What I watched: “Starfleet Academy”
The most controversial Star Trek show since … well, The Next Generation, and then DS9, and Voyager, then Enterprise, and then Discovery, Picard, Lower Decks and Prodigy … anyway, it’s the most controversial show in series history (not counting all the other ones.)
The show is only 4 episodes in so I don’t really have a grand sense of how it’s all going to look at the end but it’s a perfectly cromulent streaming show? The chuds hate it for all the usual reasons — LADY CAPTAIN?!?!?!?1!!!?!?!?! — but to be charitable to the non-chud haters, I can understand some of the fuss: it’s still a streaming show and it’s YA-adjacent, which is a departure for Trek. But the writing is good enough, some of the actors fit the roles nicely, and said lady captain is American treasure Holly Hunter, who could recite drug warning labels in a monotone and would still have my complete attention. So a cautious “go for it” from me, you know, if you can handle a little teenager drama here and there.
Bonus watch: “The Magnificent Seven”
Did this one — the 1960 OG, not the recent remake — for my podcast (coming out in a few weeks) and had a lot of fun with it. I had watched it previously, though a long time ago. My grandfather loved westerns so most of the ones I’ve seen over the years were viewed at his house in my childhood. It’s good, though I suspect the big reason this has become one of the biggest westerns ever is, in three parts: it’s a remake of “Seven Samurai,” one of the most iconic movies in history; it was apparently THE go-to TV movie for the 1960s and 1970s (a TV Guide article from the early 80s pegged it as the most-played movie on TV in history at that point); and two of the co-stars went on to be huge movie stars in their own right later in their careers, Steve McQueen and Charles Bronson.
What I read: “Grant,” by Ron Chernow
No particular reason to read this, why would you ask?
What I listened to: Geese
Are they good? I’m not sure! But they’re apparently today’s new indie rock darlings, which I guess makes me legally obligated to make an attempt on them. I like some of it! Not sure I can take the lead singer totally seriously with that voice of his. But I like some of the songs, too, so … back to the lab for more research.
What I ate: FONDUE
I’m as anti-nostalgia as anybody, but you know what? The ’70s were absolutely fuckin’ cooking with fondue. Dipping stuff in cheese? Say no more.
My mom had a 1970s orange-brown Oster fondue set — wedding present! — that we’d bust out every so often for parties or special occasions when I was younger. It lasted for decades, of course, because we used to be a proper country that built things. At some point, she upgraded to a modern stainless steel set-up, which is nicer and fancier, but alas, is NOT orange-brown.
But a couple of weeks ago, I swung by with my son just to say hi since we were in the neighborhood. She was having friends over that night, and the new fondue pot was out. I noticed, but more importantly, my son noticed and had many questions about fondue. Once he got the concept that this was dipping stuff in melty cheese he lit up like it was Christmas morning and immediately requested a fondue night.
And last night, we did! And he had a ball.
We did the stuff we liked — assorted veggies, apples, and of course, bread — and he liked some of them (he ate more peppers than I expected!) but we came prepared with some of his faves, like chicken nuggets and meatballs, and he was crushing those. He loved the long pronged forks and when my wife dropped a pepper he was cackling and being very sassy about it. My mom might have to make him fondue every time he’s over from here on out. (But that sounds like a her problem, not a me problem!)
So, Deadsplinterites, what have YOU been up to and/or dipping in cheese lately?
OH MY GOD WE’RE STILL WATCHING SILENT WITNESS IT’S SEASON 23 AND I THINK ITS STARTING TO AFFECT MY WELL-BEING.
Is your wife or the various animals on your farm plotting your demise?
…mrs luigi has made at least one proxy-posting appearance so I’m 100% convinced that our esteemed colleague is completely immune to such nefarious possibilities
…but…uhhh…the proximity to lamb on the bone is…well…so…roald dahl had a tale of the unexpected that hitchcock even directed in the “alfred hitchcock presents” run…&…nah…her husband’s a policeman…our man’ll be fine?
…as someone who has spent a great many sunday &/or saturday evenings in the company of british relatives…honestly…you have no idea how much I feel this in my very bones?
…like…at some point among the stuff you can find re-runs of on any given night now that even the free version of digital TV runs to channels that are basically wall-to-wall detective/procedural/drama repeats…it stopped being rude to suggest you’d rather go to bed with no expectation of being able to sleep before it finished than sit through another silent witness before the people going to sleep on the sofa would admit they could have gone to bed instead & left someone else to watch something else
…which…sounds anodyne…but…P.G. wodehouse could have built a novel sequence off the implications?
I initiated probably the first nerdfight on io9 when I pointed out that the scene of young Kirk watching the Abramsverse Enterprise being built on the ground was pretty fucking stupid and then using simple high school physics calculated the amount of energy needed to lift it up into low earth orbit was like equipvalent of 30,000 megatones of nuclear bombs.
That’s why you build huge things in space.
But I get it the rule of cool overrides the rule of thermodynamics even if I think it’s pretty fucking dumb.
