Really, Apple people. Next thing, you'll be telling me that there's an iDongle app that shows ... well, you know.

This seems to be the opinion of everyone I know of who reads Ultimatum, somehow. (Minus, you know, the stabby bits.)

Yes, that would be an unpleasant time for that discovery, wouldn't it?

Strangely enough, one thing my cats never did.

I understand that feeling.

I'm not sure it was "monoculture", precisely. But the times, they were certainly a bit ... different.
And, in one of those moments that makes you just sigh, it turns out that death was astonishingly good to him. It also looks like he's going to make quite the splash on the singles chart; not only did his sales skyrocket, but airplay increased 1735% Everything was too late to hit this week's singles charts, but just wait for the next two weeks...

Huh.

I think I have just seen the most subtly unsubtle outing of a continuing character that I can remember. It was just ... odd.

Basically, Brenda and her crew get dragooned into working a case for the FBI. As the beginning of that case, they wind up locating a missing body in the LA County morgue. Brenda mentions that the missing person has a boyfriend, and Dr Morales suddenly goes, "Oh, he wasn't in just in town for a party, he was going to HelLA." Brenda and Sgt. Gabriel are, understandably, politely blank, and the coroner says, "OK, time for Gay Culture 101." Which isn't quite the sort of thing one would say from the outside. (Said coroner being one Dr. Morales, first name unknown, played by Jonathan del Arco, who once played Hugh the Borg -- and I have a feeling that the date of birth listed on that profile may be as much as a good decade off, since he would not appear to be over 40, but maybe he's just extraordinarily well preserved.) The coroner then explains about gay party drugs, and circuit parties and a lot of stuff that I suppose a medical examiner in a big city would know about, but which he seems to know very very well. It was all very ... gay vague, really.

It wouldn't be surprising if they meant for people to take it that way. The episode as presented was all party boys and drug dealers and pathetic and somewhat stupid gayboys and, well, after all that, I'm sure that GLAAD would like to have a word with them.

The show also has a lesbian officer as a new recurring character, Det. Mikki Mendoza. She's rather alarmingly kickass (and crash-car, when required). It's going to be interesting to see what they do with her, since in her current position, she sits outside the Major Crimes squad in another division altogether. She's apparently being cast as an anti-romantic interest for another detective.

(Purely a side note: the SGA fen will likely be all over that episode, since it contains one of the first post-SGA appearances by David Hewlett. Playing someone oddly Rodney-esque, actually. Rodney as an FBI agent. Ew.)

To the best of my knowledge, there are now two shows dealing with the LAPD at some level. It's fascinating to see how very differently cast "The Closer" and "Southland" are. They could not look more different. As mentioned elsewhere, Southland's LAPD, with a couple of exceptions, looks like it stepped out of the 1980s, whereas "The Closer" -- with the possible exception of Brenda Leigh herself -- looks much more like the LAPD of today. Much more diverse, even at the relatively high level that they show -- almost everyone we see regularly is a sergeant, detective or above -- and it's periodically dealt with the tensions caused by that diversity, too. For all that it's, in general, a much less realistic show -- procedurals in which things get neatly wrapped up every episode are by their nature less realistic -- "The Closer" manages to get that one thing very right.

EDIT: Apparently, both Dr Morales and the actor who plays him are gay. And it was meant to be the character's "coming out episode". Del Arco talks about it in an interview from ET Online -- the first part is about the deaths of Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson, because of course every actor has to be asked about it, and the rest is about the character and himself, and working on the show, and his offscreen involvement with GLSEN.

Bors Blog: Phoning It In: That's ... kind of perfect, actually, phoning it in or no. As is this.

I can't say as I blame him for feeling that way. Only Celine Dion would maybe be worse.

I felt pretty much exactly like this after our employee "retreat" for that exact same purpose.

Of course, all of these are true. Especially the last two.

This will be utterly meaningless for someone who hasn't read the series, but I really love that last frame.

..."medical school"?

Yeah ... Yeah, I'm guessing probably not.

That's ... kind of surprising, actually. Yet apparently true, nonetheless.

Somehow, I don't think most people want to lose their junk in the trunk quite so dramatically. (Though I can just imagine that middle panel as a thoroughly startling scene in the next Star Trek...)

