Month: January 2010

For frak’s sake

Last night, I watched the pilot episode — episodes? I think what I watched online was the uncut DVD version — for Caprica, the new Battlestar Galactica prequel. I was surprised by how much I liked it.

I gave up on Battlestar somewhere midway through its final season. I would often find an individual episode intense and gripping, but almost never enjoyable, and almost always overwrought, overly dour, and more concerned with teasing the identity of “the final Cylon” (which I cared increasingly less about) than in honest character development and interesting plots. I’m aware that the last season, particularly the show’s finale, divided a lot of viewers, but I just grew uninterested with the whole thing during that failed mutiny arc. I think it’s telling that I stopped halfway through a two-part episode, right at what was ostensibly a huge cliffhanger, and felt almost no compulsion to continue watching, even into the second half.

That was several months ago, maybe even almost a year ago when the episodes first aired, and I still haven’t gone back to watch the eight that are left. I was a big fan of the show until at least Season 3, and although in retrospect I think it may have been a little heavy-handed, I think the first part of that season, on occupied New Caprica, is some of the more interesting and challenging work the show ever did. But at some point — and I’d probably have to re-watch the entire series to figure out exactly when –the show went a little off the rails for me. It felt like a chore, like I was watching out of a sense of obligation, of completion, rather than because I genuinely enjoyed the series.

And so I was thinking about giving Caprica a miss. I didn’t watch it when the DVD first came out in April, just as I didn’t watch any of the other spinoff projects like Razor or The Plan. But then I heard Jesse Thorn’s interview with Jane Espenson, the series’ executive producer, and a writer I’ve liked since at least her Buffy the Vampire Slayer days. Her explanation of the show and the themes it will explore — identity, religion, culture, racism — made it sound a lot more intriguing than I expected. And so I figured, hey, why not?

I think Noel Murray describes it best:

“This new show feels different, but its concerns are the same. Eick, Moore, and company aim to show how grief and fear drives us to construct precarious paradises, with the seeds for their own destruction rooted underneath.”

It’s too soon to tell if the series will live up to the strengths of the pilot without falling back on its occasional weaknesses (or the weaknesses that, for me, brought down Battlestar). But for now, I’m cautiously optimistic. I’m still not sure what to do about that last handful of Battlestar episodes, of course. I sometimes feel like I should watch them, if only for the sake of completion, or if only so I can stop avoiding spoilers about how the show ended.

I know some of you have seen the show to its end. What’s your take?

Saturdazed

Just another Saturday that seems to have disappeared much too quick. Where does the time go? I think it’s at least partly the shorter days in winter, the early sunsets, of which I’ve never been a particular fan. At least we’re well past the solstice at this point.

I didn’t do a whole lot today besides potter around the house, around the internet, and around the town on a short afternoon walk. I spent the walk listening to To the Best of Our Knowledge, one of my favorite podcasts. Their whole “Wonder of Physics” episode was fascinating, but I was especially intrigued by their interview with Mark Oliver Everett. Everett is the frontman of the indie rock band the Eels and, as it happens, the son of physicist Hugh Everett, who first proposed the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics. (And who was, therefore and sadly, many decades ahead of his time.) The younger Everett recently worked on a documentary about his father for the BBC. “Everybody should be so lucky to get to make a documentary about their father,” he says. It looks like his is online at YouTube, so I may have to check it out in full.

I also listened to a segment of the Leonard Lopate Show, which I’d heard a little of last night as I waited in the car to pick my parents up at the train station. It’s an interview with neuroscientist Douglas Field about glial cells, which apparently makes up the vast bulk of our brains but, until recently, weren’t at all understood. I was especially struck last night by this exchange near the end of their conversation:

Lopate: In a passage of your book where you describe the way that glia interact with oxygen, you describe oxygen as lethal. Well, I thought oxygen was what gives us life.

Field: Yes, it is what gives us life, but for a biologist, we take a long view. I mean, oxygen is relatively new in this planet’s atmosphere and wasn’t there —

Lopate: It killed off a whole previous group of living organisms —

Field: It’s a byproduct of plants. It’s a toxic byproduct, and organisms who could not adjust to that didn’t survive.

I had never looked at it quite like that, and it’s why I went back and listened to the entire interview this afternoon.

All of which is considerably more exciting than the afternoon itself. I think now I’m just going to watch the premiere episode of Caprica and then do some late-night capping.

A quiet Friday

I think I know what happened to those hours I seemed to lose the other day. They somehow got added to this Friday morning and afternoon, which, for the longest time, just would not end. This evening, though, I’ve just been lying about the house, more or less dog-sitting, while my parents are seeing South Pacific on Broadway. I could joke that I only see Broadway productions starring Angela Lansbury, since in the past year I’ve managed to see her in both Blithe Spirit and A Little Night Music. But the truth is, I much preferred having a quiet night at home. I fried up some eggs and a little leftover Chinese food for dinner, read a few stories in Poe’s Children — having finished Interpreter of Maladies on my train ride home — and watched a couple episodes of The Mighty Boosh and In the Loop.

All in all, a very pleasant, albeit low-key, evening.

Right now, I’m lying here on the bed with the dog beside me, waiting for my parents to call if they need to be picked up at the train station. The dog seems a little miffed that a) they’re not home yet, and b) that he isn’t yet asleep. He does have a schedule to keep, after all.

The drunk button

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about This American Life‘s show about the alcohol consumption at Penn State. (“A football school with a drinking problem,” is how the oft-quoted quip goes. And as someone who worked on campus during many a football game weekend, I can tell you, it’s often not far from the truth.) One of the students interviewed on the show said, “If there were a drunk button, I’d buy one.”

Well maybe now there is:

An alcohol substitute that mimics its pleasant buzz without leading to drunkenness and hangovers is being developed by scientists.

The new substance could have the added bonus of being “switched off” instantaneously with a pill, to allow drinkers to drive home or return to work.

The synthetic alcohol, being developed from chemicals related to Valium, works like alcohol on nerves in the brain that provide a feeling of wellbeing and relaxation.

But unlike alcohol its does not affect other parts of the brain that control mood swings and lead to addiction. It is also much easier to flush out of the body.

Finally because it is much more focused in its effects, it can also be switched off with an antidote, leaving the drinker immediately sober.

As Chris McLaren points out, this leads to all sorts of other questions — not to mention science-fictional, world-changing extrapolations. How, just for starters, would it impact this kind of clever molecular mixology? But I think there’s definitely something to this. Personally, I don’t drink very much, or often, and the kind of excessive drinking that TAL made seem like the norm at Penn State is, to me at least, just staggering. (Honestly, three drinks and a slight buzz over the course of a long evening is as extreme as I ever get.) But if we can simulate the pleasures and benefits of social drinking, while at the same time eliminating all the dangers inherent in excessive alcohol consumption and public drunkenness, shouldn’t we maybe look into doing so?