Know what I wish? I wish that once a serialized TV show has run through a full season, the studios would release the DVDs of that season, immediately - or at least quickly enough to give the people who've been watching the show on DVD a chance to catch-up in time for the next season. HBO timed their Sopranos DVD releases correctly; they came out in the middle of the (long) gaps between seasons - you could easily catch up before the next season started. On the other hand, SciFi did it wrong with Battlestar Galactica; they released the season 3 DVDs in April 08, at the same time they started showing season 4 on TV. You can't catch up.

See, when you can catch up, and do, you're much more likely to watch the next season as it's being shown on TV. It's why we spent the extra $10/mo to get HBO when the last two or three seasons of the Sopranos came out - we were all caught-up, the new shows were starting, and because we could watch them along with everyone else, we did. That's much nicer than trying to avoid spoilers for six months (as if we could've avoided spoilers for the Sopranos finale). But on the flip side, SciFi's stupid scheduling is why I just spent two days downloading the 4^th season of Battlestar Galactica from LimeWire.

The Raleigh News And Observer reports:

L.F. Eason III gave up the only job he'd ever had rather than lower a flag to honor former U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms.

Eason, a 29-year veteran of the state Department of Agriculture, instructed his staff at a small Raleigh lab not to fly the U.S. or North Carolina flags at half-staff Monday, as called for in a directive to all state agencies by Gov. Mike Easley.

When a superior ordered the lab to follow the directive, Eason decided to retire rather than pay tribute to Helms. After several hours' delay, one of Eason's employees hung the flags at half-staff.

...

He told his staff that he did not think it was appropriate to honor Helms because of his "doctrine of negativity, hate, and prejudice" and his opposition to civil rights bills and the federal Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.

Give that man a medal.

Haallllp! Haallllp! He didn't eat his cracker! Hate Crime! Hate Crime! Haallllp! Haaaaaaallllp!

To Masturbate An Elephant

MSNBC:

Farm-raised tilapia, one of the most highly consumed fish in America, has very low levels of the beneficial omega-3 fatty acids and very high levels of omega-6 fatty acids, a potentially dangerous fatty acid combination, researchers are now saying.

Wake Forest University School of Medicine researchers say their research revealed that farm-raised tilapia, as well as farmed catfish, "have several fatty acid characteristics that would generally be considered by the scientific community as detrimental."

Tilapia has higher levels of potentially detrimental, long-chain, omega-6 fatty acids than 80-percent-lean hamburger, doughnuts and even pork bacon," write the Wake Forest researchers in an article published this month in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association.

Good. I don't really like tilapia anyway. I'd much rather have a flounder.

M'BOSHAMO-X ??

Bruce Schneier on the threat posed by photographers:

Since 9/11, there has been an increasing war on photography. Photographers have been harassed, questioned, detained, arrested or worse, and declared to be unwelcome. We've been repeatedly told to watch out for photographers, especially suspicious ones. Clearly any terrorist is going to first photograph his target, so vigilance is required.

Except that it's nonsense. The 9/11 terrorists didn't photograph anything. Nor did the London transport bombers, the Madrid subway bombers, or the liquid bombers arrested in 2006. Timothy McVeigh didn't photograph the Oklahoma City Federal Building. The Unabomber didn't photograph anything; neither did shoe-bomber Richard Reid. Photographs aren't being found amongst the papers of Palestinian suicide bombers. The IRA wasn't known for its photography. Even those manufactured terrorist plots that the US government likes to talk about -- the Ft. Dix terrorists, the JFK airport bombers, the Miami 7, the Lackawanna 6 -- no photography.

Given that real terrorists, and even wannabe terrorists, don't seem to photograph anything, why is it such pervasive conventional wisdom that terrorists photograph their targets? Why are our fears so great that we have no choice but to be suspicious of any photographer?

Read the rest!

Someone's excited about getting the day off:

To: [me]
Subject: Test
From: notifications-noreply@lunarpages.com

Test Test Test!!! ITS JULY 4TH, and this is THE LAST THING I gotta do! Woot! See ya!