I spent my study leave in my favourite place in south Saskatchewan - a little piece of paradise. It was great to be able to read and think and write without easy access to my email and with my cell phone turned off. The local Co-Op brings in cilantro now and there is a really nice coffee place that makes a good latte so it is no hardship to be there. I rent a cottage from a super guy and we had some great conversations over some delicious meals. I've met some really interesting people through him too and had a chance to see some this trip. A friend of mine drove out for a couple of days and that was really great and of course I checked in with friends a bit via email and the aforementioned cell phone. Mostly though I feel quite cut off there - tv is limited and I didn't see a newspaper for two weeks.
Now I'm back to the reality of my van being in the shop again and an incredibly messy house - reality is crushing in again!
One thing I was really happy about though was being able to go to the movie rental place to pick up some more episodes of Battlestar Galactica. I'm hooked. I watched it in the '70s when it was fun but cheesy. Now it is really very dark with lots of sex and violence. Little kids watched it when I was a kid. Now it is hot enough that it set off the cottage's dvd player's parental controls.
It started out as essentially cowboys and indians in space. The bad guys were the cylons, robots invented by humans to do their grunt work. The cylons eventually rebelled and became the classic 20th century enemy - the faceless, emotionless horde that threatened to take over because when you killed one another just stepped forward to take its place. Maybe it was a metaphor for a time of war with an enemy that never seemed to give up and never seemed to diminish. Or maybe it was a way of talking about the dangers of the emerging technology - a kind of more popular (and much more enjoyable) version of 2001 a space odyssey.
In the new version the cylons have developed the ability to adopt human form so the war now is with the enemy within. They still fight cylons in space but the real threat is the cylons living next to them. A show about war has become a show about terrorism. Certainly this reflects the age we now live in.
2 comments:
I'm with you on the "more enjoyable version of 2001." I know it's a classic, I know it's art, but dang that opening montage is boring! OK, OK, we get it, they have to sync up their rotation. Get ON with it!
As you can see, I have residual Space Odyssey anger. I still think I should have gotten my money back for that rental.
And getting four denominations to agree, let alone move, is a daunting prospect.
Believe or not my mother took my to see SO when I was pretty young. Bored me to tears. Don't know that she enjoyed it either. She took me to a lot of Shakespeare movies that I liked a lot better.
Don't you think you should get a refund when you rent a movie that sucks. I want mine back for The Good German. Man, that movie was bad. The script sucked and the acting was embarrassing.
Yes, agreement within one denomination is enough of a challenge. Pretty amazing that we have four working together isn't it - mostly smoothly. We do run into issues of very different cultures and polities.
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