Javier’s unofficial official Blog

After watching the latest episode of Rome, it took a while to get over all of the sodomy and bestiality references to a point where I actually felt comfortable contemplating all that transpired in a subjective manner. I know they’re trying to recreate Rome in a very real and authentic manner, but there are just some aspects of Roman life that I’d rather just get hints at as opposed to seeing the acts either in progress or just the beginning of the act.

Now on to commentaries. As always, there are 2 major story lines to follow

1. The state of the Republic
2. The state of the Plebian affairs of Vorenus and Pullo

Again we see the parallels between the state of Vorenus’ personal life and the Republic. Vorenus is having such a hard time psychologically with the death of Naobi, Caesar, and assumed death of his children that he is being self destructive in every way imaginable. He reaches a new low point after his fight with Pullo as he lies on the floor in the fetal position saying “don’t touch me.” He trusts no one anymore and at this point is scared to have anyone else approach him for intimate contact–probably due to fear of hurting other people as well. The man really is insane in the membrane. Which leads to the state of the Republic. Cicero in his finest passive aggressive move to date sends Marc Antony a letter uncovering all of the maladies that ail Antony as a leader. The poor reader of the letter became the release mechanism for Antony. The Republic is in shambles again on the brink of war. Civil War is about as low as any State can get, and yet again Vorenus reaches a new low as the Republic reaches another low point in its history. The parallels are interesting and they continue with the scene in which Vorenus tells Pullo never to question his authority.  That scene plays awfully similar to the first season episode where Caesar tells Marc Antony never to question his judgment in front of the enemy ever again. There is hope for Vorenus (ad potentially the Republic if the parallels continue) as Pullo has set off to find the children.
Finally we have Atia being poisoned by Servilia’s mole. I didn’t figure the new slave boy was one of Servilia’s men, but I should have guessed from the beginning. The previews for next week’s episode show Servilia being tortured, so this Soap Opera tug of war between the two ladies surely has not seen its conclusion. Can’t wait to see how sick Atia will become after the poisoning.

It also seems a lot of posters on the Bulletin board are complaining about the decline in the quality of the shows for the second season. Personally, I feel the dialog was much better in the first season with all of Pullo’s off the wall comments, but as a whole the season has been entertaining and suspenseful-attributes that are welcomed in television. I personally think most fans are frustrated knowing the show is a lame duck show and just want to see more of the type of material of which they have fond memories from the first season. The light-hearted humor of Pullo was something I looked forward to during the first season, but haven’t seen as much the second season. Instead it’s been Eirene’s random comments (”you shave, then we kiss”, “what you gonna put in the letter? Sorry, I no f*** your wife?”) that have provided the comic relief. If everyone just sat back and watched the show and didn’t concentrate on the fact that these are the last few episodes we’ll ever see, then maybe the entire experience would be better.

Until next week.

After playing competitively against a bunch of ranked opponents, Stanford pulled off an upset that no one in the nation can ignore. Sweeping the Washington schools wasn’t enough to get some poll love, but dominating USC and coming back from 17 to beat a very solid UCLA team will surely raise eyebrows even for those lame east coasters that go to sleep and ignore all results of the west coast games.

I’m very impressed with the development of this team. During the first half, it felt like the Cardinal would get blown out as UCLA rather easily built a 17 point lead. But a funny thing happened as the first half ended, some walk-on named Brown nailed a 3 pointer to cap a 5-0 spurt that cut the lead to 12 as the teams headed into the locker room. Then the coaching staff actually made an adjustment and UCLA’s defense wasn’t as effective in the second half.

Let’s see where this team premieres in the rankings tomorrow. USC premiered as #25, a solid thumping of the #25 and a solid come from behind victory against the #3 team deserves at least a #23 ranking, no? I am slightly biased, but I could have suggested an initial ranking of #15 just because I am so admittedly partial.

Peace Out.

Update: Coach’s poll voters are Dee-Dee-Dee’s while the AP poll has ‘em at 23.

