Shows I love: Battlestar Galactica season 5, so far
posted 1-31-2009 - 4:37 pm

So: Felix Gaeda has deteriorated into a bad guy. He's not the fifth Cylon, Ellen Tigh is; but he is a mutineer and a traitor, demoralized by having come this far for nothing and blaming everything on the Cylons, including rebel Cylons. And this requires a lot of rationalization, but there's a lot of that going around now in the fleet as morale descends into near nothing and order into chaos.

I'm wondering, on this morning after the third episode, why neither Tigh nor Adama anticipates the rebels tossing in a grenade once they crack the door and isn't in place to immediately toss it right back, where it could explode on the other side. I was thinking about that even as it happened. They did have just enough time to prepare, after all. But I digress.

Shows I love: awaiting Battlestar Galactica
posted 1-16-2009 - 7:27 pm

In less than an hour, Battlestar Galactica returns after months of absence. Its fans have been alternately hopeful, pissed, confused, exasperated, and excited. Same here, but I've been mostly pissed -- at the lousy ending of the last episode that aired, at the fact that the timeline was so drastically condensed in the last 15 minutes of that episode, and that it was done in such a not-at-all credible, nonsensical fashion.

I'll get to more about that later, perhaps after I've seen the new episode of this final half-season. For now, let me indulge in what has preoccupied most fans for months: the identity of the final secret Cylon. That will be revealed in tonight's episode anyway, so the wait is nearly ended by now.

Much ado about the swan that didn't die
posted 1-15-2009 - 6:30 am

I hate artistic revisionism. At least in ballet. And I blame the post-Walt-Disney Disney Company for it.

What started this rant, you ask? I attended a performance last Sunday of the Russian National Ballet Theater, and they performed Swan Lake. Theirs is a relatively new company, having been founded during the late 1980s, and, by the caliber of dancing that I saw, clearly second tier: fine, but certainly no threat to either the Bolshoi or the Kirov. I wouldn't put them on the same level as the New York City Ballet or the American Ballet Theater, either, but those two are also world class, so no surprise there. But I love Swan Lake and Tchaikovsky's score, so I really didn't mind.

Despite some lack of precision now and then among the corps de ballet, I was enjoying the production, for the most part. Particularly the performance of the prima ballerina portraying Odette/Odile, whose performance was clearly on a higher level than the rest of the company but whose name I don't know because the program listed four names for that role (this is a traveling company, and this role is obviously rotated, as are several others). In fact, I eagerly anticipated watching that particular Odette do the dying swan scene.

Ranting for academics
posted 1-10-2009 - 2:56 am

 
I have friends whose kids are visiting high schools and colleges now, in anticipation of attending those same come autumn, and I've noticed something: they're increasingly feeling a very specific kind of rage, one fed by the harsh realities of ever higher tuition rates and a snotty streak of anti-intellectualism in this country that glorifies sport at the expense of academics.

It is a very normal and rational reaction to an absurd status quo, one that has to change, though you know the sports fans will go down fighting. Well, on second thought, perhaps that gets more complicated if the sports fans in question are also parents whose happily geeky kids turn out to be more interested in field theory than field goals. I hope so.

The backdrop for this, of course, is the worst economic recession since the Great Depression and the worst unemployment statistics in the last 16 years, courtesy of the December 2008 numbers released earlier today. These campus-visiting parents are bloody well pissed off, and justifiably so: not just about tuition costs in this economy, but about the indefensible favoritism shown to boys' athletic programs while math, science and engineering students (not to mention girls' athletics) go begging for scholarships and loans. Just who do the sports nuts think is going to pull us out of this economic disaster — football players?? Of course not!

Shedding light on dark matters
posted 1-9-2009 - 7:33 am

 
I started my day yesterday by reading through my usual selection of news sources, then skipped over to check my e-mail, where I was presented with yet more headlines, and ran across a science story in Time magazine that piqued my interest. I ended up pissed off at the reporter, the Nobel prize committee, and academia in general. And thus, a rant developed, but not without cause.

Let me back up a bit here and give you the name of the article first:

The Milky Way: Bigger, Faster, Better Understood
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1870049,00.html

The first thing that struck me was the rather middling handling the reporter gave the story; nothing grossly wrong, just not much in the way of putting this item in perspective so that I know why it's important for me to know any of this. Besides, I've read far better science reporting than this mediocre little bit. The second thing that struck me was that Mark Reid, the Harvard astronomer she interviewed, is really just tweaking the kind of work Vera Rubin has been doing for more than 40 years — and without half as much fanfare and very little public credit.

Who's Vera Rubin, you ask? Ahhhhhhhhhh, here we come to it.