Barkerburgh

To my own surprise, I am very moved by the voter turnout in Iraq. I was prepared to hear that they had all been intimidated by the insurgents and had stayed home, or that the insurgents had mounted a far-reaching and deadly campaign across the entire country and slain hundreds or even thousands, because face it, these guys are a) nuts, and 2) the closest thing to real human Hitler-style evil that’s abroad in the world right now.

But the voters showed up, the terrorists tried to kill some voters, succeeded a few times, but in one case, reported second-hand by Christiane Amanpour on CNN, a stolen ambulance full of grenade-tossing terrorists was swarmed by voters and the bad guys held for the cops. Cool. Iraq on!

Humans are not perfectable as they are, and human institutions aren’t either, no matter what the airy-fairies say. The fact that we’ve got this far in the West impresses the hell out of me, given how we all started, and how badly we’ve done elsewhere, and given all the experiments in human governance that have gone before.

It may be that in a memetic sense, democracy is virulent and contagious.

Nothing’s perfect, and hope now doesn’t in any way foretell or guarantee something good or better in the future, but hope for the future is all we’ve got, for anything, or about anything. And for people too, individuals, populations and species.

It’s always a fight though.

‘Here’ is often better than ‘there’, because we know ‘here’, even if we don’t like it, even if ‘there’ would be better. ‘Us’ is often safer than ‘them’, because we know ‘us’, even if we wouldn’t trust most of ‘us’ to babysit our kids, even if ‘them’ are nicer people. ‘This’ is better than ‘that’ because we already know ‘this’ and ‘that’ is too hard, although with way more promise.

More, it’s nature versus nurture, gene pool versus meme pool, accidentally sapient apes versus the better angels of our nature, Earth versus the Flying Saucers.

Okay, that last one refers to the Earth we know, our own ways and ideas, in a survival battle with our fears and dreams for the future, an undiscovered country, where we will always end up living, even though we never get there.

Amn’t I clever.

Thanks to a TV listing for a Frenchified version of “Grumpier Old Men”, and Google’s translation page, I now know that the French word for ‘grumpy’ is ‘grincheux’.

I suppose it’s redundant to add ‘hmm….’.

I like the Daily Show. It’s usually on Comedy (cable) at 11:00pm and CFTO (broadcast) at 12:00. I usually aim to watch at least the opening “news” on CFTO before I go to bed. If I can stay awake for the pieces and the interview, then bonus.

I sometimes wonder if the pieces are real. That is to say, are the interviewees real people with real things/issues/museums. Like that guy who didn’t like Bill Clinton and was planning to open a museum dedicated to his foibles, faux pas, and finaglin’.

Sometimes the topics are so silly, or odd, or dumb, and the questions so outrageous, that I think it must really be a setup. On us. The pieces are really well edited, and sometimes it looks like the wacky questions have been edited in later, with the interviewee’s reaction from another question used. I know that’s what I’d do. Kind of like when Weird Al took over Much Music.

I always mean to look those stories up and always forget. But not this time.

Last week I saw an item about some bronze statues of Peanuts characters the city fathers put up in St. Paul’s Rice Park, which already has a statue of Minnesotan famous son F. Scott Fitzgerald.

These little old ladies called the Ross Group actually objected to the placing of the statues in the park because of the city’s and the park’s association with F. Scott, claiming that the statues were trivial of themselves and trivialized the literary association.

Wha-???

I thought to myself “Now this has to be made up. In this day and age, what group of bluehairs is gonna actually think something like that, never mind make it public?”

The Ross Group, apparently. The story is real and the little old bluehair who defended the group’s position in the piece was named Ruby Hunt. Now, I don’t know about your people, but where I come from, ‘Ruby Hunt’ is pretty much what all little old bluehairs are called, not necessarily from birth, but eventually. They go to church (Anglicans or Presbyterians) and harumph pointedly when walking past video game parlours. Swear to God. (And there are no porn shoppes or strip-joints where Ruby Hunt lives, you can be sure of that.)

Reaction by the sensible, kind-hearted and did I say sensible is what you might expect. And this.

