Stayed at home yesterday to try to avoid further infecting the office with my germs. Everything went to hell without me there, so I suppose I'm good for something around here... daytime TV hasn't improved much since my useless-post-college-days.

The best channel was C-SPAN. They had a high-ranking general standing in front of a busy shed full of mechanics and Humvees, as he tried to explain the esoterics behind up-armoring transport vehicles in a IED&ambush war like Iraq. Thus is the state-of-the-art of spin control in 2004. The press corps wasn't totally ignorant for a change. Everybody was bending over backwards to not look like they were going to come down like a ton of bricks on the NCO who was yelling at Rumsfeld. So what's the odds look like this week on a Rumsfeld resignation? I'm guessing one in three, up from one in twenty last week. After that, they had Gen. Brooks, Robert Kaplan, and some other guy at AEI doing a panel on, of all things, spin control and information warfare. They had a lot of interesting things to say about how the administration lost the information battle over First Fallujah, and dominated the fight over the story of Second Fallujah. Interesting point - Gen. Brooks used that exact name - "Second Fallujah". How very, very 1862, don't you think?

There was a lot of lights-flickering and tv-outage later last night. When I came in this morning, I discovered that the building-site where the Mount Nittany Inn used to be, and theoretically will-be-again, BLEW UP last night. Quite spectacularly, to judge from what our secretary, who lives over that way, had to say. Apparently there's a good deal of power infrastructure up on Centre Hall Mountain by the Inn, because last night's flickering power was the outside edges of a pretty nasty series of brown-outs that took down the power here at work, and throughout Pleasant Gap and the upper reaches of Penns Valley. That Inn is snakebit, if you ask me. Time to give upon it, bury the ruins, and replace it with a tree plantation or something.