Sometimes, Things Just Fall Apart...

It looks like one of those days when stuff just falls apart or good intentions go awry.

Topping the list of key phrases is the term "additional paid time," which is what LiveJournal users are getting for a two-day blog outage that occured over the weekend. LiveJournalers are calling it the "Great Outage of 2005," and the blog service provider is offering two weeks' free memberhsip to paid users.

Among today's top links from Yahoo! News in India is this piece about Christian missionaries who allegedly abandoned their mission when the Hindu believers they were trying to help refused to convert. WWJD? Cry, probably.

And in Ohio, the same constitutional amendment that's supposed to protect citizens from gays who happen to like each other is in actuality being used as a defense against boyfriends charged with beating up their girlfriends. The boyfriends' argument: since theirs is not a legally sanctioned, state-recognized male-female union, domestic violence charges don't count.

And in the "help, save us from ourselves department!" comes this bit of news: Fox TV blurred out the rear end of a cartoon character in "Family Guy" for fear that the bare-butt animation (on an episode that aired five years ago), might offend the FCC or censors. Does that mean Donald Duck has to start wearing pants?

Australian politics are grabbing some attention, too, as speculation begins about who will replace Labor Party leader Mark Latham, who quit earlier this week for health reasons. In the U.S., red-state bloggers are foaming at the mouth over Nov. 2 election results from Wisconsin, although it's curious how so few of them say to themselves what they've been saying to blue-staters who have the same concerns all along about registration numbers and voting patterns Ohio and Florida: the election's over, get over it. (Besides, your candidate won).

And for today's weather report, we'll let bloggers chime in descriptively and leave it at that.

BLOGPULSE TREND GRAPH OF THE DAY: The second Bush Jr. presidency starts soon, with some old faces and some new.