First Draft

All We Can Do is Keep Breathing: Caprica Thread

Hottest. Space. Marriage. Ever.

Jacob:

Amanda's watching the home movies in her bedroom: Lacy gets shy about the camera and puts Zoë in front of it, and Zoë -- wearing a gold infinity pin on her sailor dress -- talks more crazy cult talk about how their lives are about to totally change, and also that she is a very pretty girl. Amanda weeps, and then Daniel shows up in the bedroom looking drunk and nuts, and without prelude he asks why she even wants to go to the ceremony. She's not sure why. Daniel flops down on the bed by her -- this scene is the best scene in the whole episode, I think -- and nearly starts crying when he tries to explain. "I don't want to think. I just feel awful, and angry, and numb, and..." Amanda asks who on earth he's mad at, and she cries listening to him: "Everybody. And everything. Myself, and the world. Her." Amanda can't even really hear him say that last one. It's too true. It's too unbearably disgusting.

You know, whenever anybody on this show goes on about how such a sweet innocent child (whether they're talking about Zoe, or Lacy, or Ben, or whoever) couldn't possibly be a terrorist, I wonder if they've ever met any teenagers. 

Younger Than That Now: Caprica Thread

Jacob:

If you have that kind of information, if you know that the tracks run out and people are going to die, it's not only your duty to use it, but your purpose on this earth. To be in the world, but not of it. To help, and to heal, and to save the world, and in so doing, save yourself. Or, as a lovely harsh woman will say years from now, to fulfill your destiny: to love them, and take care of them, show them the glory of peace. To see your infinite mercy matched only by your power, and complete control. Isn't that the definition of the righteous man? The saint? The martyr? Kara Thrace, Laura Roslin, Tory Foster, Natalie Six, D'Anna Three; Ellen Tigh, in her resurrection. Gaius, Zarek, Felix. Terrorists, if Antigone's a terrorist: to give up the right to walk in this world, for a duty that must be obeyed for our souls to stay intact, unbending.

If you saw the roller coaster heading toward the gap, if you were in the middle of that nightmare, wouldn't you do anything to stop it?

Spoilers after the jump. Sorry I didn't get this up last night, this week just totally got away from me.

Passion and Delivery

All right, look. I don't want to get into it over the iPad or whatever the fuck new shiny thing is coming along tomorrow that will "save newspapers." It's bullshit, I've been saying it's bullshit, you all know about it.

What I do want to talk about is this:

But leaving aside any discussion of Brooks the human being, this latest column of his is something that has to be discussed. The propagandistic argument he makes about the dangers of “populism”  is spelled out here as clearly as you’ll ever see it expressed in print, and this exact thing is a key reason why so much of the corruption that went on on Wall Street in the past few decades was allowed to spread unchecked.

That’s because this argument is tacitly accepted by almost everyone in our business, and most particularly is internalized in the thinking of most newspaper editors and TV news producers, who over time develop an ingrained habitual fear of publishing material that seems hysterical or angry.

This certainly has an effect on the content of news reporting, but perhaps even more importantly, it impacts the tone of news coverage, where outrages are covered without outrage, and stories that are not particularly “balanced” in reality — stories that for instance are quite plainly about one group of people screwing another group of people — become transformed into cool, “objective” news stories in which both the plainly bogus version of events and the real and infuriating version are given equal weight.

I've said before that the tendency to mistake passion for bias is far more destructive than any bias ever could be, because it makes stakeholders suspect and gives automatic preference to any claim of impartiality. It makes argument distasteful. I cannot comprehend this, and I feel like it's a recent thing, like in order to differentiate themselves from cable/radio screamers who scream all the time about stuff that isn't worth screaming about, newspapers decided to never scream ever no matter what, and somehow that evolved into this milquetoast bullshit where the only people who get to talk are the ones who have nothing to say.

I don't get this because I don't think argument is distasteful. Argument is heaven. Argument is like cotton-candy-covered chocolate caffeine sex all day long on acid, argument is why we're on this planet. God dances when His children defeat Him in argument. Argument is how we learn and grow and push and change. It's how we live. If you're not here to  argue — and I don't mean that literally, you can say just as much with your actions — but if you're not here to say something somehow in whatever voice you possess, then God, I don't know what to do with you.

When you lionize the refusal to raise one's voice no matter the provocation, when you chalk an automatic in the loss column because somebody feels something, you're making the world around you just a little more dead. And you can put that shit on an iPad or on a piece of paper or in a newscast or in a Happy Meal, and the delivery mechanism won't matter. People won't pay for it. And you know what? Even if you gave it to them for free, they won't read it. Because it doesn't matter.

A good newspaper bleeds love for its community, cheerleads shamelessly for the betterment of all the people in its purview, argues passionately on behalf of those who cannot argue for themselves, and fights for what its leaders have decided to fight for, loudly and boldly and without apology. A lot of people think the problem with our elite media is that they fight for the powerful and comfortable and there's lots of remedies prescribed for that (Stop hiring white college grads! Stop hiring inside the community! Stop hiring outside the community! Stop unpaid internships! Start unpaid "citizen journalism!" GAH, to all of it.). I think the problem is they don't fight at all because they consider it uncouth. 

When you stifle the voices of passionate debate because they upset people, when you choose the blandest and least offensive tack in every situation, when you work so hard to fight for nothing that anyone with an opinion is automatically ruled out of order, you are not creating a newspaper that deserves to survive, no matter what format you decide to put it in. And that's what's happened over the past 20 years (one could argue, over the past 60). We've made ourselves smaller and smaller, hoping we'll upset nobody, and it's worked. Nobody's upset. Nobody's upset at all.

That's a problem Steve Jobs has no possible way of solving for us.

A.

Caprica Thread

I put this up back after I watched the DVD, but here it is with a new thread for those of you who first saw the thing tonight. I understand everybody saying feh, not the new Galactica, but I think I'm gonna hang with it for a while, see where it goes. 

A.

Resenting the Youth

Amanda comes close to articulating the thing that always trips my wires about Those Kids Today stories:

As much as it defeats the desires of curmudgeons to believe that kids these days are somehow losing their way, the truth is that IQ scores have been rising steadily over the generations, a phenomenon known as the Flynn effect.  Science writer Steven Johnson wrote an entire book, Everything Bad Is Good For You, where he effectively argues that the very "overstimulation" that people like Farndale resent is probably why people keep getting smarter.  Having spent the past two days deeply immersed in the newest version of Super Mario Brothers, I can safely agree with Johnson that video games actually worked my brain pretty hard, with no noticeable decline in my literacy skills.  After all, a good video game is a rapid fire series of problem-solving situations.  Shouldn't we want kids to spend their leisure time working on that? (Scientist friend on hand wants it to be known that video games are used as therapy for ADHD kids, to retrain their brains to concentrate.  Also that it works a lot better than boring kids to death in public schools.)

[snip]

Not that I think any of this reality will cause the curmudgeons of the world to lay off complaining about kids and their video games.  Once you give yourself permission to resent kids for having access to pleasures that baffle you, you're probably not going to be in the mood to applaud them for also being better at problem-solving and having greater comfort with rapidly changing technology.

