I don’t have a TV anymore, so while visiting my parents I took the time to surf as many channels as I could. Today I came across something called bpmtv, which is ridiculous silly crap. But it did have one segment featuring the “cheesiest” dance videos of all time. Some were just atrocious. So I thought I’d share a few with you.

First up is, um, “I Need A Vacation” by Paul Lekakis:

I like how Paul adds some hot chicks to the video just to …you know… preserve some doubt.

Next is one that is clearly intentionally ironic, but nonetheless ridiculous. It’s “Biker Shorts” by Canada’s Stink Mitt:

I’ve saved the cheesiest for last. It’s by the excellently named German band Moonbootica, a song called “Roll The Dice“. It’s mesmerizingly atrocious in its transcendent douchebaggery:

After all that, I think we all need some ear bleach. I give it you now in the form of the wonderful Susan Boyle appearing here on “Britain’s Got Talent”. I implore you to watch the whole thing. It will make you happy.

How much Ibuprofen can one man take? Day two of my latest migraine and I’ve decided to get out of bed and pretend to go about my day as if I were pain free.

Speaking of pain, I was at this yoga fest thingy in Toronto this weekend when I saw a demonstration of something called the acuball. I bought one on the spot as therapy for my various back woes. The next day, after an evening of use, I was pain free for the first time in months! I wasn’t cured, but I was certainly better!

I was so pleased with the device that I took it with me to my various appointments, visits and lectures. Leaving the children’s hospital, I got on the University shuttle bus to make my next lecture and reached into my bag for my acuball, hoping to sink into its analgesic bliss for the duration of the ride.

But horrors! It was gone! I ran off the bus and retraced all my paths. In my next lecture, I put up a slide of the acuball and commanded 200 students to keep an eye out for it. I emailed the manugacturer and asked how fast they could send me a replacement ball!

Then I got an email from Jane, a friend I visited at the hospital. Apparently she had found a strange blue spherical device in her office, and was concerned (given that it originated from me) that it was some sort of diseased pervy contraption. The following image was attached, with the tag line, “Unidentifiable item, possibly hazardous”:

Apparently further experimentation was performed on said device, as evidenced by this photo of Nasty Nicky B investigating the benighted acuball, labelled “Operation Disease Ball”:

I’m pleased to report that after much negotiation, the acuball was returned to me in a brown paper wrapper at a meeting held at twilight by the banks of the Rideau canal. Details of the transaction will remained sealed.

In Other News…

Everyone has been sending me the news that Indo-American actor Kal Penn is joining the Obama White House. The problem is that the news comes with a massive spoiler from the TV show House, from an episode that I had not yet seen.

Thanks for nothing, everyone.

Obama about to take office, war in the Gaza strip, Russia freezing out Ukraine, enormous military movements in Sri Lanka, the world economy tanking…. so what will I blog about? Well, Battlestar Galactia, of course.

I have long held that the reborn (or “re-imagined”, as the Powers like to say) series is the single finest current television show in the world. I am not alone in this assessment (see here, here and here.) Few other mainstream entertainment products offer such dark assessments of the human soul, drawing fairly obvious analogies to modern American military policy, primarily the “war on terror”. It takes courage to present a universe that clearly mirrors our own, North American world, but in which the polytheists are the ostensible good guys and monotheists the bad guys. It takes further courage to miraculously get us to sympathize with the mass-murdering, robotic bad guys– and yet somehow the show manages to do this.

There are many ripe philosophical fruits to be plucked and devoured in this show. Among my favourites is the anti-heroic path of Dr. Gaius Baltar. He is demonized as a villain for having made some selfish, but very human, self-serving decisions. But if we are honest with ourselves we recognize in Baltar (in all but his genius intellect and creepy narcissism) the truth of our existence. He, unlike other impossibly and predictably heroic members of a typical TV show, behaves pretty much how a normal human being would behave, given the truly extraordinary circumstances in which he finds himself.

Baltars quest for redemption underlies, for me, the lesson of the show: that everybody is both good and evil, that everyone both deserves life and deserves death, and that only the honest among us can embrace this truth and thus seek justification for our continued existence. Dark? Of course; it’s Battlestar Galactica.

The other, more accessible philosophical plumb presented by the show is the number of models of “skin jobs”, or human-form Cylons. There are exactly 12 of them. Why? It is never expressed explicitly, but the implication is that the race of mechanic Cylons took a good, long look at humanity and saw only twelve of us. There are only 12 archetypal human beings, so simple are our motivations, so predictable our behaviours and responses.

Others have discussed this aspect of the show’s mythology. The show’s producers have encouraged this discussion, and most have landed upon a summary of the archetypes, as summarized well by a poster on nightly.net:

The innocent
The regular guy
The warrior
The caregiver
The explorer
The destroyer
The lover
The creator
The ruler
The magician
The sage
The jester

Now, as fans of the show know, while there are 12 archetypes, there are only 11 Cylon models so far identified. The lasting mystery is, of course, the identity of the final Cylon. As shown in the image below, Cylon D’Anna glimpsed the faces of the Final Five Cylons, four of whom are now known to us as occupants of the Colonial fleet.

The producers have fed the speculation, most famously by issuing the following manipulated photo, based on “The Last Supper”, with the message that none of the characters portrayed is in fact the Final Cylon:

A series of snippets were also released by the producers on a website called YouWillKnowTheTruth.com, that further fed speculation and planted clues (or, more likely, misdirections). A summary of those clues is given here.

For a lot of reasons, I believe the identity of the Final Cylon boils down to two candidates: Felix Gaeta and Anastasia Dualla.

Now, I know that I have discussed this several times in the past. And I have linked to at least one thorough analysis of the clues. But I love a good mystery. I am so satisfied that the Final Cylon is one of these two individuals that I’m even willing to put money on it.

