Star Trek Beyond

This is a FANTASTIC poster. If you don't know why, Google Star Trek: TMP

I saw the thirteenth Star Trek movie on opening weekend, over a month ago. I wanted to see it again before I posted about it but time hasn't allowed that. So, here are my thoughts.

First up, the non-spoiler points.

Star Trek Beyond has the same DNA as all the Abrams Trek movies. The visual effects are fantastic, the acting and production is first rate, but the story is filled with holes and goofiness.

I liked a lot about the movie, most notably that the cast continues to knock it out of the park. I really, really love these actors in these roles. I also loved that they don't visit Earth in this movie. It seems like a small thing, but while the original series never visited 23rd century Earth, the movies can't stay away. Of the 13 movies, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 11, and 12 all feature extended scenes on Earth, which kind of undercuts the whole "explore strange new worlds" thing. It was a huge relief that Beyond stayed away. I enjoyed the addition of more humor, thanks to writer Simon Pegg, no doubt, and the movie had a really good sense of the history of Star Trek, especially the series Enterprise.

The things I didn't like, and there are many, as well as more positive things, are dealt with below.

Spoiler Alert

I hate, hate, hate that they once again destroyed the Enterprise. This timeline's Enterprise didn't make it nearly as far as the Original Series Enterprise which was destroyed in Star Trek 3. This one was destroyed in the third year of the original five year mission. Sheesh. (Also, I'm not sure how much of a spoiler this is since they showed the ship get creamed in almost every G-D trailer!!)

I hate, hate, hate that everything is once again resolved with violence. Star Trek is supposed to be the cerebral, thinking man's science fiction. But every movie ends with Kirk and Spock in a fistfight with the bad guy. Damn. And while I appreciate that they gave some actual motivation to this villain, they didn't develop him enough to make him compelling. He's more or less just another guy who hates the Federation and is out for revenge. Sheesh.

I enjoyed them pairing off the crew while they're stranded on the planet. It allowed the characters to play off each other in a lot of fun ways, giving us some great Spock/McCoy scenes and allowed Chekov much more to do while running around with Kirk. I also really enjoyed the new alien ally, Jaylah, who helps Scott. She was pretty bad-ass and awesome.

I HATED the cruel fate that befell the majority of the Enterprise crew. The original timeline Enterprise had a crew of 430. This Enterprise is supposed to be twice as big (which is stupid) and so presumably has a bigger crew. But even if it only had 430, only a few dozen at best survive this movie. The rest are horribly killed by the initial attack, the crashing of the ship, or by having their life drained out of them by the villain in particular gruesome fashion. I DON'T want to see the crew of the Enterprise slaughtered like they're all expendable non-entities. Damn, it's really nasty and harsh.

I can believe that you could transport a guy sitting on a motorcycle. I DO NOT believe you could transport a guy riding a motorcycle very fast. How did that work? Did Kirk drive into the transporter chamber at forty miles an hour? Stupid.

I can't wait for this series to get the hell over the Beastie Boys.

The stupid brewery engineering sets are gone! Hooray!

While I liked the visual of Yorktown base, it was basically a substitute Earth for purposes of the plot, so the movie loses some points (see the point about Earth above).

If they had so much trouble getting through the nebula that they needed the Enterprise, why didn't the Enterprise (or another ship) just go around the nebula? And how did they get back through the nebula without any trouble in a much older ship?

And finally, I'm not really happy with Kirk's arc in this movie. For some really unexplained reason, he's grown tired of Captaining the Enterprise and is considering a promotion. Sure, this is a new timeline and Kirk has had very different influences shaping him, but that still seemed really out of character.

I liked this movie better than Into Darkness, and maybe on par with or slightly better than Star Trek. I really need to see it again to figure that out.

College and Festivals and Gaming, Oh My.

I think we're finally through with the busiest weekend we've had in a long while. Whew!

First up, we took Ben to college. Yikes.

He's attending York College of Pennsylvania as a music and recording major. We drove him up on Friday morning, arriving just after 8 AM. The upper-class RAs were lining the road as we drove in, cheering. Other RAs were standing by to help unpack his stuff and in short order we were setting up Ben's room. His roommate, Conrad, arrived while we were out getting last minute stuff at Target so by the time we got back to the room, his half was set up too. Conrad is an accounting major and it seems like they'll get along fine.

On the way home, Carol and I stupidly ignored Google Map's desperate attempts to get us to take another route and we got stuck in Baltimore traffic. What should have been a 90 minute drive home took 3 hours. Ugh.

On Saturday and Sunday, we attended showings of two of Rachel's student films at the 2nd Annual Global Impact Film Festival held at the beautiful Renaissance Hotel near Gallery Place in DC. The festival is a pretty small event so far, which is a shame because they showed a bunch of great short films, but we enjoyed seeing Rachel's films with an audience. They had a Q&A after each and Rachel spoke and answered questions.

Afterwards on Saturday we drove north and played games for several hours with one of our gaming groups.

 So it's been a lot for one weekend and very tiring. But Ben is all set up at school and Rachel is getting ready for her Richmond theatre adventure. Very soon Carol and I will be empty nesters. Then we'll have a lot of time to fill.

