Star Trek

I watched “The Trouble with Tribbles.” The episode starts out with Captain Kirk getting a distress call from another ship. Once there, the capp’n finds out that nobody was in trouble, but instead there was a large shipment of grain that needed to be guarded. Meanwhile, the Harold Hill of outer space (a man named Cyrano Jones) gives a tribble (a furry furby puffball) to Uhura (the only chick on board) and, at first, the animals are cute (even to Spock!), but later they start to reproduce in large numbers and before anybody knows it, the whole ship is infested with them. Eventually, the tribbles get into the wheat (that Kirk wasn’t guarding), which started to kill them off because the wheat was laced with poison. In the end, all of the tribbles were beamed over to the Klingon ship as payback for the trouble the Klingons have given to the people on the Enterpirse.

I think that the biggest difference between the sci-fi today and the sci-fi from the Star Trek days is the plot. Nowadays people wouldn’t find a bunch of furby-like creatures infesting a ship that entertaining, compared to the other shows out there now where there are life and death battles going on in every episode. I think that the sci-fi now is more relatable because the struggles of the main characters seem more human-like than they did back then. For instance, in Buffy, the slayer has to ward off all of the evil in the world while still going to high school, dealing with the pressures of being a teenager, and dealing with the stress of a family. In Start Trek, their biggest problem is trying to keep furry animals from destroying the ship. The sci-fi now is more realistic and believable, which really makes it more entertaining to watch and more easy to relate to.

Battlestar Galactica miniseries

In the opening sequence of Battlestar Galactica’s miniseries, we see the words “The Cylons were created by Man.

They were created to make life easier on the Twelve Colonies.

And then the day came when the Cylons decided to kill their masters.”

I can’t help but to be reminded of “I, Robot,” where the robots that were created to serve and to aid the human race ended up turning on everybody and trying to kill them. No matter what technology is created and how advanced it becomes, there will always be a glitch. Nothing is perfect, nothing ever will be, even if it looks like it is, it’s not.

Here, the Cylons turned on the very people that made them in order to gain power over the humans (for reasons which I still don’t really know). In order to do this so efficiently, they (specifically, Number Six) become more human like, living the way that humans do, doing the things that humans do. Once the humanistic robots gains the trust of the real humans, that’s when they strike. For example, when Number Six asked to see the woman’s baby, she carefully holds it and cradles it like any normal person would. Once the mother knows that the “woman” means no harm and can be trusted, she turns her head and talks to her husband. In that moment, the “woman” kills the baby and disappears without anybody noticing, leaving the mother to cry out in horror when she finds her baby dead in its stroller. This goes to show all of us that the things that we trust and depend on to do the things that we need the most can betray us. Who knows, maybe someday our iPods will take over the world (Scary Movie 4 anybody?)

Poem- "My Papa's Waltz"

"My Papa's Waltz" by Theodore Roethke


The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.

We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother's countenance
Could not unfrown itself.

The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my head
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.

There are two (at least) different connotations to this poem. One is that a father and son are dancing (horribly) around their kitchen, much to the mother's chagrin. The second is that the father is actually drunk and beating his son, again, much to the mother's chagrin.

When I first read this poem, I took the positive road and believed that the first scenario was true. The father, off from a hard day's work, had a little drink and decided to dance around the kitchen with his son, missing a few steps and stumbling all over the place. However, the second second scenario is, unfortunately, what I believe the poem is about now. The father is so drunk that a small boy (his son?) could get dizzy on the fumes of his breath. The mother was looking on, afraid to stop what the father was doing because there was always the chance that he would turn on her next. The father "beat time on [the son's] head, and then walked him off to bed, with the boy "still clinging to [his] shirt." Even though the boy may have just been beaten by his father, he still loves him and forgives him just as easily.

I really like this poem because it is really open to many different perceptions. It could be a pleasant family charade, or it could be some horrid event that scars the child for life, or it could mean something completely different. Not only are the perceptions different, they are polar opposite, which is something really difficult to do when writing a poem. Though I'd like to believe that the first scenario is what's happening, I can't hep but to be more convinced of the second. What do you think?

"Normal Again"

This episode of Buffy was pretty confusing, but I guess that’s how it was written to be. It’s definitely a thinker and something that we all could be experiencing without even realizing it. Could the slayer really just be a figment of Buffy’s imagination? How much of our lives is actually real and how much is what our minds perceive it to be? Did we even watch that episode, or do we just think that we did? This episode (that I'm pretty sure we watched) show us that the things that we create in our minds can sometimes get the best of us. Buffy tries to escape to a life where she isn't a slayer, or to where her life would be right now if she hadn't become the slayer, and she believes in this world so much that her mind convinces her that it's her real life. She used to have visions of past slayers and she chose to become one, so the alternate world in this episode essentially is her life as a normal human being, which--oddly enough--is actually worse without demons, vampires, and 3 nerdy boys toying with her mind.

My favorite movie!

