I tweeted this but wanted to drop into the blog too. WFAA and The Monitor say “the Electric Reliability Council of Texas — which manages much of the state’s electric grid — ordered rotating blackouts across the state to cope with heightened demand for power.”

Blackouts are going to hit Houston, Dallas, Ft Worth, San Antonio, Austin, Corpus Christi, Abilene and the Rio Grande Valley soon. Blackouts should only last 30 minutes or so (yeah, right!).

Here are some news stories from this week that I think the mainstream media completely missed out on. All links are from legitimate news sources and not the fringe / wacko sites.

* Another day, another 80’s TV actor caught doing somethin’ illegal. Larry Wilcox, the guy who played Jon from the 80’s TV show CHiPS, was busted for a crime he didn’t commit. OK, he was busted for a crime he won’t be spending any jail time for, but still I guess you can say the CHiPS are down for him now. I should let the CHiPS fall where they may. Perhaps he had a CHiPs on his shoulder? OK, I’m out of crap puns now. LETS HEAR SOME 80s TV MUSIC! [SUN SENTINEL]

* Dear God, we’re really using civilian tech and homemade apps to fight a modern war? Maybe the military would buy my ghetto “Iron Soldier Man” armor made of trash cans and pizza boxes after all! [FOX NEWS]

* Criminals sure are creative. Extremely stupid, but creative! I feel sorry for the police officer having to deal with this one… “So let me get this straight, sir. Your girlfriend, who is in multiple pieces in a cardboard barrel in the back seat of your car, died two days ago after you shagged her to death? Ah. Of course. It all makes perfect sense now! Might I interest you in trying on a pair of steel bracelets I have with me?” [MSNBC]

* On a different kind of crazy, the Voyager 2 spacecraft launched into space in 1977. It’s been in space for 34 years. It flew by Uranus over 25 years ago. It is around 91.898 AU (13.747 billion km, 8.542 billion miles or 0.001443 light years) from the Sun and it STILL HASN’T LEFT OUR SOLAR SYSTEM! That’s a whole lot of crazy if you think about it. [SPACEREF]

* Meanwhile, back on Earth, hundreds of people are actually surprised to see a gorilla walking upright at a local zoo. What? Hundreds of years of hard scientific evidence and research by brilliant dedicated people not good enough to prove evolution? Dammit, we’re never getting off this planet are we? [HUFFINGTON POST]

* In other science-related news, there’s a growing chance that the next few decades may develop a “cure” for aging! I really really really hope “death from aging” will one day be nothing more than a footnote in the medical journals. I have a feeling “death from stupid” will always be with us, though. [POPULAR MECHANICS]

* Speaking of death, when hoarders die, who gets the hoarders hoard? The relatives? The state? Maybe History channel or National Geographic can make a show about it. A cross between “Pickers”, “Pawn Stars”, and “How Clean is Your House” with rooms full of rotting piles of crap that make you go DAAAAAAA. Can’t miss! [NEWSWEEK]

*And finally, Texas got caught in a lie. It’s Texas, so it’s a big big big lie. The Obama stimulus, which the gover-nah constantly bitched and complained about, was actually used to cover 97% of the Texas budget this last year. You would think that much hypocrisy would get somebody struck by lightning! [THE ATLANTIC]

** Actually published Monday because it was my wife’s birthday weekend!

Whats going on in Egypt right now at this moment is going to change the world.

Live coverage is at Al Jazeera’s website here.

A “Why this is happening in Egypt 101” is at Mother Jone’s site here.

I’ve been glued to the Al Jazeera page all day.

Have you ever wanted to report on a internet scam or some other online crime? Check out IC3.

IC3, AKA the Internet Crime Complaint Center, is a partnership between some other Federal alphabet soup agencies – the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the National White Collar Crime Center (NW3C), and the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA).

Technically it should be IC3 = SUM (FBI + NW3C + BJA), but that’s just murder on a business card.

Anyhow, IC3 was set up to “receive, develop, and refer criminal complaints regarding the rapidly expanding arena of cyber crime” and is pretty easy to use. You click through a multiple-choice questionnaire on the site and fill in the blanks as you go along. It takes about two minutes for a typical form.

Maybe if enough people use this system, some of those “I give you this sum $3, 750,000.00 Million Dollars from the bank in south America” kind of emails will go away.

Right. Here’s the official link to the report-a-scam-and-crime website.