Dr. Huh-uh

I'm a sucker for almost any science fiction show that shows up on TV. Even the really bad ones, like Lost In Space and Land of the Giants. I even watched Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, even though there seemed to be something indefinably wrong with the show. There still is - reruns of it give me the uneasy feeling that there's something wrong with it, that I shouldn't like it.

I even liked the SF shows that Sci-Fi Channel used to run, before it changed its name to Syfy (what the hell is a siffy anyway?) and clogged its schedule with bullshit ghost-hunting shows. Things like Farscape and, uh, well, Farscape.

Here are some of the SF TV shows I've watched and liked:

UFO

Star Trek (in all its various forms)

Babylon 5

Battlestar Galactica

Lost in Space

The Time Tunnel

The Starlost

The Adventures of Briscoe County Jr. (not technically SF, but it DID have an orb)

Space: 1999

Buck Rogers in Whatever The Hell Century This Is

Farscape

Firefly

Space: Above and Beyond

Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea

Land of the Giants

I liked all these shows, and some of them I liked an awful lot.

I mention this mostly to demonstrate that I'm not some realist literary type who thinks science fiction is mere "pornography of ideas", as someone once said (it might have been me, upon seeing the cover for the Space Plumber novel. It wasn't called Space Plumber, but that's what the hero was. I wonder if a plumber in a spacesuit would exhibit butt-crack. But never mind.) I mention this so when I say that there are two wildly popular SF shows that I don't like, never liked, can't like, never could stand, you understand that I'm not exactly a hater of the whole genre.

The first is The X-Files. Honestly, the whole men in black government conspiracy grey aliens Zeta Reticuli business wears itself out on me very quickly. Like Brylcreem, a dab will do me, and for quite a while. Since I don't really dig that whole dark gummint UFO conspiracy business, I didn't really dig the show, and was always kind of mystified by its wild popularity. And it isn't because there were aliens and UFOs in it. Got no problem with aliens and UFOs - for years I had posted on my office wall certain choice quotations from G'Kar, and I think personally it would be really cool if there really were alien spacecraft at Area 51. But the whole conspiracy thing quickly turns into drudgery for me.

The second is Doctor Who. The wild popularity of this show remains a complete mystery to me. Maybe I'm missing something. Maybe I was supposed to do some reading before watching the show. But man, is it ever tedious and uninvolving. Back in the days when Tom Baker was the Timelord, people at work used to change their work hours so they could get home in time to catch it on PBS in the afternoons (this was before TiVo, obviously). I tried to catch the wave, and failed utterly. I could list a whole series of defects, like the fact that the Daleks were the least convincing villains in the history of television. I mean, come on, you could stop the Daleks dead in their tracks by spreading a little gravel on the sidewalk. They'd get high-centered, spin their wheels, and that would be that. But fundamentally, I didn't like the characters and didn't care if they lived or died. And I got really tired of people at work blathering about their sonic screwdrivers and debating the significance of Dr. Who's scarf. To paraphrase an alleged quote of Dr. Freud, sometimes a scarf is just an affectation. The only good thing that I could see in the whole tedious mess was, frankly, Elizabeth Sladen.

So that's that. I never got into the whole paranoid conspiracy theory angle of The X-Files, and Doctor Who never convinced me that I should give a rat's ass what happened to anyone in the show.

I'd much rather watch Space: 1999 than either one of those clunkers.

I am forced to withhold judgment on the whole Stargate business. The movie was kind of goofy but worth watching a time or two, but I have no idea what the show is like. As a matter of principle I don't watch "Syfy" much anyway. If they're that embarrassed with the label "science fiction", they probably wouldn't want me hanging around their channel anyway, what with all my Star Trek models and Alien mission patches and G'Kar quotes.

Just to give you a taste, here's my favorite G'Kar quote:

G’qon wrote that the war we fight is not against powers

and principalities, but against chaos. There is a greater

darkness than that which we struggle against, and

worse than the loss of life is the loss of hope.

-- G’kar

News From The Cancer Front

I went to see my oncologist Monday, and he's still happy with me. And when he's happy with me, oh, I'm happy too. I do a pretty thorough "lump-check" on my body every few hours on my own, and lately I haven't found anything untoward. But it's always a comfort when he does it and he can't find anything untoward either.

I'm due for a PET scan in a few weeks, but it's for monitoring, not diagnosis. So far - fingers crossed - I have no active cancer going on.

