Went to the Flyers / Canadiens game on Friday and found there, swarming about like mad insects, a mob of Canadians! Only a Canadian would travel to a foreign country just to watch a hockey game. They had arrived on buses from Ontario and now occupied the arena in clusters the way mold attacks bread, all cheering at inappropriate moments, chanting presumably offensive slogans in French, and singing irritating songs just like Euro futball fans. It strikes me again how much like Europeans these Canadians can be, their cities, their language, their crowd behavior, especially Eastern province Canadians, especially the French ones. For such near neighbors they really are quite foreign to us.

Yesterday I watched Battlestar Galactica! I learned that Cylon 8 (aka "Sharon" aka "Boomer") has a magic power that can produce a whole house and child inside Chief Tyrol's head! Boomer seems to live in that house, all sun-dressy and smiles, flowers and soft light. It's sort of a Second Life for Cylons. But then! Later I learned that Chief Tyrol has his own magic power: he can cause an unconscious Cylon 8 to swap places with an imprisoned Cylon 8, and nobody in a whole busy starship will take any notice! Yes, it's exciting stuff, but nothing compared to the thrills I got from watching as Starbuck sorted out her daddy issues by playing the piano. My skin is still tingling from it! And when that piano-man disappeared!? Holy frakaroni; I never saw that coming!! A-and then when that song started playing and everybody was like, dude, what the frell?! Wow, that was fun. And then some stuff happened in the last ten minutes but I forget what.

Sunday I smoked an Upmann Mag 50 and sipped some Pete's House Blend while watching the Flyers / Devils game. During intermissions and after I read Cory Doctorow's When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth on my new Kindle 2.

The new Kindle is about what I expected: good but could-be-better. It's very light but could be a little lighter; the contrast is sufficient for long-term confortable reading, but could be a little higher; and the selection of e-books in the world will never be what I want it to be, but publisher and e-zine sites like Baens are now more attractive, and there's always Gutenberg if you like old books (I'm in for some Charles Dickens soon). I've found that Gutenberg ascii texts render poorly in Kindle because they have line breaks at the end of every line and the lines are longer than Kindle's. It's better to get the html version if available and copy the text from the browser into an ascii file. Don't bother with the 10 cent email routine Amazon has set up either; just plug it into a USB port (Ubuntu automounts Kindle like any other hard drive; presumably Windows and Mac do the same). The free wireless is a nice bonus. The browser leaves much to be desired but it's sufficient for checking email or reading Wikipedia.

The Doctorow story btw is a good one; it's about the end of the world from the perspective of a bunch of sysadmins holed up in a datacenter. I'll probably get some more of his stories now since they're free and well-suited for the Kindle (I've only read Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom before this -- also recommended). I might even send him some money when I have disposable income again. Ah, disposable income! How readily I have disposed of you!

The New Yorker has an article on David Foster Wallace and the big third novel all his fans were beginning to despair of ever seeing. Reading this I am reminded of how when depressed people commit suicide after going off their medication it always seems like just a terrible accident that could and should been avoided somehow. Somehow.

With so few episodes remaining, I had expected more to happen this week, but it seems they're just treading water until the big finale. Yawn. My expectations for the finale are not high, but I do anticipate a drunken Adama will fall on his ass once or twice and writhe around weeping like a six-year-old who didn't get a pony for Christmas. Are they just copy/pasting scenes now? How many times is Tigh going to tear his cabin apart looking for booze, find that same empty bottle, and hurl it against that same bulkhead? The kludginess is really starting to chafe: Cylon-Anders in the spew-tub suddenly interfacing with the Galactica through the robo-goo spread on her hull is just a bit too convenient. Whatever plot point that turns into is almost certainly going to be annoying, especially if it involves a kamikaze maneuver. Perhaps today *is* a good day to die.... PREPARE FOR RAMMING SPEED! I feel too bored to even predict the specific circumstances.