Strong evidence that the pieces on the Daily Show might actually be real.

But I’m still investigating. Both the Daily Show and its detractors (think Tucker Carlson and that ilk) have a stake in whether or not I succeed. If all the items on the show are proven false, then they all lose their credibility as fake journalists, but if they’re proven true, then what does that say about humans in general and Americans in particular?

If I disappear, don’t

If there was ever any proof that you never know when any specific bit of school knowledge or book-learning is going to be helpful, useful, or even lifesaving…

From National Geographic News -

Tsunami Family Saved by Schoolgirl’s Geography Lesson

Nat Geo TV Shows Help Tsunami Islander Save 1,500

These stories made me very happy.

I’m a big fan of knowing things and stuff, and using them when they apply, or applying them when they’re useful, but you never know when that will happen. Lives were saved because a British schoolgirl and an ordinary port employee realized - quickly - what was happening. Because of what they had learned, one on TV, one in boring old geography class.

Hurray for learning! And, among other things, hypotenuses, because I never thought they’d ever be useful, other than for doing my impression of the Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz. Now I know different.

You can never know enough. I’ve met a few people, male and female, old and especially young, who think they already - or finally - know everything they’ll ever need to know. They couldn’t be more wrong. But there’s just no telling them, because the shop’s closed, the sign’s turned around, the lights are off, and the cash drawer is open to put off burglars.

So go learn something new. And wonderful. And if you never use it for itself, well, at least you know it. Just knowing stuff is cool.

Alien robots on Titan!

Not just SF anymore! Specifically, this!

Woo hoo!

Hurray for exclamation points.

I got me a new TV SF darling.

Did I ever mention I think Star Trek:Enterprise sucks? I can’t remember if I did, but I should have, because guess what? It sucks. It’s been Lili von Schtupp playing to a saloon full of drunks and half-wits for the last generation now. Maybe Galactica will goose them out of their ‘we’ll always have an audience so why do we have to improve?’ attitude. ‘If it aint’ broke, don’t fix it.’ (Hey, just like considerably-less-than-optimum but popular OSs!)

The new (ish) Battlestar Galactica TV series premiered on Space on Saturday night.

I’d been waiting for it for a while, and was hoping for something good, but figured, really, that the high quality of miniseries simply wouldn’t be maintained, or that they would make stupid changes (like when V went to a regular series). I was afraid that some of the cool characters like the President would go away or be replaced (like maybe Dixie Carter replacing Mary McDonnell - no offense to Carter but McDonnell owns that role).

I was re-rebuilding a computer (some projects just plain fail) when the show started, up to my elbows in stringy computer guts. I realized quite quickly that I would miss way too much if I didn’t just stop and watch. It turned out that if I didn’t keep my eye on the screen I would miss things like a shot of Adama’s stoicism as the 33 minute ticker was timing out, or a non-verbal exchange between Adama and Tigh or the look on Starbuck’s face as she was trying to disobey Apollo’s order to destroy the Olympic Carrier, but finally obeyed it anyway. The President’s desk on Colonial One, or the number ‘33′ marked on every analog clockface in the Fleet.

The external shots, of the ships, the battles, etc were interesting as well. Some of the establishing shots were unsteady zooms and pans, as if the camera operator was trying to find the right subject or part of the subject to focus on. Cylon handheld reality TV cameras? Except the Cylons are TVs, or more correctly, to quote Baltar, Cylons “looked more like walking chrome toasters.” Multitasking toasters, I’m sure. Then there’s Number Six and the other humaniform Cylons, including, omygod, - not Boomer, not her, no way. Not Boomer. Okay, Boomer.

I’m a little worried that the “Oh God, Cylons can look Just Like People” thing might be milked too much, but I fully expect to be manipulated, hoodwinked and surprised, willingly and happily, until the old girl finally jumps the shark.

Tomorrow night! Too excited. Can’t type. Can’t wait. Stupid TV. Stupid Space the Imagination Station. Stupid new logo looks like a feminine hygeine product trademark.

