Interesting Star Trek news today…

JJ Abrams, creator of TV show Lost and director of Mission Impossible III, is to produce and direct the 11th Star Trek film.

The film, produced by Paramount and set for release in 2008, will focus on the early days of Captain James T Kirk and Mr Spock.

The as-yet-untitled feature will tell of their first meeting at Starfleet Academy and first outer space mission.

JJ Abrams is cool. He wrote Armageddon, which I still think is one of the most entertaining action films ever made, as well as the tv show Alias, and created Lost. His take on Star Trek would certainly be interesting. The whole article raises a big question that isn’t addressed, though. How are you going to show Kirk and Spock as youngsters? Use different actors? I guess that could work, but it seems a strange thing to do when Shatner and Nimoy are still alive…

There’s also this interesting titbit:

Earlier this year, Next Generation star Patrick Stewart told ITV1’s This Morning there was “interest in bringing the Next Generation cast together with actors from different Star Trek series”.

That’d be great I always disagree with people regarding the modern Star Trek films. I thought Generations was great, but First Contact did nothing for me. I found Insurrection a bit snide, but Nemesis was fantastic fun - Troi actually did something useful! To be honest, though, I’d pay to watch the Next Generation crew eat sponges, and anything that gets them back on the screen is fine with me.

A while back I drove past a BBC drama shoot, and here’s what I said at the time:

I saw a very cold looking actress standing outside the house

The programme in question, Mayo, was broadcast this evening. The scene began, and the only actress on screen was dressed up warmly. I couldn’t figure it out, until the camera panned over to a short-skirted, bikini wearing…mannequin. It was being used in a crime scene reconstruction.

Look, it was night, and I was trying to drive, ok?

My life has been rated:

See what your rating is!
Created by Bart King

Bah. I’m so dull.

Today marked the launch of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre’s ‘The Complete Works‘ season - every single one of Shakespeare’s plays will be performed over the next twelve months, including Hamlet by ninjas! I only arrived home at 1630ish so missed most of the events, but I wandered into town anyway. There are flags and hangy things all down the main streets:

and local BBC radio had a stage in front of the theatre:

While walking back I passed various marquees in the ‘birthday gardens’, and heard somebody speaking from within. According to the official programme, it was Judi Dench! I didn’t recognise her voice at all. Had I arrived earlier I could have seen Patrick Stewart, it seems.

Akismet is the Wordpress blogging system’s built-in comment spam filter. It’s always worked pretty well for me, although my spam ‘traffic’ has never been very high. Having been away for five days, though, I came back to this:

Yeesh. I’d hate to have to sort that lot out manually.

He’s been hanging around for ages.

Hope it doesn’t spring a leak

Hopefully this is clear enough. I’ve never seen anybody walking a dog like that before

This is the best boat name I have ever seen

I let myself get too hopeful about a romantic possibility over the last couple of months. We became friends over the Internet last year, and then met in New York in March. We were never a proper couple or anything, but I started to think that was a possibility. Although the day in NYC was great, this Sunday she told me that the distance issue was insuperable, and that she’s started seeing somebody else. That’s entirely reasonable of her, but it makes me very sad. She was really one in a million. I hope she finds happiness, though, and I thank her for the great time I had.

It was a friend’s birthday party on Saturday evening, but I pulled out when I discovered my ex-girlfriend would be there. Being around her just makes me angry, which is actually quite unusual. I don’t do angry with people, I reserve it for inanimate objects and operating systems. It’s not that she left me - it was a long time ago, and happily I’m over that - it’s the remarkably unpleasant way she’s behaved since. I honestly don’t think I deserve it, and I’m astonished that she’s even capable of it. As a consequence, whenever I see her I begin to wonder whether the whole relationship was a big lie, which doesn’t accomplish anything other than wrecking a night’s sleep. So I avoid her whenever possible It did, though, result in my not seeing anybody or doing anything for three days, as well as pissing off people who were expecting me to be at the party.