Emphasis mine, because it is resentment, and the reason it makes me crazy is that it's unproductive. Look, man, I'm sorry I don't have to walk uphill both ways to school, but that ... what ... I mean, what does that even DO? If I apologize for not knowing how hard you had it, can we move on to cure cancer and end poverty and shit now? We have things to DO here.

I pull this shit, too, I'm not immune, I wear 1940s dresses and write about local history and this is my current favorite movie, but let's not pretend it's a dodge. For example, my telling you all about how I used to go home from my job at the paper with line tape in my hair and six bandages on my fingers from Xacto knife cuts and covered in wax from doing paste-up may be funny to us both, but it doesn't actually help you get the paper out your own self. Living in the world we live in, what are we to do? Memory lane is awesome, I live there part of the time. But memory lane starts being a destructive escape the moment you start acting like it's a year-round hangout and using it as a way to avoid worrying that somebody is passing you by.

Now, granted, not everyone thrives with the Wii or the Interwebs jacked directly back into their heads, but this is exactly the point. This one-size-fits-all attitude that the future is always scary and entertainment is always suspect and pop culture is always destructive and TV rots your brain and typing on a typewriter is just more virtuous because it's REAL (tm) and whatnot is just as dumb as saying the iPhone is automatically better than anything ever and Facebook is the new Christmas and you old, motherfucker and we should all stop speaking to one another in anything but binary and burn all our books because they take up space in the library. People do not all react the same way to everything.

We all have things that shaped us and we all have values but this turns into an argument not about those values but about brand loyalties. The Internet does not prevent us from working hard or having meaningful interaction with others, not by its own self. Video games by the nature of their existence do not make someone an anti-social asshole, they just help people who are already anti-social assholes reinforce those tendencies; if it wasn't video games it'd be something else. Didn't we have this dumbassed argument after Columbine, already? I don't even play video games, because I'm lazy as hell and it takes work to build up any skill at those things, but I get so nuts when people try to blame the existence of morons on anything but those morons.

And it doesn't really say anything all that nice about the speaker, either, saying that your generation was awesome just because you didn't have all this stuff. Better to argue, really, that it was your superior work ethic and your general adherence to Good Things in The World and your innate power of Great that kept you from sucking, and not a lack of access to Playstation.

A.

The Flounce

I'M OMG LEAVING!!11!

Don’t get me wrong: when someone changes their mind about an issue and explains why, it can be very interesting. And I’m all for it. And when someone—I won’t name names—says “how the fuck could I have supported these idiots who drove the country into a ditch”, I think that’s great.

But why would anyone feel the need to announce to the world that they no longer feel like part of the left on account of the fact that some lefty bloggers aren’t sufficiently supportive of Obama?

Other than blatant link-baiting, you mean?

Seriously, it's a shriek for attention, that's all it is. This happens all the frigging time in fandom-Internet-world, where someone declares that he or she simply can't take it anymore and the pain is too much and people are just so OMG MEEN and it didn't used to be like this! Things used to be perfect! Everyone used to be nice! There was once a place where people were perfect and no one disagreed! And off the aggrieved party will flounce, leaving presumably heartbroken fellow fans yearning for the beloved's return.

The problem with flouncing, of course, is that it only gets you attention temporarily. You get lots of petting, told you're indispensable, begged not to go. Wailings are posted about how without you the community/message board/blog/journal is nothing, and this is a sign of the apocalypse, that someone like YOU could be driven out. Once you've flounced, though, eventually the moaning over your departure ceases. Everybody gets back to work. People might think it's a shame you're not there anymore, but they don't stop their lives for you most of the time.

Which is usually when the flouncer flounces right back into the group he or she left so dramatically. Sometimes it's with a declaration that the aggrieved party just won't let the bastards win, or an attempt to blame the return on the overwhelming requests of unnamed persons who just can't stand to see anyone so talented/special/beautiful/unique leave. But most often the flouncer just shows back up and resumes arguing with everybody he or she was arguing with before. So it's just a lot of fuss over nothing.

That is, of course, assuming people do beg the flouncer to come back and try to placate him or her, and don't respond the way my mother responded whenever I threatened to run away as a child: "Go on, then. I'll miss you."

For what it's worth, I don't have a problem with anybody quitting "the Left" over dissatisfaction with Obama's first year in office, or over health care, or over the color of the brochure for the Welcome Comrades Dinner or whatever the fuck they want to leave "the Left" over. You shouldn't identify with any political movement you don't want to be seen at parties with. Just don't expect the rest of the Internet to drape itself in black and mourn your departure. Leave something because you want to be gone, not because you're really secretly hoping we'll all talk you out of it.

A.

Th-U-Ga Li-Fe

That's right. It's Schrödinger's Tat.

I love nerds.  Check out some nerd tattoos here, whence I so shamelessly hotlinked the above image.

And why in the hell is there no element with the symbol "G," anyway?  Gallium, Germanium, Gadolinium--why do they all get two letters?  Stupid science, messing up a good joke.

Avante Garde you make me hard

It's not a bad Xmas vid, but sorry, I just can't pass up gay font geeks.

Nominate First Draft for Supreme Blog Overlord 2009

Every year I forget to beg people to shower us with accolades and attention and every year when the finals roll around I'll get an e-mail that begins, "What the fuck are we, chopped liver?" from somebody who's pissed off we weren't nominated for Best Blog EVAR instead of, I don't know, Swampland or something.

This year I'm not gonna let that happen. I'm going to ask you to nominate us, so that we can lose officially instead of by default. So there.

A.

Fundraising Drive Ends: Thank You All

 

Thank you to everyone who contributed to the fundraising drive, who linked or donated or sent encouraging notes. I tried to reply to everything; if I missed somebody in there somewhere, THANK YOU. Your support means a great deal.

A.

First Draft Fundraising Continues

New posts begin below.

I get a question a lot, variations of "What do you write about on your web site?" or "What is your blog about?" And I usually respond with "it's about cat macros, Chris Dodd and making fun of shitty news stories" because it is. I joked a while back that the closest thing we had to a mission statement was TRY NOT TO SUCK. It's not a joke, though, really, because that's what we do around here. We try not to suck. We try to stand up for what we care about not just with our words but with our work, and we do the job as is put in front of us to do. Try not to suck, that's reductive, but it is true for all that.

Thank you to those of you who've given already. To those of you who haven't, please consider supporting us in our mission.

A.

First Draft Fundraising Day Three

New posts begin below.

The drive continues. Back when we were mocking the Freepi and their Freep-a-Thons, and how they complain all the time about how blogging is so hard and unrewarding, I kept thinking about what a shitty argument that is. Support this, doing it sucks and without your money it wouldn't be worth it! Plus the real  problem with reader blackmail is you can only go to that well so many times, right? 

First Draft Fundraising Week: Day 2

New posts begin below this.

This year, during a lot of conferences and meetings and summits and "whither journalism" discussions that basically had very little to do with blogging to which I went anyway, people kept asking about the business model. What's your business model? What's your plan? How do you intend to make money at what you do?

