The new self-help fad sweeping the Galaxy.

Celebrity Speaker Extolls Virtues of Arcane Weaponry As Motivational Metaphor

May the Glaive be with you. Always. You know you’ve tried to use The Force. C’mon, just admit it. Reached out your hand and focused with all of your might on lifting your toy X-Wing out of a muddy puddle in the backyard when no one was looking. The Glaive, a cross between a boomerang, shuriken and a pocket knife/switchblade, was a unique weapon wielded by Colwyn, the Errol-Flynn-meets-Luke-Skywalker King of planet Krull, using Force-like techniques to control it.

Krull, the fantasy/sci-fi movie from 1983, always seemed like one part Star Wars, one part Lord of the Rings (though, I guess back then I wouldn’t have made the LOTR reference. Maybe more like classic Robin Hood films – not the Kevin Costner/Bryan Adams chickflick). You know, Hero’s Journey/Joseph Campbell stuff. Or maybe they just copped that medieval episode from classic Galactica (the one where Starbuck teaches all of those blonde pre-Narnia kids how to storm a castle while singing a song to remember their strategy). Hey, come to think of it, The Empire Strikes Back was sort of like the Ice Planet Zero BSG episode (man, those Oliva Newton-John wannabe clones were glacier-melting hot). Not sure which came first in that case, and too lazy to Wiki it today. And that whole Firefly series was kinda like the cowboy Galactica episode (Red Eye the cylon RULED!). Hey, it’s all good – it just always made sense that EVERY sci-fi franchise should have an ice planet episode, a western-in-space episode, a medieval-in-space episode, etc. It’s just what you do.

Watching Krull again recently, I realized how all of the various situations that test Colwyn in his quest to save Princess Lyssa from the evil Beast could be translated into a self-help program encouraging positive thinking, building confidence, etc. Colwyn is just such a hyper-positive dude. In the end, when your Glaive is stuck in the flesh of the hideous Beast and you can’t get it back, you’ve got to trust in yourself. Though there’s also that special fire the Princess gave you – you know, the fire that you can shoot out of your hand. That always helps, too.

– Nigel Matrix

Cylon vs. PC

I think Cylons evolved from Macs. They seem to have the whole “cool design” theme going. Plus centralized development and implementation of software and hardware that is designed to work together seamlessly. The inside of their basestars have that minimalist, modern Apple Store look. The Cylons also have built-in iTunes so they can download their favorite versions of old Jimi Hendrix tunes directly into their minds (yeah, Jimi was a Cylon, too).

Galactica and the fleet, on the other hand, are probably running on ancient Windows machines and patched-together third-party software, downloaded for free off of some seedy Sagitaran file-sharing site. It all just barely holds together.

Now, as for Starbuck, I think she’s a Linux girl. Rebellious, open source, eager to follow her own path to the truth. No one really knows what to make of her. Plus, I think I saw a little penguin tattoo somewhere on her arm…

By the way, if you caught last week’s episode of BSG, “No Exit”, then you saw the cameo by John Hodgman (PC in the “Get a Mac” ads) as a neurosurgeon tasked with removing a bullet from Cylon Anders’ brain. Kinda distracting, actually, seeing PC there right at the moment when Anders was streaming all of this long-awaited information about everything.

– Nigel Matrix

Mr.T vs. Captain Apollo

Colonial Warriors Fail to Recognize Similar Fashion Excesses

It’s got to be nepotism, really.  How else could Captain Apollo have gotten promoted?  Sure, he was a faithful “company man” and always ready to follow dog-food slinging Ben Cartwright’s orders.  But honestly, his character was written as a bit slow on the uptake.  A good man, certainly, but not the brightest cog in the mighty Battlestar machine.  Starbuck, his good pal of questionable morals, not only was a better card player, but also seemed quicker on the draw and a lot more skilled in tactics and flying a Viper.  So did Boomer.  So did Sheba.  Heck, so did Jolly…and he couldn’t even make Lieutenant (err, there might have been a weight requirement).  For all his extra salary and responsibility under Daddy Adama, Apollo never lost that “gee whiz” attitude toward life.

Mr. T, on the other hand, never seemed to have a “gee whiz” vibe at all.  He rarely smiled, and his public persona in the media was largely all action and anger.  So much so that he became an Internet legend, and the “Mr. T vs.” online phenomena was born.  Long before LOLcats, Photoshop was weakening Western Culture by allowing the creation of online comics showing Mr. T fighting everybody.  They’re all the same, of course.  Mr. T drives the van, beats up bad guys, and saves the Youth Center.  He proclaims that either he, or his van is “Hella Tough”.   Barney, Pokemon, Space Ghost…pretty much anybody you can think of.    It’s kind of mind numbing and hypnotic, and once you open one, it’s hard to quit.  But think about it, if you had to pick someone to whoop everyone in the universe, who better?

Mr. T, of course, initially garnered much of his fame from The A-Team, playing opposite Dirk Benedict, fresh from his halcyon (Ha! Cylon?) Galactica days.  He wore a lot–and I mean, a lot–of gold chains, the weight of which would crush a lesser man.  But, if you think about it, the Colonial Warriors were pretty blinged-out, too; losta clasps, pins, patches, gold trim, capes…so who are they to judge?  Granted, Apollo wore his feathers as emblems sewn into his shirt instead of dangling from an earring loop, but if I had to put my money on one of them, I’d say it was Mr. T who probably figured out the right way to accessorize.  Oh, yeah, and “TR3”, on Mr. T’s belt buckle is the name of some kinda car wash or polish he was hawking back in the 80s.  The TV commercial is findable online, and T says of the product in question: “Goes on easy, stays on hard.  Makes your car beautiful, like me.”

