I wonder if it might be helpful for me to figure out what I might be looking for, hypothetically, in the opposite sex. Preferably before I start dating again.
Many smart people have spoken of making a list of the qualities they would want in a mate. It’s a great idea. And my dear friend Rowan wrote a post in my honor today, encouraging me to do so. I’m still not sure I’m ready. But I’ve printed her list out and posted it in my home office (aka bedroom). And it just might be the impetus I need.
Have you ever made a list? Would you be willing to share what qualities you’ve added to it?
I have made two such lists in my lifetime. One is very, very old; and indeed I can’t find it. Stylistically, it resembled Rowan’s. In my mind, it was kind of a tag cloud, an evocation of what I thought I should look for. Its purpose was affirmational more than anything: it was a way to get past defeating self-talk, to recognize that I was able to seek a truly fulfilling relationship.
More recently, I made a 3×3+♥ list shortly after my divorce finalized (which was well after the split — March ‘06, maybe?), and I have updated it several times. Most recently, just a couple of weeks ago, as I re-read I Capture The Castle (thanks Madelyn!).
I don’t think I’m willing to publicly share all of it. But how about some of it?
There was a recurring plotline in so many episodes that it almost became a running theme—some all-powerful being would set itself up as God but would eventually turn out to be nothing more than an advanced alien or megalomaniacal computer. As a little kid watching episodes like “Return of the Archons” and “The Apple,” I learned that it wasn’t enough to have faith in something just because everyone else around you did. I learned there might be truths outside one’s own society—heavy stuff for a seven-year-old.
Now consider the message: it doesn’t matter if you are all powerful. If you’re doing something wrong, you’re doing something wrong, and should be opposed. No matter what the consequence. …And so as a boy I found it increasingly hard to understand why Christians weren’t acting the way Kirk and Spock were. If there was a God, some being causing earthquakes and hurling hurricanes, why wouldn’t Christians (or Jews or Muslims for that matter) fight against such a being? What I was learning on Star Trek seemed more moral to me than what I was learning in church.
Then came TNG (that’s Star Trek, The Next Generation for those who dated in college). This time it was the Data character (played by Brent Spiner) who got me hooked. Here was an android, this super being, and he wanted to be human—with all our frailties and foibles. It was Roddenberry at the top of his game, giving us a logic machine that concluded it was logical to strive to achieve something it knew it could never achieve. Talk about a symbol for humanity. Aren’t we all at our best when we’re striving for unattainable goals, knowing that it is the act of striving that makes us better people?
Although I have tried many times, I’ve never been able to write a traditional daily journal. I have some specific hangups about it (my mother had a habit of reading her kids’ diaries), but I think part of the issues is also just stylistic: I am a socially awkward geek. I have a hard time opening up to a blank page just as I have a hard time opening up at the beginning of a conversation. But get me going, and I will pour out my soul.
When I got significantly into David Allen’s GTD system a few years ago, one of the most important observations for me was how useful it could be to apply the same structure, over and over, to lots of different areas of life. Need to get this computer fixed by next week? Open a project, write down the next action, put it in a trusted system. Want to get better about maintaining your friendships? Open a project, write down the next action, put it in a trusted system. Whether the goal is fixing that weird label ordering bug, losing weight, setting up a new user’s computer, or cleaning the closet, applying the same system over and over has tremendous value in helping me stay on top of my own priorities. (Not that I succeed in doing it all the time. But often enough to know the value.)
So at one point when wrestling with trying to define some of my thoughts on a subject, I came up with a process that I’ve found to be repeatable and useful, at least for me. I called it 3×3. I would start with three positive things about the subject — pros, if I was trying to make a decision; or affirmations, if I was trying to remind myself of something; or hopes/desires, if I was trying to choose between different options or train myself to recognize future opportunities. Then three negative things — cons, red flags, or things to avoid. Then, three things that helped me relate myself to the subject — mistakes made in the past to learn from, promises to myself for the future, or practical considerations before I could achieve the positives.
Yes, those categories are kind of open-ended. But with only three per category, nine things total, I found that I was able to surface the things I needed to think about fairly well. (Usually, the first two in each category are easy, and then I agonize over the third.)
I have used this two ways. One is to make a decision. I made a 3×3 list when I was deciding whether to offer myself for employment to my best client, or keep up with the self-employment gig; I made one when getting ready to buy my condo.
