Tell me Starbuck is that a Bradley Fighting Vehicle I spy out of the Corner of My Unglassed Eye?

I hate science fiction. I hate it the same way a former lover hates you. They know you in some ways better than you know yourself and know what makes you tick, your weaknesses and strengths. And if they are very insightful they may even realize that your strengths and your weaknesses make you the person that they loved. Knowing this may make your ex respect and like you even though they do not want to be with you. Well I feel that way about science fiction but with a dash of disfunction as a chaser since, as, a famous person once said; "Just when I thought I was out they pull me back in!" And patient readers Battlestar Galactica has pulled me back in.

The show drives me teeth grinding crazy in the way so many tellievision shows do and it makes the same mistake I see made in books and film. That mistake is being too closely tied to its' own time and place. For example in one of Philip K Dick would imagine futures where people would fly to the stars, killer androids roamed the earth while people fled from them in flying cars decked out with vinyl record players. Nowadys the original Buck Rodgers comic book & serial newsreel do not seem futuristic at all, instead in someways they are sad, played out ideas of a swashbuckling uber man who travelled halfway across the galaxy in 18th century riding boots, with a zap gun and saber. But enough about the past let us see how well BSG travasses the muddy shore of psyence fiction.

Well, five minutes into Season One Episode one of BSG I wondered why Commander Adorno was wearing glasses in a universes that had created faster than light travel, and where hundreds of thousands of folks could live in space ships full of gravity and all the joys of 21st century American Navy and more why the fuck did the captain have to wear glasses? "Anyway enjoy the show", I said to my self, "fuggedaboutit", but then the people following the newsman and his boom mike wielding soundman made me think of Space: 1999 and lousy 1970s fashions. As usual the people in the future are mainly caucasian with a token of African & Asian Americans. Where are the ethnic New Guineans, the Desis, Amerinds and the myriads of ethnicities?

Anyway the exhibition of atrocities continued with things like:

• You would think that by then instead of having comms that look like phones everyone would have an implanted mike and receiver so that they could sub vocalize from anywhere in the ship.
  
• How come funerals use the same type of caskets & elevators in BSG as we do now?
  
• Anyone in our reality will feel right at home in a kitchen or restraunt in the Battle Star Galactica universe
  
• All the audiobook, ebook users as well as environmentalists will be happy to know that books are made with dead trees. Antienvironmetalists and religous zealots will be sad to hear that the tress have been sad to know that the book pulping industry does no environmental harm to the pristine forests of Kobald since their pulp in produced by vats of GMO bacteria, pineoplastics and some kick ass biochemists who go round the tweleve colonies in geosynchronous orbit.
  
• Lovers of military protocol will be happy to know that across the universe, thousands of years in time from us flags are folded the same way for fallen heroes.
  
• Great War vets will be glad to see the Sam Browne belt making a comeback among the Kobol's soldiers, and pilots.
  
• Lastly millions of women will be dissapointed that in the future their cigarette smoking doctor will give them shit for not doing their monthly breast exams.
  

I had been hoping that at the very least that humanity would be rid of cancer as a plot device in sci-fi but I guess I am naive. After all the skyscrapers in Kobald city should have told me that the future is already here just unevenly distributed in set designers & scriptwriters imaginations.

One Thousand Words

If historians were Rock Stars .....

Rick Perlstein would be Tom Waits & Fela to me.

The Food Was Terrible & Served in Such Large Portions!

I went to a Golden Corral today and it was one of my worst dining experiences ever. I have been to the bottom of the gourmand mountain and its' not McDees, or your hated bachelor uncle's shit-on-a-shingle-cooking with sardines, and whitebread from the discard bin at Costco.This was so much worse.

The Golden Corral is an Olde Country Buffet wannabe that smells of used pastry dough, industrial chocolate, and acrid cleaners. The is a 5 yard maze that customers go through to get to their food, once you have paid there is a long, narrow hallway. Half of the hallway is occupied by the carts with the eateries, this leaves a narrow space for the people to gawk at the "food", pause and reflect on what they have eaten and check if their bowels have really rumbled. Of course with the narrow place there we, the hungry ones have to navigate through this maddening crowd to get the to the buffet.

Now as to our reason for coming there how does it suck, I cannot count the ways. For one I noticed the smell of sauces and condiments, generally when I smell those things strongly I worry if the ingredients were fresh, if you have really good chicken it does not need to be bathed in sauces to bring out the good flavours, same thing with vegetables and really good rice. What is even more unfortunate is if the food is over spiced and does not taste good. Maybe the ingredients are good but the cook sucks, but then again a cook with integrity and education would not use bad ingredients. I thought I would like the carrots but even those were not to my liking.

Generally when you have a buffet the desert is a palate cleanser at places like Olde Country Buffet, here it was the worst, did I mention the smell? From looking at the pastries, cheese cake & cookies I knew none of them were baked freshly there. To confirm this I tried some of the blueberry pie. The pies were laid out in aluminum dishes that Chef Boyardee sent them in, from the thin pale crust I could tell that they came from some synthetic pie crust mix, the little bit I tried tasted all sophisticated too. The filling was cold and left a metallic taste of dry agents, food colouring, and preserving agents, and what was worse is this Frankenstein creation, a simulacrum of a pie was served cold from the freezer. What kind of shit is this I thought as I tried a small piece. Good pie is either served at room temperature or warm from the oven.

Patient reader, you may be wondering was there anything that I liked, yes there was, the pepsi was great after a hot sweaty car ride in Montgomery, the wait staff were very helpful and nice. But I can get cheaper soda and as friendly staff at Whitecastle, and the decor is nicer, the food is cheaper, and nicer. So you if you come to this fair, historic town by I83 goto Whitecastle, the fauxfood is still bad but its' cheaper and I daresay it tastes better.

Even The Klan Has Given Obama Money!

Its' amazing everyone loves Barack Hussein Obama, Calvin Broadus reports that the Klu Kluxers have given money to his campaign. We are truly living in a transracial world now. I can just feel the love and strength bubbling through the pathways of joy. Anyway enough of my commentary which is not as interesting as what the Dogg Father said in an interview with the Guardian.

Snoop: "The KKK gave Obama money."

Interviewer: "Really?"

Snoop: "YES." Snoop has an interesting verbal mannerism of capitalising words without putting any exclamation at the end. "They was one of his biggest supporters."

"I've never heard that."

Anyway there is more

Is This Worth A Thousand Words?

The picture above is from New York at the turn of the 20th century, I really like these ancient coloured images from Photography's first "fifty years". I am surprised that there is not more horse shit on the street because getting rid of it was a real problem at the time. One of the reasons that many municipalities wanted to move to automobiles was they were supposed to be cleaner. Also I notice how folks can buy all the food they need to cook right on their doorstep. I thought that the immigrant neighbourhoods looked a lot worse than this.

If You Marry a Taxi Driver Who Loves Highlife ......

In Nigeria & Ghana in the late 50s and early 60s Highlife was a popular genre of music. Highlife was a mixture of calypso, jazz, and regional music. For people of my age two songs stand for Highlife, the first one is from the 70s while the latter was a song that was popular in 1988, and performed with a xylophone. Being that I only know the name of the former I present to you one of the most popular Nigerian songs of the past fifty years, Bobby Benson's Taxi Driver