Happy 80th William Shatner

Hat tip: Nat Wilcox

More on William Shatner

A fine interview from the NYT magazine.

A teaser:

After he was killed off from the “Star Trek” movies, he began doing commercials, because, he said, “every day I realized I would not be a star.” He was 66, beefy, no longer matinee-idol handsome. As always, he worked cheap. In 1997, he took a modest salary (and stock options) to become a spokesman for a little-known online discount-travel company, Priceline. As the pompous Priceline pitchman, he became an Internet sensation among the hip-and-cynical blogger set, which thought he was hilarious in spoofing himself. He didn’t know who this William Shatner character was, but he played to it anyway, which helped lead him to a role in the mid-2000s on the television series “The Practice” and its spinoff, “Boston Legal,” that earned him two Emmys and a Golden Globe. He played the pompous, clueless, self-aggrandizing 70-something lawyer Denny Crane, suffering from the onset of Alzheimer’s, which Crane calls “mad cow.” William Shatner the man was playing William Shatner the character playing the character Denny Crane, who was playing the character William Shatner. Shatner has said he once wore a William Shatner mask on Halloween — “Nobody knew who I was.”

Governor General of Canada

I learned this week when I was in Canada that there is a movement afoot on Facebook to make William Shatner the next Governor General (sort of the Queen's official representative) in Canada.

How can one not but heartily support this move, which could not fail to raise the average quality of Canadian Governor Generals?

Details from the National Post (the better of Canada's two national newspapers) here and Spock's endorsement here.

Addendum: there is a video from CTV news as well.

Big internet messes - revisited

So, yesterday I asked this question in regard to the "Conservative Bible project":

2. Is this the best example you have ever heard of where relying on the distributed knowledge of the internet masses is likely to produce a great big mess rather than a thing of beauty or truth? I think it may be such for me.

Ace gradual student Jessica Goldberg argues by email that in fact Star Wars Uncut, a project in which random Star Wars fan recreate individuals scenes from the movie which are then stitched together to form a remake of sorts, may be a bigger internet mess. You can see the trailer here and the full set of completed scenes here.

Of course, the competition is a bit unfair at this point, as Star Wars Uncut actually has output to look at, but based on the trailer, I think it just might win.

The architecture of Star Wars

A bit of science fiction fun from The Architects' Journal.

Hat tip: Jackie Smith

Movie: Star Trek

I do not recall a Hollywood movie ever getting ratings this high on rotten tomatoes.

I liked it a lot too. It does an amazingly good job of capturing the spirit of the original series which to my mind has always been the best (though holding this view requires not putting too much weight on the quality of the acting). The idea of starting the original characters off on a different timeline is also very clever, as it limits the amount of effort at continuity they have to put into future movies. There are plenty of touches to please the hard core - like including Captain Pike (and, apparently, a tribble, though I missed this) - but the movie is also, I would think, accessible to those who only know Star Trek from the bits that have reached popular culture at large.

This will brand me as a nerd forever (too late, I know), but I really enjoyed this movie. Some of that is person-specific as Star Trek has both a nostalgia element for me and reminds me of my father but some of it is because this is just a lot of fun.

Bonus: Greg Mankiw discusses the role of economics in Vulcan education.

Bonus: NYT review. I am starting to like the NYT film reviewer. Oh dear.

Bonus: Star Trek (2009) movie wikipedia page.

Uses for the automated prayer machine

Astute reader and friend Austin Kelly took time off from fixing the housing market this week to send me an email noting the similarity between the automated prayer service I posted on a few days ago and the goings on in the famous Arthur C. Clarke short story entitled "The Nine Billion Names of God." A discussion of the story (but not the story itself) is here.

The story is well worth reading.

Book: neuromancer

I finally read William Gibson's book Neuromancer a couple of weeks ago. I've owned for about 20 years but have not read much science fiction during that time until the past year or two. This book won all the major awards when it came out, and spawned a whole new subgenre of science fiction called "cyberpunk". It is also the first book in a trilogy all set in the same future world of the "sprawl".

I was impressed with it, though there are already bits that seem dated. The noisy printers in particular stood out, but noisy printers is what there were in 1984 when the book was first published. The mood of the book and the vision of the future, as well as its envisioning of a sort of immersion into the internet (which was not around in the way that we think of it now in 1984 either) make it both a lively read and quite prescient. The envisioning of the three-dimensional graphical representation of information within a spatial layout will stay with me, as will the fine description of the main character's life on the technological and legal edge. As with most all science fiction, the characters are the weakest link in Neuromancer, but as with the best science fiction, of which this is one example, the other facets are good enough that you are happy reader anyway.