So I was out on Saturday night with a couple of guys and the topic of vasectomies came up -- one had had one, one was enquiring about what happens when one gets one, and I was just along for all the ball talk.

Anyway, the guy who'd had one observed that the main negative effect of the vasectomy, at least for him, was that his balls now kept getting in the way because they'd dropped down a couple of extra inches or so after he got snipped.

Unfortunately, I didn't say then what instead started running through my mind -- namely the children's rhyme that was adapted by some wag to deal with ball-dropping. To whit:

Do your balls hang low?
Do they wiggle to and fro?
Can you tie them in a knot?
Can you tie them in a bow?

And so on and so forth. I hope that writing that out will help clear the rhyme from my head so I can get back to humming the theme for Space: 1999 as soon as possible.

Speaking of balls, though, I really do wonder about that AC/DC song about balls -- you know, the one with the refrain "But I've got the biggest balls of them all!" Sure, balls would be one of those words with multiple meanings that allows for a sexually punning song to be played on a radio station without being censored. But while 'balls' is often used to mean 'courage' or 'guts', there's never been much sexual competitiveness attached to having gigantic balls.

Indeed, above a certain size they're going to present problems in both sexual and daily life, especially in the latter case when you're wearing shorts. Or if you've already got that veiny mass that's commonly referred to as 'spaghetti balls.' There's a very limited pool of sexual partners who get off on spaghetti balls -- there are more fetishists for actual spaghetti, for instance.

In short, it's a stupid song that stops being funny once you realize that big balls are not going to get you any prizes except from a fairly limited pool of Ball Fetishists.
Everyone knows that the real place where size matters is in the fingers and thumb that are used to form The Shocker.

Battlestar Galactica: "Daybreak" (Series Finale)
All in all, a pretty good series finale, especially given how strident and cruddy long stretches of Season 3 and the first half of Season 4 were. The second half of season 4 comprised what amounted to a 12 hour episode, bringing to mind Ron Moore and Company's ten-episode concluding arc on Deep Space 9. That arc also involved Higher Beings of Great Power interfering with humanity, the ascension of a major character to a higher plane of existence and a really long space battle sequence. Of course, so does every other science fiction property ever broadcast on TV.

The last half-hour pretty much goes the 2001 route, and I think there's a shot quoting a shot during the 'springtime of Earth' sequence in that movie. While the series pretty much sticks with a religious spin on things (ie. God, who apparently "doesn't like to be called that", is up to something), God, as we all know, is just another name for an extremely powerful Energy Being. And humanity today has Cylon and human DNA thanks to Hera and, I'd assume, at least a few other Colonial survivors.

Our last fifteen minutes with the main characters went with the mostly elegaic tone of everything from the end of The Lord of the Rings to "Sleeping in Light", the last episode of Babylon 5. I think this mostly worked, though I also think that at least a few Colonials might have asked for a ship to at least puddle around the Solar System with. Or the galaxy.

The point at which the crippled Galactica went sailing past the Moon into view of 'our' Earth, with the familiar continents, made for a nice 'Enh?' moment. I'm sure a lot of people are carefully parsing the episodes in which 'Real Earth' appeared to see if we ever got a good look at its continents. According to Ron Moore, the answer is 'no.'

Also according to Ron Moore, they edited the Nuking the Cylon Colony sequence a bit too close to the bone, thus not making it clear that the nukes destabilize the Colony and ultimately send it into the black hole, ending the menace of the Cavill-led Cylons forever. This and a few other things will apparently be clearer on the DVD, where "Daybreak" is supposed to run an additional 20 minutes or so.

As science-fiction-and-fantasy finales go, this was a pretty good job. I don't think it quite had the oomph of "Sleeping in Light" or the hell-bent-for-leather, everything-and-the-kitchen-sink overload of the four-hour Farscape finale, but it was certainly better than anything the Star Trek series mounted with the exception of TNG's "All Good Things...", which Ron Moore also worked on. And while the closing moments suggest that the cycle may not be broken, Apollo's decision did buy (based on the previous destructive iterations of humanity) an extra 148,000 years or so. Which isn't pocket change. Well, except in relation to the duration of the universe. But in human terms, that's a lot of extra meatballs.

And now there is nothing to do on Friday nights except go out and get drunk.

Crisis on Multiple Earths: The Team-ups: Vol. 2 by John Broome, Gardner Fox, Mike Friedrich, Gil Kane, Murphy Anderson, Carmine Infantino and Neal Adams.

Collecting both Earth-2 and Earth-1/Earth-2 DC team-ups from the 1960's, this is a pretty enjoyable collection. Tops on the list is a nice piece of early Neal Adams DC work on the Spectre, from the days when the Spectre was a benevolent cosmic guardian taking on the sort of cosmic, mystical cases that Doctor Strange handled over at Marvel and not a kill-crazy Wrath of God-guy.

Perhaps more importantly, this collection contains what may be the single most bizarre scenario for a supervillain escape in comic-book history. Let's just say it involves Earth-1 Green Lantern foe Sinestro possessing a car, running a criminal gang with the talking car, and, um, well, that's just the first ten pages.

We also get a lot of Gil Kane work in colour and a cameo appearance by the Earth-2 Atom's (the original Golden Age Atom who can't shrink but is just really short) Atom-car. Or maybe it's the Atomobile.

Continuity-wise, I think it's time we retconned the Golden Age Dollman into the Golden Age Atom and vice versa because the Golden Age Atom is the lamest Golden Age hero of them all. He's a short guy who fights well! Even giving him weird atomic strength several years into his career doesn't change the fact that he seems more like one of the masked avengers who dies after getting his cape stuck in a door in Watchmen then some sort of crimebusting threat.

