Nancy's Musings

A young man came into the library today seeking Robert Jordan's fourth Wheel of Time book, called "The Shadow Rising." I don't read the series but my dad and brothers seem to like it. I am reluctant to read it, especially when the author died in September of 2007 (according to Wikipedia) leaving the story as yet unfinished (to be completed by some BYU professor, yet. Go Utes!). Not the point. He was really cute. He had nice, evenly trimmed scruff and dark eyes that seemed conversant, if not genius. He was witty enough to make me laugh at least once, and he had the confidence to step around the desk to look at my computer screen. Or perhaps that was merely invasive curiosity. I'm okay with that. He didn't seem dangerous or pushy, just quick, and perhaps impatient. I didn't look to see if he was wearing a ring. It's not an instinct I ever developed. I don't think it matters, really, because the point is that I enjoyed the experience, not that I want ...

Softer Sci-fi fans, or closet fans, often find themselves attracted to shows about seeing the dead. There are three recent (within the last five years) shows on that vein, and one more that's partially related. Most recently, the show Medium (based on the "real life" psychic Allison Dubois) features a woman who converses regularly with the dead while she's awake, and has clairvoyant dreams while she sleeps. I picked up Ms. Dubois's book while shelf-reading at the library the other day, and I have to admit, I don't believe for two seconds that she can do what she says she can. I do believe that she might believe it, however. These abilities contradict all the laws of God and common sense, which is why this show is science fiction, and not, for instance, reality TV (which shows, incidentally, also go against all the laws of God and common sense). The draw of this show (besides the escapist fantasy elements) becomes really the relationship between this mother, h...

Okay, I finished the poem for the little ones, only it turns out to be more about  little ones than for  them - a little preposition trouble there. I blame my collegiate vocabulary. Now don't be criticizin' me for mah funny accent, but do feel free to give me some constructive criticism, as this IS a rough draft. A Little Light Reading   Sally shuffles toward the desk Her arms severely laden “Hey mom,” she shouts above the tomes, “I thought we’s goin’ wadin’!”   I swam through books , young Sally thought. No wading expedition Can prep a girl for college soon Or teachers’ inquisition.   Besides, she sighed , I like this pool . Outside is so darn roastin’. I’d rather lay inside all day Than hear my skin a-toastin’.   “You comin’ mom?” she calls again. Six Librarians all hush her. But mom has been a-swimmin’ too. No sense to go and rush her.   Sally tips her load of books Upon the desk above her “My momma’s got the lib’ry card,” s...

The Summer Reading Program at our library has gotten underway, and to start things off (and because I occasionally become terribly bored sitting in my Reference Desk tower in the late afternoons) I composed the following poem for the Young Adult librarian, Christa: Express Back (the theme is Express Yourself at the Library) (an odd theme, considering the decibel restrictions)   I, Standing atop the stairs, glance around A tidal wave of expression crouches Threateningly in alphabetical order.   Chapters, like muscles, tense Emotions whirl, fade, Recede too far for comfort.   Information preys upon the unwary, And the careless find themselves Swallowed whole by unintentional education.   I laugh. The library tiger, the tsunami Does not frighten me. I am the bookworm Who shall patiently digest its insides. Now isn't that sweet. I was going to write something for Grace, the childrens' librarian, but I was nervous that the image of flesh-eating maggot...

Lord of the Rings is not Science Fiction. It falls into a cousin category known familiarly as "Fantasy." For some fans, the distinction is bewilderingly impassable, while non-nerds consider the terms interchangeable . They're both right. Some writers have skillfully entwined the two genres, although most writers choose one or the other; an imagined past-like or a futuristic reality. It's more complicated than that, I think, but not a necessary discussion. Most Star Wars fans also like LotR, probably because SW has large elements of fantasy mixed in with the sci-fi. I am awed by Tolkien's epic, but mostly it makes me cry. My other blog will contain a more scholarly interpretation of his fantasy. Here I am simply going to list all the things that make me get all misty. The Elven singing. The ring-taint on Bilbo. Frodo's strength under a burden he did not earn. Isildur's weakness and the unearned self-reproach that it brought to Aragorn and his kin (it remin...

