Married to the robot?

Television: The Emmys: A Love That Dare Not Compute Its Name
By ANTHONY GOTTLIEB, The New York Times, June 8, 2008

THE Sci Fi Channel’s “Battlestar Galactica” is a fantasy about a race of hokily spiritual robots in search of their destiny and the harassed humans who are trying to escape them. Torture, religious extremism, the precariousness of democracy in times of terror: the echoes of political conundrums are hard to miss in this show.

What may not be so obvious is that “Galactica” is, like “West Side Story,” gently pushing the same message as “Romeo and Juliet.” When the robots and humans are not trying to kill one another, they rather convincingly fall in love. Montague or Capulet, Puerto Rican or Anglo, human or robot — true love transcends all divides, or so the show seems to be saying.
( Uh, yeah, spoilers! )

Glass half full

I think this editorial and the one I posted yesterday combined make some great points: That this election shows how the battle against sexism is NOT won and how far we've come that it became reasonable for a woman to run for president.

---

Op-Ed Columnist: What Hillary Won
By GAIL COLLINS, The New York Times, June 7, 2008

As the sun was sinking on Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, the nation’s wounded feminists were burning up the Internet.

They vowed to write in Hillary’s name on their ballots in November; to wear “NObama” T-shirts all summer; to “de-register” as Democrats. One much-circulated e-mail proposed turning June 3, the day Barack Obama claimed the nomination, as a permanent day of mournful remembrance “like the people in Ireland remember the Famine.”

“The passion is very intense,” said Muriel Fox, a retired public relations executive in New York who was one of the founding members of the National Organization for Women. “It’s very much a feeling that Hillary has not been respected.”

Feel free to make fun of them. The women of Fox’s generation ought to be used to it by now. The movement they started was the first fight for equality in which the opposition deployed ridicule as its most lethal weapon. They won the ban on sex discrimination in employment by letting a conservative congressman propose it as a joke. When they staged their historic march in New York in 1970, they heard themselves described as “braless bubble-heads” by a U.S. senator and were laughed at on the evening news.

They had always seen a woman in the White House as the holy grail. Now their disappointment is compounded by the feeling that Clinton’s candidacy was not even appreciated as a noble try.
( Read More )