So I’m going to let my dorky side come out here…and say that my all tine favorite movie is RENT! What’s not to like about it? For those who may not know, it’s a musical, but not one that’s all song and dance, it’s actually pretty depressing. But what I like the most about it that all of the characters, no matter how hard their lives get, are all happier than most of the people I know. Seriously, half the characters in this movie have HIV, but the constantly look on the bright side (“Times are shitty, but I’m pretty sure they can’t get worse”). The message of this movie can best be summed up by the reprise at the end of two of the main songs in the movie, “I’d die without you” and “no day but today.”

To summarize the movie (without giving too much away), almost everybody is dirt broke and has HIV. There are 3 couples: 1 lesbian, 1 man/transvestite (my personal favorite), and 1 man/woman, all of whom lean on each other for support and love (“without you the earth turns, the sun burns, but I die,” “life goes on, but I’m gone cause I’d die without you”). The lesbian couple isn’t really that exciting, the man/woman couple is amazing, and there are a lot of cool innuendos in different songs that talk about them and their past lives and whatnot, but the couple that I have to talk about is the man/transvestite couple.

They first meet when the man, Collins, gets beat up in an alley. Angel (the transvestite) says that he has to go to a life support meeting for people with AIDS, people like him, to which Collins replies “me too.” Thus their relationship begins… I could seriously drag on and on about these two, but to give you the gist of it all, they are in love. The only difference between these two characters and every other couple in every other movie that have ever been “in love” is that you actually BELIEVE that these two are in love. I don’t know how they do it. There is this one scene in particular, again not going to give it away (it’ll ruin the whole movie if I do!), that makes me ball every time I see it just because they are so convincing (sorry that sounded really vague…)

Long story short, it’s an awesome movie. The characters are so different than any other character in any other movie out there, not to mention the songs are pretty catchy. It’s one of the only movies that never fails to make me cry while watching it, and the motto to which I live my life by can be summed up perfectly by a lyric from “Finale B,”

“There’s only us, there’s only this. Forget regret, or life is yours to miss. No other road, no other way. No but today.”

Commonplace problem

My biggest problem right now is that I’m focusing too much on BtVS itself rather than how it relates to people who aren’t in the show. In other words, I’m having trouble making my paper relevant, and maybe even compelling to people who don’t like the show. In a nutshell, I have “making decisions can alter your life drastically” and then “here is how Buffy’s decisions have altered her life.” I feel like I’ve already said as much as I can without repeating myself and making my paper boring to read. I don't want to have to change topics because I think that this is a really good one. It seems I'm in quite a conundrum, does anybody have any suggestions?

my paragraph

Everyday in out lives we have to make difficult decisions. Pressing the snooze button in the morning can drastically alter how the rest of our day goes. Just like the decisions that Buffy in BtVS makes, what we choose to do may help us or they may harm us. Pressing the snooze may make us late for work. not pressing the snooze may make us employee of the year. In Buffy's case, if she kills the wrong person (i.e. Angel, a vampire that wants to do good for the world) then she could potentially be causing the deaths of many other humans in the future. But if she doesn't kill him, then they might be able to stop all of the evil in the world (a little farfetched, I know, but it still could happen). Though in a typical day, the decision to kill somebody does not typically come up in our lives (unless you're an assassin...), so some of our decisions may not necessarily weigh as much as Buffy's do, the point is still valid. Every little thing that we do can drastically alter the future, and it is up to us to determine whether those decisions alter the future for the better or for the worse.

another problem...kinda

So I'm sitting here writing my paper and I find that I can't word things without making everything sound difficult. Here's part of a paragraph that I'm talking about and it would be great if anyone reading can tell me if it's clear enough or not.

Even though she did not get the slayer’s blood, the fact that Buffy tried to kill Faith “violates the moral stricture against taking a human life” (Marinucci 65). The “moral stricture” is what Buffy typically lives by, the fact that it is morally wrong to kill a human because, most of the time, humans are the victims and not the one causing the trouble. However, “human beings [like Faith] who become willing agents of evil are far from ordinary” humans, but are in fact “the moral equivalent of ordinary vampires” (Marinucci 65). Faith allows herself to become evil, unlike vampires who become evil unwillingly, which is not typical of a human. Humans that choose to go to the dark side change suit to become more like vampires, killing humans just for the rush. Vampires who kill for pleasure is what Buffy considers wrong, therefore she doesn’t extend “moral consideration” to them. Like vampires (excluding Angel), Faith doesn’t receive the “moral consideration” from Buffy that is usually “reserved for human beings” (Marinucci 63) and is officially pegged by Buffy and the Scooby gang as “evil.” With This logic, it would be acceptable for Buffy to kill Faith and “be no less willing to kill a human, under the relevant circumstances, than to kill a vampire” (Marinucci 65). Buffy kills the evil in the world, whether they be human or not, but she only kills humans when it becomes absolutely necessary in order for the world to stay out of danger, like she would a vampire.

It's that bold part that's really giving me troubles, the rest is really just there for context. Any help would be greatly appreciated!