Kevin Drum at Mother Jones puts the shutdown in 10 sentences:
3. Democrats in the Senate have been begging the House to negotiate over the budget for the past six months, but Republicans have refused.
4. That's because Republicans wanted to wait until they had either a government shutdown or a debt ceiling breach as leverage, something they've been very clear about all along.
He sums up: "This whole dispute is about the Republican Party fighting to make sure the working poor don't have access to affordable health care."
In other bad news about numeric things, Monday was the official start of Anno Catuli 05, 68, 105. Someday...and that day may never come...it'll be AC 0, 0, 0. Someday.