My short answer was, back in July, I have no freaking idea, but my longer one is that the work done here, the parsing of media ridiculousness and the discussion of what matters that goes on here every day, is supported by those who read and enjoy it. Supported to whatever extent those readers see fit. I'm so grateful that all of you who contributed already feel this place has value to you, and ask that if you haven't yet given, you consider doing so.

A.

First Draft Fundraising Week Begins

All right. We do this once a year, ask those of you who read the site and like the site to support the site. Cat macros ain't cheap, y'all, and the ferrets need new shoes for school.

Seriously, in the past year we've done some work I'm really proud of, like covering the election (and by "covering" I mean "posting drunkenly in the crack van until 4 a.m. and standing for nine hours in a crowd of similarly hopped-up political lunatics in a city park while Wolf Blitzer, the dicksmack, autowittered on about numbers") and the convention before that. Plus all the nonsense since then. Speaking only for myself, if I couldn't have talked through the tea party nitwittage with you all I think I would have finally become convinced the world had gone mad.

We've brought on a LOT of new voices, reached out to a lot of places and put our work where our pixels are in public schools and in care packages. It's hard to say what made me prouder of this site: The way Mr. A staggered down the stairs with all those heavy boxes full of stuff bound for Afghanistan or the photos of journalism equipment bought for school kids coming back to us.

I've also been working, behind the scenes, on building up some alliances with the local blogger contingent here in Chicago. Beyond meeting some great folks and exchanging some links, everything's still in the "wouldn't it be cool if ..." stage, but it's a start.

I'm not going to plead poverty or guilt anybody into giving; this economy sucks hard and you've been generous all year to various projects we've done. But if you can give, and you feel this place has added value to your Internet experience, hit the donate button top left.

Thanks.

A.

He Never Was a Stranger: Caprica Thread

Yes, all my post titles will be Cohen allusions for a while. DEAL.

Jacob:

Joseph Adama, the Caprica lawyer, he said once: "Be good, but not too good." So what happens when your prayers are answered? What happens when you see so clearly that you go blind? What happens when you burn off what doesn't work, and circumstances demand that you keep on burning, until there's nothing left? If you take away everything that a person is, and everything they wanted to be, and everything they ever were, and everything they ever loved. Orphans still have memory, and love, and dreams: What happens when you take those away, too?

Spoilers for the pilot, supposed to be airing in January BUT I COULDN'T WAIT, inside. If you haven't caught it on DVD and don't want to be ruined for it, don't continue.

Pssssst, Mr. A....

I think these would make lovely stocking stuffers for someone...

 

BSG Little Frakkers, via Think Geek

Guys? Guys? GUYS?!!!

Michael Steele wants to hear from you.

The Internet has been around a while, now. But, I still find it an amazing platform for innovation, not just in technology, but in life. Beyond admiring the way it powers so many inventions and businesses, it has become a personal thing for me. I love the fact that, wherever I might be, I can use technology to see my family and chat with them, and Social Media to tap into what my friends are doing.

Now we know why Sarah Palin quit: To become his ghostwriter.

Via Dan Sinker.

A.

ps. "The Internet has been around a while, now."

This Is What Socialized Medicine Drives You To

Those crazy Canadians. Before seeing this pulp cover I had no idea that Canada had ten, count 'em, famous criminals back in the day. I think of Canadians as very polite folks who are the best neighbors in the world even if they have an actual Conservative Prime Minister these days. Of course, Mr. Harper has the good sense NOT to mess too much with socialized medicine.

This post is, obviously, not about the effect of socialized medicine but is a rather self serving exercise to point you toward a regular feature at my own little corner of the interweb. I have a longstanding interest in pulp paperbacks and their cover artwork. The more lurid the better. So, if you're interested, check out this week's Pulp Fiction Thursday post; especially if you want to learn more about dancing sandwiches...

Okay, back to the hunt for desperate Canadian criminals on the run from the RCMP. Hell, they may even use the evil guvmint run system to fix their gunshot wounds. Couldn't happen in the US and A: they'd go to a croooked vet or a drunken quack.

Uh oh, I hope I'm not in trouble for shameless self-promotion. I also haven't said fuck enough since coming on board but I know how to redeem myself, quote my late, great friend Ashley Morris: fuck you, you fucking fucks. Speaking of the Perfesser, my friend and fellow NOLA blogger Mark Folse went to an event featuring the writing staff of HBO's upcoming opus, Treme. He chatted up David Simon who hinted that there will be a character partially based on Ashley in the show.LINK. 

New Poster

Everybody say hi to Adrastos, who will be joining First Draft as of whenever he gets up this morning and checks his e-mail. He's been blogging from NOLA since forever, and I'm thrilled he's decided to come on board.

A.

Joe Wilson Kissed Your Husband on the Mouth

I love the Internets.

A.

Without form, and void

So, Gmail was (relatively) briefly off-line yesterday, causing a cascading digital freak out. The #gmailfail in turn begot the #failwhale as within minutes, hundreds — yes, hundreds — began to process their experience of the disconnect via Twitter.

Personally, I was more curious and amused than upset. I get a few personal emails a day but the bulk of my Gmail is from other software programs, like my calendar, task updates, reminders, and Twitter.  Ironically, when Gmail came back up, the only mails I had at the moment were copies of tweets about the Gmail outage.

Earth-shattering or not, events like this do bring up serious issues. The wisdom of mass reliance on "the cloud," how much backup redundancy is too much, is Google the handmaiden of Satan, etc. I'm always sobered when I'm brought face to face with just how much digital and/or gadgetry assistance I rely on to get around, so I understand completely the more crazed responses from yesterday.  Gmail isn't my major crutch, but I have others. I grow increasingly reliant on them, they become mission-critical, my attachment and connection deepens, tools become more than tools. Some become addictions.

ZDnet ran this feature a few weeks back:

the technology that you simply can’t do without in your everyday life, for the one gadget that no one’s going to take from you unless it’s pried from your cold, dead fingers : Dead Finger Tech.

Which one piece of technology — gadget, peripheral or software application –  does your life most depend upon?

These are mine:

1Password - remembers all my online passwords, so I don't have to. I've been without it a few times and I was dead in the water. 

Jott and Toodle-do. Task keeper and voice-driven messaging service that I use in unison, and separately, to keep myself on target and GSD (get shit done).  Some people ridicule this kind of thing but I'm dependent on it. I'm not a linear thinker, just not wired that way, nor would I want to be.  My thought process works for me, I've learned to appreciate it for creative reasons, but it doesn't lend itself to staying on task.

Google calendar sync. In my own real life, I use Google calendar.  At work I have to use Outlook. I've learned through trial and error that keeping two separate calendars is counter productive to my ability to stay on schedule in either place.  This syncs up my two worlds. When it fails, I'm lost in the ether between.

iPod Touch and my G-1. Between the two of them, carry all the above, plus music and other entertainment, my address book, maps and other vital reference data. These two are my warp core. As they go, so goes my nation. 

How about you? What are you naked without?

