Monday, July 4, 2011
Wednesday, June 29, 2011
WeatherSpark | Beautiful Weather Graphs and Maps
Weather Reports
You can now get in-depth weather reports for any location on earth and any time of year. The report aims to answer basic questions such as "what is the weather like on a typical day". This is useful if you're for example planning a trip and would like to know what to expect from the weather where you're there.
Simply select the appropriate date using the controls at the top of the page, and soon the report will appear just above.
This feature is still very much in beta, and we'd love to get your feedback on it (link below). Yes, we do plan to add printable graphs to it ;)
via weatherspark.com
My new favorite weather site.
Monday, June 27, 2011
Saturday, June 18, 2011
Friday, June 17, 2011
Tuesday, June 7, 2011
Thursday, June 2, 2011
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Monday, May 23, 2011
Monday, May 16, 2011
Thursday, May 12, 2011
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Diebold Voting Machine Owner Committed To Give Votes To Bush in 2004
COLUMBUS - The head of a company vying to sell voting machines in Ohio told Republicans in a recent fund-raising letter that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."
The Aug. 14 letter from Walden O'Dell, chief executive of Diebold Inc. - who has become active in the re-election effort of President Bush - prompted Democrats this week to question the propriety of allowing O'Dell's company to calculate votes in the 2004 presidential election.
O'Dell attended a strategy pow-wow with wealthy Bush benefactors - known as Rangers and Pioneers - at the president's Crawford, Texas, ranch earlier this month. The next week, he penned invitations to a $1,000-a-plate fund-raiser to benefit the Ohio Republican Party's federal campaign fund - partially benefiting Bush - at his mansion in the Columbus suburb of Upper Arlington.
The letter went out the day before Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, also a Republican, was set to qualify Diebold as one of three firms eligible to sell upgraded electronic voting machines to Ohio counties in time for the 2004 election.
Blackwell's announcement is still in limbo because of a court challenge over the fairness of the selection process by a disqualified bidder, Sequoia Voting Systems.
In his invitation letter, O'Dell asked guests to consider donating or raising up to $10,000 each for the federal account that the state GOP will use to help Bush and other federal candidates - money that legislative Democratic leaders charged could come back to benefit Blackwell.
They urged Blackwell to remove Diebold from the field of voting-machine companies eligible to sell to Ohio counties.
This is the second such request in as many months. State Sen. Jeff Jacobson, a Dayton-area Republican, asked Blackwell in July to disqualify Diebold after security concerns arose over its equipment.
"Ordinary Ohioans may infer that Blackwell's office is looking past Diebold's security issues because its CEO is seeking $10,000 donations for Blackwell's party - donations that could be made with statewide elected officials right there in the same room," said Senate Democratic Leader Greg DiDonato.
Diebold spokeswoman Michelle Griggy said O'Dell - who was unavailable to comment personally - has held fund-raisers in his home for many causes, including the Columbus Zoo, Op era Columbus, Catholic Social Services and Ohio State University.
Ohio GOP spokesman Jason Mauk said the party approached O'Dell about hosting the event at his home, the historic Cotswold Manor, and not the other way around. Mauk said that under federal campaign finance rules, the party cannot use any money from its federal account for state- level candidates.
"To think that Diebold is somehow tainted because they have a couple folks on their board who support the president is just unfair," Mauk said.
Griggy said in an e-mail statement that Diebold could not comment on the political contributions of individual company employees.
Blackwell said Diebold is not the only company with political connections - noting that lobbyists for voting-machine makers read like a who's who of Columbus' powerful and politically connected.
"Let me put it to you this way: If there was one person uniquely involved in the political process, that might be troubling," he said. "But there's no one that hasn't used every legitimate avenue and bit of leverage that they could legally use to get their product looked at. Believe me, if there is a political lever to be pulled, all of them have pulled it."
Blackwell said he stands by the process used for selecting voting machine vendors as fair, thorough and impartial.
As of yesterday, however, that determination lay with Ohio Court of Claims Judge Fred Shoemaker.