My only real complaint has been the persistent swelling of my left leg, which the experts believe to be caused by the scar tissue and general destruction in the left side of my groin, some of it courtesy of chemotherapy and some of it courtesy of radiation. But I've noticed in the last week that the swelling seems to be abating somewhat. It doesn't look any different, at least not unless you know exactly what to look for, but it certainly feels different. My shoe is getting looser instead of tighter. I can bend my knee through a larger angle. It's easier to get in and out of cars.

Conduct this experiment: bend your toes downward, and notice the way wrinkles tend to form on the sole and side of your foot. For a long time I couldn't even bend my toes downward, and if I did, there were no wrinkles - my leg was so swollen it was like an overstuffed sausage, so tight that wrinkles never formed at all. But I'm starting to see wrinkles again, and I can bend my toes.

As victories go, it probably doesn't rank up there with the big ones - Trafalgar, Pharsalus, Kursk, Midway, Waterloo, the Battle of Britain, Vicksburg, Actium. It doesn't even rank up there with the not-so-big ones - Pea Ridge, Empress Augusta Bay, even French Lick. But it's a big deal to me personally.

This leads me to wonder what the most significant battle in human history was. I think every battle is hugely significant, if only to the poor bastards that had to fight it, and a lot of battles that are considered "great" were in fact meaningless. Cannae comes to mind in this regard - yeah, sure, Hannibal inflicted a terrible defeat on the Romans and killed umpteen thousand legionaries, but in the end, what did it get him? The Carthaginians still lost, Hannibal still went into exile, and today we recognize Roman notions of civilization as the underpinnings of modern civic life, not Carthaginian notions of civilization. For all the good it did Hannibal, Cannae might as well not have happened at all. Another one is the Battle of Leyte Gulf. Huge naval battle, full of stories of sacrifice and courage, especially on the part of the men of the escort carrier group Taffy Three, but even assuming the US Navy lost the battle, Japan would still have lost the war.

I usually vote for the Battle of Poitiers, also known as the Battle of Tours, where Charles Martel and a bunch of grubby Franks defeated Abdul Rahman. It is said that this battle finally ended Islamic invasions of Europe. Maybe, and maybe not. But it did cement the primacy of the Franks in western Europe and paved the way for Charlemagne, and that's pretty dang significant.

The most significant battle in modern history, I think, is the Battle of the Atlantic. I've written about this subject before, but I'll repeat just a little. Given the power of the US industrial economy, and the vast scale of US and Canadian resources, the only hope the Germans had in World War Two was severing Britain and the Soviet Union from their principal sources of supply (points not often noted in the books I've read is how the massive infusion of US-built trucks gave Soviet tank armies considerable mobility in the later years of the war, and how vast supplies of US and Canadian grain allowed the Soviets to draft far more men off their farms than they could have otherwise, not to mention how most of the high-octane av-gas burned in all those Lancasters and Spitfires came from Texas, or how many of those Lancasters and Spitfires seemed to have Canadians at the controls).

So, if the Germans were to have any hope of winning the war, they had to win the Battle of the Atlantic. This comes basically down the question of whether German U-boats could stop Atlantic convoys, or if the escorts could get the convoys through on a reliable basis. And it turned out, they could. Some of my more patriotic associates don't like my notion that it was largely British and Canadian convoy escorts that won the war, but it seems inescapable to me. This is not to say that the United States had no role to play - look at how many of the Royal Navy's escort carriers were US-made, or how many US aircraft the Coastal Command operated. But the point is that the campaign against the U-boats was for the most part planned and executed by the British and the Canadians, though perhaps using a good deal of US hardware.

Besides, it seems obvious to me that the US Navy was always chiefly interested in defeating Japan, not Germany. And it must be said that US Navy fast carrier task forces and submarines went about that task with great and terrible efficiency.

And that, me buckos, is one gigantic digression.

Stuporcars

Lately I've been watching Top Gear on BBC America. The one-word review? Fun.

I know squat about supercars, and I really don't want to know. I can hardly tell everyday cars apart as it is, let alone half-million-dollar Italian supercars that I'll never see in my lifetime, let alone actually drive. So that part of the show is lost on me - the breathtaking news that Jeremy Clarkson doesn't like the Porsche 911 is about as meaningful to me as the news that Captain Kirk doesn't like left-threaded sideways manipulators in the deuterium injection matrix (all the more true considering that a Porsche 911 is a better car than any car I've ever driven).

