Monthly Archives: March 2005

Mar142005

Who’s Your Most Annoying Trek Character?

Here’s some news that’s somewhat related to my previous post: TV Guide is conducting an on-line poll of the favorite (and least-favorite) Star Trek characters. The results will be announced in an April issue of the magazine, to coincide with the final episode of Enterprise and the likely end of “The Franchise.”

So how, you may ask, does this relate to the previous post? Well, for many years now Wil Wheaton has borne the burden of having played Wesley Crusher, one of the least-liked regular characters in all of Trek history. I’m not a big Wesley fan myself, but if you read Wil’s blog (or his highly entertaining memoir, Just a Geek), you’ll soon discover just how vile supposedly grown-up human beings can be. Wil has taken a lot of crap over the years because of Wesley, including death threats and fanboy wishes for his character — and by extension, himself — to get gang-raped by Klingons. Isn’t that a lovely image? Wil doesn’t find such things amusing, and I don’t blame him. After all, it’s not his fault the character was such a putz. He was just an eager-to-please teenage actor saying the clunky lines that adults were putting in his mouth. He quite rightly views the “Most Annoying Character” title as an albatross around his neck, and he’s asked all his loyal readers to please take the poll and make sure that someone — anyone! — other than Wesley/himself gets the title. I’m going to pass that request along to my readers here on Simple Tricks. Even if you don’t like Star Trek, or even if you do and you despise Wesley Crusher with the furious heat of a million white-hot suns, try to imagine what it would be like to have pimply-faced strangers telling you day after day how much they hate you because of a job you did fifteen years ago. Does it feel like a raw deal to you? Me, too. That’s why I’m asking you to go vote for some other character in that category.

(Incidentally, I don’t think it’s hypocritical for me to ask some actor to take on the burden of “Most Annoying,” in order to spare another actor’s feelings. For one thing, Wil Wheaton, by dint of having been on the second-to-oldest Trek series, has been on the receiving end longer than anyone else. He’s done his time and is ready for parole. Secondly, he was just a kid when the crap-rain started falling whereas the other actors up for the title are grown-ups and thus should be a little better equipped to handle it. Thirdly, the dislike of Wesley has been unnaturally violent within fanboy circles, and an “official” poll naming someone else would go a long way toward lancing this festering boil. And lastly, I’m just plain sick of hearing everyone excoriate this character when there are plenty of others who sucked every bit as hard as Wesley. It’s gotten boring, and it’s time to hear a new tune. The same goes for you haters of Jar-Jar Binks, too!)

If you’d like a preview of the poll questions or if you’re interested in how I voted, keep reading below the fold. Otherwise, just go forth and vote!

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Mar112005

Friends Who Don’t Know I Exist: Wil Wheaton and CSI

One of the weirder aspects of blogging is the way readers start to feel a personal connection with their favorite bloggers, even if they’ve never had any genuine contact with them. That observation may not apply in the case of this blog, since I happen to know that most of my readers are actual friends of mine from out there in the Real World. But in my experience of reading other blogs, I’ve noticed that I often start to think of their authors as friends. I’m perfectly aware of how ridiculous that sounds. I’m not a big commenter as a rule, so the bloggers I like aren’t even aware that I exist. How can I feel anything resembling friendship toward people who don’t know I exist? I don’t know, but nevertheless the sense of connection — or perhaps pseudo-connection is a more accurate term — is quite real. I find myself caring, sometimes deeply, about what happens to these strangers who happen to write about themselves on the Internet.

Take, for example, the case of Wil Wheaton.

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Mar102005

How Big a Fanboy?

How big a fanboy am I?

Big enough that I sat through an entire hour of The O.C. just so I wouldn’t miss the premiere of the new full-length Revenge of the Sith trailer.

Big enough that the hair rose up on my arms during said trailer and didn’t settle back down for a good three minutes after it was over.

Big enough that May 19th suddenly seems like an eternity away.

I’ve been fooled by trailers before. The Phantom Menace had a kick-ass trailer (“Every saga has a beginning…”); Attack of the Clones had a kick-ass trailer (“I will raise a Grand Army of the Republic…”). Both films ultimately let me down. This time… well, like I said, I’ve been fooled before. I so want the sixth and final Star Wars film to be the prequel I always dreamed of, the one that my eight-year-old imagination conjured up from the vaguest handful of ideas gleaned from a brief and fluffy magazine interview with The Great Flanneled One. I am trying to prepare myself for yet another disappointment. I am reminding myself that George Lucas isn’t the man he used to be and I am not the child I once was. I am struggling not to get carried away with enthusiasm like I did during the Dark Year, 1999. But it’s tough. I watched that trailer tonight and I found myself buying into it completely. I didn’t think one single element of it looked potentially cringe-inducing. I’m even daring to think that maybe, just maybe, Uncle George is going to redeem himself with this one.

