_______

Many obstacles and stumbling blocks remain in the way of health care reform. After all we’ve been through, the House still may not pass the Senate bill, and/or the budgetary aspects of the bill may not get through the Senate reconciliation process.  Almost anybody could derail the thing in the next few weeks.

But just for fun, let’s look at what conventional wisdom says will be in the final bill and see if there is anything in it that will be an immediate benefit to people with mesothelioma and other asbestos-related disease.

It is likely that the final bill will provide additional funding for state high-risk insurance pools. Currently more than 30 states run such pools, which are nonprofit, state-sponsored health insurance plans for people who can’t buy insurance because of pre-existing conditions. The biggest problem with such pools is that, often, the insurance they offer is too expensive for many who might need it. Both the Senate and House bills provide $5 billion in subsidies for state high-risk pools to make the insurance more affordable.

Under the Senate bill, beginning in 2014, private companies would no longer be able to deny coverage to adults with pre-existing conditions, nor could they charge higher premiums for people with pre-existing conditions. Until then, the state high-risk pools could provide some help.

Closing the Medicare Part D coverage gap — also called the “doughnut hole” — is another potential provision that could help some patients with asbestos-related disease. The “doughnut hole” is the gap between the coverage for yearly out-of-pocket expenses provided by Medicare Part D and Medicare’s “catastrophic coverage” threshold.

For example, in 2009 Medicare Part D paid at least 75 percent of what patients paid for prescription drugs up to $2,700. After that, patients must pay for all of their prescription medications until what they have paid exceeds $6,154. At that point, the catastrophic coverage takes over, and Medicare pays for all but 5 percent of the patient’s drug bills. The final health care reform bill probably will provide for paying at least 50 percent of out-of-pocket costs in the doughnut hole.

You may have heard the bills include budget cuts to the Medicare program, and this has been a big concern to many people. Proponents of the bill insist that savings can be found to pay for the cuts, and that people who depend on Medicare won’t face reduced services. But this is a complex issue that I want to address in a later post.

The long-term provisions probably will include many other provisions that would benefit patients with asbestos-related disease, including increased funding for medical research. Although there are many complaints about the bill coming from all parts of the political spectrum, on the whole it would be a huge benefit to many people.

— Barbara O’Brien

One, voting in the 3 Quarks Daily Arts and Literature Prize ends at 11:59 tonight (Eastern time).  Unfortunately, 3QD has one of those voting devices that allows people to see the results as they vote, so you can all see that each of my two entries has picked up one vote so far.  This is embarrassing.  Yes, I know the posts weren’t all that good, or all that literary, but one vote?  Help me, my friends, let’s at least get to three.  The voting booth is here.  I know I have very few Sunday readers (largely because I almost never post on Sundays), but what the hell.

Two, and more important, I forgot to post this picture of the Best T-Shirt Ever.  (If you right-click and “view image” you can see a somewhat larger image.)

It was a gift from people at Penn State’s Institute for Gravitation and the Cosmos, which I visited on Tuesday, February 23 at the invitation of Hannah Williams (she’s the one on the left).  Why was I visiting the Institute for Gravitation and the Cosmos, you ask?  Because Hannah had the great idea of inviting people from around the university who don’t work on gravitation or the cosmos to come in, talk about their work, and share notes with people who do work on gravitation and the cosmos.  I was there to talk about the fallout from Ye Olde Sokale Hoaxe, the legacy of T. S. Kuhn, the difference between brute fact and social fact, and the way that Down syndrome and disability studies reside at the intersection between brute fact and social fact.  It was much fun, and there was much food.  Also, a whole mess of really good questions.  This was only the second time I’ve done a presentation for physicists (the first time was April 1995, at Illinois), but I have to say, these ultra-interdisciplinary get-togethers are very enjoyable.  When else do you get to talk about the perihelion advance of Mercury and the debates over autism in the space of 90 minutes?  (Hmm, it turns out that you can download a Mercury Perihelion Procession of your very own from the Wolfram Demonstrations Project.  I do love the Internets for things like this.)

