Answers the First!

OK, time to get started! As always, Roger is in the leadoff spot:

What do you think is your worst vice? Do you just live with it, or do you want to change?

Either my tendency to swear a lot, or my sweet tooth. Definitely one of those two things. I tend to have pretty good control over my swearing, although sometimes I’m reminded of this exchange from The Simpsons:

HOMER: Think you can cut out the casual swearing?
BART: Hell, no!

I do try to limit swearing in front of people to folks I know who won’t be offended, because people are. But that’s only for the biggies — which mainly consists of, well, the F-bomb. Everything else — damn, hell, shit — those are all on the table. (Oh, there’s one that I simply don’t use at all, because it offends nearly every woman on the planet, and frankly, it’s a pretty mean-spirited word.) Generally, though, swearing is probably my worst habit, outside of my tendency to eat ALL THE SWEET THINGS. I try to limit that as well, but it’s all so good!

Oh, one more thing about swearing: I like to deploy fictional expletives as well, such as “Frakking”, and I may try to add more elaborate ones in the future, like Ron Burgundy’s “By the Hammer of Thor!” and “Great Odin’s raven!” That’s kind of fun. Or “Excrementum!” Generally I think that we give words too much power to offend or otherwise affect our emotional state. To me, just being in the presence of someone who is foul-mouthed isn’t offensive in itself, but it can put on display a certain level of unsensitivity that can be boorish.

I do recall one day in high school when I swore without realizing a teacher was behind me. The teacher yelled at me, right there in the hallway, for the sin of swearing “in mixed company”. Funny thing? The girls who were there were every bit as foul-mouthed as I was at that time.

And looking down Roger’s list of questions this time ’round, I see that answer knocks off two! He also asked: How do you feel about swearing? Is it that they’re “just words” or do words have the power to offend, hurt, et al? Do you have any euphemisms for curse words, such as Zounds or jeepers creepers?

Huzzah, a two-fer!

Josh asks: If you could be the captain of any starship in the Star Trek universe, which ship would it be and why?

I don’t think I’d want to be Captain! Helmsman, though — oh yeah, that would be cool. Or whoever it is that gets to fire the phasers and photon torpedoes. (Why is it in Star Trek II that Sulu, the helmsman, fires the phasers, but there’s a whole separate “weapons console” where the photon torpedoes are launched? What’s that about? Any why, on the Enterprise D, are the weapons fired by the one member of the bridge crew who is standing, and who is thus most likely to be thrown from their post when the shit starts gettin’ real?!)

Anyway, yeah: Helmsman’s where the action is. Now, which ship? Well, I’m generally of the view that the ships of the first six Trek movies are the niftiest. I just think they look great; the Star Trek The Motion Picture Enterprise, followed by the Enterprise A up to Star Trek VI, is my favorite Enterprise at all. The Enterprise D, from The Next Generation, is strange in that it looks fantastic from some angles but awful from others, and the Enterprise E is just too warshippy for me. It looks like the Enterprise A made love to a Star Destroyer from Star Wars, and their union produced the Enterprise E.

For this question, though, the Enterprise is a pretty obvious answer. I’d pick either the Reliant, or that tough little underrated ship from Deep Space Nine, the Defiant.

“Warp Nine, Mr. Sedinger!”
“Aye, Captain!”

Yeah, that would be pretty fun.

More to come, and feel free to ask questions still!

Share This Post