rare-pattern

Warning: Spoilers After last night’s season 3 opener, I’m a little concerned about my favorite show on television, Battlestar Galactica. The show is starting to resemble “Lost,” which from my perspective is not at all an improvement. I’m not just talkling about the tents and stress monkeys in the jungle. It’s the whole arbitrariness that comes across in sequence after sequence of surprises with very little tension. The show used to be terrific at building tension....

Warning: Spoilers. (Not much, but hey, I warned you.) So I saw Aeon Flux on DVD the other night. Given the mediocre reviews and lack of box-office love the film, um, enjoyed, I really didn’t expect much. I wanted to see it mainly because of the production design I saw in the commercials. And because of Charlize Theron. And (okay okay) because I’m something of a scifi nut. What I didn’t quite expect was the heart of the story being driven by female characters....

This little gem turned up as the top video in Technorati this morning. Hardcore fans will recognize the episodes, but compiling it all here adds a new dimension of whimsical fun. Do I really think Star Trek: TOS has a “hidden homosexual agenda”? Of course not. (I hope not. William Shatner is just too cute in the 1960s.) But given Paramount’s tassled-loafer inspiration of re-doing all the special effects in the classic series, they’re almost begging for slashy take-offs....

Why is it that the studios cannot leave enough alone? Apparently, Star Trek: The Original Series (ST:TOS to Trekkers and Trek_kies_ out there [I’m of the latter, thank you very much]) is getting a makeover, not only being remastered for HDTV but also getting all the effects shots redone. There’s no direct link to the email update I received, so I will simply quote from the SciFi news page the entire PR blurb:...

The story goes like this: A couple hundred years ago, Scottish chemist Joseph Black was approached by some Scotch distillers. With the explosion of coal power, they wanted to know exactly what techniques they should use to replace their wood-burning distilling processes with coal-fired methods. Black did some experimentation and developed for them the appropriate method. But his calculations reportedly inspired some new ideas in his colleague, James Watt, who took Black’s ideas of “latent heat” and used them in the development of a new steam engine....