BSG musings: "Daybreak, Part 2"

[NB: This post started as a liveblog of the encore showing of the finale, but I kept writing long after the finale was over. If you want to skip to the analysis of my predictions, scroll down to item number 24.

NB2, 12/31/09: The contents of this post were refined into a long essay specifically about the nature of the "deity" in BSG. See here: BSG's deity: not loving, and possibly insane.]

I'm re-watching the BSG finale, "Daybreak, Part 2," and still processing the experience, which was a generally satisfying mixture of thrills and disappointments. What follows, then, is simply a list of random thoughts.

1. Holy smokes! Baltar got away with it! His dirty secret-- that he betrayed the human race-- died with Laura Roslin. Lucky bastard. Lucky, lucky bastard.

2. The old "BSG" theme, in minor key, during Adama's final flyby of the Galactica. Nice touch. And the special effects in this episode are among the most gorgeous of the series, which has upheld a high standard in that area, especially compared to the various "Stargate" shows and whatever other sci-fi is out there. By the way-- is "Stargate" the Sci Fi Channel's version of "CSI" or "Law and Order"? It's been mutating into a gazillion spinoffs. "Stargate: Universe"?? Good Lord.

3. Old-school Cylon centurions during the final battle. Cool.

4. So... the opera house = the Galactica. We still don't know exactly why Laura Roslin and Baltar-- ostensibly human-- shared those visions. Hera's Cylon blood seems to explain the Hera-Roslin connection, but the "angels" (Head Baltar and Head Six) seem to explain the connection between all the relevant characters even better.

5. I re-watched the end of the episode "Revelations" to see whether we had a clear shot of the thirteenth colony when the fleet arrived at Earth. Sure enough, no: the clouds covered the planet too thoroughly for us to make out the shape of the land masses. Hats off to Ron Moore for pulling the wool over our eyes with that one: that nuked-out planet was indeed Earth-- just not our Earth. Our Earth, as the characters note, isn't the "real" Earth. We are, however, the Earth to which Kara Thrace had been trying to guide the fleet to all along. One potentially serious problem, though: when the fleet arrives at the Cylon Earth, the bridge crew confirms that the constellations from that vantage are "a match." How is this possible if the Cylon Earth is many solar systems away from our Earth?

6. So it seems Hera is Mitochondrial Eve. I admit I love this. It tickles me. Seeing as she's half-Cylon, that means we-- here on our Earth-- are all part-Cylon (or, from a certain point of view, entirely Cylon). And if this story has been repeating itself on all earthlike worlds, with the story always ending with an extrasolar colonization, that means that all of those worlds have hosted hominids that are part-Cylon. Which in turn means that Hera herself is more than half-Cylon, and always was.

7. There's a real case to be made, at the very end of the show, that the divine power is specifically the Cylon God, which is referred to (unless I misheard) as "It" by the angelic Baltar who appears with the angelic Six in Manhattan at the very end of the episode. What we don't know, though, is whether this deity truly is an all-powerful deity or something along the lines of the unseen aliens in Arthur C. Clarke's 2001 universe. If you've read Clarke's 2061 (see here), you know that the mysterious, monolith-dropping alien powers that have overseen the evolution of life on Earth have also been using Europa as a lab for experiments in accelerated evolution, trying over and over to grow... something. Whatever this power in the BSG universe is, its purpose appears to be to keep trying the human/Cylon experiment over and over again until something "surprising" occurs. I found it strange to think that God's plan would include something surprising: plans and surprises don't normally go together in my mind. Far from "plan," I think the proper term here would be "experiment." And "experiment" implies non-omniscience.

8. A bit disappointing to think that human parallel evolution is part of the divine plan. Moore's cosmology here strikes me as muddled. Kobol had Earthlife; the Cylon Earth had Earthlife (we see this in the Final Five's reminiscences, especially when Tyrol passed by the fresh produce market before that nuclear explosion). All that Earthlife couldn't have been brought on ships from world to world, and it couldn't have evolved the same way in every instance, not without constant micromanagement at the subatomic level. At the same time, the notion that humanity started in many different places responds to BSG viewers' earlier confusion about which planet should be thought of as humanity's planet of origin. The inescapable conclusion is that God (or some immense alien power) did this-- seeding many worlds with the reagents of life, and closely guiding life's evolution.

9. But you still see the old problem: human/Cylon history's progression is rigidly the same on all the worlds where this happens. The names of the cities might be different, the cultural details might vary slightly here and there, but the dominant cultures-- the planetary civilization that exists whenever a Fall happens-- remain anglophone North American in nature (sorry, Quebec). The only way to make sense of this is to think that, with all that Cylon-ness seeded into the population, rigid repetition is inevitable. A deity that can't figure out this problem is probably part-machine itself: truly a Cylon god, and dumb on a cosmic scale. Looked at microscopically, the act of banging one's head against a wall is also a complex process (Angelic Six talked about God's repetition of complex processes), but only a fool would think that repeated head-banging will eventually lead to a surprising result.

10. Kara Thrace as Christ: disanalogies first. (a) Unlike Jesus, Kara was female. Before you get offended, before you tell me that Jesus' maleness is an irrelevancy, you should know that a very large sector of Christianity (I met many such folks at Catholic University) views Jesus' maleness as constitutive of his divinity. I'm not saying I agree with this, but believe me, it's important to a great number of people. (b) Kara was generally a ho' and, later, an adulteress; as far as we can tell from the admittedly scant evidence of scripture, Jesus was no playboy. (c) Kara wasn't interested in imparting any teachings related to moral conduct. (d) Kara had no disciples, unless we stretch things and say that her lovers were all, in some sense, her disciples. (e) There was no empty tomb: her Viper had a body in it. You might counter by claiming that that corpse was the empty tomb, but I'd reply that you're reaching. Empty-tomb analogies don't usually use the body itself as a stand-in for the tomb. (f) Her life-arc doesn't fit the standard messianic paradigm, which culminates in a leader of a new, pacific regime-- a peaceable kingdom or something of the sort, usually temporal in nature, not spiritual. Kara obviously felt her work was done when the fleet reached our Earth, so she simply blinked out of existence.

11. Kara Thrace as Christ: analogies. (a) She died, she rose again, she disappeared-- hinting at ascension. It was all very much like Neo in "The Matrix," who jumped through all the same christic hoops. (b) Post-resurrection Kara was capable of disappearance and some form of clairvoyance, just as the post-resurrection Jesus was now truly the "Christ of faith"-- a being with transcendent properties-- and no longer merely the "Jesus of history." (c) Kara was interested in leading humanity to what might be called a redeemed end. (d) Kara had a special destiny; her life was the stuff of prophecy. (e) Kara did display certain moral virtues, like loyalty, dedication, and love. Whether her love extended to all humanity is debatable. In a sense, yes, she was intimately concerned with the survival of the human race, but whether this qualifies as a form of agape is a matter for discussion.

12. When you think about it, the story of the Cylons who spent "forty years in the wilderness" after the First Cylon War (with the Twelve Colonies) has some uncomfortable parallels with the story of the Hebrew people. With humanity (whatever that word means in the BSG universe) in both the creator and Pharaonic roles, the Cylons were the Creator's chosen people. But those chosen people were also enslaved, and they yearned for freedom. They finally did break free, and ended up wandering in the wilderness (an asteroid field doing a toilet-swirl around a black hole) for forty years. They returned "home" (to the colonies... a promised land?) to establish, per the messianic paradigm, a new order, and did so in the awareness of some higher purpose, using militaristic means, guided by a sense of justice and righteousness. But who was the Cylon messiah?

13. The end isn't the end by any means: not only have we got the theological panspermia project going on, but we've got remnants of the deity's previous experiments on the loose: the destruction of the Cylon colony didn't imply the destruction of all Cylons everywhere, and there may be billions of them. As I mentioned in a different post, those Cylons have exactly one Cylon lifetime to figure out resurrection or other forms of self-perpetuation. They might be able to do it. Or they might all die out together.

14. We never learn what regenerated both Kara and her Viper. This nags at me, though not in an entirely bad way. It's a puzzle, and I'd like to figure it out. Simply saying "God did it" isn't an explanation.

15. I may have been wrong when I predicted that the Creator wouldn't make an appearance in the form of a new character. Ron Moore himself, BSG's creator, appears in that Manhattan scene: he's the one reading the magazine article about Mitochondrial Eve.

16. Baltar, when confessing his guilt to Laura Roslin several episodes back, alluded to a flood story. Whatever powers are at work in the BSG universe must work along those same lines, using mass destruction (nukes instead of water) as a way of starting over. I sympathize with the atheist who thinks that this is a terrible way of hitting the reset button.

17. Is Hera supposed to represent God's emergency plan? When God's experiment doesn't work on a certain world or group of worlds, does God manipulate events so that a Hera comes into existence and is flung out of the solar system like a sperm to find another earthlike world (the egg) where she will breed with the local humans who've already evolved there?

18. "All Along the Watchtower" is cosmically significant, eh?

19. Eastern religion angle: in the tense CIC confrontation scene, Baltar babbles somewhat incoherently about God, who is "beyond good and evil" and "a force of nature," but he notes (as other characters have) that the goal for everyone is to break free of the painful cycle of existence-- a theme familiar to Hindus and Buddhists. And consistent with Hindu and Buddhist thinking, Baltar contends that the means to breaking free of this cycle lies within ourselves, that it's by our own choices that we'll achieve moksha. Somehow, the solution involves self-transcendence, the recognition and mastery both of our nature, and of the chain of causation that binds us constantly to this fate.

20. I'm sorry, but I laughed when Cavil shouted "Frak!" and killed himself on the bridge. That probably wasn't supposed to be funny, but his suicide really made no sense to me-- especially after all his scheming. Perhaps Cavil had forgotten that, this time, he wouldn't be resurrecting. Or perhaps he knew full well that this would be the end, and he'd finally had enough. Whatever his motivation was, I simply didn't-- and still don't-- get it. It wasn't the most stellar ending for a rather complicated BSG character. If anything explains Cavil's suicide, though, perhaps it's his deep-seated nihilism. Cavil was a bitterly cynical atheist, after all, but he also had Lucifer-like yearnings-- wanting, in his own way, to be like God (remember his rant to Ellen Tigh about how frustrated he was at his own physical limitations?). Having failed in his quest for apotheosis and/or immortality, Cavil finally gave in to the sin of suicide. I feel sorry for the character, but having seen that suicide twice now, I still think it plays out comically.

