Eureka Seven: Good Night, Sleep Tight, Young Lovers is a fast-paced action-packed love story. It has a very different plot from the original Eureka Seven series, so don't expect a sequel!

That said, the plot does parallel the series in several ways. The basic premise of aliens attacking the Earth and humans fighting back remains. Where the series portrayed the aliens as basically misunderstood and unintentionally damaging, the movie portrays them as more generically malicious, even though they did shoehorn some more 'innocent misguided intentions' stuff later in the plot.

Eureka has changed a lot. She's more of a fusion of Eureka and Anenome in the series, including frequently yelling "idiot" at Renton. That took a lot of getting used to for me. Interestingly, Novak and Anenome basically replaced Norb and Sakuya's roles in the story. It will raise a few eyebrows at first, but it worked.

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AT&T sure hates the fact that their 3G coverage sucks and Verizon is pointing it out.  The latest ad (been out for a while, actually) says that only AT&T allows you to talk and download at the same time.  Big deal if you can't get 3G service!

I hate AT&T.  I have to have them for local phone service because I use DSL and their monopoly makes them the only game in town -- and a very expensive option at that.  Cable is better for internet, but Time Warner is even lower on the scale of "good companies" in my book.  Better of the two evils -- so AT&T wins.  Thankfully, my actual DSL provider is a local company (Portbridge) and they are very good.  It's still AT&T's loop and I have to have local phone service, but at least AT&T is getting the least money possible from me.  I hate monopolies. 

I thought deregulation was supposed to fix all this?

Of course not!  Deregulation never helps the consumer.  Well I've derailed from my original point.  So, in conclusion, fuck AT&T and fuck Time Warner!

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Wow!  This is shaping up to be  a good season for teevee science fiction!  First, we get a remade V (which didn't disappoint, although the first episode wasn't as strong as the original, IMHO), now I see that The Prisoner (an absolutely iconic science fiction series from the 60s) is being remade for AMC.  Go AMC!  Go teevee!

I am a big fan of the original mini-series, V, that aired in 1983.  I was pretty young back then, so my recollection of the series is primarily through re-runs on Syfy years ago before the channel had a stupid name.  The mini-series was gripping and original.  The WWII analogies were strong and well written, and the character reactions of the story were very plausible.  In addition, the main protagonist was a cameraman.  Give it up for the geeks!  The story ended with a victorious battle, but the war was very far from over.  There were lots of open ended questions and cliff hangers.

The next year, a sequel mini-series was made, V: The Final Battle.  It completely sucked1.  They either ignored or quickly wrapped up the very dramatically laid loose ends from the previous year in very unsatisfactory ways.  The story devolved from a WWII analogy into more of a religious analogy, with the hybrid human-visitor having magical Christ-like powers that neither parent possessed (seriously, wtf?).  And they had Michael Ironside.  (Has your favorite show jumped the shark?  If Michael Ironside was just added to the cast then the answer is yes!)   And to top it all off, the humans beat the visitors with the most lame War of the Worlds deus ex machina2 rip-off ending ever – complete with like fifteen minutes of stock footage cheering and rejoicing!  After that, NBC started a series sequel to V.  The visitors quickly developed an immunity to the poison dust, lost their warbled distorted voices (no explanation given), regained rule over the planet with little resistance, and the series continued to suck and disappoint like only a series that jumps the shark before it even begins can!

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I didn't think anything could be more annoying than the Monday Night Football theme song.  Then NBC created a carbon copy (but worse) semi-country, semi-rock song sung by somebody sort of famous, but highly annoying for Sunday night.  Because, yes, it is entirely MNF's song that makes it successful in prime time and not an exciting football game itself!

Teevee executives are retarded.

(Yes, I know NBC's SNF is not exactly new, but this has been something I've been meaning to complain about since they took over in 2006. lol.)

Am I the only one that thinks the Chia Obama is, at the very least, unclassy and, at the very worst, blatantly racist?

http://www.chiaobama.com/

First Ed McMahon, then Farrah Fawcett, then Michael Jackson, and now Billy Mays has died.  Okay maybe it's weird that I'm a fan of a teevee direct marketing pitchman, but I really liked the guy.  I didn't find his "Hi! Billy Mays here" commercials annoying at all, and I use several of his products and think they work exactly as advertised.  Plus, after watching his show Pitchmen on the Discovery Channel, I really grew to like the guy as a person.  He just seemed like a nice down-to-earth guy who really believed in the products he sold (unlike the shamwow guy, who I find very annoying).  This is a sad day for direct marketing.  Their biggest star, who was still far from his peak, has passed on.

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The title says it all.  No matter what you think about his (admittedly bizarre) personal life, he was an absolute entertainment phenomenon.  There will never be another entertainer like him.  Thriller will always be one of my most prized albums in my collection of vinyl.

With this and the death of Ed McMahon and Farrah Fawcett, this has turned out to be a hell of a depressing week.  It can't end soon enough.

Not that I ever really spent much time watching and listening to the Sunday Bobblehead political shows, but this new blog I was turned onto absolutely pwns them.  Not only is it funny in a satirical way, it's also disturbingly accurate.  Now you don't need to waste any more time listening to pundits talk on Sundays!

Last night I caught part of the Ed Schultz Show on MSNBC and some conservative hack was claiming (using an out-of-context quote) that Sonia Sotomayor is a racist against the poor downtrodden rich white male.  How come these days it seems conservative pundits (usually old white men, natch) claim only non-whites are racist? 

Thankfully, I got a great link off Atrios' site that digs into this issue and sets the record straight.  Much better than I could ever do.

http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/tapped_archive?month=05&year=2009&base_name=the_racialism_of_stuart_taylor#115268