Thursday, February 10, 2005 |
Pickoff Moves
OT: The Return of Science Fiction To SciFi
One thing that really chafes whenever I see it on TV is the cliché requiring science fiction shows to have scantily-clad hotties. Probably the worst offender in this regard in recent memory was the wholly execrable Cleopatra 2525, but there have been others. My view is that if a show has an itch to add gratuitous (and more, uninspired and artificial) sex scenes or semi-naked women to the mix, the writers have discarded their credibility: here, audience, we ran out of clever plots and character-driven drama to present, but we bet you'll watch Jeri Ryan in Spandex! Hence, my immediate loathing of Star Trek: Voyager after the Seven of Nine character beamed aboard; it also chased me away fromSo with SciFi's revisited Battlestar Galactica. Not only did they have the gimmick of the Cylons' spines glowing (but only during sex!), but they were remaking a TV show that, even in its day, was the height of lame ripoffs. The thing stank like cheap cigarettes and stale armpits. Hence, staying far, far away from the TV set on nights this thing came on.
Except.
I actually watched an episode yesterday, and. It. Didn't. Actually. Suck. In fact, it was pretty good. In fact, it was one of the best-written science fiction shows I've seen on TV in the last five years; that includes the uneven-but-at-times-brilliant Farscape, and the wishes-it-would-click-like-Buffy Joss Whedon vehicle, Firefly. And now, SciFi has renewed them for another year. One good show -- however I happened upon it -- doesn't set the quality for a whole season, but given that Star Trek: Enterprise is about to hit the DVD shelves and leave the airwaves, it's fortuitous that somebody's airing quality sci-fi. It's worth a look, at least.
THT: The Best Trading Teams In History
Which teams have made the best trades in the post-expansion (1961 and beyond) era? Mike Carminati and Studes answer in Hardball Times. The Dodgers come out rather the worse for wear, as do the Angels (only not so much), but the Royals... well, what can one say, but who would have expected them to win so many trades? That the Chisox and Padres also top this list is quizzical. Would that they expand upon this tantalizing raw data, and explain just who -- and how -- these trades were won -- or lost.Update: I jumped the gun; here's Mike on the top ten worst trades of all time. The Angels' 1971 trade for Nolan Ryan ranks sixth; the Brooklyn Dodgers' 1918 trade of Casey Stengel for (mostly) Burleigh Grimes puts them in 20th.
OT: Ooh, Baby, Baby
I adore Internet toys, and this one's a particular charmer: it's a toy for discovering the relative popularity of baby names through the decades. My siblings and I all had relatively boring (read popular) names, but my wife and her sister both had rare names for their decades. A passel o' geekly fun that requires Java to make it go.
re: trades, the articles had me kind of wondering about the exact lopsidedness of the pedro/delino trade, but it's hard to find historical win shares without paying any money.
-vishal
: 2/10/2005 09:22:00 PMI knew I was gonna have to explain that one.
It's not the hotness per se that bothers me; it's the reflex that brings in the hot chick on a show that doesn't need saving, or worse, on one that does (i.e., Jeri Ryan on Voyager). It's the disconnect between the bulk of lesbians I know and the perfectly coiffed and made up cast of The L Word. (And how come they don't have any episodes at Home Depot, anyway?) It's the glow-in-the-sex spines, or the preternaturally humpy quartet of Sex And The City, whose characters are actually four gay men acted by women.
Look: sex is fun, sex is good, but it needs to be used sparingly on TV; ideally, within prime time, sex should be a spice, not a main course. And if it ever should become the main course, it needs handling with intelligence, wit, and grace. The real tragedy of pornography isn't in the nudie bits -- the kind of things that frighten the writers-to-the-FCC -- but in its apparent insensitivity to actual human couple-ing. We can't all be Anaïs Nin, of course, but the enormous gulf between her work and what passes for "erotic" these days shouldn't be unspannable. But whether the channel is Spice or SciFi, all I'm trying to find is good writing. In a city fairly crawling with talent, is that too much to ask?
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