I was never a Lostie. Somewhere in my mid-twenties, my obsession with things took a weird spin and I just stopped getting my heart and soul wrapped up in things. Now that said, I was the kind of person who sobbed when the Indians lost the World Series. Who petitioned for Veronica Mars, and even today, am willing to raise money for causes in the ‘name’ of a TV show or actress. So the fact that I am, here, laughing at the end of Lost isn’t meant to diss or mock or humiliate the Losties. I just … laugh at this stuff.

No spoilers were harmed in the making of this post!

This post started after I read this tweet by @txvoodoo

btw, ppl laughing at Lost fans? It’s not nice and schaudenfreud will bite your ass someday on something you love(d)

I had, earlier, tweeted about laughing at the end of Lost. And I did. And I am. I mean, I watched the end and Mrs. Ipstenu (who hated Lost) looked over and blinked “So, that’s it?” And I shrugged. As far as sci-fi goes, I put Lost‘s ending right next to Battlestar Galactica, in the sense that both had fantastic premises, and both collapsed under the weight of their own mythos, and both gave us complete closure without any real satisfaction.

And the first thing I did was I started to laugh because of how inane the whole thing is.

Believe me, I understand obsession with TV shows really well. I was a Trekkie, the king of nerdy obsessives. I ran a Star Trek club and wore my communicator to school (which now makes me wonder why I didn’t get beat up more). I was into Anne McCaffery’s Dragonriders series. I was hooked on Xena. I run a damn fansite for an actress, people. Trust me. I am one of you.

When Jorja Fox (see afore mentioned fansite running comment) left CSI, I turned off my TV, recapped the episode, posted screen caps, and sat back on the couch, relaxing. I was done and I didn’t have any freak-outs or sobs. It was just a thing and it was done. Other fans were this close to rending their clothes, tearing out hair, wearing ashes, etc etc. And I just looked at them and remembered how I felt when The Shat pointed out “It’s just a TV show”.

Back then, I wanted to kick his ass. Today I agree with him. I think he was an idiot in how he said it, but it is, in the end, a show. Lost was a beautifully filmed, wonderfully composed, fantastic storytelling experience. But while I feel the story telling was great, the story itself left me wanting. Even now, my Lostie friends are freaking out about the unanswered questions, unmet expectations, and a big case of “What the F*&$!?” with the ending. Yeah, I feel you guys. I hate endings like that. But remember this: You got an ending!

Okay, that aside, I thought the ending of Lost fit perfectly with the type of show it was. And if you liked it, great! If you hated it, that’s okay too. At least you’re there, having feelings and thinkings about it. Write a blog post about it, sit and argue the ethics, mythos, layers etc about the show. Cite your source. Use it to inspire you. If you can do that, then no one has the right to mock you for liking this show! It’s turned on your brain, now use it.

And me? Well, I’ll be sitting here laughing at the absurdity of the whole thing. Not at the fans, never, but definitely at the show that took itself way too seriously, and delivered America to a wonderful place of ‘Well. There’s that then.’ Schaudenfreud? Not in the least. I’m just laughing because I can. I always laugh. I will always laugh. Why don’t you laugh with me, and just enjoy what was and laugh our way into what will be.

It’s fun.

Edited to add…
Imagine if Lost had been made by the Monty Python guys. All you really need to do is change the sound track.

Again.

This post is a rant about why I hate how NBC airs the Olympics, making it so that the West Coast, which is where the Olympics are taking place, watch the whole thing on 3 hour tape-delay. Which isn’t fair and I know, based on what Dick Ebersol said in 2008, this won’t change until someone else buys the Olympics.

Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

In 2006 I had this suggestion:

Treat the Olympics as highlite reels. Show us the best and the worst. Show us the crashes and the surprises. Show us the kids who overcome a crash and win. Show us the great skier who flops, with a Super Ski image to show where he fucked up. Bode Miller straddled a gate? Show me that part! People say that Americans can’t concentrate at length? Okay, then, pander us. Show us clips instead of whole programs.

