I'm Way Late to This Party

But I finally got around to watching the first two discs of Firefly last night.

Holy crap, it's amazing. But watching it, some of the very things that make me find it amazing are probably the same kinds of things that doomed it ratings-wise.

But even so, now I actually have to see the rest of the series, and the movie. Because they're really really good.

Weird Things

Okay, maybe it's just because I spend too damn much time staring at screens, but wandering around with my new digicam, I've noticed some things look more real on the little screen on the back then they do looking at them regularly. I guess it's probably just the camera's built in automagical color and light adjustment and things, but it's still kinda creepy. Reality looking more real through another filter than it does directly. Although, when I put it like that, it doesn't sound quite as weird, because the whole point of filters is to emphasize certain parts of things, so I imagine there's lots of filters that make things seem more realistic than reality. I know there are for plots, because plenty of stuff that happens in life is weirder than anything that'd fly in a story. Most of the rest is more boring than a story, but that's separate.

One, Two, Many, Lots

My last post reminded me of something else. I finished reading The K Street Gang. It was a good summary of everything, although in the last chapter the writer switched back to trying to blame the corruption on "big government" and those gosh darn liberals who took power after Nixon and tried to regulate campaign money. But that's not what this is about. Two things struck me as I was reading it.

The first, the amounts of money. Oh, I'd seen the amounts mentioned elsewhere, and in other articles, but it didn't quite sink in. Words like "million" and "billion" get tossed around all the time, but the book got into things like the $19,000 a week hotel suite Abramoff's partner rented, the luxury cars, and the continuous amounts of money they got off people, and the chains of "non-profits" most of it got laundered through before finally ending up in their pockets. It's ridiculous. It didn't seem like the kind of thing that'd really happen, but I guess it did. And it's hard for most people to grasp the scale of things, because numbers on that magnitude are just numbers, they don't tie to anything we normally deal with. And when they're just written as $45 million", it gets mentally translated to "big". So I think newspapers should start writing out the whole number for things like that. $45,000,000 looks bigger than "$45 million." And $45,000,000,000 is visibly bigger than $45 billion, and easier to distinguish from "45 million.'

And the other thing that struck me was the excerpts from some of the emails that got sent around in high powered Washington lobbyist circles. They read like emails written by 14 year old AOLers. Spelling, and grammar and capitalization all optional, u instead of you, r instead of are, and way way way too many exclamation points. These were the kind of people who could bilk tribes out of millions of dollars and bribe Congresscritters into covering for little more than slavery? Man. I guess literacy isn't really valued that much, is it?

Trip Entertainment

Okay, anybody have suggestions for CDs or books to take with me? I think my book mix is pretty set, though. I'm gonna bring Earth, by David Brin, Perdido Street Station, and I have several candidates for the third one.

As for CDs, I'm going to burn some mix CDs, and burn copies of some others, there's no sense in risking any of the originals on a trip. I have room for 24 CDs, but I don't have to fill the case up, I'm probably only going to need music while I'm actually traveling, when I'm somewhere, I should be doing something cool that doesn't need me listening to a CD player.