Paying good money to see Jar-Jar was worth it

Nineteen lovely degrees: we're saved. Worst is over. Now we need snow. Or is it too cold to snow? Is that possible? This site says: "One phrase that is heard from time to time is that, "it is too cold to snow today". In actuality, earth's troposphere is not too cold to snow but rather it is "too dynamically stable to snow" So say that instead, and people will nod: yes, you're right.

MONEY WELL SPENT I saw all three Star Wars prequels in the theater. Hated the first, really liked 5/8ths of the second, hated the third. I bought them all on DVD just to make sure my reactions were solid; they were. You can say it was all a waste of money on an infantile half-baked poorly-written story directed by someone with no grasp of human speech, and yes: that's so. But it turns out that all the money we spent on Star Wars prequels was worth it, because they greenlighted the sequels - and J.J. Abrams will direct. It's a done deal says Deadline Hollywood. This is good. If we hadn't shelled out for the prequels en masse, they wouldn't have gone forward. Fear leads to anger, anger leads to suffering,- and suffering leads to sequels!

Before you laugh at the entire idea of guys in spaceships flying around shooting lasers: well. Our fleet should be fully operational by 2014.

DUDE ABIDES One man has the answer to the sinking fortunes of Dell Computer. You may not find this all that surprising:

his career was derailed when he was arrested for buying weed - a sting the cops called OPERATION CONDOR! This tarnished the brand, somehow - as if the Dell Dude wasn't a full-size serving of baked Spicoli in the first place.

Click here if you dare for a picture of the Dell Dude now. Terrifying eyebrows.

BLOCKBUSTED Remember Blockbuster? They've got a great new strategy lined up and rarin' to go:

There was another chain of video stores in our neighborhood; closed a few years ago. Hollywood. I have fond memories of it, party because it had big photographs of Minneapolis theaters - Radio City (the old Minnesota), the Gopher, the Boulevard Twins. They sold candy and games and books, and usually had enough DVDs so you wouldn't suffer something future generations will never know: you cannot watch that movie because omeone else is using it right now.

But mostly I remember the place for a bygone ritual parents of the future will never know: going to the video store with your kids on Friday. You stocked up o movies for the weekend, and the kids scampered up and down the Tot Section aisle, investigating and discarding all the obscure stuff before settling on something they'd seen six times already. My daughter loved to go to the video store. Something for her. That's never coming back.

Sitting together on the sofa scrolling through the Netflix listings isn't the same.

SECRETS OF ANIMATION Did you ever see smoke coming out of Dale's cigarette on King of the Hill? No. That's because of Rule #29.

The entire list of do's and don'ts for KOTH animators is here. These are the things the audience never notices or thinks about - because someone else already did. (via cartoonbrew.)

I wonder what will happen when someone in college asks Twitter to take down a nasty tweet because it violated a campus speech code. On the other hand, shiny new Twitter toy!

Sore of like that? Sort of like that. The author doesn't seem to like it much, complaining that Twitter is getting noisier. Meaning, I guess, there may be ads. Perhaps I'm just hungry and impatient - it is lunchtime, after all - but the entire article seems incoherent. He's worried that Twitter will turn into something else. Meh. Instead of a link to a gif, it's in the tweet, if you hit EXPAND. So? This ruins everything, I guess.

For some reason, this is a threat to the Zuckerplex:

There are lots of "instagram of video" apos, and I've tried and discarded them all. Another feed to check, another thing to like or favorite, another set of follower counts, separate from all the other stuff - tumblr, Facebook, Google+, Instagram. It's great if you're 14 and your friends are on the same service and you're passing stuff back and forth; otherwise no. Putting this stuff into twitter, however, integrates it with your existing networks, and that's good.