Good news all of you Whedonites, Dollhouse has been renewed for a second season!  I, for one, could not be more excited.  The show was really hitting a great stride towards the second half of the first season, and everyone I talked to was enjoying it.  Joss reacts to the news of his show being renewed over at The Live Feed.

In other news, Chuck has also been renewed for another season.  I do not watch this show, but I know that my counterpart does so I shall post the news here as well.  I watched the first season on DVD, and enjoyed some episodes very much, but they were too few and far between for me to really get into the show.

Crossing over 270 on Cemetery Road yesterday I noticed a backup in the eastbound lanes that was kind of funny (which of course tells you what direction I was going). As if the just-after-5 traffic isn’t bad enough at every intersection with ramps to the outerbelt, a family of geese decided 5:10 was the ideal time to chug across from the grassy median to the pond behind Damon’s. At first I saw only the lead goose and thought “I hope that SUV hits that stupid goose,” and then I noticed all the puffball babies and felt like the worst person on earth.

How can it be that the baby version of a useless, hateful thing like a Canadian Goose is so doggone cute? And how is it I could grow up on a farm and remain such a wimp-bag where cutesy animals are concerned?

Last weekend I “met” my cousin’s 4-H pig for the year. We’ll not even go into how my brain justifies loving both the personality and the flavor of a pig. I’d be equally useless as an exterminator or as a PETA activist.

For all her fresh and wonderful big government positions, Nancy Pelosi is apparently too dumb for the standard political hedging. I’ll not pretend this is a habit unique to the Democrats of the past decade, but the example of the Iraq war comes to mind: leading Democrats had heaps of fun talking about the threat of Saddam, and the war resolution easily passed both houses of Congress. But, when it became more politically important to protect “our children” from being sent to war, the only reasons for war were Bush’s blood-lust and avarice.

So, too, with “torture.” When briefed on techniques the CIA felt were important to get information from known terrorists, Nancy Pelosi either saw the prudence of letting them carry on as intended, or was too baked to know what was happening around her. Yet Pelosi was at the forefront when the media decided waterboarding was a fate worse than death and it was time for the Warm And Fuzzy Party to hop aboard the latest circuit of the Dubya hate train.

The irreplaceable Andy McCarthy wrote on the topic earlier this evening,

Unless a victim is killed by torture such that the death penalty comes into play (which is not alleged here), American law regards conspiracy to commit torture as something exactly as serious, punished exactly as severely, as actual torture. As it happens, I don’t think waterboarding as administered by the CIA was torture. But Pelosi says she does. If that’s where you’re coming from, how do you get off the hook by saying you only knew about a plan to torture but not actual torture?

What Representative Pelosi is doing here is digging herself a deeper and deeper hole. The last thing Team Obama needs right now is a foreign policy distraction from their glorious plans to fix all aspects of American business and culture while tending to the every need of the American poor!

Just a quick happy Mother’s Day to all of the mothers reading (which I could only assume is a very small number). Enjoy your day!

Coffing has mentioned Dollhouse a couple of times before - once before the series started, and again when it started getting good. The late upswing continued through tonight’s season (and series?) finale. If you never gave the show a chance, put the season 1 DVD on your list! If you watched at the beginning of the season and got bored… refer to the second half of the preceding sentence.

At first it seemed like Fox was going to pull another Firefly on Joss. The first several episodes had some promising characters, but nothing all that intriguing going on. Then came the rumors that Alan Tudyk would be making an appearance. And about halfway through the season, the awesomeness ensued.

I’m not sure Joss Whedon and Alan Tudyk can work on something together without it being spectacular. Alan Tudyk is so good at what he does. Do you need someone hilarious? Done. Someone crazy? Sure. Someone hilarious AND crazy? Look no further:

We’re not bluffing! –I’m bluffing –But the rest of us mean business!

