Dead Moon Cow

Mostly Obscure Musicians I Like

ebneter@ix.netcom.com — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 03:05:49 GMT

In no particular order:

1. Kirsty MacColl. If you've heard the Pogues' Christmas classic "Fairytale of New York," you've heard her sing. If you haven't heard her solo albums -- and most people haven't -- you're missing a wonderfully gifted singer and songwriter.

2. Sandy Denny. Usually called a "folksinger", which doesn't begin to do her justice. One of the greatest voices of the 20th century.

3. Fastball. Had one huge hit ("The Way"). Deserved to have many more -- brilliant songwriters with great pop hooks.

4. Screaming Blue Messiahs. "I Wanna be a Flintstone."

5. John Otway and Wild Willy Barrett. Actually had a hit in the UK with Otway's "Really Free." Sort of proto-folk-punk.

6. Pavlov's Dog. Came out of the St. Louis area in the mid-70s. Singer David Surkamp makes Geddy Lee sound like a baritone.

7. Salmon. My good friend Aaron Goodwin played guitar for this San Jose-area band. One album (Pablo, Drop the Chicken). Mined the same rap-rock vein as Rage Against the Machine.

8. Krenshaw. Another local San Jose band who released one self-produced album.

9. Syd Straw. Great singer, occasional actress, wrote a couple of my favorite songs.

10. Peter Blegvad. American expat in Britain, absolutely bloody brilliant songwriter.

11. Joan Osborne. Yeah, she had a huge hit with that folky "One of Us." What most people never realized is how atypical that song was for her; she's mostly a very soulful, bluesy singer who writes good tunes.

12. Toni Childs. Has an incredible voice and great songwriting chops.

New book about the Titanic

ebneter@ix.netcom.com — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 05:18:25 GMT

There's a new book out about the Titanic, called The Other Side of the Night, and while you'd think that every minute of the ship's voyage had been covered in great detail already, this one does, at least, attempt to focus on something a bit different, namely the other two ships that were intimately involved in the disaster. Those would be the Cunarder Carpathia, which steamed at a top speed no one ever thought her capable of to attempt a rescue, and the Leyland liner Californian, which was stopped up against an ice floe no more than 10 or so miles north of the sinking ship, but never moved despite the officers' witnessing signal rockets fired by the Titanic after she struck the iceberg. Most people familiar with the details of the disaster will already know the stories of these two ships as well, and the book doesn't really tread much new ground. (Although I don't remember ever knowing before that Second Officer Lightoller's feisty Australian wife Sylvia chewed out the Californian's junior officers during a break in the Board of Trade hearings about the disaster.)

There has long been a bit of a cottage industry of defenders of Californian's captain Stanley Lord, who claim that the ship was much farther away than 10 miles and that the rockets sighted were not those fired by Titanic. The book's author does an excellent job of both showing that this argument doesn't hold much water (so to speak) and pointing out that, even if the rockets seen by the Californian weren't those of Titanic, they were clearly distress signals as specified by the regulations of the British Board of Trade, and therefore the Californian's captain was negligent for failing to do anything. But equally significantly, he points out the falsity of the notion that if the Californian had just come to the rescue, everyone from Titanic would have been saved. While it's true that the loss of life would likely have been smaller, the reality is that by the time Californian actually got to the Titanic, even from only 10 miles or so away, there would not have been enough time to conduct a rescue of the sort performed, say, by the Ile de France at the wreck of the Andrea Doria four decades later. Titanic sank far too quickly for that. Still, there's no question that they would have been able to rescue victims from the water, and it's conceivable that the numbers of dead and rescued would have been reversed if the Californian had acted rather than not.

Good book, if a bit redundant.

My Own Personal Version of BSG Reality

ebneter@ix.netcom.com — Wed, 06 May 2009 05:21:16 GMT

Kara Thrace was/is Aurora, the goddess of the dawn.

The Lords of Kobol were/are "angels" made physical beings by God-who-doesn't-like-to-be-called-that, and they lived with humans, and, later, Cylons, on Kobol.

Something happened on Kobol -- canon is rather unclear on that -- but the Cylons went off to Earth 1 and the humans went off to the Colonies. Aurora apparently had some special connection with the Cylons, given the presence of the Temple of Aurora on Earth 1.

Sam Anders met Aurora in her temple. He may or may not have known she was the goddess, but he wrote the song "All Along the Watchtower" for her and sang it to her. She acquainted him with angels -- maybe Head!Six and Head!Baltar, although they may have taken other forms at the time -- and forewarned him and thereby the rest of the Five of the coming destruction of Earth 1.

Two thousand years or so later, God-who-doesn't-like-to-be-called-that sends Aurora to Caprica as Kara Thrace, daughter of Socrata and Dreilide Thrace; Daddy Thrace was probably another of the LoK and conveyed to Socrata how important her daughter would be. However, Kara didn't know who/what she really was. There's a story here I've not quite teased out -- that Aurora had to somehow become human and go through death in order to save both the Cylons and the humans, which is, of course, what she ends up doing, by reconnecting with Sam Anders, this time on ruined Caprica.

Iz mai story n Iz stickin to it.

Y Halo Thar

ebneter@ix.netcom.com — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 18:19:12 GMT

Ugh. Many ages since posting.

News: Just escaped from two weeks in hospital. I ... had my colon removed. (Short version: I've had ulcerative colitis for the last 35 years. Now, I don't. Yay?) I'm recovering. Two weeks in the hospital is enough, however. ;-)

It's a two-part surgery, though, so the joy is that I get to go back in 6 weeks. The second surgery is quicker and easier, though.

(For those who are terminally curious and/or interested in way Too Much Information, Google "ileoanal reservoir".)

Downsides: I can't go see Katee at Starland in Denver in April; having part of your insides on your outside, even temporarily, is ... weird.

I am TOO lucky

ebneter@ix.netcom.com — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 06:02:36 GMT

Tonight, I went to see Carrie Fisher's one-woman play, "Wishful Drinking," with a friend of mine, who had somehow obtained front row, center seats. Which were about 3 feet from the stage.

Carrie is hilarious. She was smoking throughout the play and asked me to come up to confirm that they were clove cigarettes, not regular ones, and gave me one to keep.

At the end of the play, when she came out for her curtain call, we were all standing up, so I stepped forward to shake her hand, and she reached down and grabbed me and kissed me full on the lips!

...

Why, yes, I was just kissed by Princess Leia!

Revelations

ebneter@ix.netcom.com — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 08:09:01 GMT

So, I've been thinking about the ending of "Revelations" and I have some comments about ... what they found at the end.

Since I've already seen some commentary in certain circles about the effects of nuclear war, I thought I'd toss out some more accurate information.

The two bombs that the United States dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were quite small, relatively speaking, but you can't scale up their fallout effects quite so simply to modern weapons. The Hiroshima bomb, "Little Boy," was a uranium bomb of about 13 kilotons yield, while the Nagasaki bomb, "Fat Man," was a plutonium bomb with a yield of around 20 kilotons. They were fission bombs. Modern warheads are thermonuclear, or fusion, bombs, of much higher yields -- typical ones that are intended for cities are around 0.5 - 1 Megaton -- but they are inherently much "cleaner" radiation-wise, because almost all of the explosion comes from fusion, which doesn't produce as much radioactive debris. Thus, a 1 Megaton thermonuclear bomb does not produce 50 times as much fallout as the Nagasaki bomb, for example. Actually, the main radiation effect is due to gamma rays produced by the explosion itself. The fallout radiation decays rapidly, and while yes, it would be possible to detect the site of a city that had been nuked for a long time afterwards by radiation above the background level, there's a difference between being above the background level and being uninhabitable.

This is not to say that the site of a nuclear explosion would be a fun place to hang around or that a nuclear war would be a good idea. :-)

Nuclear winter has been overhyped, too. The original doomsday scenarios presented in the early 80s had some serious flaws, including rather unrealistic targetting information (to generate the maximum possible amount of debris and smoke carried into the atmosphere) and failing to include global atmospheric circulation. More realistic models demonstrate a clear effect, but it's highly unlikely that there would be years of freezing weather following an all-out nuclear exchange. (Hrm, though: There's a fix for global warming! Just nuke the planet!)

Finally, I'm not sure most people (and that may include the producers of BSG!) realize how hard it is to kill 6 billion people. If you kill 99% of them, you still have 60 million people! To get down to 60,000 -- roughly the number of survivors in BSG right after the attacks -- you have to kill 99.999% of them. (This is why, in the short story I wrote about the cast of BSG surviving an apocalypse, I gave up trying to figure out what caused the apocalypse: I couldn't come up with anything that would kill enough people for my purposes!)

