John McCain won't throw a hat on a bed.

So, it's been a while since I wrote. Things have been moving right along, or more specifically, I'm moving right along, back to Cambridge. I've fallen for a certain red-headed pixie, and I'm happy to say I haven't been this happy in a number of years. Lost is winding up its 4th season, and Battlestar Galactica is wrapping up its 4th and final season, and the trees are budding, the days are getting sunnier.
Life is good.
A bit of housekeeping: I do write about Lost and BSG a bit, and some of my readers may not be caught up. I certainly wouldn't want to spoil anyone, so I will now offer a new feature on my blog: the Coletta Factor. When appropriate, at the beginning of a post, I will incude the Coletta factor like this: Lost-S2. That means that if you haven't seen up to season 2 of Lost, you will be spoiled. Often the Coletta factor will look like this: BSG-current, meaning you need to be caught up with all aired episodes or else you will be spoiled. I won't call these spoiler alerts, because a spoiler is a nugget of info about something that has not been aired or released to the general public, and I don't seek out, look at, or distribute spoilers. Also, this is not a TV blog. This is a place where I can write about the people, real-life and fictional, whose stories intersect with mine. One of these people is the namesake of the factor, indeed it is at her request that I give these advisories.

Saul Tigh's message of hope

"Which side are we on? We're on the side of the demons, Chief. We are evil men in the gardens of paradise, sent by the forces of death to spread devastation and destruction where ever we go. I'm surprised you didn't know that."

New stuff

If you scroll down to the bottom of this page, you'll find a BSG video player. There are 1 minute recaps of recent episodes, in addition to an 8 minute recap of the entire series so far. They are narrated in a funny and irreverant way, and I found them tons of fun, especially the series recap, which is the one with the picture of one-eyed Saul Tigh. Newbies will be enlightened, and fans can take a stroll down memory lane.

Paul Simon lyrics, vol. 4, You're Kind

You're kind
You're so kind
You rescued me when I was blind
And you put me on your pillow
When I was on the wall
You're so kind
So kind
So kind

And you're good
You're so good
You introduced me to you
neighborhood
Seems like I ain't never had
so many friends before
That's because you're good
You're so good

Why you don't treat me like
the other humans do
Is just a mystery to me
It gets me agitated when I think that
You're gonna love me now indefinitely

So goodbye,goodbye
I'm gonna leave you now
And here's the reason why

I like to sleep with the window open
And you keep the window closed

So goodbye
Goodbye
Goodbye

Tom Waits lyrics, vol. 7: Watch Her Disappear

Last night I dreamed that I was dreaming of you
And from a window across the lawn I watched you undress
Wearing your sunset of purple tightly woven around your hair
That rose in strangled ebony curls
Moving in a yellow bedroom light
The air is wet with sound
The faraway yelping of a wounded dog
And the ground is drinking a slow faucet leak
Your house is so soft and fading as it soaks the black summer heat
A light goes on and the door opens
And a yellow cat runs out on the stream of hall light and into the yard

A wooden cherry scent is faintly breathing the air
I hear your champagne laugh
You wear two lavender orchids
One in your hair and one on your hip
A string of yellow carnival lights comes on with the dusk
Circling the lake with a slowly dipping halo
And I hear a banjo tango

And you dance into the shadow of a black poplar tree
And I watched you as you disappeared
I watched you as you disappeared
I watched you as you disappeared
I watched you as you disappeared

Barack, you pixie

I saw you laughing tonight, that softie John Stewart teasing you about your plan to enslave the white race. Your joy was so genuine and contagious, and it filled me with hope.

here we go now...

I've been taking some time off from the election. After Ohio and Texas, it just looked like 8 weeks of a long hard slog, a good time to safely tune out for a while. Pennsylvania's primary is less than a week away, and not much has changed since the last time I looked. Obama still looks like the man to beat and I'm still wondering why Hillary hasn't gotten the hint yet. There was a debate last night, and I was really disappointed by the moderators, ABC's Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopolous. The first 40 minutes consisted of Gibson and Stephanopolous throwing everything but the kitchen sink at Obama, warmed-over crap like the Jeremiah Wright stuff, and why Obama doesn't wear a flag pin. Stephanopolous asked him about his association with a former member of the Weather Underground. (Apparently Stephanopolous was encouraged to ask that one by several members of the FOX noise team.) Makes me sick, why don't they ask some real damn questions?

no words, no words

they should have sent a poet...

