Friday Ephemera

Tosh?! Tosh?!

Pah!

I have to say the Hindu deities are very… colourful. What with the armies of monkeys and everything. It’s hard to keep track of all the divine beings and their various incarnations. Hinduism would make a very complicated board game. Like Catholicism, only moreso.

Those Monkeys might do better than Chinese bridge builders.

And yet, according to the TES, students will be steered away from such questions and instead will be assured that “the Qur’an has a message of peace on almost every page.” Some squinting may be involved, and possibly a neck brace to assist in arriving at the approved interpretation.
http://www.tes.co.uk/2431112
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/notesarchive.php?id=2038

Show me an army of monkeys that can…, no, wait, never mind, show me any other species that starts fires for their own benefit. I mean, one can argue Monet vs. Picasso ’till one’s blue in the face, but our mastery of fire brought us warm caves, and then metallurgy, and then thermodynamics. It’s all about managing exothermic reactions, and no one’s willing to admit it (well, except me of course, given that I just did).
Meanwhile, never mind makeovers, here’s TV’s best ever science- fiction engineer:
http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=-1599540474894707979
More on temporal-o-scopes: Panama Canal Time-lapse:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NoLcrd1ggc
Smale’s Paradox: Turning A Sphere Inside Out
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6626464599825291409
That last one is a doozy.
Oh, and on that whole LSD thing: they took too much. A few tens of micrograms can be quite delightful and, I would argue, insightful, in terms of coming to an appreciation of how dependent our normal perception is on a particular chemical balance. But you take a couple milligrams, and all bets are off. Compare a few ounces of scotch to a few quarts of scotch, in an hour. One is happy, the other is hospital (if you’re lucky). Understood?
Yes, that’s right, the word you’re looking for is “titration”. As my grandmother used to say: Everything in moderation; to which I invariably pointed out, in my then youthful exuberance: Including moderation itself. Which is fine, if you get it right; that’s called growing up, and then, standing on those shoulders, winning. The alternative, not mastering titration, and so not standing on its shoulders, in all life’s experiences, is called losing.

I agree wholeheartedly about Battlestar Galactica. The “reimagined” series is the best show on TV, pretty well. What’s good about it?
1. Most of the actors and actresses are hot – especially Grace Park. And the mature actors (Edward James Olmos, Mary McDonnell) have the required gravitas.
2. The writing is mostly superb. Moral ambiguity – the goodies sometimes do bad things (and the baddies good). Characters develop and change. Contemporary conflicts are hinted at, but never in a cheesy reductive way. Are the Cylons Muslims? There’s a hint of it, in their monotheism, their belief in something like Jihad. But there are so many ways they’re not remotely like Muslims at all…
Anything bad about it?
1. The music is okay rather than great. Bits of it are rather like Mark Isham’s score for “Crash”, with non-specific “ethnic” voices floating over analog synthesizers. If that’s what you want, I think Isham does it better. (I loved the Cliff Martinez score for the Sodeburgh remake of “Solaris”, which reimagined the Ligeti music from 2001 in the more “holy minimalist” style of Part & Tavener. That style of score is good for atmosphere and bad for drama.)
2. When I first started watching I felt James Callis was massively overacting as Gaius Baltar. Now I think it’s a part that has to be overacted to work at all, and I quite like the way he’s played. Baltar lives in a permanent internal melodrama. Even if we hate him, we always find him fascinating – unlike Admiral Adama, who’s admirable but unexciting.

Georges,
It’s hard to think of another show that’s so effectively transformed a cheesy and derivative genre series aimed largely at children into a resonant and innovative adult drama. Especially one with an ongoing four-year story arc requiring long-term commitment from the audience – and which expects the audience to keep track of the various Cylon models, copies thereof, and their (possibly) hallucinatory counterparts.
Thankfully, we don’t have to suffer the implausible deference to other cultures that Roddenberry was entranced by, and which always seemed much less believable than warp drive or transporters. After the woolly PC sermonising of Star Trek, BSG’s leaning towards psychological and moral realism is, at times, quite shocking. (Baltar is, I think, a wonderful depiction of partly inadvertent villainy, with, as you say, his “permanent internal melodrama.” Roslin is also refreshingly hard-edged, with her readiness to throw Cylon ‘sleepers’ out of the nearest available airlock.)
And some of the basestar-Galactica battle scenes are truly inspired, ghostly even.

