The doll we are calling "Snow Baby" had a quiet day. After some time drying on the heating vent, he or she was moved to the coffee table. Tomorrow is another snow holiday - our street has yet to be plowed - and more snow is expected during the day.

If lusting her Fat Back is wrong, I don't want to be 'Rite' [NSFW]

This kick ass, "Oh yeah, how about I actually tell people what's going on", email just arrived in my inbox. THANK YOU, NATALIA. See below.

Dear Agent Ska,

I want to thank all of you for your patience as the City tries to unbury itself from Friday and Saturday's snow storm. After meeting with the Mayor today and several key administration officials, I have some information for you on why the clean-up has been slow moving and what next steps the City is taking to prepare for tomorrow's storm.

First, while it is evident that the City needs to change its emergency management system given the slow response over the last four days, our public works employees have been working 12 hour shifts, plowing more than 1,000 miles of City streets. I know how frustrating this storm has been, I was without power and my car is still banked in snow. But the men and woman who are working on the ground have been working very long and very hard hours to try to get the City up and running again and I applaud their efforts.

Tomorrow starting at 10:00 AM, a winter storm warning will go into effect for the entire region and stay in effect until 7:00 PM Wednesday evening. We are expected to receive at least 6 to 10 inches of additional snow in that time. As of this e-mail the Pittsburgh Public Schools, as well as all major colleges and universities are closed tomorrow at the request of the City's Public Safety Director.

Starting this morning, all City plows were rerouted off of the City's main roads and on to neighborhood streets (so-called "secondary" and "tertiary"streets). The Department of Public Works has stated that they will be able to plow most neighborhood streets by the time snow starts falling again tomorrow.

Once the storm starts tomorrow, plows will be re-routed again to emergency roads and primary neighborhood roads. Once those roads are all clear, they will move back into the neighborhoods.

When the second storm starts tomorrow, there are some key safety measures that will help the City plow the roads and minimize the number of emergency calls it is receiving:

• Try to stay off the roads until they are plowed. One of the reasons plows have had a hard time getting into the neighborhoods is the number of vehicles that got stuck in the road Friday night and blocked a plow or emergency vehicle. It helps everyone to stay home when it snows.
• Try not to walk in the roads. While often times it is easier to walk on a driven-over or plowed street, it is not safe. If it is possible, please try to walk on sidewalks.
• Try not to shovel additional snow into the street and try not to block any fire hydrants. Try to shovel it into your yard, when it goes into the street it can slow the plows down even more.
• Call 911 for emergencies, and 311 for service requests. If you are not sure if your call is an emergency, call 911 anyway, they will be able to route your call. For your information, garbage pick-up and recycling have been suspended until further notice.
• The National Guard will be able to reach you. The National Guard responded to over 60 EMS calls last night, most of them for non-emergency medical needs. If you have a medical emergency, we will be able to reach you either with our EMS teams or with the National Guard.
• Keep fire hydrants free of snow. When you are shoveling your walk, it would help emergency crews if you were also able to shovel some space around any fire hydrants that are near your house.
• And last, please check on your neighbors, especially senior citizens. Being a good neighbor is what Pittsburgh is all about, so while you are outside, check on your neighbors to make sure they are ok.

Please continue to submit your 311 requests online through my office, we have passed on all of your comments and concerns, often times directly to the relevant department and bureau heads, and we are working as hard as can to make sure your streets are plowed sooner rather than later.

Best,
Natalia Rudiak
Pittsburgh City Councilwoman
District 4
(412) 255-2131

Yo what are they putting in that water down in the Dominican Republic

Tutto vero, dovrei scrivervi la ricetta di una delle zuppe preparate. Oppure del casino della Toyota in America (ma penso se ne sia parlato anche in Italia) che fortunatamente ha per ora lasciato fuori la mia Prius.Ma non faro' nulla di tutto cio'. La notizia di questi giorni e' la nevicata del decennio, se non del ventennio a Pittsburgh.Ma cominciamo dal principio e cioe' lo scorso Giovedi'.

It was a pretty lackluster episode.  I was actually nodding off during parts of it.  Then all of a sudden, Renee is stabbing the shit out of Vlad, Jack tries to grab her, but she buries the knife in his gut.  Vlad's main henchman comes in and Jack pulls the knife out and throws it across the room sticking the guy in the throat.

So far Jack has killed guys with an ax and a throwing knife.  This season would be complete if he starts using a chainsaw.  Or a giant broadsword. 

That being said, the rest of the subplots suck.  I look forward to seeing Jack get tortured.  Although, how many times have we seen him get the torture treatment?  He never breaks.  Christ, are they going to see the scars from his Chinese torture sessions?  I love in Joe Abercrombie's books, when Glokta is asked if he talked when he was tortured "of course I did.  I told them everything I knew, then I started making up stuff."  I may have paraphrased.

As Scotus points out over at DCUniverse, the part where Kevin gets the numbers backwards is kind of funny.  Mainly because Jack never forgets minute details.  Chloe will be like "Jack the serial number you need is 45HRJ3242354524253452345265657356524355768879525435" and Jack would rattle it off like three episodes later. 

posted by gyma When you look at this picture, what do you see? Some will automatically see ME, others will see YOU. It simply depends on where you focus. This reminds me of the way evangelicals frame their religion. From...

Washington County Public Safety Director Jeff Yates watches a National Weather Service webinar today predicting the Son of Stormageddon to arrive Tuesday as the region digs out from a snowstorm disaster.

By Scott Beveridge

WASHINGTON, Pa. – The webinar today with emergency management folks from the tri-state area and the National Weather Service in Pittsburgh left everyone with a knot in their stomachs.

