We're coming to get you, Barbara

As you may have guessed, I'm a bit slow sometimes.

There is this movie The Dish. If you haven't seen it (and you probably haven't), you should. It is about this small town in Australia with a big radio telescope, and during the first moonwalk this particular dish is supposed to help broadcast the television signal. Three or four guys with pocket protectors work there, and during this time another geek from NASA joins them. One of the pocket protector guys is really good with numbers, but not so good with social situations and jokes. Somebody tells a joke involving carrier pigeons. He doesn't get it right away. The discussion moves on. Five minutes later, when they are talking about something else, he suddenly gets the joke and laughs. Carrier pigeons!

Someone in my little group suggested that we all watch an episode of Nova or something called The Pluto Files. This seems to be a reference to The X Files, but I don't get it. I should have gotten it when something was mentioned at the beginning of the program, but somehow I didn't get it til the closing credits. Planet X. The X Files. The Pluto Files.

Carrier pigeons!

Okay, so I haven't been feeling that good. I should be busy cleaning the house, but I'm not, which shouldn't surprise anyone. I haven't done much of the usual stuff, but I did have a project that I wanted to work on, and I should have been done with it by now, especially since I haven't been doing much of the usual stuff. I need to sort out the back room again (now ten boxes of yarn and mostly finished scarves), and I need to go through the holiday stuff again. I did most of this in October, how did it get to such a state in less than a year? Still, it needs to be done again, and I'm not making much progress, mostly cause I just don't feel well. Nothing serious, just the occasional headache or something, and no energy.

So I've spent a lot of time in bed, mostly reading or watching DVDs. So after my ordeal on Monday we went to the library, and I picked up a few more DVDs, one of them being Shaun of the Dead.

I told you I was a bit slow. This was the first time I had seen Shaun of the Dead. (I still haven't seen The Rocky Horror Picture Show either, but that is on purpose, as I think that someday I will win an award for being the oldest virgin.) This movie has been out for five or six years, and everybody loves it, and I just didn't bother to go see it.

It isn't what I was expecting. I was thinking that it was going to be a parody like Young Frankenstein. No, not like that. Still very funny, but not like that.

I didn't like it to start with. There is a lot of character development before you get to the zombie part. There is so much of this, that you start to wonder if you've put in the wrong disk. It is just one of those films about lowlife bums who live in England. Okay, they are not seriously lowlife bums. There are English films about seriously lowlife bums with pretty much no plot and no lines of dialog that do not contain some sort of profanity, and they seem to be made solely for the purpose of entering a contest to see how many times the F word can be squeezed into one film. They aren't that level of lowlife, just that Shaun's best friend does say the F word a lot, calls everyone c***s and n*****s, and is often seen scratching himself where it really itches. No one likes Shaun's friend, for good reason, except Shaun, but Shaun just won't give him up, and Shaun is no prize himself even without the friend screwing things up.

Despite the name, Shaun is not in fact, dead. He's just rather brain-dead a lot. But Shaun is not a zombie.

I very soon got tired of this and wondered, what has any of this got to do with zombies?

But then you start to notice things in background. Maybe there are zombies in this movie. Be patient. Be very patient. It will be half an hour before Shaun interacts with the zombies.

A few minutes later, the best friend yells, "We're coming to get you, Barbara!"

That was funny. If I had seen this in a theater, I expect that line was fall out of your seat laughing kind of funny. My husband didn't get it. It had been too long since he'd seen The Night of the Living Dead to get the reference.

I am not an expert on zombie movies. I have watched a few (and enjoyed a few) and I tend to like a few things such as 28 Days Later, which are sort of zombie movies. But I am not an expert, and I am wondering if I missed a lot of references. Maybe the whole movie was full of lines like that, and I just didn't get it.

There were a couple of things that reminded me of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and at one part the music made me think of The Thing. I wonder if they meant to do that, or if it is just me, as I am a bit obsessed with Invasion of the Body Snatchers and rather like The Thing as well. (By the way, I hear that that are about to start filming the remake or prequel or whatever it is of The Thing. Cross fingers. And if it is good may John Campbell get credit in very big letters.)

While I was not feeling well, I also sat down to watch TRON. I just never can get through the whole thing. The first time I saw it, the beginning was boring, and I didn't finish watching it. Over time I have seen bits and pieces of it. One time I was flipping channels and saw that two actors from Babylon 5 were on it, so I tried to watch. Of course by then I had forgotten the beginning of the movie, so a lot of it didn't make since. Not that it has just a brilliant plot anyway.

So there's supposed to be a sequel (supposed to be, but now we are having doubts since there isn't much in the way of new news on the subject since San Diego Comic Con two years ago), so I figured that I had better watch TRON cause all my friends are excited that there's going to be a sequel. Okay, I have now watched it, and I just don't get why everyone was so in love with this movie.

Well, not all of them have the hots for Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

I have just heard of something else in the line of stories like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which I thought started with Who Goes There. Apparently there was a Lovecraft story before that one, so I will have to read it. It is something that I look into once in a while, like the fictional history of the transporter. Does anything predate The Fly and the Doors that are sometimes in Asimov's stories?

I suppose that is enough for now. I have another ordeal this afternoon. It isn't so bad, and it will be good to get something else over with.

A trip to the library to find The Road

If you have been reading a while you know that I used to read a lot of books, but now, not so much. Most of the time, I don't have the attention span required to enjoy reading books, and my eyesight isn't so good either. So I don't read that many books now.

Which isn't to say that I don't go to the library a lot. Most weeks we go at least twice, as there are several libraries to choose from, and we are nearly always near one. He still reads plenty of books, and he gets audio books for long trips. And I get the occasional book to read, and a few books that I don't read so much as flip through and look at the pictures (cookbooks, how-to books, etc...), and once in a great while I look at a magazine.

And I get a lot of DVDs. I check out tons of DVDs. I very rarely go to a video store unless I am really wanting to see a particular movie. The newly discovered Redbox has only been used about five times. But I tend to get a minimum of three DVDs per week at the library.

So while I am often at the library, I don't use the library catalog as much as I used to. Which is a good thing, since I don't like the newer programs as much.

The first program we used was just like the card catalog. You selected author, subject, or title, and then typed in something, and you were taken to what you had typed, or the closest thing to it. If you typed in Asimov, you were taken to lists of books written by people named Asimov, and you would scroll down a bit til you found Isaac, and then you would scroll down more to find the particular title you wanted. If you did not spell Asimov correctly or otherwise made a typing error, you would be taken to the nearest thing that the computer could find, and then maybe you would notice your error and correct it. If you still couldn't find what you were looking for, maybe you would have to get help from a librarian.

So that was the old program, which was very useful to people already used to the old card catalog, if you could type. It was fast. It wasn't very pretty, as it was yellow letters on a black screen. No pictures. But you could see about twenty-five titles per screen before you had to scroll down.

Then the bigger libraries got some new programs, which I found to be a bit of a headache.

These programs showed pictures of the books. But, in return for that added feature, you could only see about three titles at a time instead of twenty-five. And it took time to load all of those pictures. When they first got the new program, they didn't yet have the new computers, and it seemed to take a long time to find anything. They soon got new faster computers and all was well.

Except that if you misspelled or otherwise incorrectly typed Asimov, it didn't take you to the nearest thing. You just get a message that says no entry found. Since it is inconceivable that there are no books in the library by Isaac Asimov, you must have made a mistake. Try again. But when you are not looking for Isaac Asimov, when you are looking for a lesser known author with maybe only one or two books, then maybe you have misspelled something, or maybe the library just doesn't have any of the books you want. There is no way to know.

You have to go and bug the librarian.

Now that we have computers, we can list things under more than author, subject, and title. We can also add things like series. You can look up a list of all the Star Trek titles the library has.

The computer can now search through everything in the library with something called general keyword, which would have just been impossible with the paper card catalog. Like, if someone recommended a book to you, but you didn't write down the name, and you think that it had the word roses in it. Under general keyword, you can type in roses, and then you will get a list of everything the library has that roses in the title, and if you are patient enough, you might find your book.

Okay, so yesterday we went to the main branch of our little library. Our little library has three branches now, though one of the branches is so small that I have only been there once. And I don't use the catalog much anymore, unless I am looking for a particular title, cause I already know where the DVDs are and where the cookbooks are and so forth. I just walk around and see if anything gets my attention.

Recently, we had seen the movie The Road. The Road is a pretty depressing movie, which makes you want to go out and see a nice happy movie, like The Book of Eli. But someone had said that the book was better, and that it had a more uplifting ending, and I should read it. And I like to read books after I have seen the movie, and I like post apocalyptic stuff, so I thought that I would check out The Road, only I forgot who wrote it.

