YOUR RANDOM BATTLESTAR GALACTICA QUESTION OF THE DAY: Why does Grace Park look different in every scene? Caprica Boomer is different from Galactica Boomer is different from Nekkid Boomer. Do they shoot her differently? More of those celebrated special effects? Is it--you know--acting?

And did you notice INDC Bill throwing down the geek gauntlet, hyping Firefly over Galactica? I got so upset I almost choked on my ten-sided die. More reasonably, I stuck Firefly on my Netflix. It will have to really be something to replace Cowboy Bebop as the genre-bending space western of my heart, of course.

And from Bill's comment thread I am led to notice that ninme has already had a good little Galactica/Firefly debate.

UPDATE: And another random comment: I hope everyone noticed that the fight between Starbuck and Six in the museum was a Blade Runner reference, complete with terrified human with a gun and disembodied replicant voice mocking her from god knows where. Plus you have throughout BSG the living, breathing Blade Runner reference known as Edward James Olmos. I sometimes think of BSG as Philip K. Dick writing Star Trek, though that is probably not completely accurate.

ANDREA DWORKIN DEAD: At the age of 59. Via the DVDVR. And Majikthise.Who notes the dearth of media commentary about her death.

And Camille Paglia loses one of her greatest foils. Seriously--would Pags have ever taken off like she did if she didn't have Dworkin and MacKinnon to play off of? Not that Pags is as big as she was, and claiming to have invented the blog is no way to get back into the limelight, but still. Would she have been the big 90s-era political correctness-backlash figure without Dworkin and MacKinnon, is the proper question I guess.

L'AFFAIRE DE CAPTAIN'S QUARTERS*: If you were--like me--dimly aware of some kind of Canadian scandal erupting in a certain section of Right Blogland, rivka lets you know what the scoop is. Via Kevin Drum.

*Undoubtedly pidgin French.

THIS IS A TERRIBLY GEEKY POST: And it combines comics geekitude with my status as a regular listener of NPR, which is sort of an anti-Reese's peanut butter cup of maligned subcultures--but I do cringe when comics-related guests go on the Terry Gross show. Because while Terry knows a lot of things, she doesn't know the comics very well. So when Frank Miller's on to talk about Sin City she can't really ask him about his influences because she's probably heard of very few of them. Or the relationship of Sin City to his previous work, because she probably hasn't read them. So it ends up being one of her "light" interviews.

I experienced the same cringing during her Brad Bird interview, when they were talking about The Incredibles and didn't bring up Fantastic Four or Doom Patrol not once. Now in this case my cringing was less fair, since I believe Brad has publicly disavowed any comics influence on The Incredibles, though he does credit 60s pop culture quite a bit, so if there's something in that era that leads to the Fantastic Four and he's stripmining that era for ideas, then perhaps its logical that The Incredibles resemble the FF. So there's no reason for Terry to bring it up. But it would have been nice, just given how obvious the relationship is to anybody who knows the Fantastic Four story even slightly well.

The Doom Patrol Elastigirl question is something only one with the heart of a geek would ask, so that is something I wouldn't expect her to ask. But that interview kind of assumed The Incredibles emerged from his head de novo, which they did not. Not in the sense of Bird-ripping-off-the-FF, which he denies and so that's that, but in the sense that The Incredible were all fairly common super-types (stretchy guy, strong guy, fast guy. If there are any Bird-did-rip-off-the-FF conspiracists in existence they are on firmest ground with the Violet/Sue Storm comparisons, since invisibility combined with force fields combined with being a wallflower is not exactly a typical superhero motif.)

This post will be copied and filed with the Office of Minor Complaints, Internet Division.

CONSPIRACY THEORY OF THE DAY: Gannon/Guckert is the adult version of an 80s child kidnapping case, and Hunter S. Thompson directed snuff films, and it all ties together. Yep. Via the DVDVR. And the respectable version from the Des Moines Register.

A BEAUTIFUL CAMDEN SUNDAY: A woman lies on her back in front of the bus stop, on the sidewalk, knees bent, one hand over her eyes.

MUST....RESIST.....OBVIOUS.....JOKES: Preorder your Identity Crisis Dr. Light action figure now. With....with--WITH REMOVABLE PANTS! Oh, I'm so sorry....

With changeable "sociopathic rapist" and "no more Teen Titans" facial expressions. There--that's marginally better.

YOU--YOU'RE NOT CONSERVATIVES. YOU'RE--REPUBLICANS: John Cole on memogate...gate.

