By Your Command
I am so going SAST today, it isn’t even funny. There are a million different idealets running through my head but nothing solid and concrete to discuss so guess what? Prepare to be barraged by bits!
Ready? PULL!
Bit One: I have been meaning to talk about the LS floors for quite some time now. Stimulating, I know, but over the past two months they have been…I guess, redoing the flag stone hallway. The LS has three separate buildings that are all connected to each other in various places. It’s a common thing here at the U. One giant building that is a three or five or seven in one combo. In fact, now they connect the buildings so you can almost make a circuit of the diag without going outside. Don’t even get me started on the med campus, they have it worse.
So, the three main LS buildings are all connected on the first floor (for lack of a better term. In actuality none of the buildings are anywhere close to the same height so you can go from floor 7 to floor 3 by walking up a two foot incline. Thems some pretty weird floors) by a large flagstone hallway. It’s sort of the main thoroughfare. Sometime in November I noticed that they had shaved a 30 foot section of it and it caught my eye noticeably. I never realized that flagstone could get so dark and dirty until they began peeling back the top layers of yuck. They scraped all the polish and some of the stone right off and lo! If the stone wasn’t bright and cheery and pleasing to look at. Gradually the blight (or anti-blight, depending on your perspective) spread down the hallway, which amused me to no end. You never saw anyone doing this, it just happened occasionally that another 20 or 30 foot section would be brightly new sanded.
Then they started adding just a touch of gloss. It certainly wasn’t the sock sliding slick that the old stones had but it looked good. And, it was still in patches. Over Thanksgiving they sanded, striped, shined and sock glossed all but a small section near the snack shop and the flagstone is back to it’s somewhat darker complexion. I guess the sock glossing comes in two stages and the first stage is just some light almost shiny undercoating. So, the hallway still has the mange AND as an added bonus it reeks like polyurethane or whatever they use to seal it. Looks really nice though.
The next thing I noticed was the lighting they put in to the basement hallway. Oddly enough, this hallway is right off of the newly redone flagstone hallway and it has always been sort of grimly lit. Not any more. HOLY COW! I have no idea what the wattage of the new lamps are but damn if it isn’t twice as bright as daylight down there. I guess they sort of had to redo the stone if they were going to light it up like that. Oi. Where are the cockroaches going to live?
Bit Two: We watched the new SciFi Battlestar Galacta last night. I can’t decide if I like it or not but then again I was really young when the original came out and I thought it was all that back then. Odd how time and youth color your perspective. In actuality, the original series was probably cheesy as all get out but I thought it was the bomb from my first grader point of view. Plus, my dad and I used to watch the movies when they came on and we soaked up every minute of them like they were crack. Let me just state for the record that Cylons so kick Stormtroopers asses hands down. Take that Senior George. First, Cylons are shiny. Oh so shiny. SHINY SHINY! Second, they had that cool LED eyeball thing going. Second and a half was the accompanying sound. Whaow-whaow. Was that just not the coolest alien sound to date? Thirdly, their voices were all synthed out extra cool and “By your command”? I want me an army of toaster shiny red eye boppin tricked out voiced drones that say “by your command”. I’d have them do all sorts of stuff just to hear that.
[Editor’s note: Potential Spoilers here, you may want to move along to bit 3]
No “By your command”s last night but then again they did a little rewriting for the new show. Now, the Cylons are computer creations of man come back to claim their birthright. There is some weird funky time line warping going when you compare the first series with this new series but they both seem to be following the same basic outline. 12 colonies, Cylons attack with surprise, Galactica is the only remaining Battlestar, and there is a rag tag fleet of survivors. It’s a two part show so the battle ship hasn’t hooked up with the rag tag fleet yet but all signs point towards that eventual outcome. OH! There is even a Baltar character who is just about spot on with the old character, but not surrounded by toaster drones.
The differences seem to be that there were toaster Cylons; they were just the older model (there is an awesome pan by through the “museum of the Cylon wars” in which there is a toaster headed Cylon thing hanging out). In the establishing shots we are told that there was a raging Cylon war, the Cylons were banished, there is peace, no one has heard hide nor hair from the Cylons in 40 years. There also seem to still be 12 colonies hanging around, which in the old version were wiped out pretty early on in the Cylon wars. I believe that when the humans negotiated peace in the original the Cylons betrayed them and decimated everyone and then the war began in earnest.
