Screw you, you greedy bastards. You have just guaranteed I will pirate the upcoming season of Battlestar Galactica. ...

Still trying to catch up on the inventory additions. February was a very light month: it's shameful that I haven't been able to get this posted before now. At least I've formed some pretty firm opinions on most of this....

I made this dish for the Super Bowl party we attended Sunday, and it got such good reviews, I thought I'd post it. I used the recipe from Julee Rosso and Sheila Lukins's New Basics Cookbook, which (along with its siblings the Silver Palate Cookbook and Silver Palate Good Times Cookbook) is pretty much my first recourse when I want to cook for public events. ...

I cannot be the first person to notice this, but I made a fortuitous and surprising discovery recently. Having just noticed the three-week-old news that selected shows from FOX were available through ITMS, I was having a look at what they had, and found, with a certain nostalgic excitement, that Lost in Space was among the offerings. What jumped out at me were the running times of the episodes: just under 51.5 minutes. That's about 8 minutes longer than the Battlestar Galactica episodes I'd been downloading. So I dug around some more and here are some rough averages, based on ITMS track information:...

This may be heading off into tinfoil hat territory, but it occurred to me after watching tonight's encore presentation of another fine Battlestar Galactica episode, that the the television industry may not want to create good programming. Even watching for the second time in three days, this week's Galactica was gripping and memorable, but despite or because of that, advertisers got exactly zero return (from me at least) on their investments in those two hours' commercial slots. There were some Sci-Fi station IDs, that tasteless commercial from the Superbowl where a family is led to believe that the father has just been killed in the hospital, and I think Bill Ford showed up once to talk about cars. That's all I remember. I generally don't pay that much attention to commercials under the best circumstances, but I felt particularly that my level of engagement with the episode diverted any marginal attention I might have spared for advertising. ...

I am back from a 12-day family trip to Germany (Christmas with the grandparents), and am still working through my (and the kids') jet-lag, but I want to get a post up for the new year and there's some interesting stuff going on there that I don't want to completely ignore, so here's some quick jabs that I might (but very well might not) come back to in greater depth....

When Apple announced the video iPod and the ability to buy television episodes and other videos through the iTunes Music Store earlier this fall, I took note, but did not feel in the least tempted, mostly because none of the handful of shows in that first installment interested me. With the inclusion of Sci-Fi's Battlestar Galactica series in the latest content additions, I'm officially worried that I might get hooked. It's obvious even from the scattering of episodes I've managed to watch on teevee that Galactica is tremendous, probably the best science fiction series since Babylon 5. Its complex, interweaving plots and rich, gritty characterizations stand up on their own merits; the fact that something this good could be built on the foundation of the schlocky 70s series of the same name is nothing short of miraculous. (Don't believe me? Even the curmudgeonly vidiots at TeeVee.org like it: "it’s a sci-fi series for adults that doesn’t shy away from dealing with big issues: God, sex, death, betrayal, obsession, self-denial… it’s all in there.")

Galacti...

One thing I left out of my Super Bowl non-review was Napster's shamelessly misleading ad that aired a couple times during the event (no, I won't link to it because I refuse to lend even my meager traffic to these jerks). Their assertion boils down to this: owing an iPod will cost you $10,000, while subscribing to their Napster-to-go service only costs $15/month. Where to begin?...

As a native of the Greater Philadelphia Media Market, I don't really want to talk about the Iggles' loss in the Super Bowl. I'm not really in mourning or anything, we GPMMers are used to disappointment, and we did manage to keep the game interesting right down to the end. I just don't have anything that interesting or witty to say about the game. Instead I'll just refer y'all to Mark Bernstein (interesting analysis of what makes the Patriots great and how it relates to New Media research) and the Vidiots at TeeVee.org (witty panel discussion of the spectacle's high- and, more often, low-lights. While I don't agree with them that the game was dull, I definitely agree with their assessment of the the commercials. CareerBuilder.com's chimps and Kinko's/FedEx's groin kick were the clear winners of that competition).

I am in Atlanta for the SITE conference. I don't like being away from my family, and I shudder to think how much work is going to be waiting for me when I get home, but there's at least one advantage of being here: the hotel has Cartoon Network on cable. I've been rediscovering the hilarity of Futurama (it's as funny as The Simpsons; I don't know why it has never caught on in the same way), and staying up later than is really healthy to watch the Adult Swim lineup of Witch Hunter Robin, Big O, and Cowboy Bebop (Inuyasha is in the lineup too, but it doesn't do much for me). I knew Cowboy Bebop from before, having previously spent a while staying up later than was healthy to watch its combination of sci-fi, hard-boiled detective, and humor. The other two are new to me, but intriguing. Witch Hunter Robin is a noirish supernatural detective series. An in-house promo describes it, I think, as X-Files meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer with Carrie thrown in. Accurate enough. Big O is just plain weird. Based on the grand tradition of Japanese Giant Robot cartoons, the series throws in a piano-playing android maid, a one-eyed butler/robot mechanic, and a bizarre plot of stolen memories. Anyway, it's probably good that I won't be able to watch when I get home. I need my sleep.