However, I have also used them as ongoing reminders, as notes-to-self. They go into my reviews (what GTD calls the Weekly Review, except that I don’t do it every week). This second type I have extended into 3×3+♥, or Three Times Three Plus Inspiration. (Why the heart character for inspiration? I dunno, it’s just what I put in TextMate on the first one I made, and I like it.)
In the ♥ section, I gather quotes, note down musings, write questions that help me think about the subject at hand when I read the file during my reviews.
I made a template
Personally, I have always just made text files for my 3×3+♥ lists. But I am inspired to share the method (I’ll get into the why in my next post :-), and this seems like the sort of thing that a lot of people would do with pen and paper, rather than with their computer. So I made a template.
It’s still largely a blank page. But there’s just enough structure there to make it work better for me. Maybe somebody else out there will find it useful as well.
After having not been in one for a few years, I recently re-joined the Cedarville Farm CSA (community-supported agriculture) program. If you’ve never been in a CSA, the way it works is: you buy in at the beginning of the year or the harvest season, and get a share of the farm’s produce.
Each Wednesday, I pick up a box of fresh, local, sustainably grown veggies, then let the harvest guide my meal choices for the rest of the week.
It’s real food, grown nearby, and getting something so fresh and so seasonal keeps me tied to the rhythm of the year in a way a supermarket never could. It’s the next best thing to a garden.
There have been two significant controversies recently regarding pornographic presentations at programmer’s conferences. The two presentations — one at GoGaRuCo titled “CouchDB: Perform Like a Pron Star” and an afternoon keynote at Flashbelt — were on programming subjects; it’s not like these were aimed at Web pornographers or anything. Both the speakers are good programmers, and I’m not out to lynch them, but they were both way over the line.
I don’t have anything to say to the speakers that hasn’t been said. I hope they learn from their mistakes, admit that they were mistakes, and find a way to present their ideas without relying on the crutch of showing genitalia to a crowd of programmers.
What I think I can contribute to the discussion is to talk to the audience, especially to the men in the audience. Obviously, in any crowd, there are going to be a few who laugh at the “jokes,” who join right in the sexualization and objectification, and they’re not going to listen to me anyway. But the reasonable men, the men who were made uncomfortable but just sat silently through the presentation? You’re the ones I’m talking to.
At GoGaRuCo, arguably the less offensive of the two presentations, here is what it felt like for women in the audience:
Only six women at the conference… it explains everything, of course the majority liked it!
In any case, this is a good example of how insular the software development environment is. It is a boy’s club, where locker-room behavior is overlooked, and indeed, not even acknowledged.
We don’t yet live in a nudist paradise where people don’t have hang-ups about sex issues. It doesn’t matter if you think other people should stop being “prudes”, it was obvious that the images would make some people feel uncomfortable and unwelcome. If the conference wasn’t intended to make everyone feel welcome, then what was it? A club.
The key is the right to complain safely. When complaints are predictably met with accusations of “overreacting”, “political correctness”, and “intolerance”, the resulting message is: Be like us, be silent, or leave.
I’m a minority in this community. I know that, and generally I can ignore it and go along thinking it’s a meritocracy of ideas and code. Then I encounter a woman’s thonged rear on the screen at a conference, 20 feet tall, and I remember, oh yeah, people like me don’t belong here. To most of these men around me, I am, at best, an oddity, and at worst, a sexual target.
What might have been a short, juvenille, eye-rolling bit of humor continued throughout the talk to become increasingly disturbing. Amidst this normally warm, welcoming community, I spent an uncomfortable half hour wondering if I had somehow found myself in 1975.… This technique was distracting and disrespectful to an audience who, frankly, is turned on by code. This crowd had just watch hour upon hour of code slide shows and live irb sessions, often on the edge of their seats
Here’s the best sum of the problem I’ve read, from catamorphism on reddit: “It’s a question of whether you as a speaker want to remind women, explicitly, that you see them as sex objects first and as professional colleagues second.” I don’t care how edgy and hip you are, it’s not appropriate to do that in the context of programming, and if DHH (and, it seems, the larger Rails community) doesn’t get that? Rails is still a ghetto.
As reasonable men, what do we learn from this? Let’s talk about the damage done to the things we love.
If we allow these incidents to pass by unchallenged, we damage the reputation of our communities on several levels: Ruby, Rails, Flash, programmers, geeks. We damage the reputation of men in general, by reinforcing the idea that we’re all in tacit agreement with the speakers and their techniques. We damage women who code by making them unwelcome in the fields they want to contribute to. We damage girls who might get into coding, by making them unwilling to enter the field. We damage the strength of our communities (again, the whole stack: Ruby, Rails, Flash, programmers and geeks), because we are denying the contribution of the women we turn away.
