So it’s The X Factor finale tonight, not that I could really care much. I’ve only watched it when the regional auditions are on, which means I only watch it for the first four weeks or so, but they changed the format to have the auditions in front of an audience, Britain’s Got Talent-stylee. This didn’t sit well for me, so I ended up not watching at all; no great loss to my media consumption whatsoever.

Concurrent with all this X Factor bollocks, and the usual notion that the winner will go on to produce a single worthy of making enough sales to reach No. 1 of the charts for Christmas, there’s a concerted online effort by over 600,000 Facebook members to kibosh this trend — they’re urging people to buy Rage Against the Machine‘s 1993 track “Killing in the Name” so that it’ll go to No. 1. You may have heard about this over the last couple of days. Simon Cowell thinks the campaign is “stupid”, “cynical” and will “spoil the party for these three” [the X Factor finalists]. I think it’s a fantastic idea, which pushes buying power back towards the consumers, and away from the moguls who insist on showering us with manufactured pop fluff. I’m not saying there’s no place for pop fluff, but perhaps The X Factor would be better placed to promote jobbing musicians with real talent, not just at singing other people’s compositions, but at actually writing, creating and performing their own, original and passionate music. Hearing another over-produced piece of pap churned out by a dozen songwriters and emitted by the next bland Z-list wannabe is not my idea of promoting musical talent in this country. Honestly, Leona Lewis aside, can anyone point me to the classic music that past winners are still putting out?

And bear in mind that this campaign wasn’t created by some noo-meeja Nathan Barley-style wankers, or some record company execs looking to make a quick buck at Simon Cowell’s expense (Rage are signed to Epic, who are owned by Sony BMG, who employ Cowell, so Sony only stand to benefit either way here); it was created by two people on Facebook — Tracy and Jon Morter — who had decided that enough was enough. At the moment, nearly three quarters of a million people agree. If you’re on Facebook, you should join in the fun.

Anyway, the campaign: it’s ridiculously simple. Put Rage Against the Machine’s “Killing in the Name” at Number One in the Christmas chart by buying it between this Monday (14th) and Saturday (19th). Some places are saying do it tomorrow (Sunday the 13th), but it’s unclear whether or not sales tomorrow will count towards the Christmas Top 40 data, so better safe than sorry — do it sometime between Monday and Saturday. And yes, downloads absolutely count. Even if you already own the single or the 1993 self-titled album, buy it again. It won’t cost much.

You can buy it from these music outlets:

• 7 Digital Media in MP3 format for 99p
• Amazon UK in MP3 format for 79p (see note below)
• HMV in MP3 format for 79p
• iTunes in AAC (M4A) format for 99p
• Napster (I’m not a subscriber, so I have no details)
• Play Digital in MP3 format for 70p
• Tesco Entertainment in MP3 format for 67p
• WE7 in MP3 format for £1.07p

… or just rock into a record store and see if they have any copies of the single! Note that some of these links link to the album; just buy the individual track. Also, there’s a 29p MP3 version on Amazon — do not buy this. Only sales over 40p qualify for chart eligibility.

Once you’ve done that, the Facebook group is encouraging those of us participating in this stunt to donate a little something to the charity Shelter, which works to improve the lives of homeless and badly housed people. If you’re a taxpayer, an additional 20% of whatever you donate will be added on. At time of writing, they’re over the £12,000 £16,000 mark. That’s just phenomenal.

So give what you can to Shelter (I donated a tenner), and spend less than a quid pissing off Simon Cowell. It’s a win-win situation for everyone.

So now Snow Leopard is out, and it’s fab and lovely and nippy and dices and slices and so on. An immediate downside (apart from having to manually upgrade Xcode to 3.2, and reinstall MacPorts from .dmg to make that bit work again) is that the trusty icle .rsrc doesn’t work any more. Well, it works, but it doesn’t stick; OS X keeps switching back to standard British English, which means when I try to type out quotes, it comes out with at signs. This is ungood.

However, the Internet to the rescue! Some kind soul has posted new keyboard layouts for OS X to correctly map the British English key layout. Just download and extract the zip file linked to from that page, copy the files from inside the zip to either /Library/Keyboard Layouts off the root of your hard disk, or ~/Library/Keyboard Layouts in your home directory, then log out and log back in again. Go to System Preferences > Language & Text > Input Sources, then tick British (PC105). If things don’t seem consistently correct, try British (PC105 alt).

Bosh, sorted, and I can touch type again!

Update 2010-02-13: apparently this works on Dell Mini netbooks too, so Hackintosh people can get the benefit as well. Bonus!