He heard closing arguments yesterday over whether Sequoia was unfairly eliminated by Blackwell midway through the final phase of negotiations.
Shoemaker extended a temporary restraining order in the case for 14 days, but said he hopes to issue his opinion sooner than that.
© 2003 The Plain Dealer
###
via commondreams.org
Just wow!
Thursday, May 5, 2011
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
This is a good one.
I saw a person on Reddit post this and I love it."Jesus wasn't born in America yet you don't see Republicans trying to keep him out of government."
Thursday, April 21, 2011
Thursday, April 14, 2011
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
Monday, April 11, 2011
Monday, March 21, 2011
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Protect your Wordpress blog's administration from prying eyes
Protect your Wordpress blog's administration from prying eyes
December 19, 2010 (2 months ago) 2 Comments and 2 Reactions
Filed under: Security Blogging
If you also have a blog powered by Wordpress, and care at least a bit about keeping it secure, you may have thought about preventing others from accessing its administration pages.
The reason, of course, is that about every Wordpress user is aware of the default location of both its administration area (the famous wp-admin folder), and of the login page, therefore it is likely that sooner or later someone will try to gain unauthorised access to your blog, in a way or another, and have some fun. Wordpress, historically, has never been too solid from a security point of view, plus -out of the box- it does not lock down a user or IP address after a reasonable number of failed login attempts, as it should; so unless you have a very strong password, it may not take too long for a malicious, patient visitor to figure out your password (especially since Amazon announced the availability of reasonably priced Cluster GPU instances on their EC2 platform...)
So, unless you really have to let your visitors be able to register and login on your blog, it is advisable that you also keep anyone else away from the login page altogether. This may be possible or not depending on the reason why your site needs your users to login locally to perform some actions, but -luckily- there are almost always workarounds. In most cases, in fact, this has only to do with enabling your users to leave comments on the site. If this is true for you, too, I recommend you think about "outsourcing" the management of your comments to third-party services, the most popular ones being IntenseDebate (by Wordpress.com parent company Automattic) and, in particular, Disqus - which also happens to be my favourite one these days, and that therefore I recommend.
( Note: if just the though of having your blog's comments stored elsewhere, by someone else, makes you shiver, trust me: there is nothing to worry about, but only to gain. First, most of these services are free -including the aforementioned two most popular ones- so it won't cost you a penny. Second, they integrate pretty well with Wordpress in such a way that your comments are actually synchronised between your blog and the remote service, so you always have a local copy of all your blog's comments. Third, by outsourcing your comments you will be able to relieve the load on your own servers quite a bit, and improve the cacheability of your site: if your blog caches the dynamic pages to static HTML files that can be served more quickly, normally -depending on the caching solution you use- each time a user leaves a comment the cached copy of the same page must be rebuilt as the changes required to display the new comment invalidate the cache; by using Disqus -or similar- instead, a remote JavaScript call to the third-party servers fetches the comments to render on the page, therefore the durability of your cached pages is significantly higher. Fourth, since these services already integrate anti spam solutions, you may also disable Akismet and other plugins on your blog, and you know that the less plugins you install, the lighter and faster your Wordpress blog will be. Fifth, these services just work better than Wordpress' built in comments, have interesting social features, and even help improve the SEO performance of your site in a number of ways. What more could you ask for? )
Back in topic, assuming you have by now removed any need for your users to login locally on your site, there are several ways of protecting your site's login page and and administration area. To begin with, you could customise your Wordpress copy and change the location and names of the files and folders involved in the login and administration, or change altogether the way Wordpress handles authentication and authorisation on your site. But this could be pretty time consuming, and would make it a lot more difficult to upgrade your Wordpress copy each time a new version is released.
A lot easier and quicker is to use plugins which add this sort of functionality to Wordpress, without your having to fiddle with the core files, and without compromising upgrades. But as said, the more plugins you install, the slower your blog will be. Also, many of the plugins available at the moment to secure your blog, either don't work as expected with the latest release of Wordpress, or do not work at all. Among the few ones that seem to work, I have seen some that operate by basically hiding in a way or another the wp-admin folder as well as the login page. Unfortunately, while these seem to work, it is often possible to break their functionality and bypass the protection they offer.
