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Friday Five

1. Do you enjoy the cold weather and snow for the holidays?
Love it. It’s just not the holiday season without it.

2. What is your ideal holiday celebration? How, where, with whom would you celebrate to make things perfect?
A holiday back home with friends and family.

3. Do you do have any holiday traditions?
Nothing out of the ordinary.

4. Do you do anything to help the needy?
No.

5. What one gift would you like for yourself?
I have most everything I need, so there really isn’t anything in particular that iI want at the moment. Although a Trek 1500 might be nice.

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Time for Christmas

The endless loop of Christmas music in my brain has started now, despite having avoided turning on the radio since before Thanksgiving. So I guess this means it’s time for me to start getting ready for Christmas. Dragged the tree out, strung the lights and hung decorations on it. Working on Christmas cards now. And the Christmas baking has begun. Soon just about every available container in our kitchen will be stacked to overflowing with sugar cookies, destined to be shipped off to relatives.
Only a couple more weeks to go…

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Battlestar Galactica. It was…different

There might be some spoilers here. I’ll try to keep them to a minimum.

The SciFi adaptation of Battlestar Galactica is over. From the opening scene, I could almost hear the collective wail of agony from BG purists (if there is such a thing) out there.

I liked it.

Wail away BG purists. It’s not like you didn’t know it wasn’t going to be a remake of the original series. It’s not like SciFi and the creators didn’t make it absolutely clear from the outset they weren’t going to simply redo the original series with updated FX. They made it quite clear that they were going to rewrite from scratch. Oh, they kept a lot of things. The story concept and some of the ship designs remain. The characters have been largely rewritten and redeveloped. They don’t resemble the characters from the original series at all. Cylons have advanced significantly.

It’s different, more gritty and edgy than the original. The Cylongs are bigger and badder than ever. Characters are harder and more complex. Galactica, the Colonial flagship in the original series, is set to be decommissioned and destined to become a museum in the new series.

I liked the tributes to the original series they put in. There were exhibits in the museum-to-be’ showing a Cylon and Cylon basestar from the original series. The Cylon ships have the red eye moving back and forth, as do the mechanical Cylons. The Vipers look mostly the same (all the fancy new ones get wiped out).

There were a few things I didn’t like. The technology isn’t quite as advanced as it was in the original series. Vipers shoot machine gun style, the Cylon ships launch missiles and attack with nuclear warheads. Galactica is kind of ugly looking, but I’m sure it will grow on me, just like the Enterprise-D did.

As just a 2 part mini-series, I didn’t think it was long enough. I wanted more. But hopefully, more will come in the form of a series.

I wonder when/if the series will start.

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Blogger evolution

Jeremy Wright has an interesting take on blogger evolution. I think on his scale, I’m somewhere around a familial blogger, although I don’t think too many people have found my blog. I’m still pretty comfortable with what I write here though.

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Canadians != Americans

This comes from an article in the Edmonton section of Canada.com.

an American from San Diego is quoted saying: “What bugs me about Canadians, if I may, is that they wear that damn patch on their bags, the Canadian flag patch. That way, they differentiate themselves from us.”

Here’s another good one

“Some participants expressed a certain amount of annoyance at what is perceived as a systematic attempt by Canadians to make the statement that they are not Americans by sporting the maple leaf,”

Well, duh, that’s because we aren’t Americans. We’re Canadians. And most of us are damn proud of it too.

It’s an article about how Canadians should be more respectful of Americans’ feelings when travelling abroad, because of how US foreign policy is making Americans feel isolated and unsupported in the world.

Now, I personally don’t have anything against the US (maybe aside from their slightly arrogant outlook on the rest of the world). I work and live there, and I even married one. I just have no desire to become one, or to be labelled as one. I know it bugs many Canadians to no end when people try to lump Canadians and Americans into the same pot, or the endless jokes about Canada being the 52nd state. We put the maple leaf on our luggage so that we can be identified as Canadians.

Canadian, and very proud to be one.