All of this has happened before, and all of it will happen again

Was Gaius Frakking Baltar right? Delusional, and near death on the renegade Cylon Basestar, he admits his connection with the holocaust to President Roslin, and extrapolates to suggest the cycle of life needs periodic purging for life, spirit and hope to spring anew.

As a parallel to a truism, our existence needs death for life to spring anew.

On a more personal side, many things are coming to an end. Battlestar Galactica is two episodes to it’s close. Watchmen has finally made it’s cinematic debut after a long, hungering wait. In my geek’s paradise of sci-fi, much of what I’ve longed for is ending. Over. Done.

In the realm of reality, much is also drawing to a close. A potential opportunity could spark a significant change for Dawn and I. And a much needed change for the better. Things coming to am end can yeild a positive end.

We’ll also have Caprica. X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. Angels and Demons. And frak. In film school, I always wanted to be a writer. I think it’ right time to refresh my approach and effort toward that endeavour.

Death isn’t the end of all things. It’s just the change we need to start anew.

Interdum vos ut volvo ferrus six.

Not much ado about the fifth

And for the last few days, I’ve been seething about a big post to lead up to the beginning of the end. Sadly, writer’s block has hit. I don’t want to create a typical ‘who the fifth probably is’ post. Still, I haven’t been so wrapped up in a show since Twin Peaks.

Until inspiration hits me, I’m going to this site. Check it out and see what madness ensues in my soul for the next four days.

Interdum vos ut volvo ferrus six.

Gods Love the Sheer Joy of the Interweb dot Georb…

Well, at least WordPress. I do love the feature of linking related articles within the WordPress blogosphere. Amongst other reasons, it’s just good to spark the creative process.

And with my current fascination with the number Twelve (sidenote: it’s a shame the Final Five are unnumbered… I wonder if the drunk bastard is Twelve), I ran across this post about positive thinking (something I have to become engaged in again).

As such, it outlines these twelve qualities that positive thinkers typically share:

* They have confidence in themselves
* They have a very strong sense of purpose
* They never have excuses for not doing something
* They always try their hardest for perfection
* They never consider the idea of failing
* They work extremely hard towards their goals
* They know who they are
* They understand their weaknesses as well as their strong points
* They can accept and benefit from criticism
* They know when to defend what they are doing
* They are creative
* They are not afraid to be a little different in finding innovative solutions that will enable them to achieve their dreams

- Susan Polis Schulz -

As such, the next twelve posts (which I have to do by this Sunday as I feel the need to re-cap Galactica in preparation for the end, I am going to do an individual post about each item, where I stand, and where I feel I need improvement.

All this starts tomorrow.

Interdum vos ut volvo ferrus six.

The beginning of the end…

You will know the truth. Still, I’m seething to see chrome toasters marching with men against half the skin jobs.

Still, I also like the bust I got at Saturnalia as well:

Cylon Centurion Bust

Cylon Centurion Bust

Twelve Cylon Models. Twelve Lords of Kobol. Twelve Months. Twelve Astrological Signs. Twelve Colonies. Twelve more days until we know the truth.

Interdum vos ut volvo ferrus six.

I have a monitor again, election reflection, watching Watchmen, and one will be revealed.

Dear Gods, I am a bad, lazy, infrequent blogger. I must be getting old. My lack of text is far from a lack of something to say. Rather, if my thought is accurate that Battlestar Galactica is truly an allegory to my life, lately nothing has been more true than this:

Months o­n the run, and what do we have to show for it? Casualties. Deteriorating conditions. This crew needs a rest. It’s finally hitting them, that’s all. Our old lives are gone. The o­nly thing we have to look forward to is this.

Commander William Adama, Flight of the Phoenix

Months of working too much for too little, with no leads on new jobs. First a back injury, then a three week stint with serious damage to my Achilles tendon. Engine block on the car fried. Need to work more to make payments on the new vehicle. LCD computer monitor goes on the fritz, so Dawn and I can fight over computer time. No end to the monotony in sight. All I have to look forward to is more work just to get by.