Roddenberry was an optimistic humanist. (Actually, I think I am, most of the time.)
But this meant he set limits on what his writers could write. They had to assume that all the old conflicts in human society had been completely overcome. Class antagonism, religious antagonism, ethnic hatred, even amorous rivalry – these had all been transcended in Trek world. That killed off a lot of fertile terrain for a writer.
Roddenberry would have vetoed all of the religious conflicts in BSG. Maybe that’s how things seemed in the 1960s, when religion seemed to be a spent force in society. Not so now.
BTW I hear rumours that Futurama may return. I thought much of that was quite delightful.

Deep Space Nine was probably the best of the Star Trek series, and the only one to let any real moral ambiguity in. I haven’t watched it in years (though I’m sorely tempted to dig out some of the videos I have) but I seem to remember one of the main characters was revealed to have committed murder while resisting the occupation of her world and – against the usual Trek way – allowed to get away with it. I think they also ended up murdering a Romulan diplomat in order to get the Romulans into the war against the Dominion.
Most of the series conformed to the strictly moralistic tone of… well, most TV shows, but it was nice to see them acknowledging how morally complex the world can be.
It’s probably not coincidental that Ronald D. Moore was one of the main show-runners. Apparently he worked briefly on Voyager, but his vision of the show (later seen in BSG) conflicted too much with the established producers.

I think Garak was probably the best character in the show. A sort of Loki figure with a dark past.
Brilliantly portrayed by Andrew Robinson, best known for playing numerous pyscho-killers.
He had some of the best lines of the series…
Bashir: What I want to know is, out of all the stories you told me which ones were true and which ones weren’t?
Garak: My dear doctor…they’re all true.
Bashir: Even the lies?
Garak: Especially the lies.
—————————–
Garak: I’m sorry, doctor, I just don’t see the value of this man’s work.
Bashir: But Garak, Shakespeare is one of the giants of human literature.
Garak: I knew Brutus was going to kill Ceasar in the first act, but Ceasar didn’t figure it out until the knife was in his back.
Bashir: But that’s what makes it a tragedy. Ceasar couldn’t conseive that his best friend would plot to kill him.
Garak: “Tragedy” is not the word I’d use, “farce” would be more appropriate.
———————————-
Or my favourite
Garak: Why is it no-one ever believes me even when I’m telling the truth?
Bashir: Have you ever heard the story about the boy who cried wolf?
Garak: No.
Bashir: It’s a children’s story about a young shepard boy who gets lonely while attending his flock, so he cries out to the villagers that a wolf is attacking the sheep. The people come running, but of course there’s no wolf. He claims that it’s run away and the people praise him for his vigilance.
Garak: Clever lad! Charming story.
Bashir: I’m not finished. The next day the boy does it again and the next two and on the fourth day a wolf really comes. The boy cries out to the top of his lungs, but the villagers ignore him and the boy and his flock are gobbled up.
Garak: That’s a little graphic for children, wouldn’t you say?
Bashir: But the point is; if you lie all the time nobody’s going to believe you, even when you’re telling the truth.
Garak: Are you sure that’s the point, doctor?
Bashir: Of course. What else could it be?
Garak: That you should never tell the same lie twice.

Heh. Astoundingly, I hadn’t given that much thought. As you say, the female Cylons seem to be sexually… flexible; but a whiff of lesbian intrigue – even robotic lesbian intrigue – never hurt the ratings. I suppose, then, the burning issue is whether Gaeta, Helo or Apollo will be thrown, manfully, into similar entanglements.

Oh lord.
“It’s time for a commercial break, but we’ll continue rating the beefcake of BSG right after these messages…”

“No doubt there’s already a thriving internet industry of slash fiction authors exploring these intriguing possibilities of bodily combination.”
There’s mountains of it concerning the original Apollo and Starbuck characters, so I’d be shocked if there aren’t entire sites dedicated to new BSG slash.
For the interested, or just mildly curious, I’d suggest:
http://www.bsgslash.com/

It’s dirty and you want it!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkCkgtcUML0