Today’s article is a guest post by Pez Minotaur. You can check out his old LiveJournal here, but these days he just writes an article for the Big Bad Blog once every few months.

Today he looks at Star Wars. Pez’s opinions are his own, and do not necessarily reflect those of the blog.

I am a big fan of science fiction, and tend to enjoy most science fiction. I feel that statement is not redundant because we all know people who use being a fan of science fiction as an excuse to hate most science fiction. Whether or not science fiction is good or bad tends to have little effect on whether or not I enjoy it. Sometimes bad science fiction can be a lot of fun.

All that was a lead up to my next confession, I am a Star Wars fan. I can say unashamed that I enjoy watching all six Star Wars films, and yes there are six. We can’t exclude films from the franchise just because they disappointed us. For anyone reading this at home, whose blood pressure is going up after reading the starting of this paragraph, I have some homework for you. I did something similar to this on a ski vacation many years ago.

Step one is to watch Armageddon and The Core, and try and point out all of the bad writing and scientific impossibilities in these movies.

This is a warm up round. It is good to stretch before exercise. Also coincidentally this is also part of the NASA management training program. Seriously, Wikipedia said so.

Step two, now that you are warmed up, watch Star Wars Episodes I, II, and III, doing the same thing. Point out all the bad writing, bad science, and if you wish, bad acting. At this point if you wanted to you can start keeping some kind of score but it isn’t necessary.

Step three is the important part. Now that you have built up all this hostility watch Star Wars Episodes IV, V, and VI. You have to let yourself go and allow yourself to mock a childhood icon, but it won’t be hard because you prepared for it. Once you start pointing out all of the bad writing, bad acting, and bad science in them you will
realize two things. First they never were that great, they were good and fun to watch, but not worth of the esteem you held them too.

Second you will realize that when compared back to back the prequel trilogy isn’t that bad.

I do realize that I have just asked you to watch 8 movies, and if we assume an average of about 2 hours that is 16 hours. So you should break it up over a long weekend or something, but it is important to watch all 8 movies within a relatively short time span otherwise you lose your critical momentum.

Now everything I have said so far is not what I wanted to talk about. All of that was to set up how I quantifiably and dispassionately rated the Star Wars movies so I could answer a question.

Who was the coolest Jedi?

Here is how the ranking was arrived at. The first criterion is how many movies the character appears in, a number between 1 and 6. The second criterion is in how many of those appearances was the character cool, another number between 0 and the number of appearances. The number off cool appearances is divided by the total number of appearances to determine their cool percent. Then you take this list and put it into order twice. The first time based on the number of cool appearances, and then assign each character a rank. The second time based on the cool percent, and again assign each character a rank. Take these two ranks and added them together, a number theoretically between 2 and something much higher. Finally take your list of characters and rank them based on this sum to give you an accurately weighted list of how cool your favourite Jedi are. I did this and got this result.

The definitive number one was Obi Wan Kenobi. He was the only character in the franchise to have six appearances and always be cool.

Second place was a four way tie between, Yoda, Darth Vader, The Emperor, and Mace Windu. All very cool guys.

Third place is a tie between Qui-Gon Jinn and Darth Maul. Also cool dudes, but lost points for only having one appearance in the series.

Fourth, fifth and sixth places are filled out with Count Dooku, Luke Skywalker, and Anakin Skywalker respectively. Now it is important to note I prepared this list twice. One time with Anakin Skywalker and Darth Vader scored together, and a second time scoring them separately. I liked it a bit better scoring them separately, the alternative brings Vader down two spots and Anakin up two where they meet in fourth place. Also although Luke Skywalker does appear in Episode III he is a baby and cannot be judged and either being cool or not. Hence he is only credited with 3 appearances. However further analysis has revealed that if you do making his total appearances 4, he was still only cool once so his rank does not change.

Disagree that Episodes I-III are that good? That Episodes IV-VI are that bad? With the Jedi Cool Metric?

Let us know in the comments!

[Today's article is final part of a four-part guest blog by pez_minotaur, and provides a chronicle of his adventures in the Galapagos islands with his wife, Ravynne. You can read part 1 here, part 2 here and part 3 here.]

