Laura Gave Me All Her Stuff
I mentioned a couple of days ago that I had managed to get my hands on some props belonging to Laura Roslin herself. My awesome buddy, Bexy, (thank you again, hon!) sold me Laura's Moving Boxes, which she originally purchased during the BSG auctions held a while back. I don't have everything that was in that lot, as a few bits had already been sold on to other people, but I have a good chunk of it now, and I am a little bit overexcited by it.
I thought those of you on my f-list who are Laura fans (and possibly everyone else too) might like to take a closer look at the personal effects of Madam President. These are the personal possessions that sustained the Most Important Woman in the Universe for three years, folks. Get prepared for overwhelming jealousy. I certainly had to.
These are the boxes themselves, shown in the 'weird without them here' scene between Lee and Kara in Revelations. I currently only possess one of the actual boxes as I couldn't carry them both on the train home, but I'll get the other one sooner or later.
And here's a few close ups. As you can see, Laura nicked these boxes from the Galactica Records Division. As an archivist, I am completely used to people wandering into our office asking for archive boxes to put random crap in, so I vouch for the authenticity of this completely!
I'd love to know who ran the Galactica Records Division and what the hell they kept in it. I might write fic. "A Day in the Life of the Battlestar Galactica archivist". I reckon Laura spent a lot of time hanging out there, being nosy.
Now for the fun stuff.
Laura Roslin's Magic Mirror
This can be seen a lot in the background of any scene that takes place in Laura's Colonial One bedroom. She's looking into it whilst teasing Billy about his lack of knowledge about women in Water, and it crops up in lots of other scenes on one of her various dressers. It's going on my dressing table now, in the hopes that using her Magic Mirror will grant me awesome hair and the ability to age backwards the way she does. Or maybe she'll start talking to me through it ... what? Oh, this isn't Harry Potter? Dammit.
The Cylon Hairbrush of Epicness
Why is this a cylon hairbrush, you might ask?
Well, as you can see above, in two screencaps from the 'not that kind of a shot' scene in Six Degrees of Separation, this hairbrush has many copies. It is miraculously sitting on the little dresser next to Laura, AND on her dressing table behind Cottle's shoulder AT THE SAME TIME. Dun dun DUUUUN.
How did this come about? Well, as we all know, Doral spent a bit of time on Colonial One prior to his jettisoning at Ragnar. Well-groomed as he obviously always was, he had a hairbrush on his person at all times, but in his haste to find a way to neutralise the horrifying threat of Being Told What To Do By Miss Roslin, he left it in the small Colonial One bathroom. Laura found it and starting using it. She knows it's a cylon hairbrush, she knows it's spawning multiple copies, but she figures that she needs all the help she can get to tame the Hair of Awesomeness, so she's quite happy about that fact. Always a brush about when you need one.
Bottles of Goop
I think this is shampoo, shower gel and body lotion, but I haven't actually tested it.
For those of you who like to know these kinds of detail for fic, Laura Roslin smelled mostly of vanilla and coconut. It's quite yummy actually.
These were manufactured out of algae after Laura Roslin almost had a meltdown and nuked the Astral Queen on a really, really bad hair day. It was decided that all work on cylon testing and food manufacturing should stop in the science labs until someone, somewhere, managed to develop a decent substitute for shampoo and conditioner. Once discovered, Laura went back to her usual happy-go-lucky self (whut? No, I am not living in a parallel universe), and the fleet breathed a collective sigh of relief.
The other little bottle is tangerine scented shower gel. She nicked it from a hotel at some point and it was in her overnight bag when she travelled to the decommissioning, but she doesn't really like the smell of tangerine so she never used it. She was considering trading it for ear plugs to combat Bill's snoring.
All The Nail Polish in the Universe
Clearly Laura was planning to go on somewhere immediately after the decommissioning was over, because I cannot fathom otherwise why she needed to bring three bottles of brightly coloured nail polish to an event at which she didn't wear ANY.
She never really used them once on board Colonial One because she’d forgotten to bring any nail polish remover with her and decided going around with chipped nail polish wasn’t very presidential. She occasionally used to paint her toenails, however, particularly in season one where no one ever saw her feet. Except Billy, because she used to walk about barefoot when it was just the two of them in the office and she could finally kick off her heels, but he knew nothing about women so she just told him chipped toenail polish was a fashion statement.
(I am very tempted to use these, just so I can say I did)
The Everlasting Shaving Foam Can
This purple-capped can of shaving foam is in every screen cap ever. Seriously. This and the mirror crop up everywhere.