So when the 90 minutes were up, Hannah presented me with this shirt, saying that the group wanted to see how I react when I am proven wrong.  You’ll recall, of course, that back in January I wrote, “the reason all the T-shirts say ‘RACE FOR THE CURE’ is that ‘RACE FOR THE REASONABLE ACCOMMODATION’ doesn’t fit neatly on one side of the shirt.” As you can see, I am quite wrong about this.  And, as usual, very very happy to be wrong.  Because now I own the Best T-Shirt Ever.  Thanks, Hannah!  And thanks, people from the Institute for Gravitation and the Cosmos!  I look forward to meeting you again in the playoffs, when the Institute for the Arts and Humanities faces the Institute for Gravitation and the Cosmos in the interdisciplinary-institute quarterfinals.  We’ll bring the cosmopolitanism, and you bring the quantum foam!

And don’t forget, the post that inspired the Best T-Shirt Ever is one of the nominees for that 3QD prize.  For that alone, it deserves three votes, no?  11:59, people.

See you soon.  Until then, keep racing for the reasonable accommodation!

Ô Canada!
Terre de nos aïeux,
Ton front est ceint de fleurons glorieux!
Car ton bras sait porter l’épée,
Il sait porter la croix!
Ton histoire est une épopée
Des plus brillants exploits.
Et ta valeur, de foi trempée,
Protégera nos foyers et nos droits
Protégera nos foyers et nos droits.

Ahem.  Well, I don’t think it was a Game of the Ages.  Or a game for the ages, either.  But it was immensely entertaining.  And if you watched these Olympics and still don’t see why hockey is teh bestest game ever, even better than curling and the biathlon, I don’t know what to say to you.

For obvious (and entirely justifiable) reasons, everyone is going to remember Parise’s game-tying goal with 24.4 seconds left (and, I hope, the deft play by Patrick Kane that made it possible:  Kane was the USA’s offensive MVP of the night, and may eventually become the best American hockey player of all times), and the breathtaking, brilliant OT session that followed.  But the first 57 minutes of the game were not really all that thrilling.  The occasion was thrilling, sure—the final event of the 2010 Olympics, a rematch of a terrific prelim game, the latest installment in a serious rivalry.  But although the first 57 minutes were quick, physically intense, and tightly played, they were a little too tightly played.  We were treated to what’s called a “close-checking” game, and apparently everyone was prepared for it: in the pregame commentary, Eddie Olczyk predicted that the game would be won and lost in the corners, and he turned out to be exactly right (even though he didn’t say anything about the puck getting caught in an official’s skates, forcing Crosby to flick the puck down low to Iginla).  Me, I prefer a game that’s won and lost on the question of whether a team can skate through the neutral zone with speed, developing plays and creating open ice and passing lanes; but this game had no open ice or passing lanes, very few odd-man rushes, very little end-to-end action.  I longed for the freedom of the larger international rink; meanwhile, the USA and Canada played old school North American hockey, and they played it well.  It just wasn’t galvanizing—until Crosby’s breakaway and Kane’s furious, possibly-game-saving backcheck.  And then, two minutes later, Kane twisted to save a pass from Pavelski that had been deflected by Getzlaf, spun, sent the puck goalward, off Langenbrunner’s skate and into Luongo’s pads, and Parise put it in.

At which point the team that thought it was going to hold on to win a tightly-played one-goal-game realized that it was going to have to go to the locker room, sit for fifteen minutes, and then come back out and start the entire thing over from scratch.  1993-94 Rangers fans know what that’s like, having watched their team give up three last-minute goals to force overtime, two against the Devils (the second in game seven) and one against the Canucks (in game one).  Oh, yes, the 1993-94 Rangers themselves would know what that’s like, too.  It is excruciating.

Everything after that was just crazy land.  Up to that point, the game was huge because of the stakes, not because of the second-by-second thrills.  But the OT was edge-of-the-seat, second-by-second thrills.  Sudden death is like that.  And a twenty-minute sudden-death with four-on-four play is also like that, except more so.  I decided last night that it’s infinity times better than the five-minute OT, because I’ve watched way too many five-minute OTs in which neither team takes a chance for fear of making the fatal mistake that leads to a 2-on-1 the other way.  In this format, by contrast, players actually try to win the damn game instead of waiting out the OT to get to the shootout.  (I understand why the NHL has to keep it to five minutes, though.) And, of course, the four-on-four produced all the open ice I could have wanted.

