Steaming Turd

I’ll be away until Sunday. Try to hold down the fort until I get back!

Now, let’s see if he ever actually reads it…. because I’m planning on fulfilling his request by talking about Stargate SG-1 and Atlantis. The season finales of both shows happened last Friday, and I didn’t get around to writing about them then because I’d already posted a bunch of other pointless crap that day.

Spoiler Warning

Stargate SG-1

The season finale for SG-1 was a bit disappointing. It was a two-parter that started the previous week, involving SG-1 finding out that a ZPM was used as a religious artifact in 3000 BC Egypt (which was when Ra was still on Earth dominating the human race). Since SG-1 had conveniently recovered an Ancient time machine (dear god no) in a recent episode, they figured the best thing to do was go back in time and retrieve the ZPM. Anyway, they went back in time, but changed the timeline such that Sam and Daniel never hooked up with SG-1, and the Stargate program had never started. They both turned into nerds instead!

So, long story short, the new nerdy Sam and Daniel go with Jack to Chulak, meet Teal’c, watch Daniel get killed, head back in time 5000 years (again), meet the original Daniel that had already gone back in time, bury the ZPM, fix the timeline, and press the Magic Reset Button. Yes, the two-part season finale had the feel of a Star Trek: Vger episode, where everything is all screwed up until suddenly the 15-second-long denouement just sort of happens. Roll credits. Their solution to the whole timeline problem was that, in the newly-fixed timeline, SG-1 didn’t actually have to do anything (they weren’t predestined to have to go back in time or anything like that), so they just went fishing instead.

Stargate: Atlantis

Of course, they made a minor clever use of the one actual plot element to arise from that episode (the recovery of the ZPM) by tying it into the multipart-cliffhanger-season-finale of Atlantis. In the past few episodes, the SG:A team has been expecting the arrival of (and swift defeat at the hands of) the Wraith. Well, right at the last moment, they get word back from Stargate Command, as a hard-nosed colonel and about five dudes with boxes of crap show up through the stargate from Earth. Turns out that since we have the ZPM (from SG-1) now, we can connect to the stargate in Atlantis now. So, what do they do with the ZPM? Instead of using it to power the Ancient defenses on Earth, they send it by ship (remember, they can’t send it through the stargate while it’s powering the stargate) to Atlantis, but evidently nobody blinks twice at the prospect of an Earth-built ship making an intergalactic voyage in about four days. So, anyway, the rest of the episode consists of the cast of Atlantis fighting the incoming Wraith ships, combined with Dr. Weir making an appeal to the Genii for some nukes but instead getting herself kidnapped.

And to top it all off, it’s “to be continued” in July.

Now, one might think that my scathing reviews of SG-1 and Atlantis would mean that I don’t like the shows. That’s not true. They’re probably the best sci-fi on TV these days (I know a lot of people like the new Battlestar Galactica series, but I’m avoiding getting into it). I really enjoyed the previous multipart episode, resolving a lot of loose strings with Anubis and the Replicators (and guest starring Isaac Hayes!). But they have come down off their highs in seasons 4 and 5 of SG-1, and I worry that SG-1 is about to make extra sure that it jumps the shark with the upcoming cast changes. Richard Dean Anderson is officially no longer a full-time cast member in Season 9, being replaced by Farscape primary Ben Browder. Don Davis (a superb actor who didn’t get nearly the props he deserved from the fans while he was on SG-1), who had already retired from full-time work on the show for season 8, is essentially replaced in Season 9 by Beau Bridges. On the plus side, in the new tradition of having very cool black men playing Jaffa leaders (Wayne Brady, the aforementioned Isaac Hayes, and of course Christopher Judge as Teal’c), Louis Gossett, Jr., is playing a recurring role as a Jaffa in Season 9.

On the other hand, I think Atlantis has some good prospects in its upcoming guest list, even though I think they’re blowing their wad on the whole Wraith invasion thing a little too soon (it is only the end of Season 1, after all). They’ve already had Colm Meaney and Robert Davi as guest stars, and Season 2 will see Mitch Pileggi (Assistant Director Skinner of The X-Files) in a recurring guest role. They’ve done some things with the Dr. Weir character to make her seem a bit more competent as a leader (though getting herself kidnapped by the Genii was not her brightest moment). And, of course, as long as they keep having hot chicks on the show, they can make all the episodes they want.

I guess to summarize, though, Birch can blow it out his ear, because Stargate is still a generally good show. And since they’ve poached one of the actors from his show, maybe he’ll change his mind and start watching it again.