The upshot of this is that an all-out nuclear exchange would kill an awful lot of people, but it wouldn't necessarily wipe out the human race, and the planet would still support life, although parts of it would have radioactivity levels above the background for quite a long time.

WizardWorld Philly Con Report

ebneter@ix.netcom.com — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 01:35:58 GMT

Wow, I haven't done one of these in ages...

I came to Philadelphia for WizardWorld, because Katee was going to be here. There was some last minute reshuffling of things — Katee was supposed to be here Saturday but got moved to Sunday due to scheduling conflicts — but it went pretty well all things considered.

There wasn't any stage appearance. The whole thing was a signing, scheduled to run from noon to four. Ouch. I got there a bit after 11 and staked out a place near the front of the line, which eventually snaked about a third of the way around the (quite sizable) convention center hall we were in. I had a ton of things for Katee to sign, since this is one of my last opportunities to see her. She confirmed that she will be attending Dragon*Con this year and that yes, it will be her last convention. She said (I didn't record this so it's a slight paraphrase) that she did cons for the fans of the show and since the show is ending, she will no longer be doing cons.

I gave her a bunch of stuff, and she signed a bunch of things for me: a model of Scar from Diamond Select, a poster of Grant Gould's, a poster from a guy at the show that he made just for the show, the motorcycle shot from Interview magazine ("That's the only time you'll ever see me in a bikini with Grace Park and Tricia Helfer!" — and yes, that is her Harley), one of the brand-new cards from the Season 3 set that just came out, the TV Guide picture, the famous picture of her choking me, and a couple of other pictures. And I got a hug, which freaked out the security guard, who, however, apparently decided from that that I was okay and therefore didn't give me shit for standing around for the rest of the afternoon taking pictures.

Towards the end she went away to do some "con stuff" (after all the line had been cleared) and then came back to sign for some stragglers who thought "noon to four" really meant noon to four. :-) Then the handlers all shuffled her off to the Ladies' Room while I stood there and chatted with another photographer, who then noticed a bag sitting on the table: The bag I had given Katee with all of her goodies in it. And, as it turned out, all the other various goodies that other people had given her as well! Ack! Fortunately, they were still in the restroom — probably fixing makeup :-) — so we were able to get it over to the security people before she came out. (Yes, they stationed security people outside the restroom while she was in there. Good move, seriously.) Then she got whisked off to the airport. As far as I could tell, she flew in last night, got up this morning, did the show, and then hopped on an airplane to go right back to work. I hope she gets some sleep on the plane!

Regarding the "no more cons" thing, since I know that this has caused some controversy in fandom. What she said to me was that she did the cons for the fans of the show, and now that the show is ending, she wants to move on from the show. I get the impression that if, for example, they had had conventions for fans of The Education of Max Bickford, she would have done cons for that. If she does another show that there are cons for, she'd likely do more cons. She is not in any way distancing herself from science fiction nor is she dissing sci-fi fans; she has repeatedly said that sci-fi fans are the most loyal fans and that she's enjoyed having the opportunity to meet them. Sadly, for whatever reasons, they don't do cons for non-sci-fi shows. (I've always found this odd, by the way — wouldn't soap opera cons be a big business??)

I have a metric ton of pictures and will be uploading them soon. I'm still here for one more day — as a guitar player for more than 35 years, with more than a dozen Martin guitars in my collection, I can't pass up the opportunity to go visit the Martin Guitar factory in Nazareth, just up the road a ways, so I am renting a car tomorrow morning and driving out there for that.

Wow, Lyssie spends a lot of time on LJ ;-)

ebneter@ix.netcom.com — Wed, 28 May 2008 04:43:16 GMT

Since the inestimable greycoupon did this, I figured I'd try.

Total comments: 953

1	ebneter	266
2	lyssie	152
3	greycoupon	78
4	iamann	59
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16	Anonymous	12
17	squeekyjam	12
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19	azarhal	10
20	soleiltropiques	9
21	elly427	9
22	stars_like_dust	8
23	bsgnightsky	7
24	shadowserenity	6
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49	jesus_freak1234	1
50	dgainey2003	1
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57	pathstotread	1

Generated by LJ Comment Stats.

Hmmmm... I think the script that generates this should probably exclude the journal-owner. Although it does give some insight into who replies to comments.

haz not posted in months!

ebneter@ix.netcom.com — Wed, 28 May 2008 02:42:48 GMT

But I was chatting with the lovely greycoupon just now and...

