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October 17, 2009October 3, 2021

A few random teevee thoughts….

Just a few quick thoughts from some recent teevee viewing:

:: I understand why FOX had to do it, but geez, going from final three to the winner of Hell’s Kitchen in a single two-hour episode really seems rushed to me. In the past, the final two have had a two-hour show (or a two-parter) to themselves. (FOX’s scheduling bit the show in the arse — FOX runs the Major League Baseball playoffs, which are going on now, so it was either wrap HK up faster than usual, or have it go away for three weeks and then have the finale later on. They opted for the former, and I don’t blame them.)

:: The most recent episode of The Amazing Race had what had to be the most crushing defeat for a team in the show’s history. A team (a guy and his friend or brother, can’t recall which, who has Asperger’s) reaches the Pit Stop first — only to discover, minutes later, that they’ve lost one of their passports. This means they are no longer officially checked in, and have to go back onto the race course (which for this episode is in Cambodia) and look for the passport, find it, and then return to the Pit Stop. If they fail to get back before all other teams check in, they’re eliminated. They didn’t find the passport. Exit the team. Ouch.

(Oh, and so far, the show’s roadblocks and detours haven’t been as much fun as the more gonzo previous season, which had my two favorite tasks to date — the hauling of giant cheeses and the Austrian beer-hall pie throwing.

:: I’m enjoying Grey’s Anatomy as much as ever, although I do hope they introduce some new blood soon. The show’s ratings appear to be sliding, though. I’m not sure why.

:: I loved Jim and Pam’s wedding on The Office, but I wonder if the show isn’t reaching something of a tipping point. One of the show’s great strengths to me has been its believability, for the most part; it takes normal office dynamics and seemingly amps them up just a little, often for hilarious effect. Still, there have been moments in the show’s history that stood out as too unbelievable to swallow, and I’m seeing a trend of more of that kind of thing going on. Specifically, I hope the writers address the problem inherent in having Jim being an office manager where his wife works as a subordinate. Every company I’ve ever worked for had rules against this type of situation. We’ll see.

:: Thank God 30 Rock is back on, because that means there are two funny shows on NBC on Thursdays. Community and Parks and Recreation just don’t amuse me in the slightest, I’m sorry to say.

:: I’m noticing that, in watching reruns of The Family Guy, which The Daughter enjoys for some reason, the only times I really laugh invariably involve either Stewie or the talking dog. That’s it. Peter? Lois? The two older kids? They could vanish from the show. But Stewie and the talking dog really do amuse me with some of their antics and banter.

:: I still have yet to watch the first few episodes of House, Dollhouse, or Castle, which I hadn’t even realized had started already. Oops. I also want to look forward to 24 this year, but the way last season got started so strongly and then petered out in the last quarter of the season gives me pause. But then I’ll look into the eyes of FBI Agent Renee Walker again, and that’ll be that.

:: I renew my wish that Patrick Jane, on The Mentalist, would be completely wrong some time. I’m starting to get a bit bored by the show’s formula of unmasking the killer in Act IV, and then having Jane indicate that he figured it out way back in Act I. I also wish they’d quit having Jane be right at the expense of the wondrous-to-gaze-upon Agent Lisbon.

:: At The Store, some wonderfully benevolent soul has changed the teevees in our cafe from FOX News to the Food Network. That’s always a fine development.

The “Song of the South” could use a different lyricist.

I don’t know, folks — I just don’t get the South in this country. I don’t understand the mindset down there. In Texas, you have a state that has long been incredibly gung-ho about executing people, to the point where there’s a seriously good chance that they executed an innocent man — and not only is the Governor there trying to cover this up by firing the people whose job it is to investigate it, but the person from his own party who is mounting a primary challenge to him is criticizing his actions not for being wrong but for playing into the hands of “liberals who want to discredit the death penalty”.

Then, north of Texas, there’s Oklahoma, where they’ve got a nifty new law that requires all women seeking an abortion to put all kinds of personal details about their abortion into the public record.

Not outdone, though, is Louisiana, where a Justice of the Peace in some town has refused to issue marriage licenses to interracial couples. But of course, he’s certainly NOT racist! He just doesn’t think that people of different races should marry.