Some hoighty-toit once described soooper-genius as the capacity for holding two contrary concepts in one's brain at the same time. If this (dubious) qualification suffices, then Mr Obama, President of these United States, must surely be soooperific. In one fist he clenches the big red VETO stamper, all phallic and principled, and in the other a spending bill containing ~9000 earmarks, which he has pledged to eliminate from Washington. (Do you suppose they email bills to the White Castle for signing? Or send them via grave and gray courier in a briefcase handcuffed to one wrist escorted by goons with earbuds?) What's a politician to do, hey? "[T]his piece of legislation," said the stalwart Obama, apparently reconciling the conflict in his giant genius brain, "must mark an end to the old way of doing business, and the beginning of a new era of responsibility and accountability." Starting... now. No wait... now!

Ah the politician! This is a person who believes that by virtue of their having won a popularity contest they are now qualified to make decisions affecting thousands, millions, billions of lives. It's a special combination of hubris and ignorance that generates such a creature, mixed with a lack of imagination, a shallow sense of responsibility, and a general contempt for all of mankind. Or possibly total solipsism, that could explain him too.

Still with the nothing-to-do and the ne'er-do-much. We have had decent weather here lately (high 50's, light rain, little wind -- pretty much my favorite conditions) so yesterday I did an hour or two on the patio, bookended by a giant purple mug of coffee and a giant crystal ashtray, smoked a 5 Vegas Limitada 2008 (delicious cigar, Dominican corojo oscuro wrapper, mixed filler with lots of ligero; I have about 13 of these left and want more), and hung around inside the Kindle with Jack Vance.

This sprint will probably be the end of my Vance reread-athon. I've been through Dying Earth, Demon Princes, The Last Castle, The Dragon Masters, and currently Planet of Adventure. The Dying Earth collection remains in my mind the best of the Vance oeuvre, especially the first Cugel story, Eyes of the Overworld. There's something about Cugel that is almost Marx Brothers-esque; you don't so much *like* Cugel as marvel at him, shake your head in wonderment at whatever he does next, get stuck laughing at the absurdity of it. Despite his lack of any depth as a character, I find him among the most entertaining in any literature.

As for the Kindle 2 I'm still enjoying it, which surprises me, although I have begun to wonder what will happen when the novelty wears off. It's more *useful* than *pleasing*, sort of like a bike-lock, so I'll probably keep using it but stop remarking upon it. I did reluctantly purchase a Kindle book-cover, something that sort of seems like it should have been included with the gadget. Without the cover every time I go outside with the Kindle I feel like I'm carrying around a snowflake or a ming vase. I'm accustomed to dropping things.

Last night we got some wacko pizza: half Buffalo chicken, half Hawaiian. I like these new pizza forms but it's less like eating pizza than something entirely new. It makes me feel old.

Meanwhile, I am now able to customize the colors in Gmail. Right now I'm going with a white, black, and gray motif I call Snow Donkey. I really need a job.

Apparently, despite all the eye-rolling that one assumes must have attended the decision, our beloved, behated SciFi Channel is changing its name to SyFy. Presumably the pants-suits over there hope this will attract more viewers: more drooling wrestling fans, paranormal tinfoil hats, reality show onion slappers, anime weirdos, and especially women. "SyFy" is softer than "SciFi", so it should appeal to females and young txtin chuckleheads who rarely bother to spell anything the way the Queen intended. Most importantly the new name is free of those annoying associations with Science Fiction, which is a category of entertainment, rather than a fuzzy label that means nothing. Go Future!

Sun the company that is, not the star. Look at them panic over the potential fate of Netbeans. Heh heh ha! But then on the other hand, could IBM really have the cruel audacity to bind enterprise Java solely to WebSphere? A truly troubling notion....

Apollo: I know, guys! Let's send all our space ships filled with all our stuff flying into the sun! That way we'll all be way cool to each other!

Everybody: Hooray! SO SAY WE ALL! We hate electricity anyway!

Apollo (aside): I can't believe they're actually going for it...!

Everybody: Hooray! We don't need hospitals, factories, foundries, discos, or laundromats! Hooray! We don't want antibiotics, chemotherapy, anesthetics, or x-ray machines! Hooray! Death to all building tools, farming implements, hunting rifles, textiles, books, and especially computers! Hooray!

