Peter Graves was found dead in his home in California today. He was 83.

Born Peter Aurness in Minnesota, he was best known for his work as Jim Phelps on the long-running, and deservedly legendary spy series, “Mission: Impossible,” Graves was a long-time genre actor, with numerous appearances in SF shows and movies running the gamut from good to unbelievably awful.

Grrr. Is there anything worse than an episode where the audience is deliberately misled into thinking there’s real peril going on, only to find out that it’s all just a training exercise? Really, it’s just the worst bait-and-switch available.

The show’s ratings continue to rally, climbing back up to 1.5 million viewers last week. That’s the best they’ve been since the pilot! I don’t know what’s causing this, but it’ll be interesting to see if they can maintain this level of viewership for any length of time..

PLAY BY PLAY

Half a decade ago, I stumbled across mention of a fan film project called "Battlestar Galactica: The 14th Colony." Eventually, I found the trailer for the project, which revealed very little about it, but it did make it clear that it was a continuation of the 1978 Galactica, and probably a reaction to the RDM Galactica to some extent. The tag line was "Some Still Believe..." which certainly makes one think that, anyway.

There have been a number of huge space-related decisions starting with the Obama campaign, which have caused me a lot of concern, moments of anger, and some genuine disgust. Regular readers of our little blog here will know that I’m not a reactionary kind of guy. I don’t hate the other party simply because they’re the other party, I don’t generally attack them. I do occasionally tease ‘em and I’m pretty open in my confusion about their thought processes, which frequently seem self-contradictory to me. I’m not that guy. I believe in America, I believe in the Two-Party system, I believe that the system is generally self-regulating, and if either side goes too far, the people will vote the extremists out of office.

That said, I don’t know what - aside from anger - to make of this: