solar flares = worse than mercury retrograde

also, new orleans = technological dead zone.

so first, there was no way to get online at the guest house we stayed at the first couple days, then the coffee shop across that street had a sign that said "our internet is being a jerk today, and we are trying to fix it, getting the new modem up and running by tomorrow." but i still went there cuz the guys were really nice, one of which was really cute (i started calling him my boyfriend for the rest of our stay). then there were were no coffee shops to speak of in the french quarter, and the place we stayed for the rest of the weekend wasn't connected either.

but the real kicker was that the the solar flares caused my phone to go haywire for the two to three days after the 17th. and i mean like totally freaked the eff out. as in, it couldn't stop acting like all its buttons were being pushed at all times. it would scroll thru menus and try to make odd functions happen, it would continue doing this while i was trying to make it stop or trying to do something else and it kept trying to do weird shit to my contacts. it ended up deleting all my texts in the inbox, sent and draft folders (hopefully it didn't randomly call or delete anyone) it would continually type *741W over and over, even when i was trying to call or text someone. it seriously made no sense. i watched it scroll thru my contacts list almost 3 times really rapidly before i could get it to stop. it would run down my battery in a few hours but would still go crazy no matter how many times i turned it off and on again. it was driving me crazy. watching a phone go insane is really distracting and kinda stressful. i would try to make it stop freaking out to save the battery, given that my friends and i kept splitting up and wanting to get back together. super super annoying. and then i woke up on sunday morning and it had stopped. just like that. (and the weirdness of that also drove me a little crazy)
oh, and also, there was this period of time on saturday night during the parade (the very first parade of the mardi gras season, the most raunchy one of the lot--krewe de vieux) when no one in the french quarter could get their phones to work. i heard even the atms were not functioning correctly. now, presumably this was because there were so many people in the area that the cell towers just couldn't handle that much stress on the system. but that seems a little far fetched to me, i mean, it was only the beginning of mardi gras, there were so many less people there than there will be later this month. i think the much more plausible reason is that the solar flares were totally just messing with everyone's phones for fun. i mean, that's gotta be the answer, right?
cuz it wasn't just phones. janet bought a new memory card for her camera, and it kept creating errors in all the pictures she was trying to take all weekend. (until sunday morning, might i add) it really just said there were card reading errors and that the files were corrupted. made no freaking sense, just would mess up randomly. and not immediately after taking the picture, but later, after you had turned off the camera and turned it on again. then they were totally screwed up and you couldn't see them anymore. and it didn't have anything to do with the formatting of the card cuz kenny even tried that. i think he even tried taking out the batteries and putting them back in. it was just ridiculous.
my only explanation for why every bit of internet and phone and electronic mayhem occurred was because the sun had decided to belch magnetic/ionized/highly energetic particles at our magnetosphere. (see wikipedia article) this is the real truth. or at least its my truth.