If Battlestar Was an 80s Sitcom

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMri_RR7hto

We were more than a little upset when the plug was pulled in mid-2006, having a happy ritual pulled out from under us so abruptly. But, with the dial already set to the left, it literally took no more than a few days to warm up completely to their replacement, Rachel Maddow, and she continues to win people over, now suddenly the new darling of the talking-head-o-sphere.

And if you haven’t heard: this is must-see-tv. Intelligent, level-headed, and informative news commentary, with some light humor and deft handling of the issues. Check it out. Here is a snippet from one of the many latest raves about her:

Unlike so many televised liberals, who seem almost physically pained by the combative cable-news format, she obviously enjoys herself. A good example came during an election-night panel discussion of Obama’s victory in the Nebraska and Idaho primaries, which Buchanan tried to delegitimize by saying that Obama could only appeal to liberals. Without missing a beat, Maddow responded, “In what kind of a world do Idaho and Nebraska represent the left lane?” She had the entire panel laughing outright. A chastened Buchanan could only manage a wan joke about Marxists.

We saw Anticon sensation Why? at the Knitting Factory on Saturday. His sardonic nasal-whine reminded me of Soul Coughing minus the free jazz. I enjoyed it, notwithstanding the drunk 19-year olds to our left, shouting along with the words and trying to start a mosh pit in the shoulder-to-shoulder space. We moved over to be closer to more subdued oldsters like ourselves, but the kids’ ridiculous chant, “Thank God for Myspace” still resonates; because ten years ago perhaps this show would’ve only been filled with the college-radio crowd, and not nearly as packed. Or maybe I’m just getting too Andy Rooney…

Got home too late for SNL, but instead watched a rerun on E!, hosted by a svelte Britney Spears with a baby-faced, pre-Super Bowl Timberlake cameo. Weekend update allowed us to pinpoint the episode to early February 2002, and thus was spawned possibly my first “historical” look on a post-9/11 world. Bush had just given his “axis of evil” speech and had an 85% approval rating. Like Britney, Bush looked so much younger, not yet beaten down by the past six years. Indeed, their career paths have taken a remarkably parallel trajectory, and with them America in some respects.

While someone gathers the data on these shared fates, I’ll leave you with this gem from that same SNL episode that I’d never seen, a brilliant Tracy Morgan clip.

…and apparently they’ll be on Conan March 18th.

As for me, I merely indulge her. You would too, she’s cute. Which is to say she watches it on DVR, and I thumb through magazines, occasionally tossing out derisive tidbits of hilarity hilarious tidbits of derision.

Our first AI was, of course, my first AI. We were on vacation in the Spring of 2004, pre-DVR, catatonic from hiking the Grand Canyon, and in a lodge with only network TV. I said that evening that Fantasia would win. I regularly remind my wife of my prescience.

I have tuned in and out over the intervening seasons. It soon became clear (to me) I had a knack for knowing what Simon would say, whether he’d like or dislike a performer. Almost kindred spirits, he and I. My derisive tidbits grew to mirror his. Or so I would assure my wife.

Tonight over dinner we had to watch it: the Vandy game was taping, and with double-taping, you must choose or lose. I liked the girl playing piano–she’s my first white favorite. My skeptical comments about the white Tina Turner also matched Simon’s. It may well be time, my wife and I agreed, for me to cross over to the other side and admit I’m a fan of the fucking show.

Within seconds came the extended Bryan Adams montage. Leaving the room making vomit noises is all the derision I could come up with under the circumstances.

Another amateur site that the pros turn to is the Wordlustitude blog, written by Mark Peters (see “How Wordlustitude feeds my obsession”). He has tracked the use of infixes – words inserted into the middle of other words. Some of the best-known examples come from the TV cartoon series The Simpsons, where the eternally cheerful character Ned Flanders has coined phrases such as “in-diddly-different” and “wel-diddly-come”. Peters’s collection of “diddly” words caught the attention of Michael Adams, a linguist at Indiana University, Bloomington. According to Adams, infixes have been used in poetry for centuries but spoken infixes have appeared only in the last few decades. Peters’s collection provides further evidence that this is true.

Anywho, off to see U2 in 3-diddly-D tonight. All reports so far being that it is Bonolicious.

It also has to do with the fact that I find history so much more interesting now than I did as a child. Youth is wasted on the young I suppose.

It was intriguing to learn that the Upper East Side of Manhattan was replete with coal-belching locomotives in the late 20th Century, and fun to be reminded that the man who founded my alma mater was one of the original robber barons.

Most compelling, though, was the ramifications of a fatal mishap in 1902, that was likely inevitable given the congestion of heavy steel running into the old terminal. The deaths led to a public outcry over safety, which fanned the dissent over the pollution spit out by the coal engines. The New York legislature acted quickly to ban coal engines’ entry into New York City, and forced the majors to go electric or to die. They went electric, and the new beautiful Grand Central was born, and the train service was never disrupted in the process.

I was amazed to see how quickly the captains of industry were forced to modify their bread and butter in the name of the public welfare–such a stark contrast to the tepid environmental regulations that have slodged through Congress in more recent history. One of the show’s historians said that it was useless for them to resist the teeming public sentiment, the socialist and populism clamor was a force too large to be reckoned with, and the railroad was lucky to get out with what it got.

This made me feel a bit envious, I’ll admit. Not since that gilded age have the wealthy and elite been so far removed from the rest of society as they are in this part of the 21st century. But where is our public outrage, our populist movement, and where is our yellow journalism calling for reform? Have the Rupert Murdochs simply done better than their forebears by convincing 5 x more Americans to pay more attention to last night’s American Idol than to its Super Tuesday results? Why is it that slightly better than half the voters, far from outraged or disgusted, buy into the notion that the free market will sort it all out?

Beats me. All I know is that this righteous indignation has made me hungry. I’m off to lunch at Grand Central, with other yuppies who get paid well doing the Man’s dirty work.