The Queen of Trash Abdicates

Congratulations are due to my mother-in-law. She retired today from her job as the Superintendent of the Sanitation Division in the Public Works Department for the City of Harrisonburg, Virginia. Way to go, Meki! You're only 18 years ahead of me.

Not Worth It

At work this morning, several of us were in the break room waiting on the first pot of coffee to finish brewing. One of my co-workers, a project manager, was especially anxious. She said she had checked her email first and really needed to get back to her desk. I remarked, with humorous intent, that the only way that could have sounded worse would be if she checked it on her Blackberry. She agreed, said that her husband had given his back, and that it wasn't conducive to her personal life to have a boss that would email her at 10:30 on a Friday night and expect a nearly immediate response.

I recognize that I have a responsibility, indeed an obligation, to be available for application coverage. That's been part of my professional reality for over 20 years; being on-call is part of a programmer's job. Sometimes that requires, for a short period, 24/7 availability.

I reject the notion that a corporation has any more of a claim than that on me, not without a lot more loyalty and commitment than the workplace gives any employee these days.

Relay 2009

Has your life been touched by cancer, in any way? Have you taken care of someone stricken with this disease? Have you rejoiced with someone who has been cured of it? Have your mourned someone who died from it?

We understand, and we want to help. We're Team Investing in a Cure, with the 2009 Greensboro Relay For Life. Each of us has been touched in some way by cancer, and we're helping the American Cancer Society fight back.

On Friday night, May 15th, you can find us, with a bunch of other teams, around the track at Page High School in Greensboro. We're going to keep someone on the track all night. Why? Cancer doesn't sleep, so for one night we're not going to. We're going to play games, hold raffles, have a silent auction, listen to music, and eat good food. Why? To celebrate that we're alive and fighting back, and to raise money to expand the fight. We're going to line the track with luminaries that will be lit at 9:00 pm and shine the rest of the night. Why? To celebrate our survivors, honor our caregivers, and remember those we lost.

We want your support. Send us pictures of loved ones who have been stricken with cancer, and we will use them on our Relay campsite Wall of HOPE; after all, where are we against cancer without hope?

We want to support you. Are you yourself a cancer survivor? Register at the Greensboro Relay website, and come join us for a dinner in your honor on May 15th. Then, take part in the Survivors' Lap. This is the first lap of the 2009 Relay For Life, and there will be literally thousands of people cheering you on.

We want your support. Come out to Relay and see what it's all about. Cheer on the survivors. Purchase a chance in a raffle. Play a game. Bid on something at the silent auction. Get something to eat at a team's campsite. All the money you spend at Relay is donated to the American Cancer Society.

We want to support you. The American Cancer Society funds research for cancer cures, legislative advocacy, support programs for those afflicted with cancer, and cancer education.

We want your support. In the end, it takes money for any health-related issue, and cancer is one of the biggest. Any amount, no matter how little, helps.

If you'd like more information about Relay For Life in general, visit here. Visit our team Investing In A Cure to donate or to join the fight.

I'd be remiss if I didn't say thank you to Meg Gardiner, who writes mighty fine thrillers, for mentioning us on her blog lying for a living. Buy her books!

The Forgotten

There are days that I purely hate the image that my beloved country presents not only to the world, but to me and my fellow Americans. Witness this.

I really don't care so much about the name "Freedom Tower" being lost. It was an insult to the lives lost on 9/11 that the site of the Twin Towers wasn't consecrated as a memorial to those people and left alone. No, it was dedicated as a temple to commerce, and now the sop of the first skyscraper name is being thrown aside as the temple is rededicated.

Contrast this to the Gettysburg National Military Park. Or to the Bayonne Teardrop, a memorial to the 9/11 victims by a Russian sculptor.

To New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, who was quoted thus in the CNN.com story I cited above: From a patriotic point of view, is it going to make any difference? Yes, Mr. Mayor, it is going to make a difference. We do not become any safer, nor do we become any more solid a people, when naked commerce wins at the expense of the memory of lives stolen by people who hate us.

RIP Dan Seals

The first headline I saw on CMT.com this morning announced the death of Dan Seals from lymphoma at age 61.

