Boba Fett

 Now that six of the seven episodes of #BookofBobaFett have aired, I have thoughts.

Last summer, I signed up for Disney+ and binge watched The #Manalorian and was pleased to see that I only had a few months to wait before there would be a new related show to watch. In the mean time, Disney announced two more shows; Obi Wan Kenobi, which, of course is set between the first trilogy and his death in the second trilogy; and an Ahsoka Tano show set sometime after the second season of Madalorian. I'm looking forward to both of those because those characters are great and  this gives us opportunities to tie up loose ends of plot lines and characters from the animated series'. Almost thirty years pass from the end of the first trilogy to end of the second series of Madalorian.

This brings us back to the Book of Boba Fett. It begins at the same point Mandalorian S2 ended with he and Fenec Shand arriving at Jabba the Hutt's palace and taking over. 

Episode 1. It's been about eight years since Jabba died at the Sarlac pit and one of his lackeys has been running his turf, badly. Boba meets some of the locals in town and goes into an extended flashback that explains how he survived the Sarlac and lost his armor (regained in the Mandalorian). The episode ends with an homage to Ray Harryhausen that most viewers didn't seem to catch.

Episodes 2-4. Most of these episodes develop the flashbacks. The short sections of "present time" finally come together in episode four to reveal who the antagonist is going to be and that the overall plot arc is going to be The Seven Samurai/Magnificent Seven.

Episodes 5-6. A sudden digression into the Mandalorian. Yes, he's going to be one of the seven, but most of  these two episodes have nothing to do with that, they are setting up the next season of his show. It's nice to see Ahsoka Tano, but her appearance was a gratuitous cameo with no hints about her own show.

<Episode 6 spoiler> There are many characters from the earlier movies and animated series whose fates were left unexplored. The new live-action shows seem to be picking up a lot of those characters. Cad Bane is one I was eager to see. I was excited to see him, but a little disappointed in the role he's going to play. My big hope is that the charming and always treacherous Hondo will show up in Obi Wan or Ashoka. [Fun fact: Cad Bane and young Boba Fett had a duel in a planned, but never produced, episode of Clone Wars. That's supposed to be the source of the dent in Boba's helmet.] 

+Coming up next, the Seven Samurai/Magnificent Seven style finale.

The wrong way to do it

John Amato has this screen shot up at Crooks and Liars with the comment "What more needs to be said?" Quite a bit.


This is a terrible graphic. When I was a history teaching assistant in grad school, one of the most important things I learned in our short teaching orientation, was an observation on how people assimilate information. In its simplest form, there are two types of learners, verbal and visual. at one end of the spectrum are students absorb information entirely in verbal form, either from reading or lectures. At the other end are those who need visual cues, for whom a picture literally worth a thousand words (actual mileage may vary). I'm in that group. I want my history books to have charts and graphs and, especially, maps and lots of them. I can get more out of a well designed map -- and get it a lot faster -- than I get out of a dozen pages of text. I'm a very tough critic of just what constitutes a well designed map. Most of the newer textbooks I perused had sucky maps. Bach at the verbal end of the spectrum, are those people who can't read a map at all. In teaching history, the lesson was explain everything twice, once in words and once in images. In other fields, I believe, the divide is between abstract theory and hands on experimenting.

I didn't hear this Andrea Mitchell Report, so I don't know if her verbal presentation was any good. I do know, however, that this graphic is a disaster at conveying information. Two bars of the same size and color look, well, the same. Without listening carefully or reading closely -- both verbal assimilations of information -- a visually oriented person comes away with the impression that US doctors are evenly divided on the public option, when those favoring it outnumber those opposed by a ratio of better than two to one. For the graphic to communicate the message accurately to visually oriented consumers of news, the graphic needs to look something like this:


In a superb graphic, the two bars would also be in different colors, say red for opposed and green for supporting. To take into consideration certain types of color blindness, they would be in shades of those colors, say dark for supporting and light for opposing. The greater weight of the dark color would reinforce the message that there are more people on that side of the divide.

I'm, no doubt, giving them too much credit for having thought this through, but this presentation looks like the visual counterpart to the "he said, she said" false equivalency that dominates the verbal news media. It's no longer enough to present everything else as mere opinion in which both sides are equally as valid and if there aren't to valid sides to the issue to promote the radical fringe into validity. Now they need to represent issues where there are measurable quantitative differences as being somehow equal.

Television is a visual medium. They should be able get this aspect of their reporting right. It's the minimum requirement of their jobs, not an extra credit assignment. Andrea Mitchell should fire her art director and someone who gets this or, even better, have her art director contract me as a consultant and send me buckets of money. They can get me at bargain rates if they offer a good healthcare package.

Must see mammoth TV

This Tuesday, the mammoths go extinct -- again.


I wonder why they thought I'd be interested in this.

I just received a press packet from WGBH in Boston, the producers of the venerable science show NOVA (this is my first press packet; I'm so excited). Tuesday's new episode looks at the latest entrant into the "what killed the mammoths" sweepstakes. This is the theory that a comet or a meteor exploding over the Laurentide ice sheet in Canada led to the sudden extinction of the Quaternary megafauna in North America, ended the Clovis culture, and started the Younger Dryas cold climate phase. I wrote about it here, when the theory was first unveiled at the May 2007 meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

The promoters of this theory have done an excellent job of rolling it out. They have recruited supporters across a wide spectrum of fields all of whom find something in the theory to solve a vexing problem in their discipline. Hardly a season goes by without a supporter presenting a paper or chairing a session at a scientific conference. These papers are skillfully promoted in the science press.

I imagine their very success has engendered some of the resistance to the theory. Many science practitioners and observers have an instinctive aversion to science by press release. It smells too much like the tactics of the supporters of intelligent design, anti-vaccination, and climate change denialism. Scientific theories should stand or fall by proving themselves to specialists who understand all of the issues at stake and not by winning public popularity contests. At the same time, grand theories that solve all problems from paleontology, to history, to mythology, to personal hygiene are always suspect.

However, neither of these widespread reservations means the theory is wrong. I'm still on the fence about it. It will be interesting to how NOVA approaches it and what the more knowledgeable science bloggers have to say about it.