Cranky

Instead of Hera being, like, I don't know, the first us, she should have been the symbol of learning to live with the robots, instead of depending on them and growing complacent and having it all blow up in our faces. That way, when they start over again on the place where humanity first frakked up big time, all this will not happen again.

Having the Fleet populate this planet is still the dumbest god damn thing I've ever heard.

Hate
Hate
HATE.

I'd have joined your mutiny, Felix, if I'd known this is what it was coming to.

Frak Earth

I could frakkin' let loose about my extreme disappointment with the finale of Battlestar Galactica, but I really want to just say this:

From the beginning, I'd been hoping and hoping and hoping that this wouldn't be how it ended. That they wouldn't find our Earth and basically be the first humans there. Because that is the dumbest god damn thing I've ever heard. When they got to Earth at the end of the first half of the last season, and it was all bombed out, I was like, "Oh! Yay!" But then they were like, "All these remains are Cylons," and I was like, "Whuh? That's not Earth, then, huh?"

And then they ended up here, on Africa, and they just... Ugh! Aside from being cheesy and stupid, it doesn't make any anthropological sense, but I don't even know enough about anthropology to tell you why, so I'll just skip that.

What I wanted to happen, ever since we found out Earth wasn't this planet we're living on, was that they would eventually find this ball of rock, and they would find the ruins of humanity's first try at civilization. And it would be enough thousands of years for the planet to be recovering from whatever kind of bombs and crap would have destroyed humanity in the first place. They could find humanity's real origins, not some place called Kobol where the Earthlings would have gone to start over and forget the disaster of Earth ever happened.

Instead they landed here before anything got going, and the whole series turned into a warning for us, the latest modern incarnation of humanity, not to frak too much with technology, because the robots will turn on you and blow your entire world to pieces.

In retrospect, "All this has happened before, and all this will happen again," is fucking depressing. I mean, it has been demonstrated that humanity is slow to learn from its mistakes, but the way the fleet decided to settle on Earth meant that they didn't even want to try. Because, you know, we modern-day Earthlings are entirely unaware of this civilization that went before us, so everything those 38,000 people may have learned was lost--literally hurled into the frakking sun.

And then there's all the things that came from this Earth that have appeared throughout the series. We'll ignore the most obvious, "All Along the Watchtower," and the Greek gods and the zodiac for now. What I want to talk about is the words--the words that Baltar and Roslin and Sam used that came from English writers. Baltar and Roslin both quoted Shakespeare. When Sam was all brain-broken, he babbled words from Milton, from Paradise Lost. Now. The way I was hoping things had happened, that literature had made it from Earth to Kobol to the Colonies, maybe in tattered form and not well-documented or something, but still, it had been written before, and it had been able to last through the years, because it was that pervasive throughout human civilization. Shakespeare, especially, has that gift.

But the way it seems to have happened now, after the finale, is that artists are just being divinely inspired to say the same things over and over again. Sam, Kara's dad, and Bob Dylan all wrote the same song. Sam and John Milton have the same exact words to say about existence and God and whatever.

The Shakespeare stuff, I guess I could overlook, because he is so pervasive it might be the writers didn't even realize they were quoting, but "shuffle off this mortal coil"? That just occurred to Gaius Baltar the way it occurred to William Shakespeare?

You know me. I think divine inspiration is absolute bullshit. So this is what bugs more than anything else. That there's no explanation for why Sam knows the words to Paradise Lost or why Laura Roslin would use the specific phrase "pound of flesh" in some kind of political situation. Damn, I can't remember why she used that--it was way back in the first season, I think--but I jumped on it right away as being the entire point of the play The Merchant of Venice. And since Roslin was using it metaphorically--you know, no one was asking for a literal pound of flesh, like in the play--where did she get it from???

Argh. I don't even care anymore about the lame thing they did with Starbuck: angel, demon, messiah, whatever the fuck. The language thing is such an issue. Like, the fleet arrived before homo sapiens sapiens even developed, because the people on the planet didn't even have language, and all the foreign humans spoke the same language, and yet, all these bazillions of different languages developed? And went through various stages of development? I'm sure no one on the staff thought about that, but oh my god, it is bugging the shit out of me.

And then the Greek gods, who have the same names as the Lords of Kobol. Did the Geminese (they were the fanatic planet, right?) end up in the Mediterranean and immediately establish their religion? I don't understand. It makes so much more sense to me if the humans who got to Kobol set up a new religion, a new civilization with the alleged best pieces of all the old ones from Earth, and over the years the story of how civilization on Kobol all started got lost, because I don't know, maybe it's because of the limited scope of the story, but it seems to me that all the people from the colonies speak the exact same language and have the exact same history/religion, and each colony has a variant take on aspects of this culture, but they have the same core. That seems to me more like what would happen after humanity's first collapse--they'd rebuild with bits and pieces of what they knew before. But here, on this Earth, a whole bunch of different cultures and religions and histories and languages developed, basically independently of each other. They all share certain similarities, certain myth patterns, because there are certainly shared aspects of humanity, but they're not similar enough to have the same core story as their base.