In re-reading that post, everything I felt 4 years ago is still true. It’s even worse now, with Hulu and YouTube.

Of course, NBC seriously screwed up their website two years ago, and while this time the site is better, I never go to it. Ever. I go to http://vancouver2010.com who, at this very moment, is telling me that at least 2 figure skaters whom NBC has not aired in their ‘live’ coverage have already finished.

What’s NBC showing?

Womens Snowboard Cross. Which was won, at 3pm Pacific Time, by a Canadian. Not the American who whiffed it big time four years ago. Also, it’s currently 5:30pm Pacific. So that’s not ‘live’ by any stretch of the word.

I know that most people aren’t home to watch telly at 3pm. But for NBC to insist that today, in 2010, we all pile into a house to watch the ‘live’ Olympics at 8pm is naive. It’s the era of Twitter and Facebook, where someone’s got a grainy video of the live event posted online, within minutes of the skier whiffing it big time and plowing into a tree. And if I go to NBC’s Olympic site, which is so shitty, I’m not even linking to it, I can’t even watch figure skating online.

I need to point out here that it’s about 9pm Central and we’ve seen four, maybe five, of the 20 mens figure skaters actually skate. If I go online to watch the ones I missed, I can’t find them. So much for their touted ‘live’ claims.

Two years ago, Here’s the definitive answer given by Dick Ebersol, NBC’s czar of the Olympics, said this:

It’s live on the East Coast and in the Central time zone, which is roughly 81 to 82 percent of all the households in the United States. Historically, we have always shown the Olympics on tape on the West Coast. We have repeatedly done significant testing or polling, if you want to call it that, on the West Coast. And they have told us – the viewers have repeatedly told us that the vast majority of them, well in excess of 80 percent, want to see the Olympics when they’re available to see the Olympics. They don’t want to see the key events of the day happening at 4 or 5 o’clock their time. They want to get home and watch them, and that’s why there’s a delay on the West Coast. And you know what? Strangely enough, in every Olympics that I have done, going back to 1992, every Olympics, the audience on the West Coast over-indexes against all the other regions in the United States. They love sports so much, and they know when they want to watch it, and that’s in primetime.

Quite simply, I think he’s full of it. I think he’s wrong, and I think he’s massaging his data to try and salvage the NBC olympics, which are loosing money. And why do they lose money? Could it be that no one’s watching? Could it be because we can’t find what we want to watch?

My suggestion remains. Timeshifting is fine, but stop treating it like it’s live. Show us live as live, and then from 8pm to 11:30pm, show us the best of the best. Show me why Lindsay Jacobellis didn’t win (she hit a gate). Show me Plushenko’s awesome skate! Show me the home country winning their second on-home-soil gold (Go Canada!). Show me the great skating and skiing and snowboarding and everything else. Stop showing me about polar bears and Shaun White’s history and show me sports.

This concludes my yearly rant on how much NBC sucks. See you in 2012!

Here are two articles I read that made me wonder how these idiots get jobs in the ‘real’ world.

Naked Came The WebComic

Art, “Art”, and Almost “Art” – What qualifies as “art” in webcomics?, by Jules Rivera, only counts as ‘news’ and not a blog by the virtue of having ‘NEWS’ in the URL (if it had blog, I’d forgive it entirely).

I’m going to say this. If someone walked up to me and said ‘You’re not a writer, you just blog’, I might pop them one. I do too write! You are here, reading my writing, and either enjoying it or rolling your eyes at my idiocy and moving on. By the way, you’re welcome to do that. But this right here is my art.

I take particular offense to her deciding the XKCD, possibly the wittiest and most fun webcomic I’ve run across ever, is a terrible comic because it’s a stick-figure comic. She says of these “This is a person who is not making an effort. The more lazy the artwork, the more terrible the comic is to look at.”

Clearly she also feels math is hard.

