AncienTrails

Battlestar Galactica: Good-Bye

Spring          Waxing Seed Moon

Battlestar Galactica has finished.  Earth found or recreated.  Laura is dead.  Kara vanished.  The whole skipped forward 150,000 years at the very end and found Hera, the cylon/human infant, to be mitochrondial Eve.  This was the best series I’ve seen on TV and it held up well over the years.

Here’s an unusual announcement:

The United Nations and the Sci Fi Channel will present a panel discussion Tuesday evening on the social and political issues raised by the Sci Fi series “Battlestar Galactica,” which concludes on Friday night. Moderated by Whoopi Goldberg (a frequent guest on “Star Trek: The Next Generation”), the topics include human rights, terrorism, and reconciliation and dialogue among civilizations and faiths.

I’m with a 16 year-old who reported to NPR that these big issues get learned not because you have to but because they hit the nail on the head.

Battlestar Galactica reached for and attained the kind of serious fictional work that great science fiction has:  Dune,  Dahlgren, Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series among others.  In a world like ours, but different in time and technology, people a lot like us struggle with love, war, hate, xenophobia, hope and despair.  Cylons, a breed of robots developed by humans, but advanced in many ways beyond human, try to destroy the human race and succeed with the exception of some 40,000 humans on various star ships guarded by an aged battlestar that had been on its retirement mission.

Two old soldiers, Edward Olmos and Michael Hogan, both agree to one last mission to retire the battlestar.  They happen to be on board when the Cylon’s destroy Caprica, an earth simulacrum.  Then, the rest unfolds.  More on this later.

I admit I’m not the most unbiased writer about this since I have loved science fiction since the early 1960’s; but, as most sci fi fanboys–no matter their age–know, we hold science fiction and its corollary arts to an often impossible standard.  That is, though we are willing to suspend whole bushels of disbelief, we expect consistency, good science and believable narrative in addition to a new, very new take on age old problems.

Yes, like most sci fi fanboys, I will watch a good deal of TV and movie fare that do not meet these criteria–Battleship Earth, the Blob remake, Men in Black.  When, however, it comes to the question: is this good science fiction?  That is, is it better than entertainment alone, very few make the cut.  Movies like Gattaca, Blade Runner, Soylent Green and 2001: A Space Odyssey are on my list.   None of these match Battlestar Galacitica in scope.  Some of them had an excellent, but narrow focus:  AI run amuck, bio-science gone crazy, androids out of control–or, what does it mean to be human, how far will we go to feed ourselves, the nature of a fascist state.  There was the Twilight Zone and the original Outer Limits but very few TV based shows have had the courage to go where true science fiction routinely goes.

The uninitiated often think of science fiction as more like Men in Black than Gattaca, say, or the Twilight Zone.  While I found Men in Black entertaining, it was not a serious work.  Science fiction at its best meets the test of literature, of all art, it makes you see the world you live in in a new way.   Battlestar Galactica did that for me.

I was about to write and I’m sad to see it go, but I’m not.  It is the first satisfying television series of my memory–no matter the genre, satisfying in the way a novel is.  It was coherent, moved in a narrative direction, had complex characters faced with challenging, almost impossible conflict and came to an end.   Television series often do not end, rather, they trail off into insignificance as their creators try to squeeze every advertising dollar out of them, or they end.  Just end.  Most do not follow a narrative direction either.  Challenging conflict with solutions by the hour typify television, a sort of dime novel approach.

Oh, well, by now you have gathered how I feel about Battlestar Galactica.  I can’t wait for the next one, what ever it is.

Bytes and Desire or Marx Made Me Do It

Spring        Waxing Seed Moon

Mark Odegard found this quote after I wrote this.  It fits.  I’m an unwitting communist tool.  (he also helpfully underlined the key part.)   Thanks, Mark.

“Owners of capital will stimulate the working class to buy more and more of expensive goods, houses and technology, pushing them to take more and more expensive credits, until their debt becomes unbearable. The unpaid debt will lead to bankruptcy of banks, which will have to be nationalized, and the State will have to take the road which will eventually lead to communism.”
- Karl Marx, 1867, Das Kapital

OK.  Here’s a distinct smirch on my geek cred, to the extent I had any.  I thought I had filled up my hard-drive on this machine (a Dell).  I went hunting today for a few more gigabytes I could shave off the disc so I could defragment and I discoved that one of my back-up sets resided on this drive instead of the J drive (Maxtor external).  This amounted to 176 gigbytes!  I deleted it since it was a 2007 version and much more recent ones survive on the J drive.

