Goodbye, Leonard.

I doubt there will be any chance of you missing this.  But I just couldn't let the death of Leonard Nimoy go by unmentioned.  Like most people who grew up in the '70s, and had any sort of interest in sci fi TV, Star Trek was such a fixture.  And so another familiar face of my childhood is gone.

Glutton For Punishment.

Doug Camilli of the Montreal Gazette does a gossip column for Canwest News Service.  In today's column he covered Patrick Stewart being made a Knight Bachelor by the Queen.  In it he refers to Stewart's "lucrative but laughable years on Star Trek:  The Next Generation."  I can't help but think he must have a masochistic streak given the possible response from Trek fans.  Personally the last thing I'd want to encourage is hundreds of irate e-mails flooding my mailbox.

I Don't Wanna Watch A Cosplayer.

No election commentary tonight. Maybe tomorrow if I think of something worth posting while tromping around in the cold tomorrow. Rather I'll comment on the recent Entertainment Weekly cover featuring the guys playing Kirk and Spock in the upcoming Star Trek movie. Sorry JJ Abrams et al but I won't be rushing out to see this one. I was dubious about the concept from the start, but seeing the EW cover shot all I could think was that the guy playing Spock looked like a cosplayer. And that just made me even less inclined to go see it. In way it's like deciding to make a James Bond movie that's not only a '60s period piece, but has whoever is playing Bond wearing the same kind of hairpiece Sean Connery was, it just seems cheesy.

The use of the term slash to denote fanfiction that involves homosexual relationships is generally believed to have originated with Star Trek fanfiction, coming from story descriptions that contained something like "Kirk/Spock" to denote gay content in the story.

Boy, will this news get some of the Trek slash fans going! George Takei, who played Sulu in the original series, has come out in a magazine article. He decided it was finally time to do so, although one would think those who know him well already knew, especially since he's been with the same man for 18 years. Takei says he grew up with the double whammy of feeling negative about his Japanese heritage because of being interned as a child during WW2, and feeling negative about his sexual preference given the prejudices of the time. Fortunately things have changed.

It should be noted that Sulu has a canonical daughter, who appeared in the film Star Trek: Generations, so he may very well have a wife. Of course in the 23rd Century of Star Trek who knows what technologies may be used to create children by those who don't want to or can't do it in the old fashioned way.

You probably won't be able to avoid this if you hang out on any tv oriented sites over the next few days, and lots of you probably have already heard, but for those who haven't Star Trek: Enterprise has been cancelled after 98 episodes. This isn't a huge shock, as the series had disappointed Paramount in the ratings from the start, and its renewal for a fourth season almost didn't happen. Personally I've watched maybe an episode and a half all told of the series. The little bits I saw looked like the same old, same old, and didn't interest me enough to encourage me to watch. I suppose there's a small chance that a fan campaign may save the show, but I'd guess the chances are very slim. Trek needs a hiatus, but I suspect Paramount won't let it have one.