We were discussing the demise of Romo Lampkin's cat (offscreen):

me: You know, it's kind of amusing that they can kill off humans and 
human-like Cylons right, left, & center, but they don't show a cat's 
death... ;-)
greycoupon: Or even the dead cat... Lee just looked in the carrier.
me: It's probably been eaten!
greycoupon: Oh ewwwwwwwwww
me: ...
  I was actually half-suspecting that.
  ...
  but they probably wouldn't go there.
greycoupon: Yeah, standards and practices would have...had kittens.
me: ...coffee on keyboard...
greycoupon: Whoops. :)

Last Sentinel DVD

ebneter@ix.netcom.com — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 05:33:28 GMT

My copy of The Last Sentinel just arrived (just in time to have Katee autograph it this weekend), and of course I popped it in to answer that most important question — shower scene: Y/N?

Yes!

The DVD is, indeed, the full original cut. Yay DVD!

Meme sheep

ebneter@ix.netcom.com — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 02:08:29 GMT

O HAI. trinnifer had a cool meme:

The top 106 books most often left unread, per Library Thing... yanked from trinnifer by way of </a></b></a>indigo419

Bold is for books you've read.
Italics for books you've started but haven't finished.
~~Strikethrough~~ is for books you found unreadable.
And, finally, leave the ones you haven't read as they are.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius 
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
~~Wicked~~
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible.
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492 - Present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-Five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

I'm surprised that In Search of Lost Time isn't on the list, quite frankly. (And yes, I've read it! :-))

It says something about how bad Wicked is that it's the only thing on this list that I've found completely unreadable. Although Gravity's Rainbow comes close...

Y HALO THAR

ebneter@ix.netcom.com — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 06:21:16 GMT

Must attempt to post more often.
I've made a huge update to my website -- lots of new pictures -- and also finally turned on the matching LJ comm, ksackhoff_fans, to go with it. Woot!
I wonder if I'm the only person to pull the head off an Admiral Cain-blue-uniform MiniMate and stick a Kara Thrace head on it, so I now have three different Starbuck MiniMates? Probably not...
My shiny new, expensive flash on my camera made taking pictures in Toronto much, much easier than at earlier cons. Less red-eye, too.

Conventions of Doom

ebneter@ix.netcom.com — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 04:43:38 GMT

Hmmmm.

So, I think Katee is getting back at me for my pr0n question Sunday by bankrupting me. See, I swore I would go to every con she did in North America this year -- and now she's added three more: Sacramento in September, Chicago in October, and Burbank in December, and they're all Creation events.

Oy vey.

At least I can drive to the California ones...

Spell-check is not always your friend...

ebneter@ix.netcom.com — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 06:43:49 GMT

This notice is posted all over my apartment complex:

Something tells me that someone's spell-checker spit that out and they didn't notice. I hope.

I hope.

*fears for the future*

Hello, world!

ebneter@ix.netcom.com — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 03:52:53 GMT

*tap* *tap* *cough*

Yo, world, hello there!

It's ... been a while. I've been busy. Shut the fuck up.

Anyway.

Does anyone on the friends list do LJ layouts? I started a community awhile ago (but never really did anything with it) to go with my website, and I'd like to make it, well, active. It's called ksackhoff_fans. I'd love to give it a nicer layout than my journal (which just uses one of the standard ones) but I haven't ever invested the time to figure out how to do custom LJ layouts. (Slacker, I know.) Anyone? Bueller?

In other news, geology humor is always appreciated.

Oy vey

ebneter@ix.netcom.com — Thu, 31 May 2007 05:22:10 GMT

My one and only comment on this whole ... clusterfuck ... with LJ:

There are three parties to this, and I have a certain amount of sympathy for all of them.

There's LJ (and other affected blog/community sites — this is by no means limited to LJ). They're kind of in a bind with respect to the fact that they really have to go along with the advice they get from their lawyers about potential civil (and perhaps even criminal? IANAL) liability based on content.

There's the folks whose journals and communities were deleted. I've seen quite a few people essentially blaming the victims in this case, saying that if they didn't have "those interests" their journals wouldn't have been deleted. But there is a huge gulf between listing "incest" as an interest when you're talking about either fiction or, for that matter, consenting adults, and being a pedophile; and there's no a priori reason that someone who enjoys reading a particular type of fiction — or discussing issues related to incest, for that matter — would have ever guessed that listing a non-mainstream "interest" could or should get them into trouble. It's not like there's a great big flashing sign at the entrance to LJ saying, "Be careful what you list as interests! They could get you into trouble!"