...this is an improvement?

...Well, that can't be good.

Strangely, frequently true. I'm thinking that it's infectious.

...or possibly a business that insists on using a particular version of Exchange and which will never ever ever EVER upgrade the sucker! ... not that I'd know anything about that, of course.

I don't think most athiests would< actually.

grim amusements / June 25, 2009 / supreme court declares strip search in school illegal:

Every once in a while, this Court surprises....

How to Write Fan Fiction
No comment. None. Whatsoever. No.

Political press conference bingo
The second square is so very perfect that I just wish someone could use it in real life. Also, the entire row that's second from the bottom.

In fact, probably not a bad way to spend $50 million, according to, like, actual science. (And, yes, he's really doing that.)

I might buy it myself. (Lord knows, anything would be better than Genre.)

Apart from the slightly odd take (though one I've seen elsewhere), this is perhaps the last (or next to last) place I'd expect to see this controversy referenced.

Feels like that sometimes, don't it?

...There's blood left in his head?

Just because.

I did in fact get around to listening to the audiobook version of Star Trek: Movie Tie-In (I do love that title so), in which Zachary Quinto narrates Allan Dean Foster's valiant attempt at imposing narrative sense on that story.

It would be fascinating to know what version of the script Foster was working from, because there are differences that are kind of intriguing. For example, although it's touched on only very lightly, you do get the sense of the utter wrongness of the Spock/Uhura relationship -- not wrong because it violates the canons or anything like that, but wrong because he's a Starfleet instructor and she's his best student. For all that Starfleet may be different from our current military standards, he was taking an enormous, and enormously stupid, risk, all for troo luuuuv. The film manages to gloss this by eliding the fact that he's a serving officer, and not some sort of very accomplished student who gets to wear a blue shirt just because. (Aided in this elision by the fact that Quinto just isn't much older, if at all, than everyone else.) One of the strong improvements in the novel -- and honestly, I don't know why they didn't put this in the film -- is that instead of getting held up, and therefore saved, because Sulu forgot to take off the parking brake, Enterprise stops and the bridge crew has a discussion in which they realize that the planetary distress call from Vulcan is a fake -- after all, it would have to be, since the attack on the planet itself didn't start until after Enterprise came into the Vulcan system, right? They try to broadcast to the other ships in the fleet, but it's too late. (Interestingly, one of the finer side points in the novel that might get missed is how Kirk's other future gets foreclosed by the attack -- in TOS, he's supposed to have served on Farragut before going to Enterprise, but Farragut is one of the ships destroyed at Vulcan.)

The novel's got a few deliberate call-backs to other Trek moments. For example, in the final climactic battle, instead of taking place somewhere outside the solar system, everything happens next to Titan, allowing Enterprise to rise out of the mists behind Narada, much as in another Trek film. (That said, I think the film changes were better there; however improbable, Sulu -- one assumes -- shooting all of Narada's missiles down like that was just cool. Also, having a black hole open just above the ecliptic around Saturn, when a much smaller black hole swallowed and destroyed Vulcan, would probably have been just a teensy bit too much bad science for the average Trek fan to take.)

There are a couple of small moments here and there that aren't quite what one would expect. The one disappointing moment in the entire thing comes early on, as Quinto is settling into his reading style; when he says "Live long and prosper" to the Vulcan Science Academy board, he just ... says it. Mind, he was somewhat hampered by the surrounding text which specifically emphasizes how deliberately emotionless he is when he says that, but still, I was hoping for a really good "Live long and prosper, [bitch]," and it's just not there. There are also the moments where he puts on his Winona Ryder, which are just ... weird. I mean ... weird. He tries this falsetto-ish voice that just doesn't work at all. His Uhura is much more successful.

Overall, definitely a worthwhile adjunct to the film. Though I still suspect that reading Star Trek: Countdown would be slightly more helpful in making sense of Nero, at least.

A few random links:

Star Trek: The Abridged Script | The Editing Room
The money quote from the above: "BLACK HOLES MAKE EVERYTHING POSSIBLE!"

Oddly enough, despite being specifically inspired by Editing Room's style and format, Bad Transcript's version of the movie is far more interesting. Aside from the money quote, of course. And this is maybe even better.