Part of the charm of the mystery is the bizarre, almost secretive, evolution of Felix Gaeta. If you’re a fan of the show, I doubt you will ever be able to forget the haunting, creepy yet beautiful song sung by Gaeta as his leg was amputated. The composer of the song talked about it on his blog, and called it both “Gaeta’s Lament” and “The Stump Serenade”. Much analysis has surrounded the eerie song, as it supposedly contains clues to the identity of the Final Cylon, to whom God (or the gods, depending on which of the show’s faiths you subscribe to) has bestowed a special fate relating to the dispositions of both races, the humans and the Cylons.

This post has, for my money, one of the more intriguing analyses, specifically that Gaeta’s secret is his transsexualism. The theory has some appeal to me, since the nature of the hidden Cylon(s) has been something of a bridging of gaps or paradigms. Much the same way that the “skin jobs” cross the divide between men and machine, a transsexual Cylonic Gaeta would cross the divide between male and female.

Then again, for all I know, the Final Cylon is the dead cat formerly owned by Apollo’s lawyer buddy. It’s just a TV show, after all. The identity of the Final Cylon will be revealed to all in a matter of weeks.

Well, I broke my carb embargo in spectacular style today, as Ed and Meiling Wong once more stupefied us with unbelievably delicious (and a tad fattening) brunch food. The lady of the house makes something particularly yummy and life-shortening called “monkey bread”, which we devoured with such voracity that I’m pretty sure we’ll all need insulin shots within the week.

That means I lasted about 6 weeks of an extremely low carb existence. Mind you, I’ve been sliding slowly back to the land of breads and sugars this past week, with the unavoidable Christmas drunkenness and the occasional bite of cake. But otherwise I’ve been pretty strong. I feel pretty gross right now, though, and need to wash it all back with a litre of Metamucil!

The gastric adventure coincided with my first exposure to an episode of The Biggest Loser, that American reality show in which a bunch of fat people compete to lose pounds. I found the show ver very troubling. Here are a few observations:

• The show advances the belief that most fat people are just mentally weak. While I certainly subscribe to the school of thought that most people lack discipline, and that discipline is one of the surest paths to success in almost all aspects of life, there is a bit of wiggle room when it comes to extreme weight gain: mental health issues, metabolic diseases, poor nutritional education, insufficient access to proper foods and scheduling demands that prevent proper shopping and exercise among them.
• I suspect that the show deliberately selects for contestants whose weight issues are discipline based, allowing them to promote their boot camp mentality and further propagate the above belief.
• The show promotes weight loss as the end all and be all of fitness. This is perhaps the most dangerous of its failings. It’s easy, for example, for a large muscular man to lose weight quickly. If he focuses on aerobic activity and ignores hydration, he will drop muscle mass and water weight very quickly. This is not healthy weight loss. There are many more acceptable metrics of progress:

1. Inches (or centimetres) around the waist.
2. Pinchable fat at the belly, hips and triceps.
3. Body tissue electrical resistance, a proxy measurement for body fat ratio.
4. Body mass index.
5. Energy levels and psychological disposition.
6. Serum cholesterol, blood pressure, arterial inflammation and cardiac enzymes.
7. Clothing size!
8. Physical fitness benchmarks

So far, I am not impressed by this show. Maybe I’ll give it a few more viewings.

Who is this handsome young man? His name is Yogesh Chotalia and he is an up-and-coming Canadian actor from the Toronto area. Why do I have a photo of him up here?

Well, back in June 2006, I reported that the Canadian TV show ReGenesis would be introducing a new minor character based on yours truly. At the time, I was told the character would be an epidemiologist named, appropriately, “Dr. Deonandan”, and that she would be a super-hot uber-babe. I rightly wondered if there was a special psychological diagnosis for someone who is physically attracted to his own fictional portrayal on TV.

Well, “Dr. Deonandan” was morphed back into a male character, and his profession was shifted from epidemiologist to infectious disease doctor. And he is no longer based just on me, but also on a friend of the creator, named “Atul”. Hence, the character’s name is “Dr. Atul Deonandan”. And he is played by the able and charming Yogesh Chotalia.

Copyrights be damned. If you’d like to see the episode featuring the dashing, brilliant and insightful Dr. Deonandan, you can download an MP4 of low quality (about 150MB) here:

http://download.deonandan.com/ReGenesis-3×06-Phantoms.mp4

Now the embarrassing part: “Dr. Deonandan” has about a minute of total air time. If you blink, you’ll miss him. And he’s not called by name at any point during the show. That bit of info is only available in the credits. Hey, how many TV characters are named after you? So stop laughing.

In Other News…

• Ray R. sends us this great series of videos on how to save time.
• Mischa sends us this and this, indicating that Al Gore –despite my predictions of the past 6 years– will not be running for President. Well, in for a penny, in for a pound. I stick by my prediction. Helping me along is the news that Gore has just won the Nobel Peace Prize. The time is ripe, Al. The time is ripe.
• My latest MicroSoft column is up and available here.
• Spidey Patel sends us this news that Harry Potter creator JK Rowling is suing a group in India for having created a model of Hogwarts School for use in some sort of festival, without getting permission from her or Warner Brothers first. Bad bad Rowling. If these folks are not getting any commercial gain from their big model, why crush so many dreams? It’s not like you would have milked much money out of this set of poor Indians with your books and films, is it? Very very sad.
• Sarah M. sends us this survey of homosexual comic book characters…. and their fates! And we wonder why Batman and Robin keep their relationship a secret!
• I’m selling more crap on Ebay. Check ‘em out by clicking “Auctions” on the menu to the left, or by clicking here.