Star Trek Silly Season

Hello Reader,

Remember the 1960’s?

It’s “the silly season,” as news reporter call it. Parliament is in recess, nothing’s happening, and journalists are resorting to stories about the Loch Ness monster, and nostalgia for Star Trek. Me too. 

Now, some of my very best writing is not my essays, but my comments on other people’s blogs. That said, not so “best” were the comments of me and others on the blog of Scott Berkun, gentleman and scholar, when he answered a reader’s question by posting Star Trek and the ideas we must reject in order to save our future. (See footnote) He received 22 comments, some of them quite lengthy.

In the spirit of the silly season, here are my comments for Scott’s post.

The first came after a commenter, believe it or not, “dissed” Star Trek! I was shocked, shocked I say! So I commented too:

Call me a computer nerd, but:

Lisa, above, is confusing the later Star Trek universe, made during grim Reagonomics and so forth, with STOS (Star Trek the original series) made during the cresting wave of the age of Aquarius. This original series remains ever a cultural icon.

Remember? Starships could “destroy an entire planet” but didn’t, and phallic weapons were never carried in visible holsters,

(unlike on Wagon Train, the show’s touchstone for having guest stars who had been in the train/crew all along)

but tucked beneath one’s shirt.

The median year for African countries getting independence, (by my count) was 1960, only six years before the show. So the anti-imperialist Prime Directive was a welcome shock.

The Klingons were Bad Guys who, as someone (David Gerrold?) joked, had no bathtubs on their ships, but hey, you would never see one unless you went out into space.

Then I had to correct my “oopsy,” also known as a factual error:

Oops. I should have written “mode year” not “median year.”

Details: Mode means the year (number) repeated the most. Median would be the number in the middle, like a dotted road median. “Mean” would be the number that is conventionally “average.”

Well, it’s been literally decades since I took any statistics. (Strange, at my age, to measure lots of things now in decades instead of years)

We commenters had fun: 

Call me old, but I enjoy my memories:

For Star Trek, I never got used to the velcro thingy, too futuristic-silly for me, because in one of the first episodes to air, Kirk has a leather-looking holster thingy you can see for a second as he pulls his shirt down, getting ready to beam to the planet. It looked yellow, but our TV set was black and white, so I don’t know.

The brand new department store was two miles away (walking right angles) and I remember when the salesmen still couldn’t get the three colour knobs right (Jeanie had green skin) so there would be a wall of televisions with all different colour settings. I went home and reported what color the ST uniforms were.

Star Trek, airing in 1966, just barely caught the change to color TV. Lost in Space, as I know from re-runs, had their first season in black and white.

I have read they didn’t make Spock have green skin, because the make up would look bad on b&w TVs.

As for make up and fashions, on rare occasion I would see signs in the dirt sidewalk that the high school girls had worn high heels. I don’t know if any wore mini skirts. At our elementary school I think one girl did, I forget, (and all the boys in my grade—but not the younger grades—kept their hair short until junior high) but I dimly remember strangers my age from other schools wearing minis. 

I will tell you what a lot of elementary girls wore for our fashion show (fund raiser), which I haven’t seen since: Three piece bathing suits. Truly society was in transition.

Would I want my granddaughter wearing a miniskirt? As Spock would say in the episode with computer warfare: “I said I understand/have memories, I did not say I approve.”

You will recall that the first blogs were intended partly for community, with lots of intra-comments. So we communed:

Hi Scott, Lisa, Tony, everyone:

I guess it was Christmas of 1969 that we (a brother and I) got a model kit for Christmas, complete with room for a battery so (the front nacelles?) would light up. What I’m clear on is the box included a cheap booklet that included advice on how to write in to save the show, advising “don’t put Star Trek on the envelope” or it would be passed on to the actual show, not the network. It said the next season would start with the “never before seen” Turn About Intruder, and then re-runs, so save the show!

Also in the booklet you could send away for Spock’s pendant, brief celluloid film clips, and actual scripts. That was an eye opener, (either then or later) since it was super obvious the third season had all the bad episodes.