In the end, it was exactly the right outcome.  Not only because Canada really was the just-slightly-better team, and not only because Crosby deserves this place in history, but also because Crosby’s goal saved us from decades of debates about the offsides on the first US goal and the Two Clanging Posts at the opening of the third period.  Had the Americans pulled this one out, erasing Canada’s two-goal lead and ending the Vancouver Olympics on a sour note for the home team, Canadians would now be talking about that offsides and those posts, and for obvious (and entirely justifiable) reasons, would continue talking about them forever.

And with that, dear readers, this weary blog is going on hiatus for a couple of weeks.  I have some news—I’ve been asked to serve as the next director of Penn State’s Institute for the Arts and Humanities, and I’ve accepted.  I don’t officially take the job until July, but I’m going to start meeting with people well before then, and that’s going to cut deeply into blogging time, for obvious (and entirely justifiable) reasons.  I’m not giving up the thing just yet—perhaps sometime later this year, after the Penguins-Blackhawks Stanley Cup final.  We will see.  In the meantime, I leave you with three important instructional videos.  First, one for you guitarists:

Then, another for you Karen Carpenter fans:

And finally, a different drummer:

See you around the Intertubes, everyone.  While I’m gone, don’t forget—The Editors have been back for a while now.

Alas, I have no time to blog about last night’s epochal smackdown involving Canada and Russia (6-1 after 24 minutes? are you kidding me?), because I’m off to New York for an MLA meeting.  I do have time, however, to confirm that my people did indeed refuse to speak to Hitler’s people about a guest-posting gig on this resolutely anti-fascist blog, just as Abbas Raza suggested in this compelling version of “Downfall.”

I’ll be holed up in MLA headquarters for most of my stay, but I do plan to sneak away after dinner Friday night and head to the Loser’s Lounge, partly to check on my old bandmate David Terhune and partly to hear the magical music of the Carpenters.  It’s the would-have-been-60th-birthday-celebration of Karen’s work, you see.  I sent Dave an email warning him that I would be in the crowd, and letting him know that I hoped he would be playing teh awesomest guitar solo ever (in a song that sucks) in “Goodbye to Love.” He assured me that he would indeed, though he added that the horns would be taking part of the outro.  In response, I sent him this old post, which of course led me to revisit Steve Rubio’s original post on “Goodbye to Love,” and ...

Z.

O.

M.

G.

Would you look at that comment thread?

The post opens with, “OK, this is a silly thing to write about, because the audience of 12 that I have for this blog has pretty much all heard the story.” It is dated September 22, 2003, back when an audience of 12 would have made Steve’s the 83rd most influential blog on the planet, and nobody responds until one Henrietta R. Hippo (if that is her real name) posts two comments on February 25, 2004.

I originally linked to the post because of Steve’s eloquent closing encomium:

The lyrics were bad enough:

Loneliness and empty days will be my only friend
From this day love is forgotten
I’ll go on as best I can

But then Tony Peluso steps in, with a short solo in mid-song, and then a longer blast to close out the record. And if it wasn’t for those two solos, I wouldn’t even know who Tony Peluso was, but off he goes, with Hal Blaine pounding beneath him ... and the only crime is that there wasn’t a place for Tony on the recent Rolling Stone list of the 100 best guitarists of all time.

And I don’t care if the above pisses off you Carpenter fans, or if I sound like a snob, but fuckin’ A as they used to say, that solo at the end of “Goodbye to Love” is an inspiration, it suggests that anything is possible, it’s the most truly uplifting thing that ever appeared on a Carpenters record, it’s the artistic truth in opposition to the sap that was the Carpenters.

My post was dated July 1, 2005; on July 13, two more readers weighed in chez Steve.  One was someone named Sean, who wrote, “Heh, I was going to comment with this on the ‘Best Guitar Solos in Crappy Songs’ post, but this is even better, since you mentioned it.” So now the post is almost two years old, and we’re at 4 comments from three different people, two of whom may have been directed Steve’s way by this very blog.  Then there’s some more love for Tony Peluso on August 19 of that year, followed by a spray of comments in 2006, one of which is from a Cynthia Michaud who says,

Tony Peluso is my best friend. He loved Karen Carpenter—her voice and her person. So you can be a fan of both with his blessing. He is immensely proud of his work with Tacuba. It’s great that you all appreciate him so much. Check out Antonio Carmona and Natalia LaFourcade.

