Also have to vote for ANH, because there's nothing like the first one. Might be different coming at them later on DVD when they're all available.

I also think CE3K is a must and ET is expendable. So is BTTF. Terminator 2 is, oh, maybe #11 or 12. Children of Men...eh. Not even top 20. Same with Gattaca. Give me Rollerball (the original, as if I had to say it) over either. Or ST II:TWoK. Or Dark City. Or A Boy and His Dog. Or Heavy Metal, yeah, Heavy Metal...

Adama is sitting around a table on the base ship with all the Brother Cavils and their side of the civil war. Tears are streaming down his face and Brother Cavil is screaming "You did what?"

Adama hoots with laughter and says "I left that dumb-ass Tigh in command! And Starbuck, no I can't go on!"

Cavil: "You've got to tell us!"

Adama, after more laughing and wiping away of tears: "I left Starbuck as the CAG!"

Cavil laughs uncontrollably for, oh, 5 minutes straight, then says: "But she's A, crazy as a shit-house rat, and B, a plant by us!"

Adama: "Wait, it gets better! Lee is the President! And Zarek, the only one with a brain and a spine in the whole fleet is sucking a hind tit that puts out straight lemon juice!"

Roslin: "He always was a tight-ass!"

More laughter, more wiping of away tears, lame jokes about stop it before my sides split.

Cavil: "So dumb-ass thinks he's not only a Cylon whose eye we pulled out and played marbles with, but a Cylon who impregnated another Cylon?"

Adama: "I told you that music bit would be good for a hoot! 'All along the watchtower!' What a fucking bunch of morons! What's her name, your old be-otch, Laura, she killed Tyrol's whiney old wife as soon as she knew she was a Cylon. And Tyrol's going all 'Taxi Driver' and shit! He's running around looking for somebody to kill!"

Simon, once he stops laughing: "How long are we going to keep this crazy shit up?"

Brother Cavil: "I don't know. I mean, well, we've only got the next, what? Eternity? to roam around the cosmos. Might as well pull the wings off these idiots for as long as we can. Then we'll let them see Earth right before we nuke it and kill all their dumb asses. Somebody tell the Sixes and Threes and everybody over there. They'll love this shit..."

And when you need every hand every day, you can forgive a lot of Starbucks-quality hijinks.

All that said, the point at which it really jumped the shark for me was when Adama let Apollo leave to pursue a political career. It went completely against Adama's character, because it was completely insane in the context of a continually shrinking military facing an overwhelming enemy. He was one of the top two people in the cockpit, he'd been CAG, commanded a Battlestar -- I could go on. So to let him go pass his time with the piss and moan council went beyond the pale.

I also cast my vote with the people who liked the New Caprica interlude -- but only as that, an interlude. It's a show about a journey, not a destination.

That's not to say I don't enjoy the show. Can't wait for the next one, in fact. But no military person in his or her right mind would have let Apollo go.

Sure, on the face of it, and I was disappointed. But in his defense, there's a strain of SF that takes the time involved in space travel a little more realistically (Forever War, for instance). If you can't crank 'er up to warp 9.5 you have to seriously alter what an acceptable target looks like. I can imagine several scenarios (fleeing the ruined home world, for example) in which the aliens are sitting around the bridge with the boss saying "What? A planet full of water? Are you nuts?" And some poor bastard has to be the one to say "Well, we'll be coming up on the next habitable planet here in, oh, several hundred years, just a few generations after we run out of power and/or food." This is followed by a "Well, shit" discussion about taking your best shot while you can.

I don't know if he was thinking that -- and I kind of doubt it -- but I think it just makes it in under the suspension of disbelief clause.

But I realize all that is meaningless, because even widely read Philistines are still Philistines if they don't get it. My real point is that you have put words in my mouth. I never said either trilogy was the height of anything. What I said was that either trilogy was "more creativity than 99.99999 percent of the people ever born will ever be able to claim."

Granted, I probably went a little crazy with the 9s after the decimal point, but not that crazy. Even today many, if not most, people still live lives that are "nasty, brutish and short," leaving little time for the imagining of even one movie's worth of epic adventure. If you've managed to think up three movies' worth of stuff and had them become famous the world over, I'd say you can lay claim to more than your fair share.

And the creativity I was talking about is simply making up worlds and people and the actions that take place between them. If they never existed and you thought them up, you have by definition been creative. Whether or not you've done a particularly good job is something we can argue about all night.

So here's a little hint back atcha: It's not a particularly good rhetorical technique to pull a claim out of your ass, attribute it to someone else and then chide them for having made it (it is, however, a popular technique if you're running for office or covering people who are. You don't want to be like them, do you?).

See, now I've lost that great laugh high I got from watching that video three times straight. Lookit you done!

As for the expanded universe, feh!

As for that "creatively bankrupt" stuff, feh! Those six movies -- hell, either three -- are more creativity than 99.99999 percent of the people ever born will ever be able to claim. More than the vast majority of movie makers will ever be able to claim (how much creativity does it take to make the next buddy cop flick, the next teen angst flick, the next talking cute animals flick...). Personally, I wish I had one trick that good up my sleeve, whether I ever got rich from it or not. So the stars aligned and he got insanely rich from it. It could have gone to the studio fat cats and their evil corporate overlords like the profit of so many people's creativity does. Better this way.