But other parts of the show are fun. I like the "celebrity laps" where various musicians and assorted glitterati thrash a little blue economy car around the track, sometimes so vigorously that the car sheds wheels entirely. That's fun. Jeremy Clarkson's advice, apparently well-taken for all I know, is "Never lift."

I enjoy their senses of humor. Clarkson can be a bit biting at times, but that's okay. He doesn't seem to care for Americans very much, but that's okay too; there are a lot of Americans I don't care for very much either. I remember the time he had been tasked with building an amphibious automobile, so he mounted an enormous outboard motor on the tailgate of a Toyota pickup truck. He later said something like "The outboard alone weighs almost 600 pounds! That's almost as much as the average American!" I would have laughed out loud if I hadn't been shoveling Cheetos and Fiddle-Faddle into my mouth.

But the best part is the way the three hosts ("presenters", I guess they're called in the land where people drive on the wrong side - yes, I said the wrong side - of the road) hector one another. In a recent episode, Richard Hammond and James May were racing Jeremy Clarkson from London to a ski resort in Switzerland. Richard and James did it the proletarian way, using buses, trains and an airplane. Jeremy went the regal way, in some high-endish Ferrari gran tourismo machine. Beats me what it was. A Ferrari Rigatoni, I don't know. The point is that Jeremy got pulled over by the French police, and James May did the honors for the camera. "Jeremy is here," he said, pointing at a spot on a French road map, "talking to a gendarme. In a few hours' time, he'll be here." He then pointed at Paris. "In a place called la Bastille." Once again, I would have laughed out loud if I hadn't been cleaning my guns with pork fat. (The outcome, if you're interested: Richard and James got to the town first, but Jeremy got to the hotel first.)

But the best part of the show is the observation that driving should be fun, no matter what you drive, or where. All three of them would likely have unflattering things to say about my car, a dusty green Hyundai Elantra, and one imagines that Jeremy Clarkson's comments might actually be interpreted as rude by those with delicate constitutions. But I always enjoy driving my dusty green car more after I've watched Top Gear, even if I can't tell a Porsche Blitzkrieg from a Ferrari Minestrone.

A couple of thoughts on the UK. Once I flew to London on business, and when the driver picked me up at Heathrow, he inquired with earnest concern whether I'd been shot at on my way to the airport in America. What exactly do they think America is like? I personally only get shot at when I go to the local store; the airport is fine, perfectly safe. One of the guys I worked with asked me how many guns I owned, and seemed almost unsettled to find that I owned none at all. He probably thinks all Germans own a pair of lederhosen and all Argentinians like to invade the Falklands too.

And a final note. The British shouldn't be too fond of their "driving experience", because I found driving in England (I only drove in England, so I'll only blame them) a miserable experience. It isn't because they drive on the wrong side of the road, though they do. And it isn't because the weather was constantly wet and foggy, though it was. And it wasn't because the roads were very busy, though they were. It's the fact that once you get off the motorway, there isn't a single straight road anywhere in England. They do more winding and meandering than my small intestine, and seemingly for even less reason. And the signs! I'm used to America, where roads are generally marked by signs indicating the name of the road. In England, it seems that the roads are marked by destination, not name.

I was trying to find a hotel in Basingstoke, but the map and the road signs never seemed to agree and I kept ending up on the road to Aldermaston. Who knows, maybe Aldermaston would have been more fun; I should have tried it. I hear they do nuclear research there.

Lately I've been watching Firefly, the one-season science fiction show from the mind of Joss Whedon. It's quite nice. You'd think a show that didn't make it a full season would stink, but it actually doesn't. It inverts many tradition science fiction themes and tropes and maybe its deliberate blurring of the line between science fiction and western rubbed critics the wrong way. For example, it has no aliens, no faster-than-light drive, no blasters or other energy weapons, no swooshing sounds when ships zip by, and no particular emphasis on military matters. At one point the ship ends up carrying a herd of cattle as cargo; how often do you see that in a Star Trek episode?

Firefly feels a lot like the old role-playing game Traveler to me. If you mentally block out the Third Alliance, jump drive, and any non-human intelligent species, it's pretty close in general feel to Traveler. Not that I'm implying that one was cribbed from the other, merely that Firefly feels a lot more like the Traveler game than any other science fiction show I've seen.