21. We never really learn what "12" signifies. It does seem, though, that the 2003 miniseries' contention that "there are only twelve Cylon models" has been shown to be incorrect. We know now that there are probably millions of Cylon models, and that "model" might not be the best term for them.

22. It occurs to me that my old 2006 prediction about the fleet finding Earth was right. It's our Earth, but not the present-day Earth. But Moore did a great job of throwing me for a loop on this one; I was sure that the mid-season finding of Earth meant that the fleet had found our beloved Terra/Gaia/Erde. As we now know, this wasn't the case.

23. The members of the fleet are planning to scatter, leaving clumps of humanity that will likely be too small to produce generations with direct lineages that survive to our present day. Hera will have to mate with the locals, but I assume the locals are fully homo sapiens, even 150,000 years ago.

24. So how'd I do, overall, on my most recent, "final" predictions?

a. The BSG universe is theistic, but only arguably so. The theophany, when it happens, won't involve new or extra characters; it'll happen with the cast we know. I'd say I was on the money here, mainly because the cosmic powers we learn about could merely be Arthur C. Clarke-style aliens, not deities. Taken literally, the Baltar and Six who make it 150,000 years into the future are angels. But they might also be technologized manifestations of energy akin to those beings produced by the USS Enterprise-D's holodeck (but in free-roaming form, unlike holodeck characters), or they might be incorporeal forms of alien life.

b. By the end of the episode, humanity's population will be nonzero. Again, I got this right, but it wasn't hard to predict. During "The Last Frakkin' Special," a recent behind-the-scenes show about BSG, several actors and writers talked about how the show's creators had to wrestle constantly with the network regarding how dark the series would be. I assume Moore had to cave, offering us an ending that could legitimately be termed hopeful in a "the story goes on" way. However, with Hera being Mitochondrial Eve, Moore does manage to slip in a measure of darkness: we modern Earthlings are all at least partly Cylon, and this holds true for world after world, where the same story has repeated itself almost exactly.

Come to think of it, then, it's possible that I got this prediction completely wrong. "Humanity" is something of an empty term if we're all Cylon. Also, it occurs to me that the end of the episode takes place 150,000 years into the future. That means everyone we've been following for four years is dead.

c. Human or Cylon or whatever her basic nature might be, Kara Thrace is somehow a weakly flickering symbol of hope, the Aurora, perhaps the human answer to whatever Hera is. Right. Kara safely brought humanity to a peaceful Earth. Most of that humanity will quietly die off ("You will bring humanity to its end," as the prophecy went), but this will happen peacefully, and in the knowledge that the planet already has its own stock of humans.

Note, too, that Hera, who was described by Six as "the hope for both our people," is indeed the genetic gateway to the survival of both humans and Cylons on the new Earth. The humans in the fleet (we'll talk more about them in a bit) might die out, but Hera is as much Helo's daughter as she is Athena's.

d. The series will, whatever its ending, have a decidedly "And the cycle continues" feel to it. Absolutely correct, but I have to admit this was a no-brainer of a prediction to make.

e. It's been nothing but Cylons since the beginning. Humanity is long gone, and the Cylons have been replaying this drama for thousands, maybe millions, of years. You know, I think Moore has left this open to interpretation, but he may have revealed his hand (or written himself into an unintended corner). We're given to believe that the deity has been repeating its experiment on many worlds, and the first impression we get when Bill Adama and Doc Cottle are talking about the African natives they see is that those natives are truly, purely human. So up to a certain point in a planet's history, life is allowed by the deity to evolve until true humans appear, after which a Mitochondrial Eve is inserted into the populace, lacing humanity with Cylon DNA. This leaves us with a complicated scenario, making it hard simply to claim that "it's been nothing but Cylons." At the very least, we can say that all modern populations are to some degree Cylon. If that's the case, it's not so much that the Cylons have been replaying this drama, as that the drama is being repeatedly kickstarted, always on different worlds, by whoever's doing the panspermia experiment.

But hold on: there's more. Think about the further implications. If the people of the Twelve Colonies also trace back to a Mitochondrial Eve, as seems to be the case, then everyone currently alive on those colonies at the time of the Fall is already partly Cylon. Hera comes along, the product of a Caprican father and fully Cylon mother. If Helo is fundamentally Cylon at the mitochondrial level, then Hera is more than half-Cylon (a point I made earlier in this post). Given enough time and enough inter-solar jumping around, the overall proportion of Cylon-ness in the various "human" populations all over the galaxy could conceivably increase. Once the deity runs out of empty earthlike worlds on which to plant and cultivate non-Cylon life, the galaxy becomes a massive den of Cylon incest as all the legitimately human DNA disappears, forever subsumed into Cylon DNA. So, given enough time, the ultimate result of the deity's experiments is likely to be the Cylonization of all anthropic life in the galaxy. What happens after that? Move the lab to another galaxy (or is that happening already)? Anyway, what we can't know is whether, at this point in the galaxy's history, total Cylonization has already taken place. My own feeling is that it has-- based, as mentioned, on the rigid repetition of human history, language, culture, etc., which is not explicable by a collective unconscious or "racial memory." The repetitions show too high a fidelity to the same basic template.

So the evidence still inclines heavily toward an "it's all Cylons" scenario, especially as we move further forward in time. And if God creates people in his image, then we're back to the idea that this deity (or alien) is itself fundamentally Cylon in nature.

25. I love that Tory Foster got her comeuppance.

26. Excellent (though comparatively brief) BSG commentary here. Equally excellent (and longer!) commentary here, though I strongly disagree with this passage:

The idea that our Earth would get its name -- as well as certain concepts of language and other bits of race memory that would take 150,000 years to resurface -- from these familiar-looking visitors from another star system feels right. It makes the similarity in dress and idiom between Colonial society and 21st century Earth society feel less like a cheat (so the show could more easily comment on current events) than a passing of the torch down through the generations.

27. Reader John points to this TV Guide interview with Ron Moore.

28. How well does the "deity" of BSG match up to the God of process theology? That God, based as it is on Alfred North Whitehead's process philosophy, is also a God that interacts actively with the universe with the goal of producing something (Catholic thinker Teilhard de Chardin, though not a Whiteheadian, per se, saw God as trying to move humanity toward an Omega Point). Key ideas in process theology are creativity, novelty, and freedom. God is part of the cosmos, evolving with it, reacting to it, but is also outside the cosmos, supplying a constantly generative and creative force. Some critics of process theology see it as providing a morally unsavory theodicy: everything bad that happens fits into the greater purpose, which is the constant creation of novelty through the exercise of divine and creaturely freedom. This seems to imply either (1) that most of us are merely grist in a mill that is attempting to produce an eventual crème de la crème., or (2) that the wavefront of creativity is its only important part. Either way, the picture looks grim for most of bumbling creation (for an interesting critique of process thought from an African perspective, see here).

But that unsavory strategy seems to be at the heart of the BSG deity's experimentation. It wishes to run the cycle over and over-- a cycle that involves the exercise of creaturely freedom (though apparently reinforced with prophecy and "angelic" guidance)-- until something new (or as they say in the finale, "surprising") happens. The process God isn't necessarily omniscient or omnipotent, and thus is a good match for the deity we glimpse in the BSG finale. How this can be reconciled with the deity's supposed "love" for all of us has not been explained, and is perhaps best left to mystery.

29. BSG finale cupcakes!?

30. How churlish of me not to say "Hats off!" to the cast and crew of BSG for putting on an amazing show. Best of luck with "The Plan" and with "Caprica."

31. Something I wrote in an email:

[Hera] ended up being kinda the punchline of the series, what with her being Mitochondrial Eve for our Earth. I ultimately thought that was a cool thing to do for her character (since she otherwise spent her on-screen time doing little except being discussed by all the other main characters), but you're right about pregnant pauses. It's a subplot that dragged on and on, and became less interesting-- to the point that I began to wonder whether Hera was just some sort of MacGuffin, like the contents of Marsellus Wallace's briefcase in "Pulp Fiction."

[...]

Now that we know what Hera is and how significant she was in the "deity's" plan, her presence in the show makes a lot more sense. But I still think it was a long, unnecessarily tortuous road to get to that revelation. Perhaps she should have been born later in the series.

Ronald Moore admitted in interviews that he and his writing crew were making stuff up as they went along, as opposed to planning the story arc in detail. They apparently had a general idea of where they were headed, but it was also obvious by late in season 2 that they were kind of throwing ideas around without knowing which idea was worthy of follow-up. I think the entire notion of a plan-- whether it's the supposed Cylon plan (I'm still not sure I know what that plan was supposed to be) or God's plan or whoever's plan-- should have been handled with greater care, not with post hoc abandon. Going back to watch Season 1 (which I'll do at some point, when I have the money to get the DVD sets) is going to be awkward in that respect.

[...]

I'm not so sure about how sane the BSG deity is, given that its instruments are moral fuck-ups like Baltar, Starbuck, and the always-hot-to-trot Caprica Six, who often seemed to confuse sex with love.

[...]

The BSG ending has a hell of a lot in common with the ending of "The Matrix Revolutions," the word "revolution" itself implying, among other things, a circling/cycling. In "Revolutions," we see the beginning of a new human/machine paradigm for peace, but the conclusion leaves open the possibility that the cycle will simply continue, and that it's up to the humans not to allow that to happen. When little Sati asks the Oracle whether they'll ever see Neo again, the Oracle smiles and answers in the affirmative. The line is delivered as if it's supposed to be comforting, but when you think about it, what the Oracle is really saying is that Neo will be NEEDED again someday, i.e., the cycle of violence will continue.

