The  U.S. space shuttle Endeavor is about to launch after several days of delays and six holds or re-schedules.

After the Centre for Inquiry talk by PZ Myers on Hallowe’en night in Toronto, Larry Moran led some of the attenders, including PZ, through a short maze of U. of T. buildings and across the street to a pub, where we could continue talking.

There, astute shutterbugs caught Ken Ham asking Jesus for an autograph.

I have other pictures from that evening but most of them are marked “friends only” because I don’t know if people want to let their photos be shown. If you were there and want to see the pictures, just apply to become a friend; then you can tell me if you want your picture, if there is one, to be public.

Is anyone going to the CFI World Conference in Washington, DC?

Four northeastern states, notably New Hampshire, suffered an ice storm last Thursday. More than one million people are without electrical power.

For more information:

• See AccuWeather’s WeatherMatrix blog for a discussion of whether people weren’t givwn a strong enough warning. Most of the weather service map showed pink for Winter Storm Warning rather than purple for Ice Storm. And the Accuweather map echoed it, showing only a narrow band of freezing rain in the south. But look more closely:

NOAA issues a Winter Storm Warning “When a winter storm is producing or is forecast to produce heavy snow or significant ice accumulations. The criteria for this warning can vary from place to place.”

• The CIMSS Satellite Blog discusses the weather technicalities. I found this because I was looking for a map that would show the affected area.

A major ice storm impacted much of the Northeast US on 11 December – 12 December 2008 — many locations across that region experienced several hours of freezing rain leading to widespread ice accumulations of 0.5 to 1.0 inch, which brought down tree limbs and power lines (causing power outages for estimated 1 million customers).

Some opponents of California’s Proposition H8 in the U.S., which passed and thus took away the right of gays to marry the consenting adult of their choice, are organizing a protest called “Day without a gay.” They are asking gay people to take one day off work and demonstrate that they’d be missed. Naturally, some wit has named the phenomenon, “Calling in gay.”

That inevitably reminds me of the old joke, “I’ve used up my sick days so I’m calling in dead.”

Good luck to them.

The Times of India reports that a bag containing explosives was found among abandoned luggage at Mumbai’s main train station. Police said they were left over from last week’s attacks.

The bag was found when police officials were going through abandoned luggage, said senior police official Rakesh Maria….  Maria offered no further details about the explosives, but local television channels reported that the bombs had been defused…. It was not clear where they had been hidden for the last week….

Authorities reopened Chhatrapati Shivaji train station and declared it safe on Thursday morning, hours after the gunmen sprayed it with gunfire in one of their first attacks.