Get ready for the new BATTLESTAR GALACTICA

I've been watching preview copies of the new "Battlestar Galactica" that will be starting in about a month on SciFi. I'm here to tell you that it freakin' rocks! This is 0one reinvention of a classic series that has already surpassed the original in its execution. Granted, the original inspired the imagination of your average 12 year old back in 1978, but this new series is strong. It's mature. It has gravitas. It takes itself seriously. It isn't afraid to be a science fiction show. It isn't goofy.

The basics are the same as are many of the characters ... in essence. The genders may have changed, but the names have stayed the same, sort of. Apollo is now the call sign for commander Adama's son, Lee Adama. Starbuck and Boomer are calls signs as well, for female pilots. Changes the dynamic. There are no female characters who are just eye candy like the original show.

The new and improved Cylons can pose as humans and the question "Are You Alive?" is a major theme from episode to episode.

Fans of the old show will be glad to see the old Vipers are around alongside a few newer models.

Check it out.  

Paradise (and body parts) Lost

My father once told me that smoking was the only thing in his life that gave him any pleasure. Right to my face he says that. I don't think it even occurred to him that his statement could quite easily be taken badly by his offspring. It could also be argued that I shouldn't have taken it as a slight, but it was.

My failure as a son has mainly to do with the fact that I was never into hanging out in junkyards with toothless hayseeds who deliberately surrounded themselves with mountains of trash because something inside of it might be of value to someone. Fer instance. I remember one fieldtrip to a junkyard down in Plattsmouth, Neb. so my dad could go looking through mountains of wrecked cars for an intact rear windshield for some ancient piece of shit of his own. While he searched, my sister and I sat in the car and waited for about an hour... like dogs. When he returned it was with a cut hand and no windshield.

One might well ask, how expensive could any rear windshield be? The answer is not that expensive, but even if it were $50 with free installation, it would not have been as sweet as finding one in a junkyard for $20.

I grew up in a junkyard actually. My dad, always the admirer of other people's shit, kept his own little pile all around our house. There were several old cars, axles, tractors, plows, mowers and weeds, tons and tons of weeds growing in all the cracks. A completely dilapidated school bus my grandmother used to use to house chickens was the item that made sure no one driving by could fail to notice that our house had a small yard and a much larger junkyard attached to it.

After my parents got divorced, it was my mother's no. 1 priority to get rid of the embarrassing piles of rusted metal that had closed in on us over the years. Well, no. 2 if you count getting rid of my dad. My father put off the junk removal for over a year until my mother brought in another junk collector to take all the junk away for free, afterall, he was getting an amazing pile of crap in exchange. Suddenly, rather than take my sister and I out for pizza, it became my dad's primary focus to hang out with the junk dealer and move all his detritus. That was how he lost the tip of his pinky finger. He got it caught in a trailer hitch. That is the kind of thing that only happens to hicks like my dad. You don't see too many accountants or state senators who are missing parts of their bodies that they "got caught in a trailer hitch."

People are people ...

When I was a boy, my daddy told me two things that were true. One was that a man should never sit down just to pee. If you sit down, you better be wipin' your ass and not your pecker when your done. And that's a fact.

The second thing he told me that is unquestionably true is that people are complete shit. Lower than snakes. "Don't trust Whitey especially." He has not had an easy time of it in this life and I cannot say that I blame my father for his opinions. He might sound like a misanthrope, but I think he is more of a disappointed romantic. I know this because I am also a disappointed romantic. People will fail you for many reasons. They might be greedy, dishonest, lazy or just disinterested in not failing you. They don't love you, they don't help you, they don't care. They take all you offer and then try to squeeze a few more drops of generosity at the end.

Even the best people can be complete pigs when they lose interest.

What I got?

It's Dennis Hopper in Waterword, B!  

Love is ...

... what I got. I said remember that!

In the 70s, there was this movie called "Three Days of the Condor" with Robert Redford. It was about a CIA agent whose buddies are all wiped out while he's out getting lunch or something. Turns out they accidentally deciphered something the hard-core spooks were afraid they'd understand. Most of the movie is a blur, but near the end, there was an exchange between Redford and the head spook that was supposed to explain why our government might want to control events of all kinds. Primarily it comes down to limited resources. Stuff is running out and just now the third world is starting to want the kind of comforts we have. Dwindling resources meets exploding demand.

Whether or not the last war was about oil, the next one will be. It isn't an option that we will all just switch to electric cars when the oil runs out, you know. Everything in this world runs on fossil fuels. That includes combines, y'all.

It's Mad Max time and I for one say, It's about damn time! I think I could really make my mark if I could kill whoever I wanted. So sign up now to join my crew and we can cruise up and down the Missouri like Dennis Hopper in Waterworld.

Cruel to be kind?

OhmyGOD I'm a cruel whore! 

The latest slew of reality shows have been tickling my fancy. Such programs as "The $25 Million Hoax" and "My Big, Fat Obnoxious Boss" aren't exactly Emmy winners and they have even less "reality" than most reality shows. But they are fun nonetheless because they test just how cruel apparently decent people can be to their own loved ones, how greedy and how gullible they can be.

