Category Archives: true life 2006

The Big Score, and a minor Battlestar Galactica (new series) spoiler

I scored girl scout cookies earlier and I’m all wacked out on a thin mints high. We were on our way home this afternoon and I was making Husband drive slowly so I could troll for sugar. I’d almost given up, but then I spotted them, prancing their be-sashed bad selves up and down the sidewalk, hawking their wares like the little sugar whores our culture has turned them into.

“I knew there had to be a coven around here somewhere!” I probably deafened Husband, at least temporarily.

“They call them troops, not covens.” Husband politely explained. Then I waited in the car while he went to the cookie booth and procured the goods. That was for the best, I’m sure.

Now, about this Battlestar Galactica thing.

First of all, if SciFi doesn’t stop making their shows run arbitrary times I’m going to have an episode of some kind of my own. 92 minutes. If you’re going to run the show for 92 minutes say so, otherwise those of us who tivo or use a vcr or other dvr device to record the damned thing miss the big finish to the season finale and have to re-tivo it.

Now, the spoilery bit if you haven’t seen the episode yet:

Was that last part a total shout out to Galactica 1980 or what? When they showed that classroom full of cherubic kids as the cylons were landing Husband nearly had to restrain me because I was so wound up about the return of the Space Scouts. and not wound up in a good way.

Please oh please let us never see their ruddy little faces ever, ever again.

I don’t ask for much.

Failing our students

In my previous post, I wanted to highlight the perverse juxtaposition of articles about GWU’s latest basketball win and the series the Washington Post is running about basketball recruiting. GWU is far from alone in the practices the articles discuss, but that’s the subject of the articles so that is the school I mentioned in the post.

The articles raise issues about the ways we’re failing student athletes, but there’s a larger issue: the ways that students are being failed altogether. After I posted, I saw once and future Harvard President Derek Bok’s editorial, “A Test Colleges Don’t Need.”   So many students reach college unable to string together coherent sentences, let alone coherent thoughts.  In the last 10 years, the answer to that problem has been more multidisciplinary courses, but that doesn’t get to the root of the problem – many students can’t read or write.

Although I disagree vehemently with the Bush administration’s plans to gauge college learning via standardized tests, if the plan starts a discussion that highlights how poorly high school graduates are prepared not only for college, but for life, than the plan isn’t a loss at all.  Unless the tests are instituted, then I suspect everyone will lose, but that’s a post for another day, and nothing I have to say on the subject would be nearly as convincing as what Bok has to say, anyway.

Basketball (I tried to come up with a snappier title, but I failed)

Today’s Washington Post Sports section leads with a piece on George Washington’s college basketball win yesterday:

George Washington’s season was already touched with magic before yesterday’s finale against Charlotte tipped off. The final 45 minutes of the regular season took things squarely into the realm of the fairy tale.

[read the rest of the article]

For some odd reason the word “magic” is missing from the A section coverage of GWU’s basketball program, which is featured as part of Mark Schlabach’s excellent ongoing series, The Player Chase:

When George Washington University signed recruit Omar Williams in 2001, Coach Karl Hobbs called him one of the top 20 high school basketball players in the country. In the four years he has played for the Colonials, Williams has lived up to that potential, starting almost 100 games and helping a mediocre program become the sixth-ranked team in the country.

But Williams was accepted at George Washington after failing to graduate in five years from his original high school and receiving no grades at three prep schools in the next two years, including one that burned down after he was there five days. The National Collegiate Athletic Association certified his transcript without any verification, making him academically qualified for a basketball scholarship.

[read the rest of the article]

Magic, indeed.

Mormons, or, Galactica 1980 marathon, part 3

Husband informs me that Barry Van Dyke and Not-Starbuck’s dorky motorcycles could fly in the first episodes of Galactica 1980, I was just in some sort of fugue state during the flying dorkcycle scenes and didn’t notice.

Oh well. Welcome to day 3 of the Galactica 1980 Fest, wherein we don’t actually watch an episode of the show because it gives us a pain right here and we need a little break. By “us” I of course mean “me.” Even as I type Husband is happily viewing an episode of Miami Vice that starred Miles Davis, who seemed intent on proving that a great, great musician could be a bad, bad actor. The episode is from 1985. The following year, Don Johnson proved to the world that a bad, bad actor could be a bad, bad musician with his opus, Heartbeat, but that’s a post for another day. I don’t think this episode is going to be as good (if by “good” you mean “bad”) as the one with James Brown as the leader of a UFO cult.

