From my favourite radio show, CBC Radio One’s Go: If Teenage Jesus had a Vlog.

Also check out episodes two and three. “Is that Jesus? He’s off the hook!”

Mythbusters is an awesome show, as we’re already well aware. The problem though, is that it airs later than I should be staying up to watch it but it still manages to suck me in every time.

Of course I want to know if cockroaches will really survive a nuclear holocaust. Of course I need to stay up an extra hour to see two fully loaded transport trucks collide head-on. I really do need to know if vodka makes a decent mouthwash.

The problem is made that much worse by the fact that the show is very repetitive. After every commercial break we’re told what the myth is, how they’re going to bust it, what they’ve done so far, and what they’re going to do next. On top of that, they tell us again before every break. That’s great if I’m just flipping through channels and I’ve missed the first forty minutes, but when I’m there from the start and all I want to see is the answer, it gets kind of annoying.

They could probably do the show quite well in half an hour, without cutting out anything but the redundant narrations and the “coming up next” bits. Sure, I know these myths might be expensive and time consuming, but I need to work in the morning. I think lots of scientists are familiar with that mild disappointment when months of work are distilled into a single number or sentence in the conclusion of a short paper, with all those dead ends and hours of refining technique swept under the rug. You’ll get used to it.

I still love the Discovery Channel, though. Boom de ah da, boom de yada.

I’ve been watching TLC’s Miami Ink a fair bit recently. It’s a good show, but there’s a serious problem with it: It really makes you want to get a tattoo, but also shows you that your reason for getting one isn’t good enough.

The first time I saw it was probably about two years ago, when there was a marathon playing. Though I knew the show existed, it had never occurred to me to watch it because, seriously, who wants to watch a show about a tattoo parlor? But my sister claimed it was good, at the same time warning me about what she had noticed, which is the first part of the problem I already mentioned. It kind of makes you want to get a tattoo. All these other people are getting tattoos. The tattoo artists talk about how great tattoos are. And they often just look cool.

The other part of the problem comes from the narratives that the customers tell about why they’re getting the tattoos. A large proportion of them are getting memorial tattoos, commemorating a lost family member or best friend. Some of them are recovering from drug addiction and want to mark a new phase of their life. Parents get tattoos of their kids’ names. Stuff like that.

And here I am thinking I want to get a tattoo just because I saw it on TV. Why do you have to torment me like that, Miami Ink? I suppose it is just as well, though, since if I were to get a tattoo I’d want my reason to be at least because I actually want one rather than TV told me to. Considering I start to crave a Big Mac every time a MacDonald’s commercial comes on the air, I think I need to stay far away from television before making a decision about anything more permanent than lunch.

How many rowers are in this boat?

The answer is below the fold.

When I’m not listening to CBC during the drive to and from work, it’s a mix CD my mom made. It is her car after all. There are a handful of songs I like, but most I just skip over.

There was one that I was sure was a Madonna song, which I wouldn’t have expected from my mom but she does have varied tastes. For weeks I just skipped it after the first three seconds or so, but then one day I was distracted by something (possibly keeping my eye on the road) and let the song play. After about 10 or 20 seconds, what I was sure was a Madonna song turned into what I know is an ABBA song. I don’t know which ABBA song, but I recognized part of the music from an ABBA mashup techno megamix thing I had once. A melody of glissandos. I’d sing it for you but you can’t type that.

So then I stopped skipping the song. I didn’t want to have anything to do with Madonna, but an ABBA song is fine by me. If it came out today, I thought, it would probably do well. It could easily fit in with the pop charts of the day, as far as I knew. I got into the habit of listening to it on my way to the gym, as it was a good kind of song to get a person pumped up and bouncy.

I figured I should get a copy for myself and maybe add it to my erg playlist—something which requires lots of pumping up. The only problem was that at the very beginning the vocals say, with the beat, “Time goes by… so slowly… time goes by…. so slowly” which is the last thing someone wants to hear at any point during, say, a ninety minute steady state.

Nonetheless I figured I could edit that part out and the rest would be good, so I asked my mom what the name of that ABBA song on her CD was.

“ABBA song? What ABBA song?”

“You know, the one that goes like (me singing melodic glissandos)”

“Oh, that’s by Madonna.”

Damn.

Damn you Battlestar Galactica and your mid-season finale!

Here I was, sure that since it was only ten episodes into the final season, BSG would last me through the summer, building up to its grand series finale. Then, they had to go start airing a promo on Space saying “THE LAST EPISODE UNTIL 2009!”

