"I want some dispassionate, heartless women for a change. I want some women who don't waste precious time struggling with the human toll of every stupid decision."

You mean like that utterly heartless, utterly compassionless, utterly clueless, and utterly uninteresting central character on Bones?

GF started watching Crossing Jordan because she thinks Nigel is teh hawt, which i suppose only goes to prove that i will never understand what about men attracts women (which would explain a lot, but that's besides the point). But i have noticed out of all of this that Jordan Cavinaugh is likely the most realistic woman I've seen portrayed in a fictional storyline - her compassion corresponds neatly with her self-interest, and for all his improbably prettyboi geekness, Nigel is a great counterpart to her - probably the most compassionate of the bunch, if I were keeping score, arguably the most compassionate XY on the tube.

And for all it's over the top sci fi cheeziness, Cleopatra 2525 managed to give us 3 female characters, only one of whom (the titular ex-stripper) took on a stereotypically feminine role. (The other two, given the show's budget and constraints, were instead assigned stereotypically male roles, rather than explore any sort of challenging new definition for women on television, which i suspect is a large part of why the show ultimately failed; though to be fair a syndicated timeslot that followed SNL probably didn't help much either.)

But the future is coming. We already have more channels than we have shows to fill them with, and that's a trend that's only gonna continue in the short to mid term. Long term, however, will just be programs that sit on a central server as channels and time slots become entirely obsolete and everything is available on demand, so if anyone's gonna give us these callous bitches, they'd better do it fast.

As to Arrested Development - all your comment did was prove the letter writer's point. Arrested Development is nothing more than a sitcomized reminder that those with the most money are those that deserve it the least, but because they have the most money the odds of their getting a comeuppance that will be in any way lasting or meaningful are about exactly the same as the odds of the President signing into law a major tax break for those with a networth below $50k.

Cheers,

Rich

The Governator's pet initiatives were "reforms" in the same way that our invasion of the soverign nation of Iraq was a preemptive strike against an overwhelming foe. In both cases you had a powerful, elitist leadership pushing a specific agenda whatever the cost to the lower classes. In both cases you had deception, misdirection, and outright lies relied upon to sell that agenda to people whose interests it didn't reflect. And, in both cases, you have a complacent media willing to roll over and parrot back the falsehoods without doing any of that time consuming and inconvenient work known as "research". (Aside to editors: you do require that your political commentators at least read the legislation they're championing, right?)

The difference is that a smaller percentage of California was willing to along with it than was true nationally - albeit not by much. This is why the red/blue myth is such a useless tool of political analysis; it is no more fair to characterize all Californians as tree-hugging hippies than it is to characterize all Americans as bible-toting demagoges. However, the voting population of California is just slightly enough to the left that a blatant power grab on the part of the right, that ignores all sense of compromise or fair play, will be recognized for what it is and cut short.

Arnold's "reforms" weren't defeated because he was arrogant, ballsy, and unable to connect with the public. His "reforms" failed because they weren't reforms. With his lack of oversight and obliteration of checks and balances, Arnold basicly renegged on every promise he made to get into power and then, Bush-like, went before the people of California and said "trust me."

You'd think a Hollywood star would know a thing or two about pathos. Instead we're now $100 million deeper in debt so the Governator could get a reality check.

If you're going to call Andrew Leonard to task, at least let it be about something less subjective. His articles generally speaking are insightful and intelligent, but his screed on audio file formats (http://www.salon.com/tech/col/leon/2003/10/28/itunes/index.html) was poorly reasoned, poorly researched, and seemed utterly oblivious to the fact that no single category of digital media has a utopic one size fits all de facto format - even the dead-simple text file can be either DOS, Mac, or Unix text, depending on how you format things like line breaks and escape characters. Lots of things that we pay for suffer from this sort of proprietary malaise, and it's not even limited to the world of bits - quite a few razors only work with proprietary heads, vacuums with proprietary bags, water filtration systems with proprietary filters, etc. We can wish for things to be different all we like, but why should we expect music to be any different from every other consumable?