MY FAVORITE COUNTDOWN TO INFINITE CRISIS REVIEW: abhay's dc countdown mocking go! His summary:

well: everyone involved did an awful job. especially the colorists-- lets list them off: moose baumann, hi-fi, paul mounts, guy major, steve firchow. for taking a really bad comic and just making it all the worse-- muddy, gloomy, joyless, overrendered and SOULLESS.

its funny-- i picked up batman year one today. i haven't read it since i was 13. i was at camp. i borrowed a friend's copy. it fucking ROCKED harder than anything. i'd already read dark knight returns, but year one was BETTER. the art was awesome. i never read it again-- until tonight or tomorrow or whenever i get to it.

these people read the same comics i did, must've liked them-- why would they work so hard to get into comics, suck up to editors, work for years... just so they can do the Blue Beetle Snuff Comic Crossover Experience? i guess when you get older you forget that feeling you had originally...

As Jim Treacher said in the comments:

I think I've managed to boil down DC's policy to one sentence: Publish stories that only make sense if you've read every comic they've put out for the last 35 years, and then punish you for having read them.

Via Dave Intemittent.

META POSTSCRIPT: And isn't it neat the way these newfangled browsers copy font and text color? Saves me the trouble of italicising stuff, and arguable is a more accurate way of quoting someone.

THE WASHINGTON PUNDITOCRACY GOES TO A NATIONALS GAME: Details here. Via the Frog. Bob Novak is prominently involved.

OH AWESOME: Blogger is now unblocked by my office firewall. Maybe I can update more often now than twice a week.

I think they updated their filtering software, because now timeouts happen much faster when the search is slow on say Netflix or something, and I get a friendly message to contact my network administrator if this is a problem. It was weird what it used to block, too; all blogspot URLs, yet some of them I could access once a day (like Atrios and Americablog) and others wouldn't load at all. Yet all Typepad URLs were fine. Instapundit was unloadable. I could get to Josh Marshall, Radley Balko and Sports Frog (among others) once a day before the software reblocked them. If I added or removed the www. in fron of their addresses I could sometimes get to them again. Meanwhile I never had any trouble with Off Wing, or Obsidian Wings, or Crooked Timber, or Jim Henley, or Kevin Drum, or many others. Darnedest thing.

THANK THE LORDS OF KOBOL FOR THE ONE-HOUR TELEVISION FORMAT: For I am in receipt of the first season of Battlestar Galactica (a British import--thank you, Amazon.UK) and among the deleted scences are many Boxey scenes. Mostly scenes of him finding stuff about Sharon's increasingly Cylonesque proclivities, so it makes sense to leave them out. I mean, if he knows she's going mental and he doesn't tell anybody, it's a bit of an unnecessary plot hole. Plus he's got that 70s television child star hair and the presence of a kid on the Galactica is just really out of place on the new series. So thank you, Ron Moore, for excising him.

The last two episodes have a lot taken out, actually, and what's missing (save the Boxey nonsense) does add a bit to the episodes. Apollo and Crash visit Sharon in the hospital, where it's explained that they need every pilot they got and yadda yadda and she needs to get back on her feet and how could you leave a bullet in the chamber?, making it somewhat less strange that Adama picks the just-wounded Sharon for the nuke delivery. (If he's a Cylon, that's just weird. Who makes a Cylon with Edward James Olmos' complexion? You can't design that.) There's shots of her practicing her quick-draw motion, which of course would have given away everything in the final scene. And since I am a Grace Park obsessives, that's all I remember of the deleted scenes.

Hot Dog, by the way, is the Wedge Antilles of the new Battlestar Galactica. And the Internet just became slightly more pathetic.

WAYS THE NEW SEASON OF BATTLESTAR GALACTICA COULD GO WRONG: And yes, this is way ahead of time--but if they pull the "Character X is a Cylon" more than one more time I believe that would be cheating, narratively speaking. They could probably do it once more if they did it in an interesting way. More than once, the whole concept will break down in a funhouse of mirrors of paranoid reflections.

Another thing is finding a way for the humans to be a credible threat against the Cylons, for from what we've seen so far everything seems to be going exactly the way the Cylons wanted it to go: most of humanity is dead, and the ragtag survivors are leading them to God. Perhaps when they don't find God we'll see Cylon self-doubt. Or else they'll argue themselves to death like Nomad on the old Star Trek.

Boomer is the key to the show right now, by the way. She's the "weak model," designed to be the most human of the Cylons, and thus far the only one capable of bridging the gap between the two races, if merely in a biological (meaning reproductive) sense. She's also the only capable of emotional connections with a "normal" human like Helo, not a raging sociopath like the easily manipulated Baltar. Plus I'm not seeing a lot of Six-Baltar broodlings stumbling about either. Being human is just not Six's job, but it is Boomer's, and perhaps that'll be another weakness for the true humans to exploit. In a much more coherent way than I just described, of course.

