ST: Pointy eared monsters

Interesting. This episode seems to start with some sort of religious ceremony being set up. Not sure if it's church, a marriage or a funeral, but something's up and it's going to be broadcast all over the ship.

Ah. A marriage. The classic tune. Two random extras getting hitched by the captain. They wear their regular uniforms; the bride's only nod to the occasion is a small corsage. The marriage is interrupted by a "condition red" as an outpost reports attack by an unknown ship. Spoileration and happy-exciting-fun-times after the jump.

ST: Shakespeare

First up tonight: The Conscience of a King. A reference to Hamlet, of course. The episode opens on the Scottish play, however, instead of Hamlet. Neptune's ocean? Apparently, this episode is about a war criminal and whether or not he is still alive and can be brought to justice. Unfortunately, his name is Kodos. Yep, just like one of the silly aliens from The Simpsons. More ridiculousness after the jump!

A slice of neo-noir

I watched Layer Cake a while back and it's taken a few days for me to decide what I really thought about it. I'll get some of the basic things people like to know out of the way now.

It was somewhat violent. There was certainly a great deal of violence in the film, but a lot was implied and it didn't seem to me that the director ever went out of his way to try and make an impression with some gory twist or over-the-top moment. A great deal of it adhered to the dictum, most famously associated with Hitchcock, that what you let the audience imagine will be far more effective than anything you actually show them.

The language was profane. This was a British film, after all, and they have become a lot more coarse culturally than the US is. There are enough crudities to choke a moderately-sized horse.

There wasn't much sex. There are few brief scenes shown where the camera pans past things without lingering that are rather explicit. I found that I was able to fast forward through things with ease. There is one scene in a hotel room (you'll know what it is when you get there) where it is important to know what is said at the conclusion of it, but if you can still get audio at 2x speed the way I can, you can probably make it through without offending your eyes overmuch.

Okay, more detailed thoughts and some minor spoilers after the jump.

Are you tired of Gene Wolfe yet?

Because I'm not, and you're going to have to put with some more posts about him and his work. I finished reading On Blue's Waters the other day while walking back home from the bus stop. Wolfe really knows how to get a hook into the reader and drag him along with the story. This tale picks up a couple decades on from where Exodus from the Long Sun ended. The protagonist of this tale is the writer of the previous account. He writes this one in the first person about himself and his adventures in the past interspersed with accounts of what is happening to him at the time of his writing. It's an interesting device and allows for two plotlines to be set up in parallel and keep the reader intensely interested in both.

ST: And now, the exciting conclusion

On to part two, finishing up what started in the last post. I think, overall, this was a good choice for the series. It allowed for the development of the characters as much as for interesting stories and plots.

The "last time, on Star Trek" is not clips of the previous episodes as much as just a summary of what happened by Kirk for his official log. A solid choice as well, I think. Finishing after the jump.

ST: A Very Special Two-Part Episode

These are a couple episodes that I've seen before: Menagerie Parts I and II. We get our first glimpse of a starbase in this episode (Starbase 11) and meet the previous commander of the Enterprise, Captain Pike. He's been horribly disfigured and disabled in an accident while heroically saving the lives of others and we find that Spock served with him for years prior to Kirk taking command of the Enterprise. Which makes one wonder why they didn't just promote Spock to be captain. But we'll leave that aside.

Essentially, if I recall correctly, these episodes boiled down to a way to use the footage from the pilot so it didn't go to waste. The actor prior to Shatner was the captain in the pilot didn't end up being the regular captain, for whatever reason, and this was a way to include him, use the old footage in a flashback and make a two-part episode that turns a lot of our expectations on their heads. Fun times after the jump.

Arguing about water

Also from that same post that provided the previous link, is this rant by someone who wants you to know that H2O is not water. Here, I'll let him say it.

It is a straightforward fact, corrections to it are endlessly ignored, but it is simply false to say that water is H2O unless we are speaking very, very loosely.
...
A glass of water, pure as water can be, is better understood as containing H2O, OH–, H3O+ and other related but less common ions, and even this is a vast oversimplification (if we could get truly pure water, which we cannot). Our current best understanding of the electron transfers that give water the properties we observe is a statistical average of ever changing interactions so complex as to be quite literally unthinkable. Indeed, the problem is “not that we are unsure which (distribution of types of) microstructure is the correct one. The point is that there is no one correct microstructure, because the microstructure depends as much on the context and functions just as another nominal essence would” (van Brakel, 2000b, 80–81).

I think it's fair to say then, that water is H2O unless you're speaking very, very pedantically. To me, this is like those folks (though I did enjoy the topical pop culture reference at the end of the video) who get so worked up over the concept of "Π" and insist that we should use "Τ" instead. They'll tell you Π is wrong, but really they just find it less conducive to the way they think. Which is fine, but not the same thing by a long chalk.

NFL or Kenya?

Which would you rather have? Turns out, they're both worth about the same. At least by some measures.
(Via First Things.)