Well, last night was another small turn in the road. We have a library of sorts in our building, more like a small alcove in which people drop off and pick up old novels and such. Sometimes, however, other things appear there. Like a Samsung computer monitor.

Needless to say, the monitor issue is a non-issue. It is a CRT, but still, until the financial situation greatly improves, which is in process with the union contract being re-negotiated, along with a potential side business venture I’m undertaking, it will more than do. So long as someone doesn’t smash it up tomorrow (which seems to be my luck these days), we should be all good. Though in all honesty, I can’t imagine causing over $3000 in damage to a cheap computer monitor.

The car, on the other hand, wasn’t so lucky. Two days after driving off the lot with it, I got rear-ended. See a few posts back. The good is the deductible has been waived. The bad is that I’m worried shitless that some kind of vandalism will befall the loaner the body shop gave me. I really don’t need any more car problems in, oh, about forever.

Our lives have even been graced with elections (one to come in a week, and one early next year still to come, however), which in itself is allegory to the end of Season 2.

They don’t want to hear the truth. They’re tired. Exhausted. The idea of stopping, laying down their burdens and starting a new life right now is what is resonating with the voters.

Tory Foster, Lay Down Your Burdens, Part I

Not so much in Canada. We re-elected the king of personality, Stephen Harper, in an election that spent loads of tax dollars and changed next to nothing in the House of Commons. I guess one positive came out of it was that Stephane Dion stepped down as Liberal leader. I appreciate the honesty approach. When I lived in Onterrible, Dalton McGuinty got elected on a platform of ‘no tax cuts’, giving a ‘real’ plan as opposed to hollow empty promises. That’s one thing. Telling voters well before the election is even called you plan to tax us more is just plain suicide.

Still, it’s now only a matter of time before Justin takes the reigns. Probably one leader removed from another Trudeau Prime Minister dynasty.

Luckily, things are looking up down south. Congrats to Barack Obama for doing two things. First, being the first African-American voted in as President, but more importantly, having an ELECTION THAT ONLY LASTED ONE DAY. Actually, to think of it, most elections I can think of from down south really offered a result in only one day. Except two. Both elected that Dubya character. I can’t imagine that it’s only down to ballot counters having the same mathematical and academic capacity as the current puppet President. Co-incidence?

Say what you will about economic policy. I think this election might actually be a sign that the US is joining the rest of us in the 21ST century, being able to rise from the past, go against the grain, and select a man who not even 50 years ago, wouldn’t have even been fathomed as the leader of the free world.

Yeah, I said it. Many in the world look to America as a beacon of hope. And Tuesday, this beacon of hope may have been re-lit. Through fiscal policy, budget, deficit, debt, and the like, we can easily lose sight of the social conscience that government must wield. We live in a much smaller world, thanks to many ingenious things such as the interweb. Different cultures, different gender orientations, different faiths are increasingly at ends, must either learn to co-exist or they will end up destroying one another.

I can only hope the election of Obama will forward the cause of co-existence.

It could be worse. We could have had five successive terms of Richard Nixon. Though for that to have happened, I think we might have needed an omnipotent blue dude with a diagram of a hydrogen atom on his forehead.

I’m really looking forward to the Watchmen film. I’ve only read the graphic novel a handful of times, as I’ve (until very recently) had to borrow it from friends, never finding a copy of my own. Until now.

I just hope that trailer isn’t the only thing to tide me over until the second half of season 4. Well aside from hockey. Tonight’s score: Winnipeg Jets 0, Kevin ‘Boom Boom’ Bieksa 1.

Interdum vos ut volvo ferrus six.

Rainclouds keep flying overhead

I’ve been an even worse blogger than Peter these days. How does one start? If I listen to the sounds in my head, it all starts (and ends) with Watchmen. This being the song in my head going over and over right now:

So how do I write this story? To all but blatantly rip off Watchmen at this point, start with a sad story, and everything else will follow through. And to NOT rip off Watchmen entirely, we’ll start two months back. An empty pallet (and one of those right ugly heavy ones) fell on my Achilles tendon (to which I think I’ve already documented), and kept me on the shelf for three weeks. So aside from the sheer irony of watching Troy again and again, more irony was to ensue.

