In a tweet today, filmmaker Michael D. Olmos announced that his brother Bodie will be running in the 2011 Honda LA Marathon/LA 5K/LA Roadrunners on March 20, raising money for the fight against cancer.

Bodie if you'll remember played Viper pilot Brendan "Hot Dog" Costanza in Battlestar Galactica and is the son of Edward James Olmos.

At his Active.com donations page, Bodie indicates that this is his first marathon and I'm only too happy to spread the word to you, my fellow BSG fans, in hopes you'll support him by making a donation.

If you can't, I'm sure Bodie welcomes your positive thoughts and cheers.

But if you can… Make A Donation

It took some looking but I finally found a display case for my Bill Adama Cubee that Edward James Olmos signed for me at the 2010 Dallas Comic Con. It pleases me to now have a proper way to showcase the cubee since he's been relegated to a cardboard box for the last six months to keep him from getting crushed.

I found the acrylic case at The Container Store and purchased the little photo frame at Walmart. A total investment of $10.00. Not bad.

If you're interested in downloading, printing and assembling this cubee design or one of the others I've made, you'll find them on my deviantART page.

Anybody who knows me and my movie-watching habits and opinions will likely find it colossally strange that I loved “Machete.”

Graphically and gratuitously violent are not what I generally care for — and usually complain about — but “Machete” is both those things and I absolutely loved it. Probably because beneath it all is a very powerful statement about the immigration situation facing the United States.

Loaded for bear with plenty of machete and gun action and a cavalcade of Latino stars that includes Danny Trejo in his first leading role, Michelle Rodriguez, Jessica Alba and Cheech Marin, there is much more to “Machete” than meets the eye and I feel it was unfairly criticized by, well, critics.

The violence in “Machete” is not meant to be taken seriously and is often campishly comical despite the graphic nature of it. The movie overall is something of a satire, ridiculing the supposed solutions, both inhumane and asinine, to the influx of illegal immigrants who are just hoping for something better than what they had south of the border. Oddly enough, it puts a face on the people being condemned for just wanting to feed themselves and their families. Who in their right mind would protest a man/woman’s desire to do that?

There’s one point in the film, where a security guard questions the double standard of the people he works for, who want to ship the immigrants back — or kill them — while simultaneously having no problem hiring them to be nannies or gardeners. That doesn’t make any more sense to me than it did to him, but how many of us would agree that this is something of a truth?

I don’t have a solution to the immigration situation but I know the system isn’t working.  I think we can all agree that that needs to change and that the problem is that no one can agree on how to do it. That said, as I watched “Machete” I was reminded of something I heard Edward James Olmos say once. I don’t remember his exact words but the gist was that the solution to immigration matters would be to bring third-world nations, such as Mexico, into the first world. There’s a great measure of wisdom in that solution in my opinion. Yes, it would take time and money but I think I’d rather see us spend our time and money for something more compassionate and humane than electric fences and the like.

Frankly, it wouldn’t hurt all of us to think about it from the view point of the immigrants, either, and to acknowledge that they are human beings and not invaders or a sub-species, as some might contend.

Fellow citizens, Mexico may be south of the United States but her people – as well as Mexican-Americans, Latinos, Chicanos and other people of color — are not beneath us. They are a part of us and we would do well to remember that.