I want to talk about Battlestar Galactica, to many just another one of those weekly shows with guns, action and silly plots. So, before I start waffling about the end of the 2003-2009 re-imagined version, and if you’ll indulge me, some history.

After 1978, Battlestar Galactica was amongst that select group which truly captivated me. Adama, the father-figure leader; Apollo, the straight-shooting fighter ace; Starbuck, the Han Solo scoundrel; Boomer, the wise-cracking buddy; Baltar, the baddy you could really hate versus the faceless metal Cylons; the Vipers, sleekly designed star fighters; and the Galactica itself: a massive, lumbering, heavily armed city-cum-aircraft-carrier in space. It wasn’t smooth in shape like the USS Enterprise, yet not as ugly and mashed together as the Millennium Falcon. The distinctive shape helped it retain its character as separate from the human players, yet recognisable as a character on its own as opposed to simply being a prop or plot device, like those two other popular fictional spaceships.

Unfortunately, the stories told in this universe rarely matched up to the stunning premise: that the Galactica was leading a “rag tag” fleet of civilian spacecraft away from their homes, which had been destroyed in an attack by their sworn enemies, the robotic Cylons, and with luck, they would be led to a world where their distant cousins had long since fled to: Earth. There was a chance for reflection on how a civilisation survives so close to extinction, yet the show quickly devolved into standard action-adventure fare, with little story or character arc development. But when you’re a kid, you don’t notice this as being a flaw. Each week is another chance to see Apollo fly around in a Viper and shoot Cylons, to see Starbuck get into more hot water and to see the Galactica swoop around majestically in front of the camera.

Many declare the point when Battlestar Galactica jumped the shark when the fleet found modern-day Earth, the show was renamed Galactica: 1980, and the bulk of the original cast departed. I wanted to see Apollo and Starbuck, not Dick van Dyke’s son (playing the grown-up version of the kid Boxey from earlier episodes). The show was quickly cancelled, but for me the jump-the-shark moment happened in the previous season, when we had a Western-themed episode. Ugh.

Well, 25 years later, after many misfires, BSG returned to TV screens on the Sci Fi Channel in late 2003 with a 3-hour “mini-series”, broadcast in two parts over two nights. Its success was rewarded with a 13-episode season order from Sci Fi and Sky (who co-finance the show). In showrunner (and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine alumnus) Ronald D. Moore’s own words, they “kept in the things that worked and threw away the things that didn’t” from the original 70s-era BSG. With this came a sense of reality, darkness and humanity that simply didn’t exist in the original. Themes were openly explored like a surgeon attacking an open wound, themes which were often grounded in our own reality and our own current events. A sliver of humanity was escaping a nuclear holocaust, enacted by the mechanical Cylons, but enabled by one of humanity’s own: Baltar, the traitor, just as in the original, yet portrayed with so much more depth than the simple evil genius, wringing his hands together and belly laughing maniacally. The Cylons themselves were extended from mere killer robots to both robots and human versions also. These human versions of Cylons would become integral to almost every plot thread unwound over the course of four seasons of television, no longer action-adventure, but a space opera, with dark drama running through its heart.

I won’t deign to recap over five years worth of television here, as it’s not my intent. Suffice to say, if you haven’t seen any of BSG yet, seek out the DVDs, starting with the mini-series. Even if that doesn’t engage you, keep going: the first season opener “33″ flies the flag of the series’ intent high and clear: the narrative is merciless, unflinching, engaging and tremendously interesting. All that follows, save some inevitable stumbles in an episode here and there, simply continued to raise the bar of what was possible in dramatic television. There’s been so much craic posted around the ‘net about the very final regular episode of BSG that I can’t remember the source to cite this, but as someone out there has said, BSG’s season finale cliffhangers always managed to seemingly paint the scriptwriters into a wall, and instead of cowardly retreating from that wall, they threw their caps over, and just kept going. That they could do this and still keep the story hanging together — and well, I might add — will be one of this show’s legacies: how to really just go balls out and make good television instead of pandering to ratings, Standards & Practices and poor viewer sensibilities. Fuck it, if we want to kill a major character off in the interests of moving the story forward, we will: no-one is safe.

And barring another one-off special later this year (“The Plan”, another two-hour special a la 2007′s “Razor”), BSG had its last episode aired last Friday night. Two hours and eleven minutes long (including the inevitable advert breaks), this immense piece of television to me stands as one of the ultimate triumphs of modern television, utterly stunning, always captivating, and again, unflinching. Series finales run the danger of falling either into self-parody, inadequacy, or sheer farce. What we saw last week had none of that. Virtually every plot line was given closure, albeit not always with a full explanation, as was every character. This show has been so immersive over its regular lifetime that to not deliver the “what, where, when, why, how” (or at least four of that five) would cheat the characters and the story just as much as the viewers. I’m not going to go into any details as to what actually happens during the finale, as there are too many spoilerful reviews already out there, and I’m not sure I could do the narrative justice by recapping it here in a critical manner. I enjoyed it way too much to pick holes at it, even if I wanted to.

I say the finale was a triumph. The story — which I won’t go into the specifics of here as I’d hate to rob anyone who hasn’t seen it of the delight of actually seeing it, and also it’s still airing on Sky One here in the UK as I type — was crafted like a movie (albeit one with years of backstory), the acting by all as utterly sublime, the visual effects as always were beautiful without distracting from the acting, and the music: how I could go on about the music. And I will, in a minute. I’ve never seen a show end in a way that answers so many questions and leave me feel wanting, or leaves so many questions unanswered but not piss me off in doing so. I like that there are some things left unsaid, unanswered, unresolved (and believe me, there are a couple of humdingers here). There are some what feel like natural finish lines in the finale after which I’m sure the screen could have faded to black, and I’d have been fully sated, but it just kept going, Lord of the Rings: Return of the King-style. When it happened in RotK, I was shifting about in my seat in the cinema, wondering when it was going to end. While watching the BSG finale, and being caught out again by another possible ending gliding by, I was in joy that we were being given even more. But I’ve never felt more satisfied than when the Executive Producer credits appeared on screen to signify the story’s ultimate end. I can’t remember when any television show which has performed this well on bringing story arcs to conclusion without messing things up for us; employing deus ex machina with a straight face to try and close out a tale is usually bad news, and luckily this doesn’t happen to BSG. Well, not much, and even then it’s not catastrophic to the narrative, although there’s a strong tabula rasa element which some may find hard to swallow.

As I mentioned, one of the standout moments of the finale — hell, of the whole series — was the music (my last.fm profile will probably show you how strongly I think that). I’m a movie and television soundtrack geek; this isn’t news to most people, I realise. Television soundtracks often don’t interest me as much as those from the movies. They’re usually created on a much tighter timescale and budget, and they sometimes suffer as a result. However, this is a trend that’s been changing over the last few years, with shows such as BSG, Lost, even Doctor Who, getting “proper” orchestral scores. Now, I’ve complained about Doctor Who’s lack of musical panache compared to BSG before, so I won’t belabour the point here, but BSG’s score is remarkable in many ways. Leitmotifs are used intelligently, the music takes a step back when needed and never hogs the stage, and both diegetic and non-diegetic bridges are made to music from our own world, working themselves into the plot rather than standing apart and completely breaking our immersive bond with what’s going on on-screen. Bear McCreary‘s contribution to the show is similar to the comparison I made with the ship itself in the original show: the score is a living, breathing character in the story, and gives BSG a cinematic, even operatic feel that enhances almost every scene it appears in.

The score to the finale rounds out the storytelling being made here, giving us new cues to reflect the events occurring on-screen, while revisiting and refreshing the character and story motifs built up over the years. Never mawkish, and carrying a power as strong as any great actor, image or sound effect, it pulls on our heartstrings at just the right moments with just the right amount of force.

Incidentally, Doctor Who just never seems able to completely add music seamlessly to scenes, and its habit of continually jumps out of the screen and slapping you about the face, screaming “something’s happening, look, stupid, something’s happening!” is jarring, which is a disappointment. McCreary is now scoring Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, and doing a good job of it, so listen out for it if you’re watching on Fox or Virgin 1. Perhaps the BBC could give him a call for the future series of Who …

So, thanks for five years of great television, Battlestar Galactica.

Thanks, Ronald D. Moore and David Eick. Thanks, Edward James Olmos, Mary McDonnell, James Callis, Tricia Helfer, Jamie Bamber, Katee Sackhoff, Tahmoh Penikett, Grace Park, Alessandro Juliani, Kandyse McClure, Aaron Douglas, Kate Vernon, Michael Hogan, Nickie Cline, Bodie Olmos, Leah Cairns. Thanks, Bear McCreary. Thanks for showing the world how to make great television. Hopefully re-watching your work so often won’t inure me to the tale, the craft or the messages. Thanks for giving me something to do on Saturday mornings. What’s left? A one-off prequel, “The Plan”, later this year, and next year “Caprica”, a prequel mini-series. But for now, BSG is still, and silent.

What do we hear now? Nothin’ but the rain.

Not only have they linked to the bloody DEC website in a news story about how they won’t promote DEC’s appeal — and thus are promoting DEC’s appeal — they’ve now been schooled by Tony Benn, whose cachet has risen even further since yesterday. Spare three minutes and watch Tony absolutely stomp all over Maxine Mawhinney on BBC News.