And lo, there upon a new planet populated by savages, brand new infectious diseases, unpredictable weather, and a literal world of other unknown threats, the sudden colonists, the last remnant of humanity (except for the aforementioned savages, wherever *they* came from) shed their old ways, their foul weapons and CO2 producing industries, and go naked into the New Garden, there to die within a month.

ROAR!!!!!!!!

I remain bewildered and amazed. I simply cannot wrap my head around how mind-blowingly implausible it was, the proverbial cherry atop the proverbial shit sundae, all just to fix that cheesy "Ancient Astronaut" gag. I don't think Ron Moore could have insulted his audience any more effectively if he had personally flown to each of our homes and farted directly in each of our faces. I need some time to try to get over this rage I'm feeling....

OK, I'm back. I've been thinking about Adama alone on that hill, gazing off into what has to seem a bleak future. I'm trying to imagine him sharpening a rock, attaching it to a stick, then chopping timber to build his cabin. Or will he use rocks, constructing his own cairn right next to that of his deceased girlfriend? Or is she his wife now? Did Adama betroth himself to a corpse bride back there in the fleet's last flying car? That was right after deciding that Roslin would probably want another ride in another spaceship before she dies rather than spend another peaceful moment sitting in a calm meadow. It was clear the Admiral was losing his mind even before having that jacuzzi installed on the ship's bridge (I don't think Picard would ever tolerate that on *his* ship; Kirk on the other hand...). Adama's fondness for falling down drunk and puking on himself dates all the way back to Caprica, so it's been a madness a long time coming. I hope he or Tigh knows how to build an alcohol still. I don't think they'll make it through even humanity's last month without booze.

What else....

• I enjoyed the scene where the Final 5 share some bath water, then Tyrol strangles that chick because she spaced his wife, then all the hubbub afterwards, the fancy Cylon in the turquoise shirt (the gay one) shouting "It's a trick! Open fire!", and Cavil capping himself in the mouth. That should have been the entire episode, right there.
• Angels? Is that what the greasy-Baltar and glowing-Caprica hallucinations were? Is that what Starbuck was? I'm confused. I'm also irritated. These angels were guiding the humans and the cylons to their destiny? Is that it? Well, I'm not sure I can call BSG Science Fiction anyway after all the pseudo-mystical bullshit that's been flowing through it, but this is just deus ex machina. And also quite lame.
• I've been willing to suspend my disbelief for this show with regard to the fake physics (explosions and sounds in space, universal unexplained gravity on the ships) but I have to draw the line at hull-mounted flame throwers. And how did the basestar colony thing manage to stay pressurized after the Glactica rammed through its hull? How did Glactica stay pressurized after opening its airlocks to the cylon colony? Does any of this matter even a little to anyone?
• The old-school cylon centurions fighting with the new-school cylon centurions strained the special effects quite a bit, and the combat scenes were all pretty stale by now. I was happy when the fighting was over.
• I wonder if the phallic imagery of the Galactica attacking (and thrusting into) the cylon colony was intended to symbolize the future of humanity as a union of cylon and human. If so, that's pretty silly. If not, how could they not notice it?

Anyway, it's over now. The show really wasn't very good after about the second season (I especially loathed all the political idiocy, especially the New Caprica = Iraq nonsense), but there were often redeeming qualities. It was at least fun to complain and argue about, and that's more than most television programs can provide.

I've been following the Tor Books round table discussions on BSG for about as long as they've been doing them. Usually the consensus on any given episode has been either positive or optimistic that the situation would improve. No longer! See how they all agree with ME now! Actually, these guys are a LOT more pissed off about it than I was. Maybe they should have written the show off long ago like I did.

The goons in my head are compelling me to mention that this week's "Heroes" is much better than in recent months (years actually) thanks to the return of the great Bryan Fuller ("Dead Like Me", "Wonderfalls", "Pushing Daisies", etc) to the head writer's chair. During the course of the episode Fuller gradually fixes numerous little problems that the show has been enduring; it's like watching a skilled mechanic repair a wrecked vehicle. It may not be enough to save the show but it's an impressive attempt. Now maybe I can stop pretending I've stopped watching it.