Monday various

  • The Tea Party is a movement without a compass? Who could have guessed?

    In an unruly, unpredictable and chaotic election year, no group has asserted its presence and demanded to be heard more forcefully than the tea party. The grass-roots movement that was spawned with a rant has gone on to upend the existing political order, reshaping the debate in Washington, defeating a number of prominent lawmakers and elevating a fresh cast of conservative stars.

    But a new Washington Post canvass of hundreds of local tea party groups reveals a different sort of organization, one that is not so much a movement as a disparate band of vaguely connected gatherings that do surprisingly little to engage in the political process. [via]

  • Astronaut Uses Foursquare to Check In To Space Station. Oh noes! Does this mean one of his followers is going to use this opportunity to rob NASA? [via]
  • Can we just stop with the Battlestar Galactica spin-offs for a while? Personally, I like what I’ve seen of Caprica — just a handful of episodes, but then, I never did finish watching the original Ron Moore series — but with this new series planned to “take place 10 years into the first Cylon war,” I can’t think of another sci-fi universe that’s been this over-explored. Outside, say, of Dune.
  • An angry Leonard Nimoy writes to Gene Roddenberry in 1976. It’s funny, today blooper reels are pretty much par for the course on any television DVD set, but I can see Nimoy’s point.
  • And finally, could the world be heading towards a frightful kimchi shortage? [via]