[via Graham Linehan]

McCain addressed his supporters in his concession speech, saying he had called Obama to congratulate him. At the mention of Obama’s name, boos and hisses erupted from the crowd. At least twice in 30 seconds, he had to put his hands up to the crowd to basically shut them up. Meanwhile, at Obama’s speech, he said the same thing, and was met with a ripple of polite applause from the crowd. He went on to praise McCain’s efforts, and still the crowd did nothing but applaud.

Obama, your supporters, the record number of people who turned out to vote for you, they’re a class act. Just don’t let them — and the rest of us in the world — down, because we so want to love America again.

The first rule of Lunch Club is you do not talk about Lunch Club

The second rule of Lunch Club is you do not talk about Lunch Club

Third rule: If someone says “nachos!”, orders a garlic bread, or eats with their fingers, the lunch is over

Fourth rule: Only one plate to a person

Fifth rule: One course at a time

Sixth rule: No napkins, no salad forks

Seventh rule: Lunches will go on as long as they have to

And the eighth and final rule: If this your first day at Lunch Club, you have to munch

I usually chat away to cabbies, and tip pretty generously on most occasions, but one guy in San Francisco took the biscuit, and didn’t get tipped. Or chatted to, as I was giving him directions.

I had to go 8 blocks from Clay to Green carrying a load of crap in plastic bags, so thought “fuck it, cab”. There was one across from the hotel. “Battery and Green”, I’d asked. “Do you know how to get there?” he replied? I thought he was implying it wasn’t that far, or did I know where I was going? Nah, he was asking because he didn’t bloody know where it was. Then, when I gently discussed how cabbies in the UK have to do The Knowledge before they’re let loose on the streets, he told me that that was “not true, they can just go out and drive like here”. Hey, don’t mind me, I only bloody live there. I ended up having to guide this guy to the destination as, by his own admission, he’d only been working for two days, including that one.

Then there was the private cab driver who, on taking me from Chelmsford town centre to Stansted Airport on a Friday afternoon, seemed to be dominating the conversation. He was basically chatting me up. He even broke my cardinal rule, which is when taking a cab for work travel, expense the bare fare, but pay with a tip. That way, the tip comes out of my own pocket. But nooooo, this guy threw an extra fiver on the receipt. “There you go, mate, something back for yourself”. Brrrrrr. I took a meal off my expenses that week to counter it.

• a shitload of CDs
• a shitload of hard disk space
• a desire not to have my lounge cluttered with CDs any more, and
• an impetus to make a wee bit of cash back

I started collecting CDs in 1990: Christmas, 1990, to be precise, when my parents gave me a Hi Fi with CD player, and a copy of Iron Maiden’s No Prayer for the Dying and Jean Michel Jarre’s Waiting for Cousteau. I may hang on to those, but I’m now pretty intent on ripping and selling every other CD I’ve ever bought, be it album, single, soundtrack, magazine cover disc … you name it, it’s going. I just can’t justify the space they take up. I haven’t bought anything more than a CD or two a year for the last few years, and I definitely haven’t played a CD for just as long a time: there’s a Mac mini plugged into both the TV and the surround system for playing music via iTunes, I have an iPod for listening to music outside the house, why do I need to keep all these CDs again?

I have the odd gem which I may find it hard to part with (for example, a Tupelo pressing of Nirvana’s Bleach, a gold [coloured, sadly] disc version of the GoldenEye soundtrack, and so on), but I’ll take those on when I get there.

Onward, iTunes; onward, jiffy bags; onward, sense of preservation in the face of probable blatant copyright infringement! Undisc!

• My job; pursuant thereof, San Francisco, and regular trips thereto (next one in December); additionally, the stupidly weak US dollar
• Apple Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard”
• Beechams Flu Plus caplets
• The Crystal Method
• Ubuntu Linux 7.10 “Gutsy Gibbon”
• “How I Met Your Mother” (and slapcountdown.com)
• 16Mbps Sky Broadband
• Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock (Freebird, Freeeebiiiiiiird!)
• 12.x firmware for the Nokia N95
• Tesco vouchers
• Being able to play music fucking loud (cf watching movies similarly); by extension, Maplin’s 3m 3.5mm to Twin Phono jack lead, my Macbook Pro, iTunes and the + button on my Sony HT-DDW880‘s remote control
• British Airways
• Starbucks Vanilla Latte
• Ace Combat 6: Fires of Liberation (aka エースコンバット6 解放への戦火)
• Cheerios in ice cold milk
• Die Hard
• Four episodes of Star Trek: Voyager every weekday
• Barq’s Famous Old Tyme Root Beer
• A comfy chair

Awesome.