Jeebus — what is it with the South, anyway?

(No, I’m not actually judging the entire region by these instances, knowing as I do many, many fine people who live in that region. But I do find it of surpassing oddity that the South really does often seem to be the locus in America and some very nasty beliefs and actions based upon those beliefs.

Here’s a good article by advice columnist Carolyn Hax about interracial dating, by the way.)

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October 16, 2009October 3, 2021

Ten Tools

The best part of my job, as a Maintenance Man, is the collection of tools I get to use on a daily basis. I love tools. Tools rock. I now get the same rush from heading into Home Depot or Lowe’s that I once got from walking in Toys-r-Us. It’s the same rush that I get from going into Borders or Barnes&Noble! Tools rock.

Since I do general maintenance work at The Store, I have to have a fairly wide variety of tools at my disposal. People who work in specific trades will find themselves using some tools and almost never any others Some fall into the category of tools that I don’t use very often, but which are indispensable when I need them. Others, however, are my everyday tools, the ones I find myself reaching for most often. Here’s a rundown on ten of these:

Eleven-in-one screwdriver.

This is on my person at all hours of the job, and I use it a lot at home, too. Most tool manufacturers make a multi-headed screwdriver, but the eleven-in-one from Klein Tools is my favorite: it’s solidly built and includes, as the name implies, eleven different driver options: Slotted 1/4″ and 3/16″, Philips #1 and #2, square drive #1 and #2, two Torx sizes, and three nut drivers (3/8, 5/16, and 1/4″). If I were a wizard in the Harry Potterverse, this screwdriver would be my wand.

Tape measure.

Well, of course. I always need to measure stuff. I carry a 30′ Stanley Leverlock tape. I think their FatMax tapes look cool, but I suspect they would simply add too much weight to my belt.

Diagonal pliers.

Occasionally called “dikes” for short, or “small wire cutters”. I use these many times throughout the course of a typical day — so much so that I actually wear the blades out every so often. I have to buy a new pair once a year or so. I don’t mind because these tend to be fairly cheap; I get ’em at Target for five or ten bucks.

Telescoping magnet.

This gadget is extremely useful to me, although one’s mileage may obviously vary. It’s a nicely strong magnet about the size of a pencil eraser, stuck on the end of a pen-sized tool that can telescope out to a length of about two feet. The obvious use is grabbing screws that one drops inside a piece of machinery or equipment, but for me, the true use of this thing is in my usual duty of hanging advertising signage throughout The Store. For this task we use thin steel hooks of varying lengths, and it’s in this type of job that the telescoping magnet really earns its keep.

Cordless drill.

By a very wide margin, this is the most frequently used power tool in my arsenal. (Mine is a Dewalt 18V, if anyone cares.) Drilling holes, driving screws of many types — rare is the day that I don’t get the drill out of its case at some point.

Utility knife.

I also find myself often having to cut things, score things, or mark things. The utility knife is indispensable. I use a standard one, the familiar kind of knife, the most often, although I’m probably going to buy a smaller utility knife as to cut down on the size of stuff in my pockets.

Voltage tester.

Sometimes called a “tick”, this is a highly useful device in my job, where I often have to move electrical equipment — refrigerated cases, food prep equipment, and the like — from one place to another. I often have to test a power line to see if there is voltage present. Just hold this doohickey to the line or insert the probe into the receptacle’s hot terminal, and if it beeps, you’ve got voltage.

Pliers.

Pliers are important tools; I use them almost daily. I use groove-lock pliers (“Channellocks”) the most, with the linesman’s pliers and the needlenose pliers coming in second, depending on the job I need to do. Interestingly, the most traditional kind of pliers, the good old slipjoint pliers, are the one kind of pliers that I nearly never use.

Spirit level.

As noted above, I am frequently tasked with the hanging of signage throughout The Store, be the signage directly fastened to walls or hung from the ceiling. A level is essential to this task, because, believe me, if you hang a sign so that it is crooked in the slightest degree, you’ll hear about it.

Miter saw.