I didn’t attack characters or who was female or gay or whatever because I had learned that lesson post BSG Mooreverse aka BSG with Starbuck as a hot woman which proved to be more traumatic than a English voice Frenchman as captain.
Either I can bitterly cling to Dirk Benedict or accept that things change. After some emotional growth, I painfully accepted change. It’s why all the terrible iterations of post Jedi Star Wars doesn’t set me off. I accept each for what they are and take it or leave it. I can take Rogue One, but will not see the Rise of Skywalker because well, it’s so fucking stupid that I can’t stop thinking about how fucking stupid it is. At least the other two Abrhamsverse movies which weren’t that good were somewhat entertaining.
Besides I know who owns Star Wars, Dizney and they love fucking with shit to make as much money as possible.
Same applies to Star Trek. I might not like change, but I have learned to deal with it. Those that can’t just end up angry nerds spanking off over things they can’t deal with.
…I did not participate in the i09 nerdfight you cite…but…I…may have grown up early enough in relation to such things that it’s not impossible that after I first read a thing making the case that it would…at the very least…break the earth’s crust in the sense that apocalyptic earthquakes or super-volcanoes do…the thrust requirements of driving that mass from inert to escape velocity being as insane as it would be once you start to do things like try to map out the scale of the thing based on things like counting all the windows in the model & then extrapolating from the relative size of those as background set features relative to people for scale & debate to what extent a ram scoop could provide the necessary base of replenishment for all the matter being created by all those replicators you can’t account for by future-magic+recycling
…I…made that point somewhere the cited source wasn’t to a group of my peers who took considerable exception to either that part…or some aspect of my tone, phrasing or delivery…since they were of the opinion that I was wrong…&…they were clearly nerds…we were arguing about star trek…but…I
…may actually have participated directly in a nerd-fight that would pre-date the internet in addition to that particular website?
…& I probably hadn’t thought about that for…also longer than the internet has existed?
…ok…you win, internet…no offense there, @manchucandidate …but I think that might have been it…that’s where my brain broke?
The “Park the Enterprise in the ocean” is even dumber in the second movie, lol.
But those criticisms don’t bother me because there’s real science we know that says that’s stupid. You tell me a woman can’t be captain and it’s oh, OK, you’re just a sexist dick, feel free to fuck right off.
I really grew to hate the episode Turnabout Intruder where Star Fleet sez: Only dicks allowed to be captain and the antagonist goes batshit crazy by doing an alien induced Freaky Friday with Kirk only to “Prove” Star Fleet’s point.
Never sat well with me.
…there’s been not a few misfires…but even if it wasn’t for the almost mythologised reasons attributed to the guy…roddenbury’s equivalent of the prime directives for star trek scripts were arguably up there with seasame street for low-key getting people to look past some assumptions about things that are more usually seen as being load-bearing in most forms of narrative serial…& it did seem to be broadly his intention not just to avoid being just a.n. other show that did the same things just with different sets & faces…so the edict that unless someone was under some nefarious external influence there was to be no plot or narrative arc that set members of the crew in conflict…no internecine antipathy…more or less on the premise that the federation got to be the federation because once you switch paradigms to a post-scarcity model with replicators & transporters & all of space to explore the idea that people might all be capable of getting along all the time being a solid baseline you didn’t need to constantly undermine to prove your characters were human…I’d argue was a bigger case of boldly going than kirk being TVs first acknowledgement that sometimes white guys kiss black ladies?
…it’s a broad fandom…& I’m not saying I learned how to speak klingon…let alone that I did it in the expectation that I’d find a lot of intelligent gender criticism getting spun with a unique brand of militancy…but…it might be up there with mr rogers for being a neighborhood that didn’t exist that a lot of people might have struggled to imagine for themselves?
I enjoyed the Magnificent Seven. Seems cliche now, but it’s still one of my favorites. A lighter less gorier and certainly less anti-hero version of the later film Wild Bunch.
I think these guys might take issue with only Yul and Steve getting credits…
Charles Bronson
James Colburn
Robert Vaughn who played the same character in Battle Beyond The Stars
Sort of the Dirty Dozen of Westerns.
Or how Platoon kick started a large number of actors careers.
…I mean kurosawa gets credit for everything almost…star wars took the whole thing where the audience is led through events from the perspective of the two droids the way one of his has two serfs or whatever…& I’m not saying akira nicked the thing from joeseph campbell…or even that he’d necessarily read the hero of a thousand faces in the handful of years between it being published & the seven samurai hitting screens…but the gun-slinger/samurai…or ronin more often…kinda fits the individualism angle better that way…deal seems more like a mirror than an appropriate-able cultural thing that way?
…like…the three amigos is as much a riff on the magnificent seven as the latter is the wild bunch or the seven samurai…& robin hood shot that bolt long before that…& so on & so forth as flawed protagonists contest with the paths of their redemptive arcs to their credits-inducing crescendo of redemption
…but…like…ok…sometimes we make them about things that aren’t but they’re all stories for people & mostly they feature people-type characters & those famously are both almost entirely the same as one another but also no two are quite alike…that’s why we spend so much time on the parts that are the point…what it’s dressed up in & how that moves & sounds & looks & feels & how that seems to say more stuff than just “these people did this”
…sorry…don’t mind me…I refer you to my previous remark about this now being officially post-my-brain-done-broke?