Okay, so I go to the computer and type in The Road. Only the thing seems to be stuck on general keyword search. In alphabetical order it listed six hundred and something entries with the word road. The Road, which probably would have been the first entry in a title search, was on page 35 of the general keyword search.

But I do eventually find it, and I find out the name of the author is Cormac McCarthy, which is what I need to go and look for the book on the shelf. And I see that the library has two copies, and that one is checked out and that one is checked in.

Also, it is on the adult fiction shelf instead of the science fiction shelf, but we won't get into that.

Anyway, I go and look, and I can't find it on the shelf.

Time to bug the librarian.

Maybe the second copy is in paperback or something, and I will have to look somewhere else. Or maybe it is on display. Or maybe it is still in shelving.

So the librarian tells me that their copy is checked out, but I say that I thought there were two copies and that the other one was checked in. She says that the other copy is at a different branch. But then she tells me to wait, that she'll look for one in the large print section.

For some reason, it hadn't occurred to me to look for things in the large print section. I guess that I hadn't even noticed that this particular library had a large print section. The bigger libraries have one, but rarely got anything from there. I left those books for the old people who needed them.

The librarian said that the large print edition was checked in and pointed me in the right direction. I found the book.

I read the book yesterday. I can read the book without taking off my glasses and putting my nose an inch away from the paper. I might have to start reading again on a regular basis.

The Road the book is not much different from the movie. You still don't know for sure what the catastrophe was, though you can still assume that it was a nuclear war or a big meteor. As for the supposed uplifting ending, it is the same except that the woman talks about God in the next to last paragraph.

Defying Gravity and other random stuff

You may have watched Defying Gravity on ABC, until it was announced that the eighth episode was the season finale. Or maybe it was said to be the series finale. I can't remember. Anyway, it's a bit silly to call the eighth episode the season finale, but sometimes they only make eight episodes of a new show, especially when it is just a summer replacement series. Or sometimes they only make ten episodes, or maybe they only make thirteen episodes.

So, I had thought that they had only made the eight episodes, and that if the ratings were good they would make more for next year, and if the ratings weren't good then the season cliffhanger of them all looking at whatever was in storage bay four would just be the end of it.

Turns out that they filmed thirteen episodes, and episode eight was not meant to be the season cliffhanger. ABC just isn't going to bother with the other five episodes. People in Canada are still watching the show.

So, I have just found out that channel 131 has episodes nine and ten. I have just watched episode nine and seen what is in storage bay four. Tomorrow I will watch episode ten, and hopefully episode eleven will be posted on Saturday.

Anyway, if there is something that you like to watch now that you missed, and you can't find it on Hulu, look on 131.

And there is a lot of cool stuff on Hulu that you might not have noticed.

I've already mentioned finding The Bionic Woman on Hulu. I have yet to look at Return of the Planet of the Apes (animated), but that's cool that they have it. If you missed Daybreak, (think more serious Groundhog Day with the black guy from Private Practice), you can still watch it. You can watch the nineties version of Dark Shadows. They have the short-lived Century City, about a law firm in the future. Maybe you would like to watch Carl Sagan's Cosmos. They have three seasons of Sliders, and seven seasons of Stargate SG1. They have most of the new Outer Limits, and a lot of the old ones.

Anyway, they have a lot of cool stuff if you are ever wanting something to pass the time.

I guess that is all I have to say for now. I have the usual stuff to do. I'd better get started on it.

Watching TV

It is starting to bother me that I am not getting anything useful done. Working in the garden is out of the question. Some days I just do not feel well enough to do anything, but the days I feel good I still don't do much.

Yesterday, the bashed finger felt much better. It is hardly noticeable now, and tomorrow I expect it to feel completely normal again. Yesterday was hot and we didn't go anywhere or do anything, except for us watching TV and him doing stuff on the computer. It is very annoying to know that a whole day (or several days) has gone by and nothing has gotten done (unless you are on vacation or something and had planned on getting nothing done). I washed out enough dishes to do breakfast and lunch, made breakfast (cold cereal), made lunch (pasta, with what little veggies I was able to get out of the garden), and watered the plants. That was it. The rest of the day I watched TV. My husband had a similar day, he made pizza for dinner and washed off a screen from one of the air conditioners, and the rest of the day was spent on the computer or watching TV.

It's a rare day that we don't even run errands or visit the library and literally just lie around and watch TV, but I think we have had a few and are going to have more. So I am having a bit of a rant about the TV, mostly about the annoying digital switchover.

So it has been a couple of weeks since the digital switchover nonsense, and I am mostlygetting used to it, but I'm still having some problems with it.

Even before the switchover, there were some problems. Like the VCR doesn't rewind properly. If you hit the play and rewind buttons and the same time, that's fine, but it will take a really long time to rewind the whole tape. If you just want to rewind the tape, and you just hit rewind and not play, it tends to the think about it for a moment, and then the power on the VCR goes off. And then when you turn the power back on the VCR ejects the tape.

I noticed that would happen once in a while, but over the the last few months it went from happening once in a while to happening all the damn time.

The VCR is one of those tape and DVD combo things, so if I get rid of it I won't be able to watch DVDs either. It was a Christmas gift from two or three years ago. I don't think I should need another one so soon.

But it still seemed to play and record and all of that just fine. So just the rewind didn't work, and it seems to me that they used to sell something that would rewind tapes. That never quite made sense to me why anyone would need such a thing, unless maybe someone owned a video store. So I never bought one of these gadgets, but I knew that they used to make them. So I thought if I could find one that would solve my problem.

So I didn't find one, but there are just stacks and stacks of old VCRs at Goodwill and such, so we bought one of those for less than ten dollars. We didn't attach it to a TV, we just plugged it in, and now we use that to rewind the tapes.

Right about the time that we figured out to do that, the fast forward feature doesn't work either.

So we can either fast forward and play, which takes a long time, or we can put the tape in the other machine. But while there is often a need to rewind a whole tape, there isn't much need to fast forward a whole tape. And it is hard to tell how much a tape has fast forwarded on a machine that isn't hooked up to the TV, so we usually have to go with the slower play and fast forward feature.

Anyway, I think all new stuff is now deliberately designed to be crap.

Okay, so we'd about dealt with that when the digital switch happened. Which meant that we had to go and get a second box to use the VCR, and then after we got it hooked up we found out that you couldn't program the thing to record on different channels. You just have to always leave the VCR on channel four, and then it will record whatever the box is set for. And there's no programing the box to switch to a different channel.

So that all sucks, but we haven't really needed to do that yet. So it won't really suck until we go on a trip, or until the fall when we get lots of new TV to watch and record. Right now there just isn't enough new TV for it to be a problem yet.

And of course with my husband out of work, we usually don't need to record anything anyway.

But Sunday there was both Impact and Merlin. So we watched Merlin and recorded Impact.

We then noticed something odd that we hadn't noticed before. When we are watching just the TV and using just the box hooked up to the TV instead of the box hooked up to the VCR, channel 21 was on channel 8, and channel 27 was on 11. But channel 11 was not on channel 27, and channel 8 was not on channel 21. Channel 21 and channel 27 both had the "no signal" message.

That wasn't how it was a couple of weeks ago before we got the second box for the VCR. So I don't know what happened. Maybe you have to reset the things after every storm or every time the power goes out or something. Anyway, we don't know what the deal is.

But the box on the VCR seemed to work fine, and we recorded Impact okay, which we were able to watch after we rewound the tape in the other machine.

Most of this week I have been watching Ark II, Space Academy, and Jason of Star Command on DVD. In theory, I am doing this to make sure that the DVDs all work before sending them on to my friend in the great white north. But really, I just haven't seen this stuff in a very long time.

I think that Ark II is the best of them, but I loved everyone in Space Academy. I think by the time they made Jason of Star Command I wouldn't have watched it, except that James Doohan was on some of them.

I didn't like a lot of stuff that they did in TV shows made for kids. I didn't like silly stuff. I didn't like that sometimes characters did stuff just to be funny, when it didn't really make much sense for the character to do that.

Now that I am older, I guess I still don't like that sort of thing that much. But at least I am aware of the tradition of the comic relief character. I have a little more respect for the actors having to do this sort of thing. Or, at least, maybe I have a little more sympathy for them and don't call them names.

During the eighties there was this series called Evening Shade. I did not watch the show, but it seems like it was on. Maybe my parents watched it. Anyway, sometimes it was on, and I wasn't paying much attention to it.

