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Via Alabama Weather Blog, some more amazing storm pictures.

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On The Guardian’s homepage, you can hide their entire Royal Wedding section by clicking on “Republicans click here.” When you do this, the text changes to “Royalists click here,” which, of course, re-opens the Royal Wedding section. Ha!

Also, they have a special blog post called Not the royal wedding (subtitle: “Find out what else happened around the world on Friday in our sanctuary from all things William and Kate”). The blog promises to “focus on everything else that happens in the world today,” and asks readers: “Please send in any news stories, however minute. This might be the only time the Guardian reports on a cat getting stuck up a tree, or a fortysomething man in Cumbria experiencing a shuddering epiphany after watching American Beauty for the first time last night.”

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The Atlantic has a great collection of photos from the the tornadoes and other severe weather around the country.

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The final launch of Space Shuttle Endeavour has been postponed due to a technical problem. Bummer. President Obama and Gabby Giffords, whose husband is commanding the mission, were to watch the launch live.

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“Darvaz: The Door to Hell.” A natural gas fire that’s been burning since 1971. Fascinating.

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We may have the dot.com bubble of 1995 to 2000 [to thank] for making [the rise of social media] possible. The Internet could not become an effective large scale global communication system for personal and business use without exponential increases in speed and bandwidth capacity from the dial-up era. Accomplishing that would require multiple transatlantic fiber optic cables. In the late 1980s this became technologically feasible but still seemed too expensive to be financially feasible. However, aggressive telecommunications companies such as Worldcom achieved unrealistic market capitalization during the bubble, giving them unimagined capital. So many companies used that capital to lay fiber optic cable that they created not merely a robust telecommunications system but a system with so much excess capacity that transmission costs approached zero. The dot.com bubble left financial wreckage to be sure, but also bequeathed to the twentieth-first century the technological infrastructure that has made our wired society possible.

Philip B. Korb, Ballard Spahr LLP

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CNN’s top stories this morning. Sigh.