Now obviously, not every man in the audience was comfortable with the content. But understand how much damage is done. I argue that waiting until the end, shaking your head, and moving on to the next talk is not enough. If you are in this situation, the right thing to do — the manly thing to do — is to walk out. Pointedly walk out. Stand up, say “this isn’t what I came for” loud enough for others to hear, and make your way to the door, not in that slinking don’t-look-at-me way we head for the door when our cell phone rings, but with the confidence of someone who is Walking Out.
Because what happens when we don’t? What happens when we let it slide? We become part of the crowd, and we are perceived as being unified with the folks who approve of the content:
I was shocked that this was considered appropriate material for a conference about innovative developments in the world of flash and the greater creative field. And that I’d paid to see this. And that a number of people laughed at his jokes — perhaps because probably 90-95% of the people there were male.
So that’s my plea. If you’re a man in the audience and this sort of thing happens, don’t let it slide. Man up, and walk the hell out. Maybe someone else will follow you, or maybe it’ll just be you. But there’s a world of difference between ‘all the men in the room laughed’ and ‘even one of the men in the audience walked out.’ Be that difference, and maybe the next generation of Ruby (or Flash, or Java, or PHP) programmers won’t be 95% male, and our communities will be healthier for having a little diversity.
I’m going to close with a few more quotes, that do not come directly from responses to these talks, but are about feminism in general. I think reasonable men need to be reminded, every now and then, of just what women are up against, still.
You, dear male reader, are totally not one of those men. I know this, and I appreciate it. I really do. But here’s where all this victimy girl shit concerns you: …You are missing an opportunity to help stop the bad guys. [You] and the guys you hang out with may not really mean anything by it when you talk about crazy bitches and dumb sluts and heh-heh-I’d-hit-that and… I get that you don’t really mean that shit. I get that you’re just talking out your ass.
But please listen, and please trust me on this one: you have probably, at some point in your life, engaged in that kind of talk with a man who really, truly hates women–to the extent of having beaten and/or raped at least one. And you probably didn’t know which one he was.
And that guy? Thought you were on his side. As long as we live in a culture where the good guys sometimes sound just like the misogynists, the misogynists are never going to get the message….
It’s hard. I get it. I don’t speak up every time I should, I stew in silence when I should be speaking out, I understand. No one, especially not someone who loves you, is going to hate you for not speaking up.
But consider carefully what you are saying when you don’t say anything at all. Silence is speech.
It’s worse in geekland. It always has been worse in geekland. There’s [a] positive correlation between the strength of a woman’s belief that misogyny on the internet is a serious problem and the strength of her connections with geekland. It’s all over the place—the pr0n jokes, the “I’d hit that”… So here is what you do, if you’re a man wanting to help. You say, “Um, was that supposed to be funny? Because, not laughing here.”
…You are never going to eliminate all of the unconscious assumptions that your privilege — whatever that privilege might be — has programmed you with. You do not have to devote your entire life to crusading against sexism or racism or ableism any other kind of -ism there is. What makes you not That Guy is recognizing that you have that privilege, that your experience is not everyone’s experience, and — this is the critical part — not assuming or behaving as though your perspective is the only perspective and anyone who doesn’t match it is wrong.
Is it just me, or does Paul Thurrott tend to forget his own initial enthusiasm for Windows products, as time goes by?
And then there’s Windows 7. Sure, it looks like a prettier version of Windows Vista. But it’s small and fast, usable and secure. It is the first version of Windows, perhaps ever, that I can recommend wholeheartedly, and without reservation, to virtually anyone. It is the first version of Windows since, well, NT, that I’m proud to use and point out to others, sure that there isn’t anything better out there, from Microsoft or elsewhere. This is quite a turnaround.
I’ve been reviewing Windows products for a decade now, and very rarely have I been able to wholeheartedly recommend any product. Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2), however, is such a product
It’s hard to understate the importance of this release….Windows XP speaks to a far larger group [than 2000]—consumers, home users, enthusiasts, and gamers—making the stakes higher, and the goals loftier. That Microsoft was able to hit it on the head so completely is somewhat stunning, especially when you consider that this release has really only been in development for less than two years.
I strongly recommend that all users of Windows evaluate this release and plan accordingly for the future. Come October, you’re going to want to upgrade or buy a new PC. Spend a little time with Windows XP RC1, and that will be obvious.