My mom made a point of watching it one day. She said that one of the minor characters looked like someone she went to school with. The boy's name was Charlie. The actor's name was Charles, but he had a different last name. But after a while she was pretty sure that it was the same guy.

I looked on the Internet. The actor was born in Texas, though not in Dallas county. But he did grow up in Texas with a different last name. So this probably was the guy that my mom knew in school.

And this same actor was a character that I did not like in Jason of Star Command. He was supposed to be smart, but he was always doing something dumb or getting his hair caught in something.

So I wonder why my mom told us that she went to school with this guy from Evening Shade, but she didn't tell us that she went to school with the goofball from Jason of Star Command. Does having wild hair and funny eyebrows keep your fellow classmates from recognizing you, even though they recognize an even older version of you later?

My last complaint about the TV is what happened yesterday after a couple of celebrities died. I am sorry that these people died, but this sort of thing happens. People die. But you don't need to hear about it for hours and hours on four networks. These people were not past Presidents of the United States, they were just entertainers. We did not need to see old stuff about them for three hours on prime time television.

I suppose it wouldn't have mattered much, seeing as most of the shows were reruns. But they also managed to show old interviews of Farrah Fawcett in place of the one new show of the evening, Listener. (Okay, Listener isn't really a new show, it's just a Canadian show, but it is new to me, and I wanted to watch it.) So that made me mad. Not as mad as I get when football games prevent Cold Case from being shown on it's regular scheduled time, but very similar to that.

One last thing is that there is going to be something new on FOX tonight called Virtuality. Even when there is something new on TV that I might want to watch, I'm likely to miss it, because I wasn't watching enough TV (other than tapes and DVDs) to see a commercial for it. Anyway, tonight there will be this movie that I haven't seen, and it's probably going to be some really awful thing that was made for the Sci Fi channel, but I'm probably going to watch it anyway.

Monday Morons--at least try to keep up with what is going on with your own little group of fellow nerds

No, I am not through writing about the Star Trek movie weekend. But I thought that I would take a break and write about something else for a bit. And I haven't written a Monday Morons post in a very long time, so you may not be familiar with this particular thing that used to be a regular feature.

Anyway, it has been a busy time for my little group of friends. Last weekend we had three things going on at once. Most of us were involved with promoting the new Star Trek movie, and that Sunday was our regularly scheduled dinner (which we didn't think in time to move to someplace closer to the theater), and Sunday was also Mother's Day. So some of us were trying to squeeze in this Star Trek stuff in addition to doing something with mom, which is hard to do that weekend if your particular mom isn't into Star Trek and doesn't want to do any of this other stuff on Mother's Day. And while we were recovering from the busy weekend of that week, the next weekend was our annual picnic, and some people had a lot to do to get ready for that.

I don't do most of the stuff that goes on at the picnic. I was never into outdoor sports, and I would think that even if I was that I would be getting a bit to old for this sort of thing. Still, unless I really need to be doing something else, I at least make an appearance at the thing and bring something and eat a hotdog or two.

So that is what we were supposed to be doing Saturday. Only we saw on the news that it was probably going to rain. And we have been talking about what we would do if it did rain. And we talked about having the picnic or not having the picnic on and off throughout the week, but especially on Friday we discussed it a lot, and we must have had twenty emails on the subject. And we decided that we needed to make a final decision on it by about nine in the morning on Saturday.

So just after nine it was announced (by email) that the picnic was canceled, and then there were about eleven more emails discussing either meeting at someone's house or just meeting for lunch at the regular meeting place, and then either trying to reschedule the picnic for the next day or maybe even the same time next month.

So we were supposed to check the email again after eleven to see if we were going to the regular meeting place (because we didn't know if we could get the place since we didn't have a reservation), and that all worked out, so by about eleven thirty or so anybody who cared enough to check their email knew that the picnic was canceled and we would be at the regular meeting place at two.

So at two o'clock, a lot of us were at the regular meeting place, mostly talking about the new movie, cause we hadn't planned anything for the day because we had expected to be at the picnic. There were a few people who weren't there, but there are always a few people who aren't there anyway.

So that night we all got an email from someone who saw that it was raining and decided not to go to the picnic because it was raining and he wasn't sure if anyone else would be there.

And it's not like he didn't have computer access, or he couldn't have sent us the email.

There were at least thirty emails on the subject that he just decided not to read, so then he couldn't figure out if anyone was going to be at the picnic.

It was this guy that I complained about in October for sending the large emails. So I don't get why you send emails and expect everyone to read your emails when you don't stop to read anyone else's emails. I understand when people who do not have computers are out of the loop sometimes, but this guy either has a computer himself or borrows someone else's on a regular basis, and he skips over the part that says "you have 31 unread messages" so he can send us a message on the very same subject.

I know that to varying degrees we are all a bit weird in our little group, but there are a few that even I just do not get.

Billy Mummy will NOT be in Dallas this weekend

Okay, he wasn't going to be in Dallas anyway, he was going to be in Richardson. Close enough. Anyway, I just read that he isn't going to be at the Sci Fi Expo this weekend because of some family emergency. So I hope that whatever it is isn't too bad.

As for the fans who wanted to meet him, try again in August.

Me, I had already decided that I wasn't going anyway. I hate Dallas. And I hate going to a lot of near Dallas because it pretty much means driving through Dallas. So after a month or so of thinking about it, I decided not to go, even to meet Billy Mummy. And for me that would have been the main reason to go. Sure meeting all those other people would have been nice, but the main thing for me would have been seeing Billy Mummy.

Hey, look, Tony Todd. How did I miss that the first time?

No, still not going. Not for Billy Mummy and Tony Todd. So definitely not going now that Billy Mummy isn't going to be there.

So, why am I posting this?

For some reason, this was where some people first heard about the whole Fedcon disaster, so I thought that I should post Billy Mummy's cancellation, and the fact that some of the other guests might be late (Michael Hogan's flight was delayed), etc.... But these little things happen, so it's not really like Fedcon at all.

"There is another" brief question about last week's Terminator

I totally forgot to post this earlier.

Okay, so last week we were watching Terminator: the Sarah Conner Chronicles, and there was a quote from an old movie. And I laughed, and he laughed, and on with the rest of the episode. And I kind of wonder how many of us got the joke. It has been a while.

And then I'm talking to my husband later, and apparently we were laughing at different jokes.

John Henry says "There is another." And that's a quote, or part of a quote, from an old movie. And then it's a quote, or part of a quote, from a different movie. And I was thinking of one movie, and he was thinking of another movie.

Okay, so who got the one joke, and who thought it was a different joke, and who has no idea what I'm talking about?

Thank my gods it's over

I was a big fan of the original Battlestar Galactica. I even watched Galactica 1980, which wasn't near as good. As for the resent remake of Battlestar Galactica, well....

And I'm not one of those people who just hates remakes. The second Invasion of the Body Snatchers was my favorite of the four movies based on Jack Finney's book. I liked Jeff Goldblum in The Fly. I have enjoyed all versions of Star Trek, including the animated series.

I've even decided that Enterprise wasn't that bad.

I liked The War of the Worlds that Tom Cruise was in. I will even say that pollution is just as valid a reason for making The Day the Earth Stood Still now as was the threat of nuclear war in the original.

So I'm not one of those people who is just so in love with the original that they'll always see remakes as a bad thing. Sometimes we just like to update things a little bit. Every twenty or thirty years we remake Miracle on 34th Street for a new audience, and so far they've all been good.

I saw the Marlo Thomas version of It's a Wonderful Life before I new who Jimmy Stewart was.

So I'm okay with remakes, if they are good remakes. And maybe sci fi stuff gets remade a lot because of the new special effects. Sometimes you look at an old sci fi movie or tv show, and you think that people would still like this, if not for the rubber monsters and bad special effects. Now that we sometimes have pretty good cgi, maybe some of it is worth doing over again.

So there were a lot of people looking forward to the new Battlestar Galactica. A lot of us were disappointed that it wasn't a continuation of the original series, but I for one didn't totally dismiss it just because they decided to go with a remake instead.

Until I actually saw the thing.

The first episode was good, it was just too different for me to like it as part of the Battlestar Galactica universe. And right there at the end, it looked more like it should have been called The Second Variety (Screamers). But, to be fair, I like Philip K. Dick stuff as much as the next person, so that wasn't what I didn't like.

I didn't like that they took the names of characters that I cared about and gave them to totally new characters, some of whom were real a**holes. I didn't like the new special effects with the shaking camera. And I didn't like that everything looked so old.