Tivo is not your damned friend.

There is a Miami Vice-Battlestar Galactica connection. It’s not Glen A. Larson. It’s Edward James Olmos, who co-starred on Miami Vice as the token (token actor, that is) and now stars in Battlestar Galactica (the iteration I refer to as “the real one”, much to Husband’s annoyance) as Admiral Adama. (Lorne Green Action Facial Hair sold seperately).

This post is a little too paranthetical (even for me).

The problem with prolonged viewing of Galactica 1980, and in fact any show from the franchise, is that it inevitably leads to prolonged ranting (by me, at any rate) about Mormons. Not all Mormons. Not even most Mormons. Only the Super-conservative misogynistic Mormon missionary dudes who live up the blocl. I got rid of them for a long stretch of time at one point by actually inviting them in and spilling the ashes of my deceased cat (it was actually a peppermill, but they didn’t know this).

So yeah, maybe I do have a problem with some Mormons. But those are specific individuals and they’d be annoying no matter what flavor of oppressive theology they adhered to. But I could ignore all that, if the Galactica Universe wasn’t just ooy-gooy with theology, which I find boring and trite. Again, no matter whose theology it is. Series creator Glen Larson really wears his religion on his sleeve in this one. Yes, I know, plenty of sci-fi is just rehashing of established religion. (I just did that nerdy thing where you clear your throat while croaking a word, in this case: The Matrix. You just didn’t hear it). I don’t care. It’s intellectually lazy. If you want to invent a religion, invent a religion. Don’t just make anagrams and call yourself clever.

If there’s overt Mormonism in some of Larson’s other epic masterpieces, Knight Rider, Buck Rogers, and Quincy spring to mind first, I’ve never noticed. My own babblings about Mormons and Battlestar Galactica are neither insightful nor interesting, so I’ll send you elsewhere if you’re interested in reading more on the subject.

Michael Lorenzen’s essay on “Battlestar Galactica and Mormonism is interesting, albeit stiff and awkwardly written. This essay is probably a better summary, although it doesn’t go into the depth that Lorenzen’s essay does.

Well, whatever. Just think about all those naked Lucy Lawless cylons and it will all a-okay.

You may think that it’s silly to devote time to the Glen A. Larson oevre, but that just means you haven’t been following U.S. politics closely enough. According to the requisite sci-fi moment in this year’s State of the Union Address, President W pointed out that Manimal is a serious threat to our freedom:

A hopeful society has institutions of science and medicine that do not cut ethical corners, and that recognize the matchless value of every life. Tonight I ask you to pass legislation to prohibit the most egregious abuses of medical research: human cloning in all its forms, creating or implanting embryos for experiments, creating human-animal hybrids, and buying, selling, or patenting human embryos. Human life is a gift from our Creator — and that gift should never be discarded, devalued or put up for sale. (Applause.)

Sure, there are loads of bioethical issues to be addressed in the field of xenotransplantation and creation of chimeras is a hot topic. Personally, I think it’s unfortunate the Prez wants to devote more resources to stopping this research entirely, not because of the medical implications but because I’m so looking forward to someday being able to mutate into various animals at will, especially raptors.

Again, not for any medical reason. Just because the idea of being able to poop on people and get away with it sounds kinda fun. And raptors are big, big birds.

And on that note, it’s time for us to finally catch up with Friday night’s ep of (the real) Battlestar Galactica, “Downloaded.” With special guest star Lucy Lawless.

Go on to part 4

girl scout cookies!

The girl scouts aren’t big on the door to door in our neighborhood. In the last 14 years, they have knocked on our door with cookies exactly, um, never.

That didn’t used to be a problem because I used to regularly run into an over-zealous scout-momaunt. Ironically, she was also a Weightwatchers Coach, which meant she bullied you into ordering cookies and then lectured you about how she had too much moral character and willpower to eat things like cookies herself but she wasn’t judging you because she understands that people have deep psychological problems that compel them to eat things like cookies and after we were done using cookies to try to fill the deep, deep, abyss in our unstable psyche we should come see her about joining Weight Watchers.

It was fun. Like intense bowel pain.

It was a good reverse-psychology type sales approach, now that I think about it, because I’m sure we all bought extra cases of cookies just to spite her.

But I digress…

Thanks to the magic of the internet you can locate all of the planned cookie booths in the DC area. I don’t go places like the grocery store, so I don’t randomly run into girl scouts, so I think this is an extremely useful thing.