Happy New Year, world! May tolerance and understanding of others allow us to leverage our differences to make the most of 2014 and the challenges it holds!

Love Actually blows, actually. Much has been said as of late (see below) of the 2003 film Love Actually, as it assumes the status of "holiday classic." We most certainly dispute that assumption and furthermore do not think it is anything about love as it "actually" exists in the real world. "Love Cinematically" might have been an acceptable title (denigration to the cinema notwithstanding). The premise of Love Actually is no more than "if and only if a woman waits passively and exerts no control over the course of her romantic life, will she be matched with a charming, powerful man who will find, adore, and love her." It's regressive, chauvinistic, and anti-feminist, and saps one of the ownership they have over their destiny.  • http://jezebel.com/i-rewatched-love-actually-an...  • http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archiv...  • http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2013/12/14/2...  • http://moviemezzanine.com/what-the-love-actuall...  • http://thelead.blogs.cnn.com/2013/12/20/is-love...

Congratulations to everyone involved with P4A (Project for Awesome) the annual YouTube tradition in which individuals upload fundraising videos to raise awareness of their favorite charities. It's supported by ProjectForAwesome.com, which hosts a voting contest to determine the 10 best videos. The winners get to split the proceeds from donations collected by the site, which has already surpassed its fundraising goal by 200% with $750,000 and counting! This kind of grassroots activism is what makes the Internet great!

So Target disclosed that criminals somehow accessed credit/debit card information for as many as 40 million of its Black Friday retail customers. Alright, it's settled. We gotta go back to a cash-only society. But seriously, if you shopped in a brick-and-mortar Target store in between November 27 and December 1, double-check your transaction history. This is the the kind of thing that justifies having a positive brand image. The press coverage of it has been relatively light, but we wonder how such a breach would be reported if it were to happen to more divisive brands like Walmart.

For a couple days the awesome Instapaper app for iOS is free. This lets you easily save articles from the web for reading later on your mobile device. It's a super productivity enhancer for straphangers. Get it while it's hot!

The sky is falling!! Congress is actually gonna pass a budget without delay or chest-beating brinkmanship! And all it took was Boehner having a spine, and a couple experiments by the to prove the obvious. So kudos to Boehner's nascent spine, and a hearty, forceful pat on the back of the 113th Congress for meeting our minimum expectations. For once.

Big ups to Manhattan BP for smacking down CB3 for their outrageous, anti-democratic censoring of an LES resident group, the LES Dwellers. Given the history of fickle, Neanderthal thinking, it would not be surprising for CB3 to resist, which is why we can only hope that Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer is not afraid to back up his letter with muscle.

Lower East Siders, revolt! It's unconscionable that the chair of Community Board 3 has censored a community group (the LES Dwellers) for the horrible crime of Engaging Other Governmental Agencies. CB3 is losing relevance, and this act only reduces their credibility as well. What's most astounding is to imagine how CB3 must envision itself. They ultimately serve at the privilege of the community, not the other way around! We deserve better than this! We demand that Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer and District 1 Council Member Margaret Chin reel them in!

Shutdown plurality voting! - Government shuts down, due to - Ideological fundamentalism in Congress, due to - Ideological fundamentalists voted into Congress by the American people, due to - Dysfunctional, big money, two-party political system generating few election options, due to - Widespread use of simplistic, poorly-representative, winner-takes-all, Plurality Voting system based on single-mark ballots, due to - It being used when the country was founded and now being ingrained in our culture, due to - Single-mark ballots being easy to tabulate by hand. Yes, in 2013, after landing rovers on Mars, sequencing the human genome, and creating a machine than can beat humans on Jeopardy!, Americans still use a simplistic system based on single-mark ballots and plurality voting because historically they were easier to count by hand! Fortunately the Constitution (and local and state law) can be changed. ;) That means it's actually on us. Do we want to move to more evolved, robust systems, such as Preferential Voting (ranked voting) or Proportional Representation (wherever possible), to create a more representative, satisfactory, efficient government? Or do we want to keep our 'merican gladiator system that produces ideological meatheads who'd rather fight on camera than solve problems? More info: - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_transferable_vote NGO worth checking out: http://www.fairvote.org/