Galactica Redux

Last Saturday we visited a friend in London. She's good fun but intimidatingly intelligent. As a meat-eating, wine-drinking person who wasted their university education, I always feel slighted chastened by this teetotal, vegetarian with a PhD and wonder why she seems to enjoy our company when we're so different. But then I casually glanced at her DVD collection and saw Battlestar Galactica! She saw me looking and started extolling the merits of the series, praising the casting and the storylines. What is going on? She is the third non sci-fi person I've discovered enjoying Galactica.

I decided to lend my DVD to someone at work who is one of the worst intellectual snobs you could ever meet (although I usually think he's right and everyone else is wrong). He loved it. There must be something good about the series although I still watch it alone with a mild feeling of shame, as if I'm viewing some sort of deviant pornography. Sci-fi isn't cool. You only have to look at the people that buy SF and fantasy novels.

There is something about Battlestar Galactica that is attracting a mainstream audience who are prepared to ignore the absurd premise of the series and become fully engaged in the quest of the Twelve Colonies to find Earth. Apparently Galactica killed off the Star Trek Enterprise series and I can understand why. Battlstar Galactica isn't really a science fiction series - it's a dystopian post-9/11 drama which most people can relate to. Star Trek is good because it envisages a post-capitalist society in which racism and sexism are a thing of the past, but that also makes it quite dull at times and I can see why the politically correct world of the Enterprise has been superseded by the smoking, swearing, alcoholic crew of the Galactica.

Auden

The Fall of Rome

The piers are pummelled by the waves;
In a lonely field the rain
Lashes an abandoned train;
Outlaws fill the mountain caves.

Fantastic grow the evening gowns;
Agents of the Fisc pursue
Absconding tax-defaulters through
The sewers of provincial towns.

Private rites of magic send
The temple prostitutes to sleep;
All the literati keep
An imaginary friend.

Cerebrotonic Cato may
Extol the Ancient Disciplines,
But the muscle-bound Marines
Mutiny for food and pay.

Caesar's double-bed is warm
As an unimportant clerk
Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK
On a pink official form.

Unendowed with wealth or pity,
Little birds with scarlet legs,
Sitting on their speckled eggs,
Eye each flu-infected city.

Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast.

W.H.Auden

Power to the people

When I was 14, I remember seeing a report on the News at Ten about a village in Devon where, if you walked under a power line holding a flourescent tube, it suddenly lit up like a Star Wars light sabre. A group of around twenty locals were shown brandishing their tubes, waving them around like Jedi knights. Nobody seemed unduly alarmed. Indeed they all looked as if they were having great fun and the story was shown in the programme's light-hearted last item slot. I remember wondering what the power lines were doing to their bodies.

A few years later Channel Four showed a superb programme which made a pretty compelling argument linking high-voltage power lines to cancer and a variety of other illnesses. There was strong evidence to suggest a higher incidence of childhood and adult leukemia in homes that were close to electricity pylons. I naively assumed that the programme would generate a lot of coverage in the media and prompt the public to demand Government action. Nothing happened. A few lone voices tried to push the issue of EMF radiation to the top of the public health agenda, but they were generally treated as a lunatic fringe. Perhaps it wasn't a 'sexy' enough subject.

This week, two decades after the Channel Four programme, there has suddenly been a spate of articles about power lines and cancer clusters and it isn't just pylons that are the culprits now. Mobile phone masts have also been blamed for a variety of ills ranging from M.E to the disappearance of the sparrow and children have been advised not to have Wi-Fi laptops on their laps (presuming it's okay for me to continue irradiating my testicles).

Obviously I am not an expert on this subject and there is no scientific consensus about EMF radiation and health problems. There is, however, a growing convergence of opinion in the same way that there was a few years ago in the environmental movement.

If you don't know much about EMF radiation, there is a very general explanation here and a more detailed one here. If you're already concerned about this issue and want to protect yourself, there is an excellent (if slightly scary) book on how to make your home a safer place:


I am only a layman and perhaps I'm emulating my grandmother, who wouldn't talk on the phone because she believed that she'd get an electric shock, but compare the world today to 100 years ago. In addition to all of the normal background radiation our bodies are being exposed to countless radio waves. There was much hilarity when, 25 years ago, a man in New York picked up a music station on the metal plate of his false teeth (Apparently it was The Four Seasons' 'Oh What a Night'), but today most of us are within range of a mobile phone mast and can here the bip bip bip noise on our radios when a mobile phone is finding a signal. As that isn't enough, in our homes we now have cordless digital phones, baby alarms and wireless internet connections. What's it doing to us? Maybe nothing, but I'm not taking any chances.

The worst thing about working in a bookshop...

I keep spending money on books. Today I spent £16 on a book about Berlin in the 1920s. I have no interest in Berlin and can't say that I have any great affinity for the roaring twenties, but when I saw this wonderful book I had to have it.

Originally published in Vienna, this English translation is an eclectic mix of history, art, theatre, politics and popular culture in which the fascinating text is complemented by 400 illustrations. Every decent city deserves a book like this.