My cable company, Roadrunner, had an outage in our area, so I was off the Net for 5 hours. Omigod. It made me realize how dependent I am on the Internet; my businesses, this blog, and much of the antiwar organizing I do are by email and websites.

So maybe I’ll move as much as I can to the notebook computer and use Gmail and Yahoo as my primary email addresses. Then if the cable goes down again, I just go to Starbucks and get back online.

PS Roadrunner has excellent service. Outages are rare and get fixed fast. They recently upgraded in my area and I now get an average of 500-550 kps on downloads. That’s fast!

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Florida eyes allowing residents to open fire whenever they see threat.

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 From Sue:

Guys with guns and no jobs.  If they had jobs, they wouldn’t be in the Arizona desert. 

Guys with guns.  They can’t go down to the docks and prevent Chinese-made goods from coming in. They can’t go down to the factory and prevent the export of the machinery and their jobs. They can’t brandish their guns at the gates of the power brokers who are impoverish them. So they brandish their rifles at the only people allowed — the even more deprived and powerless.

Higher skilled jobs leaving for foreign countries, and now even order taking at McDonalds outsourced to India … There’s nothing that can be done about it now. The agreements have been inked, the economy is in the hands of the worldwide wealthy.

But there are a lot of guys with guns in this country. So expect more of this.

The Minutemen, white men all, attack the most powerless elements in society. Even Bush called them “vigilantes.” Counter-protestors who were there and followed them said the Minutemen appeared to be white supremacists and other such lumpen. But immigrants aren’t their enemy. Those who are destroying the social contract in this country and outsourcing jobs to whatever country is cheapest this week, that’s who their real enemy is.

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Well hey, it’s an easy news story isn’t it? Stand in St. Peters Square and interview mournful passers-by.

To some, the Pontiff was a divisive figure

John Paul muzzled liberal theologians and brought about a decline in the number of practicing Catholics in some areas, critics say.

“Divisive?” I’d call him reactionary. As the article hints at, he blocked the reforms of Vatican II whenever possible and did his best to drag the Church back to the Middle Ages.

However, for some comic relief, consider -

Pope reborn as superhero in comic

Pope John Paul II is being reborn in a Colombian comic book as a superhero battling evil with an anti-Devil cape and special chastity pants.

Race to succeed Pope includes even the fictional

The race is on to succeed John Paul II as pope and bookmakers are already getting in on the act. But not all the candidates are quite what they seem.

According to The Washington Post on Tuesday, gamblers can back Cardinal Dionigi Tettamanzi of Italy at odds of 11 to 4. “Or they can take their chances on Father Dougal Maguire of Craggy Island, Ireland, a long shot at 1,000 to 1.”

But the Post’s reporter was unaware of a key detail that, generous odds aside, would make canny bettors take a pass on Father Dougal.

He is a fictional character.

The next Pope will be reactionary too. Don’t waste time hoping for even a moderate.

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Yahoo isn’t flashy. However they have a huge amount of highly useful free and premium services.

I’m using Y! Plus now, it’s $1.99 a month, and installs its own browser that has lots of custom and advanced features for when you are on Yahoo. It’s important to note that it doesn’t mess with your other browsers, those stay as they are.

With Y! Plus you also get access to all Launchcast radio stations, commercial free, 100 MB storage on Briefcase (great for transferring files), unlimited online photo storage, 10 email sub-accounts on Yahoo Mail, an enhanced My Yahoo with lots of nice features and tweaks, and more.

My customized My Yahoo main page has news, email, messenger, maps, briefcase and my favorite, calendar. Calendar lets you send reminders to an email address, Yahoo messenger, and cell phone. So when I have an appointment I have Calendar send a reminder with address and phone number to my cell phone a few hours before. Very handy.

If you haven’t checked lately, you’ll be amazed at how much Yahoo has.

Yahoo free services

Yahoo premium services

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