Of the power saws at my disposal, the miter saw is the one I use the most, because I most often need to cut trim pieces or other kinds of similar materials for various “finish” jobs throughout The Store. The other power saws that I have at my disposal are a table saw, a circular saw, a saber saw, and a reciprocating saw. Cutting things is fun!

Of course, the tool I actually use the most frequently, far and away, is the pencil, but that’s boring — who wants to read about a pencil?

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October 16, 2009October 3, 2021

Something for Thursday

Something offbeat, but which I kind of like, since the movie is a recent favorite of mine. Here’s a medley of numbers from Saturday Night Fever.

This video contains one of my favorite tiny moments from the movie, a “blink and you miss it” bit of characterization. Tony is strutting down the sidewalk, in one of the film’s iconic moments, looking confident and masculine — you can tell by the way he uses his walk that he’s a lady’s man. But then he stops at his local pizza place, and he shows some actual vulnerability in whether to have two slices or not. In the split second interaction with the crusty lady who runs the pizza joint, all of his masculine confidence goes out the window and he’s the insecure kid.

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October 14, 2009October 3, 2021

Fly it.

Surely if the Supreme Court has affirmed the right to burn the flag — and rightly so, in my view — than one also has a right to fly the flag. When I first heard about this, I figured it was one of those hyper-anal Home Owner Assocations or whatever they’re called, the ones who get angry with you if you have a pink flamingo in your yard or if your grass is one half-inch too long or something. But no, this was an apartment manager specifically telling residents that they could not fly the American flag — in any form. Including car decals and the like.

I’m also unsurprised that the management person who made that decision wouldn’t speak to the press. Own your decisions, people.

(via)

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October 14, 2009October 3, 2021

A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter

Now, there are several teams in the conversation as to which is the worst team in the NFL — the Bills, Browns, Bucs, Rams, Raiders, Chiefs, and possibly the Titans all seem to be in the mix — but as far as who the worst organization is in the NFL, I think that one boils down to two of the above. Everybody else is at least admitting that they are in rebuilding/youth movement mode and is acting accordingly, but it seems to me that two of these franchises are mismanaged in a terribly delusional way.

So, who’s the worst organization in the NFL: the Bills or the Raiders?

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October 13, 2009October 3, 2021

By the light of the guttering candle

It’s been a while since I updated the books that The Daughter and I have been reading at bedtimes, so here are some capsules. Some of the most satisfying and entertaining reading I’ve done lately has come at night, as I read these books aloud to The Daughter, one chapter per night. What’s nice about reading aloud is that you can’t skim. At all. When reading silently, I do tend to slip into skimming once in a while, if I sense that I’m reading a passage that may not entirely be crucial to the action. Reading aloud re-directs my reading attention to each individual word, and I find myself noticing some more details occasionally that I might otherwise not notice. I also notice word rhythm a lot more, and which words actually work together sonically. This fascinates me.

A problem that occasionally crops up deals with dialogue, particular in instances where two characters are conversing. It’s not uncommon to find authors simply drop dialogue attribution altogether for a bit, since it should be easy for a reader to keep track of who’s talking. But I wonder sometimes if that’s true when reading this kind of thing aloud, so sometimes I’ll hedge a bit and throw in my own attribution, a “he said” or “she said” where the author didn’t. I suppose I could adopt other voices for different characters, but…well, no, I don’t want to do that.

Now for specific books:

:: Over the last couple of years, when I’ve been in the kid-lit sections at the local bookstores, I’ve noticed a glut of pirate tales on the shelves. I suppose the popularity of the Pirates of the Caribbean films has been the major factor here. We’ve picked up a couple of these titles, but the only one we’ve read thus far is Pirate Curse, by Kai Meyer. Meyer is a German author whose books are translated for English audiences, and Pirate Curse is the first installment in a trilogy.

Of the pirate books I’ve seen all over, all of them seem to employ supernatural goings-on. I’m not sure why this is the case, since surely a compelling pirate story could be written for kids (or adults) without ghosts or magic or whatever. I seem to recall that a fellow named Robert Louis Something wrote a highly-regarded story about a pirate whose name went on to grace a chain of fast food joints that offer deep-fried seafood, but I digress. Pirate Curse involves just that: pirates who are cursed.