Another heavy snowstorm is approaching, one with the potential to cause a disaster worse than the one that followed “Stormageddon” on Friday and Saturday and left thousands of houses without heat and electricity.

The trees and many utility wires are still wrapped in thick ice and snow, and this new storm expected at 10 a.m. tomorrow will surely cause more, possibly worse destruction, Washington County Public Safety Director Jeff Yates said this afternoon.

“I can’t even fathom where we are going with this,” Yates told the Observer-Reporter newspaper this morning.

Yates, who has had little sleep since Friday, actually buried his face in his hands at the news. I wanted to drop an F-bomb. An emergency management official chimed in and said, "That's a big ass storm."

“Buckle up,” Weather Service Meteorologist Rich Kane said during his webinar presentation when he predicted 9 to 13 inches by Saturday “double barrel” storms. Within the hour, his forecast changed to the possibility of 10 to 14 inches of snow.

We decided we needed to get out of the house today, and after sliding down the street when I tried to turn the car around in our spot, quickly changed our minds.  We needed some groceries though, so we decided that I would go out on my own, fill up the car and get some [...]

School may be cancelled, buildings and offices may be closed, but the
Mt. Lebanon School Board stuck to their date tonight and hosted a monthly architect's update as well as their monthly discussion meeting.

I walked to school from our new house by the Library and it took a bit longer than I budgeted with all the snow on sidewalks and roads.

Miss the meeting? Catch it on Channel 19 tomorrow or Thursday!

so i've been looking around for team usa t-shirts that have the player name/number on back. shop.nhl.com only has 3 team usa player t shirts and none are malone or orpik. color me annoyed. and is malkin really wearing #11 in the olympics?

I had decided not to blog about The Great Snowpocalypse of 2010 because I figured the Intertubes was probably already filled with people's sob stories of how much snow they received and how much trauma it inflicted upon them. Monday, however, brought some things that were a bit unique to me and my typical daily commute so I figured, hell, why not jump on the bandwagon.

To recap the weekend, two feet of snow overnight Friday. Five hours shoveling on Saturday. Another two and a half hours of shoveling on Sunday. Stiff and sore.

But Monday morning is where it deviates from what everyone else was doing. On a normal cold, snowy morning, I would drive to the Swinburne Street lot and ride my bike the rest of the way in. I was willing to bet that the trail hadn't been plowed so I left early so that I would then walk the three miles into town.

And I was wrong. Even though the parking lot was covered, it looked like a plow had been through sometime during the day on Saturday because there were even some places where the plow had exposed asphalt and the sun had done a little work. There was no place to park in the lot so I parked in the UPMC lot next door. (they removed the gates so there no security access anymore.)

The plow didn't get far. About midway between the Swinburne lot and the Hot Metal Bridge there was a tree down, and the plow turned around. Beyond that, there was a single track through the snow that looked like someone had a personal plow two feet wide. It was a bit strange and didn't at all look like someone had just walked through and tramped it down even though that is exactly how it came to pass..

There was another track just like it coming across the Hot Metal Bridge and continuing to Bates Street. I suppose this is a very heavily trafficked route because, beyond that towards town, it was clearly less traveled. There were also some more trees hanging down onto the trail.

On either side of the Birmingham Bridge area and the Parkway East elevated highway there were more trees down bracketing another attempt to plow the trail.

In today's badly-written article about the death of indie film, Flavorwire's Judy Berman explains why indie film can't flourish like indie music does.

Never mind that the "death of indie film" article is an article that practically writes itself or that most indie bands aren't exactly swimming in cash, Berman's chief problems stem from a couple of things:

1. Her definition of indie isn't exactly indie. When your article's primary example of just how bad things are is a film with a budget of $20M (the highest budget eligible for an Indie Spirit Award), then you aren't talking about indie film. You're talking about a small studio film that just doesn't happen to have a studio. The ability (or inability) of a $20M film to get made means very little in the indie film world.
2. She asks, when was the last time you saw someone in a Wendy and Lucy shirt? As if all films are able to sell is a DVD. The thing is, most indies will sell you more than that. Some of them a lot more. Ink, for example, will sell you a DVD, a Blu-Ray DVD, a t-shirt, a poster, and a soundtrack. Most bands won't sell you that much.
3. "Hell, O.C. and Gossip Girl creator Josh Schwartz has probably broken more indie musicians to the mainstream in the past 10 years than your average major-label A&R dude." But you know who also discovers bands? Yeah, indie filmmakers.
4. Hipsters. Indie bands are successful because of hipsters. Yay stereotypes!

Yes, Berman is right in the music has built-in advantages over film. Any idiot knows that. It's like saying it's easier to find things to do in the summer than winter. What she doesn't do is present any ways in which film can close the gap. There are no solutions, only problems. And the problems aren't all that well thought out. Some of them are just wrong.

I'm not exactly recanting my previous posts (still no snow plows). But I'm sitting in a peaceful house, snug and warm, with my sister and my daughter. We have food and heat and love. Danna is reading to Laurel before we put her to bed. Life has changed a lot in our house since the last time Danna was here, and it's so fun to show her how and have her be a part of it. So, let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.

Rafe (GALEN GERING) making out with a girl on today's episode of NBC's "Days of Our Lives."

Here are some posts from last week's Greenpage that might be worth your time:

The Windy City is blowing Toronto away

The Globe and Mail: "The Windy City is having another season to make other theatre cities envious.
By the time the Tony Awards roll around in June, a record number of Chicago productions and plays will have gusted over to New York."

Posted by David at 2/07/2010 07:36:00 PM

'War of the Worlds' plans U.S. invasion

Variety: "The aliens are COMING! THE aliens are coming!

full article | source | read more