Wil Wheaton made us aware that the original number one has passed the galactic barrier. She was made immortal of course as the voice of the comuter, and as Nurse Chapel on the TOS (The Original Series), but maybe even more famous as Lwaxana Troi, mother of Deanna on TNG (The Next Generation) where she was able to develop her character a bit more. As the wife of Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek she probably had as much influence on the series as anyone. Trektoday has some links and much more info about her can be found on memory alpha. As a fan, I’m very sad.

My daughter was playing Legacy today (one of the few games I’ve bought lately) and wanted to know how to save a game. I was across the room and I explained what to click on. She shot me a puzzled look when I told her to click on the save icon “…you know, the thing that looks like a floppy disk”. Plaintively she replied, “I don’t see that, and what’s a floppy disk?”.

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I haven’t investigated this yet, but the new Trek trailer has a whole mess of scenes to whet the Trekkie appetite, not least among them is a surprising shot with Nimoy as the elder Spock! Who is he giving the Vulcan salute to? What the heck is he doing in a movie that is supposed to be about Kirk and Spock as young cadets? More time travel?

Sarah Palin suggests that the country doesn’t know the real Barak Obama. She might be right! I think I recognize him as another very intelligent and unemotional man from our (more civilized) future… at least, in this picture If you don’t know who I mean, perhaps this link will help. Well, maybe he’s had his ears done.

You’ve seen the skit a million times, but not like this. This nifty little mashup takes the Monty Python Camelot scene from the Holy Grail movie to a whole new dimension.

I watch a lot of Star Trek. There’s really just something comforting about the show to me, and I don’t mind watching the same episodes over and over. I’m usually doing something else while it’s on, like surfing the web or reading, but there are always little things about the show that I want to look up. Maybe I’ll recognize an actor and want to know what other characters they have played on the show (most guests have had several appearances), or maybe I just want to look up some earlier episode the show references. Of course I could always run over to StarTrek.com for the official word, but I’ve found that MemoryAlpha provides a much nicer way to find those Trek answers. A wiki is the perfect way for big groups of disparate contributors to create reference documentation, and MemoryAlpha provides a wonderful reference for all things Trek.

While at I-Con this past weekend, I heard Tim Russ (you’ll remember him as Tuvok, the vulcan on Voyager) talking up a fan film project he’s been involved in recently called Star Trek of Gods and Men. An aside: I’ve posted about Star Trek fan films before here, here, and here. I was already familiar with New Voyages (now renamed Phase II after the abortive Trek series that never happened in 1978) and while I always thought they were doing great stuff, at times there were just too many amateurs on screen at one time. A seasoned actor or two can make a scene believable even if there are a few goose eggs being laid. Their third episode, World Enough and Time with George Takei absolutely *rocks*. If you haven’t watched it and you like Star Trek, you have definitely missed a killer episode. The Phase II folks are really starting to grow on me too.

What Tim Russ has done is to gather a bunch of his Trek buddies to work with the New Voyages (Phase II) folks in their upstate (Port Henry) New York homemade studios, including Ethan Phillips and Garret Wang (Neelix and Harry Kim of Voyager), Nichelle Nichols, Walter Koenig, and Grace Lee Whitney (Uhura, Chekov, Janice Rand of TOS) to name just a few. The first two “acts” have been released on the internet free of charge while the crew tries to work out a deal to sell the show on DVD or download with CBS. Read more about it on Wikipedia or on the official website: http://www.startrekofgodsandmen.net.