Spoilers below!
(more…)

The most intelligent “reality show” is back on the air.

I love ABC’s The Mole because the premise creates a mystery for the audience as well as the players to solve—Who is the mole? It’s not quite as good without Anderson Cooper as host, but I’m hoping it will live up to previous seasons.

I suspect if we were aware of who the mole was right from the start, the show would lose a lot of its charm. One of the best parts of watching this show is arguing for who you think the mole is, based on people’s behaviour and things that might be clues. Previous clues have included messages in code (e.g., a telephone number from which the mole supposedly sent a message to the other players could be translated into a sentence using a phone’s keypad as a guide) that the players themselves were privy to, but also clues directed solely to the television audience.

Monday night, in the season premiere, for example, when the introductory voice over posed the question “Who is the mole?” for the first time, what had been a sequence of shots of all the players stopped on a closeup of one player for the briefest of moments at the word “mole”. That’s probably a bit too obvious, though.

I noticed at the very end of the episode, during a sequence of seemingly innocent shots to set the atmosphere, they focused a lot on images of the Virgin Mary. Does this mean the mole is a virgin? Does it mean the mole is a woman? Maybe a Virgo? Clues have shown up in these types of shots before.

For the record, my first suspect, based on very little thinking, is Paul. But I already don’t believe that. If I knew if any players were a Virgo, I’d have a much better answer already. I’m looking forward to the rest of the season.

There are so far exactly two songs from the Battlestar Galactica soundtrack that have grabbed my attention. They are The Shape of Things to Come by Bear McCreary and Metamorphosis One by Philip Glass. I want the piano sheet music to both of these!

The latter came up early in the second season, credited to Kara Thrace’s father, but was originally from Glass’s 1989 album “Solo Piano”. That means the sheet music is at my grasp, all I have to do is pay for it.

The former is decidedly more difficult. Even if a piano arrangement of the first season of Battlestar Galactica was published, I could buy it just for this one song. The composer maintains a blog about the BSG soundtrack but I can’t very well write a comment saying “I really like this one song. You should put out a piano arrangement of it, but not any of the other songs because they all kinda suck.” Maybe I can convince a music student to transcribe it for me. Music students are good for that sort of thing.

Now, onto the second topic of the day, the BSG timeline. One outstanding question remains is the time that the series takes place. In the BSG universe the Earth is a colony of another planet, Kobol, where humans originated, but when that colonization happened, in either the BSG world or ours, is open to debate.

The timeline at the BSG wiki puts the colonization of Earth as far back as 4000 before the series takes place. Human civilization on Earth can be dated back as far as 10 000 years ago, but it didn’t really start to take off until about 8000 to 4000 years ago.

Here are some options:

• The dawn of human civilization on Earth and the arrival of settlers from Kobol is the same thing, and so must have happened much earlier than 2000 BC. This means, assuming the Galactica finds Earth at the end of this season as we all expect it will, in our timeline it has already arrived.
• The writers have taken more liberty with the Earth’s timeline than our history professors would like, so that humans arrived on Earth 4000 years ago and the fleet from the other Twelve Colonies will arrive in the present day.
• Kobol settlers arrived on Earth and mingled with the native human population. Depending on when they arrived, the series could be happening at almost any time.

There are other clues to work with.

• The Colonials worship, and have since their Kobol days, the good old fashioned Greek Gods. At first glance this could have just been a convenient way to give them a different religion—they may not actually be the same Greek gods, but they’re translated that way so that we can understand what they’re talking about in the same way that aliens in sci-fi shows always speak English, even when they explicitly don’t speak English. However, there’s more and more evidence these are the same gods. It has already turned out that our twelve signs of the zodiac are named after the Twelve Colonies and not the other way around. It might be that the Kobol settlers brought their religion with them and taught it to the Greeks. I don’t know when these Greek gods came up, but I could guess several thousand years ago. That could put the series in the present day.
• Technology is a problem. The Kobols arrived in spaceships 4000 years before the series and still had spaceships a thousand years later to go back to Kobol. One can imagine they lost their technology after arriving, but it’s slightly harder to believe that they hung onto it in good working order for a thousand years and then lost it. Why didn’t anybody, in those thousand years, make note of that spaceship parked in the back yard?
• The final four Cylons heard Bob Dylan music in their heads. Sure, Kara Thrace played a Philip Glass song, but in the BSG universe her father wrote it so it doesn’t give us a timeline. The Dylan song, though, wasn’t explained at all. We know now that the final five Cylons have been to Earth. They also said that hearing the song was like remembering something out of childhood, and hearing it made them realise that they were Cylons. It could be a very deliberate choice, then, to use a real song instead of just composing some crazy Cylon music, and this could be a firm clue as to when the series takes place (i.e., present day).
• Davis Quinton, on Corner Gas, thinks that we could all be descendants of the last surviving Battlestar. But presumably, this is based on the original series and not the new one. Too bad though, it would be a cool theory.

