sex, drugs, rock & roll and Hee Haw

This is the most awesome video ever.

The universe is defying my bad mood

Just when I thought my day couldn't get any worse, I found an ABBA video on Towleroad.



Thank heaven for ABBA. Now I am relaxed and rejuvenated.

I have an axe to grind

I'm talking of course about Guitar Hero. Or as South Park called it, Guitar Queero. I know this game is hugely popular, but last night was the first time I ever played it.

Oh my deity, I suck out loud.



I tried both of the basic songs "I Love Rock & Roll" and "Take Me Out." I got booed by the virtual crowd. There's something about being booed by those binary bitches that is most unsettling.

The problem with this game is that it uses both the left and the right hands to play the "guitar," which is actually just a big piece of plastic with five buttons on the frets and a strumming bar. I tend to be more dextrous with my right fingers because of working in retail with the 10-key and using the num lock on the computer. Unfortunately, right hand play uses your right hand on the strummer bar and your left fingers for the fret buttons. So of course, I sucked at it. I wanted to try using it left handed, but the other people playing the game were too good and I didn't really get another chance. I think this will be my new mission in life.

The Golden Compass

Yes, I saw it. I was totally stoked about seeing Daniel Craig, and I loved the idea that the central character is a girl, not a boy.

The girl, Lyra, is very intelligent and utterly fearless. She's a bit of a tomboy, but she knows how to use her wits to get by. She goes into a situation with both mental barrels and she does an impressive bit of quick thinking. She does not wait to be rescued, and she puts her life on the line in virtually every scene. She's a great role model for young women because she's both tough and smart.

That being said, here are some of my other reactions:

• The movie seemed to be very simplistic, it was not anti-faith, but rather the Magisterium is portrayed as a power-mad and power-hungry bureaucracy. The magisterium is concerned about 'freethinkers' and 'heretics,' but there wasn't anything specifically anti-religious or anti-God about the film itself.


• The concept of each person having a daemon, an animalistic embodiment of their souls that walks alongside them is kind of interesting, but I had several problems with it. — The daemons seem to mirror the characters' occupations and personalities. If this was the case, it was very classist that the kitchen boy had a puppy dog daemon, the Gyptian boy had a rat daemon, and the porters and other staff had dog daemons. To me, that was like saying if you have a Labrador retriever, you won't be able to be anything in society that is higher than a butler.


• The bear fight scene was far too vicious for many children. Even though it was CGI, the actions of the battle were disturbing to me, and I'm nearly 31 years old.


• The witches were very artfully done, but their physical nature was kind of inconsistent. If they can fly and disappear into thin air, then why can they be shot?


• Sam Elliot was an interesting touch, but he was very out of place. He was a caricature of an old west cowboy and his aw-shucks dialog was pretty much vestigial and pointless.

Overall, I think it made a great looking movie. The action was very intense, at times too much so for children. Using the concept of parallel universes is always tricky though, and this one had some problems, even for a sci-fi devotee such as myself. I would give this 3 out of 5 stars. Somewhere between see at matinee price or wait for video.

Holiday Cards

To my loyal readers and friends:

I am sending out holiday cards and it's gobbling up a great deal of my time. I will write more soon.

Sci fi supremacy revisited

So I got a little acrimonious about Star Trek and Star Wars. I apologize to the fans.

I enjoy both stories very much, but as I commented to Cbutterb, I think that the BSG universe is much more carefully honed than the other two. It is not without its overriding thematic problems in individual episodes and multi-episode story arcs.

That being said.

I need to eat my humble pie when I forgot to even include Firefly for comparison.



Firefly was a great series, and Serenity was a great movie. In reality, the acting was great, on par with most of the actors on BSG. The story lines were very compelling, though at times they were a bit of a rehash of western themes and archetypes.

The most unjust thing was that the series was never allowed to mature into its rightful place among the uppermost echelons of science fiction space operas. Serenity was the last best chance for Whedon to give us something for the ages. Unfortunately, it was hasty and frenetic, trying to cram all too much of a wrap-up into two hours of screen time. It was as though the baby was half born and the doctors shoved it back in. Then with the movie, the baby shot right out of the womb and grew up in an instant.

That's the tragedy of commercial television.

Of course, pay cable is not without its own faults. Queer as Folk proved that with no commercial sponsors to worry about and no audiences to lure, there is no accountability for taste. That sounds like a separate post, but I think I'm too tired.

Why BSG is better than Star Trek and Star Wars

In a recent conversation, I pledged my devotion to the BSG camp of Sci-fi over the Star Wars trilogy (eps. 4,5,6) and over Star Trek.

Here are some thoughts on the subject. The BSG (reloaded) universe is its own special universe. So far, it is separate from human history, though it may be tied to some far distant future, or past (gods forbid it's some scientology propaganda piece).

The Star Trek universe is a futuristic atheist-utopian fantasy where humans have united in spite of their differences upon realizing that we are not alone in the universe, as revealed in First Contact. Call me cynical, but I just don't buy that humanity can change that quickly. Another reason the Star Trek universe is flawed is that the vision and legacy of Roddenberry was corroded and polluted after his death to where misguided series after series were produced by Paramount to capitalize on the beleaguered, grieved fan base. The premises for each series grew thinner and thinner until finally people quit watching and they canceled "Enterprise" with the dreadful Bakula.

The Star Wars universe was a great piece of mythology for its time, but with the logistical problems of not doing the saga in sequence, it left the whole universe open to abject failure through the chaotic invasion of conjecture. The myriad books that expand the canon through eons before and after the saga of the 6 films seems like a cheap, capitalistic merchandising trick. When one realizes how vast the star wars merchandising universe is, one cannot help but lose trust in the motives of Lucas, et al.

All things considered, Battlestar Galactica is not without its own laundry list of faults. The most obvious of all is the boxing episode of season 3. I would have much rather watched a few more webisodes on Scifi.com than sit through the blood splatters just so we could see the memories of New Caprica come to life in the crews' thoughts.

The second problem is the sexuality of 6 and Baltar. Okay, we get it, she uses sex to manipulate people. Humans are weakest when we succomb to our base desires. yeah yeah yeah. We know you use the sex to get ratings. NYPD blue did the same damn thing about 10 years ago.

The third problem is Admiral Cain's lesbianism. It seemed that this was coming years ago, when we met Cain in season 2. It was hinted at somehow, in her body language with her ship's 6. My friend Chad called this a hackneyed stereotype. I think they should have hired Rita Mae Brown or some other lesbian writer to come up with some other way to talk about the issue. The BSG powers that be have been tempting us with Gaeta since the miniseries when we first see him gush over Baltar.

The fourth, and probably most overriding problem is the logic of posterity. My friend Chad and I argue about this in every, and I do mean EVERY BSG convo. A race of people capable of interstellar, faster-than-light space travel would surely have better records of their deities than scrolls, especially when the gods lived with them on Kobol. The only possible explanation is that the fractured, separatist nature of the colonies, and the fact that they were constantly at war with one another until shortly before the first cylon war, means that their militarism dominated all areas of society, and history and archives were never properly maintained.

All in all, the problems of BSG are ones that I largely can live with. The problems I have with the other universes cannot be overcome in my mind.