The trailer for the final BSG season is here.

Galley Friend S.B. sends in this update on Sony’s attempt to kill the PS3 just in time for me to buy one:

So here we are, sitting smack dab in the middle of the worst economy since Jimmy Carter; salaries are cratering, unemployment is spiking, deflation plagues the land, business are worried that a poor Christmas is going to sink them. . . so what does Sony do?

Check out your Best Buy circular (you can find it on the Best Buy website). They unveil a new version of the PS3 . . . that’s $100 more expensive! Oh sure, it comes with “Uncharted: Drake’s Magically Gay Adventure” or whatever that game is called, and 80 GB more hard drive space. Because I’m pretty sure that’s what’s keeping people away from the PS3: “Not enough hard drive space!” I hear the masses cry.

Seriously: I’m halfway convinced that Sony wants Blu-ray to fail at this point. XBox 360 drops their price by $100, the Nintendo Wii remains the most popular system in the land, and PS3 jacks up their price for the holidays? Jesus Christ.

A reliable source tells me that the Imax sequences on the Blu-ray edition are presented in 1.78:1 and the rest of the film is presented in 2.4:1.

Just in case you were curious.

So Andy Reid benched Donovan McNabb at half today against Baltimore. After the game, he refused to name the next game’s starter. These are acts of coaching malpractice and Reid should lose his job–perhaps tomorrow, but certainly at the end of the season. Let’s give a quick rundown:

* McNabb was having a hideous game. He threw 2 int’s and coughed up a fumble. Yet the Eagles trailed only 10-7. McNabb’s replacement, Kevin Kolb, threw a couple picks of his own and didn’t add any points to the scoreboard.

* Let’s grant some premises that I don’t think are necessarily true, but we’ll do them just for argument’s sake. Let’s say that McNabb is done, that he either can’t play anymore or can’t play effectively as an Eagle. Let’s say that Kolb is a promising young QB. Let’s say that the Eagles are scrapping to get a playoff spot.

Even if you grant all of that, the decision to bench McNabb is still insane. You don’t destroy the value of a franchise player by publicly benching him in the middle of a game. You don’t start a new young quarterback in the middle of a game against a defense as vicious as the Ravens. And you don’t switch horses on a four-day week–the Eagles have to play Arizona on Thursday.

* But of course, most of those assumptions are ridiculous. Kolb is not a starting NFL quarterback. He’s a young Doug Pederson. And the Eagles have no chance–zero–of making the playoffs this season.

* Which leaves McNabb. Is he no longer able to be effective? I don’t know. I suspect that no matter what, he’d be more effective than Kolb. What I do know is that by benching McNabb you assure that he can’t come back as a permanent fixture on the team and that he’ll have no value whatsoever on the trading block at the end of the season.

* So why in the world would Reid bench McNabb? Simple: Because it’s now clear that Reid desperately wants to keep his job. If he’s going to convince Jeff Lurie to keep him despite the team’s recent poor campaigns, he has to have a scapegoat. And that’s what today’s benching of McNabb was, pure and simple: A blatant, pathetic attempt to blame a player for the team’s failure in order to hold on to his own job. It would be bad enough, except that in so doing, Reid also showed that he’s willing to hurt the medium-term future of the franchise in order to cling to his post.

Reid, it’s now clear, is a cancer. The Eagles will never win a championship with him at the helm. He must go.

PS: For whatever it’s worth, the great Phil Sheridan makes a persuasive case that whatever is wrong with McNabb is Reid’s fault to begin with:

Anyone could see McNabb played poorly in this game. What is debatable is how this very talented, very successful quarterback got to this point. The short answer from here: He has been ground down by a coach who refuses to run the ball, who seldom keeps extra blockers in to protect him the way other elite quarterbacks are protected and who, with one notable exception, has insisted upon stocking his team with the most mediocre receivers available.

The offensive line is in marked decline. Brian Westbrook is at half speed due to injury. The play calling is hilariously bad. The tight end situation is incomprehensible.

It seems the Guns n’ Roses album Chinese Democracy is finally going to come out, first on myspace, then at Best Buy on November 23. But if none of the musicians, other than Axl Rose, are in the band, can it still really be Guns n’ Roses? When the remnants of Talking Heads reformed without David Byrne, they could not call themselves Talking Heads. When Robert Plant and Jimmy Page performed, weren’t they the Honeydrippers (2 out of 4)? Yet INXS and Van Halen went on (though not successfully) without their lead singers and they didn’t change their names. So how is it that GNR is still GNR?

So the xBox 360 unveils its new OS, which includes Netflix streaming HD movies. And suddenly Sony films are no longer available for streaming on Netflix–at least to the xBox.

Galley Friend A.W. just turned me on to a pretty neat new site called Feed Rinse. If you’re into RSS feeds, Feed Rinse allows you to filter your feeds out, by keyword or author. It would allow you, for instance, to get only Jenny posts from IDLYTW. Perhaps there are other group blogs you might want to filter.

I’ll just leave it at that. Enjoy.

So Fox is going to do another X-Men installment, but not with the mutants we know and love. They’ve hired Josh Schwartz of Gossip Girl to write X-Men First Class.

All the kids love Gossip Girl, but I’m afraid I’ve never caught the show. Is it Dawson’s or The OC or Veronica Mars, or something else altogether?