My advice is not to waste too much time with these plugins, either. If you want a way of securing the administration of your blog that is simple, effective, and doesn't slow down your blog or require plugins or any heavy customisation, my recommendation is that you simply restrict access to the reserved area(s) by IP address at web server level. This just works, and because the restriction happens without even involving Wordpress at all, it's very efficient in terms of resources as well, and will perform better in case of brute force attack that floods your site with login attemps perhaps leading to a sort of DoS. With the tecnique I suggest here, in fact, visitors trying to access reserved folders and pages from unauthorised IP addresses are instead shown a 404 page that can also be cached statically as well as the rest of the site. Therefore, with this sort of configuration a light and fast web server such as Nginx (which I strongly recommend over heavier ones like Apache) is already able to serve thousands of requests per second with significant levels of concurrency "Concurrency"), even on a cheap VPS. In case of smaller DoS or brute force attempts, this configuration may help.
Restricting access to an application by IP is easy with any web server; here is an example with Nginx, but it shouldn't take long to adapt these rules to another web server (make sure you add the following lines within the server section of your virtual host configuration, and not within a location block):
server { ... set $noadmin 1; if ($remote_addr = "xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx") { set $noadmin 0; } if ($remote_addr = "yyy.yyy.yyy.yyy") { set $noadmin 0; } if ($noadmin = 1) { rewrite ^/wp-admin/(.*)$ /index.php?q=$1 last; rewrite ^/wp-([^/]*?).php(.*)$ /index.php?q=$1 last; } ... }First, we set a flag (a custom variable in nginx) to true, meaning we'll restrict access to the admin pages by default. Then, for each of the IP addresses we want to grant access to, we set that flag to false (nginx doesn't support nested or combined conditions AFAIK, therefore I am using multiple lines here). Lastly, if the flag remains set to true -meaning the request comes from an unauthorised IP address- nginx rewrites the routes for the reserved folders and pages (you can customise these as you wish) in such a way that while the URL in the browser won't change, Wordpress' 404 page is returned instead, as if those folders or pages did not exist. We do this by simulating a Wordpress search, using the name of the folder or page requested as query. In the second rewrite rule, we basically block any PHP page starting with wp (thus also wp-login.php), for improved security: all the Wordpress PHP files matching this naming convention, in fact, are not supposed to be requested directly from a browser.
Update: reader Dave Ross pointed out in the comments that admin-ajax.php should be excluded bu the rules above since it is required by some plugins for AJAX functionality - Thanks Dave, I usually avoid anyway using AJAX based plugins unless I am totally sure they do not compromise in any way the security of a site, but yours was actually a very good point.
It's easy to exclude admin-ajax.php by adding a negative lookahead to the regular expression in the first rule:
if ($noadmin = 1) { rewrite ^/wp-admin/((?!admin-ajax\.php).*)$ /index.php?q=$1 last; rewrite ^/wp-([^/]*?).php(.*)$ /index.php?q=$1 last; }This way the only requests that will be allowed within /wp-admin regardless of the IP address are the requests made for that particular file.
I like this trick because it's simple, light on Wordpress and.. it just works. At this point, though, you've surely realised that this means you will only be able to access the administration of your blog (thus to write posts) while connected from IP addresses you know. So what about Internet cafes, a workplace, and so on? My advice here is to overcome this limitation by using a VPN or, even easier, an SSH tunnel and route all the traffic through it. First, all your traffic will be encrypted -which is something you should always care about when you connect from other Internet connections than yours- and therefore even an SSL certificate is no longer strictly required to access the reserved areas of your site; second, because you will be routing all your Internet traffic through your VPN/SSH gateway, the IP address your site will see is the IP address of your gateway, and not that of whichever Internet connection you are using at the moment. And you do know the IP address of your gateway, therefore you can configure the rules shown above to authorise that IP address.