Windows 2000 Professional is, quite simply, the best desktop operating system that’s ever been created. It might not be for you, if you need to run games or multimedia hardware, but that situation will improve over time. If you can run Windows 2000, do so. It’s the best there is.
Put simply, Windows 98 is the ultimate version of Windows. If you can accept that Windows is the de-facto operating system, and therefore represents what a modern operating is, then Windows 98 is the greatest operating system ever created.…In some ways, it’s unfortunate that Windows 98 won’t come into this world with a bang as Windows 95 did, but then it’s a sign of the times that a much better operating system should be met with a relative yawn. Windows 98 is Windows as it should be…
”It’s easier to start wars than to end them. It’s easier to blame others than to look inward. It’s easier to see what is different about someone than to find the things we share. But we should choose the right path, not just the easy path. There’s one rule that lies at the heart of every religion — that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. This truth transcends nations and peoples — a belief that isn’t new; that isn’t black or white or brown; that isn’t Christian or Muslim or Jew. It’s a belief that pulsed in the cradle of civilization, and that still beats in the hearts of billions around the world.”
— President Barack Obama at Cairo University, June 4, 2009
So a friend of mine has never seen Star Trek. My immediate thought on this is that it’s a fixable problem :-)
The question is, where to begin? There’s a lot of Trek Universe out there, and as any fan knows, there are a fair number of stinkers (Angel One, anybody? Or Spock’s Brain? I might elect for removal of that episode from my brain).
Anyway, I pored through some episode lists and put some thought into it, and this is what I came up with for a Star Trek introductory program. I’m curious about the thoughts of any Trekkies in the crowd.
The top five: get hooked
TNG: Darmok
TNG: The Inner Light
VOY: Death Wish
TOS: City on the Edge of Forever
TNG: Tapestry
These are, in my opinion, the most succesfull examples of storytelling in Trek, and illustrate some of the ways that Trek uses clichéd situations: the two leaders trying to understand each other, restoring the “proper” timeline, Q. (I think everyone needs to see Tapestry, and understand that Q can be used well, before seeing Encounter at Farpoint, where Q is much more annoying.)
The next five: strongest character stories
VOY: The Year of Hell
VOY: Living Witness
TOS: Balance of Terror
TNG: Who Watches the Watchers?
VOY: The Haunting of Deck 12
These are, I think some of the best character studies in Trek, as well as showing off the diversity of storytelling that the episodic format offers.
The rest
If one is successfully hooked by those ten episodes, this is how I think I’d recommend watching the rest:
TNG (in airing order)
TOS (in airing order)
Movies 1-9 (The Motion Picture through Insurrection)
Voyager (in airing order)
Movie 10: Nemesis
Enterprise (in airing order)
Movie 11: Star Trek (2009)
DS9 (in airing order)
What do y’all think? DS9 isn’t intended to be marginalized by its placement at the end, it’s just the most serial and the most standalone of the series, in my opinion.
“You lot, you spend all your time thinking about dying. Like you’re gonna get killed by eggs, or beef, or global warming or asteroids. But you never take time to imagine the impossible — that maybe you survive.”
(The above quote is from Doctor Who, not from Star Trek, but it turns out that I needed to look to another series to sum up the Trek universe.)
I wasn’t around, but I’m told the original Star Trek had a special relationship to its time. The 60s drew battle lines that are still with us today: feminism, race, the reshaping of the family. JFK, RFK, and MLK were dead. The prospect of civilization-ending nuclear war was an everyday reality, or at least perceived to be so.
Star Trek wasn’t the only hopeful vision of the future, but it was uniquely casual about it. Uhura’s presence on the bridge wasn’t, in the context of the show, a big deal; not because she was black or because she was a woman. She was simply a competent professional and was treated as such. Spock got ribbed about his green blood and his pointy ears, but it was all friendly. Star Trek was a vision of the human race who had made it. We were past our social growing pains.
Okay, sure, the yeomans who brought the drinks onto the bridge were all women, and the women all had bare legs, and of course one could assume the Klingons were evil bastards. Kirk’s woman-on-every-planet approach wasn’t necessarily feminist-approved. But something made it work: by displacing conflicts to other worlds, Trek could comment quite directly on the issues of the day. At its best, Star Trek is a deeply political, progressive, idealistic show.