Being in a capacity of limited mobility, the car was essential for the commute. Luckily, work offered modified duties so that I would have minimal issues trying to extract money from WCB. Good until day four. After overhauling all the cooling system, my timing chain decided to snap and cause a backfire that seized the engine. This I know in hindsight. However, for the next near five or six weeks, most nights had been spent trying to fix every possible cause of the engine not working. Fuel filter. Fuel pump. Cleaning out the fuel lines. New spark plugs. New wires. And so on, and so on, and, well, you get the point. Loads of work, effort, pain, and money, but no result. Two weeks back I broke down and went to my mechanic.

He was the one who broke the bad news. Fuckity. Another catch 22. Need a car for the commute to get to work, can’t afford the car, so the commute sucks, and physically wears me down from progressing in the direction I need to go professionally and personally. So, I’ve bitten the bullet, re-worked the budget and got a car.

Did originally get a 2009 Kia Rio 5, and drove it for two days. Once the dealership settled the financing, I was approved for $500 per month over six years, not $230 over five. Fuck. Gotta look some more. I ended up with a 2004 Kia Rio DX-V, which in all honesty drives just as nicely. It needs a bit of body work, and the dealer is going to fix some for me. I can live with tidying up a few paint scratches. Hell, I might put a darker stripe on the bottom third.

Or I might just pimp it up like a Viper Mark VII. Dawn would hate me for that. Oh well.

Not quite the car I wanted, but I can live with it. Still has 1 year left on the warranty as well.

And then Friday night happened. Now that we have the car, Dawn and I decided to change it up a bit for dinner. And en route, WHAM! I was rear ended at a traffic light. Luckily, ICBC will cover the lot, as I wasn’t at fault, but fuck me, when will this all stop? It’s like there’s a rain cloud constantly over my head. But thus is life, I do live in Vancouver, and it is monsoon season.

Maybe I need more jaunts to Hastings and Main. Then all the prostitutes, drug dealers, users, thieves, and the like can look up from their filth to me and shout ‘Save Us’.

And I’ll look down and whisper ‘No’.

Interdum vos ut volvo ferrus six.

Doesn’t election time bring out the best in us all?

This post, however, will NOT be dedicated to the Gong Show south of the border, nor the Gong Show we’re going through up here. Rather, in my blog surfing, I have a spark that has bypassed both my writer’s block and badly messed up ankle enough to formulate a reasonable post.

As such, Peter put up this post yesterday. With the title From the Mailbag it would seem it was some sort of forwarded email. It tickles the funny bone, especially if your political systems sits right of center. Mine does not. So as a rebuttal, I give you this Master’s course in the history of humanity:

Many thousands of years ago, Cylons (Titans) and Humanity warred in the heavens. They eventually found their way to a nuclear wasteland called Earth. The few who remained became Lords of Kobol, or Olympian Gods, and remained in the heavens. The hybrid children, the only who were naturally resistant to Earth’s radiation, became the new evolution of humanity. The male children were told one statement which became the center of all their truths and beliefs. A male phallus must be at least six inches in length, or one is not truly a man.

As a result, man became divided into two factions. Phallically superior, or Liberals, and phallically challenged, or Conservatives. Confident in their manhood, Liberals were calm, relaxed, and sought a peaceful and meaningful co-existence with their environment and their brothers and sisters. Conservatives felt the need to prove they were just as much a man as their Liberal brothers. They waged many wars, built oversized spears solely for the purpose of resting the handle on their groin and dreaming, and spread the myth that this

Not Quite Six Inches

is six inches. This perpetrated lie finally gets the Conservatives laid, and they learn that lies, misinformation, and academic resistance can give them power.

The Liberals realize this, but instead of challenging this myth, they go on to create democracy. Plato, a great Liberal, founds the governing system of the great classical civilizations of Greece and Rome. Rome eventually overtook Greece, and the Roman empire would be more than just a church today if not for the interference of three key figures. Gaivs Ivlivs Caesar (more commonly known as Julius Caesar), Jesus of Nazereth, and Constantine I all played their part in the dissection of democracy and the path to the dark ages.