I hope Dollhouse gets the second season that Fox screwed Firefly out of. The crew at TV by the Numbers do not seem optimistic. If you’d like to lose some faith in humanity, and watching the evening news doesn’t cut it, take a look at this graph on James Hibbard’s site. Note how Dollhouse’s ratings drop in inverse proportion to the show’s level of face-rocking goodness.

What the deuce is happening on the OSU campus this evening? Around 7:30 as I was walking to the Northwest Garage from central campus, I narrowly avoided stepping off the curb in front of a Honda racing the wrong direction down Neil Avenue, red and blues flashing inside his windshield. At the same time I noticed two police cruisers sitting on the sidewalk near the Northwest Garage exit, lights on.

In a moment the police were running back to their cars… the law-Honda zipped off of Neil onto the sidewalk and up to Woodruff; one of the cruisers cut past the architecture building to Woodruff by way of the sidewalk; the second cruiser went down Ives Dr. towards Tuttle Park Pl. Another moment later and there was a cruiser passing in front of Fisher Hall on the sidewalk, headed west. Weird. So what important or crazy person (or both, maybe) is at The Blackwell?

I sat in the car for a few minutes finishing a phone conversation with mom, and got out of the garage and onto Tuttle Park Place without any trouble. There were three cruisers in front of The Blackwell when I turned left onto Woody Hayes, but traffic on Tuttle Park Place seemed to be passing uninhibited. Presumably whatever was happening was not a bomb scare, or the police would be doing less swarming and more cordoning.

There were two cruisers with an SUV pulled over on Kenny Rd. in front of Fisher Commons. Related catastrophe? Either the situation is nothing terribly important, or NBC4i.com, Dispatch.com, and 10tv.com are all doing their jobs badly today…

[Update: The Lantern reports that it was an "aggressive panhandler" who ran from the police. Boy was that a lot of heat for an aggressive panhandler.]

From the Associated Press:

The United Auto Workers union would appear to be the big winner in the Chrysler bankruptcy saga, having exercised its considerable political muscle to win a 55 percent stake in the country’s third-largest automaker.

You win …a company that you’ve helped run into the ground. I so wish President Bush had been a less compassionate Conservative and let the UAW’s house tumble around them. Sure, the union bosses wouldn’t be the ones getting screwed, but a few more years’ union dues later and most of the hourly employees will be out of work anyway. The lifeline Bush threw was long enough that now President Obama gets to act tough about saving us money while arranging juicy deals for the UAW and framing poor fuel economy as the reason for all woes.

On the bright side, the German and Japanese carmakers can hire more American workers using all the advertising money they no longer need to spend. With 2/3 of domestic manufacturers run by the unions and the federal government, competition won’t exactly be at an all-time high.

The Heritage Foundation noted the UAW’s shortsightedness… in 2006:

The slow demise of General Motors (GM) is visibly intertwined with the inefficient labor contracts that the United Auto Workers (UAW) secured in decades past. Regular media stories showcasing problems at GM and Delphi send a potent signal to other U.S. workers that big labor’s ideal business model is a bust.

Then again, who knows. Maybe after the Democrats have tackled universal healthcare they can implement a program where the wealthiest 2% pay another tiny slice of their pie so every American gets a new Government Motors car every couple years. Sounds crazy, but the union’s earned it! The UAW has paid over $2,000,000 to Democratic candidates in each of the last ten election cycles.

From the original AP story:

The UAW started making concessions during 2007 contract negotiations and that helped in negotiating the stakes they stand to gain now. At the time, both GM and Chrysler had huge labor cost disadvantages compared with Japanese automakers, mainly because they have far more retirees and had agreed to pay their health care bills.

For GM, the health care tab is projected to total $46.7 billion over the lives of about 350,000 retirees and spouses. At Chrysler, it’s $10.9 billion for around 82,000 retirees.

The UAW pushed GM and Chrysler towards bankruptcy to score political points and maintain control of their constituents by “guaranteeing” unsustainable benefits. Hmm…. why does that sound so familiar?