And Lorien, because the two species revered him, was a good person to step in and say "Hey. Enough. Let's leave them to their own problems." Happens all the time in real life, from high school fights to somebody like Jimmy Carter stepping in to diffuse a crisis.

The whole thing was more or less like Vietnam, Korea and all the other smaller countries thumbing their noses at the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. and saying "take your ideologies and stick 'em," and England and France chiming in and telling the two big countries "trust us, this stuff never works. Better to move on." Except that the Vorlons and the Shadows listened. Now that I think about it that *was* the unrealistic. But then, they were aliens.

My problem with Tori's spacing of Cally is that right hand. Even accounting for your usual TV over-acting, that was too much. She lifted Cally off her feet and knocked her what? Six feet through the air? Underhanded? While holding a baby? Did she suddenly discover her Cylon power cell or something? My memory might be off on the particulars, but I was distinctly impressed and surprised.

That's another question overall, of course. If they're so human a doctor needs to check their blood to find out, how could they be stronger? I'm thinking that would be obvious.

It could be that Baltar is the final cylon and his journey from shallow, selfish ass to self-sacrificing saint is the road of the final cylon. The humans started out selfish, the cylons are becoming more selfish, and Baltar is the bridge between them. Kind of similar to what might happen to Lee if he becomes the final leader. Or Kara...

Anyway, the actual reason I wanted to comment: A possible explanation for the cyclical "this has all happened before" nature of the universe. What if the cylons are the mechanism god (evolution, the universe, whatever) uses to keep the human race alive? What if genocide/self-destruction are inevitable, and the survivors of the 12 colonies go through the cycle and then escape to earth, where they go through the cycle and escape to the 12 colonies, where they go through cycle...?

I hate to draw this parallel, but it would be like Zion in the Matrix: they grow until they create a crisis, the machines trim them back and let them start again with a much smaller group.

So they arrive back on a post-apocalyptic/abandoned earth and start again.

Also, god is all over the show -- the perfectly timed supernova, the visions, the healed child. Maybe Baltar will achieve enlightenment and be the only one to make it to earth, where he'll land in the middle east, oh, 2,000 years ago...

And one gripe: they let Lee leave? You're down to less than 40K humans and you're throwing former drug runners and sports heroes into the cockpit, Starbuck is a nutjob/cylon plant with an inexplicably perfect ship, you know there are other cylons around and you don't know who they are, the cylons you do know about inexplicably run when they've got you cold, and you let your best guy, your son, one who has commanded a battlestar and who you personally saw pop out of the womb (OK, I'm guessing there), explore his political options? And all the pilots who will have one less excellent pilot to watch their backs applaud?

Suspension of disbelief to full, aye.

Anyway, you persuade some (the final four out of five will change quite a few minds, I bet), co-opt some, break others and kill the ones who will never forget and never surrender. And remember, they won't have the cultural support system they have now (and our grudge-holding cultures have on Earth).

Plus, the humans will offer the Cylons plenty of opportunities to be the nicer species, and with interbreeding and all...three generations max before the distinction is forgotten.

I love all the votes for River Tam, but obviously you guys must have missed those few episodes (13, I think) where she was completely batshit. OK, not her fault, but she was screwed up and programmed by the nasty government, and even they weren't safe from her. The person who had the best luck with her was her brother, and she kicked his ass at least once. These are not good qualifications for a bodyguard.

Asians are better students because Confucian tradition put a lot of emphasis on education. Studies have shown that within three generations Asians don't do any better than other Americans. In Korea, where I've served three times, parents are lamenting the fact that their kids aren't the students they were. And they're not. The culture has changed on them.

As for this general thread, denying racism or the existence of racial differences is not a viable option unless you can get everybody to do it. If you can't, you're better off naming it, defining it and understanding it. Ignoring it just leaves the racists free to use a club you have blinded yourself to.

So you have to wonder if, while striving for expression and acceptance and, not coincidentally, money, they didn't take the avenues that were open to them. A musical superhero from a wonderful future would be a good melding of the longing for a better future and one of their "favored" forms of expression, whereas they probably wouldn't get far trying the whole black master of the universe thing.

Then you've got to wonder, which came first? Were blacks economically or culturally "encouraged" to channel their creativity more into music, and afro-futurism was one of the ways it expressed itself, or was there a need to express afro-futurism and it ended becoming popular through music because that was the venue open to popular expressions of such ideas? Or just the one that left persistent evidence (as opposed to underground comics that went through a couple dozen hands and didn't survive the author's teenage years)?

It would have been cool (by today's twisted cartoon standards) to have mixed the black rage idea with the black musical futurism and had kind of a black El Kabong bonking racists over the head with his guitar. Not to make light of the situation, but the image popped into my head and was irresistible. I've known a couple of black guys in my time who would have volunteered for the job with gusto.

The other big problem is that, after the attack on Blade's HQ, the blood pack turns into a bunch of normal guys. This happens in all those movies (and even worse in Underworld) where the vamps don't show any special physical ability, or, as in Underworld, get their asses handed to them every time a werewolf gets his mitts on them (except Selene and Viktor, of course). I guess you can't keep raising it up a notch, but it takes the bite out of the genre if they've got to have a gun to actually kill anybody.

But with Linux, you have a lot of options. With the Mac you get it Steve's way, and with Windows you get it the marketing department's way. After being an Mac fanboy for 15 years and cursing Windows at work for most of the last 20 years, I'll take it my way.