In a few hours, Mars will be close:

As if executing a cosmic air kiss, Earth and Mars will come as close as they desire in the wee hours of Wednesday during an historical event that has captivated the attention of skywatchers around the globe. The two planets will be separated by 34,646,418 million miles (55,758,006 million kilometers) at 5:51 a.m. ET (1051 GMT) on Aug. 27. Not since the Neanderthals shared this planet with early humans have the two worlds been so close

(from space.com, via Yahoo News).

Toyota plans to release a car next month in Japan that parallel parks itself, an Australian newspaper reported (from Wired).

You can see me in two shorts in two cities:

1. a north shore kid coming to the city to score some coke in Where I'm From
2. Refus, a disgusting and unhygienic country bumpkin, in Stay Dead

Where I'm From is screening in Chicago, IL, and then they both screen in Pittsburgh, PA; if you are in those towns, you can come see them (if you can't make the screenings, you can watch on-line):

Where I'm From

Saturday, August 30, 2003, 9 PM

North Beach Chicago

1551 N. Sheffield (just south of North and Sheffield), Chicago, IL (Yahoo Map)

call 312-266-7842 for more info

http://www.northbeachclub.com/chicago.htm

(a crime drama)

$10 cover (includes free bowling) must be 21 or over

Where I'm From and Stay Dead

Thursday, September 4, 2003, 6:30 PM

The Rex Theatre

1602 E. Carson St. (between 16th St. and 17th St.), Pittsburgh, PA (Yahoo Map)

call 412-381-6811 for more info

http://www.rextheatre.com/

$5

You can also watch Stay Dead on-line at any time:

Stay Dead

BBC has had some bad, and deliberately misleading reporting in the last few months (from The Weekly Standard).

A Night Light Satellite photo about 7 hours after the last week's blackout began.

Google's built-in calculator function is pretty cool (useful too).

Little things do make a big difference:

Investigators continue to hunt for clues to the cause of the outage that cut electricity from east of New York, north to Toronto and west to Detroit, Michigan - an area home to about 50 million people.

Gent said the exact cause remains unknown, but indications so far point to a downed 345,000 volt power line east of Cleveland, Ohio, on the 'Lake Erie loop' - a series of transmission lines around the lake - as the source of the outage.

Within three minutes, starting at 4:10 p.m. Thursday, 21 power plants in the United States shut down, according to Genscape, which monitors power transmissions.

All that might be from one power line falling down (from CNN).