Once again a wild and crazy missive from our friend writer/designer Scott Turner who runs the pub quiz at Rocky Sullivan's every Thursday night (there's one tonight!).

Greetings, Pub Quiz Superlucky Charmers…

Happy day after St. Patrick's Day. 
This e-mail is late — could be the week's worth of St. Pat's revelry. 
It might be beyond my purview to divulge the exact reasons for this Quizmail's tardyness.

BONUS POINTS FLASH QUIZ:  If your team can answer this at tomorrow evening's Quiz, you earn five (5) points at the outset:

What city did this St. Patrick's Day decidedly lack-of-celebration take place in yesterday?

Now, wordiness…

It's not often one can predict a death in the family, but there's one coming up this Friday evening.

…and no, it's not another sad observance of Shea Stadium's
demise — which, unbelievably, keeps demising.  Earlier this week, the
littlest and last remaining Shea — the model that's sat in the Queens Museum of Art — was taken away. [The Queens Museum, by the way, resides in the former New York City Pavilion from the 1939 and 1964 World's Fairs — a building that also housed the UN in its early days.]

Nestled right where it was in real life, the little Shea could be spotted from the balconies that overlook the New York City Panorama, a scale model of every building, park, road and contour in the five boroughs.

space-age, schmace-age — contrivance is the new adventurousness

Much like census takings, the Panorama updates itself after lengthy intervals.  It's a big job, one can imagine.  The Giuliani/Bloomberg
orgy of big-developer steamrolling will only make this a tougher task
in the years to come.  That the Queens Museum of Art is selling naming
rights to each of these little models and even littler components
makesthe tough task sadder.  [How little can you buy naming rights
for?  According to the Daily News, for $50 you can name an apartment (!).  $250 gets you a single-family home, and for the moneybag set,  $10,000 lands you a landmarks.]

But the Museum wasted no time in removing little Shea.  You can hear Jeff Wilpon, the Mets'
owner's intemperate mercurial brattish son, berating his minions to
remove all vestiges of Shea from the city's consciousness.  To that
end, Mets officials were on hand for little Shea's removal.

But NO, this missive is not about Shea.

This death in the family comes this Friday evening, 9pm, on the Sci-Fi Channel.  (Which is renaming itself the SyFy Channel in a branding strategy known as the Treat Viewers Like Idiots Paradigm.)

Battlestar Galactica's last-ever episode.

What a frakkin' show.  Based only tangentially on the schlock-fi series from the '70s, BSG
revolutionized television, even if television doesn't know it yet. 
This has been a series filled with human frailty, the constant battle
of humanity vs. technology and the uneasy allliances we all make with
machines, the reaches both short and long of theology, and every
hot-button topic America's dealt with since the early '00s.

more popular than Jesus?  No…but it's a better story.

The acting has been stellar, from old hands Edward James Olmos and Mary McDonnell
to unknowns that are now firmly known.  The photography is cinematic, a
rare descriptive for a television show.  And the show has never fallen
off the razor's edge between making us watch uncomfortable things and
entertaining us.

The show's creator, Ronald D. Moore, has led us to humanity's cracks and fissures before — Deep Space Nine, Roswell and the extraordinary Depression-era carnival-troupe good vs.evil epic Carnivale.  BSG tops them all.

Rarer still is a multi-season
show ending right when it should.  Friday night we find out where the
last 39,000 humans came from, whether they can survive, and what it
really, really means to be human.

The
vast majority of television is junk, a somnambulant we willingly ingest
time and again.  But every so often in TV land, inexplicably, a fertile
field appears, planted with sustenance that challenges us and shakes
us.  It's a rare and good thing.

Over the past five years, Battlestar Galactica has left
viewers breathless.  That's alright.  It means we're breathing, a basic
physiology television overlords would prefer we forget forever.

What a frakkin' show…