Mr. Ayme’s smile

I haven’t written anything here about the Writers Guild strike. That’s odd, since I’ve been reading about it obsessively, but I wasn’t sure I had anything unique to add to the conversation.

I suppose I could offer this paraphrase of James 5:4:

Look! The [residuals] you failed to pay the workmen who [provided the scripts for your downloadable and streaming online content] are crying out against you. The cries of the [screenwriters] have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty.

That’s actually a pretty good description of the AMPTP’s untenable position. And the next verse from James doesn’t need any paraphrasing to serve as a description of the Association of Motion Picture and Television Producers:

You have lived on earth in luxury and self-indulgence. You have fattened yourself in the day of slaughter.

But since I have nothing much in particular to add to the conversation, I’ll just do what we bloggers do best in such situations — toss out a bunch of links:

• The United Hollywood blog is a timely and entertaining source for up-to-the-minute strike news.

• Miss The Daily Show? Here’s the strike version.

• Miss The Colbert Report? Here’s the strike version.

• Miss The Office? (Well, not yet obviously, since NBC hasn’t yet run out of original episodes so the strike hasn’t yet forced the show into reruns, but you get the idea.) Here’s the strike version.

• Ask a Ninja on the writers strike (via John Rogers — a card-carrying member of the Writers Guild Dragon Claw Fire Horde who explains the strike in one word: “Tiger.”)

• Joss Whedon 1 and Joss Whedon 2 (both via Patrick)

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Here’s a lovely profile of Hal Taussig, one of my neighbors here in Everybody’s Hometown.

Taussig founded the Untours travel company. Since 1999, the company has made more than $5 million, and Taussig has given all of it away through his Untours Foundation.

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“Just a glance, down here on Magic Street“

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Dave Neiwert links to this lovely and fascinating (if dismayingly uncredited) photo essay, One Week’s Worth of Food Around Our Planet.

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Carl O. sent this link ages ago and it’s about time I shared it with the rest of the class — “Motorhead Messiah“:

Johnathan Goodwin can get 100 mpg out of a Lincoln Continental, cut emissions by 80 percent, and double the horsepower. …

Goodwin’s experiments point to a radically cleaner and cheaper future for the American car. The numbers are simple: With a $5,000 bolt-on kit he co-engineered — the poor man’s version of a Goodwin conversion — he can immediately transform any diesel vehicle to burn 50 percent less fuel and produce 80 percent fewer emissions. On a full-size gas-guzzler, he figures the kit earns its money back in about a year — or, on a regular car, two — while hitting an emissions target from the outset that’s more stringent than any regulation we’re likely to see in our lifetime. …

Goodwin is doing precisely what the big American automakers have always insisted is impossible. They have long argued that fuel-efficient and alternative-fuel cars are a hard sell because they’re too cramped and meek for our market. They’ve lobbied aggressively against raising fuel-efficiency and emissions standards, insisting that either would doom the domestic industry. …

Goodwin’s work proves that a counterattack is possible, and maybe easier than many of us imagined. If the dream is a big, badass ride that’s also clean, well, he’s there already. As he points out, his conversions consist almost entirely of taking stock GM parts and snapping them together in clever new ways. “They could do all this stuff if they wanted to,” he tells me, slapping on a visor and hunching over an arc welder.

Here’s Goodwin’s company, SAE Energy.