Category: life

Topics concerning that thing known as ‘real life’ and not virtual worlds.

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These were the voyages of several starships, Enterprise

So that’s it then. The last episode of Star Trek: Enterprise came and went, and the shows that I practically grew up on are all over. Oddly, I didn’t really care much.

I felt compelled to watch the last episode, of course, but couldn’t help rolling my eyes at the lame Troi/Riker frame story that was pasted onto an even lamer plot. It seems to me that in a final episode of the final series of Star Trek, they could have done something more interesting than sending them off to do a little favour for the Andorians. After it ended, I felt more than a little let down. After all, I wanted to see something significant, that acknowledged the end of a show that I’d watched faithfully, and at times, obsessively.

There is so much opportunity for a truly interesting storyline, especially with a timeline as well-defined as Star Trek‘s. They could have created a “historical documentary” that covered the time between Captain Tucker and Captain Kirk. When Babylon 5 wound down it’s fourth season, it had episodes that explored the future and the impact that the characters had on history. It provided closure to an immense four-year-long story arc. And Enterprise? Enterprise had Riker chopping vegetables on the holodeck.

Ow. My eyes just reflexively rolled almost backwards in reaction to the hopelessly stupid writing, worse directing, and actors who probably shouldn’t be on TV anymore (or in the first place).

The same thing happened at the end of Star Trek: Voyager. After several years of struggling to make it back to Earth alive, the final episode finally has Voyager emerge from a Borg subspace conduit almost in Earth’s orbit. And the triumphant return lasted about 15 seconds before they rolled the credits. That’s it. The reward for watching years of Voyager’s pathetically weak stories was 15 seconds of “Yay, we’re home!”

So now it’s all over for good. In the end, I don’t think fans care enough about Star Trek: Enterprise enough for the show to return in any form. Over the last years, it was sometimes interesting with rare bits that made people sit up and go “ooh” and maybe spill a bit of their beer at the same time. It failed, however, to reach out and firmly grasp the audience by the wobbly bits the way the original series and Star Trek: The Next Generation occasionally did. Figuratively speaking.

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Pesto, and my lesson for the day

Craving a dollop of pesto sauce for my pasta, I threw on my least-smelly t-shirt, hopped into my car, and made for the nearest Safeway. No, the big-chain super market doesn’t carry the really good pesto, but for my pesto fix, I wasn’t being picky. The jarred variety was fine by me.

The parkade under the Safeway was full, but I scooted past a vacant spot to try for one next to the door — I needed my pesto fix in short order. Naturally, I was immediately blocked by a line of immobile SUVs waiting for a Hummer to back into a spot marked “SMALL CAR” several times over. So much for saving time.

Fifteen minutes later, I found my jar of pesto, and hunted for the shortest line at the checkouts. Fortune smiled upon me, as a checkout girl removed the “NEXT CASHIER PLEASE” sign just as I approached. Maybe it was my friendly smile. Or maybe my Drakkar Noir. That stuff is amazing with the chicks, and it’s good as lighter fluid in a pinch.

I leapt at the checkout counter, shoving aside other customers to triumphantly place my jar of pesto in the spot of victory! Then fickle fate turned up her nose. The receipt printer jammed!

I tapped my foot for another ten minutes as a small crowd of white-and-red-uniformed employees fought with the printer. Other customers queued at other checkouts and slipped through effortlessly, while I was left frozen at this defective, receiptless counter. I shook my fist to the heavens that my struggle to hasten my shopping experience had been thwarted by a mere machine.

Eventually, they moved me to another till, checked me through, and I found myself, at last, heading home with my jar of pesto. If there’s one thing I can learn from this experience, it’s that I should avoid pesto at all cost.

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We’re being wacky, right?

If you’ve seen the new movie adaptation of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, I empathize. If you haven’t seen it, please do yourself a favour and rent a video instead. I was in pain throughout the movie. It is, in the very best sense of the word, crap.

It baffles me how a producer can take a hilarious script/novel with a proven track record, and then mangle it so badly that there’s nothing actually funny in it anymore. After they gutted it, twisted it, deleted all the quirky humour, what was left was almost but not quite entirely unlike a story by Douglas Adams.

Every scene should have been subtitled “Hey, look! We’re being wacky now, aren’t we? Yes! So wacky!” It’s just so… depressing.

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Today, I’d like to discuss wormholes

If you write in a journal infrequently, either online or on paper, you will often find yourself writing about why you don’t write. In fact, if you write rarely enough, every entry will have to start that way, and before long you have a lengthy journal that’s concerned entirely with why it hasn’t been written. I won’t do this.

Instead, I’d like to talk about wormhole singularities. I’d like to, but I won’t do that either, because I don’t know anything about the subject. To be honest, I get into serious trouble when the conversation enters the realm of relativity and multiple universes. I’m sorry to disappoint my readers — I know how many find this site by searching for “Schwartzchild wormhole”. That and “jolene blalock nakid”.

I won’t dwell on this disappointment, however. I’ll go right on typing until I settle on a completely different topic — like coffee, for example. Why does a cup of ordinary, black coffee cost two dollars? Back in my college days, the cafeteria offered cups of coffee for 30 cents. Sure, it was acrid brew that sat on a warming element for several hours, but it was affordable acrid brew, and there is no reason, in my mind, that a cup of coffee should cost more than a few dimes. After all, when an entire pound of coffee beans at the grocery store costs only a little more than the cost of a single cup at Starbucks or Blenz, one has to wonder if maybe there’s a small chance that the coffee bars just might be overcharging a little bit.

Admittedly, I don’t fully grasp the intricacies of brewing coffee in the professional manner. Of the items of exotic tools and machinery behind the counter at the local coffee bar, most baffle and frighten me. I appreciate and admire the skill and workmanship that lends itself to these young coffee artisans in the preparation of my daily brew. Their deft hands, their artist’s hands, fairly dance on the various buttons, knobs, levers, and lumps of soggy things, captivating onlookers in their aura of coffee zen.

So, on the subject of coffee or singularities, I’ll have to acknowledge my ignorance and simply accept that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in my coffee. A cup of coffee from Starbucks is worth over six and a half times more than a similar coffee at my old college, two universes are connected by a wormhole at the horizons of a black hole and a white hole, and I don’t write very often because my blog entries usually turn out to make no sense whatsoever.