The Stew

My little brother is in the Navy Reserve. He got called up to active duty; he’ll be headed to Iraq in a few weeks.

In the meantime, he’s been training with the Army — in case something goes wrong, and my desk jockey brother has to defend himself with whatever weapon he can find besides his issued sidearm.

I’m extremely proud of him, but I still find this image disturbing. He’s in the Navy, and the armed forces are so short handed because of this total cock-up we call the Iraq war that he has to go play soldier. He won’t be knocking down doors, thank God, but he’ll be boots-on-ground in the desert for at least 8 months.

More on this later.

Edited 10/5 by my nitpicky brother for accuracy.

I don’t know if this is just a Midwest thing or not, but we’ve got this phenomenon at our state fair known as “crop art.” Basically, seeds of various plants are combined in order to create artistic representations of things like, well, various plants. Some enterprising artists use the seeds to make caricatures of celebrities such as Rich Little and Phyllis Diller. (I’m guessing the choice of “celebrity” has something to do with the average age of the people making the crop art.)

This year, there was a pretty good Dolly Parton and a very flattering Colonel Sanders. And something a little extra, for those few liberals in the crowd: Bush, Cheney, Rice and Powell as The Straw Man, The Tin Man, Dorothy and The Cowardly Lion walking down “The Yellow Cake Road.” (Click image at right for a larger version.)

Actually, there’s some precedence for this. Two years ago, there was a very good image of GWB’s face on Curious George’s monkey body, looking under something or another. The caption, written like the old Curious George book covers: “Curious George Searches for Weapons of Mass Destruction.” Still brings a chuckle.

Downloading and watching Babylon 5: The Lost Tales turned out to be a much better experience than I had been expecting.

First of all, it didn’t take very long to download. It’s only about 3.5 gigs, and I could have started watching it as it was downloading but I decided to wait until it was done. I didn’t stare at the download percentage the whole time, but it was done well within two hours.

Second, the video quality made the process worthwhile. I picked the high-definition version off of Xbox Live, as described in an earlier post. There was no macroblocking, no visible color banding, and only a slight softness due to the amount of compression. It looked great — certainly much better than the show ever looked when the series was still on. I think the special effects may have suffered a little because of the resolution, as some of the digital sets looked considerably more “fake,” for lack of a better term, than on shows like Battlestar Galactica. (This B5 movie and Battlestar Galactica shared the same visual effects studio.)

And third, the movie was better than I was expecting. I didn’t bother rewatching any old Babylon 5 episodes before watching this, so I was a little rusty on my lore. Turns out it didn’t really matter. This is “Big Issue” science fiction, where large issues are pondered and the good guys, while flawed, do the right thing — sometimes grudgingly. The flick definitely suffered from the lack of supporting cast members and extras, making this huge space station seem a little small at times. But the writing and the acting were both above par, and I hope this film does well enough to convince Warner Bros. to pony up a few more.

Bonus points definitely go to the producers of this film for vamping up Teryl Rothery. That was unexpected, and in a very good way.

I recorded the premiere of the new Flash Gordon series on Sci-Fi a few weeks ago, and finally got around to watching it. Well, some of it, anyway.

I made it through about 40 minutes before it got deleted, as did my DVR’s instruction to record new episodes.

Look, I’ve got a very high tolerance for bad science fiction. I’ve seen The Ice Pirates. I sat through Alien Apocalypse. But this show was so bad, so inane, so lame, so tired, so… bad.

Don’t watch it. You probably don’t, but don’t. You’ve been warned.

Turns out we didn’t need Jack Bauer, extraordinary renditions, water boards or naked pyramids to convict Jose Padilla. He might just spend the rest of his life behind bars.

That’s the American legal system for you. Charge someone, make your case in front of a group of people and you just might get a conviction. Why do we need Guantanamo, again?

The way this guy was treated before entering our legal system was, for lack of a better word, criminal. He fully deserves the punishment that’s coming to him, but he didn’t deserve to be thrown in a hole without access to basic legal protections. The Supreme Court may have eventually come to that conclusion, if the Bush administration hadn’t chickened out at the last second and sent Padilla into the criminal law system.

This case, and the string of successes that the British have had using their existing criminal laws, should prove once and for all that we don’t need to make fundamental rights optional in order to fight terrorism.

Turd Blossom is gone. His legacy will live on, as will the subpoenas.

The one thing this proves is that the Bush presidency has definitely jumped the shark. Or it’s in its last throes, if you will. If Rove won’t even stick around until January of ‘09, you know the corpse of Bush’s legacy is starting to get a little ripe.

I’ve got a feeling that my grandkids are going to be asking me a lot of questions about the period of 2001-2009 — mostly things like “how the hell did you let that happen, you feeble old man”? And one of the best things I’ll be able to say is, “Well, at least Bush & Rove didn’t manage to do to the U.S. what they did to Texas. ‘Cause in plain terms, what they did to Texas is something they tried to make illegal in Texas.”

I feel the need to get my geek on. It’s all due to the casting news about the new Star Trek movie.

Check it:

• Tom Cruise is supposedly going to play Christopher Pike, the first captain of the Enterprise. Given J.J. Abrams’ good relationship with Cruise (which might be enough to overpower Cruise’s falling out with Paramount), this rumor makes some sense.
• According to the casting profiles for the characters in the movie, Scotty is “28-32 a brilliant ship’s engineer. Must be able to do a flawless Scottish accent!” Flawless? Craig Ferguson has rightly pointed out that Scotty’s accent is closer to Pakistani than Scottish.
• They’re apparently close to casting some guy named Anton Yelchin to play the young Pavel Checkov. Given the fact that Checkov didn’t join the crew until season two of the show, it’s going to be hard for them to integrate him into the timeline where this movie takes place.

As a non-theist, I don’t do much in the way of praying. However, I’d like to petition the deity — any and all deities, in fact — to make sure that this film doesn’t totally, completely, entirely suck.

By now, you’ve probably heard about the I-35 bridge collapse in Minneapolis. As of this writing, four are confirmed dead, and there are still a lot of people missing.

Everyone’s thoughts and prayers are with the victims of this tragedy. And while it’s too soon to be casting blame, I’m not going to let that stop me.

 Tax cuts are to blame.

Everyone hates big government, everyone hates taxes, and we’ve repeatedly elected folks who have promised to cut our taxes. They’ve also cut spending on things like… infrastructure repair.

This nation’s roads, sewer systems, electrical grids and even some aspects of our telecommunications network are in bad shape (making a cell phone call within three hours of the bridge collapse was nearly impossible anywhere in the Twin Cities). We haven’t made it a priority to do anything about it. Maybe that should change.