Darkness at noon (& the rest of the day)

I hope you don’t need to look up anything on Wikipedia today; at least not in English.

The online crowd-sourced encyclopedia has shut down its English-language pages for the day to protest proposed legislation in the US Congress.

Ditto Reddit, BoingBoing and the Cheezburger Network, all of which are social media sites, without the presence of Wikipedia. (Although I know a lot of people who are going to be pissed off about not being able to access LOLCats for a day.)

(And sorry about giving you links to “we’re shut down” banners. Try them after today.)

I don’t think there’s a day goes by that I’m not directed to Wikipedia, because I’m always looking up acronyms I find in my job search. It’s not anything I’d bet the ranch on, but it is a useful quick-&-dirty research resource, and they do a good job of weeding out whack-jobs.

As for LOLCats—well, sometimes you’ve just got to get away from it all. So that's going to be a loss, too

I don’t credit any of our Congressmorons with the ability to find or use any of these sites, but I expect their staffers are going to be bereft for the day. It’ll be interesting to see what happens with the Stop Online Pirace Act (SOPA) & Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) bills.

(Look—it’s really hard for me to give you a quick explanation of them because of Wikipedia being down…)

But let me just close with this thought: I'm guessing a lot of homework will be turned in late on Thursday in classrooms all over America.