There's the folks whose complaints apparently started this whole thing. I actually have the least amount of sympathy for them, for reasons I'll get to in a second, but I certainly sympathize with the notion of tracking down genuine child molesters and distributors of child pornography. Frankly, I think people who molest children in any way should be taken out and be — well, I have to admit to being torn between "flayed alive" and "cut to pieces slowly with a blowtorch." Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, these folks went and complained very indiscriminately about any journal or blog (as I say, this isn't the only place this is happening) that even appeared to have interests that might be related to child pornography or child molestation. And that, folks, is just an old-fashioned witch hunt. *sigh*

I don't care for fiction involving rape, non-consensual anything, sex between adults and children, etc. But it's not illegal, and I think it has a right to be here, appropriately labeled and possibly screened. Of course, LJ gets to make the rules about what is acceptable in the community as a whole; but I will leave, seriously, if I find that LJ is basically banning any non-vanilla adult content.

Man, shipper wars seem like fun...

Katee update...

ebneter@ix.netcom.com — Sun, 20 May 2007 03:15:15 GMT

Have I mentioned recently what a cool person Katee Sackhoff is? I just spent the evening with her, eating dinner, drinking a bit, and ... limbo dancing. Which, by the way, she is very good at, even with a busted knee.

Um, yes, I am at Vulkon's Ladies of SciFi Con in Orlando, FL at the moment. ;-)

More tomorrow.

P.S. Alanna -- she loved the Maelstrom mandalas.

So, yes, I am crazy, why do you ask?

ebneter@ix.netcom.com — Mon, 07 May 2007 04:39:44 GMT

Today, I bought a bicycle.

That, in and of itself, is probably not too suggestive of insanity. What's insane is why I bought it. I plan to ride it to work two - three times a week. Which also doesn't sound so terribly insane until I tell you that I live 16 miles from work.

What? Don't look at me like that! There are other people who ride their bikes that far to work!

Actually, Google has this nice shuttle service that you can take your bike on, which means that, for example, if I bike to work in the morning and it's raining in the evening, I can take the shuttle home (there's a stop less than a mile from my house) and bring my bike with me. So that's cool. And, you know, exercise! Think of all the exercise I'll get!

Insanity is fun...

ebneter@ix.netcom.com — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 04:47:38 GMT

To the dickhead next to me at the fitness center today who kept dropping his dumbbells and got very upset when I politely asked him (twice) to stop:

Dude, I don't fucking care if you tear your rotator cuff, or your pectoral muscle, or even dislocate your shoulder putting the weights down like that. There is a technique that allows you to set down very heavy weights properly without risking damage to yourself, and maybe if you asked one of the trainers that the company pays to staff the fitness center, they'd show you. Because there are people trying to work upstairs from here, one of whom is me, and every time you or one of your Neaderthal friends drops the fucking weights, it sounds like the stone giants are playing catch in the Misty Mountains. See that big guy over there? He was doing incline presses with 100 pound dumbbells -- about twice the weight you were complaining was too heavy to set down* -- and he set them down quietly.

Please die in a fire, kthxbye.

*And yes, if it's so heavy you have to drop it at the end of the set? It's too fucking heavy for you to be lifting.

Grand Slam SciFi Summit Katee Report

ebneter@ix.netcom.com — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 06:14:57 GMT

So, I registered for this thing pretty much the day I heard that Katee was going to be there, which would be back in December. This being a Creation con, the prices range from barely tolerable to outrageous, but I sprang for outrageous, figuring it came with all the bells and whistles, non? Well, sort of: It doesn't include a photo op, that's extra. OK. All taken care of.

First mistake: Not checking the website every ten minutes. At some point, in late March, they added a Charity Breakfast with the BSG stars. $75 a head. Unfortunately, it did not occur to anyone at Creation that they should maybe email the folks with the very expensive weekend passes to clue them in to this new event, as (1) they might want to attend and (2) they might want to know that it was not included in their very expensive weekend passes. That's right. So I show up with my very expensive weekend pass and discover that it covers, well, almost nothing that I am actually interested in, with the exception of giving me a fourth row seat during the BSG panel in the afternoon. (More on that later.)