The Next Generation was even more explicit (some would say preachy). It mentions on several occasions that the Federation has no need of money, though it doesn’t exactly make it clear what has replaced it (since trade missions still go on, there’s got to be some sort of exchange at work). The Prime Directive — to support spacefaring civilizations without interfering with pre-spacefaring ones — is a celebration of cultural diversity. TNG’s Enterprise delivers medicine or other humanitarian aid on a regular basis. The Federation is an economic growth machine which hesitates to use its unmatched military force, much like the United States at our best. And of course, the Klingons are our allies now, itself a statement on the old show.
In Voyager, a crew initially on opposite sides of a conflict are stranded in a distant part of the galaxy, and are able to form a cohesive whole. Then they spent seven seasons representing the best of what humanity is, making a solid streak of friends on the path back toward home.
The last few years has seen some very good science fiction.
Battlestar Galactica is riveting and relevant, asking deep questions about tribalism, terrorism, and desperation. The interplay between military and political leaders and objectives, and the ever-ratcheting stakes and fear, were a pretty excellent vehicle for thought during the Bush Administration (not to mention a hell of a story). However, it’s far from an idealist vision: aside from the apocalyptic nature of the storyline, Galactica’s humanity is always in conflict, scheming and killing and wrestling for power. No-one makes it through the story untainted.
Doctor Who has come back with a vengeance, making the most of its odd little position (after all, this is essentially a kid’s show about death). The Doctor ran away as a frightened little boy, and 900 years later, he’s never stopped running. He is a harbinger of death, and has a unique relationship with it. Who hasn’t shied away from political commentary, but such commentary is not very deep and not very central to what is essentially a character-driven show.
Stargate is probably the closest approach to the tone of Trek, and it’s a good substitute. Like Trek, it’s quite episodic; you can usually watch one episode without being lost or ending on a cliffhanger. Like Trek, the crew as a whole are a unified force for good, making a good name for Earth through the galaxy; and like Trek, that leaves plenty of room for individual character flaws. Still: Stargate Command is a military-run organization, kept secret from the populace of Earth. Our highly trained team represents a certain kind of ideal, but it’s not the diverse and successful future that we’d hope for humankind.
I’ve missed Star Trek, despite the plethora of choices, and the politicism, even the preachiness, are a significant part of what I’ve missed.
Going into the new Star Trek movie, I felt there were two things to evaluate: is it a good movie, and is it Star Trek? Certainly there’s plenty of ground still to cover in the TOS or pre-TOS era; I have no problem accepting the premise of new actors playing younger versions of Kirk and his crew.
It turns out the answers are closely tied to each other. It’s an excellent movie. It’s compelling, and the actors are spot-on. It’s full of traditional Star Trek clichés (time travel, an event that threatens ‘the entire galaxy’) as well as some new ones (my god it’s full of lens flares, and Kirk hanging by his fingertips). It’s a delight to see these characters again.
It feels like a geniune part of the Trek Universe. The Vulcans are Vulcans, the Federation is recognizable. The Romulan villian is uninteresting and doesn’t ‘feel’ very Romulan, but he’s a lone actor, unconnected to the Empire, so I’m willing to let it slide.
But it’s a dark story, and the timeline it creates as this new story moves forward is going to be a dark one. There’s a planet to rebuild. Where’s the idealism? So I’m left with a conflicting opinion. It’s a great movie, and it deserves to wear the title of Star Trek proudly. But I still miss Star Trek.
I opened with a Doctor Who quote from the episode “The End of the World.” Taken out of context like I did, it sounds hopeful. But that episode is, indeed, about the end of the world (5 billion years hence). The Doctor also says: “You think it will last forever, people and cars and concrete. But it won’t. One day it’s all gone. Even the sky.”
Maybe this is just, to borrow a phrase, a sadder and wiser Trek. Maybe what I miss is being eight years old, watching Encounter at Farpoint, thinking about a glorious future. But here’s the thing: despite the last decade, despite religious fundamentalism and terrorists, despite Bush/Cheney’s torture program, despite it all, I still think we, the human race, are going to make it. I still think that women and men across the world — or more than one world — can treat each other with dignity and respect. I still think the day will come when we will have the resources to ensure no-one goes hungry or uneducated.
Aren’t there any sci-fi screenwriters out there who still agree?
We all gasped, “this can’t happen here” We’re all much too civilized Where can these monsters hide? But they are knocking on our front door They’re rocking in our cradles They’re preaching in our churches And eating at our tables
Melissa Etheridge, “Scarecrow”
They are also serving in our Congress.