It was the easy way to go: to have the Kobol as the birthplace of humanity story be literal and to have the fleet be the first human inhabitants of Earth. They should have turned that story around, explored what Kobol meant, but I guess they didn't want to do another season, so they came up with this predictable-ass ending. Science fiction television has been doing this preachy "don't fuck with robots" ending over and over and over again. And that was what I liked most about Battlestar Galactica: it went beyond standard sci-fi tropes, like Ray Bradbury can do, like I thought the first season of Roswell did, and it was about the people, not about some message. But it ended up in a cliche sci-fi place: technology is fucking dangerous. The end. I mean, that was the actual end: fake Six and Baltar arguing about whether or not humanity would repeat its doomed relationship with technology.

And so I hated it. Hated it, hated it, hated it.

Tempering my crazy

Kelly Clarkson songs I can't stand:
"Breakaway"
"Because of You"
"If No One Will Listen"

And "A Moment Like This" and "Before Your Love," of course, but those weren't her fault. I almost hate "Miss Independent," but she loves performing it live, and that has saved it.

There. I am that objective when it comes to Kelly Clarkson. Ahem.

Hard-hitting interviews on Entertainment Tonight

"Just because I'm single and don't date a lot, that doesn't make me a lesbian."

Well, duh, Kelly. That's not what makes you a lesbian.

Teenage music critic

Ohhh, tater tots, let's talk about Kelly Clarkson's new album. Obviously, it's been leaked for at least a week (I am always the last person to find out about that), but I am dumb and always wait for the official release date. Basically so I can put the music on my iPod without even thinking about it. But anyway, Kelly!
My theory is that this will appease the people who thought My December sucked, as it's more of a return to "Since U Been Gone" form, which is what everyone's been saying, I know, but it's true. Not to say that this album is in any way Breakaway, redux (it's much better), but it's much more in that vein than My December for sure. As for me, I'm taking the sure-to-be unpopular stance and declaring it not as good as My December. Nevertheless, I already love it fiercely.

I've already been obsessed with "My Life Would Suck Without You" and how adorable she looks in the video, so we'll skip that, and I'll just talk about some standouts.

First! "I Do Not Hook Up" is fun, but it sounds like a song I've already heard, and of course I can't fucking figure out what song or even when I might have heard it (recently? in elementary school? who knows). Also, there's this line: "I fall deeply," which, um, I heard as "I fuck deeply" while I was brushing my teeth this morning, and oh. It made me laugh and laugh and laugh.

2. "Already Gone" severely bummed me out, but I think it's my favorite song, which is odd, because I hate things that make me sad. Also, being laid low by a pop song? Embarrassing. If it weren't Kelly, though, with that voice, I'd never listen to it again.

C. "Whyyawannabringmedown" is my other favorite, because it's all...wail-y and stuff. And she reminded me of Tia Carrere wailing "Ballroom Blitz" in Wayne's World so forcefully that I loved it before I'd even heard the whole thing. Like, seriously. I'm sure no one else will draw this parallel (and if anyone does, I'll ask her to marry me), but it made me so happy. Also, it features the line "I'm not your love monkey," which makes me laugh every time. I love songs that are silly by accident.

IV. The other song I love is "I Want You," which is kind of a '60s doo-wop thing that seems to be popular these days, and it kind of comes across as taking advantage of that trend, because the rest of the album is pretty pop-rockish, but I don't care. It's adorable.

Anyway, the album is nothing less than I expected, but I was trying to think if I'd like any of these songs if Kelly weren't singing them. I really don't know, maybe "My Life Would Suck Without You" and "Whyyawannabringmedown" (except the wailing is crucial to that one, and so few bitches out there can really wail), but I do know this: Kelly's voice is what makes them worth listening to for me, and it's why I will pre-order every album she releases. Even if she actually does dive off the deep-end and put out a country album. Erp.

The girliest thing about me is my enjoyment of Bath & Body Works products

I went back to Bath & Body Works last Friday because I wanted to buy a candle, and the White Barn candles they sell are the best candles around, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that they updated the candles, so they sell all the signature Bath & Body Works smells as small, medium, and large candles instead of in just one frosted glass, medium-ish sized jar. So I bought the coconut lime verbena one, because that is far and away the best Bath & Body Works smell, but this is not really the point of the story.
The point of the story is that the theme of the month was apparently promoting the different families of smells, which were "the sexys," "the romantics," "the freshes," and "the cuddlers." Hilarious names, first of all. Second, moonlight path, the worst Bath & Body Works smell, is included in "the cuddlers" family, and girl, no one is gonna wanna cuddle you if you're wearing that smell, except your grandmother. Believe it.

