Remember when I told you that Baby Copy would be the funniest thing you saw all week? Lies! Vicious lies!

I give you, the entire plot of Battlestar Galactica, in 2 minutes and 40 seconds. In clay.

That. Just. Happened.

Maybe my hi-def DVD decision is being made for me? Remember Sony’s much ballyhooed price drop from a few days ago? They were going to cut $100 off of their 60 gig model (making it only $499) while they simultaneously introduced an 80 gig model for $599. Astute observers noted at the time, that this didn’t really amount to much of a price drop, since when the PS3 originally went on sale, it offered a less-spiffy model at $499, which they subsequently discontinued. All this did was re-establish a $499 model.

Except that they didn’t!!!

Sony now announces, days after their “price-drop” announcement, that, come to think of it, they’re just going to discontinue the $499 60 gig model. Leaving them with only the $599 80 gig.

Which makes this less of price cut and more of a short-term clearance sale.

Seriously, who’s running this company? Because this is Exhibit 3,794 as to why corporate CEOs are criminally overpaid.

Galley Friend Dean Barnett has a very sweet and moving ode to Tom Watson, calling him the best player to come along between Tiger and Jack. He means in golf.

I kid! Watson may be something, I wouldn’t know. My experience with golf pretty much ended after my second summer working as a caddy at the local country club. (A club, I might add, that was all Judge Smails and no Ty Webb.) But I was struck that the occasion for Dean’s paean was Watson nearly winning the U.S. Senior Open, which Dean calls a significant tournament. I’m sure Dean’s right, and that it is. Which is one more reason why I hate–and I don’t use the word lightly–hate golf.

Golfers have the longest athletic life of any professional athletes. (NB: I will not include race car drivers. Period.) They can play in something near top form for 20 years, easily. Nicklaus is Nicklaus, but he won a major at age 46. This isn’t like Nolan Ryan pitching in the Bigs or Jimmy Connors making a long-shot run at the U.S. Open around the ages of 40. This is being closer to 50 and actually being capable of being an individual champion.

So it’s a little strange that we would invent an old-timers tour for a bunch of guys who have already gotten to play their sports professionally longer than any other athletes. Particularly when no other serious sport has a has-been league.

Steve Czaban insists that golfers are the most coddled athletes in pro sports. It sure seems like it to me, if for no other reason than this: These guys can compete for forever and even when they eventually “retire,” they never have to go away. There’s still a league willing to throw money at them and even concoct pretend “majors.”

The PGA’s senior tour began in 1980, I think, and in a way, it’s a perfect symbol of Boomer self-entitlement. Any sport that has room for that kind of nonsense is perilously close to not being much of a sport at all.

So what are your thoughts on the matter? I’ve been hard on Sony for a long while about their quest to assure the success of Blu-Ray even at the cost of their game division. Now I’m considering taking the plunge myself and getting a hi-def DVD player. So what should I get? The evidence is contradictory.

Let’s start with the raw numbers. 1.3 million Blu-Ray machines have been sold, versus only 150,000 HD-DVD machines. However, of those 1.3 million Blu-Rays, 1.2 million have been PS3’s. So of the stand-alone boxes, the two systems are very close. You can see how close, exactly, by looking at the number of discs of each format which have been sold: Blu-Ray has the slight edge with 1.5 million units versus 1.2 million for HD-DVD. Which suggests that the PS3’s are not being used very often as DVD consoles, meaning that the 1.3 million Blu-Ray player number isn’t as important as it might seem.

Then there’s price. On both lines, the price is falling. But Blu-Ray is still significantly more expensive. $499 seems to be about as low as they go, whereas you can find a second-gen HD-DVD player for about $220. So far, most of this seems to point towards HD-DVD.