The Silver Age Atom remains awesome, however. Never has male shrinkage been so heroic.

Milk (2008) directed by Gus Van Sant, starring Sean Penn, James Franco, Josh Brolin and Emile Hirsch: The structure and dictates of a biopic seem to agree as much with Van Sant as they did with Spike Lee 16 years ago when Lee directed Malcolm X -- Van Sant's occasional directorial excesses and digressions are reined in by the need to tell the story of Harvey Milk, and the result is a self-assured, accessible film with what I think is the best showcase of great American acting we're going to get out of 2008.

For the purposes of the film, Milk's life begins at 40, when he meets Franco, comes out of the closet and eventually abandons New York for San Francisco, where Milk gravitates towards being a community activist and, in 1977, the first openly gay man elected to a major office in the USA, as he wins a city supervisor seat. Along the way, he fights for gay rights, but he also campaigns as a tireless advocate for the rights of everyone whom mainstream society tries to ignore -- senior citizens, African-Americans, Hispanics, etc. Milk's political highpoint comes as he helps lead the opposition to a state-wide proposition that would see all gay and lesbian teachers fired from their jobs, along with anyone who supports gays and lesbians.

This is a profoundly affecting film that does a great job of explaining the context of the times -- the 1970's -- and of San Francisco's gay community. Sean Penn is fantastic in the role of Harvey Milk, eliminating pretty much everything we think we know about Sean Penn except for what he looks like. James Franco, Emile Hirsch and Josh Brolin are also terrific in their supporting roles, perhaps none moreso than Brolin, who's the epitome of squirmy self-loathing hidden beneath an All-American exterior as Milk's assassin. If there was a better movie made this year, I have yet to see it.
 
Fever Pitch (1992) by Nick Hornby: This is a terrific, terrifically funny book about sports, maybe one of the ten or twenty best ever written. Hornby delineates his relationship with soccer in general and Arsenal in particular over the course of a quarter-century of being a fan. On a really good day, I tolerate soccer, but Hornby's anecdotes and theories about what it is to be a sports fan are so funny and spot-on that any fan of any team in any sport is probably going to see a lot of himself or herself in this book. That this non-fiction book was made into a fictional movie about baseball starring Jimmy Fallon and Drew Barrymore must stand as one of the truly bizarre Hollywood adaptation moments of all time. If you're not a fan of any sports team, then Hornby's reminiscences may help you to understand why someone you know and/or love can live and die with the fortunes of the New England Patriots or the Philadelphia Flyers.
 
The Colour out of Time by Michael Shea (1984): Shea is one of those rare bird fantasy writers whose greatness would be more assured if he was more prolific. But, you do what you can with what he's published, and his Nifft the Lean and In Yana, the Touch of Undying stand as two of the best fantasy novels of the late 20th century. Here, Shea writes a sequel to H.P. Lovecraft's 1920's horror classic "The Colour Out of Space", setting it in the 1980's. Shea's homage to Lovecraft's prose style is pitch perfect, as is his choice of protagonists, three extremely intelligent 60-somethings who find themselves as the only line of defense between a malign alien presence and Earth (Lovecraft used similar old-but-capable protagonists in "The Dunwich Horror" and "The Whisperer in Darkness", to name but two).

This is a jolly little novel, shot through with hints of Algernon Blackwood and Arthur Machen as well as Lovecraft, and it would make a great movie. And as one could read the whole thing as an allegory about safe drinking water, it's also timely and relevant. OK, I'm half-joking with that last, but still...
 
Covenant by John Everson: A sporadically interesting horror novel from a relatively new talent, Covenant goes a little heavy on the sexual violence for my taste but manages to pull enough interesting rabbits out of the worn 'Cursed town' concept to get me to read the sequel when it comes out this summer. Everson's metaphors get a bit wonky at times, but overall the writing is fairly solid, and a cut above the blandness of Douglas Clegg or Bentley Little.

In a small East Coast town, apparent suicides keep happening on the same day in the same place -- below the spire of rock that towers over the town, and which once supported a lighthouse. A young reporter new to town, bored with covering Strawberry Socials and check presentations, stumbles upon this suicide string, something which no one in town will acknowledge as a fact and which several people warn him away from investigating. Does a demonic presence have some sort of claim on the town, or is everything just a big coincidence? Well, it's a horror novel, so I'll let you figure out which way this is gonna go. A warning to the sensitive: If you really dislike rape scenes in novels, no matter how justified by the events of the novel, do not read this novel.

Seriously.

Teams favoured by Vegas to win by between 6 and 7 1/2 points are now 13-1 in Super Bowls.

Three of the Pittsburgh Steelers' record six Super Bowl victories have come by 4 points each.

Pittsburgh has now played three of the four teams from the current NFC West Division in the Super Bowl (the Rams, the Cardinals and the Seahawks). The only NFC West team the Steelers haven't played in a Super Bowl is San Francisco, the one with the most Super Bowl appearances (5) and most Super Bowl wins (5) in that division.

Both 9-7 teams to play in Super Bowls, the Cardinals and Rams, are in the NFC West; Pittsburgh beat both of them in their Super Bowl appearances.

Pittsburgh's punter in Super Bowl 43 was Canadian; Arizona's was Australian.

By average points per game in the regular season, Pittsburgh is the 7th worst offense to ever win a Super Bowl.

Three of the six wide receivers to win Super Bowl MVP honours are now Pittsburgh Steelers (Lynn Swann, Hines Ward and Santonio Holmes).