Battlestar Galactica

If you are not watching this, you have got to start. Dumbfoundingly good.

A couple of years ago, my husband asked me if I wanted to watch the Miniseries, and I was like, Ha ha ha, good one. So he watched it alone. And after he was done, I asked "Who was the woman with the short blonde hair working on the fighter jet?" He said, "That's Starbuck." And that was enough for me. Try the miniseries, if you don't like it, you're only out a couple of hours. And if you do, you'll be thrilled. I don't know anyone who doesn't like it. An amazing ensemble cast, great writing, characters, and plots, great production values.

The show is produced and written by former Star Trek writers who were interested in writing a show that had a more realistic view of life in space than Star Trek. The producers talk about how Star Fleet (in Star Trek) is all spic-and-span, how everyone has the "Star Fleet walk" with their chests out and their shoulders back. They thought that when you're on a real naval vessel at sea for months, things aren't always in tip-top shape, people get stir-crazy, things break. They wanted to show that side.

Make sure you start with the Miniseries, and don't miss Razor (after Season 3).

Battlestar Galactica
Miniseries from netflix
Miniseries from Amazon

We Bought A Zoo - Benjamin Mee

Benjamin Mee was living his dream life in the south of France, when his sister mailed him a real estate listing for a run-down zoo with a note attached: Your dream opportunity. He, his mother, and three of his brothers and sisters work for 2 years to buy, restore, and open the zoo. An interesting look behind the scenes at a business I'd never really thought about.

Mee is an engaging writer, with interesting material. The second day they owned the zoo, his brother runs up to the house yelling "Big cat on the loose! This is not a drill!" One of the leopards has escaped, and they have to figure out how to safely get him back, with bad equipment (they have to reinforce a tiger house that evening to have a place to put him) and missing equipment (they have no functioning dart gun, so if things go bad, they will have to kill an animal).

I've always been kind of uncomfortable with zoos - I haven't liked seeing the animals caged - and I was interested to learn the justification behind zoos (conservation of species, engaging the public in conservation efforts, providing funding for conservation efforts). I don't know that I'm entirely comfortable with them, but I feel better now.

I liked learning about the difficulties in rehabilitating a run-down business. The Mees appear to now have a successful zoo, but it was only possible because the BBC produced a four-episode mini-series on them. Without that, they would have made a heroic effort re-fitting and improving the zoo, then not made enough money the first year to keep running. I'm glad Mee wrote this book, because I think it will help keep people coming to the zoo. I'm pulling for them to succeed.


We Bought A Zoo: The Amazing True Story of a Young Family, a Broken Down Zoo, and the 200 Wild Animals that Change Their Lives Forever
Benjamin Mee
2008
Available from Amazon

How To Get Your Kid To Eat...But Not Too Much - Ellyn Satter

A friendly, calm approach to dealing with mealtimes from a registered dietician and clinical social worker. I picked this book up off a friend's shelf because my one-year-old stopped drinking milk when I stopped giving her bottles, and I was stressed out about it. I came away realizing that I had to chill out. I can't make her drink milk, so the best thing for me to do is get out of the way.

Ellyn Satter is most famous for the idea that the parent is in charge of deciding what, when and how your child eats, but your child is in charge of whether and how much. This division of labor sounds reasonable and natural, but I'm discovering how far I'd gotten away from that, and how much fretting (and short-order cooking) I was doing in order to make sure my children ate enough (however much that is).

I'm a big advocate of eating what you want and trusting your body to know what the right thing is. So I was cautious about working from a book that might advocate imposing external controls on your own or your children's diets. I thought Satter stayed far away from standard diet advice and did a nice job discussing what you can control as far as weight is concerned and what you can't. Her views felt sensible and centered, not rigid.

I strongly recommend this book if you're having food battles with your child or if you're stressed out about their eating.

How To Get Your Kid To Eat...But Not Too Much
Ellyn Satter
1987
Available from Amazon

Second Nature - Michael Pollan

I really enjoyed this book. It's an incredibly literate and thoughtful discussion of gardening, of gardening as metaphor, and of our relationship to the natural world. When I first opened it, I thought it was going to be just like The $64 Tomato (which lists it in the bibliography), but it turned out to be far more reaching than that. Pollan talks about different cultural approaches to gardening - the European version versus the American version, the colonial American version versus the modern American version - in a way that is eye-opening. He talks about the relationship literary greats like Emerson, Thoreau, and Shakespeare had to the natural world, and how their writings affect our cultural views.

I only recommend books that I like on this blog, but some are four-star books and some are five-star books. This is a five-star book. I want to buttonhole everyone I know (especially, but not only, gardeners) and say: You have got to read this book.

Second Nature: A Gardener's Education
Michael Pollan
1991
Available from Amazon

Scrubs

Funny and good-hearted.

We're on about Season 5 of this, and every time I watch it I think, I should really add this to my blog. And I always think the review should be "Funny and good-hearted."

Scrubs
Seasons 1-6 available. Season 7 comes out in November.

Season 1 from Amazon or Netflix

Banana - Dan Koeppel

A surprisingly interesting look at bananas - part natural history, part US history, part banana husbandry and biotechnology explanation. Did you know every banana you see in the supermarket is genetically identical? They're all a variety called the Cavendish banana. And if a disease threatens the Cavendish banana (and it does), it will wipe it out completely. In fact, this happened 50 years ago, when Panama disease wiped out the Gros Michel variety that was at the time the only variety sold in the US, and banana companies replaced it with the Cavendish.

Interesting stuff about banana husbandry - the Cavendish banana is completely sterile and only reproduces asexually. Other edible bananas (not eaten in the US - often only grown by small African or Indian villages, where they are the primary sustenance) are only marginally fertile - 1 seed for every 10,000 bananas. This makes traditional breeding very difficult, and so the banana may require biotechnology to be saved.

I had no idea the US government intervened on behalf of banana companies, much as it now does on behalf of oil companies. Come to think of it, I am pretty naive about US government intervention - I stupidly thought it was motivated by morals and ethics, rather than by moneyed interests.

A fun book - now I'm on the lookout for unusual banana types. I tried the baby bananas sold at my supermarket - they were sweeter and creamier than regular bananas. I liked them a lot. Now I'm hoping to find more exotic bananas - especially the Lacatan variety grown in the Phillipines.

Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World
Dan Koeppel
2007
Available from Amazon