Right Wing Nation

It picks up where last season left off: Four of the final five Cylons revealed (to themselves and us, but nobody else), and the re-appearance of Starbuck. The show revolves around Starbuck: Where she was, where she’s been, why she’s suddenly alive, why she’s been gone for two months but she thinks only a few hours (and the clock on her fighter bears her out), whether she’s a Cylon (she passed the test), and whether to pay attention to her claim that she found Earth.

Oh, and these nuts who think Baltar is some kind of Holy Messenger. They must be Obamamaniacs. Think about it: There are more than a few parallels between Gaius Baltar and Barak Obama.

It ends on a cliff-hanger (quite an effective one, too).

The question of the season is who is the final Cylon. Starbuck is too obvious (and there is another reason, which I won’t go into because it comes out in the premiere). So is Baltar. The final Cylon has to be a major character, or the revelation will be anti-climatic, but until we get a better idea of how the humans and Cylons are intertwined, I don’t think we can make an intelligent guess about the identity of the final. But we can rule out who it cannot be.

It can’t be Helo, or there would be no Helo-Boomer baby (remember, the baby is the first human-Cylon cross, and since Boomer is a Cylon, Helo must not be). It can’t really be Adama, unless his kids aren’t his kids (back to that Cylon reproduction problem). But it could be just about anybody else.

If he hadn’t been revealed as a Cylon at the end of last season, I’d bet on Tigh. Oh well.

The pork roast, that is. The house smells like roast pork. I’ll roast some potatoes later today, and when they’re done, carve the roast, then deglaze the pan with some sherry and heavy cream, then pour it over the pork slices.

Meat and potatoes. How do you beat that?

Twelve Cylon models
Seven are known
Four live in secret
One will be revealed

So what happened to “And they have a plan”?

We’re back, and as soon as I put the pork roast in the oven, ready to watch BSG. We can see The Ruins tomorrow.

Oh. I wonder if the DNS is still down. Checking . . . yup, looks like it.

Time to do those errands, then come back and watch BSG.

Maggie’s Farm won’t ping. My God, how will I live through the day without MF?

One of the sites that won’t even ping is the local movie schedule site — and The Ruins is playing. That means we’ll have to drive by the theater to see when the movie is playing.

Some nitwit academic at, IIRC, U Penn declared that nobody needs to know fractions. I beg to differ. Thursday, I had a conversation with two other people that illustrates real-world need to know fractions. The other two participants were a woman who has a full-time job downtown, and a volunteer who is in the office downtown two hours a week; the woman is more or less my age, and the volunteer is a young’un, in his late 20s, and (this makes it even more horrifying) a PhD student. The relevant portion of the conversation is at the end, and I really didn’t contribute (instead, I ducked out, truly frightened).

Parking is expensive. It costs me $33.75 every week just to park so I can work here.

Oh, I know! It costs me $6 a week to volunteer here!

Parking is 25 cents for 20 minutes. That’s 75 cents an hour. The PhD student parks for two hours a week downtown.

Are you coming in more than once a week now?

God, no, I don’t have the time! I’m trying to write my dissertation.

Where do you park that costs six bucks for two hours?

I have to put six quarters in the parking meter . . .

That was the point at which she — the secretary who is my age — and I looked at each other with terror in our eyes. Her glance was also a plea to jump in and say something, because she was speechless, so I did.

So are you putting dollar coins in the meter?

They make dollar coins?

Yes. It costs a dollar and a half to park for two hours in the garage.

No, it costs six dollars. I know.

It costs six quarters, not six dollars. Six quarters is a dollar and a half.

This stunned him, to judge from the look on his face. You could see the gears turning in his head. But he wasn’t done, oh no. It got even scarier.

So there are three quarters in a dollar?

No, there are four quarters in a dollar.

Then it costs six dollars to park for two hours.

That was the point at which I decided to bow out, and leave this idiot PhD student to the secretary (I really like her, by the way). So I said something about not wanting a parking ticket and left. I figure she could give him his lesson in first-grade mathematics.

