Wow.

Where to begin … ?

In brief: Galactica is more than happily surprised when the Battlestar Pegasus shows up. Too bad Adama didn’t order the FTL jump when he had the chance. Long story short, fleet command is taken from Adama by Admiral Cain, who outranks him. She also apparently doesn’t really care to respect the civillian government as evidenced by her snubbing of President Roslin. At first Cain is all, “Oh, everything is cool” … then she’s all, “We’re going to reassign people!” I.E.: Starbuck and Apollo to Pegasus. Later, after Helo and Tyrol intervene when a Pegasus officer tries to rape Sharon Mk II — killing that fat windbag in the process — she moves quickly to bring them back to her ship where she arranges their executions. Adama is really not happy about this and orders his Marines to suit up and head over to Pegasus with a full Viper escort. Cain responds by launching her own, newer, Vipers: she’s got a lot more. That’s where the episode ends. Son of a bitch! January, get here now!

Here’s one big thing I don’t get — a big deal has been made in the way Galactica avoided the Cylon attack. See, the Cylons had access to the Colonial Defense Ministry and were able to sneak “sleeper viruses” into the computer programs that aid the operation of starships and fighters. This is demonstrated early in the miniseries when most of Galactica’s Viper Mark VIIs, preparing to engage Cylon fighters, suddenly experience complete system failure and are promptly destroyed. Aiding in Galactica’s survival were the many older Mark II fighters in her museum exhibit: fueled and armed, the Cylon fighters were unable to activate the sleeper virus and cause them to power down. Yet here we’ve got the Pegasus, and a ton of Mark VIIs in operating condition — I’m presuming that at some point some member of Pegasus’ crew deduced what was causing the massive reports of losses and wiped the computer memory of the ship and her fighters. Still, it seems odd that the ship could survive even one encounter with the Cylons after their blind FTL jump.

Is there a decent member of the Pegasus‘ crew? They all seem like a bunch of stuck up shitbags. I take that back — Fisk seems like a good guy, and a few of the pilots seem okay too, even the CAG (though he’s certainly got an ass-streak). Lt. Thorn certainly doesn’t get any points in my book — I think I know why he enjoys raping Cylonsit’s probably the only way he can get his tiny pecker serviced. I bet his off-duty passions include coercing young female enlisted crew into fucking him. Piece. Of. Shit. I wish he could have suffered a bit, though.

I should explain that Pegasus also had a Cylon aboard — one of the Six models, although we don’t know in what capacity … crewmember? Part of the retrofit team? In any case, it is eventually aluded to that she was used to sexually pleasure the male crewmembers. When Baltar sees her, she looks quite unlike the glamerous Six we’ve all come to know and fear.

There really is quite a contrast between these two ships — most noticeable is the technology level. The Pegasus has sliding doors! I also notice they like to keep their officers and enlisted folk segregated in the CIC. I don’t like the Pegasus — I like the atmosphere of Galactica, what with her manual doors, pressure valves, and un-Star Trek like interior. (According to the video blog of David Eick, many of the Pegasus sets were recycled from a FOX pilot that never made it into production: a remake of Lost in Space).

Chills. Chills at seeing Adama march through Galactica’s corridors on his way to CIC to resolve the situation with Tyrol and Helo. I suppose if Cain was bothering to respect the office of the president, Adama could’ve made an appeal to Roslin to intervene. Regardless, the episode ends with one hell of a cliffhanger: a ton of Pegasus’ Viper Mark VIIs, and a handful of Galactica’s Mark IIs, squaring off. Eep!

**

Sci-Fi did an original series Battlestar Galactica marathon a few weeks ago. One of the episodes was “Living Legend”, where Lloyd Bridges played Commander Cain of the Battlestar Pegasus. The end of the episode, Cain committed his ship to a near suicidal run on a Cylon force so that the Galactica and the fleet could escape. Most of Pegasus’ fighters were evacuated to Galactica.

So, here’s my predicition for the conclusion: no shots are fired between Vipers for whatever reason — Cylons show up, pilots on both sides are reluctant to fire on each other, Cain heeds her XO’s advice, et al. Helo and Tyrol may well be executed. Apollo, Tyler, and Starbuck return from their mission with info on the mysterious Cylon ship: a joint attack is launched, and Pegasus is heavily damaged. Cain evacuates her fighters to Galactica, which rejoins the fleet, while Pegasus stays and fights to buy the survivors of humanity enough time to escape.

Mark’s brother is famous at the Indy shop. Any time Mark is arrested, in a bar fight, slapped by a girl, or has his car stolen, odds are great that his brother somehow instigated the incident or was the actual cause of the incident. I.E., “My brother says you’re a dirty slut and you’ll fuck my brains out.” Five seconds later, Mark gets slapped by a girl he doesn’t even know and about whom he never had a conversation with his brother in the first place.

For Mark, it’s a hate-hate relationship.

Mark’s brother was accepted by Frostburg University. His parents dropped him off there before the first week of school. Mark’s brother went to his first day of classes.

And then it was back to the usual order of business - drinking, drinking, drinking.

