Trans/plant/portation

From time to time I run a blog post from a guest writer, and I’m pleased to post this from my friend Dr. Jeannine Love, Assistant Professor of Public Administration at Roosevelt University in Chicago. Here Jeannine reflects on the launch of the last Space Shuttle that happened last week.

I, for one, am relieved to see the space shuttle fleet retired. I realize that this is not necessarily a popular opinion. I watched the launch of Atlantis and the seemingly countless interviews with weeping grandmothers and space-enamored children who feel cheated that they will not get to walk on the moon during a space shuttle mission, or see the earth through the shuttle windows as they cavalierly orbit the planet. Those childhood dreams, however, are simply outweighed by my own childhood ghosts. Specifically, the ghost of the Challenger. Read More…

We all know we can’t count on advertisements to give us the truth about anything. If the biggest, most widespread example of this is the coverup by Big Tobacco to hide the reality that smoking causes cancer, then we need only look at Big Pharma to see how this plays out in the 21st Century. Anyone remember Yaz, the contraceptive pill that also mellowed out Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder? That was reintroduced in a slightly new formulation by Bayer as Beyaz, with a new series of commercials to make the difference between PMS and PMDD more clear.

And then, no more Beyaz commercials at all until the latest data suggesting Beyaz’s side effects are even worse than stated. What’s worse than heart attack, I wonder? Greater risk of heart attack, it seems. Read More…

Zombie apocalypses are terrible for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which is the loss of the human race generally and loved ones more locally. It can be especially difficult to adjust to the zombification of a child, but before one literally throws the baby out with the bathwater, there are some important considerations to remember.

1. Assess if the baby or child is in fact, a zombie Read More…

Clearly, not everybody liked Fastforward, ABC’s sci fi series adapted from a Canadian novel that aired right after V, which had its own successful franchise history. But geez, I liked Fastforward. It was part mystery, part detective show—complete with fancy FBI offices and Courtney B. Vance—and it was heavy on the temporal destabilization, which I always enjoy. It had a huge cast of characters in the V spirit, even, and I liked the performances from Joseph Feinnes, John Cho, Jack Davenport (though he’ll always be Steve to me), and Gabrielle Union. But before anything too big could be revealed about what was going on, what Jericho really was up to, or what the next flashforward meant, ABC pulled the plug on the series.

Now we would never find out. To say it was a bummer would be a gross underestimation. Read More…

This originally ran over at IFryMineinButter.com.

I was an avid fan of anything suspenseful when I was a teenager. Stephen King, Peter Straub, and Dean Koontz novels, Hitchcock movies, I soaked them up like lemonade. Once I had read through a book, chances are I would read it again immediately thereafter, in order to actually comprehend its pages sans hyperventilation. I entered into those narratives with high expectations, but not so for Stranger with My Face, by Lois Duncan. It was the first novel of hers that I read, and it spawned my love for all things fantastic. I think it’s fair to say that I read Ursula K. Le Guin because I read Duncan first, and yes, I understand how different these two writers are. Read More…

Harold Camping wants us all to know that Doomsday is coming soon. Specifically, later this week. More specifically, on May 21. It should be a bummer of a weekend, according to Harold Camping, who has presumably spent his life savings to broadcast his message so that as many of us as possible can be saved before the rapture. Excuse me. The Actual Rapture. Not like the last apocalypse that Camping asserted would happen, which was in 1994. Oh those bible verses! They can be so confusing to interpret! Read More…

Dear Detective Show Writers:

I appreciate all that you do, and I know it’s hard work coming up with new ideas and concepts and story lines for police shows. Hence, the rise of the “ripped from the headline” plots we all saw on Law & Order. But that pressure aside, can we please put a few stories on the very backmost burner? They’re not interesting anymore, and they’re one version or another of offensive. Read More…