Skiing holiday

I'm completely knackered after my dad and I went on a skiing holiday at Paoli. Anyone who's properly skied would laugh their asses off at this hill, but it's nearby and I like it. I'm not writing today because of all that, but instead I got some nice photos of other completely random people doing jumps and stuff.

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Now playing: MSNBC Rachel Maddow (video) - 01-16-2009-195223
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Time for a change

Earth was the final straw. Laura Roslin has to go.

Laura Roslin as President of the Colonies has led us on a fruitless chase for earth. She has caused uncountable deaths of civilians and military men and women. She attempted election fraud which, if successful, likely would have doomed the entire human race. And she took hallucinogens and based her government off those hallucinations. Recently she wandered off on a selfish quest for "answers" (to what, we'll probably never know) on board a Cylon BaseStar, where, if the reports are accurate, she based even more judgements on hallucinations (this time from a Cylon Hybrid).

It has become clear to me as well as many others that President Roslin is unfit for the job of President of the Twelve Colonies of Kobol and should resign post-haste. The Vice President should also resign, in fact he never should have been in office. But when I think about it the Vice Presidency of a convicted terrorist reflects more on the judgement of Roslin than anything else.

Neither Laura Roslin nor her Vice President Zarek have ever been elected to the highest office in the fleet, yet we constantly find them on Colonial One. How do they keep ending up there? Certainly, Roslin's first term is excusable; the line of succession was carefully detailed in the Articles of Confederation. There should not have been a fight over whether the election should take place seven months after the destruction of the Colonies, but there was. It is clear from that incident, not to mention Roslin's attempt to falsify the election results, that Laura Roslin is anti-democratic. What, I have to wonder, is she doing in democratic politics?

There is one man who I think should be Laura Roslin's obvious replacement. It is not Gaius Baltar; he's busy with leading his new monotheistic cult. Not Galen Tyrol, the leader of the New Caprica and Fleet Unified Workers; he is still needed fighting for the working man (ironically against Laura Roslin's union-busting hard line). One man has worked as a lawyer, soldier, and politician, and therefore knows all the aspects of power and how best to balance it. He commanded a Battlestar, rescued us off New Caprica, has a long career as a Viper pilot (and Commander of the Air Group), successfully defended Gaius Baltar against one of the most controversial trials in the history of the Colonial Justice System. And most recently he has served the people as the Quorum delegate for Caprica and, when Roslin went on one of her vendettas, Acting-President of the Colonies. I speak of course of Leland Joseph Adama.

Adama is pro-union, pro-peace with the Cylons, yet is not above taking a hard line to do the right thing. He stopped Vice President Zarek's prisoner rebellion on the Astral Queen and still solved the problem Zarek brought up of elections. He helped prevent a possible assassination attempt on Cloud 9. He sided against Colonel Saul Tigh's military junta when then-Commander William Adama, Delegate Adama's own father, was under medical treatment after being shot by a Cylon sleeper agent. He almost single-handedly brought down the fleet black market under the control of a mob boss. He is a natural leader: tough at times, sympathetic at others, and always doing the right thing. Best of all, however, Lee Adama is not completely crazy like the past two presidents (one legitimate, one not, at least the second time).

I implore the people of the fleet to vote Lee Adama in the election.

Galactica pwns your face

I, like many of my fellow geeks, have been amping up for the return and finish of Battlestar Galactica this Friday. Then my fiancee's boss has to commit the third-worst case of party-pooping in history and have Liz work Friday night. When the mall closes right when Galactica comes on the air, that's definitely NOT enough time to get home.

If you're reading this and are unfamiliar with Battlestar Galactica (the 2003 series) (yes, it makes a huge difference) I'll give you a rundown of any given episode. There is a Cylon opening bit. In series one it gave a brief history of the Cylons (they were created by man, rebelled, evolved, look and feel human, some think they are human, and they have a PLAN). In series two, they dropped the look/feel human and some think they are, because by this point everyone knew was a Cylon. In series three, the intro only changed the pictures used. Series 4.0 gave a shot of every known Cylon with captions about that (twelve cylon models, etc).

