaGa vs, The Eurythmics (Divide & Kreate Remix)"

"Bif Naked - "I Love Myself Today" Her Royal Majesty's Records" (Watch on YouTube)

This mashup of the Eurythmics' "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) and Lady Gaga's "Just Dance" is wonderfully infectious. The music aside, it's interesting to note that the two singers were famous for their non-standard gender appearances at the time the songs were released: Annie Lennox's androgynous, short-haired, suited persona led MTV to famously ask for her birth certificate to see if she was a woman, while the fashion style of Lady Gaga (born Joanne Stefani Germanotta in 1986) has led to her being mistaken for a transsexual or a drag queen.

[BRIEF NOTE] Yay! My power's back on (I think)

This informative map (PDF format) suggests that I have power now. Yay electricity, and heating, and home Internet, and other such delights.