The next, dated March 3, 2007, is from a Brian Richardson; it opens with

I was in the music dept at Long Beach State when Karen and Richard Carpenter were students there.

On March 22, Steve Richards weighs in to say,

Tony Peluso learned to play guitar by listening to Nokie Edwards, the lead guitarist of The Ventures.... The riff at the end of The Carpenters song Mr. Postman is played by Tony Peluso and is definitely a Nokie Edwards riff.

On August 13, Lucinda Filpi writes,

I knew Tony’s mom most all of my childhood. She gave me singing lessons on Saturday afternoons after she taught catechism class, when I was about twelve or so. I never remember meeting Tony, although I had seen him from a distance on occasion at church.

Then Jimmy Iovine, or someone plausibly claiming to be Mr. Iovine, appears on October 3, with a comment on the Hal Blaine love that had accumulated to that point:

Though Hal Blaine was the Carpenters primary studio drummer, Karen actually played the drums on numerous album tracks. She was also the drummer on some of their most successful hits such as “Yesterday Once More”, “Please Mister Postman”, “Ticket To Ride”, and “Sing”. Buddy Rich recognized Karen as one of his favorite drummers, and Hal Blaine himself praised Karen for her technique and overall ability as a drummer.

And here’s John Gebhart on November 16:

My family and I are blessed to have Tony Peluso as a friend. His remarkable musical talent is surpassed only by the immensity of his heart. And I’m sure I won’t live long enough to meet anyone with a more hyperactive sense of humor (I write with a huge grin).

His solo on Goodbye to Love is remarkable for any number of reasons. A distorted ‘58 335 on a Carpenters record? No way! It took amazing insight to even try it and it was executed with a master’s touch. Perhaps the overarching thing that made it work, no matter how hard he pushed the envelope that day, and he did push, was that Tony didn’t play the instrument, he played the song.

OK, so by this point two years ago, someone can show up and say,

This page is the first hit if you search for Tony Peluso on Google. Congrats to the blogger!

Followed by Spike Stewart on April 14, 2008:

I knew Tony when we where both enrolled at “Blessed Sacrament” grade school across the street from Sunset Sound. I later worked with him at C.P.MacGregor Recording Studios after his house-band gig with ‘The Abstracts’ expired at Bill Gazzari’s on the strip. Unfortunately I’ve misplaced the album long ago, but would love to have another copy sometime. I hope he is doing well and would like to know how David Dinino, Pierre Vigiant, Roland Baston and company are faring.

And in November 2008:

As we speak, Tony is in Houston to attend the Latin Grammys. Here’s hoping he’ll be a winner for his work with Cafe Tacuba! Go Tony!

Also, May 2009:

I know Richard! We talk online all of the time, so be careful of what you say! What the hell are you talking about? Who are you to say anything about the Carpenters.

And the most recent comment is dated November 6, 2009.

So let’s sum this up, shall we?  Steve Rubio posts a whimsical little something in September 2003 that he thinks will be silly and superfluous, because his readers consist of twelve people who have already heard his “Goodbye to Love” bit.  The post then generates forty-nine comments over the next six years, spread out randomly and unevenly as people famous and unfamous show up to look for Tony Peluso, Hal Blaine, friends of Richard Carpenter, David Dinino, Pierre Vigiant, Roland Baston and company.  The whole thing starts off unassumingly and gradually builds into what is clearly teh awesomest longue-durée thread to be found anywhere in the domain of the Internets, surpassing even those meta-meta-threads that are more metareferential than metareferentiality itself. 

In other words, Steve Rubio somehow wrote a tribute to “Goodbye to Love” that not only becomes the Tony Peluso Virtual Public Square but replicates in its very structure the totally unexpected WTFitude and head-asploding, medium- and genre-transforming brilliance that is Tony Peluso’s solo.  For this, and for this alone, Steve Rubio’s “Tony Peluso” post and the ensuing thread is officially the best Internet Thing ever.