John Armand, part 1

John sidled up to me in the chow line and said, "You ready to give it a go?" This was Tuesday last, 9 days ago now. Here it is, Thursday morning, and he's already gone. It's not surprising, really, seeing that a whole wing of the Pike Complex was virtually demolished. If the Board even got a hint that John said one word to me about what he was planning, I'd be lucky if they didn't throw my ass out, too.
"You ready to give it a go?"

Democracy sucks

I took the poll off the page. No one voted, anyway, and it was probably a dumb question. My sincere thanks to a certain pixie who put her two cents in.
Check out the new pics, tell me what you think, and I'll think about a new poll question...I gotta go to bed....

No spoilers...

Dear Xtine, you are absolutely right. I should give you a spoiler alert when talking about Battlestar Galactica, or anything else you haven't seen. It's only respectful. Example: Spoiler Alert!! Darth Vader is Luke's father!!! Ok, so now I'm going to tell a little story about Cylons, and it's gonna be full of spoilers, so, Xtine, go away, go away and look at your itty-bitty-kitty-committee blog, or just look at all the new pictures I spent most of tonight finding and posting, for sweet Jesus' sake, Xtine, don't read the rest of this post.

Ok, is she gone? Jeez, Xtine is such a jerk!!

invisible post

he thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts.

Your patriotic duty

Please vote in my poll. It will only take a second or two, and you can feel good about partcipating in democracy. It's ok if you don't know what a Cylon is. Here's the breakdown: Six is the leggy, pious blonde with a soft spot for the mad scientist, D'Anna is played by Lucy Lawless of Xena fame, and her thing recently is questioning her blind faith in what she's been taught. Sharon is probably the most sympathetic to humans, in fact the other Cylons are convinced that the Sharon model has some fundamental flaw. Cavil is the preacher who doesn't believe in God, Leoben is a religious fanatic who is obsessed with Starbuck. Simon and Doral are minor characters, the Ralph Naders of this poll. A vote for one of them is only a spoiler vote. So there you go. Please vote.

Paul and Saul

Bulldog's return

Lt. Danny 'Bulldog' Novacek spent three years in a Cylon prison because the Old Man, Bill Adama, gave the order to shoot down Bulldog's Viper. (A Viper is the equivalent of a fighter plane.) He ejected and survived long enough for the toasters to find him. One day they just left his cell door open and he walked out, stole a raider, and took off.
Saul of Tarsus was a bad man. He went to the temples and forced the pious to blaspheme, he imprisoned saints, he followed them to strange lands just to persecute them. One day he was on the road to Damascus to do a little afternoon persecuting, and he was surrounded by a light from Heaven, which drove him to his knees and struck him blind.
Bulldog found out that the Old Man had tried to kill him from Saul Tigh. Saul Tigh, who lost his wife down on that rock New Caprica, who had always hit the bottle a bit much, Saul was mad at Adama, but he was really mad at himself, mad at the toasters, he was feeling no small amount of guilt about Ellen. The Old Man tried to help Saul, but when you're looking through the bottom of the bottle, it's hard to be anything but angry when people try to help you. Saul got back at Adama, his friend of 40 years, by telling Bulldog that Adama had tried to kill him.
Saul of Tarsus, on the road to Damascus, driven to his knees, blinded, heard a thunderous voice from the sky: "Saul, why do you persecute me, Saul?" Saul said, "Who are you?" The reply came back: "I am Jesus, whom thou persecuteth." Jesus then told Saul that his new name was Paul, and that his new job was to spread the news of what he had seen and what God would continue to reveal to him.
Bulldog was angry, and I guess it was inevitable that he would attack the Old Man with a length of pipe, because that's exactly what he did. Nearly killed him, too, until Saul showed up and saved his friend. When Bulldog had been subdued, Saul talked to him, told him that the worst part of getting played was losing your dignity, feeling like you're not worth the oxygen you're sucking down. Adama was beaten nearly unconscious and bleeding from half a dozen head wounds, but he managed to reach out to his friend: "Saul, you put that bottle away, Saul."
Paul continued on to Damascus, and his conversion was true. He bore witness to what he had seen and what God continued to reveal to him, he was healed of his blindness in only 3 days. He did his new job so well, in fact, that he was persecuted for spreading the word. When questioned, he maintained that he said nothing other than what Moses and the prophets said must happen: "That Christ should suffer, and that he should be the first that should rise from the dead, and should show light unto the people..."
Saul Tigh isn't doing very well. He is back at work, but he's still drinking, and there's the matter of that strange music he keeps hearing. A whiff of a melody, maybe a few words, "too much confusion." Sam Anders heard it too, and the Chief, and that girl who works for the schoolteacher. Sometime soon, driven near to madness by the music, all of them will come together, and a knowledge, a certainty, will come over each of them, a certainty that they are not humans at all, but cylons, created by the One True God in his own image.

things I know to to blue...