Once again we come back to Day 2, snorkelling at North Seymour Island. You may remember it from Part two where there was the sea lion encounter. These events happened just before that. The plan was for everyone to leave in the two smaller boats, get dropped off and have the currents take us back to the main boat. I was in the lead boat, and spent the ride getting my mask and fins ready. As a result we got to the drop point, and I flipped over the side into the water. While sitting in the water waiting for Ravynne to get her stuff ready the current carried me away from my boat and towards the second boat. When I was about halfway between the two our guide, who was on the second boat, started yelling and pointing. I looked where he was pointing just in time to see a whale’s tale dip below the surface. Excited at the chance to see a whale, I yelled to my boat and just said “WHALE” and pointed. When I turned to look to make sure I was pointing in the right direction when the whale jumped out of the water. Once I could see it I recognized it’s distinct black and what pattern. It was a Killer Whale. I tried diving underwater to see what they look like below the surface, but the water was too murky to see it at that distance. So I did what I believe anyone would have done. I started swimming as hard as I could towards it to get a closer look. This produced some disbelief from the other members of my boat, specifically in the form of a cry from one of the women “What the hell is he doing swimming at the whale?”. The women wasn’t Ravynne, she is used to my antics by now. I did manage to get a closer look at the whale on the surface, but it was too far away moving too fast for me to get close enough to see it under water. However the people who stayed behind in my boat got a pretty close look as it dove under the boat, but only I got to say I swam with Killer Whales in the wild.

Biology Interlude: I realize that I was more likely to be attacked by the sharks than the whales, but since the whales are predators of sharks I think they deserve top spot on the danger scale. Also if the whale had decided to eat me, I’m pretty sure it would have succeeded. The shark wasn’t that big and I might have been able to get away if it felt like eating me.

[Today's article is the third of a four-part guest blog by pez_minotaur, and provides a chronicle of his adventures in the Galapagos islands with his wife, Ravynne. You can read part 1 here and part 2 here.]

It was a day like any other. I was snorkelling in the Galapagos at the Devil’s Crown. The Devil’s Crown is just a bunch of pointy rocks in a circle that stick out of ocean. There is a pretty strong ocean current that goes west past them. Our boat dropped us off on the east side of the Crown, the current carried us to the west side where the boat picked us up again. Earlier I had mentioned that I was a scuba diver and the response I got was “Yeah, we can tell”. When I asked how they could tell they said that I could dive deeper and hold my breath longer than anyone else on the boat. We were snorkelling in a large group of about 10 or so people, and our guide pointed said that there were sharks down bellow that underwater ridge. I couldn’t see them from the surface so I dove down the 15 or 20 feet to where the ridge was to take a look. When I got down there, there were indeed two sharks chilling in the shade under this ridge. Now there are three types of sharks in the Galapagos, Hammerheads, White Tip Reef Sharks, and Galapagos Sharks. All I can say for sure was they were not Hammerheads. I couldn’t make out the white tips, so they could have been Galapagos sharks, or it just could have been bad lighting. Now by the time I got back to the surface almost all of the group had moved on. The only person left watching me swim with sharks was Meredith, a nice woman from Australia, who seemed to be the only other person interested in the sharks. After a few more dives to look at the sharks we caught up with the rest of the group and continued to enjoy our snorkel.

Epilogue: If you are still reading this series of me swimming with danger you may have noticed that we are only at part three of four and we are all the way up to sharks. What you should be asking is “What is worse than sharks?” Tune in next time to find out.

[Today's article is the second of a four-part guest blog by pez_minotaur, and provides a chronicle of his adventures in the Galapagos islands with his wife, Ravynne. You can read part 1 here.]

Okay I know Sea Lions are only slightly more dangerous than turtles because the alpha males have a history of biting tourists to defend their turf, but trust me the danger level is increasing at logarithmic rate. Parts one and two seem like not much, but three and four will be more dangerous I promise.

At this point I would like to mention something about Galapagos wildlife in general. With the exception of alpha male sea lions none of the animals seem to have much of an interest in humans. Pretty much everything we saw, and I took pictures of, I was standing within arms reach and the animal didn’t care. That is actually how Boobies got their name. It was Spanish slang at the time for “dummies”, because the early Spanish sailors were able to walk up to Boobies, catch them by hand, take them back to the ship, cook them and eat them. It was said they were too dumb to fly away.

The sea lions on land mostly just lounged around sunning themselves by the shore. In the water they streaked along catching fish and playing with snorkelling humans. The first thing we did on our first day was go snorkelling with sea lions. I was swimming along and one came right up in my face, a few inches from my mask, checked me out and then swam off. It kinda freaked me out because it was really close and I didn’t know what it was going to do, but in the end we were friends.

On day two at North Seymour Island there was another snorkel. I was playing with a school of fish, because if you just lazily float by the fish tend to ignore you, but if you quickly swim at them they think you are a predator and run. I was chasing them to make them run when all of a sudden they all at once turned and charged back at me. I had just enough time to think they were dumb fish before the school parted and revealed the sea lion charging them down from the other direction. Now I am going to say that I didn’t scream like a girl, largely because I was about fifteen feet underwater and no one heard it. Again kinda scary to have it shooting right at me.