Mokka mit Schlag » Pop Culture

I stumbled across the first issue of Season 8 by Joss Whedon at the Forbidden Planet this afternoon. <span style="voice-family: comic book guy, male;}">Best Comic Book Adaptation Ever!</span>.

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Amazon’s taking pre-orders for the final volume in Harry Potter septology. (Is that even a word?). It’s $18.89 + shipping. If I were Amazon I’d raise the price a few bucks and offer “free” overnight shipping. For myself, I’ll probably wait till a friend finishes it, and borrow their copy like I have for the last couple of volumes. Probably won’t take any longer than shipping anyway. :-)

Oh, and if you think Dumbledore’s really dead, can I talk to you about this bridge I have for sale down at the end of Adams Street? Cheap.

Since last week’s Warcraft patch I’ve noticed a few significant changes here and there in Azeroth that foreshadow the Burning Crusade. Among them:

• A Draenei ambassador has showed up in The Hinterlands seeking audience with the Wildhammers. He’s giving quests.

  

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I just noticed that Meat Loaf and Jim Steinman are releasing Bat Out of Hell III, appropriately enough on Halloween. This team’s been vastly underrated by everyone except the listening public. Their solo efforts have never been very good, ranging from bad to pathetic. (Steinman has done great work with other artists such as Bonnie Tyler too, but a singer he’s not.) However, put the two of them together and you get some of the best hard rock ever performed, even if (or perhaps precisely because) it sounds like it belongs in a Broadway theater instead of a football stadium. Now if only they’d released it on a non-evil label. :-(

Friday night the Sci Fi channel reran The Girl in the Fireplace, a Doctor Who story in which some alien robots punch a hole through time and space to steal the brain of Madame Pompadour from pre-revolutionary France. This plot makes about as much sense as it sounds. In fact, it makes so little sense that the Doctor repeatedly comments on this fact during the episode. He does save Madame Pompadour of course, and he figures out why the robots needed a human brain, but he never figures out why they wanted Madame Pompadour’s. The audience does get a big clue, though, at the end of the episode that the Doctor never sees; but on reflection I think there’s another meta-reason.
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Was that a spectacular episode of Battlestar Galactica Friday night or what? I was on the edge of my seat the entire hour. And the scene where the Galactica “arrives” at New Caprica? I know it’s just special effects, but it was amazing. I’ve never seen anything like that, and it totally surprised me. The whole episode just set new standards for what a sci-fi show can look like. If not for the Cylons and laser beams, you’d think you were watching the nightly news from Iraq, not fiction. If you aren’t watching this show, start now. There hasn’t been anything this good on TV in years.