utenzi

Between last night and tonight I watched the last 8 episodes of "Volume 4" of Heroes , aka the second half of Season 3. While I liked the second half of the season more than the first half (volume 3--what was supposed to have been the second half of Season 2 before the Writer's Strike changed things), I thought the ending sucked on a number of fronts. The prelude to Volume 5 was interesting but I suspect that it'll be as flawed as the last season was. The themes of Sylar possibly emerging from Nathan (don't ask) and Tracy surviving her deep freeze just aren't much to hang an entire season on. Truth be told, Heroes has never fully delivered on the promise that the first season offered. Even now, the tagline Save the Cheerleader, Save the World still works. Oh well, at least this past season was a lot better than Season 2. Semi-Spoilers follow: While the episodes going back to 1961 and the internment camp provide background, as far as I could figure, Noah Be...

I watched that hour long show tonight at 8pm on NBC that introduces the new season of Heroes. It was soooooooo boring that I had no interest at all in watching the two hour season opener that aired right afterwards. I sure hope the show is better than the overly long commercial that preceded it. Else it'll be a one episode season for me. That show burnt a lot of bridge with that annoying fiasco last year.

Here in the States, the Thanksgiving holiday is upon us once more. I'll be taking off for my parents' place in SC around 3am on Thursday to avoid traffic. That departure time allows me to arrive just when they're getting up at 7am. I'll probably be staying until Sunday so there should be plenty of rubbing elbows with relatives, eating horrid amounts of food, and hopefully a good amount of paddling too. I'm almost finished up with my assays here at work so I hope to leave around 2pm. That'll give me a little bit of time to read and maybe eat in front of the tele before getting a few hours sleep for that early departure. Speaking of television, what do you think of Heroes ? That show got off to a slow and rocky start after that wonderful first season. Now it appears they're going to wrap up the season early though at least they've had several good episodes here at the tail end of the season. Too bad they didn't start off with their better episodes to s...

I finally started watching this season's episodes of Heroes . What a show. I watched the first 3 episodes in the wee hours of Monday morning and then watched the fourth episode just a few minutes ago. The show is just a little less compelling this season than last but I still like it a lot. There's a couple of new shows this season that are rivaling Heroes for quality but it's still up there near the top. That's better than Lost did going into its second season! I watched Friday's pilot episode of ABC's Women's Murder Club over the weekend and was surprised to find that I liked it. It was very familiar, seeming like a cross between Bones and Crossing Jordan , but it wasn't all that bad. Certainly better than those two shows. And given its roots in James Patterson's books, I didn't have much hope for it. It's not easy to rise above bad material. But it started off pretty well. On the other hand, Jimmy Smits and his show Cane are starting ...

MLQGPGSLLLLFLASHCCLGSARGLFLFGQPDFSYKRSNCKPIPAN LQLCHGIEYQNMRL PNLLGHETMKEVLEQAGAWIPLVMKQCHPD TKKFLCSLFAPVCLDDLDETIQPCHSLCVQ VKDRCAPVMSAFGFPW PDMLECDRFPQDNDLCIPLASSDHLLPATEEAPKVCEACKNKND DD NDIMETLCKNDFALKIKVKEITYINRDTKIILETKSKTIYKLNGVSE RDLKKSVLWLK DSLQCTCEEMNDINAPYLVMGQKQGGELVITSVK RWQKGQREFKRISRSIRKLQC That might look like gibberish to you, but it's a major pain in the bootie for me. And if you just change 5 of those letters, albeit 5 specific ones, it becomes even more a source of annoyance for me. In other complaints, I never had a chance last night to watch Heroes so I'll be watching it tonight, I guess. I did watch the pilot episode of NBC's show Journeyman . I almost deleted it in the first few minutes but I'm glad I watched it to the end. It was quite good but I don't know if I'll watch it every week. The lead characters are all very interesting and Kevin McKidd, best known from HBO's Rome, is a very charismatic lead. Here's the very brief descr...

This past weekend, in an undisclosed suburban Atlanta location, in an unsecured garage, revealing documents were located by an agent known to but not controlled by yours truly. The documents reveal an entire year of my life that had been blocked from my memory by powers that are not immediately apparent. Details to follow unless shadowy forces intervene... If that seems a little cloak and dagger, that's just in homage to Burn Notice which had its last episode, a two hour season closer, last week. I watched it late last night and the spy thing is still resonating in my head. I really liked the show and was hoping that it'd be a mid-season replacement on USA Network but unfortunately at the end of the show it was stated that the next season would start in the Summer of 2008. That's 8 months away!!!! On the other hand, Heroes ' new season starts tonight and it's not a minute too soon. I think this is the most anticipated show of the season. I hope it doesn't fall...

Just some notes on what I've been watching this past week. Last week's Heroes disappointed me so I was thinking the show might have started a decline. I'm glad to say that I really liked this week's show. The plot twist at the 45 minute mark was quite a shock to me. I didn't see it coming. While nothing huge happened in this episode it was very effective in setting up the plot line for the last 3 episodes. I expect that I'll really enjoy the way the show finishes the season. I just hope they don't leave too much on the plate for next season. That's why I stopped watching Lost 2 years ago. Too much prep and too little delivery. I was disappointed in how Sunday's The Amazing Race ended. I was really hoping that Danny and Oswald would make it to the end. On the other hand, there's really none of the teams left that I strongly dislike. I was a little surprised by Oswald calling Charla and Mirna a "class act" and endorcing them for the win....

I returned to work yesterday after taking off 7 days. It's amazing how many things can happen in just over a week! LOL Fortunately that just makes you feel wanted and needed, doesn't it? Hmmm. Not so much actually--it makes me feel like running away. Fast. Far. Not returning. Ever. Things are settling down a little bit today and since it's only a partial week I can't do some of the more complicated experiments that I have planned so it's only some IHC (immunohistochemistry) staining this week and a little bit of RNA extraction for some DNA microarrays next week. Maybe I'll get caught up with my accounting this week since I have a little free time. It's very easy to let those invoices slide but if I don't pay the vendors they'll eventually stop sending me supplies... I wasn't very impressed with the episode of Heroes the other night. After a 5 week hiatus I was expecting something more interesting. I hope that the show isn't sliding downhill!

This is a wallpaper I did for my laptop at work the other day. It's really little more than a blending of two wallpapers offered on the NBC website . I was going to embellish it a little more but then things got busy again and I forgot to do more work on it. As always, click on it to get to the bigger image.

I finished reading a 3 book series by Gordon Dickson, a SF writer, earlier tonight and then immediately started reading Michael Pollan's The Botany of Desire, the book he wrote prior to The Omnivore's Dilemma. So far the Pollan is interesting but his conflation of how evolution works can be quite irritating. In Omnivore's Dilemma he had some literary reasons for making that error but in this book that reason doesn't exist. It's starting to appear that he's a mite confused on the mechanics of how evolution works. He does have the Darwinian aspects correct, at least. I took a break from the books to watch some television and a movie that I borrowed from the library. The television was The Class (good but a little flat compared to other episodes), How I Met Your Mother (pretty bad), and Heroes (an addictive show--with a surprise ending, as usual). Before I watched those shows I started to watch a DVD, Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby but only got about...