The chatter among Star Trek fans is all about the announcement that J.J. Abrams will produce a new Star Trek film, due to come out sometime in 2008. According to the early buzz, the new film will be a prequel to The Original Series, involving the first meeting between James Kirk and Spock.
Just to confuse things a bit, although he doesn’t deny being involved in a Trek film, Abrams says those reports were the result of media speculation.
So, I did some research and checked with my various contacts out there in the world. Here’s what I found out:
What really happens in the next Trek movie is that Stacy has finally had enough of Han’s dalliances with Leia and flies off to Farspace Starbase Earhart in the Alpha Quadrant. After a fight with her new boyfriend, a red-haired Starfleet Officer nicknamed “Johnny”, Stacy accidentally spills her drink on a Nausican crewman. Johnny comes to her defense and during the ensuing melee receives a stab wound that results in his heart being replaced with an artificial organ.
Shaken by her role in Johnny’s near death, Stacy returns to her own galaxy to attempt a reconcilation with Han and Johnny goes on to lose his hair at a rigged dabo table (it was some very strange betting to be sure) but eventually takes command of a Starship.
On a like, totally unrelated note, Atom Films has put Return of Pink Five, Volume 1, online:
You can check out the entire saga at www.pinkfive.com
The Pink Five Saga:
Pink Five
Pink Five Strikes Back
Return of Pink Five, Volume One
Category Archives: Assorted Ramblings
Losing my Superpowers
If you’ve ever read a Superman comic book, then you know his great weakness. Expose him to kryptonite and his powers are gone. It’s all he can do to just stand up.
I know how he feels. By the end of the day Thursday, it was all I could do to stand up.
There weren’t any glowing rocks from outer space. What did me in was a lack of caffeine.
When I got to the office on Thursday, I had 50 cents with me. That took care of the morning caffeine, but I didn’t get a chance to stop by the supermarket during lunch. I spent the afternoon with thirty pennies, several $20 bills, and a soda machine that would take neither.
Fortunately for Superman, once the kryptonite is taken away, his powers return. I stopped at the store on my way home and bought soda for Friday. 🙂
Free Coffee
I can’t confirm it on their corporate site, but Starbucks is supposedly giving away coffee tomorrow for Earth Day. To get the free coffee, you just have to show up with your own to-go mug.
They gave it away a few weeks ago too during their “Great American Coffee Break” promotion.
My theory is that Starbucks is about to start following Google’s example. Sometime in the next few weeks they’ll announce that they’re going to start giving the coffee away for free and they’ll pay for it by putting ads on the side of the cup tailored to your personal coffee drinking habits.
(That sort of idea makes me glad I don’t drink coffee!!!)
It's a gas!
It’s not even May yet and a new version of the "Great American Gasout" chain letter is already making the rounds. This latest incarnation pretends you can magically bypass supply and demand by simply boycotting a single brand of gasoline.
I won’t waste the space putting up a copy of the email I got yesterday evening. It’s one of those things that appeals to emotion and skimps on the analysis. In other words, a typical chain letter. (Snopes has a copy along with a reasonably good analysis of why it’s a waste of time.)
I do understand the frustrations though. A couple weeks ago, various news sources were claiming that average gas prices were 25% higher than at this time last year. I don’t know where they got those numbers. Last year at this time, gas in the Germantown area was around $1.89 per gallon. If prices were 25% higher, they’d have been around $2.36. What I was seeing at the time was closer to $2.79 and just this past weekend I had my first sighting of a station charging more than $3.00 for a gallon of regular!
So yeah, I do understand the frustration, but wishful thinking won’t change anything. The best way to pay less for gasoline is to use less of it! Sadly, as the Snopes article points out though, using less gasoline doesn’t seem to be something people are willing to do.
In no time at all, I expect my email inbox will be filled with copies of that chain letter that have been forwarded dozens of times without anyone bothering to remove the list of forwards. So here’s my plan: Let’s forward copies of the Snopes link instead!
