Newspaper bag

Mr. Lacer and Girl Lacer have gone to Legoland today, Boy Lacer wasn’t too impressed with having to settle for a day at home with me even with a promise of a picnic somewhere, “No, don’t want picnic!”. Soon as Mr. Lacer and Girl Lacer are out of the door, Boy Lacer has shoes in hand “Picnic now?”. It was too early for a picnic, so Boy Lacer watched some TV, whilst I knocked up this bag.

Boy Lacer asked me “What you making?” and I told him a bag and he replies “Picnic bag?” and it was sort of. Actually it’s a shopper, something to fold up in one of my other bags and to use at the supermarket checkout, but it comes in very handy for picnics to.

The fabric is a newspaper print, I always have a fascination with bags with lots of writing on, gives me something to have a sneaky look at in a queue if it’s on my queue neighbour’s shoulder. So when I saw the fabric, quite a while ago now, in an Etsy shop from Japan, I jumped at it.

So, me, Boy Lacer, the new bag and the garden quilt I made the other day made our way down to the river for a picnic. We feasted on cocktail sausages and a bread roll (for Boy Lacer) and chicken noodle salad (for me), drank Innocent smoothie (Boy Lacer) and rhubarb and strawberry presse (for me – it was rather nice) and then fought over the fresh mango, pineapple and melon, Boy Lacer let me have the mouth watering pineapple. Whilst we watched what must have been a canoe race stream past us on the river.

Razor

Mr. Lacer has just brought a new Battlestar Galactica box set (the penultimate series – we’re a bit behind). We don’t have Sky, we find it far more economical just to buy the box sets of the TV shows we want to watch (normally shows that started out on terrestrial telly and then Murdoch brought them, grrrrhhhh). As well as Battlestar Galactica, we follow 24 like this as well, used to follow Lost, but that just got too weird and now thanks to Murdoch’s latest aquisition, we’ll have to buy House in to.

But back to Battlestar Galactica, the first thing on the penultimate box set is the stand alone feature Razor. Telling the story of Pegasus, the other surviving Battlestar, it was, as usual with any Battlestar Galactica stuff, gripping viewing where I have to remind myself to breathe. Telling the story of a search and rescue mission after Apollo has taken command of the Pegasus, the story looks at the previous command of the Pegasus by Admiral Cain through flashback and sometimes flashback within flashback.

I found watching Razor to be an excellent exercise in ‘what if’ story telling. What if a military space ship survives, as far as they know, alone, with no controlling external influence, how does that change their behaviour if they come across other people? What happens when the commanding officer has been traumatised into a brutal set of beliefs during an earlier war, how does that influence how she commands her ship? How does the commanding officer’s behaviour influence the behaviour of her junior officers, even when she’s gone? I liked in particular the closing speech by Admiral Adama, comparing how the two Battlestar commanding officers behaved after the annihilation by the Cylons. Both Battlestars thought they were the sole surviving Battlestar, the difference being whereas the Pegasus did not immediately have any civilian ships with them, Galactica did and that responsibility, along with the fact that Admiral Adama’s son was onboard, to paraphrase the speech to his son “I could have made some decisions, but the knowledge that I would have had to look you in the face the next day stopped me”, made Admiral Adama behave far more decently than Admiral Cain.