I can’t even pretend to care about the ACC-Big Ten challenge (much less college basketball in general), and I was falling asleep on my sofa a few hours ago while watching good TV, yet for some silly reason I’m wide awake and watching Duke–Indiana on TiVo delay with Dickie V anyway.

They must put drugs in the water supply here; that’s the only explanation.

Brian from MGoBlog and Mark Hasty add to the list of reasons to dislike ESPN, pushing it well over 100 entries.

þ: EDSBS, of course.

The EDSBS crew compiles a list of 52 reasons that ESPN sucks, and somehow manages to leave out the Sunday Night Football crew and Jeremy “I’m not Dick, but I am one” Schapp.

We may not get a full third season of Arrested Development, but I’ll take a third season of Battlestar Galactica as a nice consolation prize.

Arrested Development is apparently history, according to the San Jose Mercury News. Jeff Harrell thinks the show was on a bit of a creative downturn; since I haven’t seen a single episode of this season (thanks, in large part, to the power outage I had earlier this week) I can’t really judge for myself.

Now, if Fox cancels House I’ll be really annoyed.

By popular demand: Ed Orgeron wants to sell you a Hummer, in H.264 format suitable for your iPod or Apple TV, and viewable on pretty much any modern PC or Mac.

Also available in DivX format, but you’ll need the XviD codec if you don't already have it installed.

Greetings to our visitors from EDSBS. Updated to add the H.264 version, which is smaller and the same quality as the original.

Steven Taylor asks for thoughts on who the remaining Cylons are; assuming Galactica Boomer wasn’t lying in “Resistance,” there are apparently seven human-form Cylon models remaining to be unmasked. The eliminated prospects all seem quite logical to me at least. At this point, the leading contenders for Cylonhood seem to be Gaeta and Cally, but there are plenty of other prospects out there too.

Good news for all those planning to replace a wall with a television screen: prices for large-screen TVs are expected to continue to free-fall. Entirely coincidentally, the layout of my new living room here in Durham is making my eight-year-old 25-inch tube TV seem very tiny.

Will the next-generation video disc format war be over before it starts? Ars Technica notes that two more Hollywood studios have jumped on the Blu-ray Disc bandwagon, while the lower-capacity HD DVD format seems to be floundering.

Today’s Clarion-Ledger has a piece on network TV’s current science-fiction renaissance, led by the quasi-sci-fi ABC series “Lost.” Sci-Fi Friday also gets some good pub.

Paul Brewer presents the results of a content analysis of The Daily Show conducted by some of his students and himself; the statistics lend credence to suggestions that TDS presents a lot of political information to its viewers.

Mind you, whether this is an appropriate substitute for making citizens sit through The NewsHour is an open question, one best left to people with a far more normative bent than my own.

For reasons I don’t fully understand, I’m watching the Baseball Tonight Trade Deadline special (never mind that it isn’t “tonight” yet anywhere west of Greenland at this point of the day), and Karl Ravech and Harold Reynolds are wearing basically the same pinstripe jackets. Don’t they have wardrobe people to catch this sort of stuff?

Related: The Road from Bristol continues in the second round.

Via Slashdot: a feature article on the return of Battlestar Galactica to the airwaves, describing the roles of Ron Moore and Richard Hatch (not the nekkid guy from Survivor) in keeping the series alive. Probably not anything new for those fans of the new show who frequent the fan sites, but a good overview for those not properly initiated.

Inspired by Alex Knapp: the top five TV shows that got canned before their time.

1. NewsRadio
2. Crusade
3. Andy Richter Controls The Universe
4. The Job
5. Firefly

Honorable mentions: Big Apple, Now And Again, and The Ben Stiller Show.

A reminder to all the sci-fi fans in the audience (Hi Dad!): Sci-Fi Friday is all-new starting tonight, with the season premieres of Stargate: SG-1 (now featuring Beau Bridges and Ben Browder), Stargate Atlantis, and the show all the attractive libertarian women are raving about, Battlestar Galactica. Good thing I have no social life, or otherwise I’d have to put it on hold for this event.

The Baseball Crank notes that Joe Biden is throwing his hat—or at least his hairpiece—into the ring for 2008, while the SoCons are apparently in the market to coalesce behind a single Republican contender already, according to this piece linked by John Cole—after all, there’s only 1,226 shopping days left before the next presidential election. All hail the permanent campaign.

Of course, the drawback of predicting the “redshirts” at this point is that, unlike in Star Trek (or, in general, when using the Law of Economy of Characters*), you don’t know who is going to buy it until after the fact.

Matt Bai thinks national Democrats could learn a lot from Hank Hill and Gov. Mike Easley (D-N.C.). He’s probably right, although Tom Maguire has the Democrats’ likelihood of success with this theme pegged:

No more sneers? No more “Vote for my health care plan, you racist, homophobic gun nuts”?

Republican strategists can relax.

Or, to paraphrase another modern Southern legend, when the red meat your party activists want turns off the voters you need to reclaim that (oh-so-slowly) “emerging” majority, you might be a Democrat.

Update: Mr. Mike thinks Bai seriously misreads King of the Hill; not being a viewer of the show, I wouldn’t presume to know.

Another Update: Ann Althouse has more thoughts on KotH (þ: Instapundit).

I can’t believe I’m watching Game 7 of the NBA Finals instead of this cautionary morality tale that some are calling the Reefer Madness of this generation. Maybe Lifetime will rerun it overnight so I can see what I missed; this review suggests it’s off the charts on the unintentional hilarity index:

We get 8/10 for the hilariousness alone, it would be a full ten had Justin been killed by the internet porn.