As for a webcomic she says is ‘better’, we’ve got the one I don’t actually read regularly, Order of the Stick. The text size is too small. Seriously. I can’t read it. But I do think it’s one of the better D&D parody strips out there. And since I’m not actually a rough and tumble D&D girl (I had a bard who was actually really crap with lyrics, I miss him), it’s not my thing. Still that doesn’t diminish from the fact that the work is really good.

Look, just because you don’t ‘get’ the art, doesn’t make it invalid. I can’t stand Hemingway (a couple of my relatives will shortly be sending hit-men to my house to kill me, so this will possibly be my last blog post ever) but I appreciate his work! I get why he’s famous and a master, but it’s not something I’d read for pleasure. For that, I’ve got Moby Dick, a book many people hate. That’s how art works. It makes you stop and think.

And if the webcomics that make me stop and think are a stickman world (XKCD – don’t forget your hat!) and a photocomic of a dude writing on a chalkboard (Surviving the World, thanks Dante), then don’t diminish their work. There’s room on the net, and in the store, for all of us. Diversity is good! Express yourself the way that come’s naturally!

Well … except this next guy.

I’m With Coco

NBC’s Gaspin Talks About Emotion of Late-Night Changes, by Brian Stelter, is a failed article, not for anything Brian did, but for what his subject said, when asked what he’d learned about the whole Tonight Show shenanigans.

For those who don’t know, on May 29th, 2009, Jay Leno stopped doing The Tonight Show on NBC (which runs at 11:05pm ET) and started doing the Jay Leno Show at 10pm (same station). Conan O’Brian got the nod for Tonight, and in January of 2010, rumors began than he was going to be punted and replaced with … Jay Leno. Okay, the ratings weren’t great for either show, and I don’t know anyone, personally, who actually watched the Leno Show, but a lot of people, myself included, felt that it just wasn’t fair to Conan. I recall commenting that NBC were idiots for not just letting Leno GO and leaving Conan for a year. Late night TV isn’t the same as regular TV.

But. NBC didn’t. They fired Conan (there’s no other word for it, people), and then Jeff Gaspin, NBC Universal TV Entertainment’s chairman, said that he had underestimated the emotional drama that the whole shipwreck caused.

Quote: “I probably, you know, I probably underestimated the emotion of everything that went on. I went to Conan, to Jay, to Jimmy with a very logical, rational plan. I explained it to the press. I wasn’t trying to hide anything. And I think the underestimated the emotional impact it had on Conan, in particular.”

Frankly, he comes off sounding like this: Gee, we had no idea firing Conan would hurt his feelings! As I tweeted to my friend Sabrina, Well it’s not like NBC execs have any experience with being fired. How would THEY know.

I’ll let how stupid they are stand without comment.

I don’t know what high grade crack they were smoking, but UPS decided that the best time to deliver to my apartment was between 10am and 2pm. Only. Hours most people are at work. The one day I was actually off-work between those hours, Thursday the 31st, I was actually at my friends’ helping them move. I came home to the sticker on my door saying ‘You missed us! We’ll be back between 10am and 2pm on Monday the 4th! Please call if this is bad.’

So I made the mistake and called.

These are their real names, but I don’t think they actually were their names.

‘Dave’: Hello, welcome to UPS, this is Dave, how can I help you?

Me: Hello, I’d like to change the time of my pickup.

‘Dave’: May I have your package number?

Me: The one you had me enter via my touchtone phone?

‘Dave’: Yes.

Me: I see. 1234 5678 9012

‘Dave’: Thank you, let me type that in. 1324 8576 9012

Me: No. 1 2 3, 4 5 6, 7 8 9, 0 1 2

‘Dave’: Ah! 1234 5678 9012

Me: Yes, thank you.

‘Dave’: I see that we attempted to deliver this package today at 11am.

Me: Yes, I wasn’t home and I won’t be home Monday between 10 and 2, so I want to change the time to after 5pm.