If you still support Trump after this, you need to seriously reexamine your politics

If you missed Hillary Clinton's speech in the news today, check it out. After months and months of racially divisive speech from the Republican frontrunner, Hillary went through the facts, point by point in devastating fashion.  She also explicitly called out Trump's association with and adoption of the politics of the white nationalist movement, known as "Alt-Right".

This is what I want to make clear today:

A man with a long history of racial discrimination, who traffics in dark conspiracy theories drawn from the pages of supermarket tabloids and the far reaches of the internet, should never run our government or command our military.

If he doesn’t respect respect all Americans, he can’t serve all Americans!

Now, I know some people still want to give Trump the benefit of the doubt.

They hope that he will eventually reinvent himself – that there’s a kinder, gentler, more responsible Donald Trump waiting in the wings somewhere.

After all, it’s hard to believe anyone – let alone a nominee for President of the United States – could really believe all the things he says.

But the hard truth is, there’s no other Donald Trump. This is it.

Maya Angelou once said: "When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time."
 . . .
When asked in a nationally televised interview whether he would disavow the support of David Duke, a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan, Trump wouldn’t do it. Only later, again under mounting pressure, did he backtrack.

And when Trump was asked about anti-Semitic slurs and death threats coming from his supporters, he refused to condemn them.

Through it all, he has continued pushing discredited conspiracy theories with racist undertones.

Trump said thousands of American Muslims in New Jersey cheered the 9/11 attacks.

They didn’t.

He suggested that Ted Cruz’s father was involved in the Kennedy assassination. Perhaps in Trump’s mind, because he was a Cuban immigrant, he must have had something to do with it. Of course there’s absolutely no evidence of that.

Just recently, Trump claimed President Obama founded ISIS. And then he repeated that nonsense over and over.
. . .
The latest shake-up was designed to – quote – "Let Trump be Trump." To do that, he hired Stephen Bannon, the head of a right-wing website called Breitbart.com, as campaign CEO.

To give you a flavor of his work, here are a few headlines they’ve published:

"Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy."

"Would You Rather Your Child Had Feminism or Cancer?"

"Gabby Giffords: The Gun Control Movement’s Human Shield"

"Hoist It High And Proud: The Confederate Flag Proclaims A Glorious Heritage."

That one came shortly after the Charleston massacre, when Democrats and Republicans alike were doing everything they could to heal racial divides. Breitbart tried to enflame them further.

Read the whole thing or watch the video here.  It may be the most important speech Hillary has ever given. Really.

In every revolution, there's one Ipecac with a vision

So here's my last portrait.

I got a new style of glasses a few years ago but that wasn't a huge deal.  As of Sunday night, though, I actually underwent a major life change.  Here's what I look like now.

It still feels weird, but I'm getting used to it. Now that I'm no longer my evil doppleganger, I guess I'll have to stop being such a villain.

Was this for Christmas? April 1? Tax Day?

Wow, this is bizarre, uncomfortable and psychologically rich.  I present to you, Donald, Melania and Barron Trump.  [click to embiggen]

Nothing like a family photo with your son waaaaay on the other side of the picture.

Just study that for a while and take in all the many, many issues.

Thanks to kos.  Check out the link for many more observations.

Running mate or just running acquaintance?

For months, politicians on both sides of the aisle have been trying to get Donald Trump to follow the tradition and release his tax returns. He has refused, citing the current IRS audit, but the IRS says go ahead. It seems clear at this point that Trump is hiding something pretty bad that he doesn't want known. My guess is that his returns show he's not nearly as rich as he brags. Other theories are that his charitable giving is next to nothing, or that he has payments from Russia.

With that said, the headline below, when I saw it last week, made me laugh out loud.

Yes, Trump's own running mate is releasing his returns. They aren't even coordinated enough as a team to agree on that. Great job!

Sad SNL News

I was fairly distressed to learn last week that Saturday Night Live fired two of the most talented people in their current cast, Jay Pharoah and Taran Killam. I thought they were going to be part of the cast for as long as they wanted.

Taran Killam is actually one of my favorite SNL cast members of all time. So, in tribute:

Gee, I wonder how that could happen?

More rats are fleeing the sinking ship of Trump's campaign.

More than 100 GOP officials, delegates and staffers have signed an open letter calling on the Republican National Committee to cut ties with Donald Trump and shift precious resources away from his struggling presidential campaign to focus on retaining the House and Senate.

“We believe that Donald Trump’s divisiveness, recklessness, incompetence, and record-breaking unpopularity risk turning this election into a Democratic landslide, and only the immediate shift of all available RNC resources to vulnerable Senate and House races will prevent the GOP from drowning with a Trump-emblazoned anchor around its neck,” the letter states.
...
“Those recent outrages have built on his campaign of anger and exclusion, during which he has mocked and offended millions of voters, including the disabled, women, Muslims, immigrants, and minorities,” it reads. “He also has shown dangerous authoritarian tendencies, including threats to ban an entire religion from entering the country, order the military to break the law by torturing prisoners, kill the families of suspected terrorists, track law-abiding Muslim citizens in databases, and use executive orders to implement other illegal and unconstitutional measures.”  Link

First of all, ouch.

