[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here.]

Greetings west coasters, and midwesterners from the year 2011.  Its really cool.  We have rocket cars, and video phones. And the Iphone now plays flash video and is on Verizon.

And it turns out, Star Trek is actually a documentary.

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Joking aside, happy new year.

[Posted and authored by Aaron Worthing.]

Best wishes to the folks here. Happy New Year to friends and family.

[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here.]

First, let’s start with some video of the great job they are doing, plowing the streets (if it doesn’t play here, go here).

Yes, clearly the problem they had was not enough workers.  /sarcasm

Anyway, the latest from the New York Post, which is doing heroic work, here is twofold.

First, we find out that there already is an investigation into the cause of the slow snow removal:

The city’s Department of Investigation admitted it began a probe earlier this week after hearing rumblings of a coordinated job action.

Which really adds a lot of credibility to the allegations, given that this constitutes collaboration.

The second revelation is that it was apparently targeted at the neighborhoods of the wealthy and powerful, on the theory that then they would scream to city hall and get the budget for the Sanitation Department increased.

(more…)

[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here.]

Remember those very long, harsh, funny, insightful critiques of Star Wars Episode I and II?  Well, the guy is back to complete his trilogy.

Big language and content warning.  I mean at one point the man pretends to have sex with an animal.  It’s funny, but you don’t want to have to explain what the hell is happening to the kiddies.

It’s in three parts:

I think some of what he said is not actually valid.  But a lot is.  But to critique the critiquer, for instance, he didn’t seem to understand that while the original storm troopers were all clones, the ones in the original trilogy (IV-VI) were by then regular people.  And I think on some level the relative peace that Coruscant enjoyed during all of this was kind of the point, too.  None of this felt real to the people so what was a little endless war by people who were grown in vats and had no families that cared for them?  And I think in general there is less to criticize here, because it is a better movie.  It’s not as good as the originals, but some of it, imho was actually pretty good.  Still the majority of his criticism hits home, especially the fact that Vader was too much the focus of the movie.

Hat tip: Red letter media.

[Posted and authored by Aaron Worthing.]