I was somewhat late watching this week's Battlestar Galactica - what with being forgetful, then out shopping, then getting rather engrossed in my latest Tamora Pierce novel (mmm, favourite author fix), it wasn't until the middle of the evening that I remembered to grab the torrent file and kick it off. Still, it was an episode which was very much worth the wait. Great chunks of plot, some seriously heavy-duty action sequences, and plenty of heavy-duty character development - and all that in 42 minutes.

One of the things I love about sci-fi is the way it can throw you a curveball - because you don't know the "rules" of the universe in the same way you do those of our current reality, you can be caught off-guard by an unexpected "That is so cool - I had no idea they could do that!" moment, even (and perhaps especially) if in hindsight you can see the hints. My favourite instance of this is the resolution of one of the cliffhangers between The Neutronium Alchemist and The Naked God (those of you who've read those books will know what I mean, and those of you who haven't, and have any interest in space opera, should go out and read The Reality Dysfunction at once), but this week's BSG had a nifty little one too.

Going off in a completely different direction: many of you may recall the Sony advert with all the balls bouncing down a street. I remeber seeing it in the cinema and thinking "that's rather nifty. Obviously done with computer graphics, but still nifty." Fast forward to yesterday, when I came across an article about the follow-up advert (a rather sillier affair featuring exploding paint, but again extremely nifty) explaining how it was all done for real. And how contrary to what many people that, last year's ad was indeed done by sending a quarter of a million bouncy balls down a San Francisco street. Alas, none of this will make me buy a Sony TV if they cost rather more than a comparable competitor...

So, it's been a busy week on the Star Wars front, starting with the release of the long-awaited "Limited Edition" DVDs of the original trilogy, featuring the unaltered theatrical Han-shoots-first-dammit versions of the movies which George Lucas swore would never be released on DVD except if he could make a really big pile of money. Actually, they really are a bit of a con - each movie has a two-disk set, the first of which appears to be identical to the disks from the Special Edition trilogy box set, and the second of which contains the theatrical versions. No special features other than commentaries on the special editions (not even the stuff from the fourth disk of the box set). Meh.

It's no coincidence that this week also saw the release of LEGO® Star Wars™ II: The Original Trilogy - another entirely too much fun video game. It follows much the same format as the original, albeit with a few new bells and whistles. Once again there's a vast array of playable characters (and if you have a save from the first game, you can play as any of the Episode I-II characters too), and great gobbets of silliness. Excellent.

What was more fortuitous is that this week saw the One Man Star Wars show passing through Oxford, which I went to see on Thursday night. It was utter genius from start to finish - hilariously funny and constantly entertaining. Admittedly, if you don't know the movies then you'd be completely lost - but that's really not who this is aimed at. Writer/performer Charles Ross has incredible energy as he plays all the characters - including seamlessly portraying both sides of the battles. And, yes, he does the music and the spaceship battles too. Go see it if you can!

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I'm fairly sure that I've only stumbled onto MySpace once, and the horrible mishmash of text, images, sound and video sent me running for the hills, but apparently some people do use it. According to El Reg, since the lovely and benevolent Mr. Murdoch took over, the terms and conditions and conditions have been tweaked just a little. The synopsis seems to be "News Corporation pwns j00" - anything you put on MySpace, they get to keep forever and use however they like. Yup, when the MySpacer grows up and becomes famous, all those skeletons in the MySpace closet can pop up in the Sun or on Fox News. Lovely.

The last couple of days I've been working through my newly-arrived DVDs of the final season of Blakes 7. Yes, the wobbly sets and dodgy special effects are still there, but considering the tiny budget, one can hardly complain - and it's the story and characters that you watch it for (yes, I still want to be Avon when I grow up, why do you ask?) The influence on later shows like Babylon 5 (league of non-aligned planets, anyone?) and Firefly (a bunch of renegades on a spaceship fighting an evil federation which uses pacification drugs...) is clearer than ever. Plus you get one of the greatest endings to a TV series ever...

As a true geek, I've now seen Episode III twice. A third viewing can wait for the DVD. Some thought follow below, many influenced by what I've already read on other folks' journals. But it's not plagiarism, honest!

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A few random tales of shuffling iTunes:

1. Late one evening, a couple of weeks back, iTunes randomly played Paul McCartney's Another Day. Unfortunately, this triggered the part of my mind which goes "Ooh. I've heard that in a movie recently..." This sort of thing is always fatal as I of course want to know what that movie was, and I ain't gonna get to sleep until I've got the answer or managed to forget about the question. Thankfully, IMDb* came to the rescue - a bit of poking turned up the soundtrack search page which quickly gave me the answer: 50 First Dates.
2. I recently watched Charlie's Angels, and remember thinking that I should look up what one of the songs played over the end credits was. This morning, iTunes popped up All the Small Things by Blink 182, and once again I knew it was from a movie I'd seen recently, so I headed over to IMDb, thinking that I could check the Charlie's Angels soundtrack while I was there. Of course, the two questions proved to be each others' answers...
3. Later on, iTunes brought be part of the soundtrack from the final episode of Babylon 5 and I ended up turning off the shuffle feature to hear the final track as well. Those of you familiar with the show will know that the final episode is more of an epilogue than a finale, and that it appears to be deliberately written to reduce fans to gibbering wrecks - and just the music by itself can do that. Powerful stuff. Randomly, it seems that JMS has some B5 stuff up for auction on eBay - including the dalies and two director's cuts of Sleeping in Light. *WANTS SO MUCH*

* If you're not familiar with IMDb, then why not? It's easily one of the most useful sites on the 'net, with pretty much every bit of information about seemingly every movie ever made (and plenty of TV shows and some video games). Many a time and oft has it saved my sleep or sanity.

Well, I've been busy delivering flyers and the like on and off for the last few weeks, and now that election day is here, I can finally take a rest. Which is nice. UK folks, you still have a couple of hours of voting time left, so don't forget to go to the polling booth if you haven't already. Just remember, don't vote Labour, Conservative, UKIP, BNP, Veritas, Natinal Front, etc. If all else fails, spoil your ballot paper, preferably with an amusing slogan. And then look forward to finding out tomorrow just how much Tony Blair's majority has been reduced by (because, let's face it, any result other than a Labout victory is depressingly unlikely).

In other news, I went to see The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy at the weekend. Good fun, and certainly seemed to bear some passing resemblance to the book (which, admittedly, I haven't read in ages), although far from being the most hilarious film ever made - although particularly loved the opening song.

Today I've been mostly watching a new sci-fi show - new to me at least. I watched the first three or four episodes last night and was sufficiently hooked to spend today watching through the remaining eleven. Right now, I'm just managing to restrain myself from hunting down the Fox execs who cancelled Firefly and cutting their hearts out with a rusty spork.

Yes, all shows end sooner or later - indeed, another Joss Whedon show reaches its conclusion later this week - but for something that was already so good and with such great promise... It's more than a little annoying. But, apparently what the studio execs think we want is a constant diet of "reality TV". Heaven forbid they produce some quality genre drama.

For now, I'll just have to hope that the theatrical movie does make it all the way to the big screen, and is enough of a success to get the show back on the road...

A long time ago in an office far, far away . . . . P O S T E R W A R S It is a time of change in the technical department. The YODA POSTER which was thought lost many years ago when we were denied it by some other EVIL DEPARTMENT has be found. We have rescued it from down the back of a partition and restored it to a PLACE OF GLORY on our wall. The great Jedi Master in his neatly-framed A0 glory now casts his BENEVOLANT GAZE over our office.