The next part is a "previously on" segment, which is fairly common in serialised television, and I don't have to explain it (thank gods). Then they have a cold open, or a segment of the show that airs before the main titles. This is frequently either a) action-packed and some of the best television ever, or b) heavy on character development and some of the best television ever. Then the opening titles play. Series four's premiere, "He That Believeth in Me," was a perfect example of this format. Hell, that cold open even managed to give us character development AND be action-packed.

What follows the first ad break is some of the best storytelling, acting, writing, etc, that has ever been filmed. Since the show debuted in 2004 (after a 2003 miniseries pilot), it has been nominated for a Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) every year, winning in 2005 for the first series episode "33". In fairness, the only reason BSG did not win in 2006-8 for Pegasus, Downloaded, and Razor respectively is that those episodes were up against Doctor Who episodes penned by Steven Moffat, the best television writer in the known universe.

BSG has been critically praised and is probably one of the best things Sci-Fi has ever had going for them. Indeed, in late 2007 when their original remake of Flash Gordon was failing ... for good reason ... several Galactica mini-sodes aired during Flash Gordon episodes to draw viewers in as well as promote the upcoming feature-length episode, Razor. Like many things Galactica, the sodes (as they were known in fandom, coined by Galactica Watercooler podcast) brought up more questions than they ever answered. Luckily, that's just how Galactica fans like it. Among questions being asked about this final series include: Who or what is Starbuck, What's up with the final four Cylons, who is the final fifth, are the main group of Cylons going to come back and destroy Galactica and the humans, can the Cylons be trusted, and the ever-present question of Earth.

To quote Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Firefly: "If you speculate and it turns out you were right, you will have retroactively spoiled me. Which means I will have to retroactively kill you."


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Now playing: Bear McCreary - Prelude To War
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What's the matter with kids today?

Every now and then (roughly once a week) I have an off-day. I didn't sleep well last night, when I got back from class I went directly to bed, and now I can't think of a damn thing to write. In an effort to combat such days becoming anything more than an inconvenience, I use these days as an opportunity to watch telly and hope for a muse.

I'm watching West Wing series six and one of Santos's (Jimmy Smits) campaign issues is a longer school year. Personally, as a child I would've kicked this congressman in the tits for suggesting extending the (to me) already long school year. Now, when I see kids in the mall acting like little entitled shitheads who know next to nothing of literature, science, and maths, I think putting them in school year round, six days a week, is a damned good fucking idea. Hell, if you lock the shits in and don't let them go home at the end of the day I'm not horribly opposed to that.

I'm not a fan of kids in the best of times, and can count on one hand the number of children I actively like as people. I like them because they happen to have enough critical thinking skills to make them seem like adult humans as opposed to dropout-adults-in-training like I usually have to deal with. I only recently began actively considering having children of my own, with no small amount of pressuring from my fiancee. I had several caveats such as no faery stories pretended to be real (tooth faery et al), public schooling unless there's no other option, and under no circumstances will they be taught that one way is right and all others wrong without significant information on all levels.

This hasn't brought me any lack of worries that our children would have poorly-developed imaginations. In the end I don't think that's such a problem, as at least half the films in my DVD collection are sci-fi or fantasy. Plus at first glance, ... all of the books on my bookshelf are sci-fi or fantasy. And if there was ever a worry about imagination, we single-handedly ended it by deciding we would read to our child from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Voices and everything.
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Now playing: Rachel Maddow 01-12-09
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But cats EAT fish ...

PETA did it again. They acted like fucking idiots.

This time it's fish. They want to save the fish. Of course, they say there's a PR problem with saving the fish, so they want to rename the entire phylum cordata to "Sea Kittens." I presume the scientific term would be felis aqueous?

Or maybe we should rename anyone having anything to do with PETA Homo Retardus. Seriously, Sea Kittens? I've crapped better ideas than this. I have shoes with more creativity. Plus, maybe they didn't know this little fact because they're anti-pet, but cats eat fish. In the wild, in domestic situations, big cats, little cats, house cats - they all love to eat seafood. Shrimp, trout, flounder, tuna, salmon, fish of any kind, my cat loves it. So has every cat I've ever met. That's why they make dry cat food fish-flavoured: to get them to gobble up what would otherwise be a bowl of Weetabix for cats.

I understand being against animal cruelty; I'm against it myself. I even understand being so against animal cruelty that one doesn't eat meat. That's fine. I would consider it myself if I liked any veggies. Hell, I'm even okay with not eating or using any kind of animal or animal-related product, although if I had to become vegan I think I'd just kill myself. The problem I have is trying to stop other people doing what they want to do when it doesn't actually hurt anyone.

