Nuclear fail-safe

Xcel Energy Inc.'s nuclear plant at Monticello [Minnesota] has been shut down indefinitely while experts investigate why a large component broke loose and triggered the plant's automatic safety systems.

Hey, it failed safe, exactly as it's supposed to.  But have you heard anything about this on the news?  The only reason I knew about it was because yndy er, suzilem posted this Hungarian information-service site showing alert events in the US.  You can find it on Google News, if you search on Monticello, but it doesn't make the headline page.  CNN doesn't appear to have it at all.

Apparently a synergistic side-effect of the shutdown was a fish kill in the Mississippi river:

A side-effect of the shutdown was that it killed over 3,000 fish in the Mississippi River near the plant.

Nonradioactive water used to cool the plant is normally discharged into the river, Datu said, creating warm spots.  When the discharge stopped, she said, the river water quickly cooled, and the fish died of thermal shock.  A planned shutdown typically kills around 100 fish, she said.

Does this mean the fish have evolved dependence on the nuclear power plant...?

Ice storm photos from Merrimack

These are the photos I took yesterday from the ice storm.  You can see how everything is coated with ice -- even the bark litter at the base of the Khoura dogwood tree seems to have been vacuum-wrapped.  The ice is up to a half-inch thick in places.  Unfortunately, I didn't get to the mailbox before the Silly Goose broke the ice off the top of it.

Images here are quarter-size (464x348 or vice versa); click on them to get a half-size (928x696) version.  Full-size (1856x1392) versions available by request.

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This morning, the sky is clear and the sun is out.  So I went out to get a few more, to catch the sun on the ice.  I didn't stay out long, because it's bitterly cold out there today.  The thermometer on our screen porch had made it up to 0°F by the time I got outside.  Walking in the back yard sounded like a chorus of brittle, crystalline chimes as the ice on the grass blades snapped.  It sounded as though someone had dropped a crystal chandelier.  cymrullewes reports that the washer/de-icer fluid in the Mercedes is frozen solid.

The good part of the cold is, the ice is less slippery than yesterday when the temperatures were hovering around freezing.  With luck, now that the sun is out, most of the ice will melt off the driveway today.

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Oddly, I suppose we have HP to thank for this

It's official: "pretexting" to buy, sell or obtain personal phone records--except when conducted by law enforcement or intelligence agencies--is now a federal crime that could yield prison time.

It still boggles me that this was ever a "grey area" in the first place.  But now, it's officially a Federal offence to impersonate someone in order to obtain their phone records.  Doing so to obtain financial records was already illegal.

Friending frenzy, à la dr_nebula

It's not actually dr_nebula's fault.  yndy started it, with a "Tell me who I'm missing" post, in which she said to all comers, "[...] knowing me as well as you do (however well that is) who on your FL would you think I really ought to know?"

But I've never, ever felt comfortable trying to pick people who I think would get on together.  Anyone who knows my disastrously hit-and-miss record in personal friendships etc would understand why.  So I'm taking a leaf from dr_nebula's notebook instead.

So if you're reading this, whip out your comments, and say a little about yourselves and what you think makes you interesting or worth knowing.  For myself, I'll just rest on fruitylips' statement, slightly edited for reference:  "[unixronin] is a known loon."