Two Whole Days of Mostly Nuthin’

[captainsblog]

At least nothing away from the house, anyway. After all that activitying the past couple of weeks, I was in as much of a need of a recharge as the car battery was. I did complete the celebration of Eleanor‘s birthday in traditional fashion, by letting her pick out and acquire a new power tool.



This one is cordless, and is a lot lighter than the previous version that lasted maybe a year. She was out for significant stretches both weekend days, using it to cut through an interstate highway system of vines that have entangled themselves along the fence line (and into the fence itself) at the bedroom end of the house. In previous years, I would feel stress and guilt for not being out there with her on these literal deep dives. This year though, I’m reminding myself: You’re still working full-time, and she’s not. She knows what she’s doing, and you don’t. And she can ask for help, and does, and you do. Get your other shit done.

“Other shit”, this weekend, meant getting time records updated for the week, and not at the last minute as usual; sorting through the previous weeks worth of recently closed files, and paperwork to go into previously closed ones, and beginning to sort it all in the basement on a set of shelves she recently installed down there to expand a storage area; making dinner for us last night; and finally growing some mental vegetation by catching up on some recently dropped episodes of the latest Star Trek series I had fallen behind on.

Strange New Worlds is the immediate temporal prequel to the original Shatner series. It retcons Spock, Uhura, Badass Nurse Chapel with new younger actors playing them, but also brings in a bunch of its own characters in addition to essentially creating the character of Captain Christopher Pike in entirely its own mold.

Pike was to have been the ship's captain in the original pilot from the 1960s, but the studio demanded changes and got Shatner, among others. They eventually incorporated footage from the pilot into a two-part episode that explained the disappearance of Pike by subjecting him to a horrible radiation accident that turned him into a binary bot only capable of one light for yes and two lights for no.

Anson Mount gets to give the character a bit more range.



He’s not as swashbuckling as his successor, we often see him cooking, and they are slowly developing a more extensive backstory for him than he got in in his original 44 minutes of airtime.

By Sunday afternoon, I had caught up through five of the six scheduled episodes of the second season, but then I had to jump ahead to the seventh that they released a few days early, because it’s perhaps the Strangest New World they’ve ever put in this franchise.

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For several years, they have run an animated side series of Star Trek called Lower Decks. Instead of focusing on the usual suspects like the captain, the science officer, the security chief and the doctor, this one is set among the lowest-ranked n00bs down on Deck 430. It is many years in the future relative to the original series timeline, but the characters all studied their history at the Academy and are all unrepentant fanboys and girls of Kirk and Uhura and that lot.

In the just released episode of the main series, several of the animated characters go through a time portal and come to life in the time of the Pike era Enterprise. Hilarity of course ensues, or possibly Mary Sues, but from the reviews I’ve read, it is actually faithful to the main storylines about  the original and current flagships bearing license plate NCC 1701.

The animated crossover also got a shoutout I personally loved. Lower Decks is not the first animated series done by Paramount. That one was simply titled Star Trek, and came out in the 1970s in between the original cancellation and the future films, with Shatner and several other of the original crew voicing their animated counterparts. A guy I knew from high school submitted a script called “Pirates of Orion” that got turned into one of the 22 animated episodes.  Orions had been created as not-so-little Green Men, or rather women, in the pilot episode, but East Meadow's own Howie Weinstein added much of their backstory in his script, and they occasionally popped up in later Paramount shows and the 2009 J.J. Abrams reboot film.

I haven't watched the entire episode yet, but the "previously on" segment at the beginning homage Howie's spin on the species by referencing Orions' rep for piracy.  I've gotten as far as seeing Ensign Boimer's animated character appear in real life next to Pike and Spock, but the lead "actress" from animation, Ensign Mariner, has yet to appear. This should be fun when and if it happens.

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Though I didn't post about it yesterday as I often do on the day, I was quite mindful of yesterday being our oldest sister's birthday. It would have been number 84. I did remember and post, thinking about Eleanor's last week, that she and I shared Sandy's final birthday 35 years earlier. We're coming closer and closer to having lived as many years without her as we did with her, and yet we will never be completely without her.  I posted birthday wishes to one of the young poets who shares the date with her, sharing her life now with a humongous Bernese mountain dog:

Thirty-five July 23s ago, Eleanor came with me for my oldest sister's 49th birthday.  It was Sandy's last, passing a few months later after a long struggle with life and liquor.

Sandy's still with me every day, her unique way with words and love of music and unconventionality as much a part of our shared DNA as anything.

Which somehow makes your unique ways even cooler to see, if not every day.

Plus that mountain of a dog. Sandy was a cat person, but you do woof.

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Following on that memory, as it sometimes does, is that today would have been our parents' 86th anniversary. They made it through 48 of them together, beating the Jason Isbell estimate by a good eight years:
 

Watch on YouTube

That's the Good Jason in the current country wars that are centered these days in Nashville. More about him and his evil twin in a moment.

In a month, Eleanor and I will hit the three-quarter mark on that anniversary longevity, but I think I'm pretty safe in saying we've had more happy moments in those 36 years than my 'rents got in 48 of them.

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Finally, Nash Bashing:

This New Yorker piece from the just-received issue goes into the kurrent kerfuffle on Music Row between the Good Ole Boys of the country industry and the more progressive artists, like Isbell and his wife, who both sing and live in more inclusive measures.  Though dated today, the article was published before the even bigger blowback against "That Other" Jason, Aldean, after the music video to his (performed-his, not written-his) song "Try That In a Small Town" got banhammered for its dog-whistling in favor of racial hatred and violence.  Like most MAGAs, he's doubled down on its message, playing it at concerts last week as proof he refuses to be "canceled." What do you libs think I am, a drag queen or something? You don't cancel US!

And in one final callback of a Sandy on her birthday weekend, I saw this serious burnback on Aldean's horrific message:



When I saw that, I also wondered what the original middle American musician with Small Town in his recording history might say about this Mellencamp actually wrote those lyrics; I humbly suggested this update of them:

♫I was born in a small town,
Nashville isn't a small town,
Nobody got lynched in my small town
Outside a courthouse like the one that you used♫

Just a guess here, but if our Sandy was still with us and heard Aldean's crap, she probably would've told him, as I'd love to,

Make yourself scarce:P