Second of all, BOO F**KING HOO.

I'm sorry that your candidate has mocked and offended millions of voters, threatened to ban an entire religion from the US, embraced torture, and wants to implement illegal and unconstitutional measures. Maybe if your ENTIRE PARTY hadn't been advocating those things for the past 8 years and refusing to work with the President of the United States, your candidate wouldn't be such an asshole.

It's no longer amusing

In case you had any doubts about my feelings regarding Trump's insinuation yesterday that someone might have to assassinate Clinton or her Supreme Court, nominees if she's elected . . .

We're all used to Trump saying outrageous, stupid things by now. I mean, he went after Gold Star parents just last week. But even hinting that one of his duped followers should assassinate Clinton is so beyond the pale that I literally gasped when I read what he had said. It's just immediately disqualifying to any public office, much less President of the United States.

Trump is a horrible person who should never be allowed to even run for President again.

The good news is that he's probably taking the rest of the party down with them. Due to 7 years of obstruction and their cowardly reaction to Trump's seditious comments, good riddance.

A different perspective on Ghostbusters

I saw the new Ghostbusters a few weeks ago and enjoyed it. For some people, the movie was not just a fun night at the movies, but a life-changing, affirming experience.

Some spoilers below.

There is a moment, in the film’s climactic fight scene, when each of the Ghostbusters have exhausted their weapons and had a turn at battling the ever encroaching hoard of ghosts. One of the Ghostbusters, played by Kate McKinnon, remembers her last resort. She whips two hidden guns out of her proton pack, licks the barrel, and, with the Ghostbusters theme song wailing, absolutely DESTROYS every evil thing on screen, in one of the most amazing 30 seconds… 60 seconds? Eternity? Longest moments of my life.

She isn’t a princess. She isn’t a prop. She isn’t a love interest. She is the main character, in a movie with no other “greater” male main characters. She’s being a bad ass action hero, saving the day not for the happy ending kiss, but for herself and her friends and the world. But most importantly… and this is so, so very, very incredibly important: You can’t see her boobs while she does it.

Go read the whole thing here.  Why? Should I go see it?

Erin Ramsey has written a wonderful article about her reaction to Ghostbusters and how girls need to see their dreams and life reflected in our culture, not as sex objects, or prizes for men, or helpless princesses, but as real people, and, yes, even as heroes.

Fun with Charts - August 2016

Here are some informative charts to pass the time.

First up, a look at national unemployment since President Obama took office.

Yes, Republicans, Obama has definitely been a failed President. Absolutely failed. (Psst. Maybe you should stop talking about the economy. You clearly are lying or have no idea what's going on.)

Oh, what the heck. Just for fun, let's also look at the stock market during the Obama Administration.

Next up, below is the average of public opinion polls between Trump and Clinton over the past 14 months. Note Clinton's huge bump over the past week or so, compared to Trump's nosedive.  Also note that Hillary has NEVER been behind Trump.

And finally, let's take a look at how Politifact, an independent fact-checking organization, has rated the truthfulness of the Presidential candidate's statements (along with other prominent politicians).

In short, Trump is untruthful very often and his lies are really outrageous (Pants on Fire). Clinton says things that aren't true not nearly so much and the severity is much less. And yet Republicans think Clinton is the biggest liar in history. Uh-huh.

His penis size on the other hand . . .

Look, I don't want to keep blogging about Trump. He's a moron and makes me feel like I'm punching down. So let's make fun of Ben Carson instead.

In an attempt to explain why no one knows of any good deeds that Trump has actually done, Carson actually said this WITHOUT then imploding into a quantum singularity:

"I'm–then hopeful that he will begin to put–to put out many of the stories that I am very familiar with, of things that he has done to help people who have been in very, very difficult situations. You know, he–he feels that, you know, that's self-praising, he doesn't want to do it."  Link

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!!!

I am not doing a Star Trek II title riff on this

Late last week I was really anxious to post about the brave and moving anti-Trump speech given at the Democratic National Convention by Khizr Khan, with his heartbroken wife, Ghazala, at his side. As everyone probably knows by now, the Khans are the parents of an American Captain who was killed in the Iraq War while saving his troops. Donald Trump verbally attacked the still grieving parents the next day and I was so appalled I wanted to make sure the story didn't go out of the spotlight, as much as my meager blog could.

I needn't have worried.

Due to Trump's complete inability to take any perceived insult with calm and dignity, he continued to attack the Gold Star family through the weekend and got more and more outrageous each time, to the point where people in his campaign were suggesting that the Khan's hero son was actually an ISIS sympathizer.

Attacking military families, especially a family that has lost a son, has finally shown us the line that many Republicans won't cross and his unhinged harangues have turned many of them against Trump. Also, not surprisingly, this hasn't endeared Trump to too many independent voters and he's now polling a good 10 points behind Hillary.

Thanks, Donald, for being such a thin-skinned, immature asshole.