New series! Gonna be good! Message boards! Flame wars over who’s hotter!
Total geekatroid nerd wars over Macs versus Cylons!

Fan sites! Fan fic! Copyright violations! Soulless lawyers sending cease and desist orders!

Gonna be a good year for TV SF!

(And before, when I was bemoaning the state of American TV SF, I totally forgot to mention a recent new favourite, Stargate SG-1. Know my favourite part? When Jack makes references to the Simpsons. Cuz you just know it’s because the Bouvier twins are such McGyver fans. Gotta be.)

The end. I will breathe now.

It has long been established that bigots and the blindly prejudiced are detrimental to a society, to our society. Everyone knows this and the reasons are self-evident.

I propose that in order to lessen their effect on our children and institutions, bigots be stripped of their civil rights, eg voting, public assembly, and, in some cases, their right to procreate. It is known that unreasoned bigotry can be handed down from one generation to the next, so if the confirmed bigot already has children, then those offspring should be removed from the home.

If they are not allowed to vote, or to express themselves publicly, or to pass on their distorted views of reality to posterity, the rest of civilization will be better off.

How do we determine just who is a bigot? Quite easily. One need only apply a reasonable test to the opinion expressed by a suspected bigot. If the suspect would, for reasons of skin colour, sexuality, religion, area of origin, or other reasons, deny another individual or group the same basic human or civil right that the suspect would otherwise adamantly advocate for himself, that person is a bigot.

If we choose not to limit their civil or procreative rights, I would then propose that they, as a group, be segregated in some area that would allow them no contact with the rest of humanity, physically or in any virtual sense provided by technology. Their bigotry is insidious; given the chance it will spread among the unwary, uninformed and ill-prepared.

If society does not choose to segregate bigots, and does not choose to limit their reproductive rights, then I propose, since they will only breed more bigots, to help offset the social costs of tolerating their idiocies, and the cost of merely keeping them, that we eat them.

Thus the vile race of bigots, while ineradicable, will at last provide a fundamental and eternal benefit to society, and be enjoyable with perhaps a nice bearnaise sauce and an unassuming Niagara chardonnay.

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Comments are disabled. If all of you will email me your comments on this post, I will sort through them all and post a few of the most apropos, so all of the rest of you can share those thoughts. Please be patient, however, as it may take a while to go through them all. I thank you all.

I just realised that Dr. Gaius Baltar had to have been killed along with that instance of Number Six, the Cylon temptress/infiltratrix/babe in the red dress, in the blast that, corollararily, leveled what appeared to be his country home when the Cylons nuked Caprica. Which means…

And in other cool television news, A&E is starting the third season of MI5 tonight, with a second season marathon all day today, which I didn’t see any ads for, and consequently missed most of. I saw a few of the first season episodes. Mm, mm, good.

The next season of 24 starts this week too. Missed most of last season and part of the second season, but really liked the first. You can see the influence of classic British Nineties episodic crime dramas like Prime Suspect.

And what I said in an earlier post about the Americans not being able to do television science fiction very well, a stab of guilt reminded me of ‘Above and Beyond’ with the exquisite Kristen Cloke, Chris Carter’s Millennium, and to a lesser degree, The X-Files. I guess my beef is more about internal consistency, originality, fun, and characterization, not necessarily in that order, and entirely dependent on my mood when I watch any particular episode. Star Trek: Enterprise still sucks like a sucking sucker, though. Unless somebody in the production food chain of command died and somebody was promoted in a non Peter Principle way. It’s happened before, I’m sure. Just not often and not to my satisfaction.

I just caught this on IMDB.

I want to start a group to stop the cinematic stereotyping of tubby, middle-aged, dopey looking bald men who are somewhat shorter than average.

The discrimination and derogatory mockery in the form of good old humour have gone on long enough!

Arise, my brothers and start a group!

Tubby, Middle-Aged, Dopey Looking Bald Men Who Are Somewhat Shorter Than Average United Shall Never Be Divided!

We Shall Overcome!

(They should show us with supermodels, two or three maybe, is really all I’m asking. On a regular basis, with sequels. It’s the movies, for God’s sake!)