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TV: Reviewing _Sliders_ (1995-2000). Oh, and charities are annoying.
Mon, 17 Oct 2005

I surprised my wife the other day with a DVD pack of Sliders seasons 1 and 2. While most of you no doubt don't recall the show, it was one of her favourites (and I've fond memories of it as well!) Of course, my memory has never been that reliable in the long term (I thought Clash of the Titans was great when I was a kid.. but _damn_ thats some nasty to see now ;) - so I wasn't really sure if it'd survived the ravages of time. I ordered a copy of Buck Rogers in the 25th century with Gil Gerard (and Erin Gray, oh baby) at the same time and took in some Buck Rogers, MacGyver and Sliders all in a row...

And you know, Sliders is amazing stuff (the others are classic 80s junk as well .. loved, but really bad ;) Sliders had a very troubled time, switching between networks that didn't quite understand its eggheaded science fiction approach to old fashioned stories, being put up against winning shows, being cancelled and brought back a few times.. amazing the show lasted at all. The first two seasons are fantastic stuff, with charm and whit and.. most importantly, fun and interesting plotlines.

The story revolved around a young genius who developed a wormhole technology (by accident of goofing up building an anti-gravity device), and draws himself and some friends into alternate dimensions of the same Earth.. with no ability to get back. Each episode they slide to another Earth.. same place, same year, but where each planets timelines varied a little from ours. In one, women were the dominent sex (a la men in the 50s), while in another the Nazis had won World War 2, while yet in another smart folks were like sports heros. Tongue in cheek, but fun and interesting.

After a couple of seasons, someone decided they needed a villain.. instead of just trying to locate their home permutation of events, they'd also locate an alien species who also had slider technology and would chase them from existance to existance. Not too bad, but with the show swapping networks and who knows what going on, the actors started dropping out and eventually it fell to mediocrity. (Lead characters being replaced by 'their brother' and other silliness.) Still, in its prime the show was classy stuff.. at least for television prime time science fiction.

Charitable charities?

I'm a fan of charities. We've done halfway right in our lives so we like to give a little here and there to those who've had it harder than us.. and really, I've always tried to help a little ($50, $100 maybe. A little here or there is better than nothing at all, right?) here and there when I could (though usually in the past that just meant giving out candies to street-people on Halloween, which is probably not such a good idea :P I suppose heading down to the soup kitchen is a real investment, in time, but I've not done it.. I do feal a little guilty there.) Anyway, every year for the last 5 or 8, we've kicked in some here or there every few months.. for cancer research, asthma research, various children funds, heart disease research, etc... and some big lumps to the Tsunami Relief, and to help those in Louisiana etc. (People did scoff at that.. the US being the richest country in the world and all. But obviously their government couldn't help, right ;)

But you know whats a kick in the teeth? Every charity that catches wind of someone plops them into a database called "Suckers" for sharing with every other charity. We get phone calls every week, letters in the mail _every day_ begging for money from us .. to any number of charities, and we didn't get these before.. and others don't seem to get them as much as we do. We signed up once to support some families in Honduras or somewhere and got pictures of some cute little girl (I gave to my wife as a gift!), and that was nice (though I'd have rathered they kept the picture and letters from her, so they'd save some money. I know they're just trying to hook people with an emotional context, but its too transparent for me.) But once we hooked up with that, they spammed us.. essentially harassed us until we were so annoyed we quit support for them in total disgust. Maybe they'd have been better off saving money on envelopes and postage and phone-people and iving it to those in Honduras who survived the mudslide?

I almost regret having given to the charities, for the organizations are evil; they've no respect for privacy or a gift -- do they even exist to help people, or just to feed their own corporate gluttony, suffering the needy only as much as the need them to get more money? They're vultures, evil organizations who waste money to throw big galla parties with limos for famous people.. rather than save their... _our_... pennies.

Makes me sick.

We still give to charities, but less than we would; every day we get these letters from them (and from Sith-realtors!) and it annoys me. Maybe they'd get more charity if they weren't such bastards?

Edit: Found this link; so United Way blows away 20% on expenses? Feh.

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