As is always the case with children’s books, our heroes are children. A pirate girl named Jolly is what pirates call a “Polliwog”: she has the ability to walk on water. When her ship is ambushed and sunk in a trap, she is the only survivor, escaping to an island where she meets a farmboy named Munk, who also turns out to be a Polliwog. Munk’s parents are killed in another supernatural attack a short while later, and Jolly and Munk are fleeing for their lives, falling in with a mysterious man called the Ghost Trader as they try to evade the growing evil force called “The Maelstrom”.

This is a very exciting book, and we’re looking forward to returning to this series in the future. Its protagonists are engaging and sympathetic, there’s the requisite mystery of the Ghost Trader, the usual mysterious figure of authority whom I’m sure will turn out to be far more than he seems, there are fun battles and daring escapes. At times I did wonder if the book might have been a bit on the dark side, but The Daughter seemed to take it in stride. Recommended, if you like creepy pirates-and-ghosts tales with a lot of adventure in them.

:: Some time ago we read a book called Larklight, by Philip Reeve. This book looked so intriguing on the shelf at Borders that I picked it up, in hardcover, knowing nothing about it. It is a steampunk space opera that assumes that the universe actually operated the way science thought it operated back in the Victorian era: the luminiferous ether exists, people can breathe in space, and so on. The spaceships are basically sea galleons in space, powered faster than light by traveling the “Golden Roads” when someone performs an alchemical operation called the “Chemical Wedding”. The book featured the adventures of a brother and sister, Art and Myrtle Mumby, who live in a space mansion called Larklight. They fall in with a space pirate named Jack Havock (I think we need a moratorium on pirates named “Jack”) and his crew as they investigate a threat to Earth by a race of evil spider-like creatures. They also meet a spy for the British Empire (which now, naturally, extends into space) named Sir Richard Burton (whom, I suppose, is not translating the 1001 Nights) and a number of other fine people, few of whom are actually human. Larklight was a fabulously fun read, and we dutifully kept an eye out for the promised sequel.

Since then there have been two sequels: Starcross and Mothstorm. I don’t want to say too much about the plots of these books, except to note that Reeve’s wild and wooly Victorian steampunk worldbuilding continues to be a delight. We have asteroids connected by a railroad, time traveling, crusty space sailors from spaceports on the moons of Jupiter, strange things on the planet Mercury and stranger things beyond Neptune, diseases that turn people into trees, and more. These books are the most pure fun reading I’ve found since the early volumes in the Harry Potter series. The books are written in the first person, mostly from Art’s point of view, with occasional chapters from Myrtle’s point of view; Reeve very nicely maintains a completely different voice for each character. There are lots of footnotes which Reeve uses ingeniously to do his infodumping, and the books are illustrated nicely.

There was one spot at which I wanted to reach into the book and slap Reeve. During a space battle sequence, he wrote a paragraph in which he describes a ship “shaking, rattling, and rolling” as it evades “great balls of fire” and the characters suffer through a “whole lot of shaking going on”. I groaned and then had to stop reading to explain why I was groaning to the kid. I wish Reeve hadn’t done that.

So, if you’re wondering how a Victorian steampunk space opera can possibly work, check this series out.

:: Some time ago we read Lloyd Alexander’s classic Chronicles of Prydain. The Daughter loved it, although she never really said that she loved it. I know because it comes up in conversation now and then, such as when a character named “The Bard” in the book we’re reading right now came up and she said, “You mean, like Fflewddur Fflam?” So I was happy to use my reading time with her to revisit Alexander’s less-noted Westmark Trilogy, which I think is the equal of Prydain. Thus far we’ve read the first two books, Westmark and The Kestrel.

In the Prydain books, Alexander explored themes of coming-of-age, of the nature of heroism, and the nature of duty. While some of those themes are revisited in Westmark, Alexander is more interested here in more mature notions: freedom and its limits, the best type of government, whether violence is ever justifiable.