BSG ends on a similarly quasi-optimistic note, with the two "angels" speculating on whether, this time, on this planet, humanity will break free of the pattern. Angelic Six is uncharacteristically optimistic, as Angelic Baltar observes, but Six is also the one who expresses disappointment at the direction that modern humanity has taken ("Commercialism? decadence? where have we seen all this before?" she says while staring around Times Square). The series ends with everything being up to humanity. (Though, interestingly, it gives us a humanity that is already part-Cylon, and I'm convinced that Cylon-ness simply binds one more tightly to the cycle of violence since machines in the BSG universe have less free will than humans do.)

[More to come.]


_

and the BSG outcome is...

Theological panspermia and we here on Earth are all part-Cylon!

Hee hee! I'll have more to say later; am still processing what I just saw.


_

it has to be said

I don't know how the weather is where you are, but it's close to a perfect day here in Alexandria, Virginia.

Hope you're enjoying the first official day of spring.


_

BSG: final predictions

After all the heavy-duty speculation about how "Battlestar Galactica" will end, we now find ourselves within hours of knowing the truth. It's time for me to lay it on the line, then, and offer my final predictions about the BSG questions that matter most to me.

1. Is the BSG universe theistic? I'm going to go on record as saying, Yes, but only arguably so. I'm sorry if that sounds like a hedge, but I think this answer is most in line with series creator Ronald D. Moore's apparent love of ambiguity. If we think of the matter from a writer's perspective-- especially when we're talking about the creator of a series that has turned out to be quite a hit for the Sci Fi Channel, a hit that will be discussed for years-- a clear, pat conclusion would both undo the prevailing tone of the series, and would leave fans with almost nothing to discuss afterward. The power of ambiguity cannot be underestimated: it's what keeps us coming back to stories like "The Lady or the Tiger," and attracts people to poetry and scripture. Moore knows this. As I noted before, he wrote about his admiration for the way "The Sopranos" ended.

You see, if Moore gives in completely to the theism angle, he betrays a large part of his audience, a part that appreciates the bleak, "empty" universe in which the BSG plot unfolds. We've seen no aliens, no heavenly powers-- and the beings that might be divine might also just be potent hallucinations. Moore has crafted a story that allows secularists and naturalists to take Bill Adama's side and declare that religion is crap.

At the same time, if Moore gives in to the atheism angle, he betrays the set of fans who are betting that all the prophecies, all the creepy coincidences, all the talk of "higher powers" and "plans" and "purposes" and "destinies"-- that all these things are pointing to something beyond normal sight, to a divine reality that has undergirded the series from the beginning. BSG may even have provided us with its own symbol for that reality: the great mandala, a cyclic rainbow, symbolizing eternal recurrence and colored in a way that reassures us that the divine is a loving reality. Is this ultimate reality monotheistic or polytheistic? Who knows? There are many colors, but just one mandala, churning* around and around itself.

I foresee the theophany, when it happens, occurring in such a way that BSG's atheistic and theistic viewers will be able to interpret the visual data however they want. As my buddy Mike pointed out, even Head Six's public-but-invisible heaving-up of Baltar might have a plausibly naturalistic explanation (psychokinesis, not angelic might).

So the series will end with a sci-fi version of that "Pulp Fiction" scene where Jules Winnfield and Vincent Vega survive a barrage of bullets. The BSG audience is already neatly divided into Jules and Vincent camps, and like Jules and Vincent, they'll argue for years over what really went down, and what sort of universe BSG was showing us.

One final note before I move on to the next burning question. I think Moore realizes that suddenly adding an extra character-- like God Himself-- at the tail-end of the story would be a cheap, deus ex machina ploy. Such a narrative tactic might have worked (sort of) for Tolkien and those damn Eagles of his, and it might have been fun to watch Sean Connery dismount and regally face the camera during the final moments of "Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves," but Moore's audience is composed mainly of people who lack a black-and-white, swords-and-sorcery moral sensibility. BSG appeals to a grimmer crowd, I think, and those people won't take kindly to a bright, happy angel popping out of that black hole, chirping show tunes, slapping skin cream onto Admiral Adama's face, healing Roslin's cancer with a merry pink cloud of fart gas, and squealing like an animé chick for everyone to just chill. Not gonna happen. I will, in short, be very surprised to see God reveal Himself in the form of an extra character. Whatever theological answers there are, they'll be found among the cast we know.


2. What will be humanity's fate? Let me tell you how it's not going to end. It's not going to end with "...and then they all died." But before I get to my actual prediction, I'd like to talk about my hopes for how this will end.

What I hope happens is that Moore gives us the full darkness. Either there have never been any humans in this entire drama-- we've been watching robots or simulacra all along-- or so many humans will be wiped out in that final battle that humanity will have too few members to survive. If that's the case, humanity can only hope for rebirth either through some twisted form of Cylon cloning or through billions of years of parallel evolution-- from self-replicating proteins to full-on sapient hominids-- on some distant, earthlike world. I concede that there's a slim chance that humanity will be totally wiped out, but I have a hard time seeing Moore going for such an ending. As I noted in question (1) above, Moore loves ambiguity. An ending in which the human race is definitively wiped out would be decidedly unambiguous. While it might be fun to speculate on what the Cylons might do after the last human is gone, I just don't see Moore showing us this scenario.

My prediction, then? I'm betting on humanity taking heavy losses, with the clear implication that it won't be able to survive without some form of benign or malign Cylon intervention. The human population will be nonzero by the end of the episode.


3. What is Starbuck? This particular question fascinates me mainly because the series has made such a big deal over Kara Thrace's special destiny, and its insistence that she is not-- not, godsdammit!-- a Cylon.

Personally, I think she's either a special type of Cylon (Moore has been known to lie to audiences in his podcasts and interviews in order to preserve the element of surprise), or she's a product of a spooky technology that can create exact replicas of both abiotic objects (like Starbuck's Viper) and living beings (like Starbuck herself), engrams and all.

Let's focus for a moment on Starbuck's destiny, about which much has been made. She has been called both "the harbinger of death"-- a phrase that can be taken literally or metaphorically-- and the one who "will lead humanity to its end."

The term "end" can mean a literal ending, a stoppage. It can also mean "purpose," as when the old Baltimore Catechism asks, "What is the chief end of Man?" (Answer: To glorify God.) So Starbuck, far from representing true, literal death for the human race, might represent a beginning or a fulfillment. Something about her might actually be salvific (or represent something salvific), as Baltar seemed to think when he ranted about how Starbuck was living proof that regular human beings can indeed "cross over" and come back. (But can regular humans do this? Wouldn't this detract from the specialness of Starbuck's nature?)

Of course, if we're talking about a technology that can resurrect (or at least reincarnate) human beings, we're once again left to wonder whether there's anything really divine about this. Perhaps the tech comes from an alien race (as happened in the movie "Stargate," which features a preening, forever youthful alien slave driver whose fountain of youth is, paradoxically, a teched-up coffin). Perhaps it's the same sort of down-to-the-quarks tech that brought Dr. McCoy back to life in "Shore Leave." If Starbuck is truly human, and if she truly was brought back by alien (or billion-year-old Cylon) technology, then humanity's hope might lie in finding and using that tech to perpetuate itself. The humans would need to build it in a way that creates imperfect copies, of course, to simulate genetic mutation and the combination of monoploids into diploids. Genetic variation is key to humanity's survival, otherwise all you've got is an eternal procession of Adamas and Roslins and so on. But again... would this tech work for anyone other than Starbuck? And how might it relate to humanity's "end"?

So, what is Starbuck? My prediction: human or Cylon or whatever her basic nature might be, Kara Thrace is somehow a weakly flickering symbol of hope, the Aurora,** perhaps the human answer to whatever Hera is. (For some reason, I find myself completely uninterested in exploring Hera's nature and significance.)


4. Will we see clear evidence of an eternal return? To me, the question of whether the BSG universe's metaphysics includes the concept of eternal return hinges very much on whether we have been watching nothing but machines that are caught in a sad loop. A rigid eternal return-- one that manifests itself as cultures and languages that do not vary over time and space-- is understandable from a machine's point of view, and we seem to have evidence of this on the show, what with the exact resemblance of 2000-year-old Cylon/Earth culture to present-day, prelapsarian Colonial culture. I've gone over this before, so I won't belabor the point here. Instead, I'll cut right to my prediction: YES. Big yes. The series will, whatever its ending, have a decidedly "And the cycle continues" feel to it. There's simply no other way. The only two religious doctrines that have been hammered into us (aside from the annoyingly trite references to a "dying leader") are these: (1) "Life here began out there," and (2) "All this has happened before; all this will happen again." While I think such an ending makes the most sense if it's Nothing But Cylons, I can see the eternal return making sense even if the BSG universe really does include humans.


5. (Question added 12 hours later) Have we been watching nothing but Cylons? I danced around the issue in the above questions, then after publishing my answers to those questions, I realized I hadn't tackled this one directly. My prediction (which is almost sure to be wrong): Yes-- it's been nothing but Cylons since the beginning. Humanity is long gone, and the Cylons have been replaying this drama for thousands, maybe millions, of years. As stated above, constant readers have all heard my arguments for this viewpoint before, so I won't repeat them here. I'll simply say that this view makes the most sense and has the greatest explanatory power. And even though I'm sticking to my guns with this one, I'll note that the reason I'm likely to be wrong is-- as we've already agreed-- Ron Moore likes ambiguity. Declaring, "at the end of all things," that we've been watching nothing but Cylons would severely depress future DVD sales.****


And those, my friends, are the only questions that deeply concern me-- the only ones I feel are worthy of predictions. Other questions, like what the opera house signifies, or whether Bill Adama and Laura Roslin survive, or what Baltar's going to do, or what makes Hera so important,*** or whether Tyrol will find out that Tory killed his wife, just aren't as compelling to me.

In a few hours, we'll see whether my predictions hold any water.

---

*The notion of "churning" is important in Hindu thought. It's one reason why the confluence of certain rivers can become a pilgrimage site, as happens for the Kumbh Mela.

