You Can't Stop The Signal

...But the TV companies can still scramble it

One of my Christmas presents from Kate last year was the boxed set of the TV series Firefly. I'd been interested in seeing the show since we'd watched the spin-off movie Serenity - which hadn't made a hell of a lot of sense at the time, but I was intrigued and I wanted to understand more.

Before I allowed myself to watch it, I wanted to finish watching all the episodes of Babylon 5, which meant buying seasons 3, 4 and 5, and so I did – watching two or three episodes almost every day, and then also the TV movies (including the awful A Call To Arms – what the hell were they thinking?). There were a lot of episodes. It took weeks.

Finally I got to where I felt comfortable starting on Firefly.

What can I say? This show is bloody excellent. It's usually classed as 'Space Western' rather than hard SF, because it's set in a star system where many of the worlds are remote, so these places have a western pioneer trail-like feel; like all good SF it doesn't focus on the special effects, concentrating more on character and story.

Excellent show, as I said – and yet only eleven episodes were shown before it was cancelled (the DVD set includes three other episodes that had been filmed but weren't shown at the time). The fact that the show had a loyal following is illustrated by the fact that Universal made the feature-length Serenity a few years later. So, what went wrong?

The TV company that aired the show the first time round, that's what went wrong; specifically the program scheduler that decided to not show the pilot episode first (may his/her soul roast for eternity in hades). The pilot episode that sets up the entire series and shows how Simon and River Tam join the crew of the ship in the first place, and why they're there. The episode that hooks you in and leaves you gasping for the next episode, because you want some answers to the questions it asked. The TV company didn't show this one first (apparently they showed it at the end of the run) so I imagine viewers were pretty damn confused by the episodes they did see. A great series, brought low by one idiot.

Anyway, I watched all fourteen episodes then watched Serenity again (and this time it made much more sense), and then I put them to one side for a bit and I've now watched the first eleven episodes again with the last three coming soon.

If you haven't seen Firefly, watch the first episode. If you like it (that is, if you then can't live until you've seen the second episode, etc.) then go out and buy the set. And the movie. And write to Fox and tell them to bring Firefly back.

What I Did On My Holidays

Christmas 2007

Two years ago I wrote a post about what I got for Christmas. Last year I meant to, but I was too busy writing a series about home video editing. To get back to what seems to be a fine tradition, here is a summary of what I got for Christmas this year:

DVD - Babylon 5 - The Complete First Season and Babylon 5 - The Movie Collection

Babylon 5 is probably the best science fiction TV series ever made. While I'm also a great fan of Star Trek (especially Voyager), I can't help but feel that ST was overly optimistic about human society in the future - one 'nation', no money, no war. B5 is to me far more realistic in the sense that people are people and that human society will probably be much the same in 2258 as it is now - just as political, conflict-torn and self-destructive as it has ever been. Watching B5 it's easy to believe that we'll still be stuck with religion and all the problems it causes three hundred years from now. The only real differences are the technologies we happen to have at our disposal at each respective period; the only thing that shows any real advance is science.

B5 ran five seasons and also had five spin-off movies that closed out some plotlines from the series. So far we've watched something like twenty episodes and the first of the movies. I want to get the other four seasons to complete the collection.

DVD - The Pink Panther Film Collection

The best of the Peter Sellers Pink Panther films including the original The Pink Panther, A Shot In The Dark and others. There are five movies and a sixth "Bonus Disk" which is a complete mystery - there is nothing in the notes to even hint at what's on that disk. I may not post about it when I find out what's on it - it could be a tremendous spoiler. Do Not Watch This Space.

DVD - The Bourne Ultimatum

I loved the first Bourne movie, The Bourne Identity. The second, The Bourne Supremacy, was good but I do wish that modern film directors would learn that handheld, shaky camera shots don't work well when your audience is watching your work on a screen eighty feet wide and forty feet in front of them. Kate bought me the The Bourne Ultimatum and while I expect it to be as excellent as the first two I'm hoping it doesn't make me seasick like the second one almost did.

DVD - Live Free and Die Hard

The original Die Hard (1988) is a classic. The second one (1990) was stupid; the third (1995), better than the second but not, in my opinion, as good as the first. I've heard that the new one (almost twenty years after the original) is pretty good. Haven't watched it yet. We'll see.

DVD - The Kingdom

I haven't even seen a trailer for this and have no real idea what it's about, but Jamie Foxx is turning out to be a fine actor and his recent movies in particular have been damn good. I'm looking forward to seeing this one.

Rabbit Wine Preserver and Marquis Corkscrew

I do like a nice glass of wine. The wine preserver is basically a hand-operated vacuum pump that pulls the air out of an opened bottle to prevent the oxygen spoiling the wine. I've used it a couple of times already and it seems to work well. The corkscrew is a high-quality affair with a knife and bottle opener built in, very solidly made. Very nice.

Zune 30

I mentioned in an earlier posting that my iPod was having some problems, and that those problems ultimately spelled the end of the iPod because of Apple's crappy customer 'service'. Kate surprised me with a Zune for Christmas; I already like it immensely (although the Zune software that you install on your PC could do with some serious improvements).

