Mabfan's Musings

Another week, another bunch of posts to Facebook. (I wish LJ were as active as it once was.) So what was my week like?

On Sunday, I congratulated the winners of this year's Hugo Awards.

On Monday, I posted a picture of me with Harold Feld (also known as osewalrus.)

I also continued playing the game Nomi and I play of finding band names.

On Tuesday, I expressed my shock at the cost of the new Dungeons & Dragons Player's Handbook.

And I noted a conversation between me and Squeaker, which is either cute or morbid, depending on your mood.

On Thursday, I expressed my disappointment in the movie "The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug." And I also noted that my daughters are fans of both My Little Pony and Doctor Who.

And finally, I backed the Kickstarter for Chronosphere.

What did you do this week?

Today is the end of an era. Today, gnomi and I finally stopped using a CRT (cathode ray tube) television set.



You see that TV in the picture? Nomi and I have been using that TV set since 1996. It's a 17-inch Sony television set, and in 1996 it was state of the art. But yesterday, I put it out with the trash. I'll miss it in some ways, so I felt compelled to take the picture. It served us well over 18 years, but now it's time to move on.

Our first TV set was actually one I purchased as a freshman in college. A German graduate student in Chemistry was going back to Germany, and he had to get rid of his TV set. He sold it to me for a low price, and I kept it all through college and graduate school. I was the only one among my college friends who had a TV. I still remember friends gathering in our dorm room to watch The Simpsons when it was a new show, being shown on Thursday nights.

When I left the Boston area for two years, I left the TV in Nomi's custody to use and watch. When we got married in 1995, we kept using that same TV. Then, in 1996, we were watching a VHS videotape of "Batman: Mask of the Phantasm," and the picture on the set began to shrink at the top and the bottom. At first Nomi thought it might be odd letter boxing, but then we smelled burning plastic. We turned off the TV, unplugged it, and put it out in the trash with a sign on it saying it was broken. It was scavenged within the hour.

Our friend 530nm330hz drove us around to buy a new TV, and we ended up with the Sony 17-inch one pictured above. Over the years, as TV technology has progressed, I've wanted to purchase a larger, better TV set, but by the time we were ready we simply didn't have the money.

Then, last week, someone in Brookline who was moving emailed a mailing list we were on, saying he needed to sell a 42-inch LED TV that he had bought six months ago, and he was asking for less than half the original purchase price. (And it was a Sony!) I responded immediately, and so as of last Thursday we had a nice, new, larger TV set in our living room. The kids cried about still wanting the old TV at first, but they soon got used to the better TV we now have.

I offered our old CRT on the same mailing list, but no one wanted it. I put it out with the trash, and no one trash-picked it. It looks like the era of CRT television really has come to an end.

Goodbye, old TV. You did good.

So yesterday over on Facebook I asked everyone's opinion of what age would be good to read "The Wizard of Oz" to kids. (I mean the kids' age, not mine.) I had read the original 14 Oz books as a teenager when Ballantine Books brought out a new edition in the 1980s, and I loved them. Most recommendations for the Oz books place the age at a little older than my kids currently are, but I had the feeling that they might be receptive even this young.

Also, I had a rather odd incentive to get them started on these. Muffin discovered that the TV show The Fresh Beat Band apparently did a TV-movie where one of the characters goes to Oz, and she wants to see it. I did NOT want that to be my kids' introduction to the Oz books.

I also didn't want them to start with the movie. Frankly, the movie scared me when I was a kid, and as something of an Oz purist I don't like the fact that the silver shoes aren't in it (I know some of you may be asking, "What silver shoes?" thus making my point) nor the fact that the movie establishes Oz as a dream. The books make it clear that Baum does not intend for Oz to be a dream.

Enough of you who responded seemed to feel that the girls' current age would be appropriate, so I figured I'd give it a try. I asked Nomi to pick up a copy of "The Wizard of Oz" at the library, and by happenstance she picked up the one with the wonderful Michael Hague illustrations. (Denslow's are okay, but I thought the girls might respond better to the more colorful pictures.)

The upshot is that last night I started the book, and for the most part the girls were spellbound. They insisted I keep reading after chapter 1, so I got through chapter 3. Tonight, they made me read all the way through chapter 7 before they would go to bed. And the girls make me stop over and over so they can enjoy the illustrations.

I think we have a winner here.

(By the way, when we got to the part with the Kalidahs threatening Dorothy and company, I turned to Squeaker, who was a little nervous, and said to her, in essence, "She doesn't get eaten by the eels at this time.")

#SFWApro

Nomi spotted an obituary in today's paper this morning for Reinhold Weege, the television writer and producer who created the TV show Night Court. The New York Times obituary is here.

I had no personal connection to Mr. Weege, but I loved the show when I was growing up. I thought it was wacky and quirky and wonderful. For those of you unfamiliar with the show, it was set in a night court in New York City, set up to get through minor cases and clear the daily backlog of the court system. Harry Anderson played Harry T. Stone, the judge who ran the court. Given the show's locale, and the fact that my mom was a lawyer and later a judge, I found the premise particularly appealing. I was delighted when Nomi and I discovered it was among the many shows we both had enjoyed before we knew each other.

I also remember when I first noticed the name of the show's creator. One episode focused on (among other things) the real first name of character Dan Fielding (the annoying DA played to a hilt by John Larroquette, who won four well-deserved Emmys for his role). At the end of the episode, we discover that Dan has hidden his first name from everyone because it's Reinhold, and everyone agrees that it's a ridiculous first name. And then the first end credit flashed on the screen, and it was the name Reinhold Weege. I appreciated the inside joke, and the fact that presumably Mr. Weege was sharing with his audience a little bit of what he had dealt with all his life with his first name.