Well, we got beat 93-85 in one OT, after holding as much as a 20-point lead in the first half. To be honest, it was a game we were destined to lose - UofL just didn’t play the first half right. They essentially got played, as when an extra man would move in to the lane for more coverage (their normal tactic), WVU would pass to the open man on the perimeter (often, Kevin Pittsnogle) where our guys hit an astonishing 18 of 27 3-pointers. UofL tightened up their defense in the second half, playing some pretty harsh man-to-man coverage. In fact, it became really obvious the few times their defense faltered, because those were the times when we’d put up another 3.

Anyway, UofL tied it up 77-all with 38 seconds left in regulation, as they whittled our lead down over the entire second half. We couldn’t get through their defense to win in regulation, and it was pretty obvious at that point that they had us figured out enough to continue gaining on us during overtime.

On the plus side, Pittsnogle, Beilein, and Herber are all juniors this year, so hopefully next year WVU will be able to show us some more good basketball.

WVU beat Bobby Knight’s Texas Tech team 65-60 to get into the regional finals in the NCAA Div I Tourney. They play Louisville (who beat region top seed Washington 93-79) Saturday afternoon for a shot at the Final Four. WVU hasn’t progressed this far in the NCAA tournament since West Virginia native and basketball hero/legend Jerry West led the team to the championship game in 1959, where they lost to California 71-70.

I figure we’re gonna get beat on Saturday, but this is a game I’m actually gonna watch. And I hate basketball.

Tournament Brackets

It’s still a classic, and it’s still hilarious.

So this whole Terri Schiavo thing is just painful to watch. Yes, it’s sad that a person suffered horrible brain damage. But it’s even more sad that she’s been propped up for the past 15 years by her family, who for whatever reason can’t deal with the grief of losing their daughter. And it’s amazing that the government has taken up their position on this issue in proportions differing vastly from the evident view of the public, completely ignoring the ramifications which, for once, the people understand and are rightly worried about.

Assume for a moment, in case you are still holding out hope, that Schiavo is just an empty shell of a person - that all trace of personality was destroyed when her oxygen-starved cerebrum began dying many years ago. Why is she being kept alive? It’s for the false hopes of a devastated family who will never be able to move on as long as their daughter’s body is still alive. For the sake of their sanity, let her go.

Or, assume for a moment, in case you can’t see even a glimmer of conscious response in Schiavo, that somewhere in there is her consciousness - that every day for the past 15 years, she’s lived like this, fully aware of her surroundings but unable to do anything, held prisoner in her own body for as long as she lives. Why is she being kept alive? It’s in the belief that a life of pure nothing is somehow better than oblivion. For the sake of her sanity, let her go.

And that doesn’t even touch the legal issues. If I say that I don’t want to be hooked up to machines or kept catatonic for decades to come, who is the government to force those tubes down my throat? Who is my family to keep me in such a state against my will? Why does the supposed wisdom of other people trump the wishes that I’ve outlined for myself?

Anyway, while I’m on the topic, I guess I’ll just say right now that if I’m ever incapacitated and unable to communicate my wishes, with no chance of recovery, I don’t want to be kept in that state for years to come. Let me go, and let my organs save some lives.

Previously, on Steaming Turd: User registrations will not function until I get sendmail working with php. This might not be until the weekend, if not later. In the interim, I’ll open comments without registration, but if I start getting spam, I’ll have to take drastic measures.

Thanks for the patience and stuff

Turns out I had to recompile php. Some genius decided that it shouldn’t compile in support for the mail function at all, if it can’t find sendmail on your machine. When I first installed php, I didn’t have a MTA on here, so no mail function. It’s been bludgeoned into submission, though, and you can now register. Don’t forget to change your password to something you can remember later. For the time being, though, there is some wodginess apparent when a mundane user is logged in (the link at the left doesn’t change to “logout”, for example, and there’s no indication that you are logged in), so registration isn’t currently required to post comments.

Now that the site layout looks more or less right in Firefox (but not in IE 6 - take that, losers!), I just wanted to welcome everyone to the site, and give you a very brief sample of the drivel that I’ll be posting in the near future. My plans are to try to post maybe three or four times a week at least, dividing my attention between a few different topics. Politics is one, my research (or other relevant science-y stuff) is another.

By the way, I know the site layout is total crap. That’s part of the beauty of the name - I can be as lazy as I want with it, never bothering to make the layout look good, because you can’t polish a turd.

Okay, so I just installed WordPress on my web server, and I’m figuring out how things work. Seems like a really nifty interface and all. Uses PHP and MySQL, with which I fortunately have a little bit of experience from co-maintaining certain parts of another web page.

The next thing, of course, will be an attempt to recover the original look and feel of my old site. But now that I’m using a scripting language, I can say goodbye to frames at last.

Goodbye, frames!