I've even managed to transfer over all the music that I bought on iTunes. Unfortunately there's no way I've yet found to do the same thing with the audiobooks I paid for. (DRM stinks. Thank you, music pirates, for bringing us the DMCA and all the bullshit DRM garbage that it ushered in. Thanks to you I can't listen to audio that I've paid for and the only way I can get where I can use it would make me, technically speaking, a lawbreaker no better than you. You dumb bastards.)

Other Things

Also: a polished wood and glass case, kind of a men's jewelry box for keeping watches but handy for keeping all kinds of bits in one place; a really nice pair of slippers; and I'm fairly sure there's at least one other DVD I've forgotten to mention.

A Ripping Yarn

Shackleton

The other day we watched Shackleton, a dramatized version of Ernest Shackleton's expedition to cross the Antarctic. Although a dramatized version, the script was based on the diaries and first-person accounts of the explorers and so it's very close to what actually happened.

The story didn't need any dressing up to make it more exciting - it's incredible enough as it is. I knew something about the expedition - that the ship, the Endurance, became trapped in the ice for several months before finally being crushed - but that was about all. I didn't really appreciate the true story of what happened.

The Endurance was stuck for nine months before being destroyed. Shackleton and his men, twenty-eight in all, pulled three large boats for weeks across very rough ice. The ice was drifting north and when it finally broke up around them they took to the boats, spending a week in freezing conditions before landing at Elephant Island.

Shackleton knew that the chances of rescue from Elephant Island were very slim, so he and five other men took one of the boats, improved it by raising the sides and putting a deck across it, and sailed it over 800 miles to South Georgia - a two-week journey and an incredible feat of navigation given that the seas they crossed are known to be among the worst in the world and that Frank Worsley, the navigator, was only able to get four navigation readings.

If that wasn't bad enough, the six men survived a storm at sea that sank a 500-ton steamer then landed on the "wrong" side of South Georgia - so Shackleton and two others had to climb over an uncharted mountain range to reach a Whaling station on the other side of the island.

It took Shackleton four attempts and four more months to return to Elephant Island to rescue the rest of his men, and at the end of that not one of the original twenty-eight had died.

Real boys-own-paper stuff.

See Saw

We bought Saw on DVD a few days ago and at the time knew nothing about it. The cover said it had Cary Elwes and Danny Glover in it, which Kate and I took to mean it couldn't be bad.

We watched it Saturday and were both impressed with how damn good it is. This movie rocks. If you like Se7en and movies of that nature then you'll love Saw. I'm saying no more about it because there's an incredibly good plot twist that I just didn't see coming and I don't want to give anything away.

My big question is... why was it not nominated for a bunch of Oscars? The screenplay alone is so original it should have at least got a nod. Just more proof of what a charade the O$cars have become.

Back in Black and White

I haven't written so much as a line on this blog for a few weeks, partially because little has come up that I wanted to write about and partially because when I did think of something I was too busy or too tired. Today I'm pushing myself to get restarted and post more often. And so, without further ado...

The Oscars

I can't really comment on any of the winners because we haven't seen the movies yet. All the same I'm really glad that Morgan Freeman got one for best supporting actor - he's an exceptionally good actor and does a great job in everything he's in. I'm not especially interested in seeing Million Dollar Baby because I'm not a fan of boxing. Actually I think boxing is a dumb "sport" - I have no interest in seeing a couple of grown men (or grown women, I suppose, since that's what MDB is about) give each other brain damage, even if it is just a movie.

I do want to see The Aviator, though. I guess it's because I'm into the history of science and technology, and that kind of thing, and in any case Howard Hughes was an intriguing character.

I was a bit surprised about some "missing" nominations, though. How come Hellboy didn't get put up for a make-up award? Why was The Chronicles of Riddick skipped on the special effects and costume design nominations?

CSS and RSS

We finally got around to picking up a book about CSS the other day, so now both Kate and I can learn up a bit and do some stuff to make these blog pages a bit more unique. Maybe I can also fix a couple of annoying problems - the way the top of the header graphic is getting overlaid by the "Blogger" bar, for instance, and also the way the original graphic comes up and then my new one loads and overwrites it.

Also I've been learning a bit about how RSS works, which is pretty cool. RSS is an idea whose time has come. Specifically, its time came last Friday when I couldn't get to work because a tanker-trailer fell over on LBJ and closed the road for most of the day. Now I have an RSS reader installed at work and I've set it up to check for traffic reports every five minutes. Now, if anything happens that's going to cause me a problem getting home I have a chance of finding out about it before I hit the road. Doesn't help on the way out, of course, but it's still an improvement.

Now all I need to know is whether BlogSpot has a way of creating an RSS feed from my posts. That way all of my readers (Kate) will be able to see that I've put up a new post within minutes of it going live. All she'll need to do is have an RSS reader up and running 24/7 to make sure she doesn't miss out... :)

[Update... setting up the feed is actually already done - all you need is the link, which I've added to the About box, top right. Cool!]