An electric company spokesperson says a squirrel was responsible for an outage that took out power for nearly 2,000 Cupertino, California residents on Saturday.

When Hurricane "Superstorm" Sandy hit New York, a large part of Manhattan— the wealthiest place east of the Taj Mahal— was without power for weeks. At least it wasn't unfashionable. According to a new report, blackouts are becoming the new normal.

1.4 million people in the San Diego region are currently without power, and will remain to be so until Friday. The outage appears to have originated in Arizona, according to San Diego Gas and Electric, and extends across Southern California and into Baja. What happened? SDGE still doesn't know, saying only in a tweet that a weeklong heat wave may have overloaded the system, and that the lines "appeared to fail."

Here is some unequivocally good news: The AP reports that New York's power grid is holding up "...So Far." Direct quote! Plus, "electricity demand typically jumps between 5 and 6 o'clock." That's, let's see...now! Everything's fine...so far. [Pic via]

More than a few versions of the following e-mail have made their way to our inbox:

• Rip off those condoms, boys! The FDA proposes to sell the morning-after pill over the counter for women 18 and older; we encourage you to try Plan B just once, if only because the woman in its advertisement looks so damn serene. Inner peace comes from knowing you knocked that would-be zygote out of commission. [Plan B]
• Why would alleged perv Jeffrey Epstein donate $30 million to Harvard? Almost all of the university's students are of legal age. [Crimson]
• In the midst of all of Mel Gibson's anti-Semitic fun, Hollywood Jew-bashing Gregg Easterbrook is back on ESPN.com. Coincidence? Not when he's got advice from Jesus for Phil Mickelson. [ESPN]
• Haute Living, the bible of those who like to live haute, will launch a NYC spin-off version, to be found in "400 luxury buildings where the average price of an apartment is $4.2 million." Just what New York needed: rich fucks reading about their rich fucking lifestyle while lounging about their rich fucker apartment. [The Real Estate]
• And in other magazine news, introducing ShopSmart, Consumer Report's ghetto version of Lucky. [NYDN]
• Life & Style to get bloggy. [FishbowlNY]
• Poor Lower East Side. You've tried to stand tall throughout the climbing rent prices, overcrowded bars, and impossibly expensive boutique shopping. You even kept your cool when Starbucks set up shop. But now the line has been crossed: a gym, an actual area promoting fitness, is headed for Ludlow Street. A moment of silence, please. [Curbed]
• So with the biblical heat outside, how long until people start losing power? We're setting the over/under at 18 hours. [NYSun]

Northwest Queens, the severely power-damaged New York borough which became the subject of an intense legal and political battle that drew responses from the local representatives to Mayor Bloomberg to the Vatican, died today, after 8 days of attempting to repair a blackout on the order of a state court judge. Con Ed had restored power to almost all homes in the area as of last night, but after Astoria residents continued to experience sporadic power outages, the neighborhood's feeding tube was removed.

The payoff on this clip comes about thirty seconds in: As Mayor Bloomberg praises Con Ed chief Kevin Burke for, we don't know, not allowing Queens to be consumed by an apocalyptic fireball, the pols behind him visibly roll their eyes in disgust. We're surprised no one stuck two fingers up behind the mayor's tiny head. Quote of the day goes to Assemblyman Michael N. Gianaris, who said, "Someone should ask the mayor why the guy playing solitaire deserves to be fired but Kevin Burke, who denied hundreds of thousands of people electricity and lied to the people about it, deserves to stay in his job."

In a news conference this morning at City Hall, the mayor defended Kevin M. Burke, the president and chief executive of Con Ed...
"I think Kevin Burke deserves a thanks from this city," Mr. Bloomberg said. "He's worked as hard as he can every single day since then, as has everybody at Con Ed. And it's easy to go criticize but once this happened, Con Ed has been doing everything they can to bring it back. And I don't think that I could have gone in and done any better."

As powerless Queens alternately descends into Stone Age darkness or emerges to the withering gaze of the sun-god, them manholes continue to explode. Enjoy this WNBC morning news footage of a not-on-fire ConEd worker lethargically rolling across the street — until you see the flaming hellmouth he just barely escaped.

Today at Gawker, we choose to finally acknowledge the borough of Queens, which now enters the second week of an apocalyptic blackout that has even the oldest Greek grannies using AK-47s to get their rationed ice chips. So while you may have spent your Saturday night slumped over an overpriced Stella in the air-conditioned watering hole of your choice, the Astoria warriors were fighting the ConEd Hezbollah: