There she is - Serenity. Ugly thing, ain’t she? A Firefly-Class transport, and the home of the short lived Joss Whedon television series “Firefly.”

Whedon said that he’d always wanted to do a television show based on the adventures of the Millennium Falcon and her crew from Star Wars. And, roughly, that’s what we have here in Firefly - the crew of a pirate ship as they rough on through the galaxy, trying to make ends meet, and taking what jobs they can to get a little further from the domineering Alliance.

Oh, these aren’t your pretty intellectual types from Star Trek, no military academies for these pirates, no accepting orders with a smile and a ‘yessir’. These are some down and out, go for broke blue-collar folks trying to make a living; honest or criminal. But that doesn’t matter so much as the relationships this odd band has with each other, a community yes, but one on edge - two of the crew are fugitives from the Alliance, two of the crew fought the Alliance (and lost) in the War for Reunification, while others on the crew supported the Alliance during that same conflict.

It’s damn hard to go into what made “Firefly” great without spoiling too much of the plot of this short lived series. In short, the crew of a transport ship inadvertedly take aboard as passengers two fugitives from the Alliance, and so now all of their hopes and aspirations are tied together, and one miscalculation could ruin all of their lives.

There are no aliens in Firefly - Joss said that he thought humans, isolated on the edges of space for so long, could be more alien in attitude than any amount of latex could accomplish. Characters - even those clearly not educated - can speak Mandarin Chinese quite well, and often curse in it, leading one crew member to say (and I paraphrase), “It’s great because we can say ‘Oh, you turd-licking booger snacking fuck for brain’ in Chinese, and the censors don’t catch it!” The show is a curious cross between sci-fi and westerns - most of the crew carry six-shooters, and in one episode, Serenity is out running cattle from one planet to another.

If you like science-fiction, if you like well written television shows, heck, if you like a little western … watch Firefly.

Firefly was cancelled two years ago, yet another reason to hate FOX. But there is good news - based on the strengths of the DVD sales, Univeral bought the rights to Firefly and a movie, “Serenity”, is currently in post-production, and will be theatrically released in September ‘05.

Take my love. Take my land.
Take me where I cannot stand.
I don’t care, I’m still free.
You can’t take the sky from me.

Have no place I can be since I found Serenity.
But you can’t take the sky from me.

And that says it all, doesn’t it?

Oh, by the way (and I’m excited about this!) I already caught that spammer with the moderated comments. Muwahahahahhaha! Now, hopefully he’ll figure that out …

… and FUCK OFF!

The San Francisco Zoo has sent its lone Asian elephant to a sanctuary for abandoned and abused performing animals, a move that could jeopardize the zoo’s accreditation.

You’ve just really got to ask yourself - what the hell were they doing to this elephant that they had to send it to a place for the “abandoned and abused”? How do you abandon an elephant? And does no one visit the zoo anymore?

Sorry for all the confusion lately. Don’t worry about TypeKey - we enabled moderation on comments.

So what we’re doing with the comments is that now you must register through TypeKey to be able to post here. I hate taking this step, like I said before, but hopefully it’ll keep the spammers at bay, and there are advantages to not having to approve comments before they post.

So, for all my regular readers (I love you guys), I hope you take the time to register, and to continue to read and post. Thanks.

With all the spammers out, I’ve asked my web-guru, Tim, to implement a “comments delayed” feature. I’m not entirely sure when that will be brought on-line, but I’m very angered by the way these scum-sucking peddlers, who have consistently attacked our phones and our e-mail, have now spread their filth to the blogosphere. It’s very dissapointing, and one wonders, what do they intend to accomplish? The fucker who has been spamming here keeps doing so in month old posts, and I don’t think I’m interesting enough for anyone to read my archives.

I really love getting comments. If you’re a blogger, I’m sure you can remember to the time when you were first starting out, and someone left you a comment - especially when it was someone you didn’t know, and hadn’t asked to visit. In a way, the first non-solicited comment is someone saying, “Hey, blogger, welcome.” I always get a kick out of new comments because it means people are reading what I’m writing and either enjoying it or hating it, but to a degree that they want to post, and it’s like “YAY! Dance of joy!”