Redesign Comin'

The banner hasn't been operative for some time, the sidebars are starting to get on my clutter-aversion bad side, and in general I think I need to rearrange the furniture so the urge to move into a whole new house will pass. I'm not planning anything too radical, but if any of you have anything you want to see, now's the time to ask for it.

A.

Five Years

So like most important things, our blogversary slipped past me in a haze of overcaffeination and outrage at Republican idiocy. Five years ago this was a semi-password-protected site full of my ramblings about stuff and my absolute, rock-solid confidence that we would not have four more years of Worst President Ever. Though we didn't make it up that particular hill, I'm proud of what we've accomplished since, and of all the people who've participated in that, either by blogging here or guestblogging, commenting, supporting our various efforts and causes, and actually getting off the couch more often than not to do stuff.

Hats off to all of you.

A.

Skule werked four me. I kin reed an spel…

One of the perils of spending time with the folks is that you lose control over what is being watched on TV. The other night, we had “America’s Got Talent” on the big screen, watching smoke come out of David Hasselhoff’s ears as he tries to decide between a boy teen sensation and a girl teen sensation. The strange thing to me was that neither of these kids had a name that would give you any kind of hint as to the gender of the child. I swear, when he picked “Arcadia,” I was amazed that the boy reacted with joy.

In any case, in the middle of this bastion of mid-summer programming, Mariah Carey showed up to promote her new single, complete with the bad-ass male dance troupe that apparently is comprised of the descendants of Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” guys. When the song was over, they put up a graphic on the screen as to how to get “Maria Carey’s latest single.” It was up for a moment and quickly came down. I couldn’t rewind it (the folks lack TiVo, another peril of the house) so I was convinced I didn’t see it until a friend texted me about the spelling error as well.

This was the latest in a string of spelling FAIL that I’ve noticed lately in some pretty visible places. This road sign has become a national story, in that the only word they managed to get right, apparently, was “exit.”

Even worse, when Dad and I were rolling through Vegas last month, we found this beauty, a rare instance of “fail FAIL.” Making this worse, it was in the parking lot for the COURT HOUSE. Apparently while justice is blind, she is also illiterate.

Dad kind of shrugged it off as par for the course. This is the same man who sent me to Catholic school, where the nuns would beat you senseless for not looking up both the spelling AND the meaning of words you felt like using.

I asked my students (an editing class) what they thought of this phenomenon. Many of them noted it was unacceptable, horrible, rotten, bad and no good. These, however, are also the people who occasionally send me emails with the word “assingment” in the subject line.

I understand that my job value is essentially predicated on the ability to convince people that writing, grammar, style and spelling are important. Without being able to make this argument, I am like a farmer without a field or a plastic surgeon without Joan Rivers. However, I have to think that I’m not the only one who would be scared as hell to see a sign at the doctor’s office telling me that “Dr. Smith cars about all his patience.” I’d like to think that if you want people to believe you’re on your game, it starts with being careful on the little things.

Am I too concerned about this? Let me know.

Doc

RIP John Hughes

My little brother and I used to watch this move over and over and over and over, until my mother hid the VHS tape in the laundry basket:

John Hughes dead at 59.

A.

Entirely at Random Galactica Post

Um. I don't usually do conventions but ADAMA and TIGH. I'M SO THERE. What better way for a girl to spend her wedding anniversary?

(True story: Mr. A and I were pretty broke when we got married -- back then we thought that would be a temporary state, hah! -- and so we put off a honeymoon trip until we could save up to go somewhere really cool. Our "honeymoon" thus was the weekend after our wedding, during which we watched the Packer game in the bridal suite, ordered pizza, and went to Gen Con. It was like the dream honeymoon of a 14-year-old boy.)



A.

Weekend Question Thread

Why did you start blogging/commenting?

A.

That sound you heard around 8:30 last night

Was the collective squee of America's lesbians. Had it not already been such an over-the-top news day, I swear "WADERS" would have been a trending topic on Twitter.  

Full segment

Everything I need to know, I learned from Boogie Nights

(A.K.A: W.W.D.D.D?)

Sometimes the world doesn’t make a lot of sense.

My last university tenured someone and gave her a distinguished chair position after only about half the time usually required for tenure because she was the last person left with half a brain. Had it given those out to the people who actually did leave, the school would have been better off and wouldn’t be stuck filling three more positions.

A raving psychotic is likely to not only get his way in my current job but destroy our department as well.

My best friend got a jump on her mid-life crisis by doing something she always wanted to do, while my mid-life crisis is stalled because a) I hate tattoos and b) it needs to be fed with a classic Mustang I can’t afford. Meanwhile, the Missus just spent $89 on yarn for three pairs of socks while I’m stockpiling Diet Coke because I found a 5 12 packs for $10 coupon.

The long and thoughtful post I’ve been working on this week on the idiocy that was WaPo and the subsequent fall out has been trumped by Ms. A’s brilliance, thus making it pointless to post my version.

And while it seems like you couldn't name anything any other former VP has ever done in life, Dick Cheney is still creating problems.

So you might ask, “Doc, where can we turn when the world is so bat-shit crazy?”

My answer: “Boogie Nights, of course.”

Never has there been a film that more clearly defines what to do and what not to do in tense times. No other film has been as clearly inspiring or filled with fortune-cookie wisdom as P.T. Anderson’s magnum opus. The Missus and I ended up seeing this on one of our earliest dates, although that was inadvertent, given that I thought it was a story about 1970s disco movements. Of all the great moments, the best was in the theater during the scene in which we finally saw “it” exposed. The guy in front of me scoffed at the mammothity that was Dirk Diggler, saying something to the effect of “I’m close to that big” to which his girlfriend broke out in uncontrollable laughter.

Still, below is a list of all the things you can learn if you watch carefully:

You Don't Even Have a Name

What a bunch of whiny, entitled bitchery. Outing somebody because he said you were wrong? Automatic fail.

Honestly. I try to tell the newspaper kids I talk to about this kind of stuff all the time: someone criticizes you, why get into a two-week shitfight over where your critic went to school, who he "really" is, whether he's taken as many classes as you, etc etc? It just makes you look like a petty asshole. Why not instead focus on the substance of the criticism: Does this person, even if he goes by iLikeBigJugs553, have a point about some fact or interpretation of fact that I have published?

If so, either incorporate that into your next bit of work, correct the current post, or just resolve not to be such a dumbass in the future. If not, then ignore it because nobody cares. I mean, I know we bag on the Freepi a lot around here but during that week when they all called me an ugly whore, would it have benefitted me in any way to post sexy photos of myself and then demand they do the same so we could see who truly lived up to standards of physical beauty? So much easier to point, mock, and move on.

You hear this constantly from mainstream media pundits sniping back at bloggers, too: Oh yeah, well who are YOU, Mr. Imginary Internet Person, to point out the sky is not purple as I quoted Newt Gingrich saying it is but is in fact blue? You don't have a paycheck! I mean, so why? The sky is either blue or it isn't. I do not understand the impulse to prolong one's embarrassment at making a mistake by wanking about the credentials of the person who pointed it out. Except for that, of course, it makes the argument about something other than how you screwed up.