Yes, I know it was an important part of the plot that Galactica was older than most of the fleet. But I still didn't like the way it looked. The sixties are over. Rotary phones shouldn't be on spaceships.

But, still, I was trying to give it a chance.

I think, for the most part, that the first season wasn't that bad. I would have liked it better if they had done a real Battlestar Galactica, and I just wanted to shoot the camera guy, but I was watching the show and liking parts of it.

Among my friends, I was in the minority of people who were disappointed with the new show. There were a few others, and I even know one person who refused to watch after the first episode, but most of them liked the new show. The really odd thing was that some of my friends would go on and on about the things that I didn't like as if they were really good. Like shaking cameras add realism to the show.

Felgercarb.

But when I really started to lose interest was in the second or third season when the new a**hole characters really started to behave like a**holes and play musical beds. The show became more about the soap opera of the a**holes than about the war or the quest. There was an episode where most of the main characters were in a boxing ring. I think that I really would have stopped watching the show then except for two things. A.) I was already going to my brother's house to watch Stargate stuff he recorded for me, so I might as well watch Battlestar Galactica with him too, and B.) half the time Battlestar Galactica was all my friends wanted to talk about, so I had to watch the show just to have something to say about it, even if it was negative.

While everyone else was cursing that Galactica was getting canceled, all I could think was it would finally be over. All I have to do is watch one more season to keep up with what everyone is talking about, and then I'll be off the hook.

And I'm still crossing my fingers that it will get interesting again.

And for awhile, it does get interesting. There's this bit about a Cylon named Daniel, who must be Kara's father. So that explains Kara. Kara must be the first child born to a human/Cylon couple instead of Hera. So then what is the big deal about Hera?

Turns out that Daniel was not Kara's father, and Kara is not part Cylon, and we weren't supposed to be thinking that at all. What we were supposed to infer from the Cabel kills Daniel story is that they are Cain and Able.

????

So, on Friday, when everyone else is all excited about seeing the two hour finale of Battlestar Galactica and even planning little viewing parties around it, I'm just sort of relieved that it is about to be over. I don't know if I'll watch Caprica. It might be interesting. I'll certainly watch the first episode and at least give it a chance. But Battlestar Galactica, at least this version of it, is finally over and I'm not really sorry to see it go.

I look on the website just to make sure I have the time right. I had heard that it would be two hours. According to the website, it will be two hours and eleven minutes.

My brother records all of the shows. I call my brother to tell him to change the recording time.

I usually end up watching the recording the following Sunday, but due to our schedule that week I got to see it on Friday with everyone else.

And there were all of these flashbacks. And I'm thinking, who cares about this stuff now?

About an hour into the program, it looks like they've pretty much wrapped everything up. My brother looks at me and says "Are you sure it's two hours and eleven minutes. Maybe it's one hour and eleven minutes."

He wasn't making a joke. He just really thought that I had read it wrong.

More flashbacks.

A bit later, my brother looks up and says "There's still half an hour left."

Again, he's not making a joke. It sounds funny now, but he wasn't trying to be funny.

This is like the longest two hours and eleven minutes that have ever been on the small screen.

Okay, I mostly like that they got back to the original idea of these people being our ancestors. If you are a serious fan of the show, you've probably heard that the idea was originally to be a show called Adam's Ark. (I first heard the title Adam's Ark on a Sci Fi Channel show called Sciography, which is damned funny, and if you haven't seen it you could watch it on Youtube.) So I'm kind of glad that they finally got back to Earth.

I don't think that they needed to send the fleet flying into the sun. I think that most of the people watching the show are fans of science fiction in general, and they are already familiar with the idea of colonists losing their technology. It is just something that happens over time, or something that happens after some catastrophe. You don't need to deliberately get rid of the technology. It just sort of gets lost anyway.

I think that I might have sent the Galactica into the sun, because it was too damaged to land. Maybe some of the ships weren't designed to land, and I would have sent them into the sun rather than leave them in orbit where they might later fall and kill someone. But I would have kept everything else, and there probably would have been scenes of people dismantling ships and making homes from them.

But this people don't even keep the agroships. And they are on a new planet where they don't even know what to eat. I guess they'll eventually learn from watching the natives, but this still seems like a really stupid thing to do.

Never mind, it's over. We can all look forward to the next Stargate series now.

Is Friday night still the kiss of death?

When I was young, maybe six years old, I got to stay up late on Friday nights. I can't really define what "late" meant back then. I can't really remember what time I was normally supposed to go to bed. I keep thinking that my parents normally sent me to bed at eight, but until recently it just seemed unreasonable that anyone went to bed much before ten.

Now that I'm older and have a different schedule, I find myself drifting off to sleep at nine or sometimes earlier, so maybe they did send me to bed that early, just so that they had a hour or two for themselves before they fell asleep too.

Anyway, when I was very young I got to stay up late on Friday nights and watch stuff on TV. And that was the only night that I was allowed to stay up late, because Saturday morning was the only day that I was allowed to sleep late. When I was six or so, I watched a scary show, which I think was probably Ghost Story/Circle of Fear. (I'm not entirely certain that this was the show, but I've now found some of them on YouTube, so I'll watch some later to be sure.)

So I grew up thinking that Friday night was the best night to watch anything on TV, though after Ghost Story went off the air I don't really recall watching anything in particular most of that time. I think eventually The Powers of Matthew Star came on Friday nights. But in between that and Ghost Story I don't really remember anything. I just remember thinking that was the best time to watch TV, and I remember wondering why there wasn't good stuff to watch on Friday nights.

"Good stuff" being defined by pre-teen me as either horror or sci-fi. I remember seeing a lot of stuff, but I don't remember when most of it was on, and except for Ghost Story and Matthew Star they weren't regular series. Most of what I liked turned out to be pilots of shows that didn't sell, which were turned into Movie of the Week stuff, which may or may not have been shown on Friday nights. I don't remember.

When I got older I learned that the Friday night schedule was the kiss of death for TV shows. This I learned from reading behind the scenes stuff about Star Trek. It seems that for other people Friday Night was date night, not TV night. On the one night of the week that it is okay to stay up late, you're supposed to actually go out and do something with the evening, not stay home and watch TV. So if you're an actor or director or producer, you don't want your TV show to end up on the Friday night schedule, because in theory most of your desired audience is out doing something cool and cannot possibly watch your TV show.

So, even after you found something you liked to watch on Friday nights, this was bad, because the show was probably going to get cancelled.

As for Friday night being date night or anything like that, I didn't get to do much of that until 1985.

A bit before that, we got a VCR. I think that a lot of other people also got VCRs. My family got a BETA, which was a better machine than what most of the other people bought, but that's another story and we won't get into that.

I got married, and then Friday nights stopped being date night. Between our work schedules and not having much money, we didn't go out much, and certainly not on Friday nights.

In the early nineties I joined a Star Trek club, so then I again had something to do on Friday nights. A bit after that there was a show called The X-files. By then most of us had VCRs, so we were able to go to the club meetings and then watch The X-files afterwards. Of course, since it was both a good show and it was on Friday nights, we all expected that it would soon be cancelled.

It wasn't.

Later came the Sci Fi Channel. I didn't have cable at the time, and I still don't. But I was aware of it and sometimes watched it at a friends house or in a motel room when we went out of town. There were a few interviews with actors and directors and producers, some behind the scenes stuff, but mostly lots and lots of reruns. So people could spend time watching stuff that had been made years and decades before, like Lost in Space.

And then the Sci Fi Channel started making new programs. The first one I remember was Farscape. Stargate moved to the Sci Fi Channel from Showtime. Farscape and Stargate were on Friday nights.

I don't know if the Sci Fi Channel assumed that we all had VCRs and it didn't really matter what night they picked, or if they figured that none of us were dating.

Stargate was on for ten years, and it's first spin-off lasted five years. There is supposed to be third series coming soon.

So is Friday night no longer the kiss of death because we all have VCRs?

Now Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and Joss Whedon's new Dollhouse are on FOX Friday nights. FOX has had a lot of good sci fi on Friday nights, but except for The X-files they usually cancel the show before it's had a chance. But I think now there's another problem.

Why move all the sci fi to Friday nights, when they must realize that most of the sci fi fans are already watching something on the Sci Fi channel? What was wrong with leaving Terminator on Monday where it was?

Of course, that caused us to miss The Big Bang Theory....

Groundhog Day

Okay, so I have been reminded that it is Groundhog Day. And that reminds me of the movie Groundhog Day, which is a favorite movie of several family members. I like the movie just fine, but it isn't my favorite.