Caesar, the first documented Conservative who was looking for a cure to impotency, took the credit for one of his soldiers impregnating Cleopatra with his supposed son, Caesarion. After being named dictator for life, he needed a successor, and since his half-Egyptian son would not be old enough to take over in the face of his impending doom, he had to adopt a brilliant Liberal, Gaivs Octavivs (more commonly known as Augustus). This liberal brilliantly created a system to have an Emperor disguised from the mob of Rome, as a measure to avert civil war. However, Augustus’s adoptive heir Tiberius was a eunuch, and the Conservative line of emperors had but one Liberal.

During the reign of Augustus, a brilliant black man named Jesus was born. Another gifted and potent Liberal, was able to commercialize the notion of peace. Outraged, Jewish and Roman Conservatives conspired to murder Jesus before he could have children to continue his line. Jesus was crucified, and his wife Mary was forced to escape and live in exile. The possibility of an ancestral line has been obscured through the Conservative fictionalization of history.

Three hundred years later, Constantine I, the ultimate bandwagoner, realized the Pagan cult was being threatened by misguided Christian followers. In true Roman tradition, he merged the two cults, giving the black Christ the face of Galactica’s CAG, Apollo. The message of peace was augmented to peace, so long as you believe what I believe, otherwise you’re a sinner and going straight to hell. The dark ages, a system based on class and money and power, was to begin. Christ’s message of peace was spread at the point of a sword through crusades, witch hunts, and the lovely relationship between England and Ireland.

Fast forward to recently. Christopher Columbus popularizes the well known notion that the earth is round. Europe colonizes America, and two dominant countries emerge. Canada (mostly Liberal) and the United States (phallically challenged Conservatives). The US fights for their freedom first, kicked off by pouring all their tea into the Boston harbour. Being now permanently without drinkable tea, they water their beer down to such a level that they can drink beer while they work. This has quite the negative effect as the highly conservative American’s alcohol tolerance drops so low they can still get drunk on 4 or less of these highly de-alcoholized beverages.

Canada, however, has a bunch of drunken riots in the streets of Toronto, Montreal, and Quebec City. Getting fed up as the drunken Canadians can not feel pain when they are fought, Great Britain, realizing these drunken Liberals are the greatest fighting force known to man, stay heavily allied to us while giving us our freedom. We bail the Allies out of both WWI and WWII, invent the games of hockey and basketball, invent the telephone, develop insulin injections for diabetics, developed working universal healthcare, inspire grunge music, become the face of Star Trek, and most importantly, discovered the true Holy Grail.

Now if we could only find a better Liberal leader than Stephane Dion already?

Interdum vos ut volvo ferrus six.

For that day when we all have the time.

A little over a month ago, I made a promise to myself. I’d increase the amount of posting I’d do here as so to bring me back to the standard of one a day. I kept running through my head, trying to hold onto ideas to post over the course of my mundane workdays to try and hold onto some useful nugget in which I could ramble with, and some days I could, and some I couldn’t. I was content to give it up as a bad job, and in all truthfulness, I would rather have something with punch to it, not just a jumbled thought to fill the space. A friend, ages gone by, told me these should be for me first off, and as such, I shouldn’t let the practice or opinion of others affect my posting. As such, quantity over quality. Still, it has been unsettling.

Roll back four years. In film school, I could post easily twice to three times DAILY. Now it’s a struggle to get three out in a week. As this machine called life crunches on ahead, the amount of time I have to actually enjoy has dwindled. People may laugh each time I say this, but there is a very specific reason that Battlestar Galactica resonates with me. And it’s not having the hots for Starbuck (DAWN!) The show is really a mirror to my soul. And hats off to Ron Moore and David Eick’s creative talents (and their host of writers). They’ve really captured the essence of the human condition. We ALL live in a story that is told again and again throughout time.

Think about it. I’ve lost most of my family. Of the ones that are still around, I’m a continent away, far from home. All it would take would be for my neighbours to dress as chrome toasters to make the analogy complete.