So, it was an all round crappy weekend¹. I’m in the very fortunate position of being able to escape, so I’m going to join Mum and Dad on the narrowboat for a bit. Large numbers of locks, plus the inevitable downpours, will hopefully take my mind off things for a while. Later this week we’ll be heading into Little Venice - the canal basins of Paddington - which should be interesting.

Not sure when I’m back, but likely the weekend.

1. I know plenty of people have it far worse, but this is a blog, dammit [↩]

Fyi, even though The 40 Year Old Virgin may look like a Road Trip clone, I actually found it to be a really thoughtful movie, with likeable characters and clever dialogue. So if you’re the kind of person, like me, who turned Road Trip off after 25mins, this one’s worth a look.

Nuclear power is one of those buzzphrases that gets immediate negative responses from many people, but I’ve never heard anything as to quite why other than vague prohecies of catastrophe. Indeed, the founder of Greenpeace has now changed his mind, and is fully supporting new nuclear power plants. His article, here, lists the reasons why he believes nuclear power is the only way forward. A Wired article from last year goes into more detail, and it seems to make sense. It seems that current reactors are safe¹, contribute effectively nothing to global warming, and are not all that expensive. Most nuclear waste can be reprocessed and the rest can be packaged in glass that degrades 10% in one million years, and then maybe pushed into subduction zones, never to be seen again.

The only objection to nuclear power seems to be that the public are nervous. Now that climate change has been proven to be a reality, can we afford to let this override a practical and well-understood solution? It wouldn’t fix everything, but it’s something that can be done right now.

1. the accident at three-mile island in the US showed that a sixteen-hour meltdown could be contained - there were no fatalities. Chernobyl was a disaster waiting to happen, and such a reactor would no longer be permitted. New pebble bed reactors have been shown to survive all surrounding machinery being switched off [↩]

It’s what we’ve all been waiting for: Ask a Ninja. I like “How do I kill a ninja?”

Incidentally, if you try to say the word ‘ninja’ more than twenty times times you’ll find the word degrades into mush. I think this is the work of ninja linguists.

You’d expect the first episode of Doctor Who’s second series to be all about the new Doctor. David Tennant was passed out for much of the christmas special, and this was the first chance to see him in costume and at full power. So, this should have been his day. But did anybody else think Billie Piper completely stole the show? Body-swapping is often a painful sci-fi premise to watch, as few actors can pull it off convincingly, but she did a remarkable job. I’d no real idea whether she could act or not, having only ever seen her in the one type of role, but it’s easy to see why she won the part. He was pretty good too, imho - ’still got it’ was one of many lines which made me laugh out loud.

The BBC are putting mp3 episode commentaries online, as a matter of interest. I think the sci-fi channel started this trend with Battlestar Galactica, and it’s a neat idea.

South Park’s follow-up episode aired this week. The preceeding show had ended with a challenge to Comedy Central to allow an image of Mohammed to be broadcast on the network. Unfortunately Comedy Central refused, and a clip of Mohammed standing in a doorway was blanked out in this week’s show. Within the plot, however, the image was broadcast on US tv while the vast majority of US citizens had their heads buried in sand. This happened after a heartfelt plea from Kyle to the head of the network, who at one point he called ‘Doug’, a direct reference to the head of Comedy Central. Al-Qaeda’s immediate reaction was to broadcast a cartoon of their own, in which Jesus and George W. Bush, amongst others, bounced around the screen crapping on each other and everything in sight, including a US flag. Comedy Central had no problem with this being broadcast, which sums up the whole ridiculous situation.

Mohammed has actually previously been depicted in South Park, but pre 9/11. It turns out that an image of Mohammed has been visible within the quick-fire South Park credits since the beginning of season 10, which is very funny indeed.

Isn’t it ridiculous that with all the vast might of the US media, it takes a cartoon in its 10th series to point out the obvious? I particularly liked the scene of the latest episode in which the assembled press quizzed GWB on this bizarre law known as ‘the first amendment’. GWB is portrayed as more intelligent than the reporters, in contrast to his usual depiction in the show, which probably shows how much the writers think of the media.

The episode can be downloaded over BitTorrent from here.