I usually set the rules above to allow my home IP address as well as those of my servers and, by default, I always route all the traffic through one of these servers with an SSH tunnel when I am not at home. To do this easily, if you are on Mac I recommend the combination of the utilities NetworkLocation and Meerkat, so you won't have to manually change SSH tunnel depending on where you are ;)
via vitobotta.com
Monday, March 14, 2011
My 2¢ On NPR’s Supposed “Liberal Bias” | Chai Life
I listen to NPR. A lot. Specifically, I tune in to Milwaukee’s WUWM and occasionally WPR; The #1 and #2 presets in my car. In an average week, my ears get to enjoy at least some of the following programs: Morning Edition, All Things Considered, Fresh Air, On The Media, Radio Lab, Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me!, and plenty of other fantastic news and non-news public radio programs.
Lately there has been a renewed push by the Regressives of this country to strip the Corporation for Public Broadcasting of all of it’s federal funding. This would effectively shut its doors for good and close down dozens or even hundreds of local NPR and PBS affiliates. Their reasoning for the proposed defunding is because NPR has a “liberal bias”. This could not be further from the truth. Part of the reason that I so enjoy listening to the various programs from NPR is because of how hard they strive to be unbiased and balanced. I can’t think of a single story I’ve ever heard them do that I felt leaned to one side or the other or wasn’t immediately followed up with the opposing view. If I want media with a “liberal bias”, I’ll point my browser to the Huffington Post or set my TV to MSNBC. Likewise, if I want to hear conservative lies I’ll switch over to Fox News. If, however, I want straight news delivered professionally in an intelligent manner that doesn’t insult the listener, I tune my radio to NPR. My only assumption is that what the right-wing sees in NPR as a “liberal bias” is, in actuality, a bias towards intelligence and if there’s one thing that frightens the right-wing, it’s an intelligent voter.
via chailife.com
The Regressive's war on intelligence.
Saturday, March 12, 2011
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
Monday, March 7, 2011
Sunday, March 6, 2011
Friday, March 4, 2011
The Story of Citizens United v. FEC | THE STORY OF STUFF PROJECT: SEASON 2
via storyofstuff.org
People vs Corporations
Monday, February 28, 2011
Saturday, February 26, 2011
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Open Letter To Glenn Beck By Alex Jones
via prisonplanet.com
The king of conspiracy calls out fraud Glenn Beck.
On The View Glenn Beck Admits that He Doesn’t Check Facts
via politicususa.com
Gee what a surprise! so he pulls his "facts" from his ass.
Koch Brothers’ Money Fuels Wisconsin Fight
The visitor, Tim Phillips, the president of Americans for Prosperity, told a large group of counterprotesters who had gathered Saturday at one edge of what otherwise was a mostly union crowd that the cuts were not only necessary, but they also represented the start of a much-needed nationwide move to slash public-sector union benefits.
“We are going to bring fiscal sanity back to this great nation,” he said.
What Mr. Phillips did not mention was that his Virginia-based nonprofit group, whose budget surged to $40 million in 2010 from $7 million three years ago, was created and financed in part by the secretive billionaire brothers Charles G. and David H. Koch.
State records also show that Koch Industries, their energy and consumer products conglomerate based in Wichita, Kan., was one of the biggest contributors to the election campaign of Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, a Republican who has championed the proposed cuts.
Even before the new governor was sworn in last month, executives from the Koch-backed group had worked behind the scenes to try to encourage a union showdown, Mr. Phillips said in an interview on Monday.
State governments have gone into the red, he said, in part because of the excessively generous pay and benefits that unions have been able to negotiate for teachers, police, firefighters and other state and local employees.
“We thought it was important to do,” Mr. Phillips said, adding that his group is already working with activists and state officials in Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania to urge them to take similar steps to curtail union benefits or give public employees the power to opt out of unions entirely.
To union leaders and liberal activists in Washington, this intervention in Wisconsin is proof of the expanding role played by nonprofit groups with murky ties to wealthy corporate executives as they push a decidedly conservative agenda.
“The Koch brothers are the poster children of the effort by multinational corporate America to try to redefine the rights and values of American citizens,” said Representative Gwen Moore, Democrat of Wisconsin, who joined with others in the union protests.