Yep, it definitely beats watching sweaty guys in knee-length shorts run left and right across your TV screen for three hours.

OFJay has a couple of thoughts worth responding to:

Why is it that Trek fans absolutely, positively, demonizingly hate Voyager? It’s as if that show had no merit whatsover either as a Trek show or as a TV show. This inquiring mind would like to know.

I don’t know that fans necessarily “hate” Voyager, although most would probably have it tied with Enterprise for the nadir of televised Trek. I think the main problem with the series is that televised science fiction had “grown up” since The Next Generation came on the air, as more sophisticated shows like Deep Space Nine and Babylon 5 were out there, and Voyager quickly settled in as essentially redoing TNG with an inferior cast; its oft-discussed failure to deliver on its premise left it in the position of having less intelligent things to say about pushing the limits of Trekkian ideology than DS9 did in the comparatively “safe” confines of the Alpha Quadrant.

That said, there were lots of elements of Voyager that really worked, and some of the best hours of modern Trek were on the show. It just never added up to much of anything more. (This critique probably also applies to Enterprise.)

It’s been less than a month since the season ender for House but I sure miss that cranky doctor. And the “tall dark one,” the “little girl,” and the Aussie that “would run like a scared wombat.” Also Lisa Edelstein, who played a post-op transvestite in Ally McBeal and a real woman in the last season of The Practice. At least they’ve signed it on for a second season.

Indeed, despite the occasional gore (something I’m really averse to), House M.D. is probably my favorite network show these days. Greg House is probably the best unlikeable character on TV since at least early Andy Sipowicz, and possibly even Basil Fawlty. Add my thing for Sela Ward and you have must-see TV in the fall.

Today’s Washington Post reports that Bob Costas will be Larry King’s permanent guest host for about 20 appearances a year, starting this Sunday. I’ve always enjoyed Costas’ work as an interviewer, particularly on Later, and it’ll be fun to see him doing real interviews again somewhere other than HBO. (þ: memeorandum)

Daniel Drezner looks at the continued genius of Hardees and Carl’s Jr. in moving from “food porn” to virtual porn (by way of Paris Hilton) as a marketing gimmick in order to gain free ads from oft-quoted “watchdog” groups. I’m not one of those people who thinks Hilton is all that hot, but I guess I’m in the minority on that score.

I am surprised that H/CJ continues to keep a split brand, however… since Federated has now assimilated all of its department store holdings under the Macy’s brand, there really aren’t that many important split brands left—Edy’s/Dreyer’s and Checker’s/Rally’s are the only others that come to mind.

I am in general agreement with Steven Taylor’s assessment of the final two episodes of Star Trek: Enterprise; indeed, I think “Terra Prime” probably would have functioned just as well if it had been the finale. Plus, I really liked the fact they actually found something useful to do with Travis Mayweather—I think he had more lines in the “Demons/Terra Prime” two-parter than he’d had in whole seasons; he certainly had more useful things to do. I still have to wonder what bizarre fashion trend made everyone on Earth abandon normal clothing in favor of jumpsuits between 216x and the TOS era, however.

As for the finale itself, I can’t agree more with this statement:

Unfortunately These are the Voyages underscores Berman’s lack of understanding of what should have been done with Enterprise–here is the chance to focus on the founding of the Federation and instead we get a side-story about Shran’s kidnapped daughter and the ramifications of that event, including the poorly written, poorly acted, gratuitous death of Trip. One tunes in assuming that the story would be about the decommissioning of Enterprise and the signing of the Federation Charter, and yet we don’t actually get to see any of it (save a few minutes in the final act).

The surrounding story on the Enterprise-D made little sense, didn’t fit in with the events it supposedly was a part of, and was really quite unsatisfactory—and I actually like Riker and Troi, unlike a goodly portion of the fan base. About the only good thing about the episode was its showcasing of Connor Trinneer—and the D/TP two-parter did a better job of that too.

In other sci-fi news, Friday also saw Andromeda finally put out of its (and my) misery. The scary thing is that the best sci-fi on Friday night was probably the damn rerun of Battlestar Galactica’s “Litmus,” and it was barely sci-fi at all. I also learned about the Monty Hall Dilemma on Numb3ers, which you’d think I’d have known as an applied stats guy but it somehow never came up.

Of course, I didn’t see any of this live since I was actually in Pearl at the time watching the Mississippi Braves at Trustmark Park, courtesy of friends-of-friends Michelle and David.

I kinda expected most of the outcome of “Who Killed Lilly Kane?” after last week—at least, the killer didn’t particularly surprise me—but the whole thing with Logan and Weevil seemed like it was supposed to be resolved by the end of the episode, and it wasn’t—though, I suppose, resolving that might have given away who showed up at the end.

My other critique: not enough Wallace; even his mom got more screen time. Gotta love Wallace.

Drudge says ABC has greenlit a series called Commander-in-Chief starring Geena Davis as the nation’s first female president.

Somehow I don’t expect her performance in the role to hold a candle to that of Mary McDonnell in more-or-less the same role in Battlestar Galactica, but I’ll give Davis the chance to surprise me.

The gals at Go Fug Yourself are right: Bermuda shorts just aren’t appropriate for any event at which you might be photographed, unless it’s a beach party. What’s semi-frightening, though, is that Kristen Bell (q.v.) almost pulls it off through sheer force of cuteness.

Oh, yeah, and that Logan Echolls is a real bastard. Unless he didn’t really do it (and I suspect he didn’t, but what do I know?), in which case he’s cool.