Messing with the Jesus Nut:

"Don't mess with the Jesus nut" (or some less polite variation) is a Vietnem-era admonition that has nothing to do with religious zeal. The Jesus nut is the assembly that attaches the main rotor to the body of a helicopter. If it fails, you (so to speak) go to Jesus. I am reminded of it often as I try to do a website-wide template update, which, like 9-11, changes everything. So far I have managed to lop off the bottom of nearly every page at ncpr.org, break the page that lets you browse the news archives one month at a time, double-bagged the search page inside its navigation wrapper, and probably committed other crimes against robotery that won't come to light for months. This comes on the heels of erasing more than a thousand community calendar items last week and yesterday's inadvertent spamming of the whole Listening Post mailing list with the daily headline email. If this place hadn't been built out of electrons, I wo uld have burned it to the ground. But if you happen to hear a couple of minutes of dead air this week during Talk of the Nation, it is not Radio Bob messing with the Jesus nut--it is sun-transit outages--caused when the NPR satellite is briefly between the sun and our receiver. Sort of like driving west on Rt. 11 at sunset.