Take what's useful about the criticism you get and use it, even if it comes from some anonymous asshole on the Internet. Shove the rest.

A.

Weekend Question Thread: First Draft Talent Show

If we held the show tonight, what would your talent be? What would you do to amaze and inspire the assembled masses dozens?

I'd probably read something, if I could find something I'd written recently without any profanity. Wait.

A.

The Imperfect Masterpiece Revisited

(Ed. Note: Tuesday marks the 50th anniversary of Harvey Haddix's "Imperfect Masterpiece." When I started this, I asked Athenae how long is too long. Her answer: "No such thing as too long on the Interwebs. If people don't want to read that's what the scroll button is for." Well, we're going to test that theory...  I spent my whole career writing 8-inch stories on deadline. I always wanted to try something longer and I've loved this story for my whole life, so pardon the self-indulgence and if you get through it all, let me know what you think. Thanks. -Doc)

The first thing that struck me about the man was how ordinary he looked.

During his playing days, he was listed as 6-foot-2, 190 pounds. From his position at the folded out card table in the middle of a dimly lit rec center venue, he looked like he’d shrunk a bit.  His hair had grown wispy and gray while his midsection had expanded a good deal. He had a bit of a hunch to him as he scrawled his name across varying pieces of memorabilia.

When my turn at the table had come amid the sparse gathering of Milwaukee Braves fans and semi-interested interlopers, I had a million questions.

What was it like that night?

Did you think the game would ever end?

What were you thinking when Adcock finally ended it?

The answers I got were less than satisfactory. The man had pretty much gone deaf as he ambled into his 70s. The fellow next to him, a handler if you will, also explained the man had been slightly handicapped by a late night out on the town with some fellow baseball alums.

Rather than conduct a pointless interrogation, I instead asked him to personalize the autograph he was about to sign.

“What?” he asked.

I repeated the request. He shook his head like a dog trying to remove water from its ears. The handler hollered my name into the man’s good ear and then spelled it.

The man dutifully wrote it down, added “The best” and his name.

I shouted a request to shake his hand and get a picture with him. He happily obliged.

As his rough paw took a hold of mine, a smile I didn’t know I had in me consumed my face. I was touching the hand of Lew Burdette, the human instrument that had faced perfection the likes of which no one had ever seen and defeated it.

Fifty years ago this week, baseball fans witnessed something that had never happened before or since: a game in which a pitcher retired 36 batters in a row and had yet to complete the game. On a cool May night in Milwaukee, Burdette and Pittsburgh’s Harvey Haddix faced off for 77 incredible outs.

Haddix had been perfect.

Burdette had been better.

Trying REALLY Hard to Withhold Judgment

Mr. A sent this to me with a question: Why is it that people need to make Sherlock Holmes into the 19th Century's Batman? Granted, Holmes had his disguises and his moments of derring-do but this looks like the Wild Wild West:



I want this to be good because I've been starved of Sherlock Holmes on screen since forever, and because I love Robert Downey Jr. and think he's not the worst actor they could have chosen. I've seen some actors who are physically unlike Holmes absolutely kill the part, like Frank Langella in the William Gillette adaption and this red-headed kid I saw years ago in a play, who managed to get me past his looks with his acting. I'm willing to be charmed and seduced by it.

And I'm not a total canon snob, I've read and enjoyed some pretty horrible pastiches ranging from Holmes investigating the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ to time-travel absurdity and the Phantom of the Opera to Holmes being Jack the Ripper himself. But I may have to draw the line at campy sex hijinks with Irene Adler and the maid. Just ... no.

A.

This is the Future, Y'all

I'm not finding myself with a lot of sympathy for Meghan McCain's discovery that a lot of weaselly creeps who have made money off being assholes in public fora turn out to be ... weaselly, creepy assholes, but I have to admit this is a good line:

It’s really scary when the guy who houses his inmates in tents in the summer and whose most visible public-relations success involves pink underwear, boxers, and handcuffs tells you to tone it down.

Unfortunately she then goes on to deplore the reporting of what she Twitters, which ... EVERYBODY CAN SEE THE INTERNET. For fifteen years this has been true. If you're creeped out by people reposting your shit, then lock your updates or don't Twitter at all.

A.

Cold As The Star That Bears You

Caprica thread:

Q: There's a lot of really blatant racism in Caprica -- something you got a hint of in BSG but never really saw head-on.

A: Yeah, having a common enemy does a really good job of bringing people together. We always knew that there were tensions between the residents of the various Colonies before the Cylons came along, and now we get to explore that some more. We know from real life that it seems impossible to achieve peace on one planet. Twelve planets... it seems too Utopian to think that they wouldn't have conflicts. And I've always been intrigued by the fact that racism in the BSG universe is entirely cultural -- not based on ethnicity -- and that it exists in a world with little prejudice based on gender or orientation. Separating cultural conflict from conflict along all those other axes... it makes it starker.

Q: Ron Moore explained when he was writing the BSG finale that he had to remind himself, 'It's the characters, stupid!' -- that the storytelling always came back to the character interactions. Is that your motto for this show as well?

A: I always said that BSG was such a joy to write because you could put any two characters in a scene together and their pasts would instantly charge their interaction. On Caprica, you get the same effect, right out of the pilot. You learn more about monotheists and The Soldiers of the One, more about this crime syndicate that Joseph Adama is wrapped up in, more about Graystone Industries and their new Cylon invention. And you'll learn more about the conflicts between the colonies and the culture of Caprica. But, it always comes back to getting to know these characters.

A.

For the one or two of you that haven't seen this

The moment the reality show's audience and judging panel saw the small, shy, middle-aged woman, they started to smirk. When she said she wanted a professional singing career to equal that of Elaine Paige, the camera showed audience members rolling their eyes in disbelief. They scoffed when she told Simon Cowell, one of the judges, how she'd reached her forties without managing to develop a singing career because she hadn't had the opportunity. Another judge, Piers Morgan, later wrote on his blog that, just before she launched into I Dreamed a Dream, the 3000-strong audience in Glasgow was laughing and the three judges were suppressing chuckles.

It was rude and cruel and arrogant. Susan Boyle from Blackburn, West Lothian, was presumed to be a buffoon. But why?

... 

The answer is that only the pretty are expected to achieve. Not only do you have to be physically appealing to deserve fame; it seems you now have to be good-looking to merit everyday common respect. If, like Susan (and like millions more), you are plump, middle-aged and too poor or too unworldly to follow fashion or have a good hairdresser, you are a non-person.

Susan is a reminder that it's time we all looked a little deeper. She has lived an obscure but important life. She has been a companionable and caring daughter. It's people like her who are the unseen glue in society; the ones who day in and day out put themselves last. They make this country civilised and they deserve acknowledgement and respect. Susan has been forgiven her looks and been given respect because of her talent. She should always have received it because of the calibre of her character.