Sadly, Night Court isn't all that available to watch today. There was a DVD release of the first season a few years ago, but it didn't sell too well, and as far as I know they never released any of the other seasons. If you're looking for a show that will make you laugh, but with plots that will also make you think, I highly recommend tracking it down. (ETA: Apparently I was in error. Seasons of the show are indeed available on DVD! Thanks to Tom Galloway for pointing that out.)

I'll end with something I recall from the start of the show. In the first episode, everyone in the court is wondering why Harry Stone got appointed, as he is rather unqualified. Stone tells the story: they went down the list, calling candidates, and he was the first one to show up.

There's a life lesson in that.

Rest in peace, Mr. Weege. Thanks for the laughs.

Over on the Tor.com website, kradical has been blogging a re-watch of the entire Star Trek: The Next Generation series. Keith has just gotten to the episode "Yesterday's Enterprise", and it prompted me to reply about how important that episode was for me.

Here's what I said:

Keith, I'm delighted that you finally reached "Yesterday's Enterprise," which I consider probably the best episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation (although it sometimes gets edged out by "The Best of Both Worlds"). I've been waiting for this opportunity to tell you that "Yesterday's Enterprise" is the reason I started watching Star Trek again. I hope you will indulge me.

You might recall that I mentioned in one or two of my other responses to your re-watches that I missed much of the early Next Generation episodes and eventually had to catch up with them in reruns and the like. There's a reason for this. TNG premiered in syndication the same year I entered college, and given how busy I was, if I was going to make a point of watching any television show on schedule it had to captivate me. Not only would I have to give it my time because I was getting accustomed to a college workload (studying Physics, already a tough field that required a lot of study), but I would also have to find the show on a channel in an unfamiliar city.

The fact that there was a new Star Trek show on did interest me of course; how could it not? My memory tells me that I did manage to catch "Encounter at Farpoint," "The Naked Now," and one or two other episodes from season one when they were first broadcast, but I found them, well, lacking. In the end, I wrote off the new Star Trek series as not worthy of my time or attention. Ironically, channel 56 in the Boston area still showed the original series in syndication five nights a week, just before dinner time, and my roommates and I tended to watch it before traipsing off to the dining hall. The new show was there, but we were still much more interested in re-watching the original.

Flash forward to my junior year. I found myself at home in New York City during some break (perhaps it was spring break? I don't recall) and if I recall correctly, my brothers weren't at home, just my parents, so I had a lot of free time. Glancing through TV Guide, I noticed that Star Trek: The Next Generation was going to be on in the afternoon on channel 11, and since I did like science fiction and Star Trek and I had nothing better to do, I decided I might as well catch the episode. I went upstairs to my bedroom, where we had a small color television set, and I lay on my bed and watched the show.

The episode was "Yesterday's Enterprise."

The moment the teaser ended, my jaw hit the floor (metaphorically speaking). I said to myself, "Okay, this is interesting," and watched the entire episode, my eyes glued to the set (again, a metaphor). As the final credits rolled, I realized that the show had become good, possibly great, and I made a point of keeping up with it from then on.

I often think about the inflection points in life, the events that change our pathways and set us on certain courses. It's possible that had I missed that broadcast of the show, I might have come back to TNG anyway; but had channel 11 been showing an episode like the previous one, or a season one repeat, I might very well have simply given up on the show again. And while Trek is not necessarily the reason I became a science-fiction writer, as I did read and watch a lot of other SF, I can't deny that it has had a lot of influence on my path.

"Yesterday's Enterprise" was tailor-made to appeal to me. I love time-travel stories, and one in which an entire alternative timeline is posited and then erased, with no one the wiser, resonates with me more than almost any other type of science-fiction conceit. I'm still sometimes amazed that they managed to pull it off.

Believe it or not, the new season of Doctor Who and the death of Elisabeth Sladen got me thinking about something that became the topic of my latest The Brookline Parent column for Brookline Patch.

Read Tucson, Torchwood, and Twins to find out how it is that being parents has affected the way Nomi and I watch television. It's not necessarily what you think.

My latest Apex Blog post is up, on the concept of Genre-Adjacent. What does "genre-adjacent" mean? How does it fit in with my other posts on the concept of genre? Go take a look, and enjoy.

I subscribe to breaking news updates from a local television station on my iPhone, and on Tuesday afternoon I received two updates within the space of a few hours that made me wonder exactly what defines a breaking news item. Which of these is important enough to warrant sending a message out to subscribers?

The first breaking news update was that Conan O'Brien was refusing to do The Tonight Show at 12:05 following Jay Leno.

The second breaking news update was that a 7.3 magnitude earthquake had hit Haiti.

The second one kind of puts the first one in perspective, doesn't it?

To Conan's credit, even in his own public letter bemoaning the unfairness of his situation, he acknowledges how lucky he really is to be in his position. As many of my friends might say, Conan is dealing with a first-world problem, and nothing made that clearer than the sudden third-world problem the citizens of Haiti found themselves facing.

I help organize a weekly political discussion lunch at work on Wednesdays, and people who gathered were interested in discussion both Leno/Conan and Haiti. There was some feeling that the Leno/Conan story was much more trivial, and a few people seemed almost embarrassed that they wanted to discuss it.


And yet...

The world doesn't stop for disasters, either private ones or public ones. When my father died, I kept thinking that the world had stopped, and why didn't everyone else see that? When 9/11 happened, the world seemed to stop, but in truth, other aspects of life moved forward (such as the postal increase that was announced on that day). And sometimes the scope of a tragedy is so huge that we need the release of trivial matters to help us to cope.

Anyway, that's a thought for the day.