Practicalmadness

Yes, I know — it’s another ‘miscellany’ post. I’m not sufficiently exercised about anything this morning to spend a few hundred words dissing or praising it, but I did want to mention a couple bits of awesome:

• OMFG The Legend of Zelda turned 20 last month. And I still have never finished it. I’m just, um, waiting for it to come out on video-game iPod. Which means, of course, that I’ll have to wait for there to be a video-game iPod.

• Ain’t It Cool News contributor Drew McWeeny (aka Moriarty) just reviewed the Battlestar Galactica: Season 2.0 DVD set on his blog and articulated rather well the reasons why it’s possibly The Best Show on Television:

  I would call this the first great post-9/11 television show. I know RESCUE ME (a show I admire in its own right) deals overtly with life in the shadow of 9/11, but sometimes, it’s better when you don’t deal with something head-on. GALACTICA uses the remove of science-fiction to pose real ethical questions about the way we live now. No matter what culture you’re part of at the moment, no matter what country you live in, no matter what your background is, there’s a sense right now that we are in the last moments of the countdown clock, that things are going to get worse before they get better… if they get better. It’s like we’ve got survivor’s guilt on a global scale, and this show taps that fear in a very real and potent fashion.

• Just out in record shops, megastores and iTunes Music Emporia: Neko Case’s Fox Confessor Brings The Flood. (It’s also available on everyone’s favorite cheap-ass indie-rock download service, eMusic.) So far I’m not loving it as much as Blacklisted, which should not be taken as a bad thing — Fox Confessor is a different beast and will probably take some listens to fully get into. (I haven’t really gotten into The Life Pursuit yet for pretty much the same reason.)

• MSNBC reports on a new computer model that sex is less about genetic diversity, and more about isolating “harmful mutations into individual organisms so they could be easily weeded out by natural selection.” Which sounds sort of like trickle-down economics. But for sex.

• I’m brewing a longer piece reviewing up some new web apps I’m liking: StikiPad is a nice little hosted wiki service that I’m probably going to use for the Friendly PHP documentation. Newsvine is an extremely ambitious attempt to combine citizen journalism (as in blogs), community-moderated links (as in Slashdot or Digg) and wire news (as in the Associated Press) into a one-stop shop for all things news. And Ma.gnolia is like del.icio.us, but prettier and more sodden with features (like TinyURL-style link shortening and star ratings).

• Here are some photos from this weekend’s Oscar Night party at my house.