Which is good.

Traveler fails to do Firefly justice in some areas, though. Traveler was, even in its earliest incarnations, overtly militaristic - characters were almost always military veterans and were not infrequently in their thirties or forties, and I don't think the system could produce characters like Kaylee, Simon, Inara or Book. The technologies don't line up either. In some areas Firefly seems pretty advanced technologically, and in other areas it seems fairly primitive. And the show is a study of characters, while characters as such in Traveler tended to be pretty vanilla - good players could work up their own motivations, but the rules themselves don't cover such things. (Deliberately, I'm sure - Traveler could be hugely complicated when it came to things like designing starships, but in actual play the rules were pretty short and sweet.)

But the odds that I'll ever dig out my old Traveler books and dink with them are just about zero. There are too many other things to do and I'd have to win the lottery to ever find enough time to do that. But it wouldn't be an uninteresting exercise.

Bleep Rights!

One or another of those cable channels has been advertising the daylights out of the "First Amendment Comedy Tour", or whatever they're calling it. And they have the comedians (and I use the term guardedly) express their ideas of what the First Amendment means. One said something like "It means I can say whatever the bleep I want, however the bleep want to say it."

Actually, that isn't what it says. It merely says that the government cannot infringe on your rights of speech, press, religion and assembly. But it doesn't mean you have the perfect right to tell me, as a private citizen, whatever the bleep you want to say.

In other words, the First Amendment doesn't give you carte blanch to be a bleep, you bleeping bleep and bleepity-bleep bleepitude.

But since I have no intention of watching the show anyway, it's immaterial. It isn't that foul language bothers me, or that their edge "challenges me" in some way. I just don't think any of the stuff on the previews was funny, and since I reason that the best jokes always appear on the previews, the lack of yuks from the previews don't augur well for the show itself.

But I am not historically a big fan of stand-up comedy in general. There have been a few stand-up comedians that I thought were quite funny - Mitch Hedburg comes to mind, who should be immortalized for the forklift joke, if nothing else - but by and large, stand-up comedy leaves me cold. (I am reminded of the antacid commercial where the guy in the audience gets up because his heartburn is killing him, and the comedian lays into him. Meantime the poor sufferer stands there in the spotlight while the git on the stage mocks him. Just keep walking, you moron, there's no rule that says you have to stand there and be made fun of, especially when you're in pain. Geez. I had no idea stand-up comedy was such a minefield of angst and despair.)

Meantime, I'm too busy watching Firefly episodes to pay any attention to unfunny comedians who can't say "water fountain" without throwing in a few expletives. Firefly is pretty good. I missed it when it was on actual TV (and thus I was an unwitting accomplice in the poor ratings that got the show canned prematurely) but now I've decided to go back and catch up, and it's good. It's like Star Trek, only grimy. This isn't your clean, tidy, Utopian future; this is more or less Deadwood in space, though without E.B. Farnum's operatic manner of speaking.

It's good. Better than the First Amendment comedy crock, I bet.

Crystal Blue BS

Once again, I wasn't paying attention and missed the memo. But apparently a new order of being is upon us - the "Indigo Child", whom we are assured is the next step in human evolution. Here is a list of "indigo child" traits as listed on the website www.indigochild.com:

As a summary, here are the ten attributes that best describe this new kind of child, the Indigo Child

• They come into the world with a feeling of royalty (and often act like it)
  
• They have a feeling of "deserving to be here," and are surprised when others don't share that.
• Self-worth is not a big issue. They often tell the parents "who they are."
• They have difficulty with absolute authority (authority without explanation or choice).
  
• They simply will not do certain things; for example, waiting in line is difficult for them.
  
• They get frustrated with systems that are ritually oriented and don't require creative thought.
  
• They often see better ways of doing things, both at home and in school, which makes them seem like "system busters" (nonconforming to any system).
  
• They seem antisocial unless they are with their own kind. If there are no others of like consciousness around them, they often turn inward, feeling like no other human understands them. School is often extremely difficult for them socially.
  
• They will not respond to "guilt" discipline ("Wait till your father gets home and finds out what you did").
  
• They are not shy in letting you know what they need.
  