It isn't even my favorite story with this theme. Being a fan of sci fi, I had seen other time loop stories before Groundhog Day. Here is a Wikipedia article about time loop stories. I don't think that I have seen all of them. I may have to track down some of them.

The first movie I remember seeing was a made for TV movie based on Richard A. Lupoff's 12:01 PM. I haven't read the short story, but it was about a guy who kept having to relive the same hour, and there was nothing he could do about it, and he seemed to be the only one aware of the problem. The 12:01 movie made the story into a romance where Jonathan Silverman keeps reliving the same day, during which he has to both figure out how to get things back to normal and keep Helen Slater from being killed.

The short-lived series Daybreak was about a cop who keeps reliving the same day, during which he has to solve murders and hope that if he can set everything right that things will go back to normal.

Stargate's "Window of Opportunity" has Jack and Teal'c reliving the same day, but the rest of the Stargate team doesn't notice. They have to explain the problem to Sam and Daniel, watch the two of them try to figure out how to fix things, memorize what gets done, and then explain that step to Sam and Daniel so that they can figure out the next thing, which they then also have to memorize. In the middle of this they decide to take a break and do pleasant things like play golf. Among Stargate fans, this is one of the favorite episodes.


In real life, this is the fourteenth day of my trying to do the dollar a day thing. Tomorrow I plan to take a break from it to do the free Grand Slam thing at Denny's. I figure that "free" breakfast will cost us about seven dollars for drinks and a tip, which is about half what I plan to spend on grocery stuff for the rest of the week.


Sunday I ate:
.36 chili dog
.20 yogurt
.17 mac and cheese with free turkey
free cookie
.05 handful of chips
____________________
.78 daily total for Sunday

If you missed The Big Bang Theory...

And of course you probably did miss it, because you were watching Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, then you have to watch it now.

This is the best part, Penny's Christmas Gift to Sheldon, but if that's all you watch you won't get all of the jokes.

There's the rest of it:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Visiting with Mom and Dad

My mom wanted me to get some stuff for her and grandma at Micheal's, if I was going to Micheal's anyway. I wasn't going anyway, or at least, I probably wouldn't be going there anyway on Friday or Saturday. Assuming that she was wanting something in the after-Thanksgiving sales ad, I probably wouldn't be going there anyway. If it was something that she really needed and she couldn't go get it herself, maybe I could be convinced to go there anyway, but it had better be something that she really wanted very badly to get me to go over by the mall the weekend after Thanksgiving if I wasn't planning to go that direction anyway, which I was not.

If it wasn't something on the sale ad, and it could wait til Monday or Tuesday, I would be happy to do it.

But of course it was something that she wanted in the ad, and she just really didn't get it that I wasn't going to be going there anyway. I have no money to spend at Micheal's at the moment, so why would I be going there anyway. It isn't too far away from school, so I could go there after school one day, but there is no school Friday or Saturday this week, so I wouldn't be just in the area for that either. And my plans for Black Friday were in the opposite direction.

She just almost seemed to get mad. Like I go to Micheal's everyday except when she asks me to go, and then I make up other plans that prevent me from going to Micheal's. I had been to school on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday that week, and if she wanted something enough to pay full price for it, she could have asked me before school on any of those days and I would have gone. But she didn't ask me until Wednesday evening, and she did want a sale item, and I just didn't think that I could fit that into my schedule.

By Thursday she had calmed down, and after lunch on Thanksgiving she showed me the ad and want she wanted from it. And there on the ad it said that they would be open on Thanksgiving from 6pm-9pm, and there were even coupons to use only at that time. So my mom decided that she could drive there herself on Thanksgiving, and that if I would meet her at her house we could go together and I could help her pick out some things.

Okay, so far as I know, the only places open to shop on Thanksgiving were a few drugstores and Garden Ridge, and now Micheal's was going to be open for three hours. So I figured that Garden Ridge would be crowded off and on throughout the day, and that during the 6pm-9pm sale that Micheal's would be really crowded. So if I needed something from this sale I would have been there well before 6pm and in line before the store opened.

My mom calls a bit before 5:30 to see if I'm ready to go. I am. This is just about perfect timing for me to drive to her house and then for us to get to Micheal's just before 6pm. Only when I get to her house she isn't quite ready to go, and she's on the phone for a little bit, and then she's looking at her hair and such, and she wants to ask me a few things that have nothing to do with going to Micheal's. Can't this stuff wait?

My mom doesn't see why we should be in a rush. It is Thanksgiving, and she doesn't think that many people will be out shopping, especially this late in the day. So we don't leave her house until 6pm, and then she doesn't want to get on the freeway, so we don't get to the place until about 6:30.

By that time most of the people have what they came to get and are already in line for the checkout. The lines are really long. The best that I can hope for is that either my mom will totally change her mind and decide that some of the stuff can wait, and maybe one of the drugstores will have something similar to the little Christmas tree that she wanted and we'll just leave, or else maybe she has a lot of shopping to do and maybe the lines won't be so long by the time she's done.

So she looks for the little Christmas trees that she came after, but she doesn't find them. Well, if they were that great of a deal, then maybe they are sold out already. All these other people got here at six if not sooner. Maybe all the good stuff is just gone.

My mom tries again to look for the Christmas trees while I go off to look at yarn. I have a coupon, but I don't think that it is worth standing in that line to use it. But I look anyway.

My mom finds the advertised trees, but they look nothing like the picture. She doesn't want them. I put the yarn back on the shelf.

But we don't leave yet, because my mom wants to look at something else. Someone made some jewelry for my sister, and my mom wants something like it. But my mom really can't describe what is it that we are looking for, and there's like three aisles of that stuff to look through. She keeps saying that we should look at my sister's stuff (which we cannot do right then because she did not borrow my sister's stuff to bring for comparison), so that should be the end of it but somehow we keep looking. And my mom has trouble with the most basic of descriptions, so we get nowhere.

So neither of us buys anything, and I get home about three hours after I left.

I have now seen my sister's jewelry, which looks almost nothing like the stuff that my mom was looking at.

A few nights ago I had a dream about my dad. My dad was going on a business trip, and he had one of those free companion flight tickets, so I was going to go with him. I was getting to go instead of my mom, because in the dream my siblings were still kids and couldn't be left at home without her. This made perfect since in the dream, but it doesn't quite add up in real life logic. If this were happening in real life at a time when we were younger and the kids couldn't be left home alone, then there would have been several live and healthy grandparents to look after them for a week or so.

So my dad and I are at the airport and are going to get our bags checked and all of that, and the rest of the family is there to see us off. And then something bad happens, and I'm not really clear on what it was, only that in the dream I was very scared so it was like a serious accident or terrorism or something like that. And then my dad calls someone at work, and his plans totally change, and we're going to be on a different flight and maybe even we are now going to a different place. And with all of this stuff happening I get very upset and start thinking that maybe I don't want to go. And I think I say something about not having packed the right clothes for where we are going, but what I'm really thinking is something more like I want my mommy. And my dad says that we can buy a few things once we get there if I still want to go. And he's saying how that he doesn't like to waste money, but we aren't poor, and that just this once we can spend a bit of money on things that we really don't need.

And then he has this idea that we really do have money, and that just this once, we should spend some. We are all at the airport, and we should all go, even though most of us haven't even packed to go on a trip. Dad has decided to buy the extra tickets and to even buy everyone some new clothes once we get to where we are going. We could all just get on the plane and go.

Even in the dream it isn't quite that easy. Mom didn't park the car in a space for people who are going to away for the week. Stuff like that. There's a lot of rushing around and such. I think I woke up before we got on the plane.

In real life my dad has been dead for almost five years now. So when I woke up I had one of those days that I really missed having my dad around.

My dad had cancer. For almost a year I got used to the idea that he had cancer and that he might die. He had some treatments, which didn't do as much for him as the doctors hoped, but they did make him a bit better. The doctors told him he needed an operation, which my dad really did not want, but he wasn't ready to give up and die either. And whenever someone has an operation, there's always the chance that something will go wrong and the patient will die on the table, or that the doctor can't finish the operation, or that the operation itself goes well but that there's more cancer and the patient ends up dying anyway. That sort of thing. For many months I got used to the idea that he might die because of that sort of thing.

What I did not imagine is that the operation would be a success and that the cancer would all be removed, but that the stress of the whole cancer thing would cause heart problems and that he would end up dying two months later. So even after all that time of thinking that my dad might die, it was still a bit of a shock. He wasn't supposed to die then, after the doctors had all said that he was cured.

