My ISP had some scheduled maintenance between 1:00 AM and 5:00 AM this morning, clearly meant to not conflict with normal schedules, which means it has completely disrupted mine. To make matters worse, the "brief interruptions and/or suboptimal performance in your DSL service" they promised has been a complete 100% outage all night, and speaking to tech support an hour after things were supposed to come back online I learned that they were still waiting on some local telco, and I had no ETA for service. Whee! Turns out the problems started earlier than expected last night, and knocked loony offline as well... fun!

Happy Independence Day! This is my first Fourth of July in several years as a pet owner, my last cat was not a huge fan of fireworks, but I don't think they would bother the doggie so much (she doesn't mind thunder and lightning). I don't really think it will be an issue anyway, since it's pretty quiet around where we live now, and the rain, which has been falling all night, is expected to continue throughout the day.

I'll stop now -- 6+ hours of downtime to work on an OotB could provoke a record ramble here, so I'll just cease and desist, and go back to hitting refresh to see when my connection comes back (if you are reading these words, then it obviously did at some point-if you are not reading these words... well, I just won't ponder that).

Story of the Day: 'Sopranos' actor arrested on robbery charge (CNN). Life imitating art. Thanks Chris Morris.
Bonus Story: Brazil is running out of breast implants (Ananova).
Weird Science: Men called Paul 'likely to be ugly' (Ananova).
Wild Science: Moon-sized body spotted beyond Neptune (Ananova). Thanks Andrew Arace for all three of those.
Follow-up: Car rental GPS speeding fines illegal. Following up this story. Thanks Aarkwilde.