And these are their good traits? Geez. Where I come from, someone with a royal sense of entitlement, impatient inability to get along with others, and the belief that the rules don't apply to him isn't an Indigo Child. Where I come from, such a person is just a plain old asshole.

But if it makes you feel better to call yourself an Indigo Child, knock your socks off.

The Loser Channel

Remember when TLC used to stand for The Learning Channel? And when there were arts and entertainment on A&E? All these channels stink these days.

What's on TLC but shows that feature loudmouths screaming at one another, or people who are famous for having lots and lots of kids? Sorry, doesn't sound like anything I'd ever want to learn.

And what's on the other "educational" channels? Crap about bullshit paranormal activity, UFO hunters, crypto-zoology (in the kooky sense), the alleged 2012 apocalypse, Nostradamus, conspiracy theories, ghost hunters, Bible codes...

So what do we "learn" from these shows? That it's okay to scream and yell like some kind of baboon? That if you have enough kids, someone will give you millions of dollars? That pseudo-science is not only good, but cool? I guess the ideal would be a show about a loudmouthed ghost-hunter who heaps verbal abuse on his hapless assistants and how Nostradamus predicted that he would take his 239 kids to get ice cream in New York City.

I believe I'll pass, thank you very much. You think Nostradamus predicted that?

When Did That Happen?

I've been working nights for a while, which means I'm on my way home somewhere around midnight or a little later. It means, primarily, that I can't listen to NPR, because the NPR station changes to incomprehensible jazz at some point in the evening. (I know it's un-American to not like jazz, but I don't. Four guys all playing four separate songs at the same time isn't "innovative", it's just plain irritating.)

So I've tried listening to the local FM radio stations, and I don't know when it happened, when the change came, but man, they suck!

I don't know who established the formula for modern FM rock radio stations, but whoever it was needs to be punished, and by that I mean in the Frank Castle fashion. KUPD establishes a new low, as its "DJs" just sit around and talk about bodily functions and sex acts. No, they don't. Talk implies an exchange of ideas and information; they might as well just sit there and read lists of "bad words" for all the communication that goes on. Feces. Anus. Coprophilia. Oh, what fun. What, do 15 year old mallcore aficionados listen to this nonsense and think that it makes them macho? Whatever the case, it isn't meant for me.

And the music! Good heavens. I never thought I'd live to see the day that they made "metal" music that was whiny and spineless, but there it is. I don't know what kind of metal it really is. I don't think it's metal at all, because it violates the Basic Precept of Metal, which is this: Metal Doesn't Whine. I think I'm going to refer to it as "mallcore". Take ye a metal tune. Dumb it down and take out the hard, technical stuff. It's best if you can somehow turn it into a single monotonous riff that goes on and on and sounds really heavy but is really just kind of dumb. Add to that some scratching from rap, and some electronic effects from God knows where. Make the lyrics whiny. Dwell on the hideousness of your 15 year old white middle class lifestyle. It isn't even real hideousness; it isn't real pain or loss or suffering. It's the bogus bullshit suffering of some clod who bought a t-shirt at Hot Topic and then had an emotional meltdown because he saw some clod wearing the same t-shirt. It's hard for me to take very seriously the suffering of a high school kid whose parents give him a car, a cell phone, and enough money to buy Slipknot t-shirts at the mall. But oh, how they suffer. Woe is me and my affluent lifestyle, I ran out of eyeliner and my brother Timmy ate the last of the Cap'n Crunch ::cries:: I'm sure that someone one or another of these hideous bands is writing a song extolling the virtues of self-mutilation as a means of dealing with the pain of second period PE.

It's like emo, only loud. And worse. At least I could tune emo out. Oh no, another Dashboard Confessional song; well, at least I can not listen to it and amuse myself by thinking about neutron stars. But not this stuff.

I have got to get a car that my iPod will plug into. That's all there is to it. Between the vile (not to mention screamingly unfunny) FM DJs and the whiny mallcore, I'm fixing to go clean off my feed. Better to just the radio off and listen to the wind.

(And I haven't even started on the stupid FM radio commercials.)

The only bright spot in any of this is the late-night show Alice Cooper does on KSLX. The music isn't much to write home about, but at least Alice can assemble words into intelligible, occasionally funny and sometimes even reasonably interesting sentences. Compared to the hooting simians on the other radio stations, whom I imagine are easily flummoxed by bananas hanging on strings just out of their reach, he's a breath of fresh air.