This means I now have a Gateway with a 640 gig hard-drive and a 1 terabyte external for it, plus a new monitor.  Now, I believe you can never have enough computing capacity.  Somewhere along the lines of the too thin or too rich, I guess.  Still, I think I may have tipped over here into obsession.  It’s that damned deflation driving prices down.  No.  It’s my computer obsession.

Let’s just say I now have as much computing capacity as the free world had in 1950.  Or something close to that.

Spring has found another round of OMG what have I done with my life.  God, being neurotic is tiresome.  The spur this time has been the Dreiser reading.  I finished the Financier and am well into the Titan, the second book in the Desire triology. If any book does, even more than Gatsby or American Tragedy, even more than Babbit and equal to Atlas Shrugged, Dreiser’s Desire triology, makes plain the American male’s achievement imprint.

(”Streetcar magnate” Charles Tyson Yerkes was an outlaw, a scoundrel who never met a rule, regulation or obstacle he couldn’t march over, under, around or through, according to the new biography by John Franch. The inspiration for Cowperwood.)

Frank Cowperwood–the Titan–is the apotheosis of the achieving male.  His entire being focuses on what he can do to become richer, more powerful, higher in social status, better in aesthetic sensibility and well-matched at home.   In the Titan Cowperwood befriends a violin player who he defines as an artist who just didn’t have what it takes.  I identified with the violinist.  He plays brilliantly sometimes, but in general has too little of the drive to be great and too little of the talent.

Then, I say, well, so what?  Back to the 99.9999% of us who sink below the surface of history and the near certainty that humanity will, like other animals, go extinct someday.  But there is this hook, an American male hook, one decorated like a fancy lure, to which we all rise from time to time.  Just as there are Rappalas, Hulu’s, Red Devils and many other fishing lures there are many of these hooks, too:  fame, fortune, admiration, impact, legacy, power.  All elements of desire.

Even the savviest old bass in the weeds sometimes gets fooled into going for a jig.  When it happens, this old bass shakes his head and works hard to spit the hook back out into the water.  So far, most of the time, I manage to get loose.  Each time hurts, though.

Snow and Bytes

Spring          Waxing Seed Moon

“All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.” - Galileo Galilei

The snow has come and now melts.  I have installed a monitor for the gateway which means I have two up now.  This seems like too much, but screens have become cheap.  This new one cost $179,  a 20 inch high def flat-screen.

The next phase of all this work is to split the load between the two computers and connect up the exeternal hard-drives in a way that makes sense.  I’ve looked into partitioning the large drive in the Gateway–640 gigs–and the 1 terabyte Seagate external, but have not decided on whether I want to go that route or not.

My other hard drive was full and the external, Maxtor drive, has filled up, too.  This makes the Dell slower and more cranky.  The Gateway came in at $500 even, so adding a new computer was not a big cost plus its faster and has a much bigger hard-drive than the Dell.  Right now I’m loading Starry Night Pro Plus onto the Gateway.  I’ll be able take its 11 gigs off the Dell once its on the larger hard-drive.  This will  make this machine quicker and more responsive.  That’s under way as I write.

Bytes and Flakes

Spring (?)      Waxing Seed Moon

The sky has a rippled layer of cumulus from horizon to horizon, gray and low hanging.  The dewpoint is low and the barometer has taken a turn straight down, anticipating the oncoming storm.  Out on the South Dakota Minnesota border where Blue Cloud Abbey sits on the Coteau Hills a blizzard has visibility down to a quarter of a mile.

The current prediction from NOAA:

SPECIFICALLY…AREAS AROUND OLIVIA TO BUFFALO TO CAMBRIDGE
MINNESOTA WITH HAVE LOCALLY TWO TO FOUR INCHES BEFORE THE SNOW
TAPERS OFF TO FLURRIES OR LIGHT SNOW TUESDAY NIGHT. AREAS AROUND
NEW ULM TO THE TWIN CITIES WILL HAVE LOCALLY ONE INCH…POSSIBLY
AS HIGH AS TWO INCHES IN THE NORTHERN SUBURBS OF THE TWIN CITIES.

My gut tells me we’ll get more, but this evening will tell.  We had winds of 20 mph around 2 p.m. and they’ve kept the bell ringing here all day.

After a bit of a rocky start my new computer and I are on the way to becoming friends.  We can now communicate.  Feels good to get it up and functioning.

The Snow, Man. Cometh.