Take it away:

After the nominating period is over, there will be a round of voting by our readers which will narrow down the entries to the top twenty semi-finalists. After this period, we will take these top twenty voted-for nominees, and the four main daily editors of 3 Quarks Daily (Abbas Raza, Robin Varghese, Morgan Meis, and Azra Raza) will select six finalists from these, plus they may also add up to three wildcard entries of their own choosing. The three winners will be chosen from these by former U.S. Poet Laureate, Robert Pinsky, who, we are extremely pleased, has agreed to be the final judge.

The nominating process will end on 11:59 pm this Sunday, February 28, so if you want to nominate a post, you have to do it this week, folks.  You don’t have to nominate one of mine (each person is allowed only one nomination), though of course I’d be honored if you do.  The post must have been written after February 21, 2009, which eliminates all my fine posts from the summer of 2005, and they must be under 4000 words, which eliminates all my other posts.  Personally, I’d recommend this one.

No, wait, that’s not right.  Maybe this one.  I don’t know.  The truth is that when I went through the archives for the past year I found the whole thing kind of depressing.  There’s a little verve here and a little snark there, and of course a series of profound and deeply unsettling debates on His Dark Materials, cultural studies, and teabagging.  (Yes, that was all in one post—and what a post it was!) And, of course, the thing that makes this blog worth the trouble: lots of fun banter with readers in the comments.  But the writing itself, meh.  I’ve seen better. 

Still, the 3 Quarks Daily Prize in Arts and Literature looks like a fun thing, regardless of whether this humble blog is weighed in its scales and found wanting.  So head on over and nominate a blog post you really like.

And now to last night’s game.  Let’s turn things over to the Associated Press:

VANCOUVER, British Columbia — The Americans didn’t believe in miracles. They just believed.

And they pulled off the biggest Olympic hockey upset since the Miracle on Ice, stunning Canada 5-3 on Sunday to advance to the quarterfinals of an already mixed-up tournament.

Brian Rafalski scored two goals, Ryan Miller held off a flurry of shots and the Americans quieted a raucous, pro-Canada crowd that came to cheer its dream team, only to see it upstaged by a bunch of unproven kids.

One day short of the 30th anniversary of the country’s greatest hockey victory – the unfathomable win over the Soviet Union in Lake Placid – these underrated Americans were faster, more disciplined and more determined than Canada’s collection of all-stars.

Better, too.

Um, no.  Also, no, and furthermore, and in conclusion, nuh-uh.  First, Richard and MCA in this LGM thread have it right: comparing a prelim round game in which a bunch of talented NHL players beat a bunch of somewhat-more-talented NHL players to a climactic medal-round game in which a bunch of talented college kids beat the wizened superstars of the Soviet Union is just silliness distilled.  That’s understandable, given the level of hockey illiteracy in the media; no one expects the AP guy (Alan Robinson) to do a detailed comparison of this game to the Czech run of ‘98 or Belarus-Sweden in ‘02.  But the second “no” is worse:  these “underrated” Americans were not faster than Team Canada.  On the contrary, the Canadians blew their doors off for five, ten minutes at a time, flying through the neutral zone and/or playing keepaway in the attacking zone.  You don’t need to know any hockey history to understand this; you simply have to have watched the game.  The shots-on-goal stat does not lie, and I mean this not only about last night’s game (45-22) but as a comment on the stat in general: I have never seen a lopsided SOG total that did not correspond to a lopsided game.  And it wasn’t just Miller outplaying Brodeur, although that certainly did happen: it was also the Crosby line (I love the fact that Crosby plays with Nash—if only we had a great player named Stills) and Heatley and Toews and Getzlaf and Thornton doing very much what they wanted whenever they wanted to.  Except, you know, scoring.

So let’s be clear: the US was outskated and outplayed.  But that doesn’t mean Canada deserved to win.

