It Turns Out Something Is Shocking

I poked my head out the window this weekend to see if I could tell why the neighborhood was being attacked by TIE fighters and discovered that that was actually the sound of hundreds of feet of power lines snapping during a storm on a three-street perimeter around me. Our electricity is back, but when I went to check the computer, I discovered that pressing the “on” button did nothing but produce a gradually spreading smell of burning plastic. Something, evidently, got fried when the power lines went down (I picture a thin scrim of blue lightning playing over the inside of the machine, as if there were a tiny, angry Emperor Palpatine loose on the motherboard): possibly just the power supply, possibly the whole thing. I won’t know until the new power supply I ordered gets here later this week. In the meantime, I’m working on a combination of a miniature Apple touch screen and a backup laptop that I stole from the Museum of Natual History. It was in an exhibit, being used by a caveman who couldn’t believe how long it was taking to get on Netflix.

So I’m asking for your patience. (Give it to me. Give me your patience.) This came at a pretty bad time, as I am smack in the middle of a magazine piece that was already taking forever to write. Most of my stuff is backed up, but I don’t have access to Football Manager or any Pro Vercelli notes, save games, or screenshots, which means—assuming these things haven’t been voltaged to death—no Pro Vercelli updates for a while. And honestly, writing about preseason friendlies under these conditions would be frustrating for both of us. Well, it would be frustrating for me.

So don’t be surprised if there’s not a lot of new content on here for a few days. I’ll keep the Twitter fires burning, possibly literally. In the meantime, if you’re checking your email and it’s just screaming in with amazing speed, picture me standing on your shoulder, shaking a tiny fist at your ear.