Need a copy? 🙂 http://www.snopes.com/politics/gasoline/gasout.asp
Water
This is a fire hose hookup in one of the stairways at the office.
Because of the lack of snow over the winter, there are some concerns about the availability of water over the summer. So if there’s a fire, the fire fighters can try using a smaller amount of water instead of hooking up the hoses!
C for Cookie
My first introduction to television was through such shows as Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, The Electric Company (with Morgan Freeman as "Easy Reader") and, of course, Sesame Street. I remember watching the Apollo 11 moon landing, but I also recall learning letters and numbers from Sesame Street with Kermit, Grover and (of course) Cookie Monster.
I was quite disappointed last year when in a fit of political correctness (I was going to call it a "misguided fit of political correctness" but that would be redundant), the Children’s Television Workshop announced that Cookie Monster was going to become Veggie Monster. Surely this was just another Internet prank, right? Alas, no. Someone had decided that Cookie Monster had to set a good example.
Happily there are some very creative people out there who have a sense of humor. Check out this trailer for the upcoming feature (I wish), C for Cookie.
End of an Era
(This was written in late July, 2003. I know one or two people have seen it, or at least read excerpts, but somehow this never escaped to the "musings" page. )
Well, it’s almost official. I have to make an appointment with a notary, but by the end of the day on Friday, I’ll be back to having just the one car. And this time, it’ll be just a car.
I’ve been driving my pickup since September 1989; just 16 months after moving to Nevada. It was one of the last 89s on the lot and because price was an issue, it didn’t have a whole lot of features — no radio, no extended cab, no four-wheel drive and no air conditioning. The no A/C wasn’t really a problem until I moved to Virginia in 1994, and even then, it wasn’t a big problem. Going to work, I’d just use the 2-60 air-conditioner instead, meaning that I opened both windows and drove 60mph.
This truck and I have been through a lot together. I’ve slept in the back the night before the Great Reno Balloon Race so I could see the Dawn Patrol at 5am, and again on a camping trip when rain started flooding my tent. During the big snow storm six or seven years ago, I filled the back of the truck with snow and was able to go places where the four-wheel drive SUVs couldn’t, and if all the parking spaces were full of snow, I’d park on a snowdrift with the front end two feet higher than the back.
Over time, I discovered that at times having a friend with a pickup truck seems like all the excuse people need in order to decide it’s time to move to a new house or apartment. And it’s not just furniture that got hauled either. Along with the ordinary items such as firewood and wood chips, I’ve also been called upon to transport a huge pile of toys that were being donated to Toys for Tots, and parts of a spaceship bridge mockup.
There are lots of other memories in that truck — 203,700 miles worth. All with just one owner. Still, nothing lasts forever.
My truck is nearly fourteen years old and the mileage on it is more than eight times the circumference of the Earth. It’s still running like a champ, needing little more than an oil change and the occasional tune up. But the signs of its age are starting to appear. Not quite two years ago, the water pump died, stranding me in the middle of nowhere, 90 miles from home. Last winter, the head gasket had to be replaced. Four months ago, it became apparent that the clutch was approaching its replacement point for a third time. The body’s beginning to show more and more rust and even with the new muffler, the exhaust is getting louder and louder.
At the end of May, after much research and deliberation, I took advantage of the prevailing low interest rates and bought a new car. Not another pickup, but an actual car. It’s a Honda Civic with a hybrid gasoline-electric engine. It’s exactly what I need for commuting to work every day, gets excellent mileage, seats four adults (five if they’re friends), and even has air-conditioning and cup holders. It’s not a pickup, but it’ll do quite nicely.
There is a happy ending to this though. My original plan was to donate the truck to charity. I probably wouldn’t see it again, but at least it could live out the rest of its days helping someone else get to work, haul gravel, and help their friends move. It turns out that life has other plans. My next door neighbors have a son who needs a car, so they’ve decided to buy my truck. The truck will continue helping someone get to work and everything else in life, but I’ll still get to see it; maybe I’ll even borrow it sometime when I need to haul gravel and let my neighbor drive the shiny new car.