**Think associatively: Aurora, dawn, daybreak: the title of the final episode.

***When I contemplate Hera, I keep thinking of that little girl, Elizabeth, in the 1980s TV miniseries "V" who kept saying "preh-tay-lah-mah," which turned out to be lizardese for "peace."

****You might counterargue that knowing the ending of a story doesn't kill DVD sales-- after all, people buy DVD copies of movies they've seen, despite knowing how those movies end. True; I concede this. But a TV series is a huge time investment compared to a movie, which in two hours rushes you to its conclusion. If you know that a series will end in a certain undesirable way, knowledge of that ending will hang over you as you re-watch the series from the beginning. Some people might be gluttons for that sort of self-punishment, but others might decide that the DVD purchase just isn't worth the time and money, considering the already-foreknown payoff.


_

crunch

It's that end-of-the-month crunch at BK, so I've been busy. My sleep schedule is completely shot, and BK wasn't too helpful despite my protestations about my eyes. I had asked them to keep the workload at their normal "2-3 documents per day" level, but BK has been shoveling 6-8 documents per day onto me this week. My eyes are getting better (I still wear a borrowed pair of glasses*), but I'd rather give the poor orbs a chance to recuperate. After this week, things might be better.

In fact, there's a chance that I'll have to beg off from any further work with BK once the walk starts up again. Some legs of my journey promise nothing but barrenness-- no place to recharge the cell or the laptop, no place to get a decent cell or WiFi signal. Oy.

I hope to continue with BK, though, both once the walk is done and once I'm back in Korea. They might be a great source of extra income.

---

*Not to worry. As the eye doctor grudgingly confirmed, my vision is nearly perfect with them: 20/20 in one eye and 20/30 in the other.


_

where I live... revealed!

Every once in a while, curious people ask me where I really live, so I thought I'd finally point the place out to you via Google Earth.

[scroll down]

I hope you'll come and visit sometime.






_

up for discussion

Here's a quote from the book Star Wars and Philosophy, a nifty tome given to me by my buddy Mike not long ago. The excerpt comes from a chapter that examines the Force through the lens of the Hegelian concept of Geist (Spirit). The contention is, as I understand it from the larger context of the chapter, the author's (though perhaps not unique to the author):

As the civilizations of our own time clash over rival theologies inherited from the past, mankind is in need of an empowering belief for our time, one that provides a unifying distillation of all the world's religions.

You'll have noted that the statement contains certain assumptions. I can spot five right away:

1. Belief-systems need to be up to date ("for our time").

2. Humanity is currently disempowered.

3. There is a need for some sort of unification.

4. The source for that unification is not found outside of the world's many religions, but is to be distilled from (all of?) them.

5. Humanity's disempowerment is connected to the clash of rival, inherited theologies.

And with that, I leave the comments area open for discussion.


_

a-theos discourse

Reader and blogger Brian emails me a link to a blog called The Friendly Atheist, which has a post about Ellery Schempp, who "played a major role in getting forced prayer out of public schools." Schempp is on a speaking tour in the "Virginia/DC" area.

If anyone in the area is interested in checking this out, I might be motivated to go, too. In looking at Schempp's lecture schedule, I'm thinking that my best bet is the talk to be given at George Mason University on April 2. GMU is both easier to park at than George Washington University (a DC campus without any actual grounds of its own; it's basically a clump of buildings, and students have to dodge traffic like everyone else), and more pleasant to drive to. The other problem with the GWU lecture is that it's on April 6, my parents' anniversary. I plan to be home that day, or doing something with the folks.

The George Mason U. talk on April 2 will be happening from 7PM to 9PM at JC Meeting Room F (JC = Jesus Christ?). The April 1 talk at American U. (a DC university that does have its own campus grounds) also looks interesting, as the topic will be on "Patriotism and Separation of Church and State."

If you're in the area and interested in attending one of Schempp's talks, gimme a holler.


_

not Dolph Lundgren

My brother David links to a neat YouTube video of a strange and fascinating dolphin behavior. Go have a look.


_

time once again for that reminder

Remuneration, not renumeration.

Enmity, not emnity.

That is all.


_

back from the doc (and a nap)

The eye problem seems to be going away, only to be replaced by fever, achy joints, and the runs. The eye doctor says the corneal abrasion is completely healed, and the redness has gone way down, but I should still lay off the contacts for another week. Sounds like good advice to me. I still need to take those eye drops, but the frequency's been reduced to four times a day, instead of every two hours.

I came home and took a two-hour nap, making up for the previous night's lack of sleep. There's a stack of proofing for me to do; it promises to keep me busy a while.

So how have you been spending your Saint Patrick's Day? Did you chase the snakes off your property? Are you chugging green beer? Searching your genome for any trace of Irishness?


_

Costco eye clinic torture devices

Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T

followup

I'm off to the eye doctor again in the morning. My eyes don't hurt anymore, and I'm no longer light-sensitive, but the eyeballs themselves remain red. No itch to speak of. I expect the appointment to go fairly smoothly; things seem to be improving, overall.


_

I take it back

I made a remark, previously, about how trans-America bikers are a dime a dozen. While it may be factually true that the number of bikers far exceeds the number of trans-America walkers, this isn't to imply that biking across the country is easy. It takes time and effort, too, and can be dangerous, especially if you're disabled. Hats off, then, to this fallen biker, who was a lot tougher than I'll ever be.


_

if I were Bill Adama

My endgame, were I Admiral William Adama, would be this:

Given Galactica's structural weakness and the fact that it won't survive more than a few jumps, I'd jump the battlestar so that it was sitting just about on top of the Cylon colony, exactly opposite the black hole. Then I'd arm all nukes. If possible, I'd send out Vipers or Raptors to try and damage the colony's FTL.

This move ought to get the Cylons' attention. I'd be sure that the Galactica's nukes were rigged with some sort of dead man's switch, such that if any of the Galactica's crew were to be killed, the ship would go out in a blaze of glory.

Assuming we're able to execute this much of the plan successfully, I'd open a channel and start the negotiation process for Hera. Anything less than Hera's transfer-- unharmed-- to Galactica, would mean the activation of all nukes.

Because I'd have positioned Galactica opposite the black hole, I'd simply be letting Newton's Laws of Motion take over. Detonating Galactica would mean pushing the colony irreversibly into the black hole's gravity well; with no FTL drive, the colony would have no means of escape, and the Cylon homeworld would be lost, along with the Final Five and all knowledge of resurrection technology.

And that, I think, is about the best endgame I could muster under the circumstances. It wouldn't ensure the death of all Cylons everywhere, nor would it seal humanity's fate: the humans who hadn't volunteered for the mission would still be alive, as would the many millions (or billions) of Cylons who would have exactly one lifetime-- however long a Cylon lifetime is-- to try to reinvent resurrection technology or figure out sexual reproduction.

BSG geeks: what would your endgame be? What would it be from Cavil's point of view?


_

BSG and "Terminator: Salvation"

The most recent episode of BSG, "Daybreak, Part One," played out in the most frustrating way possible. Now, at the end, it's become obvious that the series creators have wanted to play things close to the vest, revealing everything (or at least a few major secrets) at the very end. I'm not sure this was the best strategy, firstly because this means the final episode will feel overstuffed instead of like a true dénouement; and secondly, because this strategy sacrifices most of the episodes that come before it: those episodes are reduced to stringing us along, feeding us ambiguity after ambiguity with no deeper purpose than to get us to the end. It's an unfortunate narrative choice, given the sheer number of questions that have been left unanswered up to now, but which could have been answered along the way. A quick review of those questions, off the top of my head:

1. What is the ontological status of Baltar's Head Six? (This Head Six seems to be the strongest argument that the series will come to some sort of theistic conclusion, as she has proven capable of acting as an invisible force in front of witnesses.)

2. What is the significance of Hera?

3. What is the significance of the funky music that activated the Final Five?

4. Which planet is truly the planet of humanity's origins?

5. Who or what is Baltar?

6. Who or what is Kara Thrace?

7. Which religion is correct-- Cylon monotheism or Colonial polytheism?

8. Are there really any humans in this drama at all?

9. Will humanity survive? (Granted, this question is rightly left to the final episode.)

10. Are the twelve Cylon models somehow related to the Colonials' twelve major gods and the twelve colonies? I suppose the larger question here is: what significance, if any, does the number 12 have?

11. What is the significance of the opera house?

12. Will we really see an eternal return?

About the only major plot points that occurred in "Daybreak, Part One" were these: (1) Sam Anders revealed the location of the Cylon homeworld, which is actually a "colony." That term sounds significant to me. The colony hovers close to a rock-crushing black hole that seems to have only one gravitationally friendly window. (2) Volunteers from the Galactica will attempt a rescue of Hera, which will involve jumping into the space right next to the colony, where all the Cylon guns are already pointed.

Aside from that, little else occurred during the episode. We get some background on President Roslin, but we don't learn anything we couldn't have guessed: she lost her sisters and father even before the Cylon attack, but this simply puts her among the bereaved. We learn a bit about Baltar's loathing for his father, but this was already covered in the episode ("Dirty Hands") where Baltar and Tyrol talk about Baltar's childhood as an Arelonian farmer. Baltar confessed to Tyrol his wish to be a Caprican, and to change his accent to something that didn't reflect his low-class roots. (Of course, whether these memories are real, or whether we're looking at more Cylon memory-tweaking, is yet to be determined.) Perhaps the most touching moment was Laura Roslin's appearance on deck to volunteer for the suicide mission. The story has always done a good job of showing that she remains stout of heart despite being frail of body.

One interesting thing the episode does, though, is begin differently: not only do the opening credits lack the usual "preview" mashup segment, but the episode itself also begins more cosmically than normal, starting with what appears to be a god's-eye view of the galaxy before moving in to a 2001-esque shot of Caprica "before the Fall." Our first hint of the great deity? Or maybe our second: viewers will recall the way the final episode of the third season ended-- with a godlike camera leap from the fleet's position to a screeching halt at Earth's doorstep.

