♥ 31 May 2009 , Tags : andrew, geek, life , Comments Off
Andrew: Kiss me.
Me: Hmm, no, I don’t think I’d better.
Andrew: Why not?
Me: I might turn into a geek.[1]
Andrew: You’re already a geek.
Me: Yes, but I wasn’t before I knew you.
Andrew: Oh, come on, you were a Trekkie and you played D&D!
Me: Well, yes, but I didn’t know I was a geek until after I met you.[2] Hey, I’m sure there must be cool people who like Star Trek and play D&D. [pause for dramatic effect] Well, okay, so there aren’t, but that doesn’t mean they all know they’re geeks…
Yes, this was a real conversation, and it’s pretty close to ver batim. I did eventually give him a kiss, though. Gave him more than one, in fact.
[1]This is in reference to the kissing of frogs. He got the reference because he almost always gets my references after all these years.
[2]That’s actually true. My true nature had not yet been realised. I really didn’t realise just how very geek-nerdy I was until I was thirty or so, but it didn’t have all that much to do with Andrew. More with the fact that I got a job at an ISP working as a support tech…
Two professional engineers illustrate the proper care and practical benefits of cats. None of the cats, humans, or engineers were mistreated in the making of this film. They were however, slightly annoyed.
I frequently annoy my cat by holding her, kissing her, and then increase her sense of indignation with a series of feigned sympathetic responses. I’m still working on proper yodeling techniques, though (much to the cat’s absolute delight, as you can well imagine).
Yes, it does happen to be my birthday. I’m 45, which seems kinda weird. I wasn’t bothered by 40, but 45 seems weird. I said to Andrew, “Forty-five is like, halfway to fifty…” (Meaning, the middle of the decade of “forties”, obviously.) He, being a smartarse and nine years younger than I am, responded, “Fifty? It’s halfway to NINETY!” *sigh*
And just for good measure, here’s a video from 1964, the year I was born:
*screams and faints*
I’m kind of semi-obsessed with the year I was born, and I have a whole web page about stuff that happened in 1964…
You may have seen this, as it’s been going around the net for a while now, but I encountered it again and thought it was so cute it was worth posting again. Is there anything cuter than fluffy baby ducks? No. No, there is not. There may be a few things as cute as fluffy baby ducks, but cuter? No. Way.
I don’t think I’ll be giving anything away if I note that in the new Star Trek film, Spock and Uhura have a more intimate relationship than has been indicated in the preceding stories. The idea, I think, is that since the space-time continuum has been changed (oh, that most useful of science fiction plot possibilities!), their relationship gets “ramped up” in a way that didn’t happen in the original timeline/story. Anyway, this is from the first season of the original show:
The episode this comes from is Charlie X, in case you didn’t know.
And as I write this, I’m listening to Weird Al sing, “Only question I ever thought was hard
was do I like Kirk or do I like Picard?” How’d I get so White & Nerdy?
We went to see the new Star Trek film today. I think I’ve probably mentioned here that I’m a Star Trek fan from way back. One of my earliest memories is of sitting on the floor in my pyjamas, watching Mr. Spock on television (black and white, too; we didn’t have a color television back then). That was probably 1966 or 1967, when the series was in its first or second season. I’ve been a Star Trek fan for that long.
I was, therefore, somewhat concerned as to what J.J. Abrams and crew were going to do with the Star Trek universe. I’m happy to report that my fears were in vain. They did a great job, and the new cast is superb.
The movie has everything you need in a Star Trek film: James Kirk hits on women, there’s a scene with his shirt off, he has to fight a scary alien creature on a hostile planet, he breaks a lot of rules and disregards all convention, all of the familiar and beloved catch phrases turn up at least once (much to the delight of longtime fans such as myself), people get beamed around in unlikely circumstances, things blow up, there’s at least one Ensign Expendable, Uhura has a miniskirt and boots, there’s an anomaly in the space-time continuum, we get to find out where Jim got the nickname “Bones” for McCoy (I always figured it was short for “sawbones”, but it turns out there’s another reason), and Spock struggles to reconcile his Vulcan and human natures. Oh, and any deviations from the official Star Trek canon are neatly explained away with that most useful of sci fi devices, the alternative reality.
The acting is good, very good. I never got the feeling that the actors were doing impressions, although some did adopt speech cadence and even gait from the original actor in the role (the most obvious example is that of Dr. McCoy). The effect is that these are competent actors really inhabiting characters, including taking on some of the original quirks and habits given to the characters by their originators. I would have been very disappointed to see Chris Pine doing a William Shatner impersonation. Yuck. But Chris Pine’s James Kirk has all the character and, if you will, flavour, of the James Tiberius Kirk we know and love (side note, we find out how he got his name), while clearly being other than Chris Pine just pretending to be William Shatner. And a good thing, too.
One thing I found amusing is that the deck of the Enterprise in this film looks suspiciously like late-nineties clear-blue-and-white Mac aesthetics. I almost expected the bridge to have gel buttons! Every generation of Star Trek has a different design aesthetic, going from that really cheap, clunky 60s stuff (to be fair, they had a pretty small budget), to the mostly black and grey of TNG and Voyager, and now this bright, light, clear and gel stuff. In another generation, I expect there will be another idea of “new and futuristic”, too.
I’m happily looking forward to more of these. I loved this one, and once I have it on DVD, I expect to watch it several times to spot all the easter eggs (catch phrases, nods to the original series, etc.). I really enjoyed this film, and I have high hopes for future films in this rebooted series. Long live Star Trek. I wonder how long they’ll be able to keep rebooting and regenerating and restarting the Trek universe…
