The Prestidigitator

I’m probably inviting ridicule by comparing Lost, a mainstay of the popular zeitgeist for over 6 years now, to something as revered as Paradise Lost. Beneath all that sheen and soap-opera style drama involving mostly beautiful people with perfect bodies, there were allusions to weighty philosophical dilemmas and age-old conundrums. I’ll admit that it took me a while to fully appreciate the epic scale of the show, and once I did, I was completely invested in its characters and mysteries despite the experience being far from perfect. But I’ve been hurt before, and it was with some amount of trepidation that I sat down to watch the final two hours of what was probably the most genre-bending show on television.

And yeah, it was a letdown (but nowhere near the fiasco that was Battelstar Galactica’s ridiculous ‘god did it’ conclusion). I fail to understand why otherwise brilliant writers resort to pulling deus ex machinas out of their asses when shows like these deserve far more fitting farewells. What exactly is the appeal in introducing overtly spiritual elements to a show that has had outstanding episodes like ‘Man of Science, Man of Faith’ and ‘The Constant’? Why tie up all loose ends with an explanation that renders it near impossible to question anything and everything that preceded it? Granted, Lost has jumped the shark a few times since season one and while the time-travel plot line was cleverly executed, drawing out an alternate reality without thinking things through was, to quote a friend, just plain shoddy and cowardly writing. Turns out, the alternate reality was (*spoiler*), purgatory. Really?

Don’t get me wrong; I loved the first 80 minutes of the episode. There was plenty of great acting (Terry O’Quinn and even Matthew Fox), a few answers, some great emotional resolutions and a pretty intense fight sequence. But the last 20 minutes took away from an otherwise great finale. I’m yet to fully grasp the impact that the finale had on me, and perhaps after the dust has settled, I’ll love it. Or maybe I’ll come to terms with how it’s been a disappointment—but a beautiful disappointment nonetheless.

I really don’t want to contribute to the hyperbole that this debate has already created but I can safely say that this is the finest one hour of debate, one-sided as it is, I’ve seen in a very long time. Two amazingly articulate intellectuals take on Catholicism and religious hypocrisy. To be fair, I do wish that the two proponents of the Catholic church would have been a little more, I don’t know, Christlike instead of pretending that (institutional) child abuse and homophobia are urban myths.

Stephen Fry makes an especially brilliant case against the so called ‘force for good’. Nod along or throw stuff at your computer but this is what good television is all about.

Go watch. Now.

Not that The Daily Show isn’t hilarious, but it gets a lot funnier when Aasif Mandvi shows up.  Here he is gloating about how India got tech support from NASA and the USGS on the Chandrayaan mission.

For every Bobby Jindal, there’s one Aasif Mandvi.

Where would we be without self-deprecation?

I realize that The Daily Show is no place to get my news from but Peter Schiff, who was on recently thinks that the worst is yet to come. Maybe, somebody should listen to him seeing that he was pretty much spot on about the current shitstorm as far back as 2006. To top it off, he thinks the bailouts are a huge mistake and that the “fundamentals” really aren’t all that strong.

“The credit crunch is part of the solution. The problem was all the reckless credit that preceded it. You know, when Barack Obama says that credit is the life blood of the economy — he’s talking about consumer credit — it’s not the life blood – it’s the cancer.”

“Massive inflation — which is what we’re gonna get – we’re just gonna destroy the value of our money.”

Such comfort.

[Read more here.]

Like most people, I thoroughly enjoyed Jon Stewart’s drawing and quartering of Jim Cramer on The Daily Show last week. It tells you something about the cultural zeitgeist when a television comedian is the one who ends up taking the mantle of journalism.

The episode, despite being immensely uncomfortable to watch, was catharsis in many ways. It was also refreshing to see Stewart finally come down on Cramer (unfortunately, a scapegoat for the real problem – financial news networks) in an expletive laden interview/skewering.

But isn’t that part of the problem? Selling this idea that you don’t have to do anything. Anytime you sell people the idea that sit back and you’ll get 10 to 20 percent on your money, don’t you always know that that’s going to be a lie? When are we going to realize in this country that our wealth is work? That we’re workers and by selling this idea that of “Hey man, I’ll teach you how to be rich”…how is that any different than an infomercial?

…

I gotta tell you. I understand that you want to make finance entertaining, but it’s not a fucking game. When I watch that, I get, I can’t tell you how angry it makes me because it says to me, “You all know.” You all know what’s going on. You can draw a straight line from those shenanigans to the stuff that was being pulled at Bear and at AIG and all this derivative market stuff that is this weird Wall Street side bet.

