I’ve read about 11 of the Edger Rice Burroughs John Carter / Barsoom series. When my kids were small, I would spend an hour or more at bedtime, reading to them and then turning off the lights and leading a steampunk adventure that lasted for years. I drew lots of pulp adventure details right from the Barsoom series — though the ground rules of our shared role-playing world precluded any…
Rewatching ST:TNG after a 20-year break The Federation faces war with the Talarians over a culture-shocked teenager who sees Picard as a father figure. The Enterprise detects faint life signs on a damaged Talarian ship. Of course they can’t just beam the injured directly to sickbay; they must first send an away team to wave props at blinking set pieces. One of the survivors is a human teenager wearing a…
Rewatching ST:TNG after taking a break for 20 years. Data sees firsthand how he’s a chip off the old block, and almost gets emotional about a new chip on his shoulder (or thereabouts). The B-plot about a brother-on-brother prank features children who are believably childish, in that they aren’t wise beyond their years, or prodigies, or fonts of innocence that melt a villain’s heart. In fact, they’re both a bit…
On Sunday night, President Donald Trump retweeted a video of a violent incident on a New York City subway platform. The video shows a Black man pushing a white woman into a train car and is captioned “Black Lives Matter / Antifa.” The problem? It is over a year old and has nothing to do with either Black Lives Matter or Antifa. It, in fact, shows the actions of a mentally ill man with no known ties to either group.
Rewatching ST:TNG after a 20-year break. Still recovering from his ordeal with the Borg, Picard visits his brother at the French vineyard where they grew up. In his boyhood village, Picard’s roadside encounter with his nephew Rene is just perfect, as are the domestic scenes with his warm sister-in-law Marie and his brittle, jealous older brother Robert (in a region of France where people speak in various British dialects). A…