The House of Representatives, as a whole, as an organization, did a good thing today — they passed the Matthew Shepard Act, aka the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2007. It’s an important act, expanding the 1969 hate crime legislation to cover gender, sexual orientation, and changes some of the funding and jurisdiction issues that have made it difficult to investigate and prosecute hate crimes.
The bill passed 249 to 175, which means that 175 representatives voted against it. Some of them may have valid reasons, I don’t know. However, Rep. Virginia Foxx of North Carolina took some time on the floor of the House to be mind-numbingly, stupidly, callous:
Yes, she just claimed that Matthew Shepard’s murder was not a hate crime. I know that nobody wants to think about this crime again, but it’s important: Matthew Shepard was targeted because he was gay. Two attackers approached him at a bar, claiming they were gay and befriending him, lured him into their vehicle and drove him to a remote area. They robbed him, beat him severely, smashing his skull, and tied him to a fence. Then they left him there to die. Eighteen hours later, he was discovered by someone else, who mistook him for a scarecrow at first. He was still alive when he was found, but was in a coma, and died soon thereafter. The severity of the beating was such that the only part of his face that was not covered in blood when he was found were the tracks of his tears, which had washed the blood away.
The notion that this was not a hate crime is ridiculous on its face. Even when the attackers claimed they only intended to rob him, they still admitted to premeditatively targeting a gay man. Once they robbed him, they did not kill him to cover their crime, or in a panic — they tortured him, beat him savagely, and left him, bleeding on a fencepost, to die.
It’s unfair to other Republicans to judge them by the words of Rep. Foxx. But I can’t help but see a parallel here: Rep. Foxx can look at the Matthew Shepard case without seeing a hate crime. One assumes she also toes the party line, and that she can look at 83 waterboardings of Abu Zubaydah, or wrapping towels around detainees’ necks and slamming them repeatedly against the walls of their cells, or confining them in small boxes with insects, without seeing torture.
This is a sick blindness. This is an inhuman blindness. Something is wrong with Rep. Foxx, and something is wrong with the Republican Party, and something is wrong with a culture that elects them, when they systematically look at the pain and suffering and death of people — whether they’re our citizens or suspected enemies of the state — and attempt to trivialize them; and refuse to label them as what they are.
Once in a while I hear or read something that strikes me as profound and important, but I don’t really have much immediate comment on it. This is one of those things.
Drought is normal in Australia. In the arid lands of Australia, “normal” ecosystems do not follow the annual seasons, as they do in other parts of the world, but rather boom (or “pulse”) after rare rain events. Flowers, seeds, seedlings, baby birds and other animals all follow at different times after the events, but the pulse produces activity, and then inactivity. During the long dry times between booms, the natural systems wait. The technical term is that they “reserve” their energy. They are waiting, not strictly “busted.”
…
Australian Aboriginal people have a different calendar… they watch the birds and flowers and understand the structure of each year on its merits.… The coming of rain, of fish, of edible seeds is each an important season, but it is not necessarily annual.… This is the story of a calendar that waits. And people who remember stories.
Dr. Libby Robin, National Museum of Australia “Ockham’s Razor,” ABC Radio National 26 April 2009
Patience, and planning, and the notion of appropriate times and places for action and inaction, is a topic dear to my heart. I like some of the vocabulary here, and I think it will change the way I think about these things. Pulse and reserve. Seasons not as cycles, but as a series of beginnings. Each year on its merits.
Here at the end of a very long series and a very long post, you don’t need me to again repeat all the reasons “Battlestar Galactica” was such a landmark television achievement. You don’t need me to tell you how it returned to the hallmarks of traditional science fiction by using the futuristic trappings to tell compelling stories about the way we live now. You don’t need me to tell you about this rich cast of characters, played by a cast of actors who will criminally never get their proper due from the rest of the showbiz community because their peers are too snobbish to realize that an Edward James Olmos or a Mary McDonnell or a Michael Hogan might be capable of giving devastating performances in the middle of a show with this title. You don’t need me to tell you about the epic action, the tear-jerking moments, the occasional snippets of comedy or all things that made this show so special. But I wanted to at least mention them before the end, before I cede the floor to you and ask…
So I walked up to the front door, with stuff in my hands, and reached in my pocket for the keys. Oops, not there. Transfer stuff to other hand, reach in that pocket for the keys. Eh? Not there either? Okay, transfer stuff back to other hand, check first pocket again.
Then I look down at the stuff I’ve been transferring from hand to hand and realize, it’s my keys.