That said, Toshiba is pulling back their expectations on sales numbers and this essay calling the fight in favor of Blu-Ray is interesting, if not dispositive. The nub of the argument is that looking at the top movies of 2007 so far, 52% of them will be exclusive to Blu-Ray, 10% will be exclusive to HD-DVD, and 37% will come to both formats. Looking at the top 100 movies of 2006, the numbers are even more in favor of Blu-Ray: 60% were exclusive to that format.

That’s a big deal. But the question becomes, will the content drive the medium, or the price? I’m not sure. Ordinarily I would lean toward content, but in this case “exclusive” doesn’t really mean exclusive, since you can buy the movie on regular DVD and upconvert, which I would think allows consumers to be more sensitive to price. But maybe I’m wrong.

Anyway, all of this points to waiting a while longer–unless you happen to need to buy a new DVD player now. Which I do. So, any thoughts? Do I stick with a normal upconverting player? Or take a chance on one of the other formats?

Really, I’m not anti-Sony in principle. In fact, I just bought a DVD player from them (I had to return it, because it didn’t work, but they handled the return pretty well) and I’m really wrestling with whether or not to take a flier on an HD-DVD or a Blu-Ray player. And it’s a close call, with merits to both sides.

But this report from Sony’s presentation at E3 is dispiriting:

[The Sony president] starts by giving us, gasp, numbers on the PS2.

Umm, when you open your showcase by boasting about how your previous-gen console is doing, that isn’t going to inspire confidence.

‘Nuff said.

As a child, I often imagined that everything interesting in the world happened in Australia. I was right:

CANBERRA, Australia – One of the largest giant squid ever found has washed up on a remote Australian beach, sparking a race against time by scientists to examine the rarely seen deep-ocean creature.

The squid, the mantle or main body of which measured 6.5 feet-long, was found by a walker late on Tuesday on Ocean Beach, near Strahan, on the western coast of island state Tasmania.

“It’s a whopper,” Tasmanian Museum senior curator Genefor Walker-Smith told local media on Wednesday. “The main mantle is about one meter across and its total length is about eight meters.”

Scientists would take samples from the creature, identified by state parks officials as an Architeuthis, which can grow to more than 33 feet in length and weigh more than 606 pounds. The Tasmanian animal weighed more than 500 pounds, Pemberton said.

Now that the magic of cinema has given us the AC-130 in action, isn’t it time we get to see giant squid vs. sperm whale?

In Slate, Dana Stevens has this to say about Daniel Radcliffe:

Radcliffe is a notoriously serious and hardworking actor—in his spare time between Potter movies, he’s not clubbing with Lindsay Lohan but appearing as the tormented lead in the West End production of Equus. At times, that work ethic gets in his way . . .

Really? Maybe he is notoriously hardworking and serious and I just don’t know about it. From what I can tell, since being cast as Harry Potter six years ago, he’s appeared in a 30-minute episode of Extras, an independent film called December Boys and has been in two stage productions–as a special guest in The Play What I Wrote and as a lead in Equus. This is nothing to be ashamed of, but I don’t know that it calls to mind a fellow obsessed with the work.

As for his extra-curriculars, it’s overstating things, I think, to suggest that he’s been the anti-Lohan. To wit:

‘Harry Potter’ star Daniel Radcliffe is happy to have sex with girls who are only interested in him because of his fame.

The 17-year-old actor insists he is too young to settle down and is keen to take advantage of any groupies he has.

He said: “Girls who want to go out with me just because I’m famous has never been a problem. I’m 17. I don’t care.

“Obviously, if I wanted a deep and meaningful relationship then I wouldn’t want to be going out with somebody who is only with me because I’m an actor, but if you don’t a relationship like that then it’s fine.”

However, Daniel is adamant he wouldn’t stay with a girl who called him Harry during sex.

He said: “People do call me Harry. I once had a friend call me it by accident. If there’s another person in the room called Harry and somebody shouts their name I do respond slightly, which is embarrassing.

“But no one has ever said it in the throws of passion. That would be the end of that session. Go now!”