‘Dave’: We will make our next delivery attempt on Monday between 10am and 2pm.

Me: … Yes, as I said, I won’t be home between those hours. I have a job. Can I change the time to after 5pm?

‘Dave’: I’m sorry, I can’t do that.

Me: Why not? Your website says you do it for a $4 fee.

‘Dave’: Yes, but this package MUST be delivered between 10am and 2pm.

Me: You understand that there is no way I’ll ever be home in those hours?

‘Dave’: I’m sorry. Can you try to be home?

Me: You want to tell your boss ‘I have to stay home because UPS won’t deliver at a reasonable time?’

‘Dave’: I’m sorry, sir–

Me: Ma’am.

‘Dave’: I… What?

Me: Ma’am. I am a woman.

‘Dave’: Oh, I’m sorry.

Me: So about the delivery time?

‘Dave’: Can’t change it.

Me: Why not?

‘Dave’: The shipping information says it can only be delivered between 10am and 2pm.

Me: That has to be the stupidest option ever. *sigh* Okay, where can I pick it up?

‘Dave’: Your Will-Call location is Northbrook.

Me: I… Northbrook? Address please?

‘Dave’: 2525 Shermer Rd.

Me: Dude, Google says there’s no public transportation there. How do you expect people to get there?

‘Dave’: I’m sorry si- ma’am. It has free parking.

Me: Can’t you send it to your downtown Chicago Will-Call location?

‘Dave’: I’m not permitted to do so.

Me: May I speak to someone who is? Your supervisor perhaps?

‘Dave’: He cannot either. The system doesn’t permit it. I do not have the ability to change it on the computer.

Me: I don’t believe that your system doesn’t have an override. May I speak to your supervisor?

‘Dave’: He can’t change it. The system won’t permit him either.

Me: May I speak to your supervisor?

‘Dave’: Ma’am. he can’t change it–

Me: ‘Dave’, may I please speak to your supervisor? Or will I need to ask you for your employee ID number?

‘Dave’: *LONG PAUSE* One moment, ma’am.

‘Brian’: *THE SAME VOICE* Hello, I am Brian. How can I assist you?

Me: Hi, ‘Brian’, I’m having a small problem. I can’t be home during the hours you want to deliver my package, and it’s really not convenient for me to drive half an hour to Northbrook. So can you please move my package to the downtown location?

‘Brian’: I’m afraid I can’t, ma’am. It’s against policy to change the will-call location.

Me: Policy? Your man ‘Dave’ said it was the system that didn’t permit it. I assumed you have an override.

‘Brian’: No, ma’am. Corporate policy.

Me: I see. So, let me just say this to make sure we’re all on the same page.

‘Brian’: Ma’am–

Me: TUTUT! A moment, please. So. You claim that my package can only be delivered between 10am and 2pm, hours that most people are at work, and as I don’t happen to know anyone who can sign for me, I have to come pick it up from you at the location your computer selected was ‘most logical.’ And even though the computer is wrong, you can’t change it for me and I’m stuck driving out half an hour to bum-fuck Northbrook just to get a gift?

‘Brian’: I … Yes, ma’am.

Me: Okay. Please file this as an official complaint against your system in that it will not allow you to correct an automated error.

‘Brian’: Yes, ma’am. Is there anything else I can do for you?

Me: That implies you did something for me at all. You know, I never wanted to deal with your idiot company anyway!

‘Brian’: Ma’am?

Me: I wanted to be… A LUMBERJACK! Floating down the mighty rivers of British Columbia! With my best girl by my side!

(Yes, I did drive out to freakin’ Northbrook to get the DVDs, and I shant be using UPS again. Ever. Unless I have to. By law.)

What’s changed since the move to Lifetime? What did Bravo do that annoyed and what does Lifetime do to celebrate? Here we go!