Granted, overfishing is a problem. Granted, it's more ecologically friendly to eat vegetarian. But honestly, eating meat doesn't hurt anyone except the animal that's killed to make the food. That can be helped at least a little by making sure the methods of slaughter (that's a term that really helps) are humane. Buying kosher meats from a local butcher is probably the easiest, if a slightly more expensive, way of making sure your meat is killed humanely. Being a douchebag to an entire geographical area (northeast, northwest and Florida come to mind in this example) and attempting to put entire industries out of work is not a good way to get animal rights.

I live in the US. Nobody in this country has ever done something they didn't want to do without significant pressure. A non-profit organisation has never had enough power to put that much pressure on a person. Churches, corporations, governments, and local "culture" are the only things with the kind of power that can actually forbid someone doing anything or cause someone to think they have to do something. Until and unless PETA becomes that powerful, they will continue to have only "ha ha look at the retards from PETA doing another stupid fucking thing again" stories in the media.

Well, the media that doesn't necessarily follow their philosophy, at least.

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Now playing: Ozzy Osbourne - Gets Me Through
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lol @ the irony of typing an anti-veggie post while listening to a vegetarian ROKK OUT

In what I HOPE is an unrelated note

I went to see The Unborn with Liz and someone from the Sci-Fi club tonight. We got into the cinema right as the pre-show adverts began playing. I don't mean the ones for Pepsi and the National Guard. I mean the local ones.

Now, when I worked at that cinema the in-between-shows ads played on a constant loop. I guess the owner realised that's incredibly expensive, so now they play for the 15 minutes leading up to the adverts for Pepsi, the National Guard, and several sports and fizzy drinks. They include businesses right next to the cinema, businesses whose owners are friendly with the cinema owner, and the like. But there was one that made me react with shouting, and the only reason I wasn't ejected from the building was because Liz noticed and put her hand firmly over my mouth until the advert was over. The advert was a recruitment ad.

For the Evansville Police.

Maybe I'm off track here, but shouldn't the police have a higher standard than "Average Moviegoer"? Sure, a lot of those movies have cops in them. Some are mysteries that resemble real policework. Others are shoot-em-up flicks that only resemble policework done in cities hosting the Republican and/or Democrat National Conventions. But either way, most policework consists of filing reports, sitting around, and executing black people traffic duties.

This explains a lot, really. It explains how cops hang out at Starbucks for hours on end. It explains how they still turn on their lights to get through traffic or a red traffic light. It explains why there's a well-known cop in the area whose entire purpose seems to be busting USI students for drinking, even when they aren't drinking. The reason is because THEY DON'T HAVE ANY QUALIFICATIONS BEFORE GOING TO POLICE ACADEMY!

Police Academy is supposed to be the place where cops-in-training learn specifics and how to do their job, not where they learn ... you know, I can't even think of a comparison, because THERE ISN'T ONE. Police shouldn't be fucking psychopaths who enjoy shooting two guns while flying through the air screaming, they should be people who have an actual interest in enforcing the fucking law. I worry that this will continue to provide Evansville with an utterly shitty police force.

At least the film was good.

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Now playing: Atheist Community of Austin - The Non-Prophets 8.1
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Really?!

Three stories on CNN. Three on MSNBC. Only one of the CNN stories even talks about the shooting, another is about the protests that turned to riots (I have heard due to "political tourism", that is outsiders coming in to wreck shit for fun), and one is about the cop who did the shooting resigning.

MSNBC is little better; one story about the riots, one about the tape of the shooting, and another about there being "Two stories" from the shooting. Apart from one story from the New York Times and one from the AP via the Boston Globe, I nearly didn't hear about this shooting.

Well, if it weren't for the blogs, that is.

I personally have a lot more respect for blogs as news sources now. Daily Kos and Shakesville both showed extensive sources for this criminal act. Shakesville even linked a video taken by a train passenger that clearly shows Oscar Grant sitting against the wall with three to four other men, then the police force him to lie prone on the floor while one cop kneels on him. Then the other police creature (I cannot call him a man; I know not what species one has to be to do such a thing) pulls his gun.

