Something was rotten in the Arbor District this last week. We’d be warned about our local cable company being traded or swapped with media behemoth Comcast. So it wasn’t completely surprising that we were left high and dry Internet-style one day… then two days slid right into three. It was time to call. Comcast claimed we were special for such an outage and said that it should be fixed in 48 hours. One additional call and we finally had that great expanse of world wide web at our beck and call again.

I felt slightly paranoid when I couldn’t access nytimes.com AND ebay.com this whole week. Is this a joke? Did someone find out how much time I spend on the NYT and calculate that I’d live a much fuller life without it? Photo uploads to various sites were also affected, but I just crossed my fingers and hoped for the best. This morning I woke up feeling vengeful and enacted some physical violence on the cable modem that involved voodoo networking practices that I cannot mention and a paperclip jammed into various orifices. The old Grey Lady is back in action… and so is my creepy obsession with buying serial killer memorabilia.*

*Obviously, I’m kidding. Only my friend Micah has such a terrifying hobby.