Collette Douglas Home

h/t ayse

Now It's Lonely Round These Fields: Final Galactica Thread

Jacob:

The sound startles a pigeon awake, on the floor of his apartment; it begins to walk and he blunders toward it, begging it to leave. He grabs a broom as it soars into the rafters, terrified. A bird in the house means death is coming; his brother has something he wants. He'll be dead soon. And Lee will feel so much guiltier about it than he knows, because this morning her face is a bird, fluttering against the glass.

He swings wildly and knocks something else off a table; he begins to curse the bird. She's caught, against the sky; she fights something she can't see because she is afraid. She fights because she doesn't know how to do anything else. Lee Adama loves Kara Thrace.

So say we frakking all.

Last one ever, guys. Boom boom boom.

No, really, seriously

Link to video from yesterday's special Battlestar Galactica panel at the United Nations. The video's two hours long, in RealVideo format, no embedded portions up anywhere that I can find yet. According to the UN Public Information Departmen, the discussion explored:

some of the themes that are of importance to both the United Nations and the critically acclaimed television show: human rights; terrorism; children and armed conflict; and reconciliation and dialogue among civilizations and faiths. The panel will be moderated by Academy Award-winning actress and producer Whoopi Goldberg. Oscar-nominated actress Mary McDonnell, Emmy Award-winning and Oscar-nominated actor Edward James Olmos, and Battlestar Galactica creators and executive producers Ronald D. Moore and David Eick will participate in the panel.

Imagine greater....in case Caprica doesn't pan out

As Battlestar Galactica comes to its climactic finale, many fans are desperate to soften the gaping black hole of emptiness looming afterwards. Some seek solace in looking ahead, rather, looking behind to the upcoming prequel, Caprica.

But what if Caprica is a dud? Worse, what if no matter how good it is, it will never see the light of day due to the whole SyFy transition concept hitting a huge wall of FAIL? What then will we do?

Allow me to offer a humble suggestion below. Sure, it's a tad low-brow... no, I doubt the UN will host a discussion about it, but we have to have hope, don't we? We have to move toward the light...

Days of octos past

I got nothing to add to this, except, "Wow."   Also, "wow."

via P. Z. Myers, newly-discovered 95 million-year-old cephalopod fossils that are amazing. Look at the preservation of the dimensions and details of the soft tissues, tentacle, suckers, and even the leaked ink.

UN Panel Discussion on BSG

Via Virgo's twittering, the UN has decided to become awesome:

Over the course of its four seasons, "Battlestar Galactica" has been lauded for its nuanced portrayal of war, faith and morality. Since it debuted six years ago, the Sci Fi drama about a rag-tag space fleet has offered challenging fictional depictions of problems afflicting our planet in the here and now.

And now a discussion of how those very issues have been handled on the show will take place at the United Nations.

On March 17, there will be a "Battlestar" retrospective at the U.N. in New York and a panel discussion of how the show examined issues such as "human rights, children and armed conflict, terrorism, human rights and reconciliation and dialogue among civilizations and faith," according to Sci Fi.

The "Battlestar" contingent on the panel will consist of executive producers Ronald D. Moore and David Eick, as well as stars Mary McDonnell (who plays president Laura Roslin on the show) and Edward James Olmos (Admiral William Adama).

And commenters for the win:

Likely lectures and lecturers

A new method of population control, by Caprica-Six

Humane and environmental disposal of unlawful enemy combatants, by Laura Roslin

Genocide as a rational response to personal identity issues, by John Cavill

A modest proposal for reforming the UN, by Tom Zarek

I've always thought Zarek and John Bolton would get along well.

A.

On The Wing: Galactica Thread

Jacob:

Because as much as this episode is about the concept of home -- Laura's off-tone speech rapidly making subtext into text as clumsily as possible -- it's also about finishing the equation Sartre and Milton started: not "hell is other people," not "myself am hell," but something much better. Home is other people. Home is letting go of the place you only thought you were standing; the place you thought was home. And it takes the heaven of everybody else to get you there. (The shepherd Bodhisattva vows not to enter paradise until everybody else does first; the trick is that you then obviously have to go about making sure that happens. I submit to you that's precisely what we're doing and we don't even know it -- this is also my explanation for Gaius Baltar's amazing ability to duck enlightenment, if not redemption -- but imagine a whole world like that. It would be like Canada, but with God. How awesome.)

Lee leads Kara, Kara leads Sam. He thinks he's talking about Six, but it's Caprica that leads Gaius. And then Gaius leads Kara, too. Laura leads Bill, Bill leads Saul. Hera is Boomer's angel. Daughter Eight is Saul's, and Ellen too, toward something we can't yet see. All of them looking -- and helping each other to look -- for strength, and for wisdom, and that measure of acceptance that moves you into the next thing, the next shape, the next home. Pilgrims of mortality, they'll say at the funeral, and voyagers traversing the stars, in search of grace, unity, life, love: No man is islanded.

Bridges

Week before last I flew to Chicago for a few days to celebrate a friend's 50th birthday. She's someone I've known for 23 years, though we don't see each other that often. Now this particular person does happen to be one of those people that you can just pick right up with, no matter how long it's been since you last saw them, but the internet has played a significant role in our keeping close. In fact, years ago, for reasons best left back there, we stopped speaking for a few years but became close again via email.

That was after her husband was diagnosed with terminal cancer and she reached out. They had just moved across the country, she was in a town she didn't know, she had a toddler, and her husband was going to die. She needed people to talk to and I reached back — because who wouldn't under those circumstances — but also grateful that it gave me a way to make a real amends for what had broken us apart. I long ago deleted the emails we exchanged during those months. I remember feeling they really weren't mine to keep. The particulars weren't what remained important anyway, it was the bond.

Anyway, on this same Chicago trip, I  finally got to meet the esteemed blogmistress of this very establishment. Over a great meal, she and Mister A and I talked about the whole online/real world collision thing briefly, but the conversation pretty quickly turned back to other stuff, movies, television, gossip, family,  the kind of things friends talk about over dinner

For a bunch of reasons, I don't really get it when people question the value of online friendships, not to mention what they can offer that's above and beyond meatspace acquaintance. The topic's been hashed and re-hashed, online and off, so don't worry, I won't attempt a treatise on it here. But it's been on my mind a lot lately, the way that people can come together. I never can figure out if it's the internet or if it's the distance it bridges. You know, the old-fashioned logistics, the miles away-ness, that encourages intimacy.

Back before I was born (needless to say, well before the digital age) my mother began a correspondence that lasted for years, with someone she would never meet. My mother collected rare shells and via a classified ad in the back of some shell collector hobbyist magazine, she came to contact a Mrs. Rook, first name Winifred, who lived in Australia. On one of the very edges of Australia in fact, in a cottage she shared with her husband, Mr. Rook, keeper of the Bustard Head Light.