So you can imagine how upset I get when I check the newly posted comments and its from some twerp advocating “Payday Loans.” It’s very frustrating. And it’s also upsetting to know that I know have to take steps as so many other blogs have, to protect this site against those loathsome beasts.

I. Want. To. Chop. Off. Their. Penises. And. Feed. It. To. Them.

I have a lot of built up anger over this.

Remember when Maryland declared war on New Joisey?

The strafing of a school by a National Guard F-16 fighter jet has divided residents of the fast-growing region around the Warren Grove Gunnery Range. Some fear for their safety, while others consider it profoundly unpatriotic to question the military during a time of war.

Let me just say, that when the military staffs a school in America, gosh, it probably isn’t too unpatriotic to say “HEY! You’re not supposed to shoot the fuckin’ SCHOOL asshole!”

Money Quote: “That guy (the pilot) probably feels so bad about this. He’s probably going to get sent overseas and he might not even come back. As long as no one got hurt, this whole thing should just be forgotten.”

But what if someone HAD gotten hurt, eh, Mr. Ex-Special Forces? Hell, you’d probably say the same thing.

Lisamarie Saccomagno’s daughter attends the school.

“Because we’re at war now, I’m very sensitive to all the military’s burdens,” she said. “We all want to be safe and secure. But we’re also concerned about our children. I’m afraid something’s going to go wrong. We really need to know where those bullets are going.”

Gosh, don’t tell that to Terry Hickman! He’ll tell you, “That guy (the pilot) probably feels so bad about this.” Because, we all know, when bullets wind up in children’s desks, that’s the thing to tell parents to calm them down!

Groggily as I crept towards conciousness today, with sunlight streaming through the blinds and 98-Rock’s morning talk show, Kirk, Mark & Lopez on the radio, I blinked my eyes and thought, “No, I didn’t hear Lopez say that, I’m dreaming.”

Twenty minutes later, sitting nearly naked at my computer, I laughed again. “Hah, a bridge collapsing because people peed on it. That’s funny.”

Then I went over to USA Today, and from there linked to the Manila Times International. And I stopped laughing.

A landmark bridge in Indonesia’s Sumatra island may collapse because too many people are fond of urinating on one of its steel pillars, a report said Saturday.

An official at the public works department in Palembang, Azmi Lakoni, was quoted as saying the bridge had deteriorated because people often took a leak on one of its piers, corroding the structure.

I’m just sort of sitting here with my mouth agape.

My sister teaches middle school in Hawaii. I hate her. She tells me, “Yeah, it sucks because the nearest bar is an hour away, so my friends and I just go to the liquor store then walk down to the beach and get drunk.” As for me, I can’t even remember the last time I set foot in a bar.*

Before she decided on taking the job in Hawaii (she’s been in Oahu less than a year and is already considering a move to Oregon), she considered an offer from Alaska. She turned the job down because she would have had to take a tiny little prop-airplane way up north, then take a sleigh ride for a few hours to get to wherever it was she was supposed to teach.

Well, that and Hawaii is warm, and Alaska is all “brrrr” and “snow” and stuff. Even my cousin Maggie (the turkey killing cousin), who would never want to live in a “non cold” state, probably wouldn’t want to move to Alaska. And who would, except for crazy people?

So, speaking of crazy people living in Alaska, you should all visit Chepooka’s blog. She’s a crazy people who lives in Alaska, and whose blog is usually all “red” and “black” and “Oooooh, I’m crazy Alaskan girl and I can’t be cheery because, look, I spend ten hours a day shoveling snow, and I’m a crazy liberal woman!**” But for some reason she’s going for the whole cheery thing this holiday season, when the rest of us are running each other over with shopping carts at the Walmart. So, like I said, crazy people!

But worth checking out. Because crazy people = more fun than non-crazy people.

*note to my friends: take me to a bar and get me drunk, I’m starving for the social thing.

** although, really, aren’t *ALL* women crazy? I mean, hello, Ann Coulter?

Just click here, and remember a time when people could trust in the integrity of those elected to this nation’s highest office.