Since y'all already know I'm an electric power geek, I'll point out that if you'd like a really geeky summary of the electricity and gas situation in the Sandy-damaged area, the DOE does situation reports. Here's this afternoon's: [link]

Yes! Community! Thank you, msbelle.

I wanted to find that tumblr picture of John Barrowman with the puppies for Steph, but I discovered that there is no simple solution to that. TUmblr is full of Arrow squee, and "How did I miss the signing????" bemoaning, and google--it's full of things like this [link] and this [link] and stuff. It's FRUSTRATING.

I had actual trick or treaters this year! There was a tiny little girl who was some sort of goblin. It was an awesome costume, I gave her like, half the bowl.

billytea: New bird taxonomy charts all 10,000 species of birds.

Ooh, nice. I discovered the other day that the penguin lineage had split off while the dinosaurs still dominated the land, though they may not have become flightless until the Palaeogene.

Two other notes: it looks like the New World vultures are back with the raptors. For a time they were often classified as being related to storks. One apparent omission too: I can't find the Corvidae on that graphic. No crows.

I am in a hotel, and had to drive from LA to Santa Barbara with a migraine, so when I got here I collapsd in bed and slept for almost 4 hours. I'm awake now, but took more drugs and expect to be back asleep shortly. So much for Halloween. Though I didn't get any trick or treaters the past two years, so I don't figure my roommate needed to bother with candy. Kinda sad. One of these days I want to do that, as a homeowner! But they go to other neighborhoods.

le Nubian, that's sad, though! I don't understand this whole "lets reschedule! Lets do its at the mall! Lets have official hours!" stuff. Halloween is Halloween, man...

Kids drive up to my sister's neighborhood from the flats, because it's wealthier and has nice safe sidewalks. So we get a lot of kids up here.

I just had my last kids: full-on teenagers, at 9PM, and it's raining, so after they left I shut off the porch light and locked the door.

And now I'm going to watch last night's Frontline and learn all about dark money.

are you serious because I am thinking about putting them in the mail to you.

can you send me your addy via email?

I never joke about peanut butter! If you're serious, I'll e-mail you my addy momentarily!

Oh, yeah, Barrowman + puppies = ALL TEH AWESOMESAUCE.

OMG the St. Bernard is lying on the floor ten feet from me, just moaning. Dude, hush!

Okay, if you think 28 Days Later is not a new iteration in an old genre, YOU ARE JUST WRONG.

Seriously, how is this even a conversation?

Oh, hey, msbelle, who's the football player in the Gatorade/NFL ad with the braids (I'm pretty sure they're not locks)?

One day I'm going to see the West Hollywood Halloween parade. But thinking about it makes me feel all old and tired as fuck.

I know I'm overinvested in silicon when things make noises in my apartment, and it takes a while to realise that I set the web log analysis program to run monthly, dump the reports in my Dropbox account, and then IFTTT sends me a text. When that shit wakes you up in the middle of the night, it really makes me wonder why I'm not doing something useful with tech, like turning the volume down when I'm asleep.