Our Home Teacher came by today. Wait, let me back up. Today our Stake President gave us some doctrinal insight into the scourge of Pornography about which the Prophet has warned us. We learned about the mind-taint which causes love to turn into apathy, and then slide further into hate. We learned about the poison that breaks marriages and prevents spirits from joining good families. I felt overwhelmingly that God would not leave us defenseless, and He has all the power to heal necessary. I'm not untroubled, but I am not anxious. Our Home Teacher gives great hugs, and has lovely false teeth. He sells furniture. His wife has some mobility issues. She's a larger woman (I've never met her, but this is how he tells it), and extremely self-conscious, but I listened today as he expressed his love for her. He dedicated more than half his life simply to be around her as often as he possibly could. He told us about treating your wife with kindness, and never speaking an unkind word a...

After Relief Society yesterday my mother was feeling very unsettled. I sat next to her and listened to the same lesson. I even contributed to the discussion (when finally called upon), but my mother (who is a gentle person and unused to, for instance, assertiveness) disagreed so violently with what the teacher was trying to say that she left the meeting buzzing with her own opinions (and the scripture references to back them up). I would describe the teacher as intelligent, educated, well put-together, and independent-spirited. She has either the self-control or the natural metabolism to stay quite thin, she maintains brilliant posture, and she clips her gray hair short. She wears well-cut and -woven clothes and speaks with perhaps two decades experience of teaching middle-school. I do admire her, as I would any successful woman. The teacher ended her comments with a catch-all cease fire, almost-but-not-quite apologizing for the feeling of disagreement her questions engendered. She kne...

I met the most amazing person today. My mother's visiting teacher invited me to sit in on their conversation, and she's bright. She's cheerful, pretty, intelligent, educated, socially inclined, active, and well-kept. She's single and thirty-six, and she says that her thirties are much better than her twenties were. The light around her was quite contagious. It was a blessing to hear about her perspective. She helped me see something: people who are single have a unique set of experiences. People who do not marry early have opportunities that others might not have. Each experience changes us, and gives us a pool of knowledge which benefits everyone, not only those who live it. To have a complete set of knowledge for society some of us must take the slower path. All of us must take different paths, and then the Lord can use what we know to benefit those around us. Being thirty-plus sounds like fun. It takes someone brilliant to show me that, and to be a kind of example th...

In the late seventies, explorations into the sub-, extra-, or super-natural were carried out by investigative journalists only, such as "Kolchak: Night Stalker" (a show of which I have seen every episode). Crime drama and Occult Investigations gave birth to a new set of shows involving the investigation of what are now called Fringe Sciences (probably coined by the firstborn of that union, The X-Files). "Kolchak: Night Stalker" ended when the writers ran out of monsters. When they had finished with vampires, werewolves, and South American human sacrifice, ghosts, zombies, and all the other conventional evils, the writers could not think of anything else for Kolchak to do. His investigations did not disturb any major political or occult figures (just his boss), and his determination to find and publish the truth did not meet with any significant resistance, and so foundered and sank. With a little scientific advancement, the wreckage could be raised again. "Chro...

I'm not sure how I feel about the possibility of creation ex nihilo , but I am convinced that miracles happen when God has something to work with, whether it's a broken heart, or a set of lost keys. The source of the manna and quail in the wilderness remains perhaps unspecified, but when the brother of Jared approached the Lord, he had stones he had taken from the mountain (still wondering what the verb "molten" means, although it's likely enough that it means the same thing as the adjective). Jesus turned water into wine, and multiplied the loaves and fishes, but someone had to donate the water and the original bread and fish. And the faith. When God wishes to send an angel, He draws from a pool of willing souls. I bring the question, then, when we need a miracle what do we bring? It's not a simple question. I suspect that the Lord (remembering the advice of 2 Samuel, that "Obedience is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams"), i...