Oh, and all the BSG things are on Sunday, which, had I known that in advance, I'd have booked my ticket for Saturday and stayed through Monday, or perhaps just gone home Sunday night, and saved a day off from work and a night in the hotel. *sigh*

Ah, well, I'll just get a ticket for the breakfast here at the con. Nope, sorry: Sold out. Well, do you have a wait list for people who want tickets, since it's not uncommon for some people to not show up? Nope. Ah. Er, well, could I put up a sign here saying that I'd like to buy a ticket in case someone wants to sell one? Nope. Ah. Er. Could you at least take my name in case someone says that they don't want their ticket and they'd like to sell it? Grudgingly, yes. "But no one will sell one, I guarantee you."

Well, I am nothing if not persistent, so I put up some signs outside, on the hotel property (where the con folks had no say, and the hotel seriously didn't care), and walked around the con on Saturday afternoon holding a notepad with a sign on it that said, in essence, "I am an idiot and I will pay an absurd amount of money for a ticket to the breakfast tomorrow in case you want to sell one." Somewhat to my surprise, people were actually looking at it, and I had a number of people commiserating with me. Finally one woman said, "Oooh, that's tempting." Heh. (Well, I was offering $200 for it...) So we talked a little. Then we negotiated a little. She took my number. She'd think about it. We kept bumping into one another, wandering around the con. I raised my price. Finally she called me. Yes, she'd sell it. She was totally there for the James Marsters and not interested in BSG, but her boyfriend wanted to go to the breakfast (as did a friend of theirs). I promised to introduce them to Katee. And give her $300 for the ticket. A meeting was arranged and the deal was done.

...yes. I paid $300 to have breakfast with the BSG folks. :-)

Now, the breakfast was originally scheduled for 9 AM, but for some reason they moved the start time up to 8:45, so I figured I'd get there around 8:00, which I did. First in line! Of course, they in no way started at 8:45; we were let in closer to 9:00 anyway. Then, we got to eat — and at least the food was good. (There was bacon! and quite good scrambled eggs and muffins that weren't the size of Jupiter, and other good stuff.) We chatted amongst ourselves. I had met up with Ashlee and Rachel, the two girls from Mars Productions that I met at Starbase Indy (recap: they are teenage sisters who wander the countryside attending science fiction conventions and make documentaries and videos), and they, with better connections than I, had talked their way into the breakfast. Also there and sitting at our table (right near the front) was Laurelei, a young woman I had also met at Starbase Indy, who was totally there for Katee, and the boyfriend and friend of the woman I'd bought the ticket from. Finally they brought in the "talent", who were a bit late because, as it developed, Katee's dog Nelly had swallowed an aspirin and Katee had had to wait for her to puke it back up. (Ah, the joys of being a star; your dog pukes just like anyone else's...) I did get to take some pictures when they came in, and got a droll, "Hi, Kate!" from Katee while she was posing for everyone's cameras. Then they did their little game where the stars go around to the tables one at a time and spend ~~30 seconds~~ a few minutes at each one. We got Bamber first, and he was quite nice and funny. Trucco was hilarious; one of the guys at the table was weåring a "Frak!" t-shirt that Trucco quite liked so I bought one for him later. He told us about how he found out that Kara was "dying." Katee told him to read part of the script, and in typical actor fashion, he was looking only at his lines: "Anders, Anders, you die, Anders..." "No, look at what happens!!" "Yeah, let's see, Anders, you die, Anders, Anders, ... I'm not sure what I'm looking for, Katee." "Look at page one!" "Hm, Anders, Anders, you die, Anders, wait, you die?!!" :-)

We did get Katee, of course, who greeted the girls and me with a chipper, "Hello, ladies!" since she remembered all of us, of course, from Indianapolis. She told us about her stalker and the cameras in her house. Apparently this happened after Christmas; somebody broke into her house, and the police found the box from a miniature wireless video camera. They couldn't find the camera, but had to assume that it had been installed (since Katee certainly didn't install it!). Interestingly, Katee was already in the process of selling the house, since she'd decided that she wanted to move nearer to the beach (and, as it happens, her boyfriend). Yeep. The friend of the woman who sold me her ticket was in the Air Force, and she mentioned to Katee that she'd sent her some mail "from an aircraft flying over Iraq," which Katee had responded to. Katee remembered the mail, and the woman gave her a medallion from her current station in South Korea. I gave her a bag with a bunch of stuff in it: Some chocolate, wisteria_'s hand-knitted version of the Eye of Jupiter, a couple of t-shirts ("Gratuitous Space Lesbian" and "Kara Trace and Her Special Destiny Farewell Tour"), and an iPod shuffle.