Set in a kingdom called Westmark, the era is roughly analogous to the French Revolution; pistols, muskets and bayonets are the weapons of choice here. In the first chapter we meet a young man named Theo who works as an apprentice to a printer in a time when freedom of the press is greatly curtailed. He quickly finds himself on the run from the law, taking refuge with a con-man named Las Bombas and his dwarf companion Musket; along the way they meet a street urchin girl named Mickle and a revolutionary beloved by the sophisticated city youth named Florian. He also comes to the attention of the kingdom’s chief minister, Cabbarus, and gradually Theo finds himself in the midst of turmoil engulfing the whole of Westmark.

This trilogy is as much about politics and concerns of adults as it is about coming of age and heroism. Alexander doesn’t shrink from the fact that many who are called “heroes” are people who have committed acts of questionable heroism for reasons that weren’t entirely noble; he also doesn’t shrink from the fact that great conflicts can arise between people who are genuinely trying to make a good world as best they can, and he presents few, if any, easy answers. At times the story gets pretty dark, actually, but it’s still exciting, briskly paced, and full of memorable characters.

I’ll report back when we finish the trilogy.

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October 13, 2009October 3, 2021

Trekkin’

A couple of Star Trek related notes:

:: Ron Moore confirms what many have suspected over the years: that the technobabble on Star Trek: The Next Generation was just made up, fill-in-the-blanks type stuff.

“It became the solution to so many plot lines and so many stories,” Moore said. “It was so mechanical that we had science consultants who would just come up with the words for us and we’d just write ‘tech’ in the script. You know, Picard would say ‘Commander La Forge, tech the tech to the warp drive.’ I’m serious. If you look at those scripts, you’ll see that.”

This comes as absolutely no surprise, obviously. The over-reliance on technobabble has always been what keeps me from ranking TNG as high as The Original Series or Deep Space Nine, both of which had much greater emphasis on their characters. TNG was at its best when it used character to its advantage, but so often it felt as if the producers just didn’t trust their characters and their cast to carry the weight fully, which is why we ended up with so many episodes where a problem is discovered, we investigate the problem for a while, and then wait until the last ten minutes when Data or Wesley would come up with the pulse or beam or blast of some kind of particle that would fix the problem with the space-time continuum.

:: That said, I was recently discussing Star Trek ’09 (which is how I now refer to the recent movie, which I discussed some months ago) with a friend at work, who was baffled as to why I had such a hard time buying into the events of the movie when I would cheerfully swallow the idea of, say, the Genesis Device. I thought that a fair question: why did I have such a hard time with the notion of a drop of “red matter” creating a black hole in the middle of a planet, while I would accept the idea of a torpedo the size of a refrigerator converting a dead planet into one with a nice biosphere?

Well, I don’t know, really. Part of it is probably how the ideas are treated. The Genesis Device is constantly referred to as an “experiment” in Trek II and shown as an outright failure in Trek III, for one thing. For another, though, the Genesis Device didn’t come on the heels of a long list of Star Trek doomsday devices, substances, and elements. The Genesis device was a new item, but now, with Trek ’09, I’ve heard a lot more along the way. Trilithium, which can halt the nuclear reactions in a star. The Tox Uthat, which does the same thing. There are many more in that vein. It gets harder and harder for Star Trek to come up with threats like these.

It also hurts the cause of the “Red Matter” when the film in question is chock-full of all manner of SF whoppers. I’ve generally found that I’ll accept something that is clearly bollocks as long as it’s not literally bollocks. That’s another part of why I can accept the Genesis Device: my brain accepts it as a fully fictional item, and I’m fine. But Trek ’09 gives us things like black holes taking one back in time, supernovas that threaten to destroy the entire galaxy, and so on. By the time we get to an explanation of “red matter”, Trek ’09 has, for me, worn out its quota of scientific-implausibility forgiveness.

