Battlestar Galactica: 2003 – 2009

 

This fall’s comedy laugh riot: “Sarah”

Greg Erickson, columnist and reporter for the Anchorage Daily News writes the following about John McCain’s VPILF Sarah Palin in today’s WashingtonPost.com:

Question: “Knowing what you do of Gov. Palin, do you think this could be a case where the more the American people know about [Sarah Palin], the more impressed and charmed they’ll be; or, could getting to know her better be trouble?

Gregg Erickson: ”It will certainly have both effects. What’s not to admire about a straight-talking soccer mom who suddenly finds herself in the running for vice-president. It’s like a TV sitcom plot. The reality of the national scrutiny will be another thing, however.”

I can only hope that in the pilot ep, they will show her up in the chopper shooting wolf cubs with her AK-47.

Barack Obama Captures Democratic Nomination

My dear friends, after too long gone, I am back with a quick note to declare tonight how proud I am of Barack Obama for receiving the Democratic Party’s nomination for president. It’s about time!

For too long this nation has pushed aside the importance, the voices and the contributions of African Americans. Tonight we nominated a true leader with the vision, judgement and intelligence to be not just our first African American president, but a great president.

Now starts the great Republican lie machine.

I’m Voting Republican

David Fincher’s 1970s SF Valentine: “Zodiac”

Saturday night the kid was gone. My wife too. I stared at the rack of DVDs in the corner of our living room. Film noir? Nope, too comfortable. Sci fi? Nope, too much of that lately. Then, from within its little NetFlix jacket, came the call of David Fincher’s 2007 crime docudrama, “Zodiac.” What the hell. Fincher usually creeps me out a bit too much for comfort, (Alien3, Seven, Fight Club) but “Zodiac” was my town, San Francisco!

The movie spans a 20-year period from the late 1960s to the early 90s when the famed Zodiac killer took lives around the the San Francisco Bay Area. He was never captured and is believed now to be deceased. The film follows three men who tried their best to identify and catch the killer.

I watched with glee as Fincher’s camera soared across Yerba Buena island over the Bay Bridge flying toward the Ferry Building. But the film doesn’t showcase the San Francisco of 2008. The Transamerica pyramid is gone, most of Embarcadero Center is under construction, and the abominable Embarcadero freeway is back! Fincher had done his homework with a ton of subtle CGI changes to the city. In the process, I was magically transported back to my earliest days as an SF newcomer.

The “Embarcadero” was a horrible elevated freeway designed in the 1950s to speed cars from the Bay Bridge to the Golden Gate Bridge. Thankfully, it was never completed.  It blocked enough views from downtown — from Mission Street to Broadway — to be an eyesore, casting huge shadows in its wake. It ultimately would be knocked down by CalTrans as a result of seismic damage sustained in the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989.  

Fincher, in his quest for historic accuracy, used CGI models to rebuild the Embarcadero and the construction of the Transamerica Pyramid, as well as a local cinematic landmark now closed, the Northpoint Theater. 

The Northpoint was something of a regional legend. George Lucas, Philip Kaufman and Francis Ford Coppola all used the gigantic theater with its state-of-the-art sound system to frequently run test screenings of their films for audiences, cast, crew and friends. I still remember getting up early Sunday morning in the summer of 1983 to see a semi-final print of The Right Stuff with my buddy Cliff. Lucas was there as was Ed Harris and Phil Kaufman.

By 1997 the writing was on the wall and huge single screen venues like the Northpoint were going the way of the drive-in before it. The stadium seat megaplex was taking over. The Northpoint closed down, this message left on the theater’s answering machine:

“Thank you for calling Cineplex Odeon’s Northpoint Theater, located at the corner of Bay and Powell streets, two blocks south of Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco. Today we are proud to present … nothing, rated nothing. Show times today are anytime you want, Monday through Friday, and Saturday and Sunday. We have a special bargain price, $4.25 for the zero show of the day, Saturday, Sunday, and holidays, and any shows before zero time. We offer no parking, a half-block north on Powell, next to the Northpoint Health Club … For further information, please dial 411. I’m sorry, we are now closed, if you haven’t figured it out.” Another voice cried out from afar, “Bye bye, and enjoy the movie!” (LINK)

Even in the midst of David Fincher’s fine unresolved hunt for the Zodiac killer, it made me smile to see the filmmaker carefully resurrect the Northpoint Theater for one more film.