Like here.
And here.
And lots of other places.
Clearly Laura rarely needed to shave her legs, because she managed to make this can last for at least two years.
Super Strength Styling Cream
This must be the magical product that allowed Laura to have Charlie's Angels hair throughout most of season one. Once it ran out in season two, she had to stop with the flickiness and go back to something a little less seventies. Which is a bit of a shame as I like the Uber-flicky Hair of Mutiny.
Bill Adama's Cologne
You may think that Laura has this because she just loves the way Bill smells, and she likes to sniff it when he’s not around to remind herself of him.
You’d be wrong. (Well, not entirely wrong because that's part of it, but...)
She stole it and hid it away so as to stop him drinking it. Or Saul Tigh drinking it. Or Ellen Tigh drinking it. Or the three of them getting together and having a cocktail party with this and some anti-freeze. She occasionally gets it out and lets him use it on date night, but then secretes it away again, and Bill is well aware she'll knee-cap him if he tries to find it so he hasn't bothered.
Make-Up
We've got pink and red lipstick, a red lipliner pencil, blush, and some black liquid eyeliner here.
I think she used the eyeliner mainly for painting fake tattoos on herself in the hopes that catching a glimpse of one might send Bill into a haze of lust. It didn't work. Ancient Tauron was never her best language and what she thought was a line from an epic Tauron love poem actually said "please can you tell me the way to the bus station?". Bill didn't stop laughing for a week.
Random Cosmetics of Randomness
I have no idea what these are. The two little pots are sealed and I haven't opened them yet, so maybe Laura had no idea what they were either and was too afraid to find out. Maybe they were left on board Colonial One after the exodus from New Caprica, and she has no desire whatsoever to discover what kind of tubs of goop Baltar might have needed, so she's just not touched them in case they were infectious.
Maybe some kind of face scrub and moisturiser or something?
Cards and Envelopes
She used to use these, originally, to write secret hatemail to Gaius Baltar, along with little drawings of nooses and airlocks, and she’d have Billy slip them under his door. Once he joined the Quorum, though, he eventually started to recognise her handwriting, and she had to stop.
Then she got a twelve year old penpal on one of the other ships, and they used to write each other long letters about how hot Lee Adama and Sam Anders and Karl Agathon were, only she got caught by Bill and he confiscated her writing materials. She's only just got them back.
Radio
There used to be headphones with this. During long, boring Quorum meetings, Laura would slip the earphones into her ears, hidden by her hair, and catch up on the latest celebrity news, music and gossip on the fleetwide pirate radio stations. She had a particular fondness for a algae-based cookery show on a Thursday afternoon, which Zarek realised after a while, and he used to try to slip all kinds of proposals under her nose whilst her attention was wandering. Tory, however, let nothing past. so he gave up after a while, and just started asking Laura to let him try whatever concoctions she decided to attempt.
Business Card Holder
Tory gave her this, along with a pile of business cards to hand out to people. Laura pointed out that it was hardly likely there was anyone left in the fleet who didn't know who she was and how to contact her, and used all the cards to make paper airplanes. Tory was not amused.
Books
This is a blank notepad, a blank address book (well, it wasn’t really that necessary to write people’s addresses down at this point - she just kept it so she’d have one available when they reached Earth), the Book of Knowledge and the Textbook of Anatomy and Physiology. The first was the Colonial version of the Kama Sutra, just so you know. I’m not sure whether Laura kept the second one for Bill-related reasons, or so she’d know the best places to secretly kick Gaius Baltar and Lee Adama where it wouldn’t show.
Compact Mirror
The mirror is loose and fell out during the firefight on Kobol where Tom Zarek saved her life and then tried to cop a feel. She was extremely pissed off about that for the rest of the trip, until she got back to Galactica, saw how bedraggled she looked, and decided she was quite pleased she hadn't know what she looked like.
Floppy Discs
Why would a woman who can't work a tape recorder and doesn't appear to own a computer have floppy discs, you might ask?
These are her secret copies of the photo Shelley Godfrey brought onboard. She's been secretly hanging out in the Galactica computer labs and desperately trying to figure out a way to use it to incriminate Baltar ever since, but her Photoshop skills are about as good as her audio-visual equipment skills, so the photos on the discs currently look a little bit like someone vomited on the screen.
She's too embarrassed to show anyone.
The Wicker Basket
Which I think you can see here
Left over from a gift basket bribe the Picon delegate attempted to give her somewhere near the beginning of the journey. It was full of chocolate. It didn't stay full of chocolate for long.