I've still got the packet of wispy airmail envelopes. There's not that many of them, but then again, it's only one half of the conversation these two women had. Who knows what happened to the other half? I don't remember how or why it came to an end, but my mom talked about that relationship for the rest of her life. She was kind of an odd soul, and she didn't have a lot of friends, and none that shared her fascination with shells. So there was the great novelty of sharing this enthusiasm with someone she'd never met, coupled with how exciting it was to receive treasures from the Great Barrier Reef, tiny fragile things not much thicker than those blue and red envelopes. Shells that had survived intact, not just the postal journey but the week(s) long overland trek it took for them to get to the post from the Rook's isolated compound. If it was during the rainy season, the mail was picked up by a bush pilot but only if there was something else important enough for him to actually land the plane, so there was often a long wait, after which my mother might get two or three blue letters, and a package! As for the mail and the shells she sent back, they were more often than not airdropped along with the lighthouse provisions. I think this was probably when my mother developed her trademark form of extreme package bondage, the fine art of which greatly amused my college room-mates years later as they watched me hack through layers and layers of criss-crossed strapping tape and brown paper.

When they heard about her friend in Australia, people always said it was too bad that my mother and she never got a chance to actually meet each other. My mom would nod or say yeah it was, but I'm not so sure she would have traded those blue letters for that chance.

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Nothing Matters When You're Free: Galactica Thread

Jacob:

And when he's played the last note, Dreilide holds up one finger like a gun, for his daughter to blow the smoke away; Kara remembers, beautifully, and smiles at him. He touches her face as she recognizes him. She thanks him for visiting, calm again, with a smile and a laugh like a fresh wind. The cruelest thing about free will is knowing you've got your whole life ahead of you, and no trajectory but what you decide.

Not the Arrow of Athena, not the leader of the search, not the harbinger of the apocalypse: just a girl. To exist. That is an incredible amount of pressure. Kara's smart enough to live through it, but I don't know that Boomer is. She hasn't been so far. In order to be the man or woman you choose to be, you have to know the moves and be brave enough to make them.

Spoilers inside.

Housekeeping Notes

Because of the amazing amounts of really vile spam we've been getting in trackbacks, I've disabled them. Nobody was using them anyway. If there's really a thing where you used them and I didn't notice I can put them back, but seriously, it was pretty nasty spam.

For the same reason, after a couple of weeks all posts' comments will close automatically. I realize this might put a damper on commenting to older posts, but for the most part after a few days most people are done talking anyway.

Anything else about this place's operation bugging you these days? I'm going to be digging into Typepad pretty hardcore this weekend so drop a comment if something's wonky.

(I know the search function sucks. Suggest a less-sucky one if you have one.)

A.

Sailed Out Against The Sky: Galactica Thread

Jacob:

The first Article of Faith is and always should be very simple: this is not all that we are. The Final Five and the Cylon race are Galactica too: falling apart, rehabilitating, stronger and stranger, not fitting together anymore. Cobbled together from shoestring and half-remembered directives and fears. This scene is really sad, in a way: Ellen and Saul join a random Six and Eight, along with Galen and Tory, around Sam's bedside. The Final Five, together for the first time. And the daughters breathe in, joyful, waiting for the single event that will tie up all their loose ends and tell them what they're doing here, mend their rended hearts and recreate the Cylon world they remember, or something better. And nothing happens.

She'll Wait and Hope and Pray: Galactica Thread

Jacob:

"Someone contaminated the amniotic fluid in which we were maturing all the Daniel copies. And then corrupted the genetic formula. I knew it was John. Envious, sadistic." Cavil totally changes the subject to how he's a total sadsack and blah blah: "If I'm so irredeemable, if I'm such a mistake, if I'm so broken, then whose fault is that?" It's your fault, you stupid motherfucker. Even Kara Frakking Thrace has figured this out, and you're like this computer genius robot thing? "It's my maker's fault. And that's not God, that's you! This is on you!" All I hear is wah, wah, wah. ( Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay to mould Me man? Did I solicit thee from darkness to promote me?)

If this show's about the cycle of vengeance, if this show's about who you become when the world ends, if this show's about now what, well, now what? How do you decide when to stop blaming what made you for who you are? And if you don't like who you are, is it ever a better use of your time being angry at what made you, instead of just spending your crazy-ridiculous-short time on this planet fixing yourself up?

I ask an honest question here because I'm not sure, because I'm torn a lot of the time between this very everyone-would-say-normal need to put everything out on the table and make sure everybody knows the score, my own desire that the people I hate be miserable, concern that the people I hate could be out making other people do insane things for shitty reasons, and an enduring need to get work done.

And don't we talk all day long about the reason the present assholes get away with it is because the ones immediately prior never answered for their crimes? And doesn't Cavil have a point here? But is having a point, the point? I'm not being cute, I'm asking: where does justice end and vengeance begin? Is the former ever not the latter? Do I have to go back to The Winslow Boy to make this make sense? ("Easy to do justice. Hard to do right.") I don't understand this all of a sudden and it's weird, because I'm Catholic, this is mother's milk to us. This show keeps screwing with my head.

There actually is a show, by the way, with spoilers inside and a hot space chick with tattoos and an old man with a gravelly voice. C'mon:

Not all Texans suck. And here's a reason why:

As a people, we have an innate, near-Borgesian, affinity for the surreal.

Which may, or may not, be entirely subconscious. 

I'm in the middle of the audiobook of Carrie Fisher's Wishful Drinking, which is partly a total squicky trainwreck and partly genius gutbusting funny.

And that makes this, below, even trippier and more inspiringly godawful tacky than it already is.

Debbie Reynolds, b. El Paso, in the first American Scopitone video. Made, not so incidentally, by her own Harmon-ee Productions company.

I love you, Mickey Hart

 

(Ed. Note: Due to a technical snafu, my second post of the day got eaten by the digital dog. Athenae was nice enough to let me post a "re-do" version with some updates tonight. I'll be back at the regular slot on Friday. Thanks for your indulgence. -Doc)

On this Valentine’s Day, what did it take for you to really come to grips with how much you love the one you’re with? Was it flowers, candy or a nice dinner? Was it a touching card that hit the sweet spot of human emotion? Or was it you and your partner simultaneously sneering at the “Hallmark holiday” that you don’t need to use to justify your love to anyone?

For me, it’s all about Billy, Jane and the love of Mickey Hart.

If you’ve never seen the movie, “For Love of the Game” this is going to need some explanation. If you’ve seen it, you probably wouldn’t mind the refresher course.

Kevin Costner is Billy Chapel, a 40-year-old pitcher for the Detroit Tigers who is closing out his Hall-of-Fame career with an 8-11 season and a bit of lousy news. He’s finally come to the point in life where he realizes the game is leaving him behind, not just because of his age but also because of its values. (He thinks kids buy baseball cards for the gum, that his friend Davis Birch should have stayed with the Tigers instead of taking the huge free-agent money to go to the Yankees and that clubs should be owned by nice old men instead of corporate conglomerates. Yeah, he’s a bit behind the times…)

He is headed to pitch in New York, where his on-again, off-again girlfriend of five years, Jane, lives and he is hoping to start the next chapter of his life with her. Instead, she tells him she’s moving to Europe and that she always knew he didn’t need her.

“You and the ball and the diamond, you’re perfect… You can win or lose the game all by yourself,” she tells him before heading off to the airport and sending him off to his final start at Yankee Stadium.

