By Your Command: A Cylon-coded fundraiser

Hey everyone! I am going to try a kind of fundraiser that is new for me. If that’s not of interest, and/or you’re only here for information related to my forthcoming Battlestar Galactica book, feel free to skip to the end for an interesting Ron Moore Fact. 

The fundraiser: I’m lucky to know the great gremlins in a group that has shipped more than one million whistles nationwide, for free, for those who want them as part of efforts to protect their communities from ICE. You can request free whistles from these excellent folks — anywhere from 100 and 3000 whistles — and get a lot more links and info at this site.

A wonderful member of the whistle mafia came up with some whistles that have a certain Cylon flavor. They’ve got black bodies, grey sides and a cool stripe down the middle. I’ve taken a few pictures of these beauties, partly because these are so pretty. Also, I just want folks to know, the stripe is red, or red with a bit of a maroon/purple tinge, depending on the light. In any case, my pals thought they looked like Cylon whistles, and I agreed! Why not use them to try to raise money for some worthy organizations? That was our thinking.

The fundraising deal is this: Send me a receipt showing you’ve donated $25 to any of the organizations below, and I’ll send you one of these whistles. It’ll be on a black lanyard and it’ll come with the whistle zine created by Teresa Magaña of Pilsen Arts and Community House, plus my eternal gratitude. Use the email moryan@duck dot com (not all spelled out like that, but you get the idea). 

For every $25, you get a whistle, so of course you can donate more money or to more than one organization. If you want to block out your contact information before you send the receipt, no worries! But if you do retain that info on the receipt, DO NOT WORRY, I will not use it in any way. My memory is not great for stuff like this, so even if you send me that kind of data, I will forget seeing it immediately, I promise.

I have temporarily opened my DMs on Bluesky and Instagram, which I regard with slightly less dread than the opening of the gates of Mordor. But nobody will make it weird, I believe this! I hope this, anyway! But the upshot is, at the moment, you can DM your receipts if you’d rather do that. 

I have a limited number of these whistles, and when they're gone, they're gone. I'll update this post and my social media when they have all flown off to explore new parts of the galaxy.

The benefiting organizations are:

• Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights. ICIRR has been doing incredible work in Chicago for a long time, but it's been especially heroic in the last year. They do trainings for ICE observers, educate communities about their rights, help folks affected by ICE and CPB, and generally have been a stalwart part of getting Illinois through this very tough time. 
• Keep Minnesota Housed. Ashley Fairbanks, the amazing person behind Stand With Minnesota, has been leading the charge when it comes to helping folks in Minneapolis stay housed (among many other things her and other volunteers are doing). I can’t thank her enough for all she’s done. Whatever the status of the federal surge in Minnesota, folks are still very much in danger of losing their housing due to lost jobs, sheltering in place and so on. 
• LA Taco: This indie publication has been doing excellent work helping communities stay informed about ICE and CBP activities in and around Los Angeles. They’re raising funds to pay for more investigative work, and they are among the many independent media sources that deserve our help. 
• Trans Continental Pipeline. This organization is helping trans folks move to greater safety, which for many of us is a huge priority under the current regime. Trans rights are human rights, always and forever.

If you participate in this fundraiser, thank you SO much, truly! 

Now, the Ron Moore Fact. I’ve interviewed him a lot recently for the Battlestar Galactica book, as you may well imagine. Of course, I’ve talked to many other folks who worked on the show as well! But during one of my chats with Ron, I asked a question that is kind of hacky. Part of the reason I went with a semi-goofy question is because every so often, he’d have to wrap up the interview, but we’d have two minutes left, so I’d ask him something out of left field. 

That said, on this question, I really did want to know the answer: What Battlestar Galactica character is he most like?

I’ve known Moore for more than 20 years at this point — I’ve been interviewing him on and off for that long. But his answer is not even remotely the one I would have guessed. Here’s what my top five guesses would have been: Laura Roslin, William Adama, Starbuck, Lee Adama, Helo. 

His answer was: Gaius Baltar! Like a good BSG plot twist, I did not see that coming. Here’s a lightly edited transcript of our exchange, during which we were laughing quite a bit:

Mo: I’m trying to think of a not terrible way to ask which character is most like you — because I think they all change and that's a good thing.

Ron: They all change. You know, I used to say for a long time that Baltar was the one that I identified with the most and thought was probably the closest to me, in a funny way. 

Mo: That’s so weird. Please, if you have 30 seconds, just expand on that. Because having known you for a while, like, obviously we’ve known each other just through professional channels. But that would not have been my first choice. Why do you say that? 

Ron: It’s the guy that’s very smart but is prone to weaknesses and is not as strong as he projects, and tries to get by in a lot of ways. And he has an actual career that has legitimacy, but you know, he is probably not as smart as you think he is — that kind of thing. There’s a certain aspect of Baltar that I always enjoyed, and I would like to think I’m as funny as Baltar, you know — that I could sort of carry it off with a certain elan. But yeah, there’s a lot of Baltar in me, for sure. 

Mo: Well, I think what I find very humanizing about him is that he’s constantly improvising on the spot to get out of a jam. And that just— I don’t know, if you’ve been in this industry or if you’re just alive… 

Ron: Yeah, me too. Getting out of a jam, trying to tap [dance] your day way out of, you know, a [sticky] situation – “Oh shit” [situations].

Mo: “I did not think this through.” 

Ron: “I did not think this through, and here I am. It’s me, it’s really on me!”

Mo: One of the very funny and enjoyable things about James' performance and that makes [Baltar] not a monster is that there are so many times where “Oh shit” just flashes across his face. Like, “I'm screwed now, ahhhgh.”

Ron [laughing]: Yep.

Thanks for reading. See you on the other side.