Last night, we got pounded with some severe storms here in St. Louis. My power flickered off a couple of times and actually stayed down twice that I know about. The longest outage was a couple of hours.

I've been trying to figure out for these past few hours whether I'm making one of the biggest mistakes of my life. From my experience, usually those questions alone are a really bad indication.

I'll post later once I've figured something out. 'K?

Yes, I'm still alive and so is my server. Unfortunately (note to self: cue up "I Hate My Frickin' ISP" by Todd Rundgren in the background) Southwestern Bell seems intent on proving my theory that their technicians' favorite thing to do when bored is to run around unplugging stuff to see what happens.

On this day in 1581, Sir Francis Drake finished his journey around the world. For his efforts, Queen Elizabeth received a message from the Spanish government, saying Drake was nothing more than a pirate who ought to be hanged. She didn't take them up on the suggestion.

In 1882, my fellow Missourian Jesse James was shot in the back of the head and killed by a man he'd recruited to help him rob a bank in Platte City. Rumors persist to this day that James faked his death, even though 1995 DNA analysis of the body buried in Kearney, Missouri under a headstone reading "Jesse James" proved 99.7% conclusive. A man named Frank Dalton died in Granbury, Texas at the age of 104 in 1951 and he claimed to his dying day that he was Jesse James. Dalton's body was to be exhumed in 2000 for DNA analysis and the story was a media sensation that you might remember. You probably don't remember the results, because a mismarked gravestone caused the body of a one-armed man who died in 1927 to be exhumed instead, and the body buried as "Jesse James, supposedly killed in 1882" has yet to be tested. Despite the 1995 tests, citizens of Gransbury and citizens of Kearney still argue over which of them has the real Jesse James.

I meant to post last night, then I noticed nobody had written a Wikipedia entry for Daniel Pearl. I had to jump on that one. We're talking about a guy who wrote a feature story about Iranian pop music and got it published on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, folks. Who gets those kinds of ideas? And then gets them published in a venue like that?

I don't normally do this--wait, I'm doing two things I don't normally do, namely, post to my blog at work and link to someone else's blog without writing anything containing a hint of originality--but you've got to read Charlie's entry for today.

My DSL connection was up and down like a yo-yo for the past day and a half or so. Sorry about that, but this is a budget operation, and that's bound to show sometimes.

I'm sick again--similar to but less intense than the last thing I got--so I'm off to the doctor again.