Thought That Came Unbidden

I have seen the pilot for the new Bionic Woman and it doesn’t completely suck.

Sure, the editing is a little first-year film school: bump cuts with virtually no narrative transition. Yep, they need to work on the tech; those heads-up displays need to be readable or they need to go.

Absolutely, the dialogue is a little flat, as is the lead actress (note to Michelle Ryan: develop more than one facial expression; the deer-in-headlights look is only going to carry it for about another episode, maybe an episode and a half).

And sure the inciting incident in the narrative (yes, I’m like that little kid in The Sixth Sense only with story structure instead of dead people) is a brutally realistic car accident that will have you flinching harder that those execrable VW commercials from last year.

But Will Yun Lee and Miguel Ferrer look like they’re ready dig in and create characters with believable conflicts and motivations, and damn Katee Sackhoff does evil so well; she makes me want to be bad.

It will be interesting to see what NBC does with the pilot given the protests from deaf advocacy groups over the fact that Corporate <gasp> didn’t have the foresight to cast an actually deaf/hearing impaired actress to play a deaf character. But given the way they’ve reframed the organization behind the bionics program, if they can get their act together once they’ve gotten by all the backstory the series looks like it will be chock full of chewy, conspiracy laden, good vs. evil vs. man’s inherently grayscale nature goodness.

Depending on where you did your survey, if you stopped 100 people on the street and asked them each to describe Hillary Rodham Clinton you’d probably get answers ranging from competent to hard nosed to cold to cast iron bitch (like I said, it depends on where you do your survey). That’s not the woman revealed in a series of letters, summarized in The New York Times today, though.

The college student revealed in letters to a high school friend is “…by turns angst-ridden and prosaic, glib and brooding, anguished and ebullient…” who suffers from all the awakenings, self doubt, and yearning those of us with even a smidgen of self-awareness are forced to cope with.

These letters make her human; they take away the illusion that if you woke her up at 3am on a random Wednesday and told her that polar bears had just become a nuclear power and were holding the state of Alaska hostage she’d be able to whip a 10 point recovery plan out of her bedside table without a blink. The New York Times, in my opinion, just made Hillary Clinton electable.

I was talking with one of my coworkers the other day about race relations and attitudes and expectations of society. Somehow, probably because she is black (her preferred term; we discussed it) and I am not, we got on to the issue of reparations for slavery.

If you’re not familiar with the concept it goes something like this: white Americans should pay black Americans money because all black people in this country are here because they had an ancestor who was a slave. Some enterprising law student even filed a suit in 2002 when she discovered a link between existing corporations and slavery.

Naturally, of course, I felt the need to ask why, exactly, when my family hadn’t owned slaves should I be expected to pay into such a plan. How do you know they didn’t, she replied?

Ah ha! I’m one of the lucky ones: I know where my people came from and when.  They came through Ellis Island on the big boat, two of them really, met up and married later (OK, so my father’s folks snuck in illegally from Canada (Irish need not apply after all)).   And the way my brain works somehow all of this conversation popped out today’s Thought.

The Statue of Liberty is covered in 31 tons of copper, the equivalent to the thickness of two American pennies. Copper gets that lovely green patina as it ages, the look of the statue we know so well, but it doesn’t start out that way.

So did she look like a shiny new penny when they first put her up in 1886?  And if she did, if that verdigris that we have now isn’t her original form, how cool must have that looked?

Victorian thinking largely regarded children as miniature adults with no special needs or requirements. Indeed, children died frequently and were seen as fungible in the Victorian era. This is part of the reason why the idea of putting a nine year-old to work in a factory didn’t seem outlandish to the robber barons of the late-1800s. It was this way until Jean Piaget began to systematically study children and, unfortunately, Piaget’s work has evolved into the current cult of the child that rules American society today.

Yet, has this view of children as possessions really changed? I don’t think so.

Look at the language surrounding children:

• Women are said to want babies (as in “I want to have another baby.”): Are we really to believe that being pregnant is so pleasurable that someone would choose the experience in and of itself with no regard to the end product of the experience? I don’t think so; it’s the baby, the outcome of being pregnant, that is the goal.
• People are said to “have” children: this could refer to either the actual birthing process or the possessing of children. I’m going with the latter: after all, people don’t birth their dogs and cats yet they “have” them.

And do we even have to go into the whole baby as accessory/foreign adoption fetish that seems to be running rampant through today’s celebrity A-list?

I’m ranting and quibbling, I know. I never promised the Thoughts would be profound. Or coherent. Or finished.

Ever have one of those days?

Ever have it start less than 15 minutes after you got out of bed?

It’s not an experience you want to try if you haven’t.

And for our added convenience:
For Washington, DC on 21 July 2007
Length Of Visible Light: 15h 31m
Length of Day: 14h 29m
Tomorrow will be 1m 33s shorter.

compared to

For Washington, DC on 21 June 2007
Length Of Visible Light: 15h 58m
Length of Day 14h 54m
Tomorrow will be 0m 1s shorter.

We’ve lost 27 minutes in a month. To think, I didn’t used to start noticing this until around the beginning of September.

And just because I’m cranky, here are a couple of other things I’ve been randomly wondering:

Don’cha think you’d notice
I just finished reading Fun Home by Alison Bechdel. I’m not usually a fan of the graphic novel – I prefer to make my own graphics in my head from the words thank you very much – but her drawings are packed with such detail, and it was a gift given in the most generous spirit so I took a stab. Fun Home is stark, sad, and sometimes a bit weird but I’m glad I read it. My only question: don’t you think you’d notice a woman had a glass eye before you had sex with her? I know they’re not as obvious as artificial limbs but still, if you can see Robert Goulet’s from the upper balcony at the National Theater, which I know for a fact you can, you’d think up close and personal one would be a little more obvious.

Qui bono?
So…Live Earth…seven venues in seven continents on the seventh day of the seventh month of the seventh year of the new century. And all to raise awareness about the fact that humanity’s shortsightedness has finally reached the point where we should put ourselves on the endangered species list.

What? Did I hear “it’s about saving the planet” ? Yeah, tell someone who believes that. The planet will probably live on long after we’re gone.

The reality is this: if we don’t change the way we consume and discard resources eventually we will have shit where we eat so much that this planet won’t be livable. Imagine Blade Runner only with no noodle shops, no hot redheaded androids in see-through overcoats, and more early death from lung cancer because you can actually see the particulate matter in the air.

So we have a global concert to raise awareness as if 07-07-07 were actually globally significant (uh, could someone tell Al Gore that on the Jewish calendar it’s 5767, the Islamic year is 1428 H, and the Buddhists call this 2550? Thanks.). Lots of hoopla, television and internet coverage out the proverbial – television and internet coverage which was then analyzed to death by both progressives and conservatives (see Slate for a good round-up of coverage including an hilarious minute-by-minute critique by conservative mag The National Review) – and yet, no one has managed to tell me the one thing I really want to know: Where’s the money going?

I wasn’t willing to consent to the full-frontal lobotomy that would have been the result of reading every single Live Earth article and press release – seriously, guys, press releases don’t have to be boring (is there anything less exciting than someone calling something “emphatic” ?) – but you’d think that in the gallons of ink, miles of newsprint (is that recycled paper?), and billions of pixels someone, somewhere would have been able to tell me where the $37.50 (USD) ticket price went, and where the money from all of those bottles of water – recycle here please – is going. I mean, when George Harrison put on The Concert for Bangladesh in 1971 UNICEF got the US$243,418.50 it raised. So, who benefits from Live Earth, exactly, besides Al Gore and MSNBC?

Lots of questions but not many answers.