Filmed in Rotterdam on their 2007 tour in support of the Snakes And Arrows album, here’s Far Cry from Rush.
Day: March 20, 2010
Speaker-less, Music-less Me
As regular readers of my blog and those who know me well will know, music is my passion. If I had to live without my music – that would be a fate worse than death. I need my music, almost about as much as I need oxygen, water, a roof over my head, food and coffee. You get the picture! I listen to my huge collection of mp3s on my pc and I have some of them also stored on 1 GB space on my iPod shuffle and my BlackBerry Curve 8320, so I can listen to them while on the move as well.
While listening to music through the earbuds on the Curve & the ipod is a necessity when you are out in public, I do not really like it. I like to be in an open room and let the music pour out through my computer speakers (at this very moment, it’s a classic: We Built This City On Rock n’Roll by Starship blaring on my system). 
So you can guess my despair when I came home on Wednesday night and switched on my computer, clicked on Winamp and tried to play a couple of Metallica songs and…..nothing! No sound. I checked and saw that the speakers were light up. A quick check told me that the adapter was plugged in right and everything seemed to be in order but still there was no green power light to indicate that the speakers were working (the speakers adapter is plugged in to another outlet). I rechecked and pulled the plus out and checked to see if the wire was loose. No it wasn’t. Bugger!
I haven’t realized how much I have come to depend on my routine – listening to music once I come back home till around 11 pm and then watching a movie or tv series episodes until I feel sleepy. Without sound these things are not possible. I’ve also been accustomed to having music playing while I read my favourite blogs or browse aimlessly through images & websites.
Wednesday night went by with me just reading for a while as I waited for sleep. Thursday evening, post work, I walked all the way from Shenoy’s Junction till Kacheripady looking for an electronics store from where I could buy a new adaptor that would suit my purpose. There were none. Dejected I drank a couple of stiff vodkas and came back home. I read and waited for sleep. Friday I went out around 12 pm to Palimukku and on Electronics Street, I found a shop that had the same brand & make of my now broken adaptor. Rs.180 exchanged hands and I was back home in 30 minutes and watching the pilot episode of Caprica.
Caprica : The Pilot
Caprica – although I’ve read about and heard about this prequel to Battlestar Galatica (Sci-fi has fallen to the prey of prequels big time) for a while, it was only two nights ago that I thought of getting a download of the pilot and watching it. I was/am a huge fan of the original series and although I get the new BSG, I’m not a fan of the very Earth like appearances that they have. Like cars, clothes (suits, hats & ties), houses, politics & religion. It’s all so Earth-like! I know a whole bunch of people like that element but this is a world that is supposed to be thousands of light years away from us and that existed eons ago. Why would they have the same things that we do, albeit a lot more advanced? That is just so that non-Scifi geeks (unlike geeks like me) can get it through their un-imaginative brains!
Lol, all jokes aside, I do like the new BSG and now Caprica too – well going by the pilot, it is a little dull in places but my interest is high. The pilot starts 58 years before the destruction of the 12 colonies and William Adama is but a young kid of 11. We see the two central families of the series – the Adamas & the Graystones – brought together in grief over the deaths of loved ones in a religious terrorist attack. Daniel Graystone (Eric Stotlz) is a wealthy scientist who creates the first Cylon, the mechanical race destined to destroy the Twelve Colonies. Joseph Adama (Esai Morales) is a boarder-line corrupt lawyer tied to the Tauron mob.
The terrorists believe in one god, while the rest believe in many gods. Graystone lost his daughter, Zoe (Alessandra Torresani), a 16 year old genius who created a virtual reality world. Her feelings, memories & emotions are stored in an avatar in this world. Adama lost his daughter & wife in the same terrorist attack – Ben Stark (Avan Jogia), who along with Zoe & Lacy are tied to the one god religious thinking, detonates a bomb in the train in which he, Zoe & Adama’s wife & daughter are travelling in.
When Daniel discovers this virtual world & Zoe’s avatar through her best friend Lacy, he has but one aim – to bring forth his daughter into a new artificial body. The first attempt is to download her avatar into his metallic cylon (so happy to see the original design here) but it looks like a failure. Adama is initially intrigued at seeing his daughter’s avatar in the virtual world but is soon disgusted with what Daniel wants to do. He does not think that the artificial bodies will substitute for their lost daughters and wants no part of it.
Towards the end of the pilot, Graystone gets the contract for a government project to build & distribute his cylons, after a convincing demonstration of it’s military aspects. And then the cylon with Zoe’s downloaded avatar reactivates itself and is horrified to see that she is in a robotic body and panics. She contacts Lacy for help.
Positives: – strong cast, character depth and a strong plot (even if I hate the religious overtones that post 9/11 has affected television) and good special effects. It will be interesting to see how the rest of the story unfolds.
Negatives:- what is more than a nod to Islam (Yousef Adama indeed), too much Earth like appearances, with an unimaginatively disguised tennis court & game, Earth clothes, shops, buildings & general outlook. Come’ on Ronald Moore!