Spring             Waxing Seed Moon

Right now the barometer has a gentle slope up, winds are in the 2-3 mph range and the sky overcast.  The weather folks at NOAA have changed their advice:

THIS HAZARDOUS WEATHER OUTLOOK IS FOR PORTIONS OF CENTRAL AND SOUTHERN MINNESOTA…AND WEST CENTRAL WISCONSIN. .DAY ONE…TODAY AND TONIGHT SNOW WILL DEVELOP ACROSS WEST CENTRAL AND CENTRAL SECTIONS OF MINNESOTA TODAY WITH THE SNOW BECOMING HEAVY TONIGHT. SNOW ACCUMULATIONS FROM 6 TO 10 INCHES ARE LIKELY BY TUESDAY MORNING ALONG AND WEST OF A LINE FROM DAWSON TO ALEXANDRIA. IN ADDITION…EASTERLY WINDS WILL INCREASE TO 20 TO 30 MPH TONIGHT CAUSING BLOWING AND DRIFTING SNOW. NEAR BLIZZARD CONDITIONS ARE POSSIBLE TONIGHT FOR AREAS NEAR THE SOUTH DAKOTA BORDER. FARTHER EAST AND SOUTH…A WINTRY MIX OF SNOW…SLEET AND FREEZING RAIN IS EXPECTED TONIGHT FROM REDWOOD FALLS AND NEW ULM THROUGH THE TWIN CITIES AS WELL AS ACROSS WEST CENTRAL WISCONSIN.

Once again into the breech.  I’m going to turn on my recalcitrant new computer and see if I can make it humm.

A Post-Modern Trail

Spring                 Waxing Seed Moon

Boy, talk about bleary eyed.  I spent today getting acquainted with my new Gateway computer.  So far we don’t know each other real well.  I performed some surgery, gutting all the Microsoft stuff I could eliminate, downloading Java’s open office suite, Avast anti-virus, Ad-Aware and Malware Bytes.

Still, the machine was poky and crashed a couple of times.  Vista, I think.  Anyhow, when I tried to set up recovery disks it wouldn’t recognize them.  This after hours at it by that time.  I needed some rest and some shut-eye.

Experience tells me I’ll convince it to communicate with me sooner or later, I just hope its sooner and that I don’t require tech help.  I also don’t want to have to box it up and send it back.  Which I will if it doesn’t work for me.

Kate came home much better tonight.  Yeah.

After spending the day in bits and byte land, I feel a little disoriented in the familiar world.   The seedlings required water this evening and as I bent over them ladling it onto them, I could smell the earth in their pots.  Made the day a good one.

I may just partition this disk, load up my current HD onto a partition and run XP on the new system.

Observant readers of this blog might note a new page at the top, Second Naivete.  It will be part of the commentary on religion project, but more it will contain close readings of various biblical texts, art, devotional literature and American scholarship.  You can read about the point of it on the page.  I’m not sure right now how often I’ll blog to it, but my intent right now is once a week.

Seasons. Changing

Spring        Waxing Seed Moon

The seed moon has begun to wax while the red stop sign pops up once again on my status bar.  That means Accuweather has identified a severe weather situation bearing down on us.  What kind of severe weather?  Snow.  Big snow.  Maybe.

The weather has been bright, but cold with little precipitation for the last few days.  Garden 2009 continues to exist only in bulbs, rhizomes and corms.  The only growth so far has come under the lights with the onions and eggplants, broccoli and cauliflower doing well.  There is a need for more and more space as the seedlings take up more space.

The cold snap looks like it will extend through next week.  Here is the NOAA forecast for the key severe weather days:

Monday: A 30 percent chance of snow, mainly after 1pm. Mostly cloudy, with a high near 42. East northeast wind between 8 and 14 mph.

Monday Night: Snow, mainly after 1am. Low around 28. Northeast wind between 13 and 16 mph. Chance of precipitation is 80%.

Tuesday: Snow, possibly mixed with freezing rain, becoming all snow after 10am. High near 39. East northeast wind around 18 mph, with gusts as high as 26 mph. Chance of precipitation is 80%.

Tuesday Night: Snow likely. Cloudy, with a low around 24. Chance of precipitation is 60%.

The Decider

Spring           New Moon (seed moon)

“In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.” - Theodore Roosevelt

Kate is a good decider(unlike the other Decider).  She makes a decision a second if necessary.  Somewhere along the line she and Teddy Roosevelt must have drunk the same water.  I’m a muller and wonderer.  It’s nice to have two different decision making styles at home because it allows a long view and a necessary, lets do it now attitude to reinforce each other.