Then it was all over and the "talent" was shuttled out of the room, Katee stopping to grab some breakfast on her way. :-) We all started wandering around and ran into the next Creation clusterfuck: "You can't come out here into the vendor area, it's not open yet. Stay in the room!" OK, fine. Except that a couple of minutes later, they come into the room and say, "You have to leave, because we need to set this up for the next thing!" Ah, what are we supposed to do, then? Just hang in the air? *sigh* Fortunately, it was almost opening time by then, so they let us out.

Next stop: Photo op with Trucco. I gave him the "Frak!" t-shirt, which he was delighted with. Got a picture.

Me and Trucco
Kate and Michael "Don't call me Mike!" Trucco. That would be him on the left.

On to the panel. I need to review my notes, which I will do later, to get to everything that happened at the panel. Katee mentioned, in response to a question from the audience, that she was getting one of her tattoos removed, because it was becoming an issue in getting jobs. "I love my tattoos," she said, "If I wasn't an actress I'd be covered in them." Black tattoos are really hard to cover, though. (I asked her later which one she was having removed, and she said the cross on her back. Apparently part of the reason they always did such a shitty job covering it on BSG was that it takes a long time to put on the makeup to cover it well. She said that the "bona fiscalia" tattoo might be next. I gathered that the one on the back of her neck was safe because of where it is.) She talked a bit about modelling Starbuck after her brother, and about the little girl who played Kacey. She and Bamber got into a bit (joking around, of course) about her hitting him in the nose ("He was over his mark!") during the filming of "Kobol's Last Gleaming," and then him hitting her in the face while they were filming "Unfinished Business." She said, "You hit like a girl!" and he said, "You bruise like one!" :-) Kate Vernon and Michael Trucco came out for the last 20 minutes or so of the panel. Someone asked Katee which guy was a better kisser, Michael or Jamie, and she rather diplomatically chose her boyfriend instead. Heh. (Although I was thinking she might say "Callum!" since she seems rather taken with him.) During the first part of the panel I went down front and was taking pictures until one of Creation's ~~thugs~~ security guys decided that wasn't allowed (not stated anywhere, dudes...) and made me go back to my seat. One big surprise, not noticed by most of the audience, was a guy who snuck into the row behind me: Mark Sheppard, aka Romo Lampkin. I took a picture of him, and he noticed that the guy who was with him had blocked the shot, so he pushed him out of the way and said, "Again," to me. :-)

Then we did photo ops with Katee. I had three pictures. (Yeah, yeah...) Laurelei had somehow scored a replica of the Arrow of Apollo (they're making a limited edition of 100 of them that you can buy, if you want) so she had her picture taken with Katee handing it to her like she did to Laura Roslin in "Home Part 1". Then she gave me the arrow and we took a picture with Katee and me and the arrow, and then a couple of just the two of us. Rachel and Ashlee invited Katee to dinner, but Katee had to leave early because she and her boyfriend were going off to Mexico. So, no dinner. Dang. Pictures:

Katee, Kate, and the Arrow of Apollo

Katee and Kate

Katee and Kate Again!

Finally they did the autographs. I got a shitload (well, okay, six), including one that Katee personalized for me despite the "no personalization!!" rule. (She offered to do them all, but I told her not to bother.) Katee was asking me about some of the pictures that I had, which were things that I'd printed from my collection. She wanted to get copies of a couple of them, so I told her I'd email her the information about where they came from. She was accompanied by Julie Caitlin Brown, who is her manager for shows like this, so I introduced myself to her as well. Katee was all, "Oh, she has the greatest web site! She's got all kinds of pictures, I don't know where she gets them!" :-)

The line went to Katee first and then to Jamie Bamber. After getting everything signed by Katee, I had one picture for poor Jamie. :-) I kind of apologized: "I really like your work on the show, but I have to admit I'm mostly here for Katee." He started looking through all the stuff I'd had her sign. One of them was a copy of the first issue of the comic book with Starbuck on the cover. He picked that up, held it up and went, "Sackhoff! Is this supposed to be you? You look Italian or something!" She was all, "Yeah, I know, I love comic books." Heh. Then he signed the picture for me. He was actually very sweet and funny.