Which brings us to last week. I had just finished taking my airbrake course, the final step from leaving my current, dead-end job employer to one with significantly more promise for the future. Still, one obstacle remained. Taking the ICBC test (yup, I had to take the course to write a knowledge test… uggghhh). Now the hurdle wasn’t being prepared for the test, but rather getting to a location in time to take it. Now throw in one of the most physically grueling weeks in terms of workload, and now that possibility is threatened. Still, I persevered, wrote and aced the test, and now stand to just the waiting game to find out when fortune will finally smile upon me.

It is, however, sufficient to say that the human condition is not without limits. The last few months have been a culmination to this point, preparing, pacing, waiting until the door finally opens. And it’s toll hit Friday. And to put it bluntly, it does not pay to be the sharp, hardworking guy in the 21st Century. I’m a firm believer in the Dilbert Principle. Only the incompetent get ahead. They need me to DO, not to LEAD. Me LEADING would impact management bonuses. As such, not only do I get my queue for Friday, I have to play clean up for others as well. Employment fairness has gone the way of the dodo. It became too much. I finally came face to face with reality. My job is killing me.

A doctor may argue my conclusion on a physical basis, but the will to live has been stretched too thin. Battle after battle with no hope of improvement has a very unnerving psychological consequence. The passion, the desire, the want fades completely away. I was becoming an empty shell, fighting a losing battle. And if there was no hope for change, it would be all over. Thankfully, it is not the case. But you couldn’t convince me of that on Friday.

“Because it’s not enough to just live. You have to have something to live for. Let it be Earth.” – Commander William Adama, Miniseries.

And there’s the rub. I haven’t been to a film in the cinema, well, since… I can’t even remember when. Shocking from the film student who saw three weekly, plus something on disc every night. What happened to that passion? I sacrificed what was core to my character just to avoid the cost. Mind you, it doesn’t help that 90% of the lot is shit, and the other 10% Dawn and I can’t agree on. Time and money, two resources in great scarcity, have been tearing me apart. Well no more.

Soon it will be that day when I once again have the time.

Interdum vos ut volvo ferrus six.

Gaius Baltar is a frakking liar!

Not that this statement represents anything that we would consider news. Still, I found the Baltar Cylon Detector, to which this result was given:

Scar

SCAR

You are SCAR.

You’re not just a Cylon, you’re a Cylon spaceship! And you’re also their very best fighter, with more human kills than any other raider in the Cylon armada. You’re a crafty (and rather mean) devil, and every fighter pilot in the human fleet has it in for you. No worries, though: floating around space waiting for hapless vipers to fall into your trap means you get to skip all those annoying Cylon staff meetings.


Battlestar Galactica Wiki

I still don’t buy it. I’m NOT A FRAKKING TOASTER!

Interdum vos ut volvo ferrus six.

Number one sign you’re a dork/geek/nerd/whatever… you write a frakking post like this and use the word frak instead of fuck…

Though in that thought, I wonder if Moore and Eick ever considered what word to use in place of cunt? Or better yet, imagine Ricky giving a speech like this:

Frak this court. Frak Jim Lahey. Frak Randy. Frak those two idiot cops right there. Frak suit dummies; as a matter of fact frak legal aid. Frak Danny and Terry’s Buffalo Chicken Wings. Frak all the old wood in here. Frak the moon, frak corn on the cob, frak squirrels. Frak me, frak you, frak everything!

It still has the same punch for me. But again, thus is the life of being a dork. A geek. A nerd. Or any other fucking word to describe someone who is both intellectually gifted and a complete social outcast. The old man (not this old man) tells me I’m just an individualist. Nothing like another signpost to the increasing conformist nature of a freedom depleting society. 1984 here we come.

But anyway, enough politics for now. I’m still seething from the suspension of the Jeff O’Neil Show for buying heroin. Bah. They’re back on.

Rather, as we’re now less than 48 hours from the last new episode of Battlestar Galactica before the ‘writer’s strike’ episode hiatus, I better get to the business of what I was trying to get to last week (though I just had this little introduction).

Since this is obscenely spoiler and speculation heavy… continue on at your own risk. Read the rest of this entry »