And there we go. Wealth and riches, I'm sure you'd agree!
(I have been playing with this stuff all week. I am ridiculous.)
I thought those of you on my f-list who are Laura fans (and possibly everyone else too) might like to take a closer look at the personal effects of Madam President. These are the personal possessions that sustained the Most Important Woman in the Universe for three years, folks. Get prepared for overwhelming jealousy. I certainly had to.
These are the boxes themselves, shown in the 'weird without them here' scene between Lee and Kara in Revelations. I currently only possess one of the actual boxes as I couldn't carry them both on the train home, but I'll get the other one sooner or later.
And here's a few close ups. As you can see, Laura nicked these boxes from the Galactica Records Division. As an archivist, I am completely used to people wandering into our office asking for archive boxes to put random crap in, so I vouch for the authenticity of this completely!
I'd love to know who ran the Galactica Records Division and what the hell they kept in it. I might write fic. "A Day in the Life of the Battlestar Galactica archivist". I reckon Laura spent a lot of time hanging out there, being nosy.
Now for the fun stuff.
Laura Roslin's Magic Mirror
This can be seen a lot in the background of any scene that takes place in Laura's Colonial One bedroom. She's looking into it whilst teasing Billy about his lack of knowledge about women in Water, and it crops up in lots of other scenes on one of her various dressers. It's going on my dressing table now, in the hopes that using her Magic Mirror will grant me awesome hair and the ability to age backwards the way she does. Or maybe she'll start talking to me through it ... what? Oh, this isn't Harry Potter? Dammit.
The Cylon Hairbrush of Epicness
Why is this a cylon hairbrush, you might ask?
Well, as you can see above, in two screencaps from the 'not that kind of a shot' scene in Six Degrees of Separation, this hairbrush has many copies. It is miraculously sitting on the little dresser next to Laura, AND on her dressing table behind Cottle's shoulder AT THE SAME TIME. Dun dun DUUUUN.
How did this come about? Well, as we all know, Doral spent a bit of time on Colonial One prior to his jettisoning at Ragnar. Well-groomed as he obviously always was, he had a hairbrush on his person at all times, but in his haste to find a way to neutralise the horrifying threat of Being Told What To Do By Miss Roslin, he left it in the small Colonial One bathroom. Laura found it and starting using it. She knows it's a cylon hairbrush, she knows it's spawning multiple copies, but she figures that she needs all the help she can get to tame the Hair of Awesomeness, so she's quite happy about that fact. Always a brush about when you need one.
Bottles of Goop
I think this is shampoo, shower gel and body lotion, but I haven't actually tested it.
For those of you who like to know these kinds of detail for fic, Laura Roslin smelled mostly of vanilla and coconut. It's quite yummy actually.
These were manufactured out of algae after Laura Roslin almost had a meltdown and nuked the Astral Queen on a really, really bad hair day. It was decided that all work on cylon testing and food manufacturing should stop in the science labs until someone, somewhere, managed to develop a decent substitute for shampoo and conditioner. Once discovered, Laura went back to her usual happy-go-lucky self (whut? No, I am not living in a parallel universe), and the fleet breathed a collective sigh of relief.
The other little bottle is tangerine scented shower gel. She nicked it from a hotel at some point and it was in her overnight bag when she travelled to the decommissioning, but she doesn't really like the smell of tangerine so she never used it. She was considering trading it for ear plugs to combat Bill's snoring.
All The Nail Polish in the Universe
Clearly Laura was planning to go on somewhere immediately after the decommissioning was over, because I cannot fathom otherwise why she needed to bring three bottles of brightly coloured nail polish to an event at which she didn't wear ANY.
She never really used them once on board Colonial One because she’d forgotten to bring any nail polish remover with her and decided going around with chipped nail polish wasn’t very presidential. She occasionally used to paint her toenails, however, particularly in season one where no one ever saw her feet. Except Billy, because she used to walk about barefoot when it was just the two of them in the office and she could finally kick off her heels, but he knew nothing about women so she just told him chipped toenail polish was a fashion statement.
(I am very tempted to use these, just so I can say I did)
The Everlasting Shaving Foam Can
This purple-capped can of shaving foam is in every screen cap ever. Seriously. This and the mirror crop up everywhere.
Like here.
And here.
And lots of other places.
Clearly Laura rarely needed to shave her legs, because she managed to make this can last for at least two years.
