Monday, August 11, 2008

A fun game of "Where is your mayor?", some boring Olympic events and a truce in Zimbabwe?

- You know I love bringing good news to all of the dorks out there, so this bit of news about Battlestar Galactica should be fun for you. With the final 10 episodes of the series set to air in 2009 and bring the long-running voyage of dorks worldwide to an end, there has been a sad, resigned atmosphere to the BSG universe. However, the Sci Fi Channel is looking to buoy those spirits with news that it is working on a prequel movie that will air once the series ends. Right now, the movie project is being labeled the “special event” and it be set in the time frame prior to the miniseries that revived the BSG franchise back in 2003. Jane Espenson and BSG star Edward James Olmos will write the movie and it is expected to feature many familiar characters from the series, which I might know if I spoke dork and was enough of a nerd to have watched a single second of the show. Since I haven’t, I’ll have to leave the rejoicing over this new development to the pocket protector, Dungeons and Dragons segment of the population….

- I hesitated about posting this next one because I think we need some hard, empirical data to verify this one. Reports are now circulating that the waifish, effeminate former American Karaoke karaoke-er Clay Aiken is a father. I have to doubt this because if there is anyone so girlish and effeminate that you wonder whether he actually has all of his man parts, it’s Aiken. Dude sings, looks and acts like a chick far too much to reach even the most minimal qualifications on the manliness scale. Yet there he is, posting an announcement on his website (shouldn’t you have to not suck royally as a musician before you can have your own site anywhere other than MySpace?) that his son Parker Foster Aiken was born Friday in North Carolina. The mother, who appropriately enough has a man’s name, Jaymes Foster, is Aiken’s friend and record producer, none of which speaks well of her. If she’s associating herself with Aiken musically, she’s already forfeited all of her credibility in that arena of life. If she’s having a kid with Aiken, that speaks ill of her in another area of life. That the two of them met while part of the biggest blight in all of music, American Karaoke, cements the bad vibe and bodes poorly for this child as he tries to make his way through life. You’ve got about five strikes against you, P.F. Aiken, but you’re only a few days old so your blissfully ignorant of all of this….for now.

- A power-sharing agreement is near in Zimbabwe, and all it took was the murder of hundreds of innocent people by those in power, constant abuse and harassment of opposition members and two fraudulent shams of elections. President Bob Mugabe and opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai are in face-to-face negotiations for a pact that would split power between the two groups even though Mugabe has no right to any power, having lost the initial presidential election in March and only won the subsequent runoff election after marring the results of the first one and running a campaign of terror and harassment that drovr Tsvangirai from the runoff. South African President Thabo Mbeki is in Zimbabwe’s capital city of Harare to mediate the negotiations for the mixed government, which then will have to address a country that has been thrown into chaos ever since the disputed March election. It isn't an optimal solution for those in the opposition movement and the country as a whole, most of whom want to see a vicious, despotic dictator like Mugabe driven from office, but it’s better than the alternative of no involvement in the government for Tsvangirai and his Movement for Democratic Change. Now all that’s left to do is hope that a deceitful, duplicitous son of a bitch like Bob Mugabe actually honors the terms of the deal he signs….

- Still believe the Olympics are a life-altering, monumentally important event? Tehn clearly you haven’t been watching preliminary rounds of rowing, equestrian events and fencing. Those were some of the first events we got a glimpse of in Beijing and….they were boring. No offense to those athletes whose specialty is jumping in a long, skinny boat and rowing backwards for thousands of meters, but your sport does not make for good TV even if it is the Olympics. The second one person or team gets a few meters ahead, the race is virtually over because making up distance is next to impossible. Equestrian events feature people in funny clothes jumping their horses over obstacles and as I’ve previously stated, if your “sport” involves the majority of the power being supplied by something non-human, a sport you are not. Fencing is another downer, a few short bursts of action where you can’t really tell what happened and the judges are running to the replay monitor after nearly every bit of action to see who actually scored a point. One upside to the tape-delayed coverage of segments of the games is that when a mediocre women’s soccer match between Canada and China is on MSNBC, you can flip over to ESPNEWS, see on the crawler that the game ended in the same 1-1 tie it now sits in at halftime on the tape-delayed broadcast and not waste any time watching the second half because nothing is going to happen. So overall, not a stellar opening weekend for the Games, maybe things will get better…but probably not…..


- Where is your city’s mayor right now? Depending on what time of day you’re reading this, your city’s mayor might be in his office, home sleeping or out at some important community function or meeting….or if you live in Detroit, your mayor may be in jail. Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick is staring down perjury and other charges for lying under oath about an affair with his former chief of staff during a civil trial, but those are far from his only concerns at the moment. Kilpatrick has been ordered to jail because he violated his bond by taking a quick trip to Canada without notifying authorities prior to leaving. He made the short voyage across the border to Windsor, Ontario for “official city business” (didn’t know gambling in casinos was official city business, but I digress) and apologized for his mistake. Judge Ronald Giles didn’t appear to be swayed by either the mayor’s status as the leader of the city or by his contrition, demanding that Kilpatrick go to jail for his mistake just like any other citizen in his position. This guy just can’t stay out of his own way; he’s his own worst enemy and he keeps digging a bigger hole for himself. He had the affair and he could have chosen not to, he lied under oath about the affair when telling the truth would have done personal but not professional damage and he violated his bond by taking an unapproved trip. He’d better request an expedited trial date for all of the charges he’s facing because at this point, the longer he’s a free man, the more he seems to screw himself over….

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