When I took Macbeth in high school I counted five episode titles.

Luckily for me, we lost our TV part way through the series, and so for years I could look forward to possibly seeing a new-to-me episode.

Since I left home in mid-1975, it would have been sometime in the first half of the decade that my brother perused the TV guide and pointed out there was an episode showing, on some channel or other, seven days a week. So the show was popular years before Star Wars encouraged a movie release with Star Wars style orchestra music, instead of futuristic space music.

(And hey, the above was probably before cable, let alone satellite) We all got on a roll, even unto non-Star Trek things. Of course you remember The Troubles With Tribbles episode!:

• Call me a fan, but I can’t resist sharing:
• Speaking of the tribbles script by David Gerrold, I put his Chtorr War series in the “about me” section on favorite books in my blog. The series has lots to say about integrity, responsibility and leadership. It’s told first person, like a detective story, as the hero learns about life and the alien Chtorr.
  
• The series starts with exposition about some serious plagues (only 76 congressmen survive) Now the survivors have to “step up to the plate” and not say, “Let George do it.”
  
• Everyone feels like an orphan in mourning, everyone therefore has a golden excuse to escape into alcoholism and drugs, but the good ones carry on. The hero starts out as a spoiled brat, but he learns better.
  
• The army is integrated, to the point where the young hero often forgets to mention the gender of a soldier in the background.
  The feminist in me laughs at how he gets a girl friend (husband and child deceased) who is older, more sexually and relationship-ly experienced, taller, smarter and of higher military rank.
  As you might guess, Gerrold is from wacky Southern California.

I guess we talked of how in the Star Trek future humans were all so affluent. No wonder we had less war in the future.

Lisa: Thank you.

Scott (and everybody): 

Regarding American society and affluence, I just tried a search engine. No luck.

But I’m sure that (probably in a coffee table patriotic picture book) John Steinbeck wrote something years ago which I’m still thinking about:

That Americans, after several generations of trying, had finally achieved affluence … and for the first time were at a loss as to what to do next.

I suppose we meant that United Statesians had lost one of their national dreams.

…Well dear reader, that’s enough silliness. 

For next week’s post, maybe I’ll blog deadly dull, and serious. But don’t worry, it will be posted near labour day, so I don’t suppose you will read it.

Sean Crawford

August

in a loft in Cochrane,

2018

Footnote: 

~Here’s the link to Berkun’s post. I am a fan of his web site.

~For more about TV history, of a more scholarly bent, see my essay Death of Buffy, archived January 2012. 

~For the death of Buffy’s friend, see Anya, Friend of Buffy, archived April 2017, regarding how at last I understand her phobia for bunny rabbits.

Free Fall Geography

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

Hello Reader,

Got a sense of place?

I love to graphy, write, about the geo, land. More accurately, I like to see if I can use the power of words to conjure up a space-time location. 

Here are some Free Fall pieces where, using a timer, we get a prompt, then rush along with no time to check whether the geography is politically correct—just get the words out!

We rush without expectations … then it’s so much fun, so surprising, to go around the table reading aloud.

It ain’t free fall if it’s edited.

Here are some geo pieces, the first 1-5 being prose, and then ending with number 6, a poem.

1 Prompt- 

highway of words

Sometimes people came to the block at the back of the hospital. The morgue. Sometimes they were found in the desert after buzzards were seen cruising. How sad, to die alone on the lonesome prairie. And how beautiful was the land, for those with ample water and supplies. Georgia O’keefe settled here to make her paintings that now sell for millions. A beautiful land, but cruelly unforgiving.

Take the road to the next town, and what do you see? Can you paint it with words? Scrub grass as far as the eye can see, grass with life enough to feed animals, plentiful enough to feed buzzards. So yes, the great plains are alive. Sandy spots, rocky spots, and table sized rocks. Table rocks, they call them, straight like a table with their worn strata.