A few months after that we went to see The Butterfly Effect, which I really think is a great movie. And I'm one of those people who might cry just a little bit at a movie theater, but not like a cry out loud cry that would disturb the people sitting next to me, but more of a quiet cry or mostly just my eyes tearing up a bit. So The Butterfly Effect has a lot of moments where your eyes get wet. It also has very disturbing moments and violence and all of that, and there are moments when you might actually feel a bit sick. But at the end of the movie my eyes were a bit wet again. And we didn't just jump up and run for the door. And while the credits roll by I wait for my eyes to dry. And I think I'd like to tell my dad about this movie, and then I realize that I can't do that, cause he's dead. So then I just become a blubbering idiot right there in the theater while everyone else walks past us.

I didn't break down like that too much when he died, and I think that time in the theater was probably the worst of it, maybe even worse than at the hospital or the funeral. I know he's in a better place and all of that, and I even think that he was ready to go. But sometimes it is damned annoying that I cannot ask him stuff, and that I can't talk to him about the "Hobbit" fossils and hear what he thinks about it.

It was kind of nice to see him at the airport, even if it was just a dream.

Why some of us put up with bad science fiction movies

There's a story that a couple of well known science fiction writers were invited to discuss being involved with Space 1999. The show wasn't yet on television, and perhaps at this early date they had yet to film anything. I'm not sure if they were just trying to get these two authors to write scripts for them, or if they were looking to hire more people to work directly for the show as consultants, or if they were just thinking that maybe these two authors would give them some advice.

I'm told that the two writers were Ben Bova and Isaac Asimov. But I did not read the story myself, so I might be remembering the wrong names.

So the two writers listen to the plans for the new show. If you're not familiar with Space 1999, let me explain. The story is about the men and women of Moonbase Alpha and their adventures in outer space, which all happen after a nuclear waste explosion sends the moon out of Earth's orbit, causing them to visit other planets and meet aliens, etc.... Somehow, the explosion that is big enough to part the Moon from the Earth doesn't destroy either. And somehow the out of control moon ends going fast enough and going through wormholes and such that it ends up visiting a different planet every other week.

This seemed like a good idea to someone in 1975. Someone invested money in this show. Really nice sets were built, costumes were made, models of spaceships were made, special effects experts were hired, etc....

So the two writers were in this meeting listening to all of the plans for Space 1999. At some point they all took a break, and Ben Bova said that he and his colleague were going to go outside and discuss a few things. Bova left and Isaac Asimov followed him. Bova just kept walking, and Asimov asked where they were going.

"As far away as possible."


My husband says that I will watch any bad sci-fi thing that comes on TV. This is possibly true. I did not get to watch Space 1999 when it first aired, when I was only ten and probably would have really enjoyed it, but I tried to watch it a few years later when one of our local stations was showing reruns. I was a teenager by then, and could see that it didn't quite make sense. Also, a lot of the episodes involve fighting with rubber monsters. But I didn't have much else to do and watched it anyway. I have recently watched them all again on DVD. I needed an excuse not to do housework, so I borrowed the longest thing I could from my brother.

This is probably not even the worst thing that I have watched. There's some really awful episodes of Lost in Space. And there are other series that I'll watch again just because I liked them as a kid. And there are still even other things that I will watch just because they are on the tube.

Notice my husband says that I will watch any bad sci-fi thing that comes on TV. I probably won't watch any bad sci-fi thing that is made into a movie. Going to the movies usually requires time and effort and money. Turning on the television is much easier.

We have found the exception to the rule. I will not watch whatever monster movie that ends up on The Sci Fi Channel on Saturdays. Those are usually really bad. And they are two hours each of really bad. Some of the stuff that used to be on at 2am on One Star Theater was better than most of these. Saturdays on the Sci Fi Channel often include movies about dinosaurs, giant spiders, sea creatures that Peter Benchley decided not to bother with, etc....

I've been told recently that I have to suspend disbelief....

No, I don't. I don't have to suspend disbelief, and neither does anyone else. I am well aware that this is the saying, but it is more properly said that if you can suspend disbelief you might enjoy the movie. Sure, that is true, but I might also enjoy the movie if there were not so many logic gaps, more interesting characters, properly thought out motivation for what everyone is doing, and maybe a bit more plausible science in the science fiction.

So it isn't that I have to suspend disbelief, it is that most of the time I want to suspend disbelief. I want to suspend disbelief for an hour or so to watch Star Trek or Stargate or Babylon 5 or The Outer Limits. I'll even suspend disbelief and watch those first few episodes of Lost in Space. But don't make us go that extra bit and make us suspend disbelief in places where you've just written a bad script and haven't thought things through or done the homework on the science. Our suspension of disbelief limit has already been used up by stuff like most aliens look like humans, act like humans, live on planets with the same gravity and air as Earth, and usually speak English.

And why is it that we want to suspend disbelief?

Because we like science fiction, but we really don't want to spend two hours watching a movie length version of "Cold Equations". One hour on The Outer Limits was good enough. Padding it for another hour with special effects and longer discussions of why someone has to die wouldn't help anything.

And we don't want Disney buying it and giving it a happier ending either.

So we don't have to suspend disbelief, but a lot of us want to. Not all of us do. When Star Trek first aired, it was not universally loved by the readers and writers of science fiction. It wasn't serious enough for them. For some people, science fiction should be left entirely to the written word, or very rarely made into a movie or an episode of The Outer Limits. So for some people, Star Trek was not taken seriously as science fiction, not seen as a good thing at all.

Some thought it was end of civilization as we knew it, rather like The Beatles.

For some of us, Star Trek is the standard by which we measure everything else. Other people will have other standards like Star Wars. Maybe there are others who would choose Plan Nine from Outer Space. A few people still go the other direction and measure everything against 2001: A Space Odyssey. But I think that most of us first saw Star Trek or Star Wars, and for us one of those is the ideal of science fiction, and we are either okay with people on the other side of the galaxy looking and talking just like us on Star Trek, or maybe we go with the idea that no matter what you look like or sound like you can still breathe the same air and still drink beer at Mos Eisley. Star Trek explains things with universal translators and such, while I suppose in the case of Star Wars that The Force might keep beer from doing more damage than the usual hangover.

If you measure things against Star Trek, you expect that most of the science stuff has been thought out to a certain extent and that except for the English speaking human looking aliens you don't have to suspend disbelief too much. If you measure things against Star Wars, you expect that the science stuff is going to be very limited, that spaceships work a certain way and that weapons work a certain way, etc...and for the most part other science is going to be left out of the story. If there's no science in your science fiction story other than having spaceships and lasers around to give the movie a certain look, then you can't ruin the story by messing up the science. If you try to add other elements of science to something like Star Wars, then you are probably going to screw it up.

Still, there are films that try to use varying degrees of science, which is often used incorrectly. While I might watch these films and even enjoy these films, I would prefer that the person writing the story would do the research and not make these mistakes. Or, at least, the writer needs to do the research and realize that things don't really work that way, but it just works out better filmed a certain way, such as explosions in space that make noise and spaceships that travel here there and everywhere without dealing with stuff like time has passed on the planets involved that the people on the spaceships did not experience.

And then there are films that just out right do things wrong. But we go see the film anyway because we enjoy watching the actors, we like most of the storyline, and most everything makes sense until the cable guy gives the alien spacecraft a computer virus. Or we go to see a film that makes even less sense, because we like Bruce Willis and scenes of stuff being blown up.

So what happens when your script has scenes that don't make sense and characters with no motivation, and Bruce Willis doesn't want the job, and whoever might be interested in it doesn't have the budget for good special effects?

If the script doesn't go straight into the trash bin, it might be sold but never made into a movie. Or it might go through so many rewrites that your name gets taken off of it.

Or it might show up on the Sci Fi Channel on a Saturday.

...and they eat us. The end

I've been discussing whether or not certain plots for science fiction stories are plausible. This reminded me that is has been a while since I have asked for help in finding a certain item from Omni Magazine. So, I think I'll have another go at it here.

Omni Magazine was a little bit of science fiction and a little bit of science fact. It had a lot of H. R. Giger's artwork. It had stories, and it had rumors about upcoming movies, and it had little articles about rock musicians claiming that the cure for the common cold was whatever illegal drug that they were taking.

And it had the funniest cartoons. Ripley from Alien says, "You men go out and die stupid deaths while I strip down to my underwear." And it had games and I.Q. tests and other stuff.

