Getting Physical

I had my regular check-up last week and an additional blood draw, and the consensus was that there's no cause for alarm, but I really need to get back in the habit of exercising regularly again. So, I've been experimenting with fitting an hour or so of walking around the neighborhood into my schedule somehow.

Generally, that's been going pretty well. The blisters aside, the walks themselves are nice. The weather has been mild, and I just listen to audio books I've been meaning to read anyway. But my body has its ways of telling me that this is a pretty dramatic change in routine and that it will take time for it to adjust to them. I've been tired earlier in the evening, less prone to getting up at 5 on the dot, and just a bit more distracted by hunger throughout the day. Eventually, I'll find some equilibrium, but the important thing at the moment is to rearrange my routine to accommodate these walks.

At least until Minnesota winter slams down like a fist and I scamper indoors to ride on my exercise bike, instead.

My TV group is currently working through The Foundation. Its premise is based on the celebrated Asimov series of the same name, but that's pretty much where the similarities end. We're enjoying it, mind you. If the adaptation had been too faithful, it would get through the whole book series by the end of the first season, and we can't be having that. It's Foundation fanfic, yes, but it's good fanfic, so I'm willing to forgive that.

Given that the story arc nominally spans centuries, you'd think it would have a problem with needing to replace actors constantly, but it has a couple of cheats to make sure key characters can show up again and again. Good old cryogenic stasis plays a role here (despite not being a technology available in the books and one that would have disrupted their premise), but what they do with the emperors is just amazing and exactly the sort of hare-brained cloning nonsense you'd expect from an egotistical emperor bent on extending his rule into infinity - at once a triumvirate and a dictatorship.

I think my main gripe so far is that, in an effort to keep their best actors around, they've kind of lost track of the fact that the whole point of the Seldon Plan is that no one person directs it or is essential to it. The Great Man Theory is alive and well in this story about the inevitable progression of history. Asimov himself rode that line carefully. You can't very well have a story in which nobody is important; even plot-driven sci-fi requires some likable (or at least interesting) characters the audience can root for. But Salvor Hardin's mysterious immunity to the Vault's weird knock-out magic is such a shameless plot device that it throws into doubt the whole premise of psychohistory and cheapens Salvor's character. And maybe the show will eventually get around to explaining how that could be predicted by a statistical analysis of trillions of people, but I fear the writers thought Salvor just needed some superpowers to make it clear to the audience that she's a main character (I am, however, loving the gender-swapping of some key characters, given that the books barely had any women in them and certainly none that weren't present solely by dint of their connection to an important male character).

It's a pretty sci-fi show and an interesting one, but it's a loose adaptation of a book series that was published 75 years ago, and that shows - sometimes in ways I don't quite like. I'm willing to keep watching, though.