Also collecting the sun’s rays are dull green bushes with dull waxy leaves, the stems dry and hard, growing up and out, like miniature versions of those great trees of the African savannah. And smaller barrel shaped growths with spines all over. So many vines and branches to catch, delay, claw and discourage foraging. Only because the barrels have such a succulent centre, a centre unseen.

You roll along the road with your water and repair kit under a blue pitiless hot sky and what is unseen is: your dreams that draw you on. Somewhere ahead is an air conditioned cafe with ice cream, and colours unknown to this dusty land.

2 Prompt- 

east or west

There I was, standing by my jeep in the middle of the prairie, on the shoulder of the Queen Elizabeth II highway. Somewhere lost behind me was Cowtown, somewhere ahead was the Capital. The highway had a soccer-field sized strip of grass between two strips of pavement, each of two lanes. And it was  real grass, watered by the province. The real native grass was on the flanks of the highway, feeding brown cattle.

My jeep popped and cricked as the engine settled and cooled. Strange, that down in Arizona a little road would have a speed limit even faster than this modern piece of engineering. Perhaps our speed limits are a compromise so people won’t go too fast when the roads are slick and dangerous with snow. But now it was summer. I stood and looked and wondered where I should go, east or west? To the west was the town of Sundre, with a nice used book store. I have found some treasures there. To the east was a gopher museum. The gophers were stuffed and outfitted with cutesy little jerseys. Also there was a disco in an old quonset hut. The hipster in me said, “go east”; the bookworm in me said, “go west.” I like hipsters, but all of my favourite people would go west.

3 Prompt- 

creepy

It was creepy. To my left was the F.B .I. office. To my right was the I.R.S. Strange to think that someday my children won’t know what those initials mean. Strange that all the I.R.S. produced was paper, paper and more paper. They didn’t make anything. Didn’t grow anything. And now the place was dark inside. Nothing could grow, but it was creepy.

I was armed, of course. An old army M-16 slung on my shoulder. No sidearm—I couldn’t be bothered to lug the weight. Part of what made it creepy was that no one had fitted the building up to the old power grid. Why would we? Even the old government workers wouldn’t have any sentimental attachment to it. People squat in the strangest of places, but no, not the I.R.S.

I made my approach across a wide cement plaza, covered in an inch of snow. Which was a blessing. I could see no footprints. Which didn’t mean anything. Most folks these days used small doorways. To the side or back. Office buildings were stupid, All that plate glass let out too much heat. I walked right up. The clock was stopped at 8:20, of course. The time it happened. The doors, to my surprise, were locked. Didn’t everyone just rush out?

I stepped close to the door because it had started snowing again. No wind. Just little flakes falling, drifting and spiralling a bit in their own air currents, self-made by their little snow flake arms. I had seen actual snowflakes like that, landing on my grey rifle as I was waiting for a feral dog to appear. Now, I just wanted to get in, find an address, and get out. I figured some former taxpayer might still be squatting.

4 Prompt- 

a big umbrella

These day it’s a cutesy fashion to have small umbrellas. I don’t get it. In my day umbrellas were the proper size. From Japan these days you can order a transparent umbrella: boring to them, really cutesy over here. And big. The Japanese say it is very romantic to have two people under one umbrella.

One day in a light rain I found myself on a cobbled Paris street with my big black bumbershoot. Sounds exotic, but not to the French. Even before the Chunnel, British-types with furled umbrellas were boring. Approaching me was a gorgeous French lady. Not too old, not too young, not too rich, not too poor. If only I were James Bond meeting another agent. Like I had in Tokyo last year, when I used up my first life. But here I was, on vacation, in the rain, with a boring umbrella and a big boring black trench coat. I should have worn khaki, but that colour was out of style in the city when I was outfitting my travel wardrobe.

Not being a trained agent, I had no idea how to accost a native. Yes, I’m supposed to get information, but I don’t have any idea how to molest someone’s passage down a public sidewalk. There was no one else around. Not a soul. My feet went clop clop. Well sort of, I’m not a foley artist, you can imagine for yourself what sounds I made, and her too, as we approached closer and closer. Just when we were about to maneuver our big umbrellas to avoid each other, necessitating eye contact, I initiated agent contact:

“Pardon me, mademoiselle, Oo eh la Japanese store?” I needed a non-boring umbrella.