:: A tiny detail also glared out at me upon re-watching the movie. At one point, Kirk, and the rest of our heroes, are at Starfleet Academy, where he decides to take the Kobayashi Maru test for the third time. In a scene with McCoy, he says he’s taking it “tomorrow”. That night, though, he’s making out with a green-skinned cadet who happens to be Nyota Uhura’s roommate. Uhura comes in and describes a distress call she’s just intercepted from the Klingons, in which an entire Klingon armada has been destroyed by a Romulan ship. OK.

Cut to the next morning, when Kirk is beating the Kobayashi Maru test after reprogramming it. This causes scandal, so there is a full tribunal of, it appears, all of the Starfleet cadets in Kirk’s class. As the tribunal goes on, a distress call from Vulcan comes through, causing Starfleet to mobilize its fleet. Off everyone goes to their ships, with cadets first being assigned to various vessels, then flying to them by shuttle. Some legerdemain on McCoy’s part gets Kirk on board the Enterprise, and after some more stuff surrounding the launch, Kirk listens to the ship’s briefing on what’s happening and realizes that Vulcan is under attack. He races to the bridge to tell Captain Pike what he’s learned…citing the attack on the Klingon fleet as evidence. So far so good…except that he says that the attack happened last night.

Wait a minute.

So, all of the above has happened in one day. Kirk’s reprogramming of the Kobayashi Maru test, his taking of the test, the suspicion and investigation of his possible cheating, the mobilization of Starfleet and the launch of an entire fleet whose crews haven’t even been assigned yet. Yeah, I have trouble with that.

:: I’ve decided that, at long last, I believe the entire Kobayashi Maru test to be complete BS.

We’ve seen the Kobayashi Maru test twice now: in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, and in Star Trek ’09. The idea seems pretty simple: it puts a cadet into a situation from which there is no possibility of a “win”, and thereby tests what the cadets do in a “no-win” situation.

The scenario depicted in both instances is the same: a distress call is received from a damaged ship, the Kobayashi Maru, in the Neutral Zone. It’s illegal to enter the Zone and is seen by Klingons as an act of war, so the cadets have a hard choice: respect the Neutral Zone and allow the Kobayashi Maru to die, or embark on a rescue mission. Both films establish, through dialog, that rescue is impossible, so then the choice becomes fight-or-flee. So the possible resolutions seem to be these: attempt no rescue, attempt a rescue but abandon it as soon as the shooting starts, and attempt a rescue and go down in flames with the ship. Hence the “no-win” scenario.

In Wrath of Khan, Admiral Kirk tells Saavik that the Kobayashi Maru test is a “test of character”, presumably to see how cadets deal with the “no-win scenario”. It’s “facing death”, Kirk says: “How we deal with death is at least as important as how we deal with life”. And later on, when Saavik learns that Kirk actually cheated to beat the test, she replies: “Then you never have faced that situation. Faced death.” I’ve always found that line extremely odd. Kirk hasn’t “faced death”? The guy who stood and watched as Edith Keeler died, who had to kill his own best friend (Gary Mitchell), and so on and so forth? He never “faced death” because he cheated his way out of a fake test? Right.

In Trek ’09, we have the afore-mentioned tribunal after Kirk cheats. Spock tells Kirk that he has failed to grasp the point of the test: it is to ensure that cadets in command situations have “experience fear” and dealt with it in a command situation.

So, the Kobayashi Maru test is, basically, a device to make cadets “face death” and “experience fear”. But the problem is this: by its very nature, the Kobayashi Maru test can do neither of those things.

If you’re a Starfleet cadet taking the Kobayashi Maru test, the problem is this: you know you’re taking a test. How can you “experience fear” or “face death” in any kind of meaningful way when you know that you are not on the bridge of a starship but in a simulator on the planet Earth? You are not facing death when you know that you’re not actually ordering a starship into the Neutral Zone to rescue a ship that doesn’t exist, and you can not be filled with fear — other than the typical kinds of academic fear, such as what will my fellow cadets think of me when I fail this again or how embarrassing will the post-test talk with the professors be — when you know that you’re not facing any kind of real situation.

