Fuit lux

34° inside when we got back home last night, and we'd finally lost water pressure, though I don't know if the pipes froze or if our landlord flushed them. We brushed our teeth with bottled icewater and huddled, all three of us, under every blanket we own, finding it more or less impossible to get warm. (Gus-Gus never gets under the covers; she must have been in dire straits.) (I think she played bass.)

Shortly before 5AM, adfamiliares poked me: "Do you hear that?" I blinked my eyes open: "Do you see that?" The referents were: the downstairs furnace rumbling to life, and the light I'd left switched on in the living room. Joy! When I dashed out of bed to restart our furnace, the thermostat had just hit 32°; I doubt anything had a chance to get damaged by freezing solid.

Unrelatedly, I had a dream last night about a sequel to Alien in which a new kind of alien—the "bull alien"—wore an orange fright wig and deelyboppers. Its job was to distract people so the other new kind of alien—the kind which almost looked human, except for the lumpy and patchwork quality of their faces—could sneak up and devour them, clearing the way for new doppelgangers.

MySpace: "the Internet's red-light district"

Oh, won't somebody please think of the children? Some more?

The AP is worried about MySpace:

"And the horror stories are indeed terrifying. Last month, for example, 14-year-old Judy Cajuste was found strangled and naked in a Newark, N.J., garbage bin. Police seized a computer from her bedroom after friends said she told them of a man in his 20s she met on MySpace. The death remains unsolved." So...it's unsolved, but we're assuming this creepy MySpace dude is the killer anyway? I guess that makes sense; if you don't understand something, it's probably evil.

Even worse: "MySpace profiles have been used to threaten classmates and in at least one case, to mock a school principal."

Horrors. That's almost as bad as taunting an alderman. I mean, really. There are some lines you just don't cross, kids.