So at this point, we've gone through four seasons of BSG, which has been, in part, a long meditation on the questions "Who am I?" and "Who are we?" The question can be broken down into sub-questions, such as whether Cylons are really sentient and deserving of rights, which leads to the question of whether treating them as "frakkin' toasters" is a form of racism. These aren't new questions in sci-fi; they've been dealt with in other storylines, such as those found in "The Matrix" or in "Blade Runner."

Which brings me to "Terminator: Salvation," for which a truly amazing preview trailer has just come out (see Trailer 3 here; you need Quicktime to view it). The Terminator series has also dealt with the revolt of machines once they achieve sentience. It's enough to make you wonder whether the authors of such scenarios ultimately side with the machines, who by the authors' lights are sentient and therefore slaves in need of liberation. The Matrix series muddies this question by showing you machines that, with a ruthless sense of justice, enslave the humans who had enslaved them. BSG does something similar when it shows that the Cylons are, at least at first, mostly intent on eradicating the human race.

What worries me about the new "Terminator: Salvation" (hereinafter "TS" for short), though, is that a person who has just gone through four seasons of BSG is going to view TS as merely rehashing the same questions covered in BSG. You see, Trailer 3 of TS shows us an enfleshed Terminator that thinks it's human. Ever heard that scenario before? True: this is a departure from all the previous Terminator films, in which the good guys and bad guys were each clear about their respective roles. But it's not a departure from what's been happening on BSG since 2003, and it's a reminder of even older sci-fi scenarios that covered the same ground, such as Rachel's belief that she's human in 1982's "Blade Runner."

So my own anticipation of TS has little to do with whatever Big Questions it might (or might not) be trying to explore. Instead, I'm looking forward to a dizzying variety of killing machines that have been promised by the TS trailers: driverless motorbikes, house-crushing robots, sinister hovercraft, and yes, a Terminator that cries out in self-hatred when it looks down at its open torso and discovers it's not human.

I suppose one reason why we're constantly fascinated by the whole man/machine question is that the question arises and is sustained by multiple streams of thought. One stream questions whether there is, fundamentally, any difference between people and machines. Quite a few scientists openly contend that that's essentially what human beings are-- extremely complex, well-honed machines, operating according to purely natural laws of causation. By this reckoning, humans aren't perfect or perfectly efficient; they have no divine spark. They may be amazing in terms of processing power and creativity, but they remain machines.

A second stream of thought is occupied with the ethical question of what counts as real. If something isn't real to you, whatever "real" might mean, it's hard for you to care about it. Throughout the ages, warring factions have justified their wars by dehumanizing the other side, making them somehow less real and therefore easier to kill. BSG has tried to show how complicated this is by posing its version of the "zombie problem," since Cylons replicate humans down to the molecular level. If a Cylon is just a toaster, you can kill it and sleep well at night. If, however, it falls in love with you, you fall in love with it, and then you get it pregnant, what's your view of that same entity?

Humanity's creation of and dependence on technology represents an evolving relationship. Sci-fi is one of the ways in which we attempt to explore and anticipate how that evolution will progress. Perhaps because it's entertaining, or perhaps because it really does reflect our instincts, most sci-fi portrayals of that relationship seem overwhelmingly negative. Will BSG take the plunge and show us its version of that negativity? We've got a week to find out.


ADDENDUM: You might enjoy this essay at Conscious Entities about computers and minds.


_

3.141592653...

3.141592653...

That's as far as I've ever memorized pi. Happy Pi Day.


_

eyeball verdict

Well, folks, it turns out that I've got both an infection in my right and left eyes, and an abrasion on the surface of my right eye. We don't know the cause of the infection (or at least the doc didn't say), but the abrasion is the likely result of sleeping with the contacts in my eyes, and perhaps the pressure of my face on the pillow (I tend to sleep on my right side, and it's my right eye that's abraded).

I've got drops that I have to take every two hours, and an ointment that I have to goosh under my eyelids before sleeping. I'm to look for signs of improvement within 48 hours, and I've got a follow-up appointment on Tuesday.

So now you know as much as I do.


_

the great Eye of Sauron

It appears that I'm suffering from some sort of eye infection or allergic reaction, which started yesterday (Friday) sometime while I was asleep. I woke up on the downstairs couch around 5PM after crashing about 7 hours; I had pulled a working all-nighter that had lasted from Thursday evening until about 6AM Friday morning. The Korean company had given me 11 articles to do, which is 3 times my normal load. By the time I was done, I was pooped, but was also too frazzled to sleep right away. I ended up staying up until 10AM before finally collapsing on the couch.

I fell asleep without removing my contacts. Having done this many times before, I'm hesitant to say that the contacts were a factor in my present predicament. However, I now wear disposables as opposed to the tougher daily-wear lenses that I used to sport, so that might have something to do with the way things are now. The symptoms include extreme redness in both eyes, but mostly the right; blinking is painful because it feels as though the eye and eyelid are scraping each other. Lots of tears and mucus, and a pronounced sensitivity to light, which is currently making it hard to type. I tried ice packs on my eyes yesterday to reduce the redness through vasoconstriction, but that seems not to have helped.

Got a clinic appointment at 4PM today. We'll know more later. Meanwhile, have a look:




_

do it

I hope Japan does shoot down North Korea's missile. No one else seems to have the cojones to make the move. If you think my position is insane, I'm all for a discussion in the comments. This is a subject on which I've thought long and hard, and in the end, I can't see NK departing this earth in any way but the hard way. Better sooner than later, whatever the initial carnage.


_

techno-telepathy through better clothing

A recent article notes that science continues to inch ever closer to true "mind-reading."

A machine to read the mind came a step closer on Thursday, when scientists at University College London released the results of an experiment in which brain scans revealed the location of people moving around a virtual reality environment.

Demis Hassabis, co-author of the study, said it was “a small step towards the idea of mind reading, because just by looking at neural activity we were able to say what someone was thinking”.

I foresee a convergence of this tech with nanotech. Imagine wearing a tee shirt composed of a reactive nanoweave that, because it's in contact with your skin, is sensitive to your neural activity. Imagine that this same shirt incorporates an advanced nanotech version of a cephalopod's ability to change color, such that high-definition images of one's thoughts can be reproduced on the shirt's surface.

Now imagine thousands or millions of people wearing such tee shirts on a busy street during a gorgeous summer's day.

What would be flashing across people's chests and backs? Would we see words as well as images? How fleeting or lasting would any given image be? Would the images be layered, reflecting the simultaneous existence of both persistent, nagging thoughts and brief, random thoughts? Would we begin to see how those images varied according to people's personalities and levels of mental discipline? Would the thoughts of a soldier prove to have anything in common with those of a monk? Would there be commonalities and differences between the thoughts of the very intelligent and the very stupid? Between men and women? Young people and old people? Would cultural differences affect what images would appear, and how they appeared? Would people in a choir or on the same sports team project images that possessed some group-oriented theme?

And what if we found a feral child and made him wear such a tee shirt? How would the images be affected by such factors as religion, political leanings, sports preferences, hobbies, or sexuality? Would feelings be rendered in some way as images? What about smells and tastes and sounds that impinge on our consciousness? What about the memories of those sense impressions? What would the shirts show when a person was shopping or meditating or taking drugs or having sex (well, the shirt might be on the floor for that last activity)? How would the shirt depict metacognition? What would it show after the wearer had committed a crime like theft or murder? How different would the shirt's images be depending on whether one was talking or listening-- lying or telling the truth? What images would we see on someone who was being tortured, or mauled by a shark, or struck by a car?

And what might such a shirt show at the very moment of one's death?

Fascinating stuff. Feel free to speculate in the comments.


_

what I need for my walk

A mobile phone battery than can be charged in just ten seconds? Hell, yeah!

Too bad it won't be ready for two or three years.


_

don't fellate the pandas

Joshua opines on Charles Freeman's recent crash-and-burn.

Shortly before Freeman withdrew, the well-connected pro-appeasement graybeard Chris Nelson alleged that Freeman’s words were taken “out of context” and that it was “a lie ... no other word for it” to suggest that Freeman had defended the massacre. Well, then, let’s have some more context:

For myself, I side on this — if not on numerous other issues — with Gen. Douglas MacArthur. I do not believe it is acceptable for any country to allow the heart of its national capital to be occupied by dissidents intent on disrupting the normal functions of government, however appealing to foreigners their propaganda may be. Such folk, whether they represent a veterans’ “Bonus Army” or a “student uprising” on behalf of “the goddess of democracy” should expect to be displaced with despatch from the ground they occupy. [The Weekly Standard]

It’s one thing to hug pandas, but it’s downright unnatural to fellate them.

Classic. All the current Neville Chamberlains in high places should take heed.


_

many thanks

I seem, bizarrely, to have stopped thanking my readership for the different ways in which they have helped and continue to help me, even during this strange, sedentary period of the walk. The membership for my Facebook group "Kevin's Walk" has reached 20 members plus me, which is quite cool, and most of those members joined within the past week. My humble thanks to all of you. Here's hoping that you'll look through the post topics and leave advice (and, I hope, offers of help) in them. The walk truly does depend on your activism, but if my buddy Mike wins big on the lottery, he's promised to bankroll me, in which case you all can just drive by me and chuck beer cans at my head while I'm trudging along.


_

from a reader

Reader and friend Mark T. offers this link to a Catholic priest practicing his own form of Vatican 2-style aggiornamento. Mark's comment:

Here's a man of the cloth I suspect you would like. He loves food, martial arts, and theology. No word on if he is a BSG fan.

_

a "Lie to Me" question

The American version of a British TV show about a profiler-- the US version was titled "Cracker," like the British original-- fell flat in the ratings, so what makes us think that a show like "Lie to Me," which also purports to show us the power of psychology as a predictive and interpretive method, will do any better?

My suspicion is that "Lie to Me" is motivated by the school of thought that contends that interrogation techniques need only be minimally coercive, i.e., a person with needed information simply has to be detained and questioned, not tortured. A skillful interrogator, such as the character played by Tim Roth, needs nothing more than his own eyes to determine whether a subject is telling the truth. From there, the interrogator can shape the interview to reveal whatever his interlocutor is hiding. "Lie to Me" exists, then, as a response to the torture-happy "24."

