Sometimes I look up and stare at the stars…

…on clear, cloudless nights particularly after a storm. Those are my favorite times, and one of the reasons why I love taking walks at night. The cool windy air smells fresh and the empty streets, still damp with rainwater, adds a cinematic character to the city. It’s not the same in the countryside, but the smell of wet windy air is like taking in air for the first time.

I look up and for a moment stare at the stars, wondering if they would look (arranged) the same if it had been a different period in time. Or a different planet. I do this to remind myself how small and insignificant I am, and, as Jodie Foster said in Contact, how rare and precious we all are. In a way, I would tend to believe, this keeps my feet on the ground. I am such a big dreamer that often I lose my personal sense of The Now.

The other night, while sharing favorite episodes of The West Wing, a friend asked what I did to feed my Battlestar Galactica relapse while the show is in its mid-season hiatus. I didn’t get to answer the question, so tonight I googled battlestar and updated myself with what’s happening with my favorite show on television as it heads towards its final 10 episodes beginning January.

I came across an online article which posted a few pictures of a special commemorative book of BSG to be distributed to the cast & crew. In it was a picture of one of the Call Sheets – a sheet of paper that outlines a day’s work in a film ot tv production, usually organized by the assistant director/s. It looked very similar to the ones I made for Big Time, primarily because I got the format from an assistant director who was trained in the states who trained me in my first work in the first movie set I was on.

Googling further, it turns out one of the show’s producers has leaked the titles of its few remaining episodes. They are:

• 413: Sometimes a Great Notion
  414: A Disquiet Follows My Soul
  415: The Oath
  416: Blood on the Scales
  417: No Exit
  418: Deadlock
  419: Someone to Watch Over Me
  420: Islanded In A Stream Of Stars
  421: Daybreak 1
  422: Daybreak 2
  423: Daybreak 3

The title of the penultimate episode before the 3-part series finale, Islanded in a Stream of Stars, prompted this post. I didn’t have to google for the source of the phrase, because somebody posted it as a comment in the article.

“For a moment of night we have a glimpse of ourselves and of our world islanded in a stream of stars – pilgrims of mortality, voyaging between horizons across the eternal seas of space and time”
- Henry Beston, The Outermost House, 1933

For those who believe that the human race is worth saving from itself, there is still time

~ by vives on September 20, 2008.