Multiple sources say the gun "accidentally went off". That is not remotely the point. He was doing nothing that could be interpreted by a thinking person (or even an extremely jittery, stressed, thinking person) as an attempt at violence or escape. Grant was struggling to be sure, but then again, he did have a cop's knee in his fucking back.

According to the CNN report, the fired shot (I refuse to use weaselspeak and say "Discharged round") entered through Grant's back, ricocheted off the floor and pierced his lungs. He died seven hours later. Happy fucking new year, incidentally, to his four-year-old daughter.

Throughout the period of wrestling Grant to the floor, which was not obviously justified, the people viewing and recording from the train were shouting at the police that their actions, to put it lightly, were not proportionate. One man can be clearly heard saying "That's fucked up" repeatedly. Then the gun goes off (whether accidentaly or not is frankly irrelevant, as the officer should not have HAD IT OFF HIS HIP IN THE FIRST PLACE), and there is a moment of ghastly silence and shock. Everyone begins to shout at the police (quite understandably at this point) and the train doors shut them into the car.

This is possibly one of the most hideous videos I have ever seen. If you don't want to be utterly pissed off, sickened, depressed, or shocked beyond belief, do not watch. link

Judge for your damn selves if it was justified. The police creature who fired the shot resigned Wednesday. That should not save him from at the very least, an incredibly long prison term. As the poster of the above-linked video says, "You don’t get to execute someone and just find yourself on the job market again." Grant was cooperating by all available evidence and is now dead for the crime of obeying a police officer's orders.

Damn the lot of you. You deserve Inquisition-level punishments.

Round and round and round they go

A friend linked me today to a story about Greenfield, Ind.'s mayor proposing four new roundabouts. To quote the webcomic "Questionable Content," I am in favour of this so much you have no idea.

You see, in my hometown of Evansville, Ind., we have an east side and a west side. These sides of town have developed their own segregated cultures due to the difficulty involved in crossing from one side to the other. There are only two roads. One is a six-lane divided highway (which shrinks to four lanes outside of city limits, but even so) and the other is a four-lane divided street that doubles as State Route 62. The latter is called Diamond Ave. within city limits, and is far too north of where I typically need to go. Thus, my only real option is the former, known within city limits as the Lloyd Expressway.

The Lloyd as it is known colloquially was named for an ex-mayor who was murdered by a woman who believed him to still be the mayor back in the early 1980s. The expressway was constructed in his memory (partly due to his involvement during his life and time in office, I believe). It runs from Warrick County to the east to Posey County to the west. All along its route are traffic lights approximately every half-mile to mile, apart from one two-and-a-half mile stretch of elevated highway. How, many have asked, including my father upon its construction in 1982, the hell is this a god damned "expressway"?

Matters only get worse, of course. In the mid 1990s, there was an extensive construction project known locally for its severe cock-ups. The project took over one thousand days to complete. Eventually, approximately ten years ago, the project was completed and all lanes of the Lloyd "Expressway" were open for traffic again, apart from minor construction issues that all roads face. This past year, two lanes (one each direction) were shut down and an off-ramp was constructed. The two lanes being shut down increased the amount of time it took to cross Fulton Ave. westbound, the location where all lanes reopened.

Come December, the eastbound route is still restricted to two lanes after Fulton until Wabash, then restricted again to two lanes upon leaving city limits (which causes one to wonder why the fuck they don't just cut it to two lanes for the time in between but never mind that for now), but the westbound route takes the newly-constructed off-ramp, stops at a newly-installed traffic light on South Fulton, goes to another traffic light at First Ave. (southbound), ANOTHER traffic light at First Ave. (northbound), then to an on-ramp and back onto the elevated highway portion of the Lloyd.

Now hypothetically they are removing the traffic light at Fulton Ave. and installing an on/off ramp system. This is something I approve of, however I would very much prefer if we didn't have to trade one traffic light for three in the mean time. If you can build an off-ramp, odds are you could also remove the need for three traffic lights and simply have a turn-in/turn-out space like other sections of the highway have. This would only limit it to two traffic lights at First Ave., but with a bit of effort they could be much better synchronised than they currently are. The ultimate up-side of this would be fewer people would think their city planners and road commissioners are stupid fucking assholes.

Or, we could replace half the traffic lights with roundabouts and let the stupid drivers die on them.