5 Prompt- 

upside down in the ditch

You know what’s weird about the big city? No ditches. So what goes along the road? Nothing. Except that every block, near the intersection, you see a little grate where the gutter would normally be. Yes they have ditches, but they’re underground.

You know what else is weird? No gutter on the grassy side of the sidewalk. Which means that all the water flows over the lawn and onto the sidewalk. That’s fine in summer. And spring. And fall. But in winter? Can you spell Ice Slick? All it takes is a slick one-millimetre of transparent ice. And zoom! Granny has a broken hip; Grandpa is swearing like he still rode a horse; Grandson is grabbing a tire iron and charging into the building to take the law into his own hands. … All for the want of a single afternoon of spade work to make a gutter.

In the smaller towns, more personal, you wouldn’t need to grab a tire iron, for you would have spoken to the owner of the big impersonal building, because it would be  a person you would know. Don’t mess with a small towner. I’m still laughing at the time some Hells Angels (no apostrophe) came through town in a convoy… with police escort…. To protect the angels from the local citizens. The black clad angels got through town in a hurry.

Back on the prairie, every town has churches. That’s with an s. By day I tune in to the station with the hog report. By night, the all-gospel station. That’s a no-brainer. If my car ends up upside down in a ditch, with my oil pan leaking, and me hanging by my seatbelt, I want the last thing I hear to be the words of my Lord. Hey, I hate to sound like an apple polisher, but sometimes Saint Peter needs a little extra nudge when he’s deciding which gate to put me through.

In a small town, Protestants turn Catholic so they can enjoy Hallowe’en, and atheists turn Christian so they can enjoy the carols at Christmas time. No, Anglos don’t turn Mexican so they can enjoy the day of the dead. We’re not that cosmopolitan here.

6 prompt- groundhog day

The sun rises and sets,

my life is routine, no bets.

The days go by, 

and here am I,

wondering where the groundhogs are.

The clutter advances like the tide,

at least I can work to have some pride.

And then my clutter departs, recedes,

but under bare ground you know there’s weeds.

Another book read, article wrote, 

speech made,

I deserve to sit in the shade, 

as the years could become a gloomier glade.

But no, these things count, don’t let them fade,

 wondering where the groundhogs are.

Again the open road, again the wondrous town.

Again the joy of leaving my burdens down,

a chance to walk like an eager clown.

Wondering where the groundhogs are.

Sean Crawford

August,

on the highway,

with a post written in Calgary,

the fourth most livable city in the world this year,

According to The Economist magazine in 2018.

Footnotes: 

~UPDATE By coincidence, this afternoon, Thursday, the CBC Radio One  Homestretch did a story on the Torrington museum, and the various dioramas that represent the town history. An older lady was amused at how many letters of protest the town got from PETA.  The interview would be findable on the CBC website. (But I forgot to post until this evening)

~AS I WRITE THIS, Camelot, the bookstore in Sundre, with a “for lease” sign in the window, is selling treasures at 50% off, even for antiques and classics, being due to close at (I think) the end of August. (Don’t delay!—there’s a separate room for ancient hardcovers) I like to take the scenic road (22 is way more scenic that the QE II, with many horses instead of only cows) north from Cochrane, after grabbing a java in the loft at Coffee Traders. If you find Camelot closed, well, then there is still a zoo and a museum in Sundre. And river trails. 

~To get your own transparent umbrella, web search J-List, an export company.

~the Chunnel is the channel tunnel, carved through solid rock-chalk underneath—can you believe it?— the English Channel, also known as la straits du Calais. Since we let the French put an e on the Anglo-French Concorde supersonic passenger jet, it’s only right that we get to use the word dreamed of since even before spaceflight. Nobody romantically dreamed of saying “Eurostar.”

Now that we have Brexit, can we take our name back?

~As for that outrageous gopher museum, complete with gopher hockey players, it ain’t going anywhere.