I remember the "private eyes" of the 70's. They were all, for the most part, equipped with emotional or physical gimmicks. Cannon was the fat detective (a slightly more mobile Nero Wolfe), Barnaby Jones, the old detective. Longstreet, the blind detective. Ironside, the wheelchair detective.

Most of their cases were identical. Most of their deductions were identical. With the minor adjustments of their gimmicks, they all behaved the same way. In the early 70's, the FCC was willing to trade violence for sex, so some of their detectives like McMillan and Wife or Cool Million had unprecedented sexual involvement. But by the late 70's, sex had reached its limit, so the detectives mentioned in the first paragraph were all single and sexless. You could barely hear their deductions over the mechanical clanking of the plot.

Now we have a bunch of egotistical psychos like House and this new one. And Monk, a PI with so many debilitating psychological problems that someone should have shot him out of mercy years ago. Perhaps it's another vain attempt to spice up the genre. Outside of the expensive CGI simulations, the CSI shows are also mechanically plotted. The human factor counts for nothing or less in the solving of these crimes.

It's a slippery slope, saying that ordinary people are morons and only people who should be in straightjackets can effectively solve crimes. Or maybe it's ingenuous. It's the same philosophy of "genius" that explains away drug abuse and sexual problems of stars and studio executives. Why bother stopping Keith Ledger? He takes drugs, he must be a genius!

If I was pitching shows to Jerry Suckhammer, or whatever that producer's name is, I'd send him a DVD of the 1960's series Checkmate. At least the detectives in that show had personalities, not mental quirks randomly selected from an issue of Psychology Today.

...the Free Republic people will walk over to Salon and start posting their delusional, paranoid rants here.

Someone was actually cheering the Great Depression, the Third Reich and the Civil War on, and said that the Presidents who dug us out of them were frauds. Well, I guess Virginal is a fan of the early Rockefellers, Jefferson Davis, John Paul Rogers (the last publicly known head of the Florida Klan) and that paperhanger corporal. And probably that Italian that made the trains run on time...although she would want the trains destroyed in favor of more SUV's.

Well, I saw a post on another site by someone who said he broke the windows of Lexus and other foreign cars on the street, posted signs that the owners were "traitors to America" and rammed shopping baskets into their doors. Of course he coudn't do that to cars designed by his beloved American corporations because they'd collapse into piles of rust.

I hope the President and his family are enjoying this day. Tomorrow they'll have to deal with brownshirts and psychotics like the above two posters.

And I did expect Elephantman-poop, but the Irish washerwoman surprised me. (Sure, and me mother's maiden name was Irish, so don' give me that blarney, ye hag.)

As for the others, there is an interesting parable out there about a boy who wanted a blue wagon, instead of the flimsy red one sold by the GWB company of Arkansas. But he didn't get a Kucinich blue wagon, he got an Obama blue wagon, and hated it and abused it. As a result, the negative PR made sure there were never any more blue wagons ever, and the GWB company held illimitable dominion over all.

In other words, idiots, quit being perfectionists. You now have a President light years beyond the Giggling Murder Monkey. Work with that, work with him, and stop believing God Himself will make you Boss of the World.

It's not proper to review a show that way, and since I only saw the first three hours of Galactica I don't make a proper judge of the series. But I read the synopsis posted a few days ago on Salon, and I saw one of the factors that turned me off of the series.

There's too much sex in it.

I don't care who's sleeping with who or why. I don't care if they're Cylons, Gungans, same-sex, some-other-sex or any of it. Sex has nothing to do with surviving an enemy that wants to freaking kill you. It became clear in the first episode that a human-looking sexy female Cylon was going to seduce a lot of humans, undoubtedly with the intent of killing them. Just like human women.

Science fiction is supposed to be a form of fiction that examines human beings and their interaction with the unfanthomable mysteries of the universe. Not the mundane, conventional, stupid human race and its crappy needs. That is covered thoroughly by every other genre of fiction. Science fiction was supposed to be better.

Since I can't get more specific than that, all I can do is console Ms. Havrilesky. It appears that Galactica was not plotted as thoroughly as, say, Babylon 5. On that show, Straczynski planned for every eventuality, including the death or disappearance of any of the major actors - or Straczynski himself. It sounds like the last season of Galactica is trying to run through all the plot points they intended to save for a couple more seasons and theatrical features.

All they need to make this program a complete wash is have the entire series turn out to be a hallucination in the mind of a young boy, driven to madness by the cancellation of Galactica 1980, just before he jumps off a garage roof to his death. That would be the final uplifted finger for this show, and I wouldn't put it past them.