Also, Mike's boyfriend works at Bath & Body Works down in Georgia somewheres, and he had to do a floorset on Sunday night, and oh, the sense of relief that I won't have to deal with that bullshit ever again was so delicious. David was heading off to work at 5:00 p.m., and I was still sitting on the couch in my pajamas, playing Super Paper Mario. That's what Sunday nights are for. I bet it's not that bad in other stores, though, because seriously, the Bath & Body Works at the Pheasant Lane Mall is quite possibly the largest Bath & Body Works of all time, and it makes changing the store around a grueling, thankless, hideous experience. Especially when the Devil was running the scene.

I miss the 30 percent discount, though, because $9.50 for a four ounce candle? Highway robbery!

Half-baked analysis

In all the uproar over the remake of The Neverending Story, I keep seeing people lauding its "message," which is, I guess, "do what you dream," more or less, and that is the cheesiest (and possibly worst) thing about the movie. That's not what the story is about, okay? Remaking the movie and making the themes more compelling and less overt would be a good move. The Neverending Story is not about achieving anything; The Neverending Story doesn't have a moral. The Neverending Story is about using your imagination, for good and ill. What's evil in the novel is not what we would consider evil, not G'mork (although, as a servant of the Nothing, perhaps he would count...) or Xayide, but the Nothing. You can see this in the Childlike Empress; though she is the ruler of Fantastica, she does not condemn evil or praise good--what she fights against is the Nothing, against the thing that is destroying all of Fantastica, good and bad. And the Nothing is taking over Fantastica because people from our world are not using their imaginations--not creating anything. I forget, too, but I believe the Nothing threatens our world as well, because Fantastica is falling.

So while Bastian needs to obtain a kind of belief in himself in order to play his role in this story, that's not the point.

Look, it's been a while since I had to English major out on a book, but if I had to say what the book is really about it, it is about walking the line between imagination and reality. When you live too much in the dismal real world, that world itself suffers for lack of creativity, but if you live too much in a fantasy land, that world also suffers, even while the real world loses you--and you lose yourself. Creation is the theme of this book, filling the Nothing with Something over and over in an infinite number of ways.

It's not about achieving your dreams or whatever damn thing. It's about imagination and how that shapes you and the corner of the world you inhabit.

Venting my digital spleen

There are some things I would like to know about Front Row, which I almost want to marry, but I can't quite make the commitment because it has some serious flaws.

On the real, I would really like to know where it's grabbing the files--does it go through iTunes at all, or does it just take the folders and files in the Music and Movies folders and vomit them onto its interface? I mean, it would seem to bypass parts of the iTunes library, because no matter what I do, I can't get Front Row to look like my iTunes library, particularly in the area of television shows.

So I get that Apple thought it was a brilliant idea to list the episodes of each show in reverse order, keeping the most recent on top for easy viewing after iTunes has downloaded the latest episode of the show. Fine. And I know there are dicey legal issues about ripping DVDs, even for personal use, so they just ignored that and organized based on episodes bought from the iTunes store, but come on. Plenty of OCD nerds want the episodes displayed in the correct order. So why can't Apple create user preferences for Front Row, so it displays content the way you, the OCD nerd, would prefer? Doesn't Apple understand about OCD nerds?!

Basically, my real problem is that Front Row will not display seasons of television shows in the proper order. Some of them are listed 1,2,3, etc. Some are listed 4,3,2,1 (for example). And some are listed ridiculously 7,6,1,2,3,4,5 (Gilmore Girls) or 11,5,10,6,4,3,2,1 (South Park). Friday Night Lights goes 2,3,1, and Grey's Anatomy goes 3,2,1,4. How does this happen??? I've tried organizing the files into folders named by season, and that worked on Popular and Xena, but that's it. So what is the deal? I feel like I should tell Apple that this is a big problem, but would they even listen? And then do I want to get into the fact that I've ripped hundreds of DVDs onto an external hard drive so I can watch them on my iMac because, maybe you missed this, but I am a(n OCD) nerd?

Really, I would just like to know how Front Row works, because this is driving me bananas. Also, why can't you play video playlists in Front Row? Come on, Apple. This interface could be totally awesome, and yet it's stuck at almost awesome but simultaneously fucking frustrating. Let's develop this, please. I give you the input; your OCD nerd engineers write the updates. This could be a beautiful partnership. And then you could give me a free Apple TV as thanks for my invaluable insight.