Happy winter to those of us in the northern hemisphere, and happy summer to those below the equator (and happy perpetual summer to those along the equator itself), as yesterday was the solstice. As I mentioned along the way in the past couple of crazy days here, the problems with our FiOS phone finally got straightened out: The order was written incorrectly, which held things up, and the pesky order then defied several efforts to purge it from the system, which prevented anything else from happening. We also got our power back last night after a surprisingly long outage: We often have short blackouts from trees breaking overhead lines, but this time there was a fire which caused the pole to fall, and a repair had to wait for them to erect a new one. Thanks for your patience as this got sorted.

R.I.P.: Iron Butterfly bassist Lee Dorman dies at age 70.

Winter Links:	Thanks Ant and Acleacius.
Science:	Bears were used in test flights of world’s first supersonic jet bomber.
Media:	The Embarrassing Aftermath of the Mayan Apocalypse. NSFW. Amazing 3D illusions on paper. The Best Action Scenes of 2012.
Follow-up:	Celebrations in Mexico as world survives Maya "end of days".