Wind and/or wuthering

It’s been an insanely windy 24 hours here. We’re talking sustained 30-40mph winds (and the gusts are worse). Needless to say, my already-battered mailbox has all but been left laying in the ditch by this. The resulting temperature drop – down to around freezing – has accelerated that time of year when Xena becomes a full-time resident inside the house. Which seems to suit Olivia just fine – it means that wagging tail is always just a pounce away, in the comfort of her own home!
Shall we do promos for global thermonuclear war?
At exactly the same time tonight, everyone working for a Hearst Argyle TV station got an automated call on their home or cell phones, testing an automated “emergency response” system to be activated in the event of major emergencies or disasters; I guess it’s there to tell us if the station’s been taken out by a surgical strike (though I can’t imagine who’d want to do that now that Dancing With Or Without The Stars is over), or, more likely, to tell everyone to Report To Work Now Now Now in the event of a 9/11-scale emergency. This system was put in place after Katrina all but wiped out our sister station (and one of the oldest continuously broadcasting stations in the U.S.) WDSU last year. It sounds like the mutant love child resulting from a menage a trois between WOPR, Speak & Spell, and some Commodore 64 text-to-speech program whose name I’ve long since forgotten. It’s like getting a surprise phone call from Stephen Hawking, and he’s calling me “Early Green.” I’ll try to record it off the answering machine later in the day before I delete it, for your amusement.
Twilight Zone Standard Time
I have a small cluster of VCRs which I used for converting international videotapes to domestic formats and vice versa. (If anyone actually still requires this service in the age of DVD, give me a shout – I give good PAL conversion.) One of these VCRs has been routinely slipping into another timestream. For example: the always-accurate clock on my DVD recorder says “4:08A” (I kid you not, the thing is tuned into the atomic clock or something, because I’ve never had to set it once in 3+ years). The JVC VCR, at this moment, says “10:12A.” I’ve come home from work at two in the morning to find the VCR claiming it’s in PM time somewhere. And 12 hours or so later, with no readily apparent explanation, wham, it snaps back into real time. This would be great if I could get it to record stuff from the future, you know? I’d suddenly become an avid (and quite probably much wealthier than I am now) sports fan. Sort of like a slightly more modern version of Early Edition. Minus the yellow cat. Which is probably for the best, Olivia would chase his tail too.