You fucking idiot

Dear fucknut:

Your username is a Spanish-language pun on "Backwards", and it's never been so appropriate: it perfectly describes your thinking on nearly everything. You actually said, in a discussion on Proposition 8 and homosexuality,

The backlash against Mormons is not about them being "interlopers" it is because Mormons are minority that it is politically correct to demonize.

Would this be a bad time to mention that Mormons are allowed to do damn near whatever they like? Mormons are not allowed to marry multiple people, certainly, but then again neither is anyone else. Gay marriage would work as an equaliser: Everyone can marry one person of legal age of their choice, regardless of race, religion or gender. But the Mormons don't want that. Could they be jealous because they can't marry the twelve people they want? Honestly, I don't have a huge problem with polygamy either, so after gay marriage, if the Mormons want to push for poly-marriage, I'd be happy to support that cause too. I'll be happy to be the bigger person and support those who have opposed and even demonised my friends and those I've championed. 

But currently, Mormons are the most persecuted group, or at least popular to be persecuted. Are they really? You really think so, Backwards? Let's go to Richmond, Calif. Richmond is on the East San Francisco Bay area, a few miles north of Oakland. You know, the same San Francisco Bay Area that is a central city of gay culture and liberal politics. There was a story in the news, not widely reported of course, because it was sort of a downer, that on 13 December, a woman was hit with a blunt object, forcibly stripped of her clothes, and gang-raped. She was left naked outside a burned-out apartment block (source: San Francisco Chronicle). She MUST have been a Mormon, right? Nope. She was an open lesbian. The crime is being investigated as a hate crime, probably because it WAS one. 

A google search of "mormon hate crime" turns up two or three stories from Arizona newspapers of a Mormon missionary getting beaten up by an unknown assailant who shouted "Mormon" at him, and the rest of the results on the first page are attacks on buildings, not people, certainly not RAPES, many of which post-Proposition 8. 

Now maybe I'm off-target on this, but I think rape is the most despicable thing a so-called human can do to another human (or non-human as the case may be, but let's stick to intra-species violation). Murder, assault, battery, emotional abuse, property damage, or dismemberment don't hold a candle in my view to rape. So the next time a Mormon missionary is kidnapped, mugged, and gang-raped, and the police treat it as if it MIGHT be a hate crime as opposed to an OBVIOUS hate crime, I'll admit that maybe Mormons are persecuted. As it is, anyone claiming Mormons as a minority "that it is politically correct to demonise" can go fuck themselves.

Dr Gupta (CNND) and the economy

I'm really not confident in this administration anymore. I expected to lose confidence in the person I elected, of course, but I really wished I'd be able to watch the inauguration in peace first. So, gays: you're not a priority, we'd rather involve someone who hates gay people ... yet who claims he doesn't hate gay people, doesn't fear gay people, rather that gay people fear Christ (he said it. Yup, he did.) and ... you know, I'm not sure I can write about the things this guy has said. Having a functional brain and a severe lack of cognitive dissonance, I can't even begin to see where his line of thinking begins, let alone where it connects to other things. 

Not only that, but now Sanjay Gupta, a CNN doctor, is proposed to be the next Surgeon General of the United States. Based on his previous opinions (a glance at his Wikipædia article comes to mind) this makes me very nervous. I am guessing (uneducated guess though it may be) that now health care, which you would have to be a fucking crackhead to say "it's in great shape", is not a priority either. What's next, are we going to say "Fuck the economy" too? "Americans don't need to have jobs" sound like a good policy? Granted it sure seemed like we were going to hear it sometime soon during the auto bailout hearings, which lasted two to three weeks (as opposed to the bank/Wall St bailouts which lasted ONE).

This leads me to something I really just don't understand: If people are losing jobs the world over ... who is buying the things these people make? Who is paying the people who still have jobs? Seriously, if the economy is going south, why do I see people coming into my job at the mall and buying things? I suppose, sure, if people don't keep buying things regardless of the state of the economy (Which is FAKE anyway) then the economy will get even worse(er) than it is. But isn't that just horrendously cyclical? It feels like we ought to be able to just start producing, people will start buying with all the money they're making producing all that stuff they're producing, which in turn will create MORE jobs, ad infinitum. 

Granted, I know fuck-all about economics, but that's where I am.