On "Boss," the contestants are all so stupid they actually believe the fake billionaire they are scrambling for is in possession of Excalibur ... the sword of King Arthur. They scramble and backstab, lie and cheat to make money on the streets of Chicago for a job with a billionaire they've never heard of but whose ass they kiss nevertheless .... and they think Excalibur is real AND that some dickhead in Chicago owns it?

Meanwhile, a small town girl who really loves her parents and siblings is torturing them as she spends $5 million dollars all on herself right in front of them, taunting them. Occasionally, she cries, but the producers remind her that they will all win $500,000 for real.

Now my family has an understanding that should we ever be placed in the morally perilous position of hurting each other for money, we are to do it with complete malice of forethought knowing that money heals all later so long as we get a cut.

 

I'm not normally a perv, but I came across this photo of Mariska Hargitay of "Law&Order SVU" and just had to share it with you. I justify my exploitation of her thusly. One, she posed for this and you can read why if you click on it. Two, she's "mature" and, three, my attraction to her isn't simply 'cause "she's hot" in the conventional horn-dog sense, it's because she has a strength about her, an austerity. And a sweet ass, but it's OK that I dig her because she's not an 18 year old centerfold bimbo.

A letter to my artist buddy about his dark works

I guess I never noticed just how unsophisticated some of these little fuckers were. I am particularly made ill by the editorial in today's opinion section that claims having the Olympics in Beijing will somehow improve human rights in China. Apparently, these little pischers are unfamiliar with a gentleman named Adolf Hitler and a little known country called Germany that hosted the Olympics in 1938 and yet still somehow managed to conjure up a holocaust. That is right up there with their contention that banning cell phones while driving was bad when the ban was only on talking on your cell phone while driving.

What a bunch of turd burglars.

You must get out of there my brother before Andrea and Michelle decide to replace you with some 19-year-old girl who draws pictures of ponies and rainbows crying with the words "Beijing 2008" written underneath. You should flee before you get sucked up Hauser's coozy with the rest of the pathetic gynocentric, psuedo feminist crackers in the newsroom. Do it before they force you to wear a dress and gratify ***** in unholy ways only William S. Burroughs could conjure up.

I don't know how anyone could be as stupid as Hauser and then think that anyone who finds her stupid does so because they are not down with "strong women" like her. Her kind makes me violently ill because they are beyond redemption. No amount of rational discourse, convincing or clubbing can make these human moles see the light. They could have stood behind the Buddha and looked down their noses at him.

Friend, by the black lamps of the Lord, don't let these brightly lit bastards convince you it will. They will say "why can't you draw something nice, why cant you make your point without being so gross or insulting." SCREW THEM! They don't get it and they never will. YOU ARE SUBLIME!

The world will be destroyed by the empty-headed tyranny of the nice as sure as I love cheese, those people who smile while laying off 500 people, they are the people who try to "pump you up." These were the people who told all those black guys down in the south to not push so hard for human dignity, just be patient, they said while their daddies and uncles were lynched in the swamps. Just give it some time, just die a little while longer, just let white people kill you and subjugate you for a few more decades or centuries, just suffer the rapes and murder and oppression a little while longer just to keep the world nice for us.

Some things are sick and should be drawn that way. Doing a nice drawing of something evil is an affront to God. God has a strong stomach and can take anything. He killed every man woman and child on the face of the planet except for a boatload of Jews and their zoo. He can take a nasty picture or two I think. Cleanliness has little to do with godliness, I think, especially when it comes to a clean mind. God is beyond clean and filthy. God, if he is anything, has to be the TRUTH, in all caps, and the TRUTH can be as foul as a pig sty. So shove the foul and dark in their faces and don't apologize.

Make no mistake, the armies of darkness look like your high school pep squad, they are Satan's glee club. True evil is as pure as innocence and the godly who are filled with the spirit know this to be true. They are judged mad by the cloying masses of "good Christian folk" who are just into it for the occasional temptation, for the security of knowing they can fuck up and still get the big present at the end.

Dull, brown and grey

You like to think about the past like there was something in it that you let slip away, that if you had only stepped up, you coulda or woulda and that's crap. Sentimental, melancholy crap. The truth is you do that so can wallow in the past and pretend there is something worth regretting. The truth is worse because the truth is there was never anything there to begin with. You missed nothing and that means that not only is there no potential, there never was.

This life is not a story of hope. If you are lucky, it is a story about promise unfulfilled. More than likely it's just short, miserable and sorry.

Under pressure. Or not.

Today, my nurse takes my blood pressure because I stopped taking my Altace, blood pressure meds, about three months ago when my insurance ran out. She tells me that not only is my blood pressure OK, it's better than hers and she's pregnant. Then she wonders why I'm on Coreg. "For my heart." That's all anyone ever said to me. "It's for your heart" or "it's a gamma blocker." Oh that's nice. Nurse tells me it is usually only taken by old people. So all these drugs might have been doing more harm than good as far as I know.

POP ... goes the weasel

When I was a kid, I was so ashamed of my own disobedient genitals that I used to rack myself whenever I got a boner in a sad attempt at self-managed penance. But then who didn't, am I right? People? Come on, who's with me?
Oh sure, Catholics may be fucked up, but try growing up in the sticks in the years before cable with parents who don't like to explain things.