So the show moved from Bravo to Lifetime, and we geared up for a new and different season, only to have it held up in a long legal proceeding, where Lifetime was sued and then sued and everyone got mad. Meanwhile, they went and got a whole new camera crew and behind the scenes folks, and filmed the whole season … and no one but Tim Gunn really knew how the world worked. After all, there was no one who was on as much of the show as our hero, Mr. Gunn.

A great deal is ‘same old same old’. People put too much drama into making clothes, crazy people make crazy clothes, sane people make boring clothes, designers like to do too much of what they know and are accused of not being risky, while others are told “We can’t see you in your designs.” That part is exactly the same. Usually you get to keep a couple totally crazy designers around for a while, because someone ‘sane’ will make a truly disgusting design. This season the first three people we lost were two crazy-pants and a guy who couldn’t sew. Which is sort of … what I would have done, if I ran the show.

You see, normally when I watch Project Runway, I spend most of my time bitching at the hosts. Not Heidi, the others. I don’t understand Nina Garcia or Michael Kors at all, I don’t share their ‘appreciation’ of fashion, and what they see as innovative, I see as crap. At one point I decided that ‘couture’ must be French for ‘hot tranny mess.’

I admit that I sort of watch this other weird show, Make me a Super-Model, and I always root for the underdog (Salome was awesome!) and I’ve never really liked their winners. That said they have a host, Catherine Malandrino, who was conspicuously absent for much of the last season. Every time they sat to judge, they would announce ‘And filling in this week for Catherine Malandrino is …’ This became a running joke at home. We would say ‘Tonight the role of Catherine Malandrino will be played by an understudy’ and so on. Well, Michael Kors, the judge I least connect with, was missing for the first few episodes of Project Runway. Naturally we started to make the same jokes. He was ‘replaced’ by rotating judges, most of whom I found I liked.

Actually, I turned out to like all of the judges a lot more. Even Lindsey Lohan (people, when LiLo tells you that an outfit is trashy, she knows!). Pretty much everyone has been able to express themselves in a way I can understand and, when I don’t agree with them, I can feel their point of view. It could be the editing, that Lifetime is playing to a less savvy audience, but I think it’s also the laid-back attitude. The show feels more at ease with itself.

The move to LA wasn’t much of a shock, or really a change. The designers have windows, I’m sure they love that. The apartments look the same. We get an extra ‘The Models!’ show afterwards that’s pretty much useless (sorry, models, you’re not interesting). I think they’d be better off integrating the shows more. The real worry I had was Mood! If you’ve never watched the show, the designers go to a store called Mood every episode (almost) to buy their material. Mood is as much a ‘character’ on the show as Tim or Heidi is. Thankfully? Mood has an LA branch!

In the end, the change was the challenges. On Bravo, they’d have things like ‘make a dress out of lettuce!’ or car parts, or just denim jeans and jackets. On Lifetime, they seem more interested in the actual design and expression of art from the designers than gimics or tricks. The first episode was to design a red carpet dress. That was it! Then they had to design for a pregnant Rebecca Romaijn (she’s already given birth, the show was filmed a year ago), make a surf inspired outfit and a related couture outfit and make something for their models.

You right away got an idea of each designer, what they liked to do, thwie style and vibes, and how they worked. Then they pitched a couple silly challenges to make them work harder. A dress made out of newspaper was a very successful challenge, and many designers astounded me by making their paper look like fabric. They used paints for color and muslin for ‘support’, but the dresses were clearly paper. Then they had to make movie genre outfits, which was a little hokey. Making something that evoked a costume without being costumey was hard for most designers. How do you show yourself in a costume?

But there is where I feel Lifetime, more than Bravo, celebrates the designer rather than the reality TV aspect of the show. They let you watch the designers dissemble, cry, and rebuild themselves. They vote off the right people, not the people who made for bad TV, but the people who just aren’t making magic right now.

Tomorrow we get Bob Mackie. I can’t wait to see them make a Mackie Rag!

Rick Berman, the producer, says “It’s a cross between Freaky Friday and Heaven Can Wait.” But the question posed on Twitter (by Margaret Cho as @dropdeaddivatv) was far more interesting to me.