Oh, I forgot. He’s working on a PhD in education. Surprised, anyone?

Seems so. There are lots of sites that won’t even ping this morning.

Here’s a useful idea for Firefox (or an add-on): Instead of idiotic crap like “Turn everything on your screen psychedelic!” how about something that loads NO external data, you know, like ad.doublecick.net, google syndication, nothing, just the data from the domain, how about that?

No, I guess that makes too much sense. You idiots are far too into reproducing the disaster that was Netscape (a browser that died a very well-deserved death).

Speaking of morons who need to be institutionalized, check this out (and follow the links). I realize it’s Kos, but come on, are these loons trying to see who is the most psychotic? Is there some kind of nutty sweepstakes, and if so, what do they get for a grand prize, a giant puppet head?

Of course, this points up the problem Democrats will have running against McCain. There’s no dirt to dig up. They’ll try to throw monkey shit at him, of course, leftists always do, but it will fly right back on their faces. None of the politics based on deranged character assassination is only going to backfire. They’ll have to run on the issues, and that’s never good for liberals.

It’s going to be an interesting race.

I’ve said a number of times that we need to put Prozac in the water supply. Okay, maybe that’s a bit much. I’m not big on entitlement programs (to say the least), but I would get behind a Prozac for nutjobs program, particularly for wackos like this woman (the headline says it all): “ Classy Dem Dragged From Hillary Event- Tries to Pi$$ On Floor.”

The fainters, hell, just about any of the Obamanuts badly need Prozac too, if not straitjackets.

One of the series recording is John Adams on HBO. But the Military Channel is running an excellent series of documentaries called Revolutionary War, which I’m also recording. I just started it playing to clear off the hard drive.

You know, I often see people on the web complain that all of the war coverage is negative. If you’re one of these people, let me point you to the Military Channel. Yeah, a lot of the programming is stuff like Futureweapons, but there’s a lot of good programming. My War Diary, a series of videos filmed by troops, runs as the videos come in from Iraq and Afghanistan. There’s a lot of good programming there.

Another great sleeper is on HBO, Shadow of the Vampire, from 2000, starring John Malkovich and Willem DaFoe in perhaps his greatest performance, and I highly recommend it. Part of the reason more didn’t see it, I think, was that nobody knew exactly what it was supposed to be — we didn’t either. It’s an original idea: F.M. Murnau is shooting Nosferatu, and is using the real Dracula (Willem DaFoe) in the title role, but only Murnau knows that the Dracula character really is a vampire. It isn’t a horror movie at all, and the “real vampire in the vampire movie” idea is really only tangential to what makes this a great movie. This is a beautifully done insight into F.M. Murnau and German Expressionism.

Everything about this movie is great. The photography, the editing, the performances. But the best way to see this is to watch it, then watch Nosferatu. You’ll see things in the classic that you had never seen before. And if you don’t think film can be great art, then you haven’t seen Nosferatu.

Wyatt said:

I am assuming you were home in time for BSG???

One word: TiVO.

Provided you have a DVR with two tuners (so you can record on two different channels simultaneously, or watch one while recording the other), it may change your viewing patterns forever. We almost never watch live TV (that is, shows when they’re being broadcast). We record anything we may want to watch, then watch it when we want to. That’s good for me, since I’m brain-dead by 8 pm, and asleep by 9. Many of the shows we watch are being broadcast when I’m dead to the world.

So it’s on the hard drive, but we haven’t seen it yet. Haven’t seen “Razor” either, but it’s sitting on the hard drive from, oh let’s see here (picks up remote, clicks menu button and looks), Saturday, November 24. I have the TiVO set up never to delete BSG (or Lost) episodes. When I need room on the hard drive, I’ll burn episodes to DVD.

I saw, by the way, when I clicked the menu button that American Gangster is on PPV. Good movie, one of the best last year (I know, that’s not saying much), if you’re looking for something to watch this weekend. About 2.5 hours long. But the sleeper of the year is also on PPV, Gone Baby Gone. This is really a great movie, I think the best movie of the year. I just set up TiVO to record it starting at 6:30.