Babylon 5 was a brilliant show that ran for five years. Unlike most shows (which may get prematurely cancelled), Babylon 5 completed a story arc so well-tied together that it must have been intended substantially from its conception. Although the show has been compared (less than favorably) with Star Trek , it never had the same "a monster a week" logic. It was deeply political, philosophical, romantic, and strategic. Some characters came and went, but all wove well into the larger tapestry. The name of the show is the name of a space station established by Earth to host other species. The captain and other officers of the crew are human, but they interact significantly with ambassadors from the Mimbari, Centauri, Narn, and Vorlon races, as well as many other less impactful groups. Soon a great enemy emerges - one of the old races called the "shadows" - and they have the creepiest looking ships I've ever seen in science fiction. The show would be very differen...

I've always been disparaging of a certain type of stagnant female. It seems to me that those women who remain single over the age of thirty-five or so lose something. They seem to me demanding, opinionated, nosy, pushy, and generally intolerable. They constantly battle bitterness for what must be imagined a general rejection from the human race (and men specifically) against the need for human contact. Their generosity and flexibility abandon them, leaving them in the clutches of an unpleasant realism. They will often become passive-agressive or openly vindictive, or they will settle into a mediocrity prescribed by their own wilting self-opinions. Perhaps they were already that way. Perhaps they travel widely, or educate themselves beyond their intelligence. They take to wearing colorful glasses with thick, plastic rims. This does not seem to be the cure. I'm halfway there. I'm not long for my twenties, and already I see things I wish were too stupid to notice. My glass is ...

Just in case you are wondering, my list of Science Fiction universes goes up to twenty-five items at least. Today's object is Farscape . The hero of the adventures is a young astronaut and physicist named John Crichton who accidentally launches himself into the other end of the universe where he meets aliens. The ruling body at that end of existence are called Peacekeepers, and they are actually quite tyranical and violent. They are also humanoid (well, from our perspective, naturally). He meets some interesting people and makes some interesting shipmates as he attempts to return home. They live as semi-symbiotic parasites on a space-going leviathan named Moya. Most characters have lovely Australian accents with a few exceptions. John speaks with an American accent, as does Dargo (an alien friend). Aeryn (the love interest) sounds British. Thus far, the accents have some historical relevance to their relative positions in the show. This dynamic only holds for shipmates; most peacek...

I have been experiencing an amazing amount of deja vu recently in one particular situation in my current (and rather over-simple) life. I have also been indulging in a reasonable amount of nostalgia, but I still do not know how or when I encountered this situation before. Sometimes deja vu is quite pleasant. It embues life with a sense of continuity, or destiny. If we think someting has happened before, we might also consider that we had forseen it in some forgotten dream. But the question that haunts me isn't about when and why and where, but what I do next. What did I do then, when I was looking at myself? How did I see myself acting? If I knew, and knew the outcome, then I am certain I could make a more informed decision. Am I the kind of person who would do it the same because I already knew how it would be? Or am I the kind of person who would try something different, risk a previous for a better result? I suppose it depends on the original result, and the original action (mor...

One of the most popular science fiction shows of the last twenty years is Stargate SG1 . It sprang as a spinnoff of the movie Stargate , but ended up with a fandom all its own and ran for ten strong seasons plus two movies. The first six seasons star Richard Dean Anderson (of MacGuyver fame) as the broody and violent Colonel Jack O'Neil. As the seasons progress, though, he loosens up and becomes one of the most endearing characters. Daniel Jackson backs off from his intense role as romantic lead, and becomes more of the moral compass/spiritual leader. Major Samantha Carter (Amanda Tapping) remains a fairly static personality, but as she was not a character included in the original movie, she did not have any previous actor portrayals to fight against. She gets bits and pieces of personal life throughout the seasons. Teal'C, a lovely character introduced in the first episodes of season 1, didn't impress me. The actor had little skill or diction, which I found frustrating. ...