I’m currently torn between two theories. I think it would be cool to have it end up that BSG is taking place in the present day and that we are all descendants of the thirteenth tribe of Kobol. It’s probably the story that fits best with the timeline so far. On the other hand, I’m still betting that the Final Five Cylons are not Cylons at all but something similar that has not just visited Earth but actually originated here. That would mean the series takes place in the future, which might strain the timeline of the settlement of Earth in the first place. But maybe not—a couple hundred years in either direction never hurt anybody. (I’m also really hoping that contact between the Final Five and the Cylons we’re familiar with somehow precipitated the war. Maybe the Final Five were sent to re-establish contact with the Twelve Colonies and the Cylons didn’t take kindly to the idea.) But as far as the topic of this post, I just want to know how the timeline will resolve itself, whether the choice of using the Bob Dylan song means anything, and how to play The Shape of Things to Come on the piano.

—

Addendum: Bear McCreary talks about the use of the Bob Dylan / Jimi Hendrix song here. Apparently the idea is that the song comes from a Colonial composer, and just happens to be the same as a song on Earth. I still think it’s a suspicious, though. But maybe, if both colonies can write the same song, both can invent the same Cylons, and therefore my theory is right. Woo me! (Just wait until the series finale when I’m proved utterly wrong…)

So, as promised: How music can be like reading a book.

The fact that Dvorak’s New World Symphony is my favourite symphony can probably be traced back to my following along with the score while listening to it. We had a copy that was printed like a little novel, or a play with each instrument as a character. Following along while the instruments played made even the boring slow movements entertaining. It was quite like having someone read aloud to me.

Recently, from the Music Animation Machine, I came across this visualisation of Clair de Lune (which is, by the way, one of the best pieces of classical music ever). It, too, lets the eye follow along with the music and experience it in a new way. It also makes me want to have a piano again.

Occasionally I’m too lazy to go to bed. Really. I’ll be sitting at my computer or on my couch or something and know that it’s bedtime, but just can’t bring myself to go get into bed. I can be really tired and not even have anything interesting to keep me occupied on the internet, but I’ll still find something.

What I tend to do when this kind of mood hits me—since I know I can’t stay up forever—is get my pillow and blanket, curl up on the couch, and fall asleep there while watching a movie. My couch is actually just as comfortable as my bed, if a little more asymmetric, so it’s actually quite nice. I’m often asleep within 5 minutes.

This works better with some movies than others. It doesn’t have to be a particularly quiet movie, but it does help if it’s one where I can tell what’s happening from the audio alone. Otherwise I’m tempted to keep my eyes open and watch what’s going on. Typically this means mellow dramas with lots of dialogue more than, say, action films with big fight scenes.

I was going about this same routine a few weeks ago and ended up watching Garden State, which I had never seen. It’s usually risky to watch a movie for the first time while doing this—often I’ll either be too bored with it to be soothed to sleep, or too engrossed in it to remember to sleep. This one turned out pretty well though, for one reason in particular: Descriptive Video.

I’ve never seen a movie with descriptive video before. It was a lot like listening to an audio book. The movie is exactly the same as without, but in between lines of dialogue, a narrator will chime in with helpful descriptions of what’s going on:

“Andrew touches a wooden rail on a spiral staircase to his left,”

“Next morning, shafts of sunlight pierce rips in curtains above a couch where Andrew has been sleeping under a blanket. He sits up urgently. He’s got ‘balls’ written across his forehead.”

“Tim glowers through his pretty, almond-shaped eyes.”

Who writes these things I wonder? Are we really supposed to note the pretty almond-shaped eyes? Maybe not, but that kind of marration really does bring out features of the visuals I wouldn’t notice otherwise. It makes it great to listen to while falling asleep, but it also really enhances the film when watching it normally.

I really want to watch more movies with descriptive video now. It would probably be a bit disconcerting for movies I already know and love but it might also be kind of cool.

Next time: How music can be like reading a book.