We are also told that the Galactica is being decommissioned and seems to be some sort of floating museum. We weren’t sure whether the ship was being decommissioned from military duty into a floating museum or, since there were several tour groups and displays already set up, if the museum ship was being decommissioned from ship duty all together. One of my favorite exchanges in the new series (so far) talks about the museum nature of the Galactica.
STARBUCK: Why can’t we fly these vipers out of the starboard launching bay?
TECH CHIEF: It’s a gift shop now.
Wasn’t the starboard bay the one that always seemed to get torched in the old series?
OH! I almost forgot. Starbuck is a she. THAT’S new. The character is still the loud mouth, bragging, gambling, cigar smoking, hot headed Starbuck we all love except…he’s a she. Take a walk on the wild side! As far as we were able to figure out, there is some history between Starbuck and Apollo and we think it might be that Starbuck was married/fianced/involved with Apollo’s deceased brother. Err…before he became deceased. They didn’t alter the character THAT much. Ew. They had best keep things like that because if Starbuck and Apollo jump in the sack, my brain is going to just outright pop. That is so not right on too many levels to even begin to discuss. Just…No.
There was a whole lot of jumping in the sack too. Everyone’s getting some in the new version. WhoooYAW! Gotta love that cable ratings system babE! OK, everyone but Adama, Tigh and Starbuck…so far.
I’m not sure if the new series is any good because I carry a lot of fond memories from the old. I’m thinking that without knowing the first series this new series might not be so good. I found myself thinking “Hey, I wonder if we really care about this character? The OLD “X” was cool but…am I really so sad to see this new “X” in this tough spot?”. I can’t answer that question because the old “X” colors my perception of the new “X”. So that’s why I have to say that I’m not sure if this is a good show or not. I’m enjoying it so I think it’s grand. I guess that is good enough for me.
Bit Three: My poor husband (hee! HUSBAND!) is home sick today. Much loves and hugs for him. Tonight is our date night (although I really hate that term. An acquaintance of mine who went rabid used it quite frequently and whenever I say DATE NIGHT it makes me want to smack someone) and we had planned to do a gamer’s night in (mmm, geek night: networked computer games, pizza and pop) to test out some boss system upgrades to TheMan’s computer. If he isn’t feeling up to snuff, we may just postpone until later. Foo. That’s a shame because he should be able to play Diablo II (and NWN, but I am not so fond of that one) without the previous hitching and lag.
Bit Three: Not that I am counting this sort of thing, but it occurred to me that today is my husband’s and my first month-a-versary. I only stumbled upon this because my blog turns a year old on the 11th and this morning I was trying to figure out what day of the week that would be. It was a long and involved procedure because that meant I first had to figure out what day today was and then figure out when the 11th would be according to standard calendar practices. After 5 minutes of coming up with today being the 9th (and you really don’t want to know how I figured that out. Let’s just say I went from Sunday being Pearl Harbor day which I knew was the 7th and extrapolated. Mornings are not my best time for higher functioning thought) I thought: Oh, that makes the 11th two days from now (which I still hadn’t figured out what DAY of the week that would be. I decided that tomorrow it would be one day away and at that point in time I could more easily figure out which day of the week the blog-a-versary fell on). Then I stood there and said “Oh say, today is the 9th. We got married on the 9th. OH! It’s our one month-a-versary. Huh!” I don’t intend to do the A-versarys other than the one year thing but I found it sort of sad after we had been married a week because we weren’t ever going to have a “Our first Friday” or “Our first weekend” any more. Now, we are never going to have a “first month”. It’s all passé from here on out.
OK, not really but it gave me pause. I suppose it makes me want to step into “live for the moment” mode because once the moment is gone, you can never get it back. Then again, maybe you just go on creating new moments when the old ones are missed. I like the sound of that better. Creating new moments seems like something that you don’t have to work so hard or frantically at and it also seems like something you can do when you are good and ready to do. Sometimes, I just don’t have the energy to live that moment, I think I’ll just put mine on hold until I can enjoy it more fully.