cellio | short takes

The story about the elephant is the funniest thing I've read in days.

I have a new front-runner in the "deceptive marketing" category. Today I examined a bag of Glenny's Soy Crisps, which proudly proclaims "10 grams pure soy protein" and "only 65 calories per serving". However, it is not 10 grams of protein per serving. (The bag contains two servings, so it's 5g protein per 65 calories.)

Yesterday I came into the office to find a keyboard tray peeking out from beneath my desk. I wondered how long it had been there without my noticing; it was possible to push it back well out of sight, so it could have been there for a long time. The mystery was solved when someone walked into my office later and found me, not my office-mate, sitting at my desk. Apparently he'd installed it the previous night, but in the wrong place. I suppose that beats the alternative outcomes. :-) (No, I don't want a keyboard tray; my arms aren't long enough to use one with proper posture.)

Tonight was an On the Mark practice. Jenn has decided to leave the group due to an attack of life. It's unfortunate, but I understand. I don't want anyone to burn out. Ray is staying, so we'll juggle some parts around and things will be ok.

Tonight's episode of Enterprise, "Cogenitor", had a dreadful preview. It was also one of the best episodes of the show to date. That was an extremely pleasant surprise. (Ok, I saw every key plot point well ahead of schedule, but that didn't hurt the show, as it turned out. Now we just have to wait and see if they actually follow through on this in future episodes.)

Embla lay down in my lap while I was watching the show tonight. She's never done that before. Yay! It took five and a half years, but she's finally comfortable enough to actually settle down in my lap, rather than just walking across it and then scampering away. Progress. :-)

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The story about the elephant is the funniest thing I've read in days.

The last paragraph or so of that story explains so much about the popularity of Commedia dell Arte...

Tonight's episode of Enterprise, "Cogenitor", had a dreadful preview. It was also one of the best episodes of the show to date.

I don't know, to me it seemed awfully derivative of the feel of the ST:TNG episode The Outcast (http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~werdna/sttng/tlynch/outcast.rev.html).

And the B5 episode The Believers (http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/guide/010.html) beat 'em both for "be careful imposing good, noble intentions on other cultures."

Oh, I didn't mean to imply that it was one of the finest hours of SF or anything like that. "Believers" is one of my favorite B5 episodes; "Cogenitor" isn't in that league. (I don't remember "The Outcast" well enough to comment.) But it was a good show, and especially pleasant given what the previews implied about the show.

(This episode was probably also better than either of the episodes from last year that was nominated for a Hugo, too.)

Cigfran and I spent the commercial time trying to work out the mechanics. The doc's pictures would have helped! :D They apparently have male, female and neuter genders. I think they said the neuter contributes an enzyme and about 3% of the population is neuter. The engineer wanted to sleep with Tripp, so it's possible to have sex with just two people. Given that Tripp can participate, it's probably some varient of er, ah "tab and slot" mechanics. But how does the neuter fit in? (Pun intended) :D Can you mate with a neuter? Niven did it well for puppeteers, a seed male, an egg male and a womb female.

Well, Phlox said something like "first the woman..." before Tripp cut him off. And we don't know which of the three provides the womb. So there are several possibilities:

1. Female acquires enzyme from cogenitor, then mates with male.
2. Female deposits egg-equivalent with cogenitor, male mates with cogentor. (Probably the cogenitor provides the womb in this case.)
3. Female and male mate, then whicheve of them ended up with all ingredients (canonically the female) mates with the cogenitor.

There are more, but you get the idea. We don't have enough information to narrow it down much. During the episode I was assuming #1, but that's just instinct.

As for Tripp and the female, remember: these aren't humans. We don't know what anatomy they have; we also don't know if she had done any basic research on compatability issues. Maybe she was just horny and wanted to make out despite incompatabilities. :-)

"Believers" is one of my favorite B5 episodes

Oooh, I so don't agree. "Believers" makes me completely crazy, because it's one of the most Trekky episodes of B5. There's a certain ham-fistedness of the moral that makes me nuts. I mean, I understand what the moral of the story is, and it's a good one, and in general it's not a terribly written episode. But there's just something so blatant about it that it simply annoys me, simply in the way that it jumps up and down and screams, "Look! Look! Here's a Moral!"

One of the things I like about B5 is that it tends not to have that ST:TNG hitting-you-over-the-head thing. This is one of the episodes that does...

What saved it for me was that the moral dilemma wasn't completely unambiguous. Trek would deliver a ham-fisted moral, but most modern Americans would agree that it was the "right" one from fairly early in the episode, or at least find it uncomfortable to argue for the alternative. You can point to a dozen or so Trek episodes where they essentially did what the doctor here did and it worked out OK. In The Believers, I think most of the audience would tend to believe that, at least in some idealistic sense, the doctor's arguments were more "right" than the family's ("not that it necessarily excused what he did, but if he could just have talked sense into them." That sort of way in which it's very hard to really appreciate an ideaology that alien to your own.) I think it was interesting to see the story suggest that it wasn't as cut and dried as just coming down on the moral position we found most sympathetic, by whatever means that then requires.

GROPOS, on the other hand, was a real sledgehammer to the knees :-)

Or maybe she found out from the holo-deck aliens from ealier that Trip was easy and also a good mommie?
(Haven't seen this episode; life intervened and I forgot to tape it... I'll see it on Sunday, maybe.)

The problem I had with Cogenitor was that I didn't believe Archer would really have been angry with Tripp, based on previous episodes. I agree with Tripp's assumption that Archer would have done the same thing.

This spoiled the episode for me. :(

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