Month: September 2017

I have seen any number of ads for “Star Trek: Discovery” and here’s my problem with it.

I have no idea what any of it looks like.

Every single scene was apparently filmed in a power outage. The sets are dark, the costumes are dark, everything is so dámņëd dark. I mean, yes, people said that the new Enterprise in the Abrams film looked like an Apple store, but at least you could see it. I can’t see crap in ST:D.

Wait.

ST:D? The abbreviation for the new show is STD? I admit I haven’t been active on Trek boards, but has anyone else commented on that? TOS, TNG, that’s fine. But STD? Jesus Christ, was anyone thinking about that?

Okay, anyway: “The Orville” is at least lit like the original series. Everything is bright. Everything is open. The bridge, while having some commonality with the TNG bridge, is sufficiently different. It’s certainly larger. They have a panoramic array of windows rather than just staring at a viewscreen.

The whole place is colorful and cheerful and old-style pleasant. People are crying it’s a rip off of “Star Trek.” Okay, here’s a news flash: I LIKE “Star Trek.” It seems to me that MacFarlane is trying to do something that evokes all the best things about “Trek” and leaving out all the stuff we hate. And I’m fine with that. The same people who are harshly judging it after one episode gave STTNG three freaking YEARS to find its footing.

So I’m aboard for “The Orville.”

I’ve also posted a Cowboy Pete review over on my Patreon account.

PAD

Dammit. As if there isn’t already enough stuff to be depressed about this time of year. I realized yesterday that today was September 11, and once again we as a nation would collectively open the wounds of the Twin Towers, of the thousands of people who died that day.

But then yesterday I was driving and Kath was on the Internet, and she suddenly said, “Shìŧ. RIP Len Wein.” I immediately pulled over as she ran quick verifications to make sure it wasn’t somebody’s sick idea of a joke. It wasn’t.

Unbelievable. First Jerry Pournelle, whom I saw just a few days ago at Dragon*Con, and now Len. I still remember when we were out at dinner at San Diego during the con, and he was telling me with great enthusiasm about this new television program called “Pushing Daisies.” I knew from his description that the show wouldn’t last, but it sounded great. And I also recall when Hugh Jackman thanked him on the SDCC stage for giving him a career. His health was obviously deteriorating but I thought he would outlast us all.

Shìŧ.

PAD

When right wing evangelicals declare that LGBTQ are responsible for Hurricane Harvey rather than, y’know, climate change…when even Ann Coulter declares, “I don’t believe Hurricane Harvey is God’s punishment for Houston electing a lesbian mayor. But that is more credible than ‘climate change,” that’s just standard issue and can be ignored.

When Rush Limbaugh states that Hurricane Irma is actually being amplified out of all reason by the news media, well, he’s just talking like a wrong headed righty.

When Pat Robertson says Hurricane Katrina was God’s punishment for abortion, well, that’s just Pat Robertson being an idiot.

But Jennifer Lawrence does an interview in which she comments about how hurricanes are representative of nature’s wrath (poetic but okay), that climate change is due to human activity (it is), and that the only voice we really have to try and do something is through voting (that’s right.). She said that Trump’s election was startling (it was; Hillary Clinton wrote a whole book about it) and that was pretty much it.

And insanely, news coverage is declaring that she’s blaming Trump for the hurricanes. And naturally Twitter idiots who aren’t bothering to actually READ the articles and realize that she’s saying no such thing have erupted and declared that she’s an idiot and should be boycotted.

Basically, this is genuinely fake news, but the idiot Trump supporters aren’t capable of realizing it as such and are fully embracing it.

Me, all I can notice is that Mar-a-Lago is right in Irma’s path and might be obliterated. I would find that further proof of Voltaire’s statement that God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.

PAD

Y’know what? Just to shake things up, let’s start with something that Trump did right this week.

The enemy of my enemy. Trump has regularly gone after Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan and pretty much all the GOP as they have failed to build his wall or repeal Obamacare or…well, pretty much anything, really. Naturally the Party of No’s impulse is to blame everything on the Democrats, even though they’re in the majority.

So now with a desperate need for Harvey aid calling for the attention of the same people who couldn’t be bothered to help victims of Hurricane Sandy, not to mention a deal on the debt ceiling required lest the government shut down, the Democrats came up with a plan that would solve it for at least three months. Ryan naturally turned it down. To the utter shock of the GOP, the Democrats met with Trump and Trump took the deal. Why? Because the GOP forgot that for the majority of his life, Trump was a Democrat. His turn to the GOP was just a matter of convenience so that he could get some publicity in running for President, never dreaming that he would actually get the job. Now that he’s there, though, he’s starting to remember that the GOP is largely composed of dìçkš who are interested in two things and two things only: holding on to power and stopping the Democrats at every turn. And there is an outside possibility that Trump has begun to realize that that attitude isn’t going to serve him in the slightest. So suddenly Charles Schumer and Nancy Pelosi are referred to as “Chuck and Nancy” and Trump is extolling the virtues of reaching across the aisle and working with the people that Ryan, McConnell and the others cannot stand.

Now of course the problem is that, this being Trump, his syphilitic brain could turn him against the Democrats tomorrow or even later today. But at the moment I have to admit that I am loving watching the GOP trying to downplay their obvious panic over this turn of events.

Meanwhile, even his stupidity this week has a positive turn to it.

Dream a little dream. . During the Obama era or, as we like to recall it, last year, Obama swore that the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program was solid. There are seven hundred thousand people in this country who have never had the opportunity to go anywhere else. They were brought here as kids or even infants, and now while their American-born siblings are allowed to stay, immigration wanted to throw them out of the only country they’ve ever lived in, even though they committed no crimes and have been loyal, upstanding citizens. Obama said don’t sweat it. But this infuriated Trump’s hardline conservative nutbag supporters who wanted every immigrant thrown out of a country that was largely founded by immigrants. They apparently came up with an alternate plan: Kick All Foreign Kids Away, or KAFKA. And Trump originally swore that he was going to adhere to KAFKA, even going so far this week as to explicitly say he was going to do away with DACA. This naturally caused panic. Chelsea Handler summarized the situation perfectly: “We’re sorry for making it clear that white supremacists and Nazis are welcome in this country, while young hardworking immigrants brought here as children are not.”

And yet astoundingly Trump wound up calling Nancy Pelosi and she suggested that, at the very least, he let everyone who is currently applying to DACA know that they shouldn’t get worked up about KAFKA. Which prompted Trump to perform a metamorphosis and tweet “For all of those (DACA) that are concerned about your status during the 6 month period, you have nothing to worry about – No action!” So he is definitely waffling now, and while it’s still a shame that hundreds of thousands of kids are living in fear in an uncertain world, it’s evident that–at least for the moment–Trump’s priorities are swinging back to the side of people who are interested in reason and compassion instead of the GOP áššhølëš.

So it’s been a good week.

PAD

Sorry, folks. I’m at Dragon*Con and my mind is far away from Trump. Talk amongst yourselves.

PAD