BSG 2x08

I have the strangest urge to dance around the room to the theme from the Flinstones right now, but I recognize that it's premature. Maybe tomorrow it will be time to give in to that kind of behavior; today, I have a couple notes on BSG 2x08: ( spoilers for the final cut )

We watched the first two episodes of Deadwood last night; I like Sol even more this time around. And Swearengen, of course, but I'm starting to think about Sol more.

Anniversary

Tomorrow I will give a lecture on the first cities in history. Prehistory, really, since writing is invented a little later. Anyway, the thing that strikes me is how well cities endure: they shrink and grow, they're burned to the ground or flooded out, the inhabitants change their language and their habits, but once a city gets started it will last for millennia. Modernism may encourage us to see the city as unnatural, alienating, rootless, but history says otherwise; ancient history may be full of lost cities, but most of those cities were alive far longer than they were buried.

I am writing this in Halifax, which was pretty much leveled on December 6, 1917, by the largest man-made explosion before the atom bomb.