Somewhere in the gap between "appointment TV" and "well-developed narrative" lies this week's Battlestar Galactica, which tied up so many loose ends at such a frenetic pace I hardly know where to begin. Couldn't some of this have been spread out, you know, over the last few seasons? And couldn't the exposition have been less of a ham-fisted contrivance?

[coconut falls on head] I remember everything!

Don't even get me started on the inevitable introduction of [SPOILER] another final Cylon mystery [/SPOILER]. Why, Gods, why?

Overall, it's (the start) of a decent series mythology, wrapped inside an absolutely ludicrous sense of plot. Even a pro like Dean Stockwell could barely sell it. John Hodgman, however, owned the screen...

In the London Review of Books, Nicholas Spice has thoughts on the horrifying Elisabeth Fritzl story, still I think the most awful thing I've ever heard.

The story of Amstetten has the unreality of the ‘bad’ fairy tale. The numbers in it are fairy-tale numbers: seven children above ground, seven children below. The 24 years of Elisabeth’s captivity are as inexact as the hundred years that Sleeping Beauty slept – they stand for eternity. We might be able to imagine being locked away in a windowless cellar for 24 days, for 24 weeks even, but not 24 years. How did Elisabeth Fritzl survive this? In what sense did she survive it?

There’s a strange, haunting novel called Die Wand (The Wall) by Marlen Haushofer, an Austrian writer from the generation before Jelinek’s, in which a woman finds herself trapped in a mountain valley which has been sealed off by a mysterious and invisible wall. She is alone except for a dog, a cat and a cow. As the months pass, her fear grows that she will lose her humanity: not that she will become an animal – animals are not monstrous – but that she will overstep the animal altogether, since ‘a human being can never become just an animal; he plunges beyond, into the abyss.’ In an attempt to prevent this she keeps strictly to her daily routine – brushing her teeth, cleaning the house, keeping her clothes in good order, hanging up the washing, feeding the animals. Josef Fritzl doubtless imposed certain standards on his daughter’s housekeeping. She needed to be kept moderately human. So he built her a kitchen and a bathroom (did he let her choose the tiles? Jelinek asks). So that, like any good housewife, she could wash and cook. So that, like any good housewife, she would remain wholesome to fuck.

If we have trouble grasping how Elisabeth Fritzl could have stayed sane, the capacity of her father not to understand what he was doing to his daughter, not, above all, to understand what it meant to keep her there for a quarter of a century, is perplexing in a different way (in his first account of himself, Fritzl said he was ‘probably a monster’ – probably). Freud characterised the unconscious as without temporal extension. Fantasies expressive of unconscious desires do not exist in time. Above ground, Josef Fritzl obeyed the rules of ordinary time and causality, the rules that say actions have consequences and are subject to the constraints of conscience (das Gewissen); but when he went down into his cellar, he left all this behind to enter the timeless underworld (das Ungewisse) of his desires. As long as no one found out, it was as if what he did down there had never happened (if he’d killed his children and grandchildren, he said, no one would have made a fuss). Jelinek calls what Fritzl did to his daughter a ‘performance’, the addictive acting out of a pathological need. In building his cellar, Fritzl was building a compartment of his own mind, a theatre for the nightly performance of his fantasies. Elisabeth Fritzl’s grotesque misfortune was to be imprisoned in this compartment, to be trapped inside her father’s head.

The official death toll in the central Chinese earthquake has now exceeded 12,000, with more than 18,000 people believed to be trapped under rubble in a single city alone.

I don't normally post the big-media sensationalism of the moment, but this without a doubt is one of the most awful things I've ever heard.

Police in Austria have entered a cellar where a man allegedly held his daughter captive for 24 years, during which time he may have fathered seven children by her.

...

Detectives say Elisabeth Fritzl had been missing since August 29, 1984.

And, unbelievably, it gets worse.

A rather random assortment of links, even for me:

* How's life? Well, it's practically over, thank God. Cynical-C has another nice Vonnegut link: one of his last recorded television interviews, October 7, 2005. As you might expect, it's great. Here's an excerpt, and here's the rest.



* "The 'Problem of Evil' in Postwar Europe, Tony Judt's acceptance speech for the 2007 Hannah Arendt Prize. Via MeFi.

Today, the Shoah is a universal reference. The history of the Final Solution, or Nazism, or World War II is a required course in high school curriculums everywhere. Indeed, there are schools in the US and even Britain where such a course may be the only topic in modern European history that a child ever studies. There are now countless records and retellings and studies of the wartime extermination of the Jews of Europe: local monographs, philosophical essays, sociological and psychological investigations, memoirs, fictions, feature films, archives of interviews, and much else. Hannah Arendt's prophecy would seem to have come true: the history of the problem of evil has become a fundamental theme of European intellectual life.

So now everything is all right? Now that we have looked into the dark past, called it by its name, and sworn that it must never again be repeated? I am not so sure. Let me suggest five difficulties that arise from our contemporary preoccupation with the Shoah, with what every schoolchild now calls "the Holocaust"...

* Rules and quirks of baseball. As I've said in the past, rules and quirks are pretty much the only aspect of professional sports that can keep my interest, so this is the perfect link for me.

* Scientists have accidentally discovered a promising new technique for treating memory loss.

* Hillary Only Up By 12 Over Obama In New York? This would be amazing, but I find it a little hard to believe it's really that close.

* Also in political news: Obama wins the coveted Hulk Hogan endorsement.

After a tornado tore through Arkadelphia, Arkansas, in 1997, Mike Huckabee refused to sign a disaster insurance bill for over three weeks because it used standard language that referred to natural disasters as "acts of God." I am not shitting you. He really did this.

"While I realize that to some this is a minor issue, it is a matter of deep conscience with me to attribute in law a destructive and deadly force as being an 'act of God,' " he eventually wrote to the bill's sponsors, Young and Sen. Wayne Dowd. While acknowledging that "acts of God" was the "appropriate" legal term, he suggested the legislature substitute "natural disaster."

This man is insane. Meet your next president. Via Washington Monthly.