Asymptomatic

After watching the first half of SciFi's The Peacekeeper Wars miniseries, I am reminded how great a show Farscape was, and how stupid problems needlessly ruin a good thing all too often.

Don't know about Farscape? Check out this Farscape primer.

Last night's episode was pretty good. There was just enough of all the quirky action that makes Farscape great. I was afraid they were going to make it just another (longer) episode, but that doesn't seem the case. The story is actually progressing....

I just wanted to say that I thought Peter Jennings won the debate. ABC rocks.

The dudes on the other networks looked like they had stuffed zombies into suits. The Tom Brokaw on NBC lost his breath grunting (irritable bowels?) so many times while talking that he looked like he was going to die on air, and Dan Rather on CBS was so vapid that he would probably have fallen mute if someone didn't show him his cue card.

Also, will someone please buy CBS some new news equipment so that their remote guests aren't on a 3 second delay? Man, that's awful....

Over the weekend I downloaded the full Teen Titans second season. I've been recording it in the afternoons, but it seems like they keep repeating episodes from the first season, so we haven't seen anything new in a while.

Abby likes to watch Teen Titans while Berta of I comb her hair at night. It gets her to sit still during this complicated process. Otherwise, it might be impossible.

Teen Titans is probably the best cartoon on TV these days. It's based on a comic book from the 60's that gathers several teen sidekicks of major superheros. Unlike this poor IGN review, I think that Teen Titans has a lot of style. Granted, the comic may have been completely different, but different writers have license to remake comic properties with varies results. Maybe the series is a bit "cartoony", but that's one of the things that I like about it.In spite of seeming like an empty no-frills cartoon, the show manages to spin some deep plots. Unlike the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle animates series (which is also nothing like its origins), the characters actually have some depth. I have a hard time choosing any particular favorite from among the five, but Berta and Abby tend to favor the goofy teen Beast Boy....

I just got done watching the pilot episode of Lost (ABC, Wednesday 8/7), where a plane crashes on an island and there's some thing in the woods. It's pretty good. Maybe not the sort of thing you want to watch when you're going to travel by plane in a week, but pretty freaky.

One thing that bothered me about the show (bothered in a "made me wary" sort of way, not a "this is stupid" sort of way) is how everyone assumes that they're going to be saved instantly. There's this one girl who refuses to eat a candy bar (why??) because she's going to wait until the rescue boat arrives. I think that if I had survived a fall from 40,000 feet in a plane, I wouldn't count on anyone showing up and would start making with the survival preparations. Food rationing, shelter.

And when these "rescuers" don't show up by morning, I'd be burying bodies, for sure. Especially after learning more of the nature of whatever-it-is that's lurking around in the jungle. Clearly we're venturing into sci-fi territory here, but... Freaky!

It amuses me that the Olympics people have tried to circumvent how the internet works with their archaic policies. It amuses me even more that they've got network TV to consent to not broadcast news of the games live so that local stations can cover it in their own time. This basically means that the US doesn't get to see the games as they happen, but as the network deems them ready.

So, in case you hadn't noticed, the US women's gymnastics team took the silver medal, while Romania took the gold, and Russia took the bronze. Indeed, you can't even get this news on the official web site (it was down when I last tried, but it's here now, and foreign news sites are prohibited from serving that information to anyone with an American IP address.

I don't really have these restrictions....