As many of you know, EGR HQ is located deep in the heart of the Yucatan peninsula -- 1000 feet below the as yet undiscovered -- and undiscoverable -- remains of an ancient Mayan pyramid. So don't bother mounting any expeditions.

Most of the time, however, when operations are... ah, let's just say, less sensitive, we work out of Boulder, Colorado. To further insulate ourselves from the not-so-idle curiosity of various world "intelligence" communities, our popserver and web hosting is located in NY City, on Panix. What can we say? We thought the name was congruent with our plans (very much still in effect) for world domination. In the last several days you may have noticed that this blog was unreachable. And, if you sent mail, that it was bouncing.

This temporary outage was the result of a certain experimental alternative power project we had underwritten some months ago in the upstate New York region, involving Very Large Scale Array Tesla coils, plus some offworld tech that looked highly promising from a cursory study of the schematics we managed to recover from Area 51 last year. Bringing the project online Thursday was quite a thrill, as it was a success surpassing everything we'd hoped to accomplish. The champagne and heroin were flowing liberally!

However, it seems that we'd rather underestimated the electromagnetic pulse (EMP) effect, which took out conventional power to some 81 million square miles of the northeastern United States and parts of Canada. Whoops. Actually, RB had warned the field team that this might happen, and as a precautionary measure had therefore shipped one of EGR's interociters to Panix earlier in the week. Using this as an infinitely uninterruptable power supply, they could at least keep the EGR site live even if the rest of the country got blacked out. The device was assembled in record time using nanotech utility fog coordinates transmitted, unbeknownst to Rupert Murdoch's notoriously dim IT staff, via B-Star-B uplink. As later investigation uncovered, however, the terabit decryption key for unlocking the initialization codes necessary to boot the sub-space shunt were still being sent via RB's 56k modem when the Eastern grid went down. As far-famed technology guru and incomparable ex-lover Esther Dyson likes to say: "Always make new mistakes." Well, this sure was a new one for us! Apologies to any of you who may have been inconvenienced.

Meanwhile, RB's first attempt at dating in over 200 years is meeting with mixed results. On the plus side, many women are apparently ecstatic at the prospect of meeting (and whatevering) him. On the minus side, some unethical individual seems to have posted RB's unlisted telephone number on the Internet. As a result, EGR has been forced to retain a sizable cadre of telephone operators to deal with a 19,000% increase in incoming message traffic. This has been necessary, despite the enormous expense, to keep our lines clear for the coordination of international terro... uh, that is, humanitarian aid projects.

Notwithstanding these efforts, some particularly persistent applicants have managed to locate the whereabouts of this new emergency call center in Budapest, and several (as pictured above in a still taken from our video surveillance system) have attempted to bribe these poor women -- who, by the way, speak only Rhaeto-Romance -- to divulge RB's location in the Yucatan, from where, for what we hope will be obvious reasons, we are blogging this tonight.

On a rather more positive note -- at least it seemed so at first -- RB did take a particular shine to one of the Yahoo Personals respondents. To such a degree, in fact, that he ill-advisedly flew her to HQ in the Lear. All, of course, without a by your leave, and without posting a flight plan. How utterly like him. When the swat team we scrambled to find him -- kidnapping was initially suspected -- did in fact find locate him some 72 hours later, he told them not to worry, as he had, and we quote, "a good feeling about this one."

Evidently, however, the young woman in question has had second (not to mention third, fourth and fifth) thoughts about the advantages of becoming RB's exclusive Love Slave, as he insists upon calling her. Now it appears her memory will have to be erased -- he didn't even bother to blindfold her on the inbound flight path -- but it turns out that none of the neuralyzers are working at the moement, and the Japanese tech support team is on vacation this month in Tierra del Fuego. So she may be with us for an extended stay. Oh well. Just another week at the ranch.