In a scene deleted from the final cut of "Pulp Fiction," Uma Thurman's character, Mia Wallace, asks John Travolta's character, Vincent Vega, whether he's an "Elvis man" or a "Beatles man," asserting that you can learn a lot about a person's character from that answer. I suspect the same could be said when examining people's political leanings: "Are you a '24' man or a 'Lie to Me' man?"

Interesting note: Wikipedia says this about the British version of "Cracker":

Cracker's conception was also in some ways a reaction against the police procedural approach of fellow Granada crime serial Prime Suspect, placing more emphasis on emotional and psychological truth than on correct police procedure. In an interview with the NME, McGovern dismissed Prime Suspect, noting that "Good TV writing has narrative simplicity and emotional complexity," and characterising the series as "A narratively complex story going up its own arse." Gub Neal, who produced the first season of Cracker, is quoted as saying, "That we had adopted the right approach was confirmed for me when Jacky Malton, the senior woman police officer who advised on Prime Suspect, said that although the way things happened in Cracker was sometimes highly improbable, the relationships between the police were in many ways much more credible than they had been in Prime Suspect."

So I might not be reaching to think that "Lie to Me" is in some ways a response to "24." Both shows are, by the way, on Fox.


_

swamped

Tons of work to do. What's painful is that, thanks to the deteriorating won-dollar relationship, I'm earning peanuts now.


_

BSG heads-up

BSG fans should note that there are four hours of BSG left.

1. "Daybreak, Part 1" is an hour long.

2. "The Last Frakkin' Special," a show that brings everyone up to speed on the major issues in BSG, is also an hour long.

3. "Daybreak, Part 2" is, as rumored, 2 hours long.

Check your local cable guide for details.


_

...and we're back

I'm back in northern Virginia after a brief stint at the Villainschloss, where the babysitting went quite well. The kiddies were well-behaved, and as far as I can tell, no diseases were transmitted in either direction (them to me, or me to them). Much of the time was spent in front of the big-screen TV, watching "Attack of the Clones" and "Revenge of the Sith." The four-year-old, a Star Wars fan, knew exactly when to cover his eyes (kissing scenes, lightsaber amputations, Anakin's lava-induced makeover). The eleven-year-old, my lovely goddaughter, is now old enough to think that kissing might not be so icky after all, her protestations about Anakin and Padmé notwithstanding. The eight-year-old was tickled by the fact that her big sis is in love with Edward Cullen, the vampiric protagonist of the Twilight series of children's books.

Much fun was had by all, and I was treated to two excellent restaurant meals for my efforts.


_

alone with three sick kiddies

Peace reigns at the Maximum Leader's house. Three sick children are upstairs. Two are watching a Wallace and Gromit video; one is reading whatever it is that 11-year-old girls read. Of the three kids, two are old enough to be missing school. I remember such days from my own youth.

I'm in the bedroom directly below the bedroom currently being shared by two of the children; the faint sounds of a claymation adventure are seeping through the floor. All is otherwise quiet.

They say the sage accomplishes everything by doing nothing. We'll see how long that holds true.

I look at my forearms. No purple blotches. The kids might be sick, but their leprosy hasn't spread to me yet. When it does, after my fingers fall off, I might be reduced to knuckling or tonguing the keyboard. Won't that be nice.

Should violence break out, I'll do my best to type out a final message here.


_

"tea party" protests

"Tea parties," essentially protests that target the stimulus and bailout packages, are becoming an increasingly widespread phenomenon these days. I think the whole thing is premature-- the president hasn't even had his first 100 days yet-- but hey, more power to the protesters, if that's their thing. I'm not much of a joiner, so I've never seen the utility of gathering en masse and shouting oversimplified sound bites, but freedom of assembly is something we cherish in this country, and even I can't discount the role of protest in consciousness-raising.

It wasn't long ago that certain smug conservatives, referring to anti-Bush protesters, claimed that "conservatives don't engage in useless protests" and "protesters tend to be ugly losers with nothing better to do" (this was aimed primarily at liberal women). It warms my heart to see that many conservatives have either seen the light and embraced protesting as something anyone can do, or have never bought into that rhetoric. Good for them.


_

le baby-sitteur

Looks as though I'll be babysitting a sick brood tomorrow morning. My buddy Mike is coming over this evening to fetch me, then, tomorrow morning, he's throwing me into a dank pit with his pestilential offspring (they all have leprosy or necrotizing fasciitis or something) while he and the Missus head off to work, and I'm apparently supposed to spend a few hours in the pit, running in circles and trying to keep his afflicted progeny from eating my brain. Luckily, I work off my laptop, so doing work while babysitting won't be a problem. Mike says he'll be back home for lunch break. I imagine he'll throw some food into the pit, cackle at our predicament, then leave.

I think the Missus will be home in the early afternoon, as she's a teacher. If I still have my brain by then, I'll be pleasantly surprised.

More later.


_

well, that's one correct

Yes, ladies and gentlemen: this is my first-ever blog post written while sitting on the toilet. Not to worry-- no pictures will accompany this post.

I wanted to announce that, at long last, one of my TV predictions finally came true, and in a most unambiguous way (WARNING: SPOILER FOR THOSE TRYING TO CATCH UP ON THEIR VIEWING OF "24"): one of my all-time favorite characters, the very cool Bill Buchanan, bit the big one in tonight's episode. He went out in style, to be sure, saving the life of President Taylor and allowing Jack (plus the assault team that eventually stormed the White House) to control the situation by taking down General Juma and most of his men. Buchanan died the way I want to go: in a huge explosion.

But there was no time to mourn Buchanan's passing. Hodges (Jon Voight) is the bad guy who was in cahoots with General Juma, so we're after him now. In the meantime, poor Agent Walker is beginning to feel a true tug-of-war of the spirit as she begins to realize that her boss and possible love interest, Agent Moss, might actually be congenitally stupid. Jack is brutal but efficient, and brutal efficiency is sexy for a tough cookie like Walker, who merely needs to give in to her dark side to feel true bliss with Jack. Moss seems like a good fellow; his heart is in the right place, but his instincts are all wrong and his insistence on going by the book is making him look like a fool. So for Walker, it's a choice between the dumb bureaucrat and the ruthless killing machine. Choose wisely, Special Agent!

It's too bad that "24" will be continuing after I restart the walk, but at least BSG will be finished in a couple weeks. I'll have some closure.

[NB: Somewhere during the latter half of the post, I left the porcelain throne.]


_

here's one for the "Get Religion" crowd

Get Religion is a "meta" website that covers religious coverage. Here's something the GR folks might find interesting-- mainly thanks to the provocative headline:

Police: Ill. pastor deflected gunshot with Bible

Without even reading the article, you might be led to think two things:

1. The pastor somehow did this intentionally, and

2. The pastor "miraculously" survived the gunman's attack, thanks to his bullet-deflecting Bible.

The headline makes you think a miracle occurred, and many people, especially those who aren't religious, might sense a bit of nudge-nudge-wink-wink mockery on the part of whoever crafted the title (keep in mind that journalists don't always get to title their own articles).

When you take the time to read the article, however, you learn the headline is tastelessly glib, and what actually occurred was heart-wrenching:

A pastor shot and killed during his Sunday sermon deflected the first of the gunman's four rounds with a Bible, sending a confetti-like spray of paper into the air in a horrifying scene that congregants initially thought was a skit, police said.

The gunman strode down the aisle of the sprawling First Baptist Church shortly after 8 a.m. and briefly spoke with The Rev. Fred Winters, then pulled out a .45-caliber semiautomatic pistol and began firing until it jammed, Illinois State Police Director Larry Trent said. Churchgoers wrestled the gunman to the ground as he waved a knife, slashing himself and two other people, Trent said.

None of the about 150 congregants seemed to recognize the gunman and investigators do not know details of Winters' conversation with him, but they planned to review an audio recording of the service, Trent said. The service was not videotaped.

"We thought it was part of a drama skit ... when he shot, what you saw was confetti," said congregant Linda Cunningham, whose husband is a minister of adult education at the church. "We just sat there waiting for what comes next, not realizing that he had wounded the pastor."

Winters had stood on an elevated platform to deliver his sermon about finding happiness in the workplace and managed to run halfway down the sanctuary's side aisle before collapsing, Cunningham said.

Two congregants tackled the gunman as he pulled the 4-inch knife, and all three were stabbed, police said. The gunman suffered "a pretty serious wound to the neck" while one congregant had lower back wounds, Trent said.

Were we to confront the editor of this piece about the tastelessness of the article's title, I imagine he'd feign wide-eyed innocence and note that the first bullet was deflected by the pastor's Bible. But given the events described in the article, does "Pastor deflected gunshot with Bible" really sound like an appropriate title for this article? Does the title really capture what the article's about, or does it manufacture a miracle and inject sly mockery in the process-- all for the marketing-related purpose of attracting the reader to the article?

I'm not sure why this particular article incenses me so much, but it does. Let me back up: the article's fine. The title isn't.


_

wanted: an intrepid chase car driver!

If you've joined the group "Kevin's Walk" on Facebook, you've seen that I've plotted out the route to Salt Lake City. The route requires about 40 days of walking, but if we add in the anticipated breaks (I've given myself periodic breaks), the number is closer to 50 or so days.

The route takes me out of Walla Walla and back into Oregon, where I'll be following my old faithful, I-84, for a goodly part of the journey. Once I hit Salt Lake City, however, I'll be switching to I-80, which runs eastward across the country and gets me close to one of my major destinations: Chicago.

But my journey on I-80 takes me into the verge of the Rockies and leads me through southern Wyoming. This promises to be an arduous trek: there is-- as many, many readers have warned me-- literally nothing along the way. True: it's not nothing if you're a biologist or geologist or a dedicated photographer, but from the practical stance of the long-distance walker, "nothing" refers to the lack of towns at which a weary traveler might seek rest and the replenishment of his supplies.

