Monday's Child R.I.P.

Should have posted this a while ago, in remembrance.

Monday's child is Farrah Fawcett,
Tuesday's child is Fuller Brush Man,
Wednesday's child is Martin Balsam,
Thursday's child is Tommy Newsome,
Friday's child is Euell Gibbons,
Saturday's child is Richard Simmons,
But the child that's born on the sabbath day
Is John and Paul and George and Jay.

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Act Well Your Part Now Available for Kindle

Don's first novel, Act Well Your Part, is now available in Amazon Kindle format for $3.50.

Act Well Your Part is the story of Keith Graff, who dislikes his new school, Oak Grove High. He misses his old friends, and despairs of ever fitting in. Then he joins the school's drama club, where he meets the boyishly cute Bran Davenport. From there on it's a rollicking good boy-meets-boy story.

Since its original publication in 1986, Act Well Your Part has become a classic, an unabashed love story set not in the world that was, but in the world as, perhaps, it should be. It is a world in which sexual orientation matters about as much as eye color of left-handedness.

Amazon Kindle format is an electronic text format that can be viewed on Amazon's Kindle device and Apple's iPhone.

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Help Spread the Word

Folks, please help me spread the word that a thinly-disguised Michael Jackson was a character in Dance for the Ivory Madonna. I think lots of people would be interested to see Michael Jackson in a science fiction novel.

The link is tinyurl.com/mjsfnovel

Thanks!

-Don Sakers

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Reviewing the Star Trek Movies

Everyone is asking what we thought of the new Star Trek movie. Before answering that, you should know what we thought of the others.

First, a few words on how we review movies:

To begin with, we rate movies along two axes. One is good/bad; the other is fun/not-fun. A movie can be good and fun (The Princess Bride), good and not fun (Das Boot), bad but fun (Independence Day), or bad and not fun (Ernest Goes to Camp). In addition, we sometimes rate movies on a scale of 1 to 101 Dalmatians (the animated one, of course).

That being said, here are our opinions of the various Star Trek movies.

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#1: Star Trek: The Motion Picture

Very good, pretty fun

A good science fiction movie, although not necessarily good Star Trek. Maybe 85 dalmatians.

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#2: The Wrath of Khan

Pretty good, very fun.

Although we still want to know where they got enough mass to form a planet in the middle of that nebula. Maybe 80-85 dalmatians.

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#3: The Search for Spock

Pretty good, very fun.

Very hard to separate from Wrath of Khan - they're really 2 parts of the same movie, aren't they? Maybe 70-75 dalmatians.

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#4: The Voyage Home

Bad, somewhat fun.

Time travel is not Star Trek's forte. And why did the whale tank have to be transparent? Maybe 50-55 dalmatians.

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#5: The Final Frontier

Bad, not much fun.

Maybe 50-55 dalmatians.

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#6: The Undscovered Country

Very bad, not much fun.

Okay, guys, which ship was doing the gas surveys? Maybe 30-35 dalmatians.

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#7: Generations

Not too bad, somewhat fun.

Crashing the saucer section was fun. But time travel again...oh my. Maybe 50-60 dalmatians.

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#8: First Contact

Not too good, somewhat fun.

Impossible to reconcile this version of Zefram Cochrane with the one seen in the series. And...oh dear...time travel and the Borg? Really? Maybe 60-65 dalmatians.

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#9: Insurrection

Quite good, quite fun.

Good sf, good Trek, a cool planet and a plot that makes sense. Maybe as many as 80-85 dalmatians.

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#10: Nemesis

Very bad, not much fun.

Proof that Star Trek can be awful without time travel or the Borg. Maybe 30-35 dalmatians, maybe fewer.

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#11 Star Trek.

Not that good but really fun.

Lots of nods to fans, some really good actors. But necessary to give up trying to piece together the sloppy narrative. Head off to save Vulcan with only two real officers and a bunch of third-year cadets on the Federation Flagship? Really? Make a third-year cadet who is on probation the First Officer? Did I mention it's the Flagship? Promote that cadet to Flagship Captain, over the heads of all the existing officers? Sure, why not?

Maybe 75-80 dalmatians?

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Soured on Apple

I am well and truly pissed at Apple.

It all started on June 7 with Security Update 2009-02. I installed it on our venerable seven-year-old iMac G4 (running OSX 10.4.11). Afterwards, the iMac wouldn't start up. It froze on the blue startup screen. What's worse, it would not boot into so-called "safe mode."

I looked online and found that I was not the only person bitten by this bug. There were many suggestions, so I started trying them. Start up in single-user mode (which it did) and repair the startup disc, repair permissions, change the name of various preferences files, delete this-that-and-another file from various Libraries. No dice.

I finally learned the trick of opening the DVD drive, so was able to boot from the install disc. Fromt there, I was able to boot into OS9. But that did me no good.

One source said to boot from an external Firewire drive. So I used the install DVD to install OSX 10.4.6 on the external drive, and tried to boot from that.