All I can say is WOW!!! Yet again I watched another episode of the awesome HBO show Rome and was left wanting more. We all knew a physical confrontation between Octavian and Marc Antony was inevitable, but even as it’s happening I found myself thinking, “Oh Octavian, brains can only get you so far against brawn.” Octavian would be dead if not for his mom pleading for his life. Octavian always struck me to be rather Machiavellian, so it doesn’t surprise me that he goes against his mother’s wishes in order to achieve his ultimate goal-being ruler of Rome. That story line just keeps heating up and is only bound to get better. As an FYI, I think this may have been the final episode where we see Max Pirkis play Octavian. So mad props to the Egeria’s “Bull”.

In order to help establish peace in the Aventine, Antony let’s Vorenus redeem himself by in essence making him the Godfather of the lower Aventine. Vorenus is so foo-bar’ed he goes postal on the religious artifact that all the captains held in such high regard. The man who previously chastised Pullo for speaking ill of the Gods at Atia’s (when returning Octavian after freeing him from the Blue Spaniards) is now destroying religious artifacts and claiming to sodomize Gods. Holy Cow!!! That’s foo-bar’ed to the foo-bar’ed power. But that’s why we keep watching because the show never ceases to surprise.

Going back to the parallels that Rome always incorporates, I like the juxtaposition of Marc Antony bargaining with Cleopatra and Pullo interviewing potential employees for his new endeavor with Vorenus. They are functioning in polar opposites of the social structure, but they’re basically doing the same thing: trying to manipulate people into succumbing to the will of the “person in power.”

And finally, we now know that Vorenus’ children are in fact alive. Now we just need to think of how Vorenus will come to find them and perhaps lead him back from this dark path towards which he is headed.

My loyal and faithful hard drive of 8 years decided it’d had enough over the weekend. As I went to check the computer to see why neither the website nor my IMAP server were responding in a timely fashion, I was greeted by the all too familiar–yet cringe inducing–sound of a cylinder spinning and a needle bouncing back and forth. Too confirm my initial fears, the error message “unable to read /dev/hda” was consuming the entire monitor screen. Just for kicks I rebooted the machine to see what would happen, and of course the computer wouldn’t even start, instead complaining hardware failure.

So without a current backup, everything on that hard drive was lost–which included my INBOX. Luckily for me, sometime around list August or so, I had a moment of semi-sanity and ran the backup script for the web site. That coupled with the fact that MySQL was writing all of its data to a different hard drive, means the contents of the web site were salvaged. But if any of you out there read this and you sent me an e-mail message over the weekend, you’ll wanna resend it since it’s very likely it sitting on the dead hard never having been opened.

So I downloaded the Fedora Core 6 DVD iso, burned it onto a DVD, and installed the OS on a new hard drive while keeping the second hard drive that didn’t fail and contained my home directories and the MySQL data directory.

So backup your hard drives folks!!! It sucks losing data you take for granted in your computing lives.

Peace Out.

So Stanford sweeps the Washington (schools which were both ranked at the time) this past weekend and hardly gets any votes for the rankings!?!? The coaches poll threw them a bone, but the AP poll doesn’t even have them listed as one of those schools in the “others receiving votes” section.

Rome finally gave us a new episode.

Caesar is dead and the mighty “Republic” is in ruins yet again. Thanks to the brains of Octavian, the ill-prepared betrayers of Caesar didn’t get the dramatic “Thank You, saviors” they’d so eagerly anticipated. Instead they are viewed as murders of the most popular ruler of that generation. Not a good way to endear themselves to the “mob”. Caesar was a great character in the drama and the writer’s will hopefully replace his charismatic and engaging persona with an equal presence this season. Octavian appears to be growing some “cojones” this season and may provide a worthy alternate to Caesar’s displaced personality.

The writers have taken Mark Antony’s historical reputation as a womanizer and are showing it off in a rather crude and crass manner. Although his acts are rather deplorable as a human being, one can’t help but laugh as he refuses to rise from bed until he copulates. Maybe I need a sense of humor adjustment, but I couldn’t help laughing at the absurdity of that scene.

Finally we’re left contemplating the expedited fall of Lucious Vorenus. One minute he’s an all powerful Senator of Rome, then suddenly his wife is dead and children have gone missing. Seeing how Erastes Fulmen knew he was a dead man, it’s certainly possible he made up the part about the fate of Vorenus’ children just to spite Vorenus. Until I see the bodies or the passsing to the afterlife of the children, I leave open to the realm of possibility they were sold off to slavery and Vorenus may one day find them.

