When Will US Shut Down End?

As night fell over the Capitol on Monday, Senator Majority Leader Harry Reid struck a tone of optimism.

Talks with his Republican counterpart, Mitch McConnell, to end the partial government shutdown and avoid a U.S. default had made tremendous progress, he said.

"Perhaps," he added, "tomorrow will be a bright day."

That, indeed, is the hope among investors, world leaders and regular Americans weary of the government stalemate.

Financial markets that began the day Monday with falling stocks ended higher at day's end, with Wall Street heartened by news of a possible deal.

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The negotiations are also

being closely watched by other nations, which would also feel the impact of a U.S. default.

John Cunliffe, who will become the deputy governor of the Bank of England, told British lawmakers over the weekend that banks should begin planning for contingencies.

Meeting postponed

As Reid and McConnell negotiated Monday, the White House announced that it was postponing a meeting between President Barack Obama and congressional leaders.

Most political experts took that to be a good sign -- that Obama was stepping back as the two leaders made good progress on an agreement.

Any agreement that Reid and McConnell reach will likely pass muster in the Senate. But the big question is whether the Republican-dominated House will play ball.

Mindful that the Thursday debt deadline is days away, House Republican leaders are considering all their options, said a GOP leadership aide, speaking on the condition of anonymity. There are however seven crazy side effects you should know about the shut down.  You know about the obvious impacts of the government shutdown: federal workers idled, offices closed, funding disrupted for all sorts of activities.

But some of the impacts are less obvious, more outrageous, or a little bit of both.

Here's a sampling of some of the spinoff effects of the shutdown showdown in Washington:

In the digital equivalent of throwing a sheet over unused furniture, many federal agencies have replaced their websites and all the information on them with static pages announcing the government shutdown.

Whether a website will be up or not, however, is something of a guessing game.

The National Parks Service site is down. It sends visitors to the Department of Interior's website, which is up but not being updated.

The Department of Justice website is up, but the website for its subordinate agency, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, greets visitors with a stark white page reading, "Due to the lapse in federal funding, this Office of Justice Programs (OJP) website is unavailable."

That you can still reach the websites mean the computers that serve the data are still up and running, and the government is either paying a private company to operate them or they're using taxpayer-funded power to continue running.

But it doesn't matter if running the sites with big "closed" sign draped across the front costs the same or even more than letting them run, the White House said in a September 17 memo to federal employees.

"The determination of which services continue during an appropriations lapse is not affected by whether the costs of shutdown exceed the costs of maintaining services," according to the memo.

Icing Antarctic research

While NASA has the okay to keep supporting U.S. astronauts at the International Space Station, the same apparently isn't true of scientists at what may be the United States' next most desolate outpost: Antarctica.

The National Science Foundation said Wednesday that it would run out of money to keep the U.S. Antarctic Program going by October 14.

So it's putting the program into "caretaker status," leaving research stations and other facilities staffed with only the bare number of people necessary to "ensure human safety and preserve government property," the agency said.

That means many of the scientists who would be heading to the program's Antarctic research stations to work over the Southern Hemisphere's summer, which begins in December and runs February, are in limbo.

The agency says it will try to restart the research program once funding resumes, but says that it could be tough once seasonal workers are let go and the seasonal window to do some of the work has passed.

Emptiest catch

The shutdown also could make its way to your seafood dinner plate.

Without federal employees to set rules and quotas for the fishing season, crab fleets in Alaska are in limbo -- unsure whether they'll be able to head out in pursuit of lucrative crab that bring in millions of dollars each season.

A delay of even a few days could be costly, Rep. Suzan DelBene, D-Washington, said in a House speech last week. Her district includes the home port for some of the fleets that fish for Bering Sea crab.

"A delay could mean they'll miss out exporting to the all-important Asian holiday market when demand is at its highest and most lucrative," she said.

That could cost the industry millions, dealing it what she called a "crippling blow."

One fishing captain explained that the delay threatens what they call the "Super Bowl of crab fishing."

"We think of a lot of other things besides the government affecting our fishing -- weather, boats, crew," said Capt. Moore Dye of the fishing vessel Western Mariner. "This has really caught us off guard." 

Hmmm.. this is really funny