Basically, the Kobayashi Maru test by its very nature can reveal nothing meaningful about those who take it. It’s an interesting diversion and nothing more. (And really, the only reason they came up with it in the first place was so that Trek II could fake us out at the beginning, since everybody knew that Spock was going to die at the end of the flick — I know that when I saw the movie as a ten-year-old kid, I saw Spock “perish” as the bridge burned after the Klingon attack, and I thought, “Wait, they killed him in the first five minutes?!”)

Interestingly, this kind of test was actually handled in much more convincing fashion in an early episode of The Next Generation, called “Coming of Age”. In this episode, Wesley Crusher is undergoing testing to see if he makes it into Starfleet Academy yet. It’s all typical academic stuff, although there’s something called a “Psych Test”, which is tailored to each student individually based on their psychological profile. The day comes for Wesley’s, and he goes into the room where he’s to take it, whereupon he hears a distant explosion. Getting up and leaving to investigate, he finds that a laboratory down the hall has erupted into fire, endangering two scientists. The room is about to be sealed, and Wesley can only get one guy out himself, so he makes his choice and drags the one guy he can out before the room is sealed, killing the other scientist.

Of course, the whole explosion was the test, and both scientists are fine. The test for Wesley was to see if he could, in a desperate situation, make the kind of decision that cost someone their life (since his father had died years before when another officer had made a similar decision). But what made it effective was that at no point during the test did Wesley ever realize that this was the test itself. The Kobayashi Maru test isn’t like that at all; especially not in Trek ’09, when the cadet in the Captain’s chair can actually see the professors watching him, in the overhead galleries.

:: Finally, I hope the next movie reveals that Gaila, Uhura’s green-skinned roommate, wasn’t killed in the incredibly-short Battle of Vulcan. I found her both hot and cute. For a green-skinned Orion girl.

OK, I’m done geeking out for now.

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October 12, 2009October 3, 2021

Sentential Links #186

Linkage time! Get yer linkage here!

:: Americans just don’t realize how big a deal this is for the rest of the world.

Might it be that our definition of what constitutes peacemaking is too insular and narrow — too exclusively Western — too lacking in shalom?

:: But this prize isn’t about political partisanship inside the U.S. Again, it was a clear signal from an old friend.

As usual, though, America is too obsessed with itself to notice. (Both of these links via Sean.)

:: The key to understanding McCain’s strategic “thought” is that he loves war. Whichever war the United States of America seems mostly likely to start on any given day is the war he wants to start. Whichever war the United States of America seems mostly likely to escalate on any given day is the war he wants to escalate. The entire rest of his erstwhile worldview will just revolve around that. (A lot of people seem to love war, and I find it maddening. I’m no dove-like peacenik myself, but it has struck me as incredibly odd that for years, our national discourse has treated the people who constantly agitate in favor of war as the solution for nearly any foreign policy problem as the “serious” people. “War is serious, therefore someone calling for it must also be serious,” goes the logic, and it’s extremely foolish.)

:: The argument for giving Obama a Nobel Prize is that America is important enough and Republicans are bad enough. (Or, as he put it in comments to the Matthew Yglesias post linked just above: This is where you can build a pretty powerful case for Obama getting the Nobel Peace Prize. Keeping this man [John McCain] from controlling the US military was a gigantic service to world peace.

:: Bottom line: you care about your kids? Don’t feed them Nutella and toast every day for breakfast. (Er…OK. But who does that? I’ve never even tasted Nutella. We use good old peanut butter here. And the breakfast of choice for The Daughter these days is a single egg and a slice of cheese on a toasted multi-grain English muffin.)

:: I now present you with a seventeen year old rant about my time at Taco Bell, written today from the perspective of me in 1992. (God in Heaven, that brings back memories. Working in corporate restaurants is just like that; just change the name in Shamus’s post and you’ve got what it was like at Pizza Hut, or McDonald’s, or anywhere else. This reminds me of many sanctimonious lectures we managers would receive from the Area Managers at Pizza Hut when they’d come round. Ugh.)

:: For in playing, or writing, or drawing, or simply talking oneself deep into the world of a popular artwork that invites the regard of the amateur, the fan, one is seeking above all to connect, not only with the world of the show, comic book, or film, but with the encircling, embracing metaworld of all those who love it as much as you do.

More next week.