THE LINGERING OF REGRETTABLE RECIPES IN THE MIND'S EYE: About a month ago I tried to adapt the Grandma's meatballs recipes for tofu. I am a tofu novice. I bought the extra firm kind and just used a pound of it and the other ingredients as normal. The meatballs stuck together like meatballs should, mostly. They fried up nicely, but I could tell they were a bit fragile. The taste was acceptable. I thought I could be careful and gently simmer them in the sauce--but there was no way. They were destroyed in the simmering process--every attempt to stir the sauce brought more destruction--and I ended up with this rather disgusting red tofu glop. It's been a month and I can't quite forget how eeeeeyucky this was. I may need counseling.

I bring this up because the Easter raviolis met a similar fate yesterday, as problems with the gas flame boiling the ravis led to the assumption that a little extra time was needed to cook the things. This was not the case as it turned out. The raviolis did not survive the straining process. Dinner was not destroyed, though; the raviolis were not the only dish, and my aunt makes Grandma's meatballs the way Grandma intended, and far better than I can make them.

ANNUAL LONG NATIONAL NIGHTMARE OVER POST: Duke loses.

OBLIGATORY SCHIAVO POST: Because I think Blogger closes your account if you don't say something about it. As I am conspiracy-minded, my favorite comment comes from ObWi Katherine, in the midst of a discussion of the merits of the law Congress actually passed:

You don't get de novo anything, let alone a [temporary restraining order], if you don't state a non-frivolous legal claim. And they didn't. It's as simple as that.

This is first-semester-of-law school stuff. Either the majority was in such a hurry and so blinded by ideology that they forgot to check on the statutory language (they don't lack for lawyers on their staffs), or the Schindlers' attorneys are in way over their heads, or someone high up in the party was playing a very cynical game.

All these losses by all these different courts, all being portrayed as judicial usurpations. How perfectly does it set up the filibuster fight for the GOP? What chance do John McCain and Chuck Hagel stand in a 2008 primary if they don't vote the party line on the nuclear option? And non-presidential candidates can have their own reasons to worry--chairmanships, primary opponents, that sort of thing.

Reid should have been up there arguing that they were blatantly abusing power, that they didn't believe in checks and balances, that they were bullying their way into private matters that were none of their business...they did end up proving our argument all on their own, and the Senate Dems' deal may have prevented a worse bill from passing. And Reid and Durbin were both out of the country. Even so, I think they screwed this one up.

As for Levin's comment, a specific explanation about the meaning of a specific change of a specific statutory provision, which is immediately agreed to by the leader of the other party, is going to carry more weight then some random Congressman's speech about choosing life. And one is supported by the plain text of the statute, and one simply isn't.

The middle paragraph is what I found interesting--the part about the very cynical game and the chance to blame this all on the judiciary. Katherine also directs us to this from Chris Matthews sidekick David Shuster:

Despite the sweeping floor statements about "protecting life," the legislation itself did not require the federal courts to start by reinserting Schiavo's feeding tube. And while the bill does give the Schiavo family "jurisdiction and standing" to make an argument in federal court, take a look at Section 3 called "relief." Section 3 states, "After a determination of the merits of a suit brought under this Act, the District Court shall issue such declaratory and injunctive relief as may be necessary..." The key words are "after a determination..." Congress did not say the federal court must accept the merits of the lawsuit.

Based on what Schiavo's parents have been saying this week, it appears the legislation's fine print was never shared with them by Bill Frist or anybody else for that matter. Early Monday morning, after President Bush signed the Schiavo bill, Bob Schindler was positively beaming in front of the television cameras. He said he walked into his daughter's hospice room and told her, "We had to wake the President up to save your life."

Did Bill Frist and Tom Delay ever call the Schindler family and say, "not so fast?" Apparently not. In their latest court filing, the Schinder family still clings to the misleading notion offered by lawmakers last weekend that their bill required Schiavo's feeding tube to be immediately reinserted. Quote, "If Congress meant to give the federal courts the power to let her die..." says the Schindler's filing, then passing the law "would be little more than a cruel hoax." Read it again... The Schindlers argue: "If Congress meant to give the federal courts the power..." The fact is, that's exactly what Congress did. And a "cruel hoax" on Terry Schiavo's family is exactly the right description. As one of my doctor contacts observed, "This has always been about politics, not about helping Terri Schiavo or her parents."

John Cole's series of battlefield conversion posts (well, not really) brought on by the Schiavo-bankruptcy bill double-punch are pretty great too. And speaking of the bankruptcy bill--the last topic I was obsessively blogreading about, when I was in hiatus mode all those many......two weeks ago--here's John Quiggin dissecting the only credible pro-bankruptcy bill position I've noticed. "Credible" meaning attempting to find a reason for passing the bankruptcy bill that doesn't involve the Republican Party and Joe Biden being entirely in the thrall of the credit card industry. You know--a good reason. There apparently isn't one.