The gentlemen on the right are very blue, as is the sky, the ocean, comedy containing swear words and sex jokes, some corn chips, blue jays, cobalt, which will turn your skin blue if you take too much of it, newborn mammals' eyes, some campsite coffeepots, maybe a stray lantern or two, my heart a few years back, Scooby-doo's collar, bruises, Blue Meanies, some Mondays, Nightcrawler (bamf!), some houses, some cars, 1% milk, scrubs, navy uniforms, cop uniforms, vanilla soy milk boxes, Equal packets, Captain Picard's barber, the starship on my arm, bud light cans, recycling bins, Chanukah decorations, John Locke after Helen left him, Jack Shepherd after Sarah left him, Sam Anders after Kara left him, Danielle Rousseau after Alex was taken, Charlie after Claire was taken, Saul Tigh after Ellen died, Alex Supertramp's family after he died, J.K. Rowling before Harry Potter, Kurt Cobain during his success, Orson Welles after Citizen Kane, and so on...

We're all muggles

Ron tried 2 times to use his broken wand, and you know what he found out? Broken wands don't work, or they do work, but they reflect the spell back to the person behind the wand. Ron found that out the hard way. Twice. Later in the film, when we see a bad guy, not The Bad Guy, just a bad guy, with Ron's broken wand, we know before the bad guy that he's in deep trouble. He's trying to incapacitate Harry and Ron and run away like a coward, but he only succeeded in wiping his own memory. That couple of seconds when we see the broken wand in his hand are delicious. It's only a moment of anticipation, but it contains the essence of the boys' victory over the terrible monster that has turned their friend to stone.

Central Park

For your viewing pleasure, a slideshow of Central Park:
http://gonyc.about.com/od/photogalleries/ss/central_park.htm

it's not your fault, blogspot

I started writing a post that was shaping up to be pretty decent, then I clicked on my IMDB button without opening a new tab. Guess what happened? I went straight to IMDB and lost the post. It's ok, I didn't spend too much time on it, and I was just writing about Battlestar Galactica anyway. This post is not about Battlestar. It's not about the fact that there are in fact two half-human, half-cylon babies, or about what Cally's gonna do when she finds out that her husband is a toaster. I won't mention the time that Cally went all Jack Ruby on Boomer after Boomer put two bullets into the Old Man's belly. This post is not about Saul Tigh, who fought two wars, lost an eye, lost his wife,only to find out that he is, in fact, the same enemy he spent his life fighting against.

I won't show you this picture, which hangs on the wall of President Roslin's office. I don't need to explain that it's called Lest We Forget, and it depicts a Colonial soldier driven to his knees by the carnage and wanton destruction that was the Cylon attack on the 12 Colonies. I won't draw the obvious parallels to the most significant event Americans have seen since Pearl Harbor. This post is not about Battlestar Galactica. This post is about baseball, springtime, coffee, and girls who wear sweaters. I missed the first 3 Red Sox games of the year, but I only regret missing the first 2. Should've gotten up at 6am to see them play in Japan. Tonight's game, I'm sure, was pretty forgettable,and there are 159 left before the end of the season. Tonight was more about springtime, and sitting outside chatting, drinking coffee, way too much coffee. It was about good company, about feeling the rightness of where I am. Today was about the past, the present, even a little about the future. It was about keeping secrets, not spilling the beans. (ha-ha, beans! Spoodle!) It was about a girl I know, a girl with blue eyes wearing a blue sweater, lighting her cigarettes with a blue lighter, and it was about a blue couch I used to have. I hatched a plan to play an elaborate prank on a co-worker. I'll blog about that one after it happens. Loose lips do indeed sink ships. I took two showers and had a burrito for dinner, not to mention the fact that the local 24 was out of my cigarettes, so I had to switch up. There's more, there's always more, but I just noticed the time and I've got a date with a certain Battlestar named Galactica...