As I mentioned in comments last night, whenever you take three consecutive stupid penalties, you deserve to pay for it.  You might even deserve to lose!  The first two were especially awful, coming in the offensive zone and committed by high-skill players: Eric Staal somehow thinking no one would notice if he tried to climb over a defender, and Crosby failing to control his stick around the net.  The third was a stick-breaking slash from Corey Perry, and the US took that 4-2 lead on the ensuing power play.  At that point, I suggested to my viewing companions that we were looking at a 5-3 game, in which Canada makes it close in the final minutes but gives up an empty-net goal.  (Before that point, I firmly believed the Canadians were coming back to win the thing.) So much for the suspense in that house!  But I didn’t predict the part where, after closing to 4-3, Canada owns the puck for ninety seconds in the USA zone while five exhausted Americans are chased around on defense.  That shift was just utterly intense, and well worth the price of admission—but I have a question.  Well, it’s more of a comment.  If I’m Mike Babcock, I pull Brodeur right there.  I don’t wait for the final minute.  I’m running the Americans ragged and they can’t get off the ice; they’re not going to take a long shot at the empty net because they won’t be able to change lines if they miss and the puck goes for icing; and I want to extend this shift forever, because it is a well-known Hockey Fact that no one ever gets tired when the puck is in the other team’s end and you’re peppering their goaltender with shots from everywhere, whereas players get extra extra tired when they’re stuck in their own zone racing from the boards to the faceoff dots and back and then diving to block shots every so often.  Instead, the Canadians had themselves one great shift from the 2:30 mark to the 1:00 mark, and after the US cleared the zone and got the faceoff, the Canadians never really came close again.

And then there is the great Brodeur Question.  It’s interesting to see that someone in the LGM thread brought up this controversial blog, about which I’ve been meaning to write for a very long time.  Suffice it to say, for now, that I don’t think Brodeur is a fraud.  Yes, he has played his entire career with a team that features a stellar defensive system, and he is not the Best Goaltender Ever.  He is not quite in the league of Roy, Hasek, Esposito, or Plante.  But shutouts are not flukes: playing on a solid team (and the Devils have been solid for a very long time now) will help you get that wins record, but the shutout is largely up to you.  I remember being in the Garden in 1970 when the ancient Terry Sawchuk beat the Penguins 6-0: not an impressive win by any measure, but even at the age of eight, I knew enough to think, “dang, I just saw a record that will never be broken—103 career shutouts.” So I give Brodeur his due.  But the second goal was entirely his fault, and anytime you’re stopping 18 of 22 in a big game, you’re just not playing well enough.  (I hesitate to blame goalies for shots that go in off deflections, like Rafalski’s opening stunner off Crosby.  But on that goal and Langenbrunner’s, Brodeur could plausibly have squared up better; his position as Langenbrunner’s went in was downright awkward.) The man is 37, after all, and as Scott says, “the game won’t comfort any Canada rooter who (like me) was concerned about the team dipping into its nostalgia file.” Niedermayer must have turned over the puck half a dozen times alone; in fact, it was when Zach Parise outhustled and outdug him in the corner that the USA gained control of the puck and got it to Rafalski for that first goal.

So my verdict is that Canada is in moderate-to-severe trouble, and that Babcock should start Luongo tomorrow against Germany.  And I don’t like their chances against those crazy Russians.

Update:  According to spyder in comment 36, Luongo it is.

“After all these years, my passion for service to my fellow citizens is undiminished, but my desire to do so in Congress has waned,” said Bayh, whose decision to step down was all the more surprising because he appeared almost certain to be reelected to a third term in November even though he represents a predominantly Republican state.

“There is too much partisanship and not enough progress—too much narrow ideology and not enough practical problem-solving,” Bayh said in a statement. “Even at a time of enormous challenge, the people’s business is not being done.”

“Two weeks ago, the Senate voted down a bipartisan commission to deal with one of the greatest threats facing our nation: our exploding deficits and debt. The measure would have passed, but seven members who had endorsed the idea instead voted ‘no’ for short-term political reasons,” he said.

“Just last week, a major piece of legislation to create jobs—the public’s top priority—fell apart amid complaints from both the left and right. All of this and much more has led me to believe that there are better ways to serve my fellow citizens, my beloved state and our nation than continued service in Congress.”

Bayh blamed “so-called centrist Democrats” for enabling Republican obstructionism, claiming that they were exploiting Senate filibuster rules to extract concessions that capitulate to capricious Republican demands and water down White House initiatives.  “A handful of ‘Blue Dog’ Democrats in both chambers did all they could to blunt Obama’s agenda, block meaningful health care reform, and reinforce the image of the Democrats as a party unable to govern,” Bayh said.  “The Republicans couldn’t have done it all by themselves—they needed the help of a key group of Democrats who were willing to repeat their talking points and serve as all-purpose concern trolls.  Some of them did it for personal gain, some for sheer pettiness, but it doesn’t matter what their motives were.  What matters is that they have effectively sealed the Democrats’ fate for the foreseeable future.”

