jliedl.ca

My chapter on “The Battle for History in Battlestar Galactica is now in print as the capstone piece in Space and Time: Essays on Visions of History in Science Fiction and Fantasy Television edited by David C. Wright and Allan W. Austin (Jefferson, NC: McFarland Press: 2010) (Amazon.com).

I wrote this in 2007 and it’s held up pretty well despite not having a chance to work in any of the major revelations from the last run of episodes (season 4.5). Here’s an excerpt from the opening:

The Cylons consider themselves the rightful heirs and interpreters of the Colonials’ prophetic texts that speak of cycles of destruction, rebirth, and renewal. “Humanitiy’s children are returning home today,” coldly noted the Cylon known as Number Six, while she approvingly witnessed the destruction of most of Colonial humanity. This statement establishes the tone for the new Battlestar Galactica as well as the series’ dynamic. The Cylon rebellion may have brought them liberty, but, as with many other colonized peoples, that freedom has brought them no peace with their past.

Not typing or writing much due to an ill-timed bout of enthusiastic dandelion weeding that left me with a badly blistered palm. On my writing hand, of course! Both typing and handwriting are awkward. Of course, this would be when I have a big batch of marks to enter and share around. Tomorrow I’m hoping for enough functionality to get those out (and that’d be everything except for the exams and final marks for the sophomore survey).

My students’ labour and my own, that is. Today I spent almost fourteen hours editing and entering data into a Google docs spreadsheet that auto-populates a timeline (via a cool gadget) with biographical and analytic entries about early medieval figures. It was a bit of a battle to both figure out the technology and the teaching techniques (next time I have students do a similar project, we’ll definitely spend more time on “how to write for a reference work”). I also marked each of these short assigments so I’m on the home stretch for the class although many other assignments still remain to be graded.

There were a few other bobbles along the way. The webpage is kludgy and since I couldn’t use all of the SIMILE gadgets directly, I don’t have quite the layout or interoperability I’d hoped for. I still have to take the last few remaining hard-copy entries and input those, myself. But for now? I’m pretty pleased at what we’ve got.

Please, take a look at what they’ve done: Early Medieval Biographical Timeline.

Now that the pop culture collection is out (go buy a copy, you know you want to read all about Twilight and History!), I’m sharing some notes that didn’t make it into the final version of the chapter on Carlisle, patriarch of the ethical Cullen vampire clan. Be warned: this gets very dirty, very quickly: sewer dirt, but only of the virtual variety! Read more »

1) We’re running low on whiskey. Somebody stock us up?

2) Why didn’t we get some cool t-shirts like these from ThinkGeek? Still waiting on the Wesley Crushers bowling shirts, though!

3) Who in their right mind thinks it is a good idea to use “u” instead of “you” in a formal academic composition?

Driving to my last stop after a long day of running errands, I was startled out of my normal driving mode (pay attention to the slowpoke beside me who might be drifting in my lane, watch to see if that minivan’s going to try to pull out into the road even though there’s not a lot of space in the traffic) by some crazy swerving up ahead.

From what I could see, a car passed a pickup with maybe not so much room to spare. The truck driver began to shout, swerved so hard his vehicle almost went over a scary decline and began to race alongside the car, braking randomly while the two drivers seemed to shout at each other.

All of this was conducted at about 20km/hr over the speed limit, although the random braking made speed hard to gauge. You can bet that I slowed way down so as to stay far away from any more of their stupidity. But, wait, it’s far from over!

As we came to the light, the utility truck first pulled up alongside the car and then, after more shouting, pulled across the car into the right-hand turn off. As I watched, aghast, the driver stormed out of his pickup and the car driver opened his door. The first man shoved the car door into the other and then a random flailing of fisticuffs ensued between two scruffy men who probably weren’t thirty years old, either of them. Textbook examples of testosterone poisoning? Maybe.

The light changed and I wasn’t about to block all the lanes of traffic trying to stop this so I drove on but with a few glances back in the rearview mirror confirming they were still engrossed in fighting it out with each other. I hope that the idiots sobered up enough to realize what a stupid thing they were doing and stopped it. Being almost cut-off on the road wasn’t worth nearly driving your vehicle over a cliff or picking a fight!

Whether it’s virtual dust from my research files or actual dust (mountains of it) from my bedroom, today’s been spent clearing things up for better working and living.

Even though I wrote three chapters over the past two terms (woot!), there’s still a lot of research that’s been mostly untouched since last summer. I’d love to get an article together this summer from one chunk of material, so I need to hit up the ILL requests and acquire a few more relevant primary sources to make it possible. And it doesn’t hurt to have evicted a couple of dust bunnies from a few rooms in the house!

Now if only tomorrow’s forecasted 5-10 cm of snow and ice pellets doesn’t hold true. *crosses fingers*

Seriously, this feels a bit strange but we’ve finished the twelve weeks of term in class. Exam period starts next week and I still have a mountain of marking but classes are over.

This term was a lot more manageable than last. Funny that — working with about 100 students is much easier than over 225, especially when there’s lots of writing to mark. Now, as they’ll be expecting some of that feedback, I’ll be spending the holiday weekend with my pen or my comment function keeping busy.