I've been building up one doozy of a case of cabin fever for the last week and a half. I can't breathe. My little sister decided this was a great time to pick a fight. She insisted that she couldn't wait for me to watch the last hour of Daniel Deronda; she absolutely had to watch another episode of Eureka RIGHT THEN. Our house simply does not have the bandwidth to support two simultaneous streamings, so we tiffed - rather loudly. In honor of the frustration of trying to get a bipolar teen to be patient or empathetic, this blog is about Eureka. Eureka is set at the present time, and I believe somewhere in Northern California. The story is basically about a marginally street-smart U.S. Marshall who stumbles upon a secret little town populated by the leading technological geniuses. The town is funded by the Department of Defense, and the local company, Global Dynamics, has an entire top-secret section (Section 5) devoted to weapons and defense development. The humor of the sho...

Joss Whedon's Firefly is an interesting balance between Star Wars and Star Trek. Like Star Trek, it is set futuristically and is based entirely on science, but like the Millenium Falcon, Serenity is more like your uncle's chevy than a hospital in space. Only the Alliance (the "North") have crisp, white cruisers. Really, Firefly is a post-Civil War era Western set in space. The captain and central, charismatic figure was a leader for the hypothetical "South," but was betrayed by his own people at the battle of Serenity Valley, where he was forced to surrender. After the war, he and his second in command started smuggling, and taking on passengers to look more legitimate. Once a rebel. . . In Whedon's imagination, like Roddenberry's, humans have expanded to fill the galaxy, but unlike Roddenberry's United Federation of Planets, they have found they are alone. Humans terraformed worlds to the barest minimums and then dumped settlers on them. The c...

In my experience, conventional (less artsy) movies require either a kiss, or an explosion to be complete. For my approval, explosions need only be large, colorful, and contain interesting debris, or an amusing camera angle. If this is the case, I am very likely to be a wholehearted fan of the entire movie. My fanaticism for Independence Day and The Rundown are both based on the explosions they contain. I am also particularly fond of the explosions in Live Free or Die Hard . I like it more when the explosions are disproportionately large (which they almost always are). Kisses are less amusing, but still require much skill. Anyone who has been the reluctant audience for PDA will understand that not every kiss is worth watching. What makes a kiss unwelcome for the audience? I don't know. I'm just one person. I know that I am most irritated when a kiss is either too cold, or too passionate for the character or relationship (or situation) (I'm a big fan of the appropriate, and...

The obvious rival for Star Wars is Star Trek. Where Star Wars has elements of adventure, carelessness about technical details, and a basic good vs. evil premise, Star Trek often pulls from an opposite pole. Star Wars has a kind of retro, nostalgic feeling where Star Trek often makes one uncomfortable with its futurism. We can all imagine driving our uncle's 50s chevy in space, but who imagines the sleek and silent running of ships in Gene Roddenberry's world? My father says that he likes Star Trek specifically because it does take place in our own universe and reveals an optimism about the potential of the human race. Rather than evolving a set of charismatic characters and setting them inside a war, Gene Roddenberry instead imagined a situation of exploration. He saw the universe vast, and filled with unbounded curiosity and dedication to adaptation. With technology instead of magic, the crews of the galaxy class starships Enterprise, NCC1701 series, embark into parts unknown....

I am a long-time fan of all things science-fiction. When my students ask me if I've seen a movie, unless I have, my response is usually, "does it have magic or a space battle?" and then they struggle to find some way to catch my interest. Unless it really does have magic or a space battle, it rarely works. I can pretty well promise never to watch Forest Gump . As a brief sidenote, I have deep and varied interests outside of science fiction, but because they rarely intersect with anyone else's or my own, I don't mention them as often. Back to the point. Most people encounter science fiction through the cultural phenomenon of Star Wars. Many people stop there. I do not consider fans of Star Wars to be nearly as nerdy as they think they are, or as the rest of the world seems to think they are. Star Wars is much too popular generally to be strictly in the same culture. Science Fiction fans are accustomed to jokes about programming languages, comparing seven different ...