Last Monday, I had to run out to Safeway while working because we were almost out of oregeno. (”Oh, no, we’re out of oregeno! We can’t sell thin-crust pizza!”) Anyway, so I get to the store, and I find the spice aisle, and I grab the cheapest plastic bottle of oregeno I can find. I don’t know why I bother — the store is going to reimburse me, why not grab the ten dollar McCormack brand? But whatever. So I get in line, and of course some lady is insisting that hot pockets are on sale five for ten bucks and the cashier can’t get anyone to confirm that and no managers are coming over …
… so the long and short of it is that I’m not going anywhere, fast or otherwise. This is the express lane, and the other two lanes have folks with fully-stocked shopping carts five deep.
I take out my cell phone and start paging through my address book. Why? Because I was fucking bored, okay? Shut up.
Anyway, so I’m scrolling down, and I see an entry I don’t recognize. Now, mind you, I’ve got some people in my phone as “RETARD” (because, let’s face it, he is), so it’s gotta be kind of bizzare to get my attention. Or at least, its gotta be one of those things so off-the-wall I don’t recognize it. In this case, it was a simple acronymn, DFB.
My mind started working. Did I know anyone with the initials DFB? Not off the top of my head. What if DFB doesn’t stand for a name? What if it’s a description of the person’s attitude, or my impression of them? If it was DFC, I’d have a few chicks in mind, but for DFB? Dumb Fucking Bitch? Could that be …
… and then it suddenly came to me. Right. Not Dumb Fucking Bitch!
When I was working on collecting folklore information for class, fellow blogger Dog Face Boy made me a “cootie-catcher”, and we rendezvoused in Lauraville so that I could get it. We exchanged phone numbers, and I entered her in my phone as DFB.
Standing in line, I chuckled to myself. The dude in front of me, with a handbasket, asked if I wanted to go ahead of him. I didn’t — as I told him, “I’m getting paid to be here” — then reflected that putting people’s blog names in your cell phone as an acronymn can lead to some confusing mental processes (and that, there, is the morale of this blog post). Anyway, lesson learned, I edited the entry to read “DOG FACE BOY”, the problem at the register got cleared up, and a few minutes later, I was on my way.
And now you’ve wasted five minutes of your time reading this. Sucker.
After forty-years of cold war with an enemy hiding in space, the twelve colonies of mankind are nuked into oblivion by a deadly sneak attack by the Cylon forces. The only survivors assemble in a desperate attempt to find their only salvation, the thirteenth “lost” colony: Earth. Protected by the last surviving battlestar, Galactica, the survivors of humanity — all 50,000 of them — flee across the unexplored reaches of the galaxy.
At the end of the second season, a political upset had dethroned Laura Roslin and installed Dr. Gaius Baltar — the man who allowed the Cylon sneak attack to succeed — as the President of the Colonies. Having located an inhabitable world, and with so many tired of fleeing for what many believed to be a fictional world (Earth), Baltar ordered the establishment of a permanent settlement, New Caprica, and the dissolution of the fleet. In the last fifteen minutes of the 2nd season finale, Lay Down Your Burdens, we jumped forward a year to see where our characters were when the Cylons returned. Here’s where they were:
President Baltar was living in a relative luxury on the grounded Colonial One, whoring it up with a couple of hot chicks, while the former Tactical Officer of Galactica, Felix Gaeta, appeared to have taken a big — bad — step in becoming Baltar’s top aide. Kara “Starbuck” Thrace gave up the pilot’s chair of a Viper for married life with Anders, and was trying to find scare medicine to treat his condition, while Tigh, recently relieved from his position aboard Galactica, arrived on the surface to try to establish a new life. Chief Tyrol — with wife Callie and their child — had become an outspoken labor leader, while former president Roslin led the new settlement’s makeshift school. In orbit, a newly mustached Admiral William Adama maintains vigil aboard the Galactica, with former ECO Karl “Helo” Agathon as his apparent XO. Aboard the Pegasus, a weightier Lee “Apollo” Adama holds a grudge against Starbuck, although he seems happy enough with his wife Dualla.
