1: The word "finagle" comes from spanish missions in the west. The finagle used to be the standard unit of measurement. It was a large, rectangular box that you bought your grains, provisions etc in units of. Think like buying barrels of oil, you buy per barrell yadda yadda. So if you were a' travelin' you'd come to a mission and need to restock, so you'd buy a couple of finagles of grain and whatever else you needed. The problem was, what with the west being all spread out and whatnot, that it was nigh impossible to enforce the standard size of the finagle. So you might buy 6 finagles of grain at the standard price, then find out when it was delivered that the local finagles were like 2/3 of what a finagle was a supposed to be. Unless you remembered to check the finagle size ahead of time, this was a good way to get screwed over and is the orgigin of "being finagled."
2: I just found a neat little thingy in the Battlestar Galactica pilot. Right after the scene where Starbuck gets thrown in the brig and Edward James Olmowesome talks the XO out of pressing charges, it cuts to some city on another planet. The next cut is looking out the skylight of a house, and it pans down. Spaceships are flying overhead, and as the rooftops are coming into view, what should fly by but the Serenity from Firefly!
Yup, definitely the serenity flying overhead, no doubt about it. Assuming you're geeky enough to care about that, you must now bow down to me as your geek lord.