"Who?", you may be asking. In the 1970s, he was half of the duo England Dan and John Ford Coley; their biggest hit was I'd Really Love To See You Tonight. It was a nice piece of pop fluff, but I was partial to the title cut of the album that song came from, Nights Are Forever. I have a very fond memory of listening to this song on the radio at my grandparents' house; that would've been 1976. Grandmama was still alive, and Granddaddy's mind was not yet lost to dementia. Both of these things had changed by the next summer.

The pop duo lasted into the early 1980s. After they broke up, Dan Seals moved to country music. According to the CMT.com story, he had eleven #1 songs during his country career, including Bop, Meet Me In Montana (a duet with Marie Osmond), and Everything That Glitters (Is Not Gold). He won CMA awards for the first two.

The Dan Seals song that made the biggest impression on me was They Rage On. It's got a gorgeous melody that Seals' voice simply fits, the instrumental arrangement is a perfect accompaniment to the melody, and the lyrics have a melancholy-yet-not-quite-despairing feel. It's the kind of country song that I easily fall in love with. Here, courtesy of Youtube, is the video.



Thank you, Mr. Seals, for some especially poignant recollections.

Knowing

Just got back from the latest Nicholas Cage flick, and all in all, this one's a loser. It simply can't make up it's mind what kind of story it wants to tell. Is it an end-of-the world disaster movie? Is it about numerology? Is it about faith vs rationality? Is it a low budget horror film? Is it trying to rip off Childhood's End or Inconstant Moon?

There are a lot of ambitious stories that hit almost all of these themes. The successful ones are grounded in their characters. In Knowing, the actors are neither powerful enough in their performances nor generous enough in their characterizations to rise above the flaws in the story. Don't bother, even with Netflix.

Further Reflections On The Battlestar Galactica Finale

Can't help myself, it's not often that a television show engages the mind as well as the emotions.

Here be spoilers.

• I was not surprised that the resolution of the series would bring the survivors of the Twelve Colonies here. That's a common trope in both science fiction and New Age pseudo-science (remember von Daniken's "Chariots of the Gods" from the 1970s). The unexpected part was that the BSG survivors got here so far back in our past: 150,000 years!



• The time capsule approach to time travel was pretty cool. No deus ex machina here, as long as you discount the FTL jump technology.



• It felt like an appropriate and proportionate response that Boomer and Tory received rough justice at the hands of Athena and Tyrol, respectively.



• It comes as no surprise that a show that demands you take faith seriously would demand you do the same with angels. The identity of the angels, though? That, my friends, requires a bit more pondering.



• For a show with such an Old Testament feel, the redemption of Gaius Baltar was a nice touch.



• Lee Adama, Luddite! It's rare to see a story deal with a society that uses high technology to survive long enough to reach a point that they can recognize how their use of that technology is damaging them spiritually, that decides to discard their technology so that they can start anew, and that actually follows through on the decision. That's moral courage, people.



• If my count is correct, the role of Moses in this drama took four parts: Adama, Roslin, Starbuck, and "Galactica" herself. And they all got to see the Promised Land, even though none of them got to dwell there.



• Our last image before the fade to the ending credits was of Six and Baltar, arm-in-arm walking away from us, becoming lost in the Manhattan crowd. With the strong notion of cycles throughout not only this episode but the entire series, I'm trying to remember if the miniseries began with them arm-in-arm walking toward us? I'm thinking no, that it began with Six alone, in her sexy red dress, on her way to meet Baltar. If that's not a false memory, then I'll leave BSG taking away the message that cycles of destruction can be broken, and that we certainly, no matter who we are and what we've done, do not have to end up alone.

They Have A Plan...

The series finale of BSG had its share, and more, of holy frak moments tonight. I found it very satisfying, from the frantic moments of combat to the awe inspiring sight of ships deliberately flying into the sun to the Return of the King-like multiple goodbyes at the end. I'm a sucker for a good redemption story, and there were several redemptive threads here.

It's refreshing to see a very SFnal story that not only doesn't ridicule faith, but embraces it as essential to life.

It's also fitting that the Sci Fi channel is bidding farewell to its most critically and popularly lauded show in the same week that it has announced that it is changing its name to "SyFy". The network's press release said that the new name is more of an "extensible brand", one that will be free of connotations of -- and I paraphrase here -- video game loving geeks who live in their parents' basements, and will appeal more to females. Talk about dissing your core audience...