And one issue had a maze that supposedly contained the plots for all sci-fi movies. So you start in the middle of the maze--on Earth. And then maybe you stayed on Earth, or you went to the moon, or people colonized another planet, or people went to visit another galaxy, or maybe someone invented the time machine, etc.... And then from there you made another turn where something else happened, like maybe some aliens come to visit, or the spaceship breaks, or a bunch of people get sick, or whatever. Some of the maze routes were very small, such as-- we're on Earth, and we stay on Earth, and we invent something, and we blow ourselves up, the end.

There were a lot of things that could happen if we met aliens, but after all of the twists and turns we usually end up with--and they eat us, the end. One was, and the aliens take our women and leave, the end. And another one was, and the aliens take our women, and then they eat us, the end.

Anyway, I just loved this thing, and I kept that issue of the magazine. But then I got married, and I moved, and stuff happened, and at some point I lost the magazine. So if anyone out there has the thing, I would love a copy of this maze.

A screenplay treatment, writing seminars, and a Deep Space Nine script

Recently a friend sent me a screenplay treatment for a sci-fi movie. The screenplay treatment was written not by my friend, but by another friend of my friend, and I don't know the other friend. So I'm reading a treatment written by a friend of a friend, see? More about that later.

I used to go to sci-fi conventions a lot. Some of them had writing seminars. I didn't get to go to many of them because I didn't have the money. Once J. Michael Straczynski gave one, and I didn't have the money, and I was really not happy about missing that one. So I saved money so that I could go to the next one that sounded like the person giving it knew what he was talking about. I can't remember, but the guy on the next one either worked for Babylon 5 or one of the Star Trek shows for a year or two.

So we got to pick this guy's brain for a few hours. To start of with, he went around the room and asked us why we were all here. One guy held up a script and said that he was here to find out the code, did the little brass bracket go in the first and second holes of a three hole punched script, or did the little brass bracket go in the first hole of a two hole punched script, or did all the holes need little brass brackets, or did we need to switch to another color bracket or staples or a maybe a magic paper clip? And about half of us were laughing, and the other half didn't have clue what he was talking about and moved away from him in case he was contagious.

There is all kinds of stuff that might happen to your script or book or whatever after you submit it. For one thing, you have to be sure you are submitting it in the correct form. If the place you are sending it wants everything with certain margins and double spaced with one staple on the right side, and you send in something with the wrong margins or single spaced or a staple on the left side, all your hard work probably went straight into the trash bin. Nobody read any of it, except for your name and address so they'd know where to send the rejection letter.

There's other stuff you have to know about. Like you might need an agent. If you send a script to certain shows without an agent it is returned unopened, and also some places only read completed scripts and will not read any of your story ideas. Then you probably have to sign a lot of forms before anyone will read your completed script that was properly submitted through an agent, cause they might already have something very much like it, and they don't want to be sued because you think that they stole your idea.

And there's the whole slushpile thing. If you've never been published, your book is going to first be read by someone who doesn't really decide anything important. The only thing that person gets to decide is that you don't deserve to have your book read by anyone else. And most of the time, that is exactly what that person will decide. I have heard that some of these people get paid per book, so they'll get paid more the sooner they decide that your book isn't worth reading.

Anyway, I don't remember what was said about magic paper clips at the writing seminar, other than he confirmed that you need to find out the format that particular place uses and follow it exactly even if you have to go to Kinko's and have the whole thing reprinted every time. And unless you have a personal letter requesting something be sent single spaced, never ever submit something that isn't double spaced. Otherwise, single spaced stuff gets dumped in the trash, completely unread.

At another convention, I met R. R was the guy who came over and asked if his group could sit at the table with us, and his group ended up including the guy in the Vorlon suit. So we were all talking about this and that, and I think that the guy in the Vorlon suit says something to R like maybe, too bad about that whole Deep Space Nine thing.

What Deep Space Nine thing?

So R has to start over at the beginning of the story since I had never heard it before. R had also gone to a number of these writing seminars, and after this one guy kept seeing R over and over again, he says something like, it's time to show me what you've got. So R has been working on a Deep Space Nine script, and the guy giving the writing seminar is someone who either reads Deep Space Nine scripts himself or is in a position to have that person read the script. And they read the script, and they like it, and R gets a check for three thousand dollars and a note saying what changes that they would like, etc....And R says, cool, and then he goes back to his life and thinks about the changes that should be made to the script.

The Deep Space Nine people do not hear from R for a week, then two weeks, and then they continue without him. Whenever R got all the problems with the script worked out, he sent it in, and they weren't interested anymore. R's script dealt mainly with stuff happening to a certain character, and at the time they bought the script that would have worked out, but several weeks later they had read other scripts, and they had decided to do something different with the character. They couldn't film R's script and the other things that they wanted to do, so R's script was never filmed. So R got the three thousand dollars and a lesson learned, and that was that.

I've since lost contact with R and have no idea if he went on to sell more scripts.

Okay, back to the friend of the friend who wanted comments on the sci-fi script treatment.

I assumed that this was one wannabe helping out another wannabe. But that's okay, and I spent about five hours writing out the problems that I saw with the story. And I emailed him my first set of comments and then waited for him to email me back so that I could make some more comments. I think that both my friend and the friend of the friend are (unlike me) professional writers, but I don't think that they have any movie credits. While I'm waiting for the friend of the friend to email me, the friend emails me and tells me not to get upset if it takes the guy a few days to get back to me, cause he gets tons of emails and he's busy with his other writing, etc....

I sent the email on Sunday. It is now Wednesday. I have read a few things that make me think that maybe this isn't just one wannabe helping out another wannabe, that maybe this guy has had a conversation with someone who could actually get this movie made, that maybe another friend of a friend is really interested in this guy's story, or at least is interested in making some sort of story on the subject into a movie.

So now I'm worried that this friend of a friend could really sell a movie script if he would change a few things, but he's going to blow it cause he's taking too long and there are other scripts and treatments to read, etc.... Also, the guy's treatment is typed out singled-spaced. He says that he knows people are supposed to type double-spaced, but he thought that he would save some money and paper and space on the computer and such, and so he typed it single-spaced instead. While I appreciate it being sent to me single-spaced, he'd better know to change it to double-spaced before anyone else reads it, or it will go straight into the trash bin. So that could totally ruin things for him too.

And I think that I've got the answer to the guy's main problem with the story, but for all I know he hasn't even read my first email, so I don't think I'm going to write out anything more until he does.

Journey to 3-D land is 3 times the price

I like going to movies. It isn't the big deal that it used to be, but don't go out and do much else for fun. I don't drink, I don't dance, and except for Halloween and New Year's Eve and the occasional thing at a con I don't go out and party. I go to a movie and maybe dinner and maybe do some shopping in between. I like going to zoos and parks and beaches, but I'm getting old and I don't like walking and being outdoors as much as I used to. I just like to hang out, and maybe go to a movie.

So we were going to see Journey to the Center of the Earth in 3-D. It wasn't something that I was getting all excited about. It isn't Star Trek and it isn't the X-Files and it doesn't have Keanu Reeves in it. It's just the new thing that's out, so I figured that we would go and see it.

I'm lucky to live about a bit down the road from a Cinemark that charges about 3.25 for a matinee ticket for new movies, and if I miss anything there another company has a theater a bit north of us that shows second run movies for a dollar. If something isn't showing at either of those places, I really have to want to see it to drive farther than that and pay extra. And I don't go to evening shows very often either, cause it costs more and there's usually more people to deal with.

So my husband and I were going to go see Journey to the Center of the Earth, and we found out that it wasn't at our Cinemark. Okay, I'm like, I don't have to go see this if you don't want to, but my husband says let's go anyway. And after looking around a bit he finds someplace that has it, but that isn't my favorite theater cause it doesn't have stadium seating. If I'm going to pay more, and drive more, I should get more not less. So he looks around again and finds out that place doesn't have the 3-D version anyway. That was odd. I didn't know that you had a choice. So we decided to go to the AMC at a mall and go to eat at a salad place afterward and maybe then do some shopping.

I haven't been to this theater in a while, cause last time I was there the tickets were six dollars or maybe a bit more. That's like double what I pay at my usual place for a mattinee. Anyway, we get there and they tell us that the movie costs extra because it's in 3-D, so the tickets are $9.25. $9.25 for a Monday afternoon? But, we decided to pay it anyway.

Here's the price breakdown at this particular AMC theater (some theaters are probably even higher). $5.00 for shows that start before noon (though there are no shows that start before noon except for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday), $.7.25 for other shows starting before 6pm, and $9.25 for shows starting after 6pm, and an additional $2.00 charge for 3-D films.