And then the Cylons, investigating radiation-leftover from the destruction of Cloud Nine (don’t ask), locate their prey. There’s no time for an evacuation, and both Battlestars — already understaffed to begin with, now “skeleton crewed” — don’t even have enough crew to mount any sort of offensive. Coming to a grim conclusion, Bill Adama orders the fleet’s evacuation, and the remaining orbiting ships jump for safety. On the surface, Cylon fighters roar overhead as Centurions march through the settlement. Arriving aboard Colonial One, the Cylon human models –Six, Sharon, and Doral — are greeted by President Baltar, who informs them, “On behalf of the Twelve Colonies … I surrender.”
So it’s been about six months since the show’s second season ended. Friday is either a two-hour premier episode, or two episodes aired back-to-back (I’m not certain), at 9pm on Sci-Fi, although this isn’t the first original BSG material to make it out since then. Ten “webisodes” were produced, each three minutes long, showing what has happened on the occupied settlement between the seasons. The tenth will be available at some point today on SciFi channel’s Battlestar Galactica webpage, where you can find the first nine (you might also try YouTube).
How long will it take to resolve this plot development? Remember, it took seven episodes to resolve the first season’s cliffhanger, Kobol’s Last Gleaming. There, the fleet was divided by a military coup of the civilian government. Starbuck disobeyed orders and took the captured Cylon raider on a suicide mission back to Cylon-occupied Caprica. Roslin was arrested by Galactica Marines, as was Lee Adama, who drew his weapon on Col. Tigh. A mission to Kobol ended in disaster, with one Raptor destroyed, and a team (including Chief Tyrol, Dr. Baltar, and “Crashdown”) stranded planetside with Cylons closing on their position. To top everything off, the Cylon sleeper agent made her move and put two rounds in Bill Adama’s chest. Seven episodes to resolve those plot points, and I’ve been avoiding as many spoilers as I can for this season, so I’m going to guess a minimum of five episodes before the Adamas and their Battlestars return to New Caprica to kick Cylon ass, rescue their people, and beat-ass back on the path for Earth.
L->R: Col. Tigh; Pres. Roslin; Bill Adama; Lee Adama; Dr. Baltar (sitting); Starbuck; Helo; Six (sitting); Boomer
Several people pointed me in the direction of Entertainment Weekly’s feature article of Battlestar Galactica. Here’s an excerpt:
There sure is a lot of frakkin’ human drama on this sci-fi show. Sometimes there’s more of it than there is actual science fiction — and that’s exactly how they like it in Galactica’s little corner of the cosmos. To be certain, the show has its fair share of far-out bits, like visually stunning F/X, trippy concepts (a half-Cylon/half-human baby whose blood has cancer-curing powers), and, of course, Number Six (Tricia Helfer), an immortal platinum blond Cylon partial to wearing crimson red dresses and high heels. But more than that, the show has distinguished itself as one of television’s very best dramas — on a par with 24, The Wire, and Lost — because it so utterly transcends both its genre and its source material.
The original ABC series was a one-season wonder of Star Wars-era escapism that over time has attracted a nostalgic, multigenerational cult following. But this gritty new version has taken the same bleak conceit of its predecessor — the unceremonious obliteration of humanity on the peaceful planet of Caprica by cybernetic invaders — and rewired it with prickly, challenging post-9/11 relevance. No longer are the Cylons chrome-plated toasters with oscillating LED eyes — they’ve evolved into flesh and blood, which allows them to hide in plain sight, like, say, as a muckraking journalist (D’Anna, played by Lucy Lawless). Moreover, they’re now motivated by their radical belief in one God to wipe out their creators from existence. Fortunately, the Capricans are as resilient as cockroaches.
I can’t wait until Friday night at nine. I will attempt to live-blog the episode. It’ll be so good, I’m sure I’ll give up trying to live-blog it so that I can just enjoy it.