The sight of Anakin Skywalker leading an army of clonetroopers, of Emperor Palpatine drawing a lightsaber against Jedi Master Windu, of giant starships exchanging broadsides like sea-going galleons and interior shots of explosions tearing through their gun-decks, made me pump my fist with testerone-laden glee. The glimpse of the Tantive IV‘s familiar engine-cluster arcing toward a beautiful green world and of R2 in a fighter socket and 3PO in his polished glory made me smile with fond nostalgia. And the sound of Padme’s sobs and Obi-Wan’s anguished cry, “You were the chosen one!” as his student and friend attacks him broke my heart.

(If you caught the reference to the Tantive IV, congratulations. You’re as big a fanboy as me. If you don’t know, it’s the rebel ship seen at the beginning of the original Star Wars, the one Princess Leia is “racing home” aboard. Technically, it’s the official transport of the Royal House of Alderaan.)

Going purely off this three-minute advertisement, it looks to me like this is the film George has been waiting to make all along, the true back-story that he started putting down on legal pads around 1975. Maybe Episodes I and II were weak because he had the fewest notes for them. Maybe Revenge of the Sith is the only prequel he really needed to make, the only one he really wanted to make.

Maybe I’m just a big sucker setting myself up to knocked down again, a compulsive gambler who doesn’t know better than to keep going back to the three-card-monte dealer on the corner. Maybe. We’ll see in just about two months. But I’ll tell you this much: after tonight, I’m feeling happier to call myself a Star Wars fan than I have in years.

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Mar092005

What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?

I’ve been trying to think of something to say about Dan Rather’s final broadcast from the anchor’s chair of The CBS Evening News, but I can’t find the right approach. The problem is that I’m really not sure anyone cares about Rather’s departure, aside from political right-wingers who see him as the embodiment of their hated “liberal media” and so are thrilled to see him go. While professional observers view Rather’s choice to step down — as well as Tom Brokaw’s recent retirement — as “the end of an era,” the public seems to be yawning with indifference.

It wasn’t like this when Rather’s predecessor, Walter Cronkite, stepped down. I think it’s fair to say (based, of course, on my readings into media history and not personal memory) that Cronkite’s departure produced a near-universal sense of warmth and fond regret to see him go. I can remember my parents tuning in to Cronkite’s final show with an air almost of apprehension, like they were about to lose a member of their family. No one I know feels that way today about Rather or Brokaw. But then, to use an oft-repeated phrase, it was a different world in Cronkite’s day.

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Mar042005

Blog Envy

[Sunday Night Update: I’ve changed the title of this entry and pulled up some text from “below the fold” — i.e., the dividing line between what you see here on the page and the “Read More” section — because I realized that this entry really isn’t so much about finding a new blogger as it is about my reaction to him, and my three loyal readers might not have been getting that point. Or maybe they were and didn’t care. Whatever. The point is, I made a couple of changes…]

I’ve run across something that may interest fans of the TV series Lost: the show’s supervising producer, Javier Grillo-Marxuach, maintains his very own LiveJournal. You won’t find much in the way of insider info or spoilers on upcoming episodes — he doesn’t seem to write about the show at all, at least not in the half-dozen entries I’ve skimmed — but he is an articulate fellow with some interesting opinions.

I’m actually rather envious of his abilities. Take his entry on the demise of Star Trek, in which he says pretty much the same things I did, but with a bit more flair and precision than I think I managed to summon. For example, I loved his description of the depressing opening night for the final Trek film, Nemesis, when “mann’s chinese theater theater [was] only half-full with the last remaining faithful who, like brezhnev-era muscovites, dragged themselves out into the cold to vote in yet another meaningless election.”

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Mar032005

Architecture Out of Context

You may recall that a while back I was lamenting how our public architecture has evolved into “post-postmodern” monstrosities that may function as individual works of art but fail to integrate with their more prosaic surroundings. Here’s an extreme illustration of what I was talking about: the Frank Gehry-designed Disney Concert Hall in LA is undergoing some renovations because its reflective surface is focusing ordinary sunlight into high-temperature heat-rays that are frying pedestrians and annoying residents of nearby condos.

And this isn’t the only Gehry building that has issues with its neighbors. The Peter B. Lewis Building in Cleveland has a nasty tendency to drop ice and snow on pedestrians as well as producing the same kinds of heat and light effects as the Disney Hall. It appears that it’s not only aesthetically unsettling to be in the vicinity of a Gehry building, it’s also downright dangerous.

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Mar012005

How Many Banned Books Have You Read?

Uh-oh, it’s another LiveJournal meme. Surf on if you’re not interested in gaining further insight into my questionable tastes and interests…

Still here? Oh, good, then let’s talk about banned books. What follows is a list of the 110 all-time banned books. Exactly what the term “all-time” means is open to interpretation, since the LiveJournaller I appropriated this from wasn’t sure who compiled the list or what criteria were used in choosing items for it. Nevertheless, these are books that at some point have gotten somebody’s ruffles in a bunch. The idea of this meme (presumably) is to demonstrate to all the world how enlightened, literate, countercultural, or just plain contrary you may be by showing how many of these you’ve read.

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