2008 Web 2.0 Expo – San Francisco

Last week’s Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco set me all atwitter with fever dreams of summer 2001. There’s gold in ‘them thar hills’ but pay no attention to the economic storm clouds on the horizon. This time around we are all supposed to have better rain gear and smaller, sharper pick axes. 

It was hard not to feel out of place in this stampeding San Francisco geekfest — a graphic designer involved in professional services vertical markets surrounded by coders and startup types looking for quicksilver in a sputtering marketplace.  As Caroline McCarthy keenly pointed out on her “The Social” blog on News.com:

Tim O’Reilly preached a keep-on-trucking sermon in his keynote address, admitting, “We’ve been kind of whipsawed lately.” He also railed upon the statistics detailed in reports like one by Dow Jones VentureSource last week, which are finding that venture dollars for start-up companies are growing scarcer. Urging conference attendees to focus on innovation, he said, “If you’re following the headlines you might as well stay home, because you’ll be very terminally confused,” he said. “You have to think about what really matters.”  …  ”We’re at a turning point akin to literacy or the formation of cities,” O’Reilly said. “This is a huge change in the way the world works.”

So I set forth with my de rigueur complimentary web 2 tote bag and my recycled water bottle half full, so to speak. My inverted pyramid of interests collapsed into three narrowing layers:

• Big, bold Web 2.0 trends. (How healthy is the internet? Are we all destined to become part of a globally-warmed open social network?)
• Best practices for web development today, tomorrow and 18 months from now. (This was the eye-opening layer, including my new favorite conversation starter, Microformats.)
• Mobile web. Is your future really in my hand? (And did Steve Jobs place it there?)

Part 1: Big, bold web trends

We’re open for business. What started with thousands of horribly ugly web pages, each declaring ‘this is my space,’ has mushroomed into the next mantra of the web: Your site damn well better be open and social! Yahoo announced that it will be opening up vast portions of its data and applications with the launch of its new Yahoo! Open Strategy or Y! OS. Yahoo writes:

Under [the Y! OS] plan, third-party developers will be able to create applications that can access every property within Yahoo’s empire — from search, chat and mail to fantasy sports, photo sharing and social event planning. These custom apps will run anywhere on Yahoo a user wants to place them.”

The Y! OS system will support the Open ID standard which allows users to span multiple social sites with a unified set of personal credentials.

All your data be our data. From the opening moments of the Expo, a common thread ran through the 2.0 hype: If you want to plug into the world of mobile, widgets, apps running within apps and thus get cross-pollenated, you better open up your data sets.  ZDNet’s Paul Miller wrote:

Yes, (some) businesses would suffer irreparable harm if they opened access to their money tree without also rethinking their Victorian business model. But the UK Government figures (and others) clearly suggest that business (and society) benefits from increased access to this contextual data, even if individual businesses might not.

Wealthy players such as Microsoft and the incumbent search engines might do much here (as they have begun to do with map data) to force a widespread shift in business model, away from enforced scarcity of supply toward plentiful supply and more innovative monetisation of value-added services atop the basic and increasingly commoditised data.”

Standards, standards, standards was the drumbeat from mobile developers, global-focus panelists, and high profile web companies like Flickr, Mozilla, Google and Microsoft. In order to have a richer, more context-aware extensible online experience, web developers need to be more vigilant about building sites in standards-based XML and XHTML-strict languages. I was also impressed with the overarching need to separate the presentation layer of HTML markup from the content-based layer. 

This week, I will be looking at some of the breakout sessions from the Expo, including some posts on mobile development and microformats. In the meantime, do I think that Web 2.0 is going to crash as severely as Web 1.0? Who can say? Remember though, that objects in mirror are closer than they appear.

In Praise of BSG’s Michael Taylor: “The Ties That Bind”

[Tory Foster and Chief Tyrol ponder the skills of Michael Taylor]

Science fiction on TV gets a bum rap, most of the time deservedly so. It’s superficial, escapist, and implausible. And that’s why I love it. The simplistic unified world view and perfection of Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek franchise was my particular brand of sweet escape. 

