A fundamental problem with this entire example is that it is based on a very ancient tech cliche: that every person who owns a Mac or any Apple product is by definition a Mac-fanatic. This is so off the mark as to be outright bigoted. However, as we're talking about computer preferences, I don't see that kind of bigotry as particularly alarming.

This may shock some actual Mac zealots, but my wife and I have been using Macs since 1992 to do work. Actual, day-to-day, nine-to-five (before we went freelance) work. And being work, it often boils down to sheer drudgery. Another term for it is making a living. If we couldn't do that on our Macs, we sure as hell wouldn't be using Macs. But I tellya, at the end of a long work session, the only thing we want to do is get away from the damned things for a while. Awfully hard to be all starry-eyed and rah-rah for an OS and the box it runs on when their job is to crank along with you to pay the bills.

Are there more Mac users like my wife and myself than there are so-called Mac-fanatics? I don't know, but I'm betting there are. Lots more, but you don't hear from us much because, well, we're busy.

So, one more way to have an abortion has come to light. Pardon my yawn, but...so what?

After reading vast quantities of commentary, statistics, political debate (and demagoguery) and even accepted medical facts about abortion over the years, I've come to this conclusion: abortion is too vast and complex an issue, in all its facets, to be remotely an either-or proposition. Those who support blanket opposition to it plainly do not see this, and it is very difficult to believe they have any real understanding of the subject or even of their position. All-out pro-choicers, on the other hand, don't seem to understand that there is no argument that can shift the "you're killing babies" mindset. The overall politics of it have become so fixed and fixated that there doesn't even seem to be much that our current presidential campaigners can or will say about it.

Plainly, on this subject, this nation has run itself completely off the rails. Bitter as the clashes over it will continue to be, the matter itself is becoming as irresolvable as, say, the one between Christians and Jews over who killed Christ.

One thing the Internet has helped to make glaringly clear is that there is no material behavioral difference between liberals and conservatives when it comes to the conduct of their private lives. It is also no longer possible to maintain, without being willful obtuse, that the privates lives of our politicians are, or ever have been, any kind of accurate gauge of their ability to serve the public.

"Do as I say, not as I do" has long been a popular parental rational, and we're coming to realize that that's just how things really work on just about every level of society regardless of political and/or religious and/or governmental viewpoint.

I readily admit I lost a lot of enthusiasm for Battlestar Galactica, after enjoying the mini-series and getting a kick out of the first episodes of the first regular season, because I started to see the "infiltrated Cylon" count go up. No matter how the creators have tried to slice it, that just wrecked the plausibility of the entire premise. With human-like Cylons popping up like weeds amongst the small population of human refugees, there's just no way to parse the idea that they the humans got away at all and have it make a particle of sense. And the revelation at the end of Season Three just confirmed my constantly growing suspicion that the entire show has turned out to be one long stringing out of the "hidden" premise that it's all about Cylons fighting Cylons, with the few actual humans just caught haplessly in the middle.

If it was all about Cylons needing humans to procreate, then I thoroughly agree with an earlier poster that they effectively had that problem licked when the first Six was popped from the mold. With that, their clear knowledge of the right combination of human-Cylon for making babies, an even clearer knowledge of what would perk a human male's sexual interest, and their unparalleled mastery of infiltration, the attack on the Twelve Colonies was just plain stupid.

Freddie--

I won't swear to it, but the episode you refer to, where our trio of heroes sit in a cave staring at candles, might have been a late one. For reasons I can't remember (I've only seen the episode once, first run) they're stranded out in the middle of some southwestern nowhere and their only hope for aid is from an older gent living alone out in the middle of that nowhere. The hitch is, he's grumpy and deeply resentful of young people like them. His own son died in the war, and he has no use for kids who protest against war and enjoy the privileges his son died for. He decides, like a good TV psychotic, to take it out on good ol' Pete, Julie and Linc. As a result, to my recollection, this forces our heroes to hide out in a cave for a fair bit. And though P, J & L ultimately win the day, they're taken aback by a final revelation that call their own perceptions of the older generation into question.

One feature of this episode that struck me as a bit backward even then was Linc, when confronted by the older gent's keen lack of sympathy for their plight, pleads "We have a girl with us!" Desperate times call for desperate words, I suppose, and Linc no doubt only hoped to touch a soft spot in the fellow, but it still sounded strangely out of character.