A spokesman for Koch Industries, as well as Mr. Phillips, scoffed at that accusation. The companies owned by Koch (pronounced Coke) — which include the Georgia-Pacific Corporation and the Koch Pipeline Company — have no direct stake in the union debate, they said. The company has about 3,000 employees in Wisconsin, including workers at a toilet paper factory and gasoline supply terminals. The pending legislation would not directly affect its bottom line.
“A balanced budget will benefit Koch Industries and its thousands of employees in Wisconsin no more and no less than the rest of the state’s private-sector workers and employers,” said Jeff Schoepke, a Koch Industries lobbyist in Wisconsin. “This is a dispute between public-sector unions and democratically elected officials over how best to serve the public interest.”
Certainly, the Koch brothers have long used their wallets to promote fiscal conservatism and combat regulation, another Koch Industries spokesman said Monday.
But the push to curtail union benefits in Wisconsin has been backed by many conservative groups that have no Koch connection, Mr. Phillips noted.
Americans for Prosperity came to Wisconsin more than five years ago and has thousands of members, he said. The state chapter organized buses on Saturday for hundreds of Wisconsin residents to go to the Capitol to support the governor’s proposals.
“This is a Wisconsin movement,” said Fred Luber, chief executive of the Supersteel Products Corporation in Milwaukee, who serves on Americans for Prosperity’s Wisconsin state advisory board. “Obviously, Washington is interested in this. But it is up to us to do.”
Political activism is high on the list of priorities for Charles Koch, who in a letter last September to other business leaders and conservatives explained that he saw no other choice.
“If not us, who? If not now, when?” said the letter, which invited other conservatives to a retreat in January in Rancho Mirage, Calif. “It is up to us to combat what is now the greatest assault on American freedom and prosperity in our lifetimes.”
Campaign finance records in Washington show that donations by Koch Industries and its employees climbed to a total of $2 million in the last election cycle, twice as much as a decade ago, with 92 percent of that money going to Republicans. Donations in state government races — like in Wisconsin — have also surged in recent years, records show.
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Steven Greenhouse contributed reporting from Madison, Wis.
via nytimes.com
Quote For The Day III - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan
"This is what I mean by my constant insistence on 'moderation' in government. Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes that you can do these things. Among them are a few Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or businessman from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid," - president Eisenhower, as a counterpoint to FDR.
A true Republican!
Monday, February 21, 2011
Saturday, February 19, 2011
Friday, February 18, 2011
Walker Concocts 'Scoop and Toss' Borrowing Scheme to Pay for $140 Million in Special Interest Spending - One Wisconsin Now
Wall Street Bond Holders Win; Wisconsin's Long-Term Debt Rises
Madison-- Republican Gov. Scott Walker plans to pay for $140 million in new special interest spending signed into law in January by extending the state's long term debt in a "scoop and toss" refinancing scheme that will cost untold tens of millions of dollars in additional debt for Wisconsin.
"Scott Walker railed non-stop against budget gimmicks as a candidate and now as governor he's put together a scheme that would make a pay-day lender blush," said Scot Ross, One Wisconsin Now Executive Director. "Gov. Walker created this problem by handing out $140 million in special interest spending to his corporate pals and he's going to make our children pay for it by taking loans the state was ready to pay off and borrow more money on them."
