I have to say that facebook has yielded some great new phrases for me in the last few days. Social networking be damned, I’m one of the least social people I know. Which is probably an oxymoron.
“Ride the lightning” is something I was urged to do after discussing the effects of legalized trucker speed. I investigated to find that this was actually a Metallica song title. This aside, I still like the idea of trying to find a pursuit where I can yell to someone on my right, “RIDE THE LIGHTNING!” and they’d look back at me from behind dark glasses as they straddled their own personal thunderbolt and yell “F*** YEAH!”. Maybe I should take up kite flying in storms.
The next phrase was “disco moustache” which like a precocious androgynous toddler at the counter of an ice cream shop, speaks for itself.
The third phrase which pertains to an inability of the power generation companies to, er, generate power when it’s cold. Rolling blackouts are happening in Austin to mitigate the loss of production of several power stations due to such lame things as frozen pipes.
“Dear mr. power station, I’m sorry if the long-predicted cold snap has caught you off guard. I have received eleventeen emails from people telling me how to avoid frozen pipes in the last three days. I’m sorry that you didn’t receive any of them, or perhaps they went to your spam folder. At any rate, I’m sorry that you didn’t know it was going to be cold and didn’t leave the tap running. Have you tried insulating your pipes?”
To me, “rolling blackout” sounds like something that you should aim to avoid when you’re at a rave in a strange country and you don’t know the people you’re dancing with. Apparently in Austin it means that you can’t watch TV reliably in really cold weather. Sigh. If only the country’s leading smart grid demonstration project was in my neighborhood we could have an uninterruptable energy internet. Oh hang on, we do have such a project. Yay!
Oh, and before any of you smart alecs tell me that you can easily switch off the internet and cite Egypt as an example, click this link for a picture of a camel in a riot and news that they turned the internet back on.