Three (oops Five!) TV serieses I really want on DVD…

  1. “The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr.”: Bruce Campbell, in one of his funniest roles, and what the Wild Wild West movie could have been, even if Kenneth Branagh was cool as the villain.
  2. “Voyagers”: Early 1980s time travel TV show. Probably in retrospect not as cool as “Quantum Leap,” but one is less demanding at age 7 than at age 14 I suppose, and the “Titanic” episode is stuck in my memory.
  3. “Dungeons & Dragons”: My favorite game as a kid, turned to one of my all time favorite cartoons. Shlocky, and simultaneously dumb and intelligent. (Actually, this one IS on DVD, but last I checked only in the UK… UPDATE Sep. 2005: Marie bought the UK Region 2 DVD box set when we were in England a few months ago,)

And how could I forget “War of the Worlds”, and”Friday the 13th”, both late 80s shows I watched when I finally started staying up late? Both vaguely science-fictiony, and at least in the case of War of the Worlds, there was something of a story arc as well.

Given the riches of recent TV re-releases on DVD(Buck Rogers in the 25th Century - The Complete Series,Land of the Lost - The Complete First Season,Quantum Leap - The Complete First Season, etc…) perhaps I’ll get to see these again after all. Do they ever live up to memory? Perhaps not, but I still want to see them again.

Can we call it GannonGate yet?

From AMERICAblog:

Has Jeff Gannon told Peter Fitzgerald all he knows about the Plame affair? If you’d like to “spread the word” on the Gannon story to help encourage the Prosecutor’s office to give Jeff a call, put a link to it on your Web site.

http://americablog.blogspot.com/2005/02/man-called-jeff.html

The more links, the more likely Google is to pick it up in their Google News. The more news coverage of this story, the closer we are to getting to the bottom of the Plame crime.

Note also warning regarding the linked article:

WARNING: A number of the links in this story are to x-rated photographs, and some of those might prove shocking to some people. Please exercise your own discretion when clicking. (And, as you read, please forgive the necessary typos – I’m going for rock-solid facts, rather than spelling.)

“What about a catapult?”

From a post on a post of RASF.written:

The idea:
http://qdbii.pyoko.org/upload/catapult1.gif

The execution:
http://qdbii.pyoko.org/upload/catapult2.gif

I think this all started from a discussion some geeks were having on
Somethingawful.com. I have nothing to do with it, just thinks its pretty
good work.

They come in threes.

So I hear that Ossie Davis and Max Schmeling passed away on the radio this morning. And apparantly, John Vernon Dean Wormer from “Animal House” also just died.

Aside from the eerie coincidence that “they come in threes” actually applied this time without much of a stretch, it’s a sad loss of some quality talent.

“I do have a cause, though. It is obscenity. I’m for it.”

from GOP’s Red Light District at Oliver Willis’s Blog:

The right is investing massive amounts of money in a growth industry. Hardcore porn. How much did Jenna Jameson contribute to the Bush war chest?

linking to the not-quite-so juicy:
Will the “Moral Values” GOP Refund the Money?

The Republican Party likes to call itself the party of “moral values.” So the question is, will it return the tens of thousands of dollars it has pocketed from companies that air pornography?

As reported by the LA Times today, “Adelphia Communications Corp. has quietly become the nation’s only leading cable operator to offer the most explicit category of hard-core porn.”

According to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, Adelphia gives the overwhelming amount of its financial support to Republicans, the party of “moral values.”

Which in turn links to GOP Corporate Donors Cash In on Smut

Shill time: Quote in subject from patter before “Smut” by Tom Lehrer, a very funny song which can be found on his album That Was the Year That WasThat Was the Year That Was

Brin on Star Wars vs. Star Trek

A great article that I’d lost track of by David Brin… “Star Wars” despots vs. “Star Trek” populists

Anyway, when it comes to portraying human destiny, where would you rather live, assuming you’ll be a normal citizen and no demigod? In Roddenberry’s Federation? Or Lucas’ Empire?

See also his “incautious and heretical re-appraisal of J.R.R. Tolkien”… this latter article should be mandatory reading for would-be fantasy writers.

Now, this just about begs some Amazon links, but I’ll spare you the blatant shilling today. Just go look at the links, instead.

Today’s post is brought to you by the letter “R”

The word for the day is “reification”

Reification
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Reification, also called hypostatisation, is treating an abstract concept as if it were a real, concrete thing. The term is often used pejoratively by epistemological realists as a criticism of epistemological idealists. Epistemological realists often regard reification as a logical fallacy.

Wikipedia rocks. As a word and as a concept worth knowing, so does “reification”; see for example Stephen Jay Gould‘s discussion of the reification of “intelligence” in The Mismeasure of Man.

What’s the relevance of the word? Well, I’ve been in some arguments on rec.arts.sf.fandom on “intellectual property” and why I think subsuming copyright, patents, and other related rights into a single reified concept of “intellectual property” is a bad thing, and the concept of reification is key to my sense of the argument – although they’re critical to the functioning of modern society and a modern economy, these rights are specific and of limited duration – and granted by society for the mutual benefits of creators and of society as a matter of social contract.

Property rights, on the other hand, are a legal recognition of an existing natural state of material objects (and in some ways, places) insofar as most material objects that we care about can only be in one place at a time, and thus usually only in one person’s physical possession. Or, in the case of space, only one person can occupy a given precise location, although clearly this is not enough to justify the complex legalities of land ownership.

This is not an area I know enough about to really get through the argument fully, but this is kind of a hot button for me and figure it’s better to try to think through it here – on my own soapbox – than to end up in public and all-too-likely vituperative arguments about it on rassf.

A final thought, from the U.S. Constitution:
Article I, Section 8 (enumarating the powers of Congress), clause 8: “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;”

Norwegians know the truth about Bush…

Norwegians Confused by Bush Salute

OSLO, Norway – President Bush’s “Hook ’em, ‘horns” salute got lost in translation in Norway, where shocked people interpreted his hand gesture during his inauguration as a salute to Satan.

That’s what it means in the Nordics when you throw up the right hand with the index and pinky fingers raised, a gesture popular among heavy metal groups and their fans in the region.
…
For Texans, the gesture is a sign of love for the University of Texas Longhorns, whose fans are known to shout out “Hook ’em, ‘horns!” at sporting events.

I hadn’t any idea that the same sign was used for anything but the heavy metal thing, and while I’d heard the phrase “Hoom ’em horns” I’d never had any idea what the f it meant or referred to. Some UT team, as it says above? Sports fans, weird folks…

Lighter, faster, cheaper?

From Stars & Stripes:

One serving officer, who asked not to be identified, said Rumsfeld “didn’t even let us go to war with the Army we had; he made us leave half our armored vehicles at home in pursuit of lighter, faster and cheaper.”

Apparantly, we had a lot of Bradleys and similar APCs, and never deployed them. That’s almost forgiveable in the initial invasion, but c’mon – it’s only happening NOW, 19 months later? How about in the first month or two…?

Oh, and that quote was the last paragraph of the article. Can we say “burying the lead” boys and girls?

via The Isle of Balta