It will be nearly impossible to survive this portion of the walk without some sort of help, either from passersby or from a committed chase car driver. I need to plot out the exact length of the I-80 jaunt, but any potential chase car driver should know that it's going to mean a long distance and a long time. A very rough plot on Google Earth shows the stretch to be more than 400 miles. If I average about 15 miles per day, we're talking about a time commitment of at least 27 days. The actual length of the trip will be closer to 430 miles, I think, so we're really looking at a minimum of 30 days-- a whole calendar month to cross the great expanse.

I keep getting comments from people about "why not bike the distance?", but I determined long ago that I didn't want to do this. One reason is admittedly ego-related: the fraternity of trans-America walkers is much smaller than that of trans-America bikers who are-- no offense-- a dime a dozen these days. Once you adjust your mind to the scale of long-distance travel, you quickly see that biking across the country is no big shakes. A second reason I haven't wanted to bike across the country is that I'd have to have a very good bike, and would need to be able to maintain it. A big guy like me will put a lot of strain on any bike, no matter how well-made it is. I'd be stopping for repairs two or three times per state. So No, thanks to all you good folks who've suggested biking. I know you've been thinking about my knees, but my knees are a lot better; I've been ready to walk for months.

So I'll be crossing Wyoming on foot, just as I've done to get to Walla Walla, WA, and just as I'll do to get from Walla Walla to Salt Lake City.

After Wyoming, things look substantially easier. Nebraska has its open spaces, but it's got more towns along the western portion of I-80 than Wyoming does along its western portion of I-80.

Think you can chase-car me through Wyoming? Know somebody who might be able to do such a thing? Give me a comment, send me an email, TALK TO ME!

ADDENDUM: I should mention that another major problem with walking through nothing is that I can't recharge my laptop or my BlackBerry by plugging cords into a buffalo's butt. A chase car driver would have to help me out with that issue, somehow.


_

oh, please

If this pastor's wild-eyed prediction comes true, it'll only be because he's somehow in on the action.

Do any of my readers buy into this sort of thing? You can already see where my bias lies; don't be afraid to show yours.


_

making use of Facebook for the rest of the walk

Longtime readers of this blog are well aware of my hatred of and derision for Facebook. I did, however, sign up for the service and have decided, finally, to make it work for me.

I've been quietly plotting my route out of Walla Walla and across the country, using a "group" I created on Facebook as a place to leave route-related topics. Specifically, what I've done is to create topics that cover each day of the journey, and my hope is that people will post replies to those topics, offering help in the form of suggestions or actual aid: a chase car, a place to stay, etc.

The object of the game is to avoid expenses in all the areas that killed me over the first 600 miles: paying for campsites, paying for motels, and paying for food. While I doubt I'll be able to emulate Hakim's feat (of course, I don't really know the details of his journey, so I don't know whether he really did the whole thing on 200-plus dollars), I hope to get by with a minimum of expenditures.

As always, you can help out either by sending me a donation, or by buying products from my CafePress shop (all links are on the sidebar). You can also join my Facebook group, "Kevin's Walk," and start reacting to what you see there. In fact, I'm hoping you will join that group, as it shows my itinerary.


_

never more meta

YouTube allows you to be as meta as you want, picking up pieces of other pieces and creating your own piece. Justin Yoshida, in this post, links to an amazing musical example of this. Imagine scouring the Web for musical pieces, then editing them together into a coherent funk soundtrack.

In a sense, something like this has been happening since the beginning. Why are old comedies often less funny or witty than newer ones? Because newer ones contain jokes that riff off our knowledge of the older jokes. The result is an archaeology of references and meta-references, with those of us alive today riding that constantly self-updating referential wavefront (we do this for as long as we can before dropping off, settling into a particular groove, and losing touch with that front). Steve Martin's version of "The Pink Panther" would have been hilarious back in the 1960s, but because Martin did little more than recycle Peter Sellers's old jokes, the movie (and its recent sequel) fell flat for 21st-century audiences.*

Of course, we often lose track of the original datum to which all the later references refer. Just today, I watched the original "The Day the Earth Stood Still" for the first time, and saw where the Cylon centurion got its face: right from Gort the robot! Wish I'd known this earlier.

That a current phenomenon is the result of other, preceding phenomena is a central tenet of Buddhist metaphysics. All phenomena are dependently co-arisen; it's not just music that works this way. And if we follow this line of thinking a bit further, we begin to see that there was no original datum, because even that datum arose from antecedent causes.

In any case, enjoy your meta-funk. Thanks, Justin, for the link.

---

*At the same time, many forms of physical comedy retain their humor even today. The classic Mr. Creosote scene in "Monthy Python's The Meaning of Life" is a good example, and the long-ago international success of the traveling Commedia dell'Arte is another example of comedy with wide and long-standing appeal.


_

spring forward

Yanks who read this blog are reminded that tomorrow is the day we turn our clocks forward to mark the return to Daylight Savings Time. The implication for me is that DC will once again find itself only 13 hours behind Seoul instead of 14.

I think it's time we got rid of this nonsense. The history of DST throughout the world was and is linked to technological issues: it affects the energy use of farmers, retailers, and homeowners.

You might be interested to know that Korea doesn't change its clocks twice a year. I lived with that fact for eight years and found it perfectly fine. So what if the mornings are darker or brighter according to the season? For most of us, office-bound as we are, this means little. And farmers can certainly adjust their own schedules to adapt to the changing lighting (they probably do this already!). What's the point of making such a twice-yearly change these days? I find it archaic.

I've often mused about going further and switching us to one single "Global Standard Time." This would put everyone on the planet on exactly the same page, though it would render an expression like "working 9 to 5" irrelevant for most of the world. It would also appear counterintuitive that some people would look at their clocks and read "12AM" at midday, and "12PM" at midnight.

But travelers would never again have to worry about "local time." Historians would have a more objective metric by which to chronicle events. "The incident occurred at 10:20PM" would mean the same thing to everyone, no matter their location on the globe. Of course, historians would be further tasked with mentioning the time of day: "The incident occurred at 10:20PM, a bright summer's morning in Chesterville."

What are your thoughts on upending the status quo?


_

BSG musings: still room for my theory?

"Islanded in a Stream of Stars"

So Kara Thrace confessed to Baltar about the body she'd found on Earth. She gave Baltar her corpse's dog tags and asked him to perform tests on it. The result? "Necrotic flesh," says Baltar, in a rather tasteless coda to a funeral for humans and Cylons who died during a hull breach. The implication, at least as Baltar sees it (unless he's actually lying), is that humans, too, can somehow be reborn. This still doesn't explain the pristine Viper that Kara flew back to the fleet... but everything does make sense if we once again come back to the "they're all Cylons" theory, i.e., the colonists think of themselves as human, but they've been Cylon since forever. Perhaps it's true that, in the BSG universe, humanity left the building long, long ago, but the Cylon technology that creates exact replicas of things still exists.

The reason I find this theory so attractive is its explanatory power. How else to explain the similarity in language and culture between Earth of 2000 years ago and the modern Twelve Colonies-- a similarity that has somehow obtained over distance and time? Such rigid faithfulness only makes sense when everyone's a machine-- dressing the same, acting the same, thinking the same-- from generation to generation, and from solar system to solar system. And the theory also explains the various instances of telepathy, the spooky coincidences, the visions, and the prophecies-- all of which make perfect sense if we view BSG's overall story arc as the preordained unfolding of some massive computer program. The only alternative is to do what Ellen Tigh and others are doing: to invoke a higher power.

Eternal return is a myth for actual humans, as I've discussed before. Not even Hindus see history as perfectly cyclical: there's repetition, but it's imperfectly realized, giving us more of a spiral notion of history than a circular notion.

One might counterargue that, even in BSG, there's no reason not to believe in spiral time. Perhaps there are humans who play out and replay their history imperfectly, or perhaps it's nothing but Cylons, but they're replaying their history imperfectly. I lean toward discounting the first possibility, for the reasons I've stated: humans don't repeat their history this perfectly, whereas machines would be capable of such a feat. The second possibility, though, strikes me as plausible, and would be consistent with the Cylon view of history, especially as laid out by Leoben long ago, when he told Kara that the same story would unfold again, but with the actors switching roles.

We've got two episodes left to find out what's what. I have a feeling that most of the big questions will be left unresolved, with the writers deliberately keeping the question of the theistic universe ambiguous. However, I should balance that by noting that the final episode is rumored to be a long one-- maybe 2 or 3 hours. A lot might get settled during that time.

One final note: the final two episodes are titled "Daybreak, Part I and II." That would seem to signify some sort of new beginning.


_

no dice

I didn't go see "Watchmen" today. I might try to see it on Monday-- an early showing, to avoid the noisy geek crowd. My brother saw it last night, the bum. He thought it was pretty good. The reviews I've been reading have been mixed, and some of them note the conspicuous absence of the giant "sacrificial squid" that makes its appearance at the end of the graphic novel. That's sort of disappointing, but if whatever has replaced the squid isn't lame, I'll forgive this rather major change to the story.

Tonight, I comfort myself with some BSG.


_

choices, choices

I still haven't been out to see "Gran Torino" or "Doubt," both of which linger in one or two local theaters. But just as cells in your body die and make way for newer cells, a new crop of movies is out this month, with two in particular grabbing my attention. The first is "Race to Witch Mountain," a remake of a film I remember seeing when I was a kid in the 1970s. The second is Zack Snyder's version of the classic 1980s-era graphic novel "Watchmen," which apparently has a 2:40:00 running time but looks-- if the trailers don't lie-- like it might be worth emptying my wallet for.

Of the two, "Watchmen" looks to be the surer bet.


_

unstable Asians and the insanity defense

We of Asian ethnicity have heard the stereotypes: Asians are neurotic slaves to parental pressure, manic overachievers, and generally nerdy as hell. You don't normally see an Asian leading man in an American movie unless he's proficient at one or more martial arts-- also part of the Asian stereotype. Asians are paradoxically viewed as overly passionate and expressive, but also overly stoic and detached. What's strange, though, is that the phrase "emotionally unstable" is almost never a part of the stereotype.