See, I didn't even know that there were 3-D films. I thought that there was just this one. Apparently I have missed a few, and there will soon be animated films in 3-D, one about a dog actor who doesn't know it's just a TV show, and one about three flies who go to the moon.

The movie was okay. It wasn't worth three times the price, but it was okay. We had fun, I'm glad I went and all that, but $9.25??? Anyway, I was going to come back to this and write about how it's a fun movie and not a serious movie, and how it's weird that a hundred years ago this was really serious stuff. But I was lazy and didn't come back and write the rest of it, and now I think I'd better just go ahead and publish the damned thing just in case this news about the movie costing a lot is still of use to anybody. I'll have to write that other stuff some other time.

Missing Tomatoes and Ugly Chickens

About fifteen years ago I read something very funny about tomatoes. I've tried for years to remember the name of it. I couldn't remember who wrote it either. I was thinking that it was something like The Great Tomato Epidemic of 1978.

That wasn't it. Anyway, it was a very short funny thing, really short, and I couldn't find it. I had read it in a library book, a collection of short stories, and I wasn't really even sure of the name of that book. I remember that it was one of those "best of" books, and that it was in the same volume with a story called "The Ugly Chickens." (The Ugly Chickens is also a very funny story, though not nearly as short as the one about tomatoes.) Since I did not want to go back to that library and try to find a collection of short stories containing the story "The Ugly Chickens" in order to find another story about tomatoes, I have many times tried to find the tomato story on the Internet.

Sometimes Google just doesn't seem very helpful. You would think that science fiction stories about tomatoes would be a rare thing and what I was looking for would pop right up. But most searches either lead to Killer Tomatoes or Rotten Tomatoes, so I was having no luck with it. Sometimes, just no amount of typing or banging one's head against the wall produces what one is looking for.

Anyway, this morning I found this. I'd remembered the name entirely wrong. In fact, it turned out to be The Dread Tomato Addiction, so the only word I'd gotten right was tomato. And it's a lot shorter than I remembered, only one page. Still, it is funny.

Around here, I am starting to miss tomatoes. I'd heard on the news that there was a problem with salmonella poisoning and tomatoes, but I hadn't really paid much attention to it. I didn't pay attention to the previous problem with spinach either. I just thought that if I got any from the store that I would wash them, and if I got any at a restaurant someone else would wash them, and that would be that. Apparently, it isn't that simple, and you can't just wash the stuff off of the tomatoes. But, still, I wasn't really paying attention.

Then a week or two ago we went to Taco Cabana and had tacos. But there was no tomatoes on the tacos, and there was no pico de gallo on the salsa bar either. I can't think of anything that I eat there that I don't want pico de gallo, so I guess I won't be going there til it is all sorted out. The next day we went to Whataburger, and again there was the sign on the door saying that they wouldn't be serving tomatoes for a while. I prefer tomatoes on my hamburger, so I ordered a fish sandwich instead, so that I did not notice the absence of tomatoes as much.

A few days after that, I forgot about the whole tomato thing, and we went to Chipotle's. But they still had pico de gallo, so my burrito was not ruined.

My plants are not producing at the moment, which I had assumed was due to the heat. Tomatoes don't produce fruit above a certain temperature, and being in Texas we spend a lot of time with the temperature being above whatever it is that makes the tomato plants happy. So I had not thought much of it, just that it must have gotten hotter sooner this year than last time I had tomato plants. Only my neighbors with tomato plants are still getting a fair amount of tomatoes, and at least one guy is having a bumper crop. So I must have done something wrong, and I will have to read up on it later.

The Incredible Hulk

Okay, I promised a review of this movie, and a friend is waiting on it, so I guess I'd better get on with it.

I am not a big fan of comic books, or at least, I don't read them much. I read Elfquest a bit way back when, but I haven't even kept up with that one. Other than that, I just don't read them.

Which isn't to say that they don't often have good stories that make excellent movies or TV shows. When I was a kid I watched Shazam and Isis, which I think were first comic books. Later came Spiderman and Wonder Woman. I watched the short-lived series The Flash. Now I watch Smallville, and before that I watched three other shows based on Superman. And of course I watch all the big movies that are based on comic books--Superman, Batman, The X-Men, Spiderman, etc.... I think Hellboy was a comic book first. And Ironman was excellent. If you haven't seen it yet, go watch Ironman.

When I was about eleven there was a show on called The Incredible Hulk. And at first either I didn't know about the comic book or it didn't look much like the comic book and someone had to tell me that's were they got the idea from. This was a science fiction show about a scientist who had made a terrible mistake experimenting on himself. And while he did end up rescuing a lot of people from this and that, he wasn't like other comic book heroes who deliberately went around looking for people to save, and he didn't run around in a spandex costume beating up bad guys. This guy was spent most of his time trying to find a cure for his odd condition, just as before this happened he was trying to find something that would make people stronger, and before that he was trying to cure cancer or something.

I joke about wanting to marry Mr. Spock. But I think even when I was eleven I loved David Banner. And as an adult, I still think he's pretty special. This is the guy I want. I want someone who would look at me like that. And if he happens to look like Bill Bixby, so much the better.

While I love David Banner from the TV show, I hardly know anything about Bruce Banner from the comic books. Actual comic books are not really my thing. Not that there's anything wrong with them, but I just never really got into them.

So a few years ago someone made this movie called The Hulk, and I went to see it. And it wasn't about David Banner from the TV show, and I don't know if the fans of the comic book liked it or not. To be honest, I didn't care for it, and the main thing that I remember about the plot was that his problems had as much to do with his father's research as it did his own. And I didn't like the CGI big as a building Hulk. Lou Ferringo did such a great job on the TV show, and this movie replaced him with a cartoon.

Anyway, that movie had nothing to do with the TV show.

So then I heard that there was another movie, and again there's another big as a building CGI Hulk. Okay, maybe not quite as big as a building, maybe he's more RV sized. Anyway, no Lou Ferrigno, so I was thinking maybe it was just a sequel to this movie I didn't like. Except that Ed Norton was now playing Dr. Banner. Would Ed Norton be in a sequel to this movie that I didn't like? Not sure.

So I go see the movie, just in case. This movie is a whole lot more like the TV show. The opening is even a lot like the TV show, except that the scientist who is dumb enough to experiment on himself at least isn't dumb enough to do it after hours in a room by himself. So when the Hulk makes his first appearance, the resulting damage puts Banner's girlfriend in the hospital. And then he goes on the run, not from a reporter, but from the whole US military. So Bruce Banner is in hiding, in a country where he doesn't quite speak the language, and everyone who knows him thinks that he's just a little bit nuts. Or maybe a lot nuts.

Ed Norton's Bruce Banner is a lot like Bill Bixby's David Banner. Not quite, but give him a few years and he'll probably get there. Except right at the end of the movie, maybe they're going to go a different direction with this.

And still there is the giant CGI Hulk. No Lou Ferrigno. Now, I know that they couldn't have really hired Lou Ferrigno, that even though Lou still very much keeps in shape, they would want to hire somebody younger. But they didn't. This cartoon is better than the other movie's cartoon, but it will never be Lou. Surely there is someone out there like Lou who could do the part better than a cartoon. Surely there are a few body builders out there who don't kill themselves with steroids and can act.

I don't know why they did this again. Other movies, even movies based on comic books, don't do that. I know that they use a lot of CGI, but for most shots, I think the orange guy in The Fantastic Four is a guy in a suit. And for the most part, Hellboy is Ron Perlman in a ton of makeup. So why can't the Hulk be an actor in the movies?

What else can I say about the movie without plot spoilers? I hate spoilers. I just need to see an interesting preview and hear that someone liked the movie so I'll want to go see it. I don't like to hear anything else about the movie. So if my opinion counts to anyone, there it is. Go see the movie.

There's a lot of cameos and familiar names in this movie. Lou has a cameo. Stan has a cameo, he always does. Even Bill has a cameo at the beginning of the movie, but don't blink or you'll miss it. And there's nothing to be gained by sitting through all the credits. There's this little scene with a cameo from another movie, but they show that right before the credits. All that stuff was fun.

Okay, that's about it. If you were a fan of the TV show I think that you'll like this movie. And if you're not a fan of the show but are a fan of the comic book, I don't know if you'll like it or not. It is significantly better than the previous movie. Ed Norris is in it, Liv Tyler is in it, William Hurt is in it, and they blow up a lot of stuff. Hulk smash! So go see the movie, and if you haven't already done so, go see Ironman too.