For the title of this morning’s blog post about “Battlestar Galactica,” I asked ChatGPT:
What are some playful plays on words for the title of “Battlestar Galactica” that would indicate we think it’s a bad show?
The response:
Here are a few playful and critical wordplays on “Battlestar Galactica”:
- “Battle-Snore Galactica”
- “Blunderstar Galactica”
- “Battlestar Lacklusterica”
- “Borestar Galactica”
- “Battlestar Catastrophica”
Not bad.
We never got into the 2004 “Battlestar Galactica.” We loved the mini-series, but the first episode of the full series didn’t appeal to us so, we bailed out.
For the next 20 years, I’ve heard people raving about how great the show is. It’s become a classic. I got FOMO.
We started watching the series recently. We rewatched the miniseries and 10 episodes of the series.
And I think we’re done. Every episode is the same. For a space opera, it’s awfully claustrophobic.
“Battlestar Galactica” today looks like a rough draft of “The Expanse” and “For All Mankind.” And, indeed, “For All Manknd” is executive-produced by Ronald Moore, who produced “Galactica.”
I buy audiobooks from Libro.fm rather than Audible, primarily so that I can listen to the audio using the Overcast podcast app. Overcast is more familiar to me than the Audible app, and Overcast has excellent audio quality.
As a side-benefit, I also get non-DRMed audiobooks, which means I’m not locked into the Audible ecosystem. Also, I get to support a competitor to the Amazon monopoly. I buy plenty of stuff from Amazon, but it’s nice to occasionally shop elsewhere.
Inspired by this post on Threads, I hit Wikipedia to read the synopsis of “Flowers in the Attic.”
I remember the book being hugely popular, but I have never read it. I thought: It’s about children who live in an attic, which I guess is kind of nice, right?
No, it’s not nice. Holy shit. Just when I think it’s hit maximum fucked-upness, it takes another turn.
The German Bertha was born into a wealthy family and married engineer Karl Benz, writes Sari Rosenberg at Lifetime.
Bertha used her family money to finance her husband’s creation of a horseless carriage. Under modern day law, Bertha would have actually owned the patent rights. However, German law in the 1880s prohibited married women from even applying for a patent.
Her husband, Karl Benz, gets the credit for the invention, but her money, marketing “and chutzpah” built the business.
Benz’s Motorwagen was made of wood, with two wheels in back, one in front and a “handle-like contraption” for steering, and could reach speeds up to 25 mph, Rosenberg writes.
People were reluctant to buy a machine that only traveled short distances, and “Bertha realized the only way to sell more cars was if they demystified the public’s fear of driving.”
With only a small amount of fuel in the carburetor, Bertha had to plan her route around where apothecaries were located so she could buy ligroin, a detergent that was used as fuel.
…
When a fuel line got clogged, she used a long hat pin to fix it. She used a garter to repair a broken ignition. At one point, she had to employ the help of a blacksmith to help fix a broken chain. When the brakes on the car began to fail, Bertha visited a cobbler who installed leather on them, hence creating the first brake pads. Meanwhile, at a time before roadmaps even existed, she literally forged her own path on the trip via automobile to her mom’s house.
“We used to be better than they are, we used to be good.… Now we are the same.” Journalist Aviya Kushner writes at The Forward about her encounter at an Israeli light rail station with a woman older than the state of Israel itself.
Israelis opposing Netanyahu use the word “hamadena” to describe what Netanyahu is destroying. “For Israelis, that word, hamedina, or ‘the state’ is not just the State of Israel, but the dream of the State of Israel.”
I think the elderly woman is oversimplifying. I, too, used to believe Israel was good. Since the reaction to the Oct. 7 attack, I have come to see that Israel is founded on injustice.
Israel is not unique or fundamentally evil. As Ezra Klein said, nearly every state is founded in blood.
However, Israel can’t just go back to locking the Palestinians in the basement and nailing the door shut. Israel has to do better.
This is a thoughtful article, and I agree with the overall thrust. But I disagree with key premises. Many people don’t use social media or just use it occasionally. This is true even in the tech industry, marketing and journalism.
The ‘Trans Boxer’ story isn’t what you think: Gender wars, Russian influence ops, and our addiction to rage bait — Unusual circumstances are great for inciting Internet rage wars, and Russia is happy to fan the flames.
We had stopped for a minute for me to pick up the dog’s by-product. I heard the chickens before I saw them. and thought, “WTF is that?” The sound was simultaneously very familiar and utterly strange.
We live in an ordinary Southern California suburb, not farm country by any means. By SoCal standards, we live in the city. I have heard people keep chickens around here, but have not encountered it in person for 15 years or so.
When you see an El Camino, you are required to photograph it and share the photo. Those are the rules.
“Why I was gone.” Andrea Lopez-Villafaña, managing editor, daily news, for the Voice of San Diego, is a DREAMer. Brought to the United States as a small child by her parents, she qualified for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, in 2013. DACA requires her to re-apply for the right to work in the US every two years. But the federal government was slow to process applications and in June she was forced to take an unpaid leave of absence from work, returning recently.
I missed her voice on the Voice of San Diego weekly podcast, and was glad when she came back.
People who’ve lived their whole lives in the US should have an easy path to citizenship and not have to suffer this ridiculous bureaucracy