Given the pure dreck that "SyFy" usually broadcasts, it's also fitting that some marketing genius missed, as has been pointed out widely on the Net this week, that "syfy" idiomatically translates as a venereal disease in Polish, and as excrement in at least one Nordic language.

It's rather fascinating to watch a whole cable network jump the shark.

Think about it...

This is a pregnant sentence

24 and the Shark

How, in this post-modern metaworld where everything is a reference to and a comment upon itself, does a television show jump the shark twice? I ask because, last night, 24 did it again.

There's never been another show to compare to 24. Each season, one day, 24 episodes, each occurring in real-time, a massive conspiracy, and America survives because of one man. Jack Bauer. It shouldn't have worked the first time, not when the big event in the debut episode was a terrorist blowing an airliner with several hundred passengers aboard out of the sky. And she escaped. Not when that episode was delayed in the aftermath of 9/11.

As a reader primarily of science fiction, fantasy, and suspense thrillers, I long ago learned to bring a willing suspension of disbelief to my reading. It's a required tool, more so in these genres than in fiction at large, and it transfers to the medium of television quite well. Without it, I could never be a fan of such a show as 24, as I was for its first five seasons.

You see, 24 has always had large credibility gaps in its story lines. It also had the uncanny ability to take its lead character, put him in the most outrageously stressed situations, lead him up to the very edge of a gaping hole in credibility, and have him successfully cross it on a tightrope made from the tautest razor's edge of suspense. It worked, not only because of the always unbearably heightening tension, but because of the character of Jack Bauer.

Take a fundamentally decent man, one with a seemingly endless ability to love (especially something larger than himself), with a driving need to protect that which he loves, and with self-discipline to shame a centurion. Train him in the myriad uses of deadly force. You then have a warrior, whose one and only priority is his mission.

You have Jack Bauer.

That is why the first five seasons of 24 worked, because Jack Bauer was always a soldier, fighting to protect something worthy of his devotion. It helped that for the first four seasons, as well as his country and her people, he had a leader, in first Senator and then President David Palmer, who was worthy of the mission. And, of course, season five was about avenging the death of David Palmer, among other fallen comrades.

In season six, there was no tighter focus than the amorphous threat to the country. And, lacking that tighter focus, there was no way to anchor that tightrope of suspense, no way to make it over the widening craters of the plot holes. After five seasons in which missing an episode of 24 was a reason for a week-long depressive funk, I quit watching the show with a half dozen episodes left. I still don't know what happened in the season six finale, and I really don't care.

I had no intention of watching season seven, but a week before the season premier, Fox rebroadcast 24: Redemption, the movie from last November that set up a reboot of the series. It was a dead night for television otherwise, and it piqued my interest. So, I started season seven the next week. And was caught up in the old 24 fashion.

Until last night.

An attack on the White House by commandos under the personal leadership of an African warlord? A Secret Service force that doesn't at the first sign of a threat move the President to a completely secure location? A Secret Service force, where every man is a deadly marksman, that knows it's facing armed men, manages to set up a somewhat protected position, and doesn't take down at least as many men from the opposing force as it loses? The evil warlord finds a White House staffer alone in an office on the phone, tells her to hang up, she complies, he guns her down, and then takes as a hostage the first armed man his force compels to put down his pistol? The commandos have complete electronic control of the White House, including the combination to the armored door of the panic room? The commandos manage to capture the President's daughter, who refused to listen to the advice of a seasoned and trusted security agent, which might have kept her safe? The President, upon seeing her daughter in the warlord's power, telling the one person in the panic room with her -- Jack Bauer!!! -- to open the door so she can keep her daughter from being killed? Jack Bauer complying, without reminding the President of how many men have already died this night to keep her safe?

It doesn't work, not for me. 24 requires a complicated balancing act, dancing as it always does on the edge of a precipice. It's a tribute to a large number of creative people that it pulled it off for most of five seasons and that it succeeded in a series reboot after jumping the shark in season six. Last night, however, was a profound disappointment that has, once again, shattered my willingness to suspend disbelief.

RIP Paul Harvey

And now, he knows...the rest of the story.