The Final Fifth Cylon Is….

Mechanical Vegetable Extractor Revealed to Be Enemy of Humanity

There were only three old-school cylon models–centurian, IL series (the ones with the awesome disco heads) and the goat-faced, purple-afro’d Imperious Leader, who had this unexplainable obsession with sitting thirty feet high in the air under a mood light.   Purists will say, yes, a fourth humaniod model was added in Galactica 1980.  And the really obsessed will say, yes, there was a fifth “civilian” cylon model present at the Battle of Gamoray in “The Living Legend Part II”.  Fine.  But now there’s twelve cylons in the new series, and we don’t even know who they are.  They don’t even know who they are.   And after being off the air for what, 9 or 12 months, it’s hard to remember the ones that we did figure out.   But slowly it’s ramping up speed again.  Maybe it’s the fact that they keep saying “The Final Episodes” in the commercials…closure is a good thing.

Rampant speculation fueled the Internet regarding who the final fifth cylon was: Starbuck?  Apollo?  Roslin?  That smarmy lawyer dude?  Now the truth has been revealed, and it’s just somewhat of a “meh” revelation.  Meanwhile, a Cute Robot Movie From Disney swarmed out of Pixar land and took over western culture for a while.  Gee, let’s take Johnny 5 from Short Circuit, strand him on the Earth with mountains of garbage, and give him really, really sad eyes, like a puppy whose favorite chew toy just got taken away.  Oh, yeah, let him collect sporks, and maybe old lunchboxes.   And humanity is all fat and bloblike, cruising through space with all their needs taken care of.  (How did they do it without sporks and lunchboxes?!?!) Don’t get me wrong, Wall-E was beautifully animated and very, very well done, and if heavy-handed environmental moralizing is your thing, you might want to see it again.  Wall-E’s “girlfriend” is EVE, and automated vegetable extraction robot (and exemplar of the term “probe droid”) whose task is to see if the Earth can sustain life again.  EVE has a bit of a mean streak, though, and is a little too trigger-happy with her killer lasers.  Poor Wall-E, who has no weapons, is dating a ‘bot that could mop up the floor with him, despite the whole puppy-dog thing he’s got going on.  It’s the old “girlfriend with a black belt” syndrome.

When we come away from Nuevo Galatica, what lesson are we supposed to learn?  That blonde women are evil, they get inside your head, and there’s lots of them?  That your bald with a capital “B”, hard-drinking XO is really an evil robot with a thing for Dylan tunes, and that his wife is even eviller (is that a word?  is now…) cause she’s mean to the evil hard drinking friend you didn’t even know was a robot?    Or maybe it’s just that your tools shouldn’t think on their own.  Not even the ones you send to look for emerging plant life.  Or maybe…if you have a hard-driving executive officer who’s bald and also secretly an evil robot…send him to look for sporks and lunchboxes?

A gift from the outgoing President

They Live! A special pair of sunglasses discovered by pro wrestler Rowdy Roddy Piper (essentially playing himself as a homeless man in the 1988 movie They Live by John Carpenter) allows him to see the terrifying truth behind who’s really running our government. Skull-faced aliens (hey, maybe they’re related to those Martians from Mars Attacks!) hide amongst us, disguised by a signal transmitted through our TVs. Subliminal messages permeate our media, ordering us to Obey, Consume, Marry and Reproduce – and declaring money to be our God. (Whoa… um, this is actually starting to sound, uh, real or something…).

Wouldn’t it suck to go through all that work to get to the point where you become President, hoping to do all kinds of good things for the country – end wars, fix education and healthcare, etc. – only to find out that everything is being run by skull aliens, or lizard people, or grays, or those dudes from the Hollow Earth. And now you’re on their payroll and you have to keep global warming increasing so the climate becomes more habitable for them. Or you have to keep quiet about that hybrid program (and we’re not talking about cars here…).

Time to chew some bubblegum and kick some… uh, check out the movie.

– Nigel Matrix

Dr. Hans Rienhardt’s Short-Lived Deli Job

Interplanetary Combat Robot Proves Mettle In Processing Lunchmeat

Well, if you’re gonna be a madman, who says you can’t make a mean cold cut?  Hans Rienhardt, villian of Disney’s 1980s sci-fi trek The Black Hole, managed a state-of-the-art food growing and processing facility onboard the U.S.S. Cygnus so that he could feed his army of mechanized humanoid workers.  He had to start somewhere, right?  He probably got the idea of mechanizing his crew from one of those automatic ordering systems you find nowadays when purchasing bulk lunchmeat products.  Please allow 35 minutes to complete your order of cybernetic slaves, thanks.

Of course, no one knew much about black holes in the 1980s.  We didn’t understand being compressed to a singularity, squished beyond jello squished.  We knew nothing about spagettification.   The only spagettification in the Disney cannon at that point happened during Lady and the Tramp, where both titular canines try to eat the same noodle and end up sucking face instead.  Not getting stretched into infinite thinness hitting the event horizon.  No one hazarded a guess that black holes lurked in the center of every galaxy, or that the universe was tuned to a really low Bb note.   All we knew was that red robots were cool, and that you could talk to them with ESP.   I bet you Honda’s already working on that somewhere right now.  But all you can think about is salami.