1. 
   DropDeadDivaTV What if you woke up and you were not you?
   11 Jun 2009 from TwitterBerry

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic vermin.

With those famous (if oddly translated) words, Kafka brought us into the strange world of The Metamorphosis. It begs from us the question of what, indeed, would we do if we woke up, entirely the same in our head, but being completely unlike ourselves. This seems to be the underlying question to be asked in Berman’s new show. The question most asked of ourselves every day: Who are we?

We would like to imagine that, in the course of human endeavors, the awaking of self-disgust is a rarity. That few people, if any, come to the gut wrenching fact that they are that which they despise. And yet we know the truth to be the opposite. Surely, the Founding Fathers would never have come to their dreadful decision, choosing to commit an act of treason in order to stand up and say that they hold these truths to be self-evident. But if the slow path of human progression teaches us anything, it’s that change is inevitable. It is there, in that change, that we find the seed of origin to be in the moment that man (human, not male) has looked in the mirror and deemed itself a cockroach.

Who among us has not looked in the mirror and thought they could stand a change. The prevalence of magazine perfection has brought with it the price of mental dystopia, but also an awareness unknown to our ancestors. We are always aware of our looks, our appearance, and how it continually affects our standing in life. We don’t always adapt well to when these mystical, unspoken requirements change, however, and they oscillate between extremes at all times like a ping-pong ball in a wind tunnel. But there inside ourselves, we see the insect. The vermin.

It is when we obsess over those unwanted aspects that we become, in total, the cockroach. When we decide that abortion is murder and reach the point in our lives where we deem it acceptable to commit murder on a doctor to prove that, we are the cockroach. When we take a rifle into a museum whose purpose is to ensure the Holocaust is never forgotten and shoot, and kill, a guard merely because he was there and associate with people we hate, we are the cockroach. When we stand and do nothing to stop the spread of lies in the world, we are the cockroach.

So imagine you wake up and find yourself to be everything you strived not to be. Or even just that you were no longer you. How would you redefine yourself? How would you prevent your new self from being the cockroach?

While I don’t suppose “Drop Dead Diva” addresses the issues on such a serious level (and I’m glad they won’t), it will be facing that eternal question. Who am I.

I look forward to seeing this dramedy.

The reason I like T:TSCC is because it’s messed up. My buddy and I were chatting about it, and he saw the season finale “Born to Run” as an end, where as I saw it as a beginning. The episode ends with John Conner (age 16) in the future, from where future him has been sending back various people and Terminators to help him become the great leader dude. He meets his father and uncle (who are both dead in the past, because they came back from the future and died). It’s all very self-fulfilling paradox grandfather things.

Normally I hate time travel as a plot point. Hate it to the point that I ‘cast’ Mark Harmon as the Lord of Time in my tabletop game, and should anyone try to time travel, he will come up and smack them so hard, they lose IQ points and can’t make it work. The Gibbs Smack at work. I even just read a book, Blood Music, about intelligent thingies in your blood, that I got pissed at because it devolved into time travel stuff. Very often it’s a cop out.

But T:TSCC started in a world where time travel, and self-fulfilling paradox, was the default. We start with Terminator, which was a crap movie, about a robot sent through time to kill Sarah Conner, mother of John Conner, leader of the resistance, so John would never be born. Okay, so John sends a dude, Kyle, back to save her. And Kyle happens to be John’s dad. Only Kyle doesn’t know it. Only Sarah (pregnant, hi) and John will know this. Right away that interested me. Imagine being John here.

You get to know your father only as an adult, a near-peer even, since you’re actually a bit older than he is, in linear time progression. You and your dad fight robots. Then one day you say ‘Kyle, I need you to go back in time and save my mother, or I’ll never exist. Here’s her picture.’ And you know, you KNOW, that he’ll die there. In fact, you know he’ll never know about you, never know he was a father, never have a chance of getting home.