Walker is refusing to provide full accounting of how much in additional costs his "scoop and toss" scheme would cost taxpayers down the road. Since his inauguration in early January, Walker has approved $140 million in new special interest spending that includes:
- $25 million for an economic development fund for job creation that still has $73 million due to a lack of job creation. Walker is creating a $25 million hole which will not create or retain jobs. [Wisconsin Legislative Fiscal Bureau, 1/7/11]
- $48 million for private health savings accounts, which primarily benefit the wealthy. A study from the federal Governmental Accountability Office showed the average adjusted gross income of HSA participants was $139,000 and nearly half of HSA participants reported withdrawing nothing from their HSA, evidence that it is serving as a tax shelter for wealthy participants. [Government Accountability Office, 4/1/08; Wisconsin Legislative Fiscal Bureau, 1/11/11]
- $67 million for a tax shift plan, so ill-conceived that at-best the benefit provided to job creators would be less than a dollar a day per new job, and may be as little as 30 cents a day. [Associated Press, 1/28/01]
Walker made numerous statements before and after his election as governor criticizing borrowing schemes as a means of balancing the state's budget, a sample of which includes:
Soon, we will lay out our plans for the next state budget and we will successfully tackle the three billion dollar deficit. We will do it without raids on segregated funds, or excessive borrowing. [Walker Inaugural Address, 1/3/11]
I throw out a couple examples of things we pointed out there to get this next budget intact to make sure we don't do what the governor has done the last couple of times, which is kick the can down into the future and create even bigger budget deficits we got to get our legacy costs under control. [Walker-Neumann Debate, 8/25/10]
Our budget repair bill will lay the foundation for a structurally sound budget that doesn't rely on short-term fixes and other gap measures that only delay the pain and create perilous uncertainty. [Walker State of the State Address, 2/3/11]
In addition to not disclosing how much more this will cost the taxpayers in the long-run, Walker has not released how much the Wall Street firms and bond lawyers will profit off this deal.
"Gov. Walker's unprecedented power grab is turning his office into the state's largest lobbyist waiting room," said Ross. "Wisconsin deserves to know immediately the long-term cost of this borrowing scheme and what Wall Street firms and bond lawyers stand to make from our tax dollars."
Printer-friendly version of this release.
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One Wisconsin Now is a statewide communications network specializing in effective earned media and online organizing to advance progressive leadership and values.
Thursday, February 17, 2011
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Tuesday, February 8, 2011
In Praise of Space Muppets
I Got Your Warp Drive Here, Pal
| In praise of Space Muppets. |
The latest version of the venerable starship Enterprise, on the show that bears its name, maxes out at Warp 5. That's a fraction of the speed of its predecessors, and it's no surprise. Enterprise has to lug around the entire crushing weight of the Star Trek franchise.
After five TV series and nine, soon to be ten movies (four, if you only count the good ones), Star Trek has history. It has tradition. The good guys all get along, make the right choices in the end, and always walk away from their adventures none the worse for wear.
It's dependable. Even comforting. But when's the last time Star Trek made you laugh out loud, or stand up and cheer like a maniac?
Rockne S. O'Bannon and David Kemper, the creator and executive producer of Sci-Fi's Farscape, don't have a franchise to protect. Sure, Kemper used to write for Star Trek, and O'Bannon's trying to live down a little toxic accident called seaQuest DSV. But they're not bound by thirty-five years of ironclad fandom-- they're just out to have fun. Farscape is what Trek could be if it loosened its collar, let its hair down, and knocked back a couple of tequila shots. In the sterile, stately world of TV science fiction, it's gloriously messy.
There is no captain on Farscape's ship -- Moya is a living creature with a mind of its own, and a symbiotic pilot creature to relay its opinions to its crew. The heroes aren't a close-knit military team; they're a mishmash of rogues and fugitives who would probably end up killing each other if they didn't need to cooperate to survive. We see them engaged in the unglamorous realities of space travel: cleaning their teeth (with a living toothbrush), cooking, even doing laundry. Their sex lives, neither ignored nor turned into sweeps fodder, are passionate, messy and fraught with consequences. Status quo for Moya and her crew is to be damaged, hungry, and on the run.
The Jim Henson Company produces Farscape, and the legacy of The Muppet Show is happily apparent in the show's loony, anything-goes spirit. Each episode is breathlessly paced, crammed with rapid-fire dialogue and subtle details that reward multiple viewings. At least once every act, the plot or the characters take a hard left turn into the unexpected. Trying to guess how any given episode will end-- even at the end of the third act-- is an easy way to lose a bet. And every now and then, the producers will take their nicely working formula and give it a good hard shake, peppering an episode with hallucinatory jump cuts and flash-forwards, or illustrating the main character's inner turmoil as a fully animated Roadrunner-style cartoon.