That might change, what with the Cho Seung Hui massacre, the recent stabbing of a Kiwi teacher by a Korean teen, and the horrifying beheading of a Greyhound Bus passenger by a Chinese immigrant.

The above-linked article notes the clemency of Canadian justice: the murderer was adjudged insane, and will have no criminal record. That's too bad; I'm not a fan of the insanity defense. I understand the rationale behind it ("can you blame an angry bear for acting like an angry bear?"), but don't accept it as sufficient to obviate the need for some sort of punitive or severely restrictive measure. Travis the chimpanzee might also have been considered "not responsible for his actions," but his shooting death was condign: had he not been stopped, he would have done far worse damage than he'd already done.

I've mentioned Herbert Fingarette before, but just to remind you: Fingarette, in his book Confucius: The Secular as Sacred, notes that responsibility breaks down two ways: (1) it refers to one's being the locus of some action (e.g., "Who ate the hiker? That bear did."), and (2) it refers to moral agency (e.g., the difference between accidentally and deliberately injuring someone). While sense (2) might not apply to an insane person, sense (1) assuredly does, so it is within bounds to say that an insane person is responsible for his deeds. Punishment might not be the answer if the person in question is truly unable to process the gravity of what he's done, which is why I also mentioned severely restrictive measures. I'm not convinced that rehabilitation and eventual release into the community (which is what the above-linked article says is a possibility for Vince Li, the crazy Chinese immigrant) are the best solutions when dealing with the criminally insane.

Then there's this example of Asian insanity...


_

religious notes

1. Interreligious relations in Bali aren't always positive, such as when the Muslim authorities issue silly fatwas against certain aspects of yoga practice.

...the Indonesian Council of Ulemas, the top religious body in the mainly Muslim country, issued a fatwa in January banning Indonesian Muslims from all forms of yoga that involve Hindu religious rituals such as chanting mantras.

It said performing yoga purely for the physical benefits was however acceptable.

The move raised the hackles of religious moderates and civil libertarian groups who accused the council of meddling in affairs over which it had no authority.

Religious edicts issued by the ulemas are not legally binding on Muslims but it is considered sinful to ignore them.

Andrini said organisers were not afraid to hold the festival at the Bajrasandi Bali Monument in Denpasar -- the capital of the Hindu-majority island of Bali -- despite the fatwa.

"I'm a Muslim myself. Our kind of yoga, which is called Patanjali, involves movement and breathing. People may recite their own mantra or prayer according to their faith," she said.

2. Brian notes an ongoing problem in Korea with Buddhist temples that charge hikers a fee to hike through land owned by the local temple. Jesus might have been on to something when he wanred about the linkage of God and Mammon, but historically speaking, religion and money have always gone hand in hand.

On the academic front, students of Korean religious history will see that the current problem is a continuation of a long and bitter conflict involving Buddhist temples, land use rights, and the local authorities.

Personally, I find it obnoxious (and hypocritical) when religious sites won't allow anyone in without paying first, but in Korea, the problem is often that temples, especially the famous ones, are as much tourist attractions as places of practice. The relevant orders (mostly Jogyae, the order that administrates the majority of Buddhist activity in South Korea, encompassing Zen [Seon], Hua Yen [Hwa Eom], Pure Land, and other strains) might have concluded that asking for a small fee is a good, practical, middle-way solution, but I'd rather that the temples moved toward a more European model, where tourists are allowed to enter the grounds for free, but are also not discouraged from leaving free-will offerings. This works well enough in Europe (Notre Dame, Chartres, and the cathedral in Fribourg, Switzerland come to mind from my own experience; you pay only to see special areas), and can also be seen here in DC: the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception is free to all comers, and so is the National Cathedral.

As I mentioned, not all Korean Buddhist temples charge a fee to visit their grounds. In fact a majority don't, and to be fair, even some of the most famous temples will allow you on the grounds free of charge-- Jogyae-sa in downtown Seoul is one example; Hwagyae-sa in the northern part of Seoul is another. But you're not getting into temples like Haein-sa or Bulguk-sa without paying, and as my friend Sperwer and I discovered, the only way to avoid paying for the climb up some of Bukhan-san's trails (the mountain features several Buddhist outposts) is to start very early in the day-- before the old ajeossi gets to the ticket office and sees you stepping quietly over the chain barrier at the trailhead.


_

back!

We're back from Snowshoe, which is a very beautiful, very well-organized resort. Many thanks to my brother David, who sponsored the trip. Thanks as well to the parents for bringing way too much food for two nights.

I didn't get too involved with the snowings-on; the parents, however, went all over the place and enjoyed some "tubing," a variant of the old activity in which you throw yourself down a snowy slope while atop a fat inner tube. The tubes used at Snowshoe have long fabric handles, allowing people to latch onto each other, descending the slope in pairs (or, illegally, in threes) like clustered leukocytes whooshing through an artery.

Last night, we had dinner at the Foxfire Grille, which serves generous portions of good food at fairly reasonable prices. We all shared a Philly Cheesesteak Nachos appetizer; Mom and Dad dug in to a barbecue combo platter; David had a sausage-broccolini ravioli that made me wish I hadn't ordered my gyro. But the gyro was good (I'd been craving one for a while), and the dessert afterward was fantastic: it was a layered, multi-berry cheesecake done up in a quasi-tiramisu style. Nicely executed, and admittedly unexpected in a place that doesn't have a haughty, high-rent vibe.

Two highlights: (1) we had bacon for breakfast yesterday morning; the smoke set off our fire alarm, which wasn't connected to 911, thank Jeebus; and (2) Dad hurt his ribs while pushing Mom off during one of their tubing sessions on the slopes. Dad's a lot better today; we had worried that he might have cracked or broken a rib or two. Mom razzed him about not being young anymore, but that's not going to stop Dad.

The view from our third-floor window was gorgeous the morning after we arrived; Snowshoe is located at an altitude of 4848 feet in the Alleghenies (there's even a store named 4848). The drive back today was equally gorgeous; we took a scenic route recommended by David.

Now we're home, settling back into our routine, and I've got a mess of proofing to finish in the next 75 minutes.


_

Snowshoe, West Virginia: afternoon view from the 3rd-floor room/balcony

Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T

snowy in Snowshoe

We're up in the West Virginia mountains, huddled in our "studio" and prepping for sleep. We watched the two-hour "24" special as a family and had fun scoffing at the idea that General Juma could storm the White House with a mere handful of not-very-well-armed commandos. I've been thinking for a while, now, that the White House is essentially a surrogate for CTU HQ, which was also routinely full of moles and easily breached.

Mom, who was new to "24," wasn't following the action so well (around that time of night, she's usually off watching her Korean programs on a different TV), but she did ask us whether "24" was some sort of sci-fi program. Why? "Jack Bauer talks like an alien," she said. (She was referring to Jack's sustained, growly whisper when he was confined and talking to Bill Buchanan about the upcoming assault.) That gave me a new perspective on the show, and now that I think of it, "24" does have a lot in common with a series like BSG, which also features sleeper agents, conflicted loyalties, torture, confinement, and treachery.

The weather in Snowshoe was windy and snowy earlier this evening; my brother David says this pretty much marks the end of the snow. I might spend part of tomorrow just tromping around the compound. Dad and Mom are thinking about going tubing and snowmobiling; David is going snowboarding, and might also do some skiing. Whatever we do tomorrow, I might come back with pictures.

Night.


_

morning snow on deck

Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T

snowy outing

We're supposed to be heading out to Snowshoe, West Virginia on Monday morning, courtesy of my brother David. A snowstorm is on its way here right now, and the weather gurus are predicting significant dumpage. I'll be curious to see how the drive goes tomorrow.


_

samil-jeol

While not exactly a happy day for Koreans, I still wish Korea a Happy March First.


_

"Needful Things"

Stephen King's novel Needful Things is a morality tale about the Devil's visit to the small Maine town of Castle Rock, and the mayhem that ensues. I thought it was a great story, so I was interested when "Needful Things," the movie, popped up on cable, uncut, on the HDNet Movies channel. I was pleased to see Ed Harris as the main good guy, Bonnie Bedelia as his squeeze (you may remember her as John McClane's wife Holly Gennaro/McClane in the first two Die Hard films), and the always-awesome Max von Sydow in the role of Satan-- here named, as he is in the novel, Mr. Leland Gaunt. It's an interesting switch for von Sydow, who battled Satan (or his demons) in 1973's "The Exorcist."

Alas, despite a fine cast, the filmic "Needful Things" was a huge disappointment, as so many film adaptations of novels are. Poor Ed Harris is forced by the script to give a long, pious speech to the townies at the end, and instead of King's very visual confrontation between Ed Harris's town sheriff and Mr. Gaunt-- during which Gaunt's true form is revealed-- we are given a cop-out.

What was most distasteful was that the movie ended up making exactly the opposite point of the novel. In the novel, it's clear that the Devil preys upon humanity's inherent sinfulness. Everything bad that happens in the town is, ultimately, the result of the free choices made by all the characters, which makes them all morally culpable, despite Gaunt's various methods of subtle compulsion. But the devil himself needs to be expelled, and Sheriff Pangborn's confrontation with Leland gaunt at the end of the novel serves as a sort of exorcism. In the movie version, however, Pangborn's speech makes clear that the townies aren't at fault at all: the blame rests squarely on Gaunt. And Gaunt, instead of being expelled from the town, leaves it under his own power. It's an ill-advised switch of the loci of responsibility.

It must be a painful thing for a novelist to watch his work get chopped to ribbons for the big screen. Perhaps King has grown used to this by now; the adaptations of his horror stories are almost all notoriously bad, while his non-horror short stories ("The Body" and "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption" come to mind) tend to turn out well. King might be richer than I can even dream of becoming, but he still has my sympathies. "Needful Things," the movie, was a waste of time. Needful Things, the novel, is worth your while.


_