The interesting parallels of the series never cease to amaze, view Season 1 and notice how the relationship between Naobi and Vorenus seems to parallel Caesar’s quest to rule Rome. Both acend and reach a plateau and then come crashing to a deadly halt, all in unison.

Now let us ponder the reversal of roles between Titus Pullo and Vorenus. In Season 1, it was Vorenus jumping into the arena to rescue Pullo from imminent death. In the first episode of Season 2, Pullo pulls himself into the psychological arena of death that Vorneus has just entered and brings Vorenus out alive. If it weren’t for Pullo, it’s quite conceivable that Vorenus would’ve comited suicide. For all his brutishness, Pullo has got to rank up there with one of the best friends of all time. Keeping the secret, ensuring his friend’s marriage survives (hey, I’m not defending his qualities as a human being, just his qualities as a friend to Vorenus), and then seeing Vorenus through what is arguable the most difficult time of his life.

Vorenus appears to be transitioning from Senator to Godfather this season. Only time will tell, but I believe Michael Corleone probably learned all of his tricks from the original–Lucius Vorenus.

Can’t wait ’til next week’s episode.

Peace Out.

Well, it’s January and the Pac-10 basketball schedule is in full swing now. Looking at the standings, nationally ranked Washington is currently sitting “pretty” in 8th place with a 1-4 mark. Yikes!!! Thanks to my switch to DirecTV last year, I can now watch many of Stanford’s basketball games on the tube. (An unexpected side affect of getting the local FSN affiliate was that I needed to get all of the FSN signals at the same time.) Last night I tuned to FSN Northwest and caught the heavily biased broadcast of the game. After seeing them pull off 2 nail biters after choking down the stretch against Arizona and laying an enormous egg against Cal, the team is maturing very quickly. Pulling out nail biters is something the veteran teams normally do, and these young guns are doing a decent job of it. Of course it helps having a Senior guard in during crunch time (Fred Washington figured prominently down the stretch of their 2 nail biter victories).

Nonetheless, having two 7 footers in your lineup does you no good if you don’t have guards that can get them the ball. From what I’ve seen, the perimeter players aren’t very good at making post entry passes. The only ones who does a semi-decent job are Washington and Hill during one of the penetrate and dish efforts. The rest just sit at the 3 point line and pass the ball around the top as the other team’s zone defense sags down on the big guys denying the entry pass. I’ve seen this enough in the handful of games I’ve watched that the coaching staff must have noticed and should have done something to remedy the situation. Perhaps there isn’t enough confidence in the guards so they just tell ‘em to do the ol’ rotate the ball until you find an opening.

My impression of this team: Can finish as high as 4th in the Pac-10 or as low as 8th. They’re inconsistent and the Conference is tough. The last 2 games are encouraging, let’s see if they can keep it up going forward. NIT invitation will definitely come, but these guys are capable of being the last team from the Pac-10 to get an invitation to the Big Dance.
Peace Out.

My how I have eagerly anticipated the arrival of the new season of Rome. Now there’s the teaser caption about the first episode:

Passover (1/14/2007) Mark Antony makes plans to leave the city; Vorenus mourns his wife; Vorenus and Pullo learn that Erastes has abducted Vorenus’ children.

Followed by the tease for the next week:

Son of Hades (1/21/2007) Cleopatra arrives in Rome; Vorenus is ordered to assume Erastes’ captaincy; Octavian infuriates his mother and Mark Antony.

What exactly does Vorenus do to Erastes that requires Vorenus to assume Erastes’ captaincy? We don’t really know, but you can be assured it will be raw, exciting, and intense. A man so devoted to never losing his wife (remember he gave up “coitus” with Cleopatra because he loved her so much) is liable to go absolutely Captain Insane-O now that she’s actually gone. Then throw on top of that having his children kidnapped!!!! Pullo from Season 1 may be child’s play compared to the craziness Vorneus is about to unleash.

I’ve been waiting for over a year, my TiVo’s all set up to record the show on *both* tuners, ’cause there’s just no way I’m missing this, and neither should you.

So tune in this Sunday and watch my boys Pullo and Vorenus kick some major tuckus.

Peace Out.