Two iconoclasts have crossed my way of late.  Freeman Dyson is one.  He’s a really smart guy, a physicist and an employee of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton.  He’s written all sorts of stuff; I’ve read his essays, but none of his books.  He thinks global warming is real, but that the radical consequences predicted are not.  One telling aspect of his critique involves the notion of climate models.  He claims that assumptions used to build those systems are not accurate.  If the assumptions are no good, the model can not be.  I don’t know the science, but he’s a guy whose thought matters.

I’ve not changed my mind.  At least not yet.  But he has made me wary.

The second is a Patrick Moore, a founder of Green Peace and now, ironically, a supporter of nuclear power.  In an article published in 2006 he makes the argument about base-load generation that I mentioned a couple of days ago.  He seems to think nuclear is the only generative source with enough oomph to replace coal in the interim between now and an eventual switch to renewables.  I found his arguments less compelling.  He seems to think reprocessing is a reasonable solution to the waste problem, but a Scientific American I read this week points out many problems with reprocessing, not the least of which is that it produces plutonium, material useful in a bomb.

It’s good to have received wisdom challenged by reputable people, it sharpens the debate and makes everyone think more clearly.

Blest Be The Tie That Binds

Spring                New Moon  (seed moon)

The notion of legacy, Frank’s question from last Woolly meeting, has rolled over one more time in my thought.  While resuming watching the Mahabarata, Time (the narrator of this long epic) comments on family as a garland.  A family is like a garland, made of individual flowers, but joined by a common thread.  The thread, he says, should be invisible, and the flowers’ scents and colors, though distinct, must not clash.

It made me think of the thread in our family, rather than the individual flowers.  In the West we spend so much time growing, cultivating, nourishing the flowers we often forget about, neglect the thread.  In Chinese culture the family name comes first, then the given name.  I mentioned a woman I called Ming Miao to a Chinese acquaintance who thought a moment, then said, “Oh, Miao Ming!”  This difference is not subtle, it lies in the way we name ourselves.

To complicate matters even more the thread has become a cord in our  3rd millennial realm of shifting family ties, divorce, single parents and adoption.  Perhaps the musical metaphor would serve better here, individual family members as notes and the link between them all a Wagnerian leitmotif.

This section of the Mahabarata has made me wonder about spending time nourishing the thread, the cord, the leitmotif.  I’m not sure I even know where to begin.  Two ideas pushed themselves forward at once.  The first, stimulated by Roy Wolf, the host of our sheepshead game, involves regular communication in writing with grandchildren.  He writes each grandchild a letter once a week.

The second came forward from another prod in the Mahabarata.  The sage has a key role at this point in Indian history, especially in his role as teacher and as an advisor to kings and princes.  In commenting on the purpose of the sage Dronacharya noted that learning alone has no purpose; learning must be shared.  “The river,” he said, “cannot fit in one vessel.”

One of the links in my family, from both the Ellis and Keaton side, is a long tradition of teachers.  My grandmother Ellis was a teacher.  My mother was a teacher.  Many of my cousins on both sides are teachers as are my brother and sister.  Jon and Jen are both teachers.  The teaching occurs at all levels from elementary school through graduate school, but teachers have a major presence in all my family links including Jon and Jen.

There is, too, the art of taking in knowledge and passing it on through different forms of vocational practice:  medicine, military, clergy.  That too is a mark of my family.  These three are the oldest and in some person’s definitions, the only, professions.  Professing and sustaining the traditions of medicine, warrior and person of faith also teach, but outside of the educational establishment.

OK.  Let’s say that teaching or transfer of knowledge is somehow the link, or at least a strong part of the link.  Now what? Don’t know right now, but this seems important to  me.

Kate

Spring       New Moon (Seed Moon)

This year’s vegetable garden, part of it anyhow, continues to grow under the lights.  We’re still eating onions and garlic from last year’s crop and this year we plan to have even more stored food.  Of course, we’ve had  canned tomatoes, cucumbers, relish and jelly for several years.  Kate’s got the Iowa farm kitchen thing goin’ on.

Speaking of Kate, she got her first commission for a quilt this week.  A woman liked her work on a memorial quilt for a four-year old who died suddenly and asked her if she would make a quilt for her daughter commemorating her soft ball team.  She’s apparently played with these same girls since junior high or so.  Kate’s got a big heart and she’s done two quilts recently, the memorial quilt and a quilt for a colleague with multiple myeloma that involved many, many hearts signed by his friends and patients that show it.

She’s a crafty lady. Kate makes shirts, dresses, bags from felt and cloth, cans, cooks like a gourmet and is a mean hand with a trowel.  Not to mention that medical thing.

The dogs have begun to lobby for lunch.  I’m gonna feed them and then go the grocery store myself.