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According to Thursday’s Honolulu Advertiser, HPD and Oceanic Time Warner personnel believe copper thieves were responsible for an outage during the Sugar Bowl on Tuesday.

An Oceanic line near the Wilson Tunnel was snagged by a downed tree Tuesday afternoon. Soon afterwards, someone found the cable and bent it open at a 90-degree angle, as if they were looking for copper wiring.

It was a fiber optic line. It’s full of glass strands, without a trace of copper.

When the outage occurred around 5:15 pm HT, my Georgia Bulldogs were leading the Hawaii Warriors 7-3. That was the closest margin that UH could muster. Georgia scored an easy 41-10 victory that made me wonder why the Bulldogs weren’t paired with USC instead. The Trojans would have had a much harder time against Georgia than the Illini.

About half of that line’s fibers remained unbroken as the would-be copper thieves skipped away to darken our island some other day. Backup systems kept 85,000 homes that were using that cable online during the outage, but 5,000 homes in Punaluu, Kaneohe, Kailua and Hawaii Kai were offline for up to an hour.

All 80,000 neighbor island customers were offline for even longer, according to the Advertiser. The outage really wrecked some Sugar Bowl parties. Terrestrial reception on the neighbor islands is spotty at best, so antennas were of little value. When cable service returned, there were reports of poor audio or video.

I was home in Honolulu, where I watched the entire game on my computer via a DSL connection to my cable television box in New Jersey. No worries here!

I just opened up my June 2007 copy of the University of Georgia alumni magazine and, on page 34, I received a pleasant surprise: Danger Mouse, otherwise known as Brian Burton or one half of Gnarls Barkley, earned his undergraduate degree in music at UGA in 2000. Wikipedia confirms this.

The Grey Album was one of my favorite downloads of 2005, and I do enjoy Gnarls Barkley’s music a lot.

On Sunday, Boing Boing posted a link to Bad Copy, Good Copy, a Danish documentary about copyright law and the media. It features an interview with Danger Mouse, along with snippets of his music. The video can be viewed for free at the web site, or downloaded for free in XviD format via BitTorrent. It’s a fun hour of viewing pleasure.

From a joking friend:

Thanks to all my friends who sent me such important emails in 2003 and 2004! It’s so wonderful that you included me in your quest to inform! Because of all of you:

I stopped drinking Coca-Cola after I found out that it’s good for removing toilet stains.

I stopped going to the movies for fear of sitting on a needle infected with AIDS.

I smell awful, but thank goodness I stopped using deodorant because they cause cancer.

I don’t leave my car in any parking lot even though I sometimes have to walk about seven blocks, for fear that someone might drug me with a perfume sample and then try to rob me.

I also stopped answering the phone for fear that they will ask me to dial a stupid number and then I get a phone bill from hell with calls to Uganda, Singapore and Tokyo.

I stopped consuming several foods for fear that the estrogen they contain may turn me gay.

I also stopped drinking anything out of a can for fear that I will get sick from the rat feces and urine.

When I go to parties, I now don’t mix with anybody, for fear that someone will take my kidneys and leave me taking a nap in a bathtub full of ice.

I went bankrupt from bounced checks that I made, expecting the $15,000 that Microsoft and AOL were supposed to send me when I participated in their special e-mail program.

It’s weird, though, that my new free cell phone never arrived, and neither did the passes for my paid vacation to Disney. But I am positive that all this is because of the chain I broke or forgot to follow and I got a curse from hell.

If you don’t send this e-mail to at least 1200 people in the next ten seconds, a bird will crap on you today at 7:00 PM.

Hawai’i: Governor Linda Lingle is considering a mandate to add ethanol to gasoline in Hawai’i. Ethanol can be made from sugar cane, which would encourage agriculture in the state. The move wouldn’t change gas prices, but it would decrease profits for the oil industry. There is only one gasoline refinery in Hawai’i.

World: Scientist Bill McGuire claims that a volcanic eruption in the Canary Islands could spawn a killer giant tidal wave that would devastate the eastern USA, Western Africa, Spain, Portugal, and the Caribbean. No one is monitoring Cumbre Vieja, which last erupted in 1971. Sounds like a bad movie.