Bayh refused to name specific members of Congress in the statement, but a senior aide said privately that Bayh was “especially furious” at Senate Democrats who pose publicly as “deficit hawks” but vote repeatedly to lower tax rates on the very rich.  “Evan wants those people out of the Senate altogether,” said the aide, “and he wants them out now.”

Over at the Timber that Cannot be Straightened, we’re having a nice pleasant discussion about bringing guns to faculty meetings.  I managed to work a District 9 link into the update about Instapundit, but I don’t suppose anyone is going to get it.

Blogs are so 2005, though.  And in the spirit of aught-five, I’d like to say a couple of things about the first season of Battlestar Galactica.  The opening miniseries is very effective, and sheds new light (for me) on how much of the wingnut mentality depends on seeing apocalyptic threats everywhere, like that time when the inscrutable Cylon Soviet Mexican Islamists killed all but fifty thousand of us.  And this household hearts Starbuck.  Who wouldn’t?

But we have two complaints.  One, the setting in the distant past.  Yes, we understand that this will all be explained in the end, and the polytheistic humans and monotheistic Cylons will eventually be us, and the twelve colonies will become the twelve constellations, got it.  But didn’t any of the writers see that this would pose a spot of trouble along the way when it came to accessories and backgrounds?  Like, for instance, why is it that ancient humans had corded telephones and suits and neckties and stuff, and then lost them, and then got them back again?  Take the victory celebration after Baltar’s election as vice-president: are you telling me that ancient humans danced to swing music, then forgot it, then invented it again in the twentieth century? 

More important, the distant-past thing takes a lot of sand out of the bag, so to speak.  I mean, I don’t know about you, but for me, nine-tenths of the fun and interest in science fiction is the depiction of a more-or-less plausible future.  (See below for today’s Arbitrary game!) And I didn’t realize I felt this way until I started thinking for a while about the whole entire premise of BSG, so it’s not like I came to the series with a bad attitude.

Two, we hate the Number Six / Gaius Baltar plot.  Hate it hate it hate it.  And all its silly devices, too.

After we started season two last night, I asked Janet to remind me just why we were doing this anyway.  Weren’t we going to catch up on Deadwood or something instead?  She said that a friend and colleague told her that we absolutely had to see Battlestar Galactica first because, in the friend’s words, “it’s like The West Wing with sex.” When Janet told her that we’d never seen The West Wing, our friend did what all our academic friends do when we tell them we’ve never seen seen The West Wing: she fell out of her chair. 

Apparently we were supposed to watch The West Wing. 

Anyway, now that the enlightened insects are here and one of them has his own blog, which SF movie most plausibly depicts what the Earth will be like in the next few decades?

2001, except for the floating-fetus bit and, oh yeah, except for the whole “set-in-2001” bit.

Blade Runner, except for the flying cars.

Children of Men, except for the global-infertility epidemic.

I Am Legend 28 Days Later, except with extra zombies.

Independence Day, except that the First Lady survives the helicopter crash and becomes President of the Twelve Colonies.

Terminator series, except that after the terminator comes at us in a big truck carrying crude oil or liquid nitrogen or something, and we crush it in a drill press or maybe shoot it and shatter it into a million pieces, but then his metal forearm survives and provides scientists with the basis for creating a whole new kind of artificial intelligence, and then the liquid-metal terminator re-forms and we have to shoot it with one of those huge exploding bullets and make it fall backwards into a vat of molten steel, and then we send ourselves back into the past (that is, the present) to protect ourselves from the terminators who want to start a global thermonuclear war, but then it turns out that the war happens anyway, which is kind of complicated, because we thought we’d avoided it when we shot the liquid-metal terminator with the huge exploding bullet and he fell into the vat of molten steel, but then we win the war in the future and also there’s a sequel to the molten-vat part that’s also a prequel to the ... never mind, I meant to say “except for the part where the terminator becomes governor of California and turns the state into a barren, nightmarish landscape of twisted steel.” Because that’s from Demolition Man.

District 9, except for ... no, that one seems pretty much spot on.

Your suggestions?