…ok…I think I actually had a thing that was, like, not mindless & worth mentioning but now my brain is broke & I can only seem to remember to remember that I already said the wonder man thing which mainly gets carried by ben kingsley doing a deceptively wonderful job playing a caricature with conviction opposite a guy I now know is called yahya abdul mateen II but whose name I failed to learn after the one about the chicago 7 & their less-than-magnificent treatment…&…no offense to the guy…had forgotten was in an aquaman movie or two as one of the black mantas…every so often there’s a line or a cameo playing themselves makes a remark that underpins both the humor & the sort of overblown & arguably absurd but also convincingly sincere…& tragically absurd to the point of it being maybe impossible to take it seriously paradox of what it takes to be great at something that requires portraying something you aren’t in a way where something you are makes it ring true…&…like…don’t watch it because of that…& especially don’t not-watch it because I wound up saying that about it…just…it’s fun & it’s marvel & if you don’t hate those two or think they can’t go together you’ll likely like it fine…but…all that nonsense about the importance of taking churning out nonsense like it’s the most serious undertaking there is…it’s still in there, too…&…if you squint right it seems like on its own terms it might be in earnest & kinda punching outside its traditional weight-class the way wanda-vision did & arguably the cap+winter-soldier one maybe didn’t…&…honestly…I didn’t think you could start with wonder man like I read that character off & on & land up with the nearest point of comparison I can think of being luke cage…but that not be because the leads aren’t white & wonder man in the comics was
…damn…I’ll shut up about that…anyway…the two bouts of bautista-brand brain-optional enjoyable nonsense were “afterburn” & “the wrecking crew”…afterburn is fun & knows it’s a bunch of nonsense but it looks like they had a great time making it & a budget that allowed for lines like “how many tanks has this guy got?”…& it’s set in a dystopian hellscape
…the wrecking crew is nominally set in contemporary reality…but jason momoa is the estranged half-brother who moved to eventually being a cop on a reservation somewhere who appears to be wearing a nomads biker cut when he first appears on pretty much the right sort of bike…& bautista is the navy seal swim instructor who never left home…& if I have beef with it it might just be that frankie adams (who was bobbie draper badass-martian-marine in the expanse) doesn’t get to go all bobbie draper on the badguys on account of it very much being the sort of film where the leads get to fuck up basically everything in sight in what seems like the majority of scenes…& if that isn’t called for in the sense that breaks the scenery then they just go back to chewing that up in lieu of gum while they wait to go back to the kicking ass they came for?
AND I’M STILL READING JOHN MILTON’S PARADISE LOST! I SWEAR THIS WINTER WILL END ME.
…I shouldn’t laugh…but…you know how sometimes the zen masters would claim to be meditating while standing under freezing water dropping on their head from a height?
…not knocking the material for the watching or the reading…but…if you’re standing under the waterfall…maybe…pick a warm one?
…I can see how milton might seem like the sort of contrast that could make the dialogue of silent witness sit at the other end of some sort of balance but it does seem like you’re dialling up the endurance requirements beyond most people’s idea of what makes for a comfort zone?
…have you considered perhaps a spot of kafka for light relief…maybe while listening to the smiths?
That reminds me: one of the Silent Witness episodes we watched last night had The Smiths playing while Dr Nikki Alexander was buried alive in a wooden box in Mexico. At least I think it was last night. I can’t keep it straight anymore.
…it’s…too perfect…it was probably “girlfriend in a coma”, too
…truly…silent witness does the vanishing with a smiths backing track might be peak silent witness…I…might be having a flashback
…you realise we probably sound like ‘nam vets but not in the cool M.A.S.H. way at this point
…well…ok…so the “we” might be doing unnatural amounts of lifting in that in a heroic attempt to suggest that isn’t just me…but…either way?
I love 🫕! Craving nostalgia, I ate it twice this December… which was admittedly one time too many. I have my grandmother’s set sitting in storage in Montreal. Alas, it’s not orange but brown.
…I know it’s not really similar in any way to fondue beyond sometimes people keep it simmering at the table rather than trying to eat it all before it goes cold…but a while back a new hot pot place opened near my folks & the other day I finally got an excuse to try it out but it did involve ordering for them…we’ve now established that though unprepared for the approach of “maybe there’s a bone” extending to any size bit of duck in the one that isn’t…that “medium spicy” broth…is a bit more spicy than they really like it…but otherwise they seem to be game to do more of that sort of thing so I may soon find out whether “mildly spicy” works for them or if we’ll have to make separate orders in a way that slightly defeats the object of the exercise?
…they…also probably have a fondue set somewhere…although I think it was an aunt that had the ceramic one…I definitely remember one that was metal & much thinner & lighter & quicker to warm up…pretty sure at least once or twice that just had oil in & you stabbed little bits of meat or some sort of tempura-type thing on the end of the forks & there were lots of dips & spices & stuff for once it came out…which they at least told me was called fondue when I was a kid?