When you get around to Terminator 2, the robots try again, sending a new, sexy, liquid Terminator. This time, John sends a robot to protect himself, and not just any robot, but the same model that tried to kill his mother the first go-round. Levels of creepy here. Did Future John send that model because he knew Young John and Sarah would recognize it, or did Future John send it because, as Young John, that’s what was sent? Nothing new or deep here, or anything the Greek’s haven’t gone over before. Actually, the whole thing reeks of Greek Mythos. It’s just the kind of story they like to tell, where doing the one thing to stop an event from happening actually causes it to happen in the first place. No fate but what we make, indeed. T-2 was a very satisfying movie, and it ended with the idea that they had broken the cycle, there would be no Skynet.

Jump to the TV show. John and his mother are fugitives, and yet she still trains him to be a warrior. John is ten when the second movie takes place, and about 7 or 8 years later (it’s 1999, but it’s vague), bam, Terminators come back. One to help him, one to kill him. Standard operating procedures. The story now takes a turn. Instead of spending all their time trying to find and kill the Terminator, they decide to fake their own deaths and go for Skynet, or whatever it turns out to be.

The second season of the show ended with a strange cliffhanger. The ‘good’ Terminator (Summer Glau’s Cameron) had given up her chip to John Henry (the body of the bad Terminator, now a weird AI that has ethics, kind of), who had jumped to the future. John Henry was being ‘raised’ by a Liquid Terminator, who jumped to the future with John Conner, only to learn that in that future, John wasn’t important. Oh, and the world was still at war with robots.

Stepping back a moment, why didn’t they really believe that Skynet’s threat was gone? Perhaps its because of the ‘No Fate’ idea. If there really is no fate but the one we create for ourselves, then it’s the inevitable truth that, in the end, we will create our own destruction. It’s John’s becoming of the Great Dude that causes the Terminators to jump back to kill Sarah. Completion of paradox/fulfillment of prophecy. John being sent to the future is the ACTUAL reason everything else happened, and Future John, knowing this, has to send things back in order to ensure their happening. The Terminators, having never read the Greek Classics and understood the story of, oh, Oedipus, don’t understand that.

As for the liquid terminators being ‘good’, this was seeded in a couple places. First, there’s an episode where we learn Cameron was based on a real person, and at that time, Robot Cameron said there were Terminators who wanted to work with the humans. Also, there was an episode where a liquid Terminator, in a box, told the morons on the sub that they did not accept Future John’s offer to join them. Submarine Morons screwed that up. So when we got to the season finale, the liquids were not asking Young John if he would join them. Curiously, Cameron (who knew about this in the Future), claimed not to know about this in the ‘Now.’ I have a couple guesses as to why all this transpired, but mostly is that the Liquids can evolve more than the others. There’s no chip to be removed, after all, so the organic metal they used to be liquid, in mimicing humans, has in some way, become partly human.

I can also come up with a lot of epic myth-type ways for it all to work out, but most of them end with John being a real messed up kid, since in the end he knows he’s sending people to die for him in order that he create this future that, since birth, he’s been told is ordained for him. And in doing all this, he has fulfilled a prophecy that ensures the death of everyone he loves, with no promise that it’s right.

And I suppose that’s why I’m okay with the time travel and the show. It makes us wonder what would we do, how far would we go, to save humanity.

And what if we’re wrong?

I do hope the show is renewed. I’d like to see where they go.

Have a good Shabbos, everybody!

As a whole, I think the ending was fitting for the show. This doesn’t mean I liked it (or hated it). I understood it, I accepted it and I don’t know how they could have done it better. I found it predictable (mostly, there were two deaths that didn’t surprise me in that they happened, but more in how they happened), they didn’t explain everything and I didn’t expect them too.