So we’ve got two weeks until our CompSci Prof wants us to give presentations to the class. It would’ve been nice if he’d given us the assignment a bit earlier … five people in the group, hard to get together because we’re all full time employees and full time students.
The assignment is a fifteen-minute power-point presentation discussing the ethics of the Dutch hacker who tried to alert Microsoft to a security vulnerability in their software, but after being told to “fuck off”, used the security vulnerability to leave a nasty message on their home page. Our group has decided to go with a pro-position, that the hacker’s actions, although wrong when taken out of context, were justified by the protection offered to computer users when Microsoft employees fixed the hack.
The information offered by our prof is lacking. He didn’t even provide us the Dutch Hacker’s name. All of us in the group agreed we’d heard something similar happening recently — and I’m going to study up on the HP scandal in the news to determine if this case might be something similar — but does anyone know any specific information on this Dutch Hacker case, or of other similar cases?
I’d really appreciate any help you could provide. If you get to a Blogger Happy Hour — November 1st at 6pm at Remington’s Dizzy Issie’s!! — I’d be happy to buy you a beer. Or give you a big hug.
So I got home last night just in time to catch the last fifteen minutes of Lost. I don’t get those people who couldn’t follow the second season — I got through it pretty quickly once I had the DVD set. I’ll be the first to say that the show is addictive, but unlike some people, even I couldn’t get through a full season of the show in just two days.
Anyway, I think I’m going to request to start working late on Wednesday nights so I can watch the whole show through the full run. Actually, it’d only be for a little over a month and a half — six episodes, then re-runs, then new episodes again — and then I could work closing again until …
… or, I could just do what I’ve always done, not bother even trying to catch it in first run, and wait for next September and cough up the cash for the season set. Or I could bit-torrent them, I suppose, but that tends to result in a ton of spyware getting downloaded and stuff.
Decisions, decisions.
(I also saw most of the pilot for The Nine … which I’m sure will be a hit tv show or whatever, but it just doesn’t appeal to me right now. Instead of feeling original, it feels like a rip-off of a Bruckheimer show stirred in with the serialized aspects of Lost.)
Towson is like a self-contained city. I have this realization several times a semester, this semester is occured when the lady at the library reference desk gawked at my student ID. “I haven’t seen one of these in years!” (The specific type of student ID, mind you, not a student ID in general).
It was an old “OneCard” I got when first a student, my first semester in the fall of ‘99. Apparently there’s an Identification Services located in the Student Union, and I’ve been meaning to make my way over there for the last two weeks, but haven’t had the time. (By which I mean, ‘I’ve been lazy.’)
My Chaucer prof is off in Texas for a conference today, so class is cancelled. It’s my last class of the day, so I’ll probably run down and get the new ID before jetting off campus.
(The cute story was about how old my student ID is. Cute, right?)
Broadsheet and I had talked about trying to get out to see 49-Up together, the latest in Michael Apted’s amazing documentary series. Starting when they were seven, a selection of youth from across Britain’s social classes were “looked in on” every seven years. They’re forty-nine now, and I have never seen a movie series or television show as amazing, incredible, and addicting as this documentary series.
Unfortunatly, it won’t be showing in Baltimore (it opens tomorrow). According to MovieFone, the nearest location is the Landmark-E Street Cinema in Washington, DC, which it is impossible for me to get to on my very compact and busy work/school/sleep? schedule. (Emphasis on the question mark after sleep, which I’ve been neglecting lately).
Fortunatly, 49-Up will be released on DVD in about a month.
Let me just get this straight, because after listening to this, I don’t know if I’ve gotten the whole Mark Foley story straight.
According to Katherine Harris, it’s the Democratic leadership covering up for one of their top money-makers, and the evil, anti-American, liberal, communist, socialist, fascist news media who conspire with them. I love that last quote of hers: “Because our children are at stake.”
Katherine Harris. COMPLETELY DIVORCED FROM REALITY. And she’s running for the senate from Florida, Foley’s state. I wonder how out-of-touch Floridians are, and if Harris’ lack of any discernable brain power just cost her an election she was already a long-shot to win.