The cast is clearly having fun, and after three seasons they wear each of their characters like a comfortable pair of jeans. Each of the main characters has poked and prodded the dimensions of their standard-issue role into delightfully odd territory. So the fierce guy with the big sword turns out to be kind of a goofball who loves the ladies, the sexy thief is scared and vulnerable and a little messed up, and the snotty drama queen proves to be smarter and more compassionate than she'd like to let on.
All the show's stars are gifted, none more so than leads Ben Browder and Claudia Black. As lost astronaut John Crichton, Browder is the antidote to every starched-collar all-American space hero from Kirk onward. Marooned amidst unimaginable weirdness, he's making everything up as he goes along, and half the time he just doesn't give a damn. Since the show began, he's grown darker and more aggressive, moving ever further from his initially peaceful values. His rapid-fire pop culture references come across as the attempts of a desperately lonely man to hang on to his sanity.
If Browder is all manic energy, Black's ex-soldier Aeryn Sun is cool reserve, a little bit sad even when she's smiling. Hard as nails on the outside, an open emotional wound on the inside, Aeryn is one of the most marvelously complex female characters on TV. If Crichton has gotten meaner to survive, his influence has helped Aeryn discover compassion for the first time in her highly regimented life, and it frightens and confuses her. Black's marvelously expressive face, like the great Emma Thompson's, allows her to say more with one longing glance than she could with a whole monologue.
I'd be remiss not to mention the Muppets. Two of the show's regular characters, six-armed Pilot and Rygel, the tiny slug emperor, are made of foam rubber and animatronics. It's to the writers' great credit that the show's Henson contingent isn't thrown any softballs, character-wise. They have backstories, regrets, and character flaws, all performed with a skill and subtlety most human actors would kill for. Rygel in particular behaves like the unholy anti-Kermit: he steals, he bites, he boasts about his sexual prowess, and he's not above selling out his crewmates to get what he wants. Despite that, he's a brilliant diplomat and negotiator who earns what little respect he deserves. His selfish advice usually turns out to be the wisest course of action.
The villains are the icing on the cake. We're not talking your bland, faceless, identical Star Trek villains here. These guys are meaty, lip-smacking nasties with genuine personality and menace. First came Crais (Lani Tupu), a bloodthirsty military captain who blamed Crichton for the accidental death of his brother. After a season of relentless pursuit, he lost his command, regained a measure of his sanity, and began a crawl toward genuine heroism and redemption-- but not before "appropriating" Moya's newborn child as his personal battleship.
The series' Biggest Bad to date is Scorpius (Wayne Pygram), the most deliciously wicked TV villain in years. He wants the interstellar secrets that friendly aliens lodged in Crichton's brain, and he'll stop at nothing-- torture, madness, mind control-- to get them. He has Mr. Spock's implacable logic, the Terminator's refusal to die, Pinhead's tailor, and Ernst Blofeld's sinister charm. Scorpius's doesn't rant or bluster like most sci-fi heavies. He's polite, soft-spoken, always smiling with those little needle teeth-- and scary as hell. And just when you think you hate him, the producers reveal some noble twist to his personality that almost makes him sympathetic. Almost.
By breaking all the rules, the producers and cast of Farscape have given television a new kind of space opera. It's more honest, more emotional, and a lot more exciting. The sort of risks Farscape takes are exactly what Star Trek needs to produce a great series again-- and exactly what Trek's carefully guarded cash-cow status will never permit. Which makes John Crichton and company the only TV space crew boldly going where no one has gone before.
Farscape returns for its fourth season on Sci Fi June 7. New episodes (in letterbox format) will run every Friday night at 10 all summer long.
Watch Me: No Whammies, No Whammies... Stop!
No Whammies! Big Money! And, hey, is that random pattern really random? Apparently not, since Michael Larson cracked the Press Your Luck code in 1984 and won $110,237 by hitting the button at the exact right time. Learn the entire sordid history (possibly including the part where Larson withdrew most of his winnings in one-dollar bills to win a radio contest and had them all stolen from his house) on Big Bucks: The Press Your Luck Scandal.
Monday, Game Show Network, 9pm ET
â€"Monty Ashley
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