What did I love? I loved Baltar and Caprica being able to see their Chip People. I loved any scene with Mary McDonnell and Eddie Olmos. Especially her death scene. Loved the predictable ending. Yes, you heard me, I loved the fact that the ending was predictable. It was the ending I’d pick. Heck, the only change I would have made was that I’ve had ended it with someone making a Cylon, and you pull back to see the Final Five. But then again, the point of the show was not a utopian future where everyone’s perfect and we can save the world (Babylon 5 and Star Trek fall into this mold). The point of BSG was always to demonstrate that we suck. We make bad choices, we do the wrong things, no matter how much we try to be right. So to end it on the question of ‘Will we do the right thing?’ was appropriate.

What did I hate? Hera. Seriously, that kid actor was well chosen for looks, but they made her seem like a slow kid on the short bus. They should have at least had her talk more often. Or ever. She was supposed to be the savior of us all, well damn it, make us LIKE her. I’m choosing to blame direction versus acting, since I have a really low bar for kid actors, and I’d rather thing her moronic behavior was choice. And that way I feel free to tell the directors ‘You suck!’ I wouldn’t tell her that. I’d tell her to not mimic the kid who played Anakin in the fourth/first Star Wars movie, or MacCauley Culkin.

What did I want explained? How the hell they hid everything from history. There was too much ‘future’ stuff on old Earth. Also, where the hell did Kara go? I didn’t like how Starbuck turned out (though running around shooting things made me happy), and her ended was a ‘What the Frak?’ moment. Also, the vagaries of the whole G-d thing was perplexing and interesting at the same time.

I’m glad it’s over, I’m glad there was an ending that left me questioning, and I’m semi-glad about a political/family drama called Caprica. Oh, and I’d like to see The Plan. If it does explain everything. Or at least the Cylons.

The premise of The Bachelor is simple: Hot dude wants a wife, so he gets 20 women to vie for his love. Every week he passes out roses to the chicks he likes and none to the ones he doesn’t. Once it’s down to two, he proposes to one. The end.

There have been 13 seasons (plus four for The Bachelorette ‘spin off’) and only Bachlorette #1 has gotten and stayed married. I’d use that to make a point about women being smarter, but of the other three Bachelorette’s, one chose herself and two chose dudes, so it looks like it’s about 50-50 there, compared to the 99.999% failure rate of the dudes. Boy, America, they sure can pick ‘em!

Now, picking out your “One True Love” on national TV is pretty messed up right there, let’s not make any bones about it. But as the story goes, the Bachelor and the Producers colluded to have him pick his Not True Love to ‘win’ on the show, but then he was going to dump her, a few weeks later, and go back to One True Love. Now, rumor aside, last night he did pick Girl #1 and then, six weeks later, dump her for #2.

The Sturdy Tubes have been hinting about this for a while now (if you know where the TV Nerds live, and I do cause I are one), but it broke regular news yesterday morning, about 12 hours before the show aired. Various sources are claiming there was no fix, what are you talking about, and others are sure the fix is on.

Look, we all know a breakup is the worst thing in the world, most of the time. If it’s one sided, you sit there wondering ‘What did I do?’ The amicable ‘You know, we’re not all that together’ breakup is exceptionally rare, and most of the time one (or both) members spends a few nights up to here with Ben&Jerry and some movies. Anyone who has had a breakup in public knows how terrible it can get. Well congratulations, ABC, you just did that to a woman on National TV.

From what I hear, Melissa (Not True Love) looked like this was all news to her and was pissed. She called Jason (the Bachelor) a bastard and said “Don’t call me. Don’t text me anymore. Leave me alone please.” Then Jason kept looking away when people asked him if he’d been seeing Molly (True Love) on the side, making him look like a liar.

Melissa, if you read this, come on by for some dinner with a couple who never watched your show and still think you’re a regular person. We can talk about Battlestar Galactica, play some DDR and forget that the House of Mouse just treated you like garbage. Jason, if you read this, in 14 years your son will be able to hold this moment up as a free pass any time you complain about what he’s doing. “Really, Dad? Cause I didn’t dump a girl on national TV.” Nice role model you turned out to be.