LITTLE BIT OF A HIATUS OVER HERE: Haven't had a whole lot to say lately, I'm afraid. I have been getting into this whole Henley-led new Battlestar Galactica watching, though. I have never had any use for the original--I only know it as a continual butt of jokes on Mystery Science Theater 3000--but this new one is pretty great. I thought originally that Boomer was a sly Bubblegum Crisis reference, by the way, but apparently she is another character derived from the original series.

Back to hiatus mode.

MONOPOLY CARD MONDAY: You know in Monopoly, you have the cards that unexpectedly bless you with cash or remove it from you? Like "YOU HAVE WON SECOND PRIZE IN A BEAUTY CONTEST COLLECT $10"? I had their real-life equivalent happen to me today:

According to our records, you purchased a Postal Service employment packet from Think Achievement Corporation. The district court for the Northern District of Indiana has found in favor of the Federal Trade Commission ("FTC") that Think Achievement engaged in fraudulent and deceptive trade practices in connection with the sale of Postal Service employment packets. In fact, you never have to pay for information about job vacancies or employment opportunities with the U.S. government or U.S. Postal Service. It is available for free at www.usajobs.com.

On November 18, 2004, the district court approved the FTC's plan for refunds to consumers who had purchased these packets. Pursuant to the district court's order, the FTC contracted with Analytics, Inc., to administer the refund distribution.

My cut? A cool $25 and change.

And yes, I bought the packet--like six years ago, when I was really sick of my office drone status and postal work seemed easy and consistent employment. I never did apply for reasons that escape me, but do not regret now. Probably something about not wanting to trade one kind of monkey work for another. The rest is history.

SOMETHING HAPPENED TO ME DURING THE SUPERBOWL: I started feeling bad for Eagles fans. I'd done my best to hate them for the two weeks leading up to last night, given the constant Eagles hype around here, the "wear green Thursdays" at work, the fact that my brother hates them because he's a Giants fan (even though I hate the Giants because they get all the hype and the Jets get squat), that atrocious fight song blaring over the loudspeakers at the Pathmark. But when they kept it close--and when I saw TO running around on that reconstructed ankle--little thoughts started reeping in, like, "Do the Patriots really need another Superbowl?" and "Boy that Teddy Bruschi is a little bit obnoxious." I kept all these thoughts on the downlow, of course, lest my brother smite me.

But, yeah. When they were in position to make a tying field goal in the end there and didn't do it, I was bummed. My heart had turned for the Eagles. But imagine being an actual Eagles fan and watching that game, watching Reid and McNabb blow those about three? three minutes? I think--of the final five minutes of the fourth quarter on an incredibly inept display of clock management. Then Akers didn't give them a good shot at the onsides kick recovery, but they held the Patriots anyway, but the Pats punted and bottled the Eagles up down on their end with 45 to go, and--and, well, you saw what happened. Given how badly they did scoring quickly the previous time, the Eagles were not going to march 60 yards in less than a minute to get within Akers' potential range. And so the Patriots did it again. McNabb need a mistake-free game to win and while he had a strong game--I think somebody on the tv said his game was fourth-most offensive yards ever for a Superbowl quarterback--it was not mistake-free. Not that Tom Brady had a great game either, and I'm happy, at least, that they didn't give him the MVP just because he's the quarterback. It went to Deion Branch, who was crying when he got the trophy, and I watched a lot of the postgame, by the way, and I didn't see the "I'm going to Disneyland" ad. Maybe they couldn't track him down in the chaos to do it.

Anyway, it was hard for me to be an Eagles hater yesterday. It's going to be hard to be a TO hater ever again, because his performance was really gutsy. McNabb's still a bit hatable, if only for his Peytonesque aloofness on the sideline, though he lacks Peyton's ability to get mad at his teammates and the world around him. Andy Reid....they're not going to get rid of him, but it really does not appear he can get the job done. I guess it's more likely than ever that these Eagles will remain what Bill Simmons said they might be, a memorable team that never won the big one.

FOOD MADE: Lessons learned:

--Any recipe that involves stuffing things smaller than a turkey is probably more trouble than it's worth. That is to say, the taste payoff from stuffing forty pepperoncinis with a dill-salmon-cream cheese mixture is less than the cost of the effort put into stuffing all those little things, plus you bought fresh dill to make it and what do you do with the rest of it? The stuffed olives are still in super-secret marination lockdown; they'll have to be pretty g-d tasty to make them worth the hour put into them.

--Grandma's meatballs, on the other hand, are incredibly simple, and the payoff would be immense even if it took an hour to make them.

--There is no end to the number of times I will not learn the lesson about eyes being bigger than stomachs, or however that goes. I think that's a lesson about a lesson--a meta-lesson.

Game today. Patriots in a walk.