I was just visiting Digg and the first story on their front page had this title “How to respond to a racist joke“.

Without reading anything beyond that or clicking that link, the first thing that popped into my mind was: “erm, laugh?”.

Come on people. While there are a lot of racist jokes out there, only a very small percentage are meant with ill purpose. Most of them are just genuinely funny. So, just freaking laugh. There is no “special pre-calculated response” you need to have to a ‘racist’ joke, even if the joke is all about your own race/nation. By laughing with it is the only way you can make things better, not worse. What are people made up these days from? Melting sugar?

Jeez.

Update: Read the comments for some more explanation.

BTW, personally, I am more of a prank person rather than a sick-joke person. For example, last year, I had our neighbor of our Greek home on IM and at the same time I was speaking to my mother on the phone who she was sitting at her patio. I could tell her everything she was doing, and she couldn’t understand how this was possible. She was astonished. I kept telling her “I see you via satellite” and she believed it. She kept looking at the sky! Little did she know of the neighbor.

Now that the next 4 Cylon models were revealed at the finale of Battlestar Galactica’s Season 3, there is only 1 model remain to be revealed. My theory is (and that’s just a theory) that the last model is Gaius Baltar.

Of course, Baltar is the No1 person under suspicion by the fans to be a Cylon. It would be too obvious, right? Well, that’s true, but on the other hand, it would not make any sense for anyone else to be a Cylon. If the writers pull a stunt and introduce as a 12th Cylon someone like the president, or the admiral, or Lee, or Starbuck, it just wouldn’t make much sense and it would be way too far fetched.

You see, there are some pointers that Baltar is the last Cylon:
– He sees No6 out of thin air. Like the MS Word “clippy” to help him along his destiny.
– No6 told Baltar that Boomer’s child would be “their” child, but this was just an allegory.
– D’Anna asked for his forgiveness when she saw the face of the last Cylon. “I didn’t know it was you”, she said, and Baltar was the only human she interacted so much with.
– He is a narcissist. It is in fact a ‘justified’ reason to be one when you deep inside you know that you are the final model.
– He is deeply flawed in many other ways. It is the perfect excuse for redemption. I believe that Baltar might be saving everyone at the long end, by making the “right” choice for the humans, and at the same time, betraying his true Cylon nature, just like Cylons betrayed the humans. He would be the perfect example to show the Cylons that creations are not necessarily better than the creators — and hence learning their lesson.

Maybe the “Baltar is too obvious of a choice” is the whole trick anyway. Everyone has him under suspicion, and because of that no one believes that the writers will pick him as a Cylon. And maybe that’s exactly why he will be introduced as the last Cylon.

My second choice would be Cally, for reasons I won’t explain here because it would be too much of a spoiler for things we know so far.