This weekend was a bit crazy in the laid back department. I was expecting a quiet day at my ceramics class on Saturday with many of us glazing our last pieces for the final next week. Since this week is the annual three-day ceramics sale that funds the ceramics program at SJCC, our studio space was overrun by former instructors and students who made the pottery wheels disappeared into the back, the floor swept and mopped, and the tables rearranged to display an overflow of ceramics coming out of boxes and newspaper wrappings.
Those of us still glazing our pieces were shoved into the far corner to share limited space among the buckets of glazes. That was a pain since we had our large pieces that weren't simple to glaze. My large piece, the Roman god of doors and beginnings, Janus, in 25 pounds of brown clay, took two hours to hand paint a half-dozen glazes on. After glazing that, an abstract teapot dipped into two glazes, and making a test glaze from powder that I applied to four test pieces, I was exhausted. I spent the rest of the weekend watching DVDs and reading books.
The first DVD was Battlestar Galactica: Razor that's being sandwiched between the end of Season Three this year and the beginning of Season Four next year. This two-hour movie is focused on the Battlestar Pegasus after Lee "Apollo" Adama takes command with flashblacks by Executive Officer Kendra Shaw, who remembers joining the crew just shortly before the Colonial fleet was attacked by the Cylons, and a young William "Thrusher" Adama during the first Cylon war who fell from the sky during an aerial battle onto a secret Cylon basestar conducting the initial experiments on humans to form a biological-based Cylon. Fascinating to watch Admiral Helena Cain transform from a tough but caring commander into the cold-blooded warrior that she became, the hard moral choices that military leaders must make during a time of war that could mean life and death for innocent civilians, and the retro Cylons of the escaped basestar in their final battle with Pegasus. There are dark hints as to what may happen in the final season as the rag tag fleet of humanity searches for Earth.
The second DVD was Flight of the Living Dead (a.k.a, "Zombies on a Plane"). Horror movies generally follow a set formula (i.e., teenagers involved in sex and/or drugs died fast and furious in the 1980's slasher films), and the formula for this one is that anyone with an attitude on the airplane gets killed by the zombies. This turns out to be a laugh riot as you got all the crazy stereotypes—scientists "who should know better" transporting a sexy disease carrier in the cargo hold, young lovers cheating on each other in the restrooms, a fast talking criminal handcuffed to a dour cop, an air marshal who looks like a drug rehab dropout, a professional golfer polishing a putter with a whiny wife at his side, and a nun overwhelmed by sinners and zombies alike—on a doomed airplane over the Atlantic Ocean in an severe electrical storm. The funniest "poor luck" zombie was the one who couldn't undo his seatbelt and tries desperately to bite anyone running by his aisle seat. The ending was somewhat predictable as the plane crashed with the usual assortment of humans and zombies surviving the wreckage. Surprisingly, there were few head shots and no one being stretched out to have their guts torn out as common in other zombie movies. I was also expecting the airplane to get hit by a lightning strike that didn't happen as the movie strongly reminded me of a Twilight Zone episode, Nightmare At 20,000 Feet. If you're a zombie fan, this is a pure zombie fest.
The first book read was "Genshiken: The Society for the Study of Modern Visual Culture, Volume 9" by Kio Shimoku that just came out. This is the first magna series that I read from the very first volume when it came out in 2005, and I pre-ordered every volume since then. There's no overriding story arc in this slice-of-life series about an odd assortment of Japanese college students who are fans of anime, video games and cosplay but don't fit in with any of the other clubs. The story that I identify the most with in part because I'm a writer is Ogiue's decision to submit her work professionally. She asks her boyfriend, Sasahara, who has a part-time job as an manga editor, to critique her work and she reacts badly when told that her 50-page managa is unfocused. When he visits her the next day, he's surprised that she revised her work overnight—which isn't easy considering the amount of drawings and text involved without using a computer—that it's much better than the original version. When she pulls out an 80-page story that needs to be look at, he wonders if their relationship can survive the critique process. I was disappointed to find out that this volume was also the last one in the series since most of the club members from the beginning are now graduates.
The second book I'm still reading is "In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing The Second World War" by David Reynolds. Most people know that Winston Churchill as the widely quoted leader who led Great Britain during the darkest hours of World War II, but very few know that it was his writings that funded his long political career. (Which is quite different than today's politicians panhandling for money instead of working for it.) After being tossed out of office in the first election following the war, and finding himself short of money, he embarks on writing a six-volume memoir of the war as he had previously written a five-volume set on World War I. His main concerns was trying to avoid paying the 97.5% income tax to pay for the war and reconstruction, hanging on to the papers he wrote during his five years of being prime minister, and keeping an eye on his political future where he will once more serve as prime minister in the 1950's. I found this book to be quite readable and entertaining. (The first biography that I read, "Churchill" by Roy Jenkins, was painfully boring as my interest in British politics was so superficial that it took a year-and-a-half to read.) If you're a history buff and/or a writer (I'm both), this book will interest you.
I added Subversion, an open source version control system (VCS), to my file server, Titania, to maintain the changes for the website code base. Since next year is the tenth anniversary of my website, and I'm starting a three-stage project to redesign the website from top to bottom, I thought now was the time to implement a VCS. The first stage is cleaning up the existing PHP and CSS files. I find myself keeping a tight focus on how much code I'm modifying at one time as I don't want to have too many changes implemented. If I need to step back from a change or two, I can now do that.
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