Interviews with Orci and Kurzman, the scriptwriters:
Part 1
Part 2
A few things become blindingly obvious as you read through these:
(1) They were not prepared for the obsessiveness of the average Trek fan, let alone the seriously obsessive fanboys. Their befuddlement at certain moments is just ... charming, really. Unintentionally, of course. But really, someone should have warned them.
(2) By scrupulously avoiding a great deal of the previous 69 episodes and 10 films, they managed to be completely unaware, for a very long time, of the fact that Trek had cobbled together a surprisingly coherent view of time (as long as you ignore the end of Voyager and, it seems, Enterprise) -- that there is One True Timeline, and if someone meddles in it, you have to go and re-meddle to make it go back the way it was supposed to. While this may be forgiveable for the youngsters, it makes it more than mildly baffling that Spock doesn't say to young Kirk and friends, "So, what say we take a slingshot trip around Vulcan's sun, warn everyone what's about to happen so that they can just shoot down Nero's lightly protected drill with all the spacecraft that Vulcan, as the oldest spacefaring culture in the Federation, should have just lying around, and prevent Vulcan from getting all crunched in the first place? Hey, maybe we could even slingshot into the future, save Romulus, and prevent Nero from going bonkers in the first place! Howzabout that?" After all, he's done it at least three times himself.

In any event, they are very clear that the TNG/DS9/Voyager timeline continues, and they'd rather like to see a new TNG film. It seems highly unlikely -- I cannot imagine Paramount et al deciding that they would like to simultaneously juggle two different continuities on film, thank you VERY much, especially given that the last TNG film only just made back its production budget domestically, whereas the reboot has been wildly profitable, even against a much increased production budget. Paramount is likely to just invest in the current timeline and explore the changes that have been made possible. (Does Kirk have to go back and fail to rescue Edith Keeler again? Do they need to go back and get another couple whales, or did Narada maybe kinda accidentally blow up that probe for them? Just how much is Spock Prime going to tell them, or not tell them? Inquiring minds want to know!) I do wonder if the still robust book publishing program for TOS/TNG will be allowed to continue, or if they'll shut that off in favor of only working within the reboot universe.

(Purely a sidenote: everyone keeps calling it the reboot, which keeps making me want to shout "ReBoot!" Which will, of course, be meaningless to just about everyone, so here, have a teeny bit of context.)

Barack Obama, Fierce Advocate of LGBT Rights! (See also: Grim Amusements: love and anger)

ComicCritics.com » Archive » The sad, strange tale of Dwayne McDuffie: As the book where most of DC's characters come together, JLA ought to be one of their big, frontline books. As it turns out, as the book where most of DC's characters come together, it winds up being at the mercy of every single other one of those books, every single crossover, and subject to rampant editorial dictat. Alone of DC's titles, JLA is a slave to past and ongoing continuity of every major title, whereas the other titles are primarily if not purely slaves to their own continuity. Which means that it's a bitch to write, because it almost never gets to tell its own story, so to speak.

All's I got to say is: Victoria's Secret is a bajillion times worse. (The horror, the horror ...)

Have I ever mentioned that I have an unusual fondness for this strip? Really, quite quite fond.

My. Apparently Luke Wilson is very hardcore. Who knew?

Well, who hasn't?

Because my brain is fried and I have nothing useful to say about ... well, anything, really.

First, there's this, just because I like the way it sounds.


Uninvited - Westworld

Unfortunately, the other cover song I wanted isn't available -- pity, it's very freaky weird, all things considered -- so we'll just have to leap into ... um ... well ... this. It's very very ... Bulgarian. (That's not a euphemism. The singer is Bulgarian.)



OK, so it wasn't just a euphemism.

All's I can say is, I like Lookouts but I really really really hope that they decide to do Automata if they decide to take only one to series.

The sort of moment where all sane cat owners think to themselves, "No ... no, I really don't want to know".

I wonder if any lawyers would actually do that? Or, more likely, I wonder how many lawyers drag themselves through cases when they know for a fact that their client is a perfect boogerbrain, but they have to make the argument anyway because that's what they were hired to do.

I understand how she feels...

Yeah ... pretty sure no HMO would ever cover that.

Well, who doesn't have a position on that?

Somehow, I don't think it works that way.