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"People say I am picky. Ok, sometimes I am. But somebody has to stand up for what is right and just. Maybe I am that person.
Please stop using the word force if you donât know what it is.
There. I said it. You can attack me now." -
"Mr. Wilkins promised that On Deadly Ground is just about the batshit-craziest bad movie in existence. He is not wrong. I have included an unprecedented number of clips so that you, dear reader, will know that this film actually exists, and that I didn't merely hallucinate it during a peyote-induced weeklong vision quest in the deserts of Arizona. Words really cannot do justice to the film's surreal insanity, especially hackneyed, clichéd words like "Words really cannot do justice to.""
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"Even for a native of Washington, D.C., the city that our new president recently described as in need of "flinty Chicago toughness" because of its pathetic response to the occasional snowflake, this reaction seemed excessive. So did the reaction of London's transportation network, which grounded most of the city's vast underground system and all 8,000 of its buses, leaving more than 6 million passengers stranded. So did the reactions of London schools (all canceled) and Londoners themselves. Walking down Piccadilly in the evening, I found no evidence that anyone had made use of anything resembling a snow shovel throughout the entire day. "
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"The point here is to make the case that blogging is good for your career. It's been good for me and it's been good for a lot of other people and I think it has potential for everyone."
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Exactly how much power is insignificant next to the power of the Force?
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The news reports about how Londoners are dealing (or not) with snow sound not vastly different from what I encountered when visiting Seattle during their December Snowpocalypse. I arrived on a Friday evening to find that the company with a monopoly on door-to-door shuttle service to/from the airport was only serving hotels on the I-5 corridor, and taxis were between scarce and unavailable. King County took a large fraction of their bus fleet out of service, because they rely on articulated buses that cannot handle snow, and many of the routes that still allegedly had service were modified to avoid hills as much as possible. Both SEA and PDX ran out of de-icing fluid, and there was no way to get more because the snow closed all highways across the Cascades. Some areas had gasoline shortages because tanker trucks could not safely deliver to those areas.
It's easy to criticize a city for shutting down in the face of trivial amounts of snow when you live in a place that considers such snowfalls routine. But because they are routine here, we have the equipment and manpower to dig out. Stockpiling equipment for a once-a-decade (or less frequent) weather event doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Washington, DC, sees snow often enough that they should handle it better than they do. Seattle itself rarely sees snow, but it happens often enough in the surrounding hills that there are people who know how to deal with it--they are the ones I saw driving around with tire chains on--or improvise solutions with what they have on hand (like the fellow my mom and I saw who was using a garden shovel to shovel snow). London doesn't even have the nearby hills that Seattle does, so I understand why it's a struggle for them.