But 9/11 changed everything and former Trek writer Ronald D. Moore figured that out. His re-imagined award-winning Battlestar Galactica on the Sci Fi Channel portrays a devastated human society now on the run for its very life. Perfect universes with clean starships and altruistic heroes are nowhere to be found in Battlestar’s world. Indeed, we are all frakked as they say.

In assembling writers for the show, executive producer Moore has gathered some of the finest sci-fi TV writers today. Bradley Thompson and David Weddle are masters of changing up space battles in completely unexpected ways. “Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s” Jane Espenson brings strength and determination to such BSG episodes as “Dirty Hands” and “The Passage.”

But the overarching tragic reality of BSG’s universe is best written by Michael Taylor. In Friday night’s truly masterful “The Ties That Bind,” Taylor takes viewers through the claustrophobic political games of Lee Adama’s new political charge, the questioning motivations of Kara Thrace’s new-age search for Earth, and — most importantly — the initially paranoid, later horrifying fear that Cally Tyrol faces when she discovers her husband is a Cylon robot. Taylor, along with director Michael Nankin, takes us into Cally’s nearly hallucinogenic head. He perfectly twists the motivations of nemesis Tory Foster to create an ending that is as moving as it is dramatic.

Michael Taylor has the ability to capture the darkest moments of human survival — moments that define the soul of this post 9/11 universe. He gave fans the deeply-flawed heroine of BSG’s “Razor,” Kendra Shaw, who’s kicking-and-screaming search for redemption took an otherwise familiar BSG story and painted it with terrific depth and drama.

Now Taylor and BSG exec producer Ron Moore have signed on with Fox TV to write the pilot for “Virtuality.” I only hope that it shows the same intense characters and twists that define his episodes of Battlestar Galactica. 

Links:

• Longer appreciation of “The Ties that Bind.
• Maureen Ryan’s 2007 Chicago Tribune interview  with Taylor

ABC Outfoxes Fox News on Debate

Wednesday evening’s Democratic presidential debate broadcast by ABC News proved that the network believes voters will fill up at the media trough of wedge filth. Moderated by Charles Gibson and former Clinton press secretary George Stephanopolous, the two questioners spent the first 45 minutes peppering both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama with Fox News-style “wedge issue” questions.

“Do you believe in the American Flag?”, tired questions about Reverend Wright, Bosnian snipers, clinging to guns or religion, flag pins, and on and on. As I write this, there are almost 17,000 comments over at ABC News on the disturbing lack of substance that the moderators put into their questions. Move over Hannity, Charlie and George are gunning for anchor jobs at Fox News.

Following is a pitiful defense video by ABC News president David Westin.

Shame on ABC News! 

FortéCEO Trade Show Jumps Through Hoops

At Right Hat recently we had the challenge of taking a consulting firm, FortéCEO, and creating a trade show display for a looming deadline. Our partner and strategist Elonide Semmes coined the phrase “Change. Delivered.” after numerous CEO and client interviews.

We started with designing a new logo. We then fast-tracked a dramatic and colorful booth image of a person jumping through hoops to deliver superior turnaround performance for companies in transition. FortéCEO execs were thrilled with the results, exclaiming:

“Thank you to the entire Right Hat team. You created a magnificent product in a very short period of time. A lot of blood, sweat and tears went into the passionate thought and discussions during this process.”

It’s nice to get mail like this!

The Boss for Barack

Bruce Springsteen in a letter on his website has endorsed Barack Obama, writing:

“Dear Friends and Fans:

“LIke most of you, I’ve been following the campaign and I have now seen and heard enough to know where I stand. Senator Obama, in my view, is head and shoulders above the rest.

He has the depth, the reflectiveness, and the resilience to be our next President. He speaks to the America I’ve envisioned in my music for the past 35 years, a generous nation with a citizenry willing to tackle nuanced and complex problems, a country that’s interested in its collective destiny and in the potential of its gathered spirit. A place where “…nobody crowds you, and nobody goes it alone.”"

The full endorsement is HERE