For the first six innings, she’s right. He’s pissed, he’s reliving their life together via flashbacks (big tool in this movie, almost to a fault) and he’s firing smoke. He’s got eight strikeouts and everything caught behind him has been pretty routine. He doesn’t need anyone. 

In the seventh, an old arm injury flares up. Jane, her flight delayed at JFK, has been trying to avoid the game all day, but she catches this part of the game in the airport bar. She knows he’s not going to win now because he’s hurt and he’s stubborn and he won’t tell anyone (parallels anyone?) so she heads to the gate, where her flight is finally boarding.

Chapel makes it out of the inning somehow and retakes the mound in the eighth with a one-run lead (courtesy of catcher Gus Sinski, played brilliantly by John C. Reilly). It’s at this point Chapel looks back at the scoreboard and realizes he’s been throwing a perfect game. He asks Sinski if anyone’s been on base and the two finally have “the talk:”  Yes, Billy, you’re throwing a perfect game and now that you realize it, you’ve got to work even harder not to blow it. Billy staggers off the mound dejectedly, telling Gus, “I don’t know if I have anything left.” Gus props him up with the great “We don’t stink right now” speech, which has to be among the most inspirational things ever put to film. “Just throw whatever you’ve got, whatever’s left. The boys are all here for you. We’ll back you up. We’ll be there.”

Of course, the first batter is Davis Birch and suddenly, Billy can’t find the plate. He throws three god-awful pitches and he’s one pitch away from a walk that would kill the perfect game.  Birch is also a huge hitting threat, so he can’t just groove one either. Billy rares back, finds inspiration in a flashback (this time he flashes back to dad playing with him in the front yard as a kid: “Billy, you can do it. Just calm down. Throw the ball to the glove. Just play catch.”)  and throws a frozen rope across the inside corner. (Several cuts of Jane at the airport heading to the gate are interspersed here.)

So he’s 3-1 to Birch and still in serious trouble. Announcer Vin Scully notes, “Well they put the handcuffs on him 3-0, but he’s such an aggressive hitter, you know they’re going to green light him 3-1.” (Side note: has there ever been a better play-by-play guy that Vin Scully? He can make something epic without screaming like an idiot. Half the play-by-play guys in baseball make a routine fly to center sound like the Invasion of Normandy. Scully’s always metered and yet engaged.) 

Sure enough, Billy leaves too much of a fastball out over the plate and Birch hammers it to deep right field. It’s gone without a doubt, the music is this sad, slow piano and strings combo and to make matters worse, you’ve got Mickey Hart back there in right. The only thing Hart was ever known for was his “Canseco Catch” at Fenway where the ball hit him in the head and went over the wall. He was the guy Gus said “just could never catch a break.”

Hart is racing back, looking over each shoulder frantically, showing no sense that he’ll ever get there. Scully’s voice is covering the action “…to the track … at the wall…” And then you see it. Hart goes up, his glove just above the wall, and the ball smacks just into the webbing. He crashes to the ground holding the ball aloft. Scully: “… and LEAPS UP AND ONE-HANDS IT!”

Billy reacts with metered joy (hey, it’s Costner, he’s not going to go all “I just won the ‘Price is Right’ showcase on anyone), while Gus is screaming “YEAH! YEAH!” Birch stops half way around first and just stares at Mickey Hart with a “Jesus, if you could have played that way when I was here, I might not have left” look on his face. The Detroit manager, played by J.K. Simmons (another great casting move) is clapping and screaming from the dugout, “I love you Mickey Hart.”

Meanwhile at the airport, Jane’s practically to the gate when she hears the Yankee fans reacting to the catch with varying levels of groans and “how the hell did that happen” mutterings. She pauses and looks back at the TV, as Scully’s gleefully chattering: “He took a home run away from Davis Birch and the perfect-o is still alive!” Meanwhile, the lady at the gate is saying, “Ma’am, are you coming? I’m sorry, you’ll have to board now…” Jane freezes for a second, and then starts walking toward the TV as the ticket lady keeps calling after her, “Ma’am? Ma’am?” She reaches the group of people watching the game, drops her bag and calls back to the ticket lady:

“Give my seat to somebody else.”

The first time I watched this movie was about 10 years ago when it first came out on DVD. At the time, I didn’t have a DVD player and the movie folks were staggering DVD and VHS releases, trying to drive more buyers toward the DVD market. I was at Target, shopping with the future Missus during a weekend visit while we were dating. She had come down to visit me (we were living several states away and were very much like Billy and Jane: on-again, off-again and in that “OK how does this work” area). Buy it, she told me, you can watch it on your computer. I hemmed and hawed but she kept poking me. It’s your birthday, she said. I’m down here, and we’ll watch it together.

So we did and I bawled like a schoolgirl with a skinned knee when Mickey Hart made that catch. I still do. Two days later, I had to take the future Missus back to the train station so she could take a 9-hour trip back home.  I got her set up, we said our goodbyes and yet I couldn’t watch her leave. I put her on the train and got into the car and just sat there completely broken in half.  I waited until the train started to move. I waited until the last car had pulled out of sight. I waited for ten minutes after that. I didn’t want to leave.

I wanted to know if she’d given her seat to somebody else. She hadn’t.

I must have watched that scene 1,000 times in the next week and each time I thought of her. I had no idea what would happen next, but every time I saw that movie, it brought back that emotion and that feeling of curling up with her in a plastic office chair while watching that movie on a Blueberry iMac. I knew I needed that for the rest of my life.

She eventually moved down and when I decided to propose, I took her back to that same train station. After she said yes and put the ring on, we drove back to our local bar so she could have a drink and stop hyperventilating. After that, we went home and I watched that movie again. It’s been a symbol for me of how close you have to come to losing something before you really know you want it badly enough to do anything for it.

I return to the film from time to time when life is hard or I want to go back to that moment in time where I locked in on love. I popped it in early this morning after a beautiful Valentine’s Day celebration. It helped me remember that we’re in this together, no matter what the circumstances or how hard things get. It reminded me of the little things like buying that movie in Target or how she eats the breakfast I’ll make for her, even though I’m the world's lousiest cook. It always helps me remember that no matter how close to perfection I try to get, that nothing is ever perfect without her.

I also smile and know that she’s a special woman who doesn’t mind sharing my love with Mickey Hart.

You Must Raise Our Child With Dignity: Galactica Thread

Mrowr.

Jacob:

Adama's last act was to invite the 268s into a glorious future he hadn't written yet, and now he's been cockblocked from sketching out the rest of the story, from building the new Will to Meaning for everybody, to get everybody out alive like any good Adama tries to do. Can Adama be the Lie he used to be? Can he rally the tatters? If he dies, can Laura build a world around his memory? If he lives, can he talk the people into remembering there's a future? He spends this episode like the cat in the box, neither living nor dead, and we're right back at depression, the way you get out of it alive: can you commit yourself to that half-future long enough, on faith, to find your way out of the maze? Can you forget Christmas and Easter, the way Cally and Dee forgot to do, and have faith in the end of the story? Stop waiting and move forward into light.

Spoilers within.