Super Strength Styling Cream
This must be the magical product that allowed Laura to have Charlie's Angels hair throughout most of season one. Once it ran out in season two, she had to stop with the flickiness and go back to something a little less seventies. Which is a bit of a shame as I like the Uber-flicky Hair of Mutiny.
Bill Adama's Cologne
You may think that Laura has this because she just loves the way Bill smells, and she likes to sniff it when he’s not around to remind herself of him.
You’d be wrong. (Well, not entirely wrong because that's part of it, but...)
She stole it and hid it away so as to stop him drinking it. Or Saul Tigh drinking it. Or Ellen Tigh drinking it. Or the three of them getting together and having a cocktail party with this and some anti-freeze. She occasionally gets it out and lets him use it on date night, but then secretes it away again, and Bill is well aware she'll knee-cap him if he tries to find it so he hasn't bothered.
Make-Up
We've got pink and red lipstick, a red lipliner pencil, blush, and some black liquid eyeliner here.
I think she used the eyeliner mainly for painting fake tattoos on herself in the hopes that catching a glimpse of one might send Bill into a haze of lust. It didn't work. Ancient Tauron was never her best language and what she thought was a line from an epic Tauron love poem actually said "please can you tell me the way to the bus station?". Bill didn't stop laughing for a week.
Random Cosmetics of Randomness
I have no idea what these are. The two little pots are sealed and I haven't opened them yet, so maybe Laura had no idea what they were either and was too afraid to find out. Maybe they were left on board Colonial One after the exodus from New Caprica, and she has no desire whatsoever to discover what kind of tubs of goop Baltar might have needed, so she's just not touched them in case they were infectious.
Maybe some kind of face scrub and moisturiser or something?
Cards and Envelopes
She used to use these, originally, to write secret hatemail to Gaius Baltar, along with little drawings of nooses and airlocks, and she’d have Billy slip them under his door. Once he joined the Quorum, though, he eventually started to recognise her handwriting, and she had to stop.
Then she got a twelve year old penpal on one of the other ships, and they used to write each other long letters about how hot Lee Adama and Sam Anders and Karl Agathon were, only she got caught by Bill and he confiscated her writing materials. She's only just got them back.
Radio
There used to be headphones with this. During long, boring Quorum meetings, Laura would slip the earphones into her ears, hidden by her hair, and catch up on the latest celebrity news, music and gossip on the fleetwide pirate radio stations. She had a particular fondness for a algae-based cookery show on a Thursday afternoon, which Zarek realised after a while, and he used to try to slip all kinds of proposals under her nose whilst her attention was wandering. Tory, however, let nothing past. so he gave up after a while, and just started asking Laura to let him try whatever concoctions she decided to attempt.
Business Card Holder
Tory gave her this, along with a pile of business cards to hand out to people. Laura pointed out that it was hardly likely there was anyone left in the fleet who didn't know who she was and how to contact her, and used all the cards to make paper airplanes. Tory was not amused.
Books
This is a blank notepad, a blank address book (well, it wasn’t really that necessary to write people’s addresses down at this point - she just kept it so she’d have one available when they reached Earth), the Book of Knowledge and the Textbook of Anatomy and Physiology. The first was the Colonial version of the Kama Sutra, just so you know. I’m not sure whether Laura kept the second one for Bill-related reasons, or so she’d know the best places to secretly kick Gaius Baltar and Lee Adama where it wouldn’t show.
Compact Mirror
The mirror is loose and fell out during the firefight on Kobol where Tom Zarek saved her life and then tried to cop a feel. She was extremely pissed off about that for the rest of the trip, until she got back to Galactica, saw how bedraggled she looked, and decided she was quite pleased she hadn't know what she looked like.
Floppy Discs
Why would a woman who can't work a tape recorder and doesn't appear to own a computer have floppy discs, you might ask?
These are her secret copies of the photo Shelley Godfrey brought onboard. She's been secretly hanging out in the Galactica computer labs and desperately trying to figure out a way to use it to incriminate Baltar ever since, but her Photoshop skills are about as good as her audio-visual equipment skills, so the photos on the discs currently look a little bit like someone vomited on the screen.
She's too embarrassed to show anyone.
The Wicker Basket
Which I think you can see here
Left over from a gift basket bribe the Picon delegate attempted to give her somewhere near the beginning of the journey. It was full of chocolate. It didn't stay full of chocolate for long.
And there we go. Wealth and riches, I'm sure you'd agree!
(I have been playing with this stuff all week. I am ridiculous.)