Category: Reviews: Other

I saw the Peanuts Holiday Collection and just had to have it for my collection.
It’s a 3 DVD set containing 6 cartoons, all of which are classics and familiar to anyone who’s grown up watching them on TV as a kid. It’s not chock full of extras or anything, just two half-hour cartoons on each disk. No matter how old you are, they will be a delight to watch. Big kids can watch and enjoy them and can introduce their little kids to the Peanuts gang.
Definitely a must-have item for any Peanuts fan.

I liked it. I think it’s going to be a cool spin-off with bad guys that make the Goa’uld look like playground bullies. The new digital Stargates in Atlantis are pretty spiffy looking. The only problem I had with it was that the new team had absolutely no trouble communicating with they aliens they found in a whole other galaxy millions of light years away. I’m still looking forward to the upcoming shows though. Hopefully the Stargate writers don’t fall into the same trap that the Star Trek writers seem to keep falling into and recycling plots.

The concert over the weekend was ok. Loud, very loud. My ears are still ringing. I’m not really a big fan of rap and hip-hop music, but my wife is, and she listens to it so that means I listen to it too.
We actually ended up with some reasonably decent seats. Halfway up the first tier behind the left corner of the rink, with the stage at about the far blue line. The people on stage were still pretty small, but visible through the crowd.
The concert opened with someone named Tamia who sang pretty well. Next up was Missy Elliot who had a pretty active show, although I couldn’t understand a word she was singing/rapping about. Then came Alicia Keys, who I thought was by far the best part of the show. My wife thought so too. Sang well, played some great piano and really played to the crowd. Last up was Beyonce. Made a good entrance, but I thought the performance was lacking. My wife thought she did too much dancing and running about the stage, and not enough singing. And a lot of the time I thought her background instruments and singers drowned out her singing. The rest of the audience seemed excited enough about her though. A surprise appearance by Jay-Z really sent the audience through the roof. I think the crowd got more worked up when he popped up on stage than they did about Beyonce.
And that was the concert. 100+ dB of ear numbing noise, shrieks and drums and probably about 120dB when Jay-Z came out.

There might be some spoilers here. I’ll try to keep them to a minimum.
The SciFi adaptation of Battlestar Galactica is over. From the opening scene, I could almost hear the collective wail of agony from BG purists (if there is such a thing) out there.
I liked it.
Wail away BG purists. It’s not like you didn’t know it wasn’t going to be a remake of the original series. It’s not like SciFi and the creators didn’t make it absolutely clear from the outset they weren’t going to simply redo the original series with updated FX. They made it quite clear that they were going to rewrite from scratch. Oh, they kept a lot of things. The story concept and some of the ship designs remain. The characters have been largely rewritten and redeveloped. They don’t resemble the characters from the original series at all. Cylons have advanced significantly.
It’s different, more gritty and edgy than the original. The Cylongs are bigger and badder than ever. Characters are harder and more complex. Galactica, the Colonial flagship in the original series, is set to be decommissioned and destined to become a museum in the new series.
I liked the tributes to the original series they put in. There were exhibits in the museum-to-be’ showing a Cylon and Cylon basestar from the original series. The Cylon ships have the red eye moving back and forth, as do the mechanical Cylons. The Vipers look mostly the same (all the fancy new ones get wiped out).
There were a few things I didn’t like. The technology isn’t quite as advanced as it was in the original series. Vipers shoot machine gun style, the Cylon ships launch missiles and attack with nuclear warheads. Galactica is kind of ugly looking, but I’m sure it will grow on me, just like the Enterprise-D did.
As just a 2 part mini-series, I didn’t think it was long enough. I wanted more. But hopefully, more will come in the form of a series.
I wonder when/if the series will start.

Because my wife is a biology person (where I am decidely not), I occasionally end up getting introduced (willing or not) to various biology and chemistry related topics. So when the latest issue of New Trail (the University of Alberta alumni magazine) arrived, arrived I saw an article about something called Microbe Cards that I thought she might be interested in.

MicrobeCards are like baseball cards. But instead of pictures of athletes, you get pictures of different microbes. All sorts of nasty looking germs, virii, fungi and the like.
The front of each card has several pictures of the organism (electron micrographs, microsope images, sometimes x-ray images, etc) so you can see what they look like. On the back of the card is a description of the microbe, effects on people, symptoms, possible treatments, and short descriptions of what the photos on the front are.

Developed by a U of A prof (another reason I’m plugging these cards), the cards are organized in colour coded groups: gram-negative, gram-positive, fungi and parasites, and viruses.

I bought a couple of packs for her and she thought they were just the coolest thing. For their size, they pack a good deal of information for reviewing characteristics of particular microbes.

You can find the cards at Amazon.com or at the University of Alberta Bookstore.