Mobile assumptions

As I signed into Google to post on the blog, a screen came up after I typed my password that encouraged me to enter my mobile phone number so that if I became locked out and forgot my password, my cell could be used in some way to get me logged back in. I do not, in fact, have a cell phone. I find it interesting that they have become so ubiquitous in only 30 years or so that the common assumption is that everyone has one. What other technological inventions have similar rates of adoption, I wonder? MP3 players, perhaps?

Fill-um

Okay, did the books, now for the movies and I'll be all caught up. Then I can procrastinate again with a clear conscience.

Playing catch-up

Every time I fall behind in posting about the books and movies I enjoy, I tend to continue procrastinating because the job of work catching up keeps becoming more daunting the more time passes. So I'm going to get that out of the way now. If you don't care, don't jump.

I have of late--

but wherefore I know not-- lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercise; and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.

~Hamlet, Act II, scene ii

End the occupation: bring the muppets home

The text here may or may not be worth your literacy, but I thought the pictures were worth your time, if you haven't already seen them.

http://www.tauntr.com/blog/occupy-sesame-street-gets-violent

ST: Condition Alert

Tonight's exciting episode is The Corbomite Maneuver. I thought about titling this post "The Made-Up Words" episode, but before I got logged in all the way the Enterprise encountered an interstellar Rubik's Cube that someone had already helpfully solved and gone to "Condition Alert". Apparently they don't have the red and yellow alerts that I remember from TNG. I'll try to remember when those first appear. Now! On to the silliness!

Literacy that isn't

I've been reading a lot of Gene Wolfe lately. In one of his essays (or perhaps it was a transcribed speech) Wolfe talks about the dangers of modern illiteracy. He views the standard understanding of illiteracy as an unwelcome eventuation; that people should learn to read he assumes as a good thing. (I am not so sanguine.) But he notes that he fears even more that people are learning to read and then refusing to do so. They have the knowledge but refuse to use it.

I think that's an interesting point of view. I don't agree that not learning to read and write at all is a bad thing, so it is easy for me to agree that learning to do so and failing to use those skills is worse, but I'm not sure I had considered that previous to this. At least, not in such words. He takes the view that it is more dangerous to give people the ability to read great literature and have them not do so than to have them be unable to do so at all. And I'm not sure he's not right. Too many people are able to read great works of literature, but scorn to do so. It's not that they just don't have time or interest, but that they actively despise doing so and make a virtue of the fact that they spend their time watching Dancing with the Stars or Jersey Shore instead. This active contempt for the finer parts of our civilisation is more of a threat to it than having a multitude that would like to be able to do so and is unable. At least then the great works are valued even if they cannot be fully appreciated.

Sporty things

An interesting question raised at Baseball Reference about a play in the Cards-Phillies game. It's things like this that are the most fun because they are out of the ordinary and provide fodder for discussion. I like it when players are alert enough to try for an extra base and even more when fielders are alert to their attempts to do so. People talk a lot about home runs, but I think the run down is one of the most exciting plays in baseball. They tend to last a lot longer too.

Also! Linked from the sister site Pro Football Reference, if you scroll down here there is a discussion of the fact that the Patriots have the greatest offense in football history over a four-game span so far this year. They're only 3-1, however, because their defense is so bad that the second-greatest offense in football history could be made by combining the stats of their opponents over those same four games. I think that's awesome.

100 posts?

We scoff at that milestone. Thus we take no note of passing it by. (Does this still count as paralipsis?)

The beginning of the end for "you and me"

A lot of grammarians are shocked to hear people nowadays say something like "The president is giving a speech, and it is important for you and I to listen," or "It's like he's talking to you and I!" or "Between you and I, this speech is not his best." People have forgotten that the word "me" can be used after the words "you and" - and it seems like we had just gotten people to stop using "you and me" in the subjective case! So where did this come from? House of Pain's 1992 hit song will now play in your head to give you instructions on how to find out.

ST: Pointy pointy

Final episode on this disc is Dagger of the Mind. We start out with an convict escaping from a penal colony and getting loose on the Enterprise. No time is wasted, he clocks a red-shirted crewman in less than 5 minutes. Another couple minutes, another redshirt down and he's got a phaser. Plot twists after we move to hyperspace.

ST: Tom Cruise's kid

This episode is Miri, which I could have sworn was Tom Cruise's kid's name. Oh, looked it up, it's Suri. So, close. Anyway, this episode is one of those "parallel world" episodes, only they didn't bother with another universe, they just happened to find another planet out there that looked just like Earth Prime. And there was a distress signal, so they beam on down. Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Rand and two expendables (in red shirts!). Yada, yada, yada, jump.

ST: Nursery Rhyme Edition

Tonight's episode is What Are Little Girls Made Of? My guess is that it won't be sugar and spice and everything nice. We start out in a promising fashion. Once again the Enterprise is looking for a lost scientist who has made startling discoveries but seems to have been lost for years. Spoilers, blah, blah, jump.