No luck. Under OS9 it mounted the external drive without trouble; but it would not boot from that drive no matter what I did.

Eventually, I had no other choice but to reinstall the OS. I was reluctant to do this, because I had to do it back in February (after another botched Security Update) and the update destroyed a bunch of settings, as well as wiping out all our iTunes playlists. But there was no other choice.

So I installed OSX 10.4.6 on the iMac. And it rebooted successfully, hooray!

But...

The wireless card is messed up. System Profiler sees the card, but the iMac insists that it is not installed. The ethernet port is messed up -- the system doesn't even admit that it has an Ethernet port, and it certainly won't go online. (Both the wireless network and the ethernet connection work fine on the laptop.)

Worse, the iMac won't mount the external drive. Nor will with external drive mount on the laptop. That drive holds all our iTunes, all our iPhotos, and a bunch of other stuff that I really don't want to lose.

Without being able to go online, I can't install any system updates. I am afraid to run anything because I don't want to have OS conflicts.

Thanks a lot, Apple. You've turned a perfectly-good computer into a wreck.

I'd been planning to buy a brand-new iMac with tax refund money...but now I am very reluctant. I've recommended Apple to many friends over the last few years...but I can't do that in any good conscience any longer. I am definitely soured on Apple.

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Update 9:08 PM: Well, I can still boot into OS 9.2...and then the iMac recognizes its wireless connection. So we can get online using a ten-year-old version of Internet Explorer. Bah.

Apple still sucks big-time.

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CostumeCon 27 Pictures

Our CostumeCon 27 presentation was "CostumeCon 1889: Steampunk Style." In it, we did a masquerade-within-the-masquerade, in Steampunk style, which spoofed all the standard cliches of costuming: Star Trek, Harry Potter, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, and five different Snow Queens. Not only did we get a group award for workmanship and the "Best Concept" masquerade award...but the New York/New Jersey Costumer's Guild awarded us the coveted Spazzy Award, given for the most sick and twisted presentation.

Here's the group picture:



And here's Thomas as Darth Vader. His helmet is made of folded and glued cardboard.



And here is the last costume we presented, Don as the ultimate Snow Queen: a steampunk drag queen cocaine dealer (Snow Queen, get it?)

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Earth Day

I can see a time, in the not-too-distant future, when Earth Day will replace Easter as the default Spring holiday. I'm in favor: with the exception of Christmas, all of our other national holidays are secular ones. And we need a Spring holiday.

I can also see a time, in the more-distant future, when people on the Moon, Mars, and various space settlements will insist that the name "Earth Day" be changed because it's too Earth-centric. And there, too, I'm in favor.

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How We Designate Planets Nowadays

(GEEK ALERT! Only interesting if you are a science or science-fiction geek. Mundanes may skip without penalty.)

How do we designate planets? The old way, the venerable science fiction way, was to give planets roman numerals in order of their distance from their sun. In this system, Earth was "Sol III," Khan was exiled on "Ceti Alpha V," and in the Dune universe, the planet Ix derived its name from the fact that it was the ninth planet from its sun.

That's not how it works in the real world. According to the all-knowing Wikipedia:

The most common way of naming extrasolar planets is almost the same as binary stars, except that a lowercase letter is used for the planet instead of the uppercase letter for stars. A lowercase letter is placed after the star name, starting with "b" for the first planet found in the system (51 Pegasi b). The next planet found in the system could be labeled the next letter in the alphabet. For instance, any more planets found around 51 Pegasi would be catalogued as "51 Pegasi c" and then "51 Pegasi d", and so on. If two planets are discovered around the same time, the closest one to the star gets the next letter, while the last planet would get the last letter. For example, in the Gliese 876 system, the most recently discovered planet is referred to as Gliese 876 d, despite the fact that it is closer to the star than Gliese 876 b and Gliese 876 c. The suffix "a" was intended to refer specifically to the primary, as opposed to the system as a whole, but this did not catch on. At present, the planet 55 Cancri f (being the fifth planet found in the 55 Cancri system) is the only planet to have "f" in its name, the highest letter currently in use.

In practical terms, this basically means that we're assigning letters in decreasing order of mass, since we detect extrasolar planets by their mass.

I assume that the old "roman numerals" system would still apply, once we get close enough to another planetary system to be sure that we've detected all the planets in the correct order.

Anyway, it occurred to me that I haven't seen the new way applied to the Solar System. So here it is:

Sol b - Jupiter
Sol c - Saturn
Sol d - Neptune
Sol e - Uranus
Sol f - Earth
Sol g - Venus
Sol h - Mars
Sol i - Mercury

I'm going to let the dwarf planets fight it out among themselves.

I suppose there's an analogous system for satellites, under which Ganymede = Jupiter b, Callisto = Jupiter c, Io = Jupiter d, Europa = Jupiter e; Titan = Saturn b; Triton = Neptune b; and even Charon = Pluto b. Saturn is going to cause problems, since it had more than 25 satellites.

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