I can live with that.
Mystery Solved
One of the cool things that happened when the Shore Leave site moved to the new hosting company (aside from having things work correctly) was that now we can get statistics on how often the site is visited, what pages people visit, and other stuff like that.
One of the newly available items is a list of the search terms people were using when they clicked a link that brought them to our site. For the past several months, I’ve been amused to see that “Black Death” is, by a large margin, the single most common search term bringing people to Shore Leave. For the month of March, “Black Death” accounted for more than 37% of the traffic coming from search sites, and until recently, we had no idea why.
I had an idea a week or so back and instead of the usual “Causing Mischief” type of idea, this was one of those, “Trying to solve a mystery” ideas.
If you do a normal search on Google, Yahoo, or whatever and just look for “Black Death”, you get back several bazillion results, most referring to the bubonic plague. I’m sure we’re in there somewhere, but it’s nowhere obvious.
But if you use the exact same words for a Google image search… One of the photos from the Shore Leave site – labeled “Black Death” – is in the top dozen!
I don’t think we need to “fix” anything, after all, this means people are finding our site. We just need to make sure that nobody tells Amanda Tapping a guy dressed as the Grim Reaper is 250 times more popular than she is!!!
The Ice Cream Curse
Coldstone Creamery opened a new store in Germantown last year. I’ve never been in it and at this point, I don’t ever plan to go there.
Laura and I have a running joke about how we’ve been cursed. We’re not really sure who put the curse on us, much less why, but it seems as though every time we go out for ice cream, we find that the store closing time was five minutes before we got there, or else the place has gone out of business.
It’s not universal. We’ve had very few problems with national chains such as Dairy Queen, and on more than one occasion, we actually arrived five to ten minutes before Baskin Robbins closed.
On the other hand, there’s a small hamburger and ice cream shop up in Frederick that we took a liking to last summer. It’s definitely not a franchise store and at the time we started going there, it had been owned and operated by the same family for several decades. Shortly after we decided that it was one of “our places” to go for food, we learned that the place had been sold. We’ve been afraid to go back since.
Early last fall, Laura and I went up to the Germantown Town Center and on the way to dinner, walked past the new Coldstone Creamery. The store had been in the works for a while, but this was the first time I’d seen it open; and not merely open, there was a line reaching out to the sidewalk and down to the next storefront. We made a note to stop there on our way back to the car.
After dinner, we decided to take a walk around the new Town Center and around 7:00, we stopped at Coldstone. Despite the fact that the store was packed with customers and one of the workers was sitting out front on a break, the door was locked! We each tried the door again to no avail at which point the fellow taking his break looked up and told us, “We’re not open.”
The store was full of customers, the time was 7:00 and (according to the sign anyhow), they were supposed to be open for another two hours. But they weren’t open?! What an interesting business model that must be! I’ll laugh about being cursed when I arrive after closing time, but to refuse service during business hours when they’re open to other customers, that’s just plain rude.
Several people have told me that Coldstone’s product is good. I wouldn’t know; they wouldn’t serve me and thus lost me as a potential customer. I doubt I’m missing much though, several other people have told me that they’ve also experienced service problems with that chain.
The staff at Ben & Jerry’s always treats me nicely though.
I'll get around to it
I saw a great bumper sticker the other day, "I’ll procrastinate tomorrow." It quickly reminded me of my plans to one of these days join the American Procrastination Society.
Of course, any club for procrastinators is going to have problems. First you have to get around to recruiting some members and then, once they join, you still have to wait for them to send in their dues. I haven’t researched it – not yet anyhow – but I’m certain the Procrastination Society is having financial problems because of that. In fact, they’ll probably have to file for bankruptcy.
Assuming they ever get around to forming in the first place.