How come journalists back in India never hold our politicians’ feet to the fire like Stewart did?

(PS: I did feel sorry for Cramer.)

Television shows are a lot like relationships; you can usually figure out if it’s going anywhere from the first two days/episodes after which it’s all about commitment. Terrible metaphors aside, I find it hard to believe how much Battlestar Galactica has grown on me over the last couple of months. Science Fiction is a genre that has been done to death on TV and then some, but rarely has a show attempted what Battlestar Galactica has. While finding it’s bearings in a kind of pseudo present day society, it still manages to enthrall as a space opera with dogfights and exploding spaceships aplenty minus kitschy overdressed aliens.

BSG is set in a time line nobody is quite sure of (though there are chances this ambiguity may be intentional) and in a universe that may or may not be our own. Cylons are a breed of intelligent cyborgs created by humans who turn on their masters due to… well, religious differences. The Cylons are steadfast believers in a monotheistic God with scary resemblances to the Judeo-Christian version of a loving and benevolent creator. One thing leads to another and the human colonies are destroyed by the Cylons leaving 50,000 odd survivors adrift in space on a fleet of ships led by a single military ship, the Battlestar Galactica. Also, the Cylons can apparently take the shape of humans with the obligatory blonde bombshell thrown in solely for the purpose of satisfying legions of male fans with no social lives to speak of, yours truly included.

What’s different about BSG is that it takes shots at topics straight from today’s headlines; terrorism, suicide bombings, fundamentalism, religion and politics and is far superior to the mindless drivel that crowds the screens these days. The character arcs and plot twists rival those of most other contemporary series although it does seem at times that the writers are working on the story as they go; which I sincerely hope isn’t true. This is the kind of show that needs a grand finale and a much bigger audience.

Links:

• Battlestar Galactica on SciFi
• Wikipedia Article
• Ron Moore’s Deep Space Journey [NY Times]
  
• In Galactica, It’s Politics as Usual, Or Is It? [NY Times]
  

To fuel my current fascination for all things medical, I’ve been on a House marathon of sorts. In less than a week, I’ve managed to watch over 35 episodes of the 45 minute medical drama. Sure most of the jargon manages to fly by but I’ve come to a point where I can tell the difference between Vasculitis and Pericardiitis. Not really, but still.

But the episode Skin Deep from Season 2 had me utterly speechless for a couple of hours. A 15 year old female supermodel gets admitted after blacking out on the ramp. After a series of differential diagnoses, the doctors think she may have a psychological condition resulting from abuse. However, after an MRI of her pelvic area, House concludes she has a tumor on her testes.

Yes, testes. Apparently the patient had male Pseudohermaphroditism.

Genital and gonadal sex determinations are discordant in cases of pseudohermaphroditism e.g. an apparently female individual may have testes (a male pseudohermaphrodite).

There are two main causes of pseudohermaphroditism:

• genetic causes e.g. testicular feminisation
• teratogenic e.g. in utero exposure of a female to androgens

House goes on to explain that the she was really supposed to be a he whose genitals just didn’t drop. According to our man House, this actually happens to about 1 in 150,000 fetuses.

So next time you see a pretty girl, mull this over.

The new Apple iPOD Nano ad (video link) has an extremely catchy tune. After humming it on trains, at work and in the shower, I decided to find out who the artist was.

The track, 1234 is sung by the beautiful Leslie Feist (the video is quite interesting as well) whose album The Reminder is as good and sometimes even better that the infectious track itself. Very light, breezy music with ample strumming.

On a related note, I finally got around to buying a guitar and christened her/it Cecilia.

Radio Host: What’s your latest obsession?

Hank: Just the fact that people seem to be getting dumber and dumber. You know, I mean we have all this amazing technology and yet computers have turned into basically four figure wank machines. The internet was supposed to set us free, democratize us, but all it’s really given us is Howard Dean’s aborted candidacy and 24 hour a day access to kiddie porn. People…they don’t write anymore – they blog. Instead of talking, they text, no punctuation, no grammar: LOL this and LMFAO that. You know, it just seems to me it’s just a bunch of stupid people pseudo-communicating with a bunch of other stupid people in a proto-language that resembles more what cavemen used to speak than the King’s English.

Radio Host: Yet you’re part of the problem, I mean you’re out there blogging with the best of them.

Hank: Hence my self-loathing.

-Californication (Episode 5)

“What’s life without the ability to make stupid choices?”

-Dr Gregory House