Sci Fi Wire -- The News Service of the Sci Fi Channel

Battlestar renewed!

New video blogs are also available on their site as well as deleted scenese from season 2. Off to watch now...

Winter schedule

Dec16 - Toby to Rocky.
Dec21 - Kate to Rocky.
Dec26 - Toby and Kate to Vancouver.
Jan 3 - Toby to Chicago.

I figure Kate's immigration stuff should be done in January or February sometime.

America continues to dominate in the field of irony

Ex-Fema boss starts disaster firm

The man who lost his job as head of the US response to Hurricane Katrina has started up a new firm - dealing with disaster readiness.
...
Mr Brown said his experience could be used to demonstrate how firms and agencies can better prepare themselves for unseen problems, and how to react when they arise.

His "experience"? As in, his experience in disaster readiness? No, no, no, that would be a kind of job experience, which would entail that he actually fulfilled duties of some sort in his capactiy as head of FEMA. I think the term to use here is "example", in the sense of "cautionary example".

He said the way he was criticised hurt, especially his family.

Oh, it always breaks my heart to hear about the pain that people suffered in the aftermath of Katrina.

But he added: "I'm moving on with my life. I'm doing a lot of good work with some great clients... My wife, children and my grandchild still love me. My parents are still proud of me."

Well, thank God he's been able to piece his life back together, after all he's been through! Someone ought to write an inspirational biopic about this amazing saga. The title could be Comeback Kid: The Michael Brown Story, with the tagline: Though New Orleans fell, not all was lost....

Imitating art

One: "According to the man steering this whole process, one of the aims of co-management is to break down the barriers between intellectual and physical labour; between those who do the thinking and those who do the work."

Two: "Between the mind that plans and the hands that build there must be a Mediator, and this must be the heart."

A note from Kierkegaard

From the concluding pages of The Concept of Irony:

Therefore, if at times someone is heard talking with great superiority about irony in the infinite striving in which it runs wild, one may certainly agree with him, but insofar as he does not perceive the infinity that moves in irony, he stands not above but below irony. So it is always wherever we disregard the dialectic of life. It takes courage not to surrender to the shrewd or sympathetic counsel of despair that allows a person to erase himself from the number of the living; but this does not necessarily mean that every sausage peddler, fed and fattened on self-confidence, has more courage than the person who succumbed to despair. It takes courage when sorrow would delude one, when it would reduce all joy to sadness, all longing to privation, every hope to recollection--it takes courage to will to be happy; but this does not necessarily mean that every full-grown adult infant with his sweet, sentimental smile, his joy-intoxicated eyes, has more courage than the person who yielded to grief and forgot to smile. So it is also with irony.

The Concept of Irony was Kierkegaard's dissertation. I don't think they write dissertations like this any more.

I'm a fan.

Japanese for Dummies

I introduced my dad to my landlords..."This is my mother."

argh!

Thanks Toby, for pointing it out after the fact. :P

Happy Remembrance Day

They don't do Remembrance Day in America. It's like living on Mars or something. Anyway, I went down to the Consulate to get my poppy, because I'm such a hardcore Canadian.

Seriously, though:

* * *

Dulce Et Decorum Est
By Wilfred Owen

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Guardian of what now?

The Guardian Unlimited has published a smear on Noam Chomsky that so willfully violates minimal standards of journalism that it would be shocking to find in a trashy American newsrag. Original article here.

(Story via Leiter, whose weekly postings of bad poetry do not in any way impugn his value as a source of news and/or polemics.)

I Quit!

Feels good. Looks like I'll be coming home to N. America for good this xmas. :D

Connected!

I got my phone, I got my computer, I got my DSL (approximately 4% as fast as in Japan), and I even have a lamp for my computer desk.

What I learned this week: Eichmann in Jerusalem is an amazing book. It is also utterly draining. It's a real page turner, but every once in a while I just have to throw it down and say the word "No" at the walls for a couple of minutes.

In other news, myself and a few of my fellow first-year PhD students have started up a communal blog. I'd intended it to be a kind of social lubricant, a la the Clubhouse, but so far it's mostly been a launching pad for attacks on Brian Leiter. Hilarious attacks.

Amazon.com: The Ultimate Star Trek Collection (1989): Explore similar items

Sweet!