A week ago, his bro had to get back to Baltimore for a court-date regarding an alcohol citation. Hiding this from his parents, Mark’s brother had his girlfriend drive him from Frostburg to Baltimore, then back. Sadly, his girlfriend’s car broke down and they had to spend the night at Mark’s parents. I don’t quite know the story, but his parents apparently caught the two having relations on their very expensive pool table (without bothering to put down the pool table cover first). Coupled with his admission of the alcohol citation, Mark’s bro and Mark’s father got into a very loud screaming match which eventually ended with Mark’s bro stealing one of his parents’ cars and heading back to Frostburg, leaving a naked and embarassed girlfriend on the pool table.

A week or so go past and Mark is awoken in the middle of the night by his parents and sister calling: they haven’t spoken to the younger brother and are worried about him. This culminates in a drive to Frostburg where they find two things: their car, and the brother - drunk out of his mind and trying to rush a frat. They also find out he hasn’t been to class since the first day.

The parents decide - enough is enough! If he wants to go out and get drunk and piss his life away, fine, but not on our dollar! The ridiculousness of this statement will become apparent in a moment.

“Want to know what they’re having him do?” Mark asked me, a smile spreading across his face.

“Makin’ him join the Marine Corps?” I queried.

“Nope. They’re getting him an apartment. Right next to mine.”

Mark, of course, not thrilled about this particular development. He elaborated that his parents are paying his brother’s rent for five months, at which point he needs to find a roomate. He’s still got this stupid grin on his face, and I asked about it.

Mark, who isn’t exactly trouble free, elaborated: he’s getting excellent grades, and hasn’t had any (serious) trouble with the law in several months. He’s hoping to play on these achievements and get his parents to reward him with a plasma television.

A big one.

It reads: “AhThBch”, and is mounted on a sports car, driven by a male in his early twenties.

I can’t decide between “I’m the Bitch” and “I’m the Beach.” Neither quite makes sense to me, but maybe he’s married and he’s his wife’s bitch.

There are a lot of fun, interesting, and some times gruesome stories of life in a hospital that are told in the medical terminology class. There are about eighteen students, most of whom are employed by this particular hospital-system: for them, it’s in-service training. A handful of us are not (yet) employed in the medical field … one woman, a transcriptionist, is taking the class to get more work; another is considering a possible change of careers when she retires from the postal service in three years (she told me she will have worked for the USPS for forty years at that point).

Last week, the Sister teaching the class brought up a rather disturbing story regarding the MRI machine. She explained that since her job had little to do with the MRI she hadn’t really done any research on the machine or its dangers until after this incident — seems that a not-so long time ago, in a hospital far, far, away, a five year old had brain surgery to remove a tumor. A year later, he came back for an MRI to make sure his brain was good and tumor free. Somehow, an oxygen cansiter had been left in the room, and was hurtled by the powerful magnet into the boy’s skull, killing him.

None of the people I worked with care. “Eh. Um. That’s cool?”

One of the things about working in a pizza shop is that you’re working mostly with single men, many with a variety of drug dependencies, who spend most of their down time eye-fucking every hot piece of ass that saunters past the store front. Heck, even the married guys do that. One of the other things about working in a pizza shop is that stories are valued — when I say stories, I don’t mean “A long time ago…”, because very few people who work in pizza shops know how to read, much less do it for fun, much less read fiction for fun. The best stories are the real and gruesome: there’s nothing better than finding out Gary left a party drunk and fell asleep in a poison ivy patch, or that Mark got arrested for the third time because he was defending his jerk-off brother, or that the new kid decided to try to sell mushrooms to a customer who turned out to be a plainclothed cop.

So the story about the kid getting his skull cracked was good … but not great. It just wasn’t resonating. What you’re ideally going for with a story is that your coworkers hear it, gasp, and quickly begin repeating it to other people. It’s a competition.

So I changed the story — first, I told them about the machine and its incredibly powerful magnet. I told them about the questions patients are asked before they go into the machine — any tattoos? Any metal in the body (i.e., replacement hip or a pacemaker)? This is true: a majority of tattoos contain metals — go into the machine with one of those tattoos, and you’ll be leaving with 2nd or 3rd degree burns.

With the story set up, I told it, and the reaction was just what I hoped for — I told two stories, one each for the different stores. At the indy, she was a seventeen year old girl (rich, Paris Hilton type) who didn’t want to tell her mother she had a genital piercing. This plays particularly well at the Indy since we’ve got Midget Porn Girl working (weekends now with school back), and last month she was bitching because her parents were making her sell her Mercedes SUV and she had to get - gasp! - a used BMW. I doubt she realizes this, but that’s not really the thing you want to tell people who mostly live paycheck to paycheck, spoiled whore. Anyway, so in the story, this spoiled Paris Hilton, er, Midget Porn Girl type goes into the machine, it was turned on, and the piercing was ripped out of her skull at sixty miles per hour. (At the other job, because one of the guy there claims to have a piercing down there , the story became a seventeen-year old boy with a similar piercing).

Mind you, I have no idea how an MRI actually works: I don’t know if it actually gets turned on, or if its always on. For the purposes of the story, the patient was standing, but I don’t know if they stand or sit in reality. No one picked up on these nits, of if they did, they were too happy imagining Midget Porn Girl’s piercing getting ripped out of her body they didn’t say anything about it. Which isn’t to say anyone actually wants to see something bad happen to Midget Porn Girl, its just that when she comes into the store and moans that Daddy is only going to pay $1500 off her credit cards this month … y’know?

Exasperating.