Then I went over to get Michael Trucco's autograph. He thanked me again for the t-shirt. I really liked him, actually. (Katee at one point said that she'd wanted to keep him around as eye candy.)

After all of that I figured out where the "talent" would be ushered out behind the auditorium, and staked that out. They finally came out, with their Creation handlers. Jamie wandered off towards the bathrooms and a Creation employee literally ran down the hall after him. Can't have the "talent" wandering around unaccompanied! Katee came by a bit later on her way to the restroom, also with guardian, and I asked her if she was getting a bit tired of being escorted everywhere. "Yes!" she said. "And my boyfriend's late!" :-) She left a little while later in a limo; I saw her briefly outside as she was getting in and told her I'd see her next month in Orlando. Her escort seemed rather nonplussed by the fact that she was chatting so cheerfully with a member of the unwashed masses...

Thus endeth my adventures, pretty much. I got on a plane and came home. Next month: Ladies of Sci-Fi, a Vulkon con in Orlando, which will hopefully be better run with less annoying people.

The Creation employees ranged from clueless but friendly, to really helpful, to amazing assholes, with a strong emphasis on the last category. There were some serious clusterfucks not involving the BSG folks, like a program that said that Matt Frewer would be signing autographs on Sunday along with Katee and Jamie — when in fact, he signed on Saturday, and probably ones I know nothing about as well.

I'm baaaaaacccckkkk

ebneter@ix.netcom.com — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 04:30:40 GMT

Bet you didn't even notice I was gone.

I spent the weekend at the Creation Entertainment Grand Slam SciFi Summit in beautiful ~~downtown~~ right-next-to-the-airport Burbank. Because, of course, Katee was there. :-)

A full-length post on my adventures will follow, probably tomorrow, but some short points:

1. Creation cons suck big time. Big time. Man.
2. Katee is gorgeous, as ever, and just as sweet as ever. She had a serious stalker who apparently put video cameras in her house. Scary. She has moved nearer to the beach.
3. She's getting at least one of her tattoos removed (the cross on her back) because it's affecting her ability to get jobs. :-( She may have the one on her forearm removed as well.

More later, including the Exciting Adventures of Kate and the $300 Breakfast. Heh.

Miscellany

ebneter@ix.netcom.com — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 05:33:10 GMT

• I don't know what crawled into our recycling bin and died, but holy crap did it smell bad. Cue 30 minutes of trash can scrubbery followed by incense. Whew!

• I had nothing whatsoever to do with either of Google's April Fool's Day jokes. I may, however, have been responsible for the confiscation of the flying screaming pigs.

• I can run! I ran for 25 minutes today. On a treadmill. Granted, most people can walk faster than I can run, but dooods... That's -- well, to me, it's frakkin' amazing.

• My cat's name is "Duncan," not, as the vet's receptionist apparently thought, "Dunkin'". *sigh*

Poll!

ebneter@ix.netcom.com — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 04:01:34 GMT

View Poll: #955302

Miscellany

ebneter@ix.netcom.com — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 04:23:52 GMT

• Katee's movie The Last Sentinel will air on SciFi starting May 1st. Whoot!

• Today's 1st WTF: Someone emailed me and said, "Sorry, but your 'source' is wrong. Katie [sic] Sackhoff is going to play Jaime Summers [also sic] in the Bionic Woman. I have very good sources for that."

I, er, LOL'd, considering what my source was...

• Today's 2nd WTF: I find that CignaTel Drugs, the mailorder pharmacy that handles my "chronic" prescriptions, thinks I owe them $60. I find this odd since I gave them my credit card number when I sent in the prescriptions, so I call them. They do, indeed, have my credit card number. So, why didn't they charge it? "We need your permission."

Huh. I kinda thought I gave them that when I signed the fucking form. *sigh*

Katee updates

ebneter@ix.netcom.com — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 05:08:13 GMT

Updated my website with some info on what Katee's up to during her break (temporary or permanent? who knows?) from BSG. Here's the scoop, straight from the source*:

"Be careful What You Wish For". (lifetime MOW) Lead role Sara Jacobs
Shooting now in Saskachawan, Canada

"Robot Chicken" (Adult Swim) Role of Wisp, College student, and Starbuck
Voice over work already completed

"The Bionic Woman" (pilot NBC) Role of Sarah
Starts shooting in Vancouver this month.

*That would be an exceptionally reliable source. ;-)