Updates and Follows
Nov. 30th, 2022 02:10 pmMy birthmonth is winding down, it's been pouring outside all day, and after work we begin two fun days of Musical Cars getting them maintained, tires checked and in my case snows put on, and mine inspected. So I'll get back to the promised update as well as some other things that came to mind about other things written about here.
So. Two nights ago, the long overdue rewatch of the fourth and funniest of the original case Star Trek films, made and largely set in 1986. While the costumes and hairstyles still had some 80s dating to them, the story itself held up pretty well. The first half hour or so is most of their CGI and Industrial Light-type magic, featuring a Doomsday Machine with truck nuts destroying everything in its path until reaching 22nd century Earth, blasting out whale songs, and getting mad when nobody replied with the countersign So long and thanks for all the fish. Our Heroes need to slingshot around Sol to bring themselves back to 1986 to find some whales to bring home for the chat, some nonexistent transparent aluminum to hold them, and some "nuclear wessels" to recharge the cloaked ship's batteries to they can get home.
As soon as Kirk bounds down the stairs with Everybody remember where we parked, the fun is on. Director Leonard Nimoy chews his own scenery, Spocking a "punk on the bus" who was actually one of the film's producers (a scene the dude himself recreates in the latest time travel mess in Picard), failing at cursing, and probably appearing more human than he ever did before or since. Scotty pulls the biggest "there I fixed it" for the whale tank, not only engineering a lightweight transparent tank but neatly breaking the Prime Directive in half before our eyes when he gives the formula to a 1986 engineer centuries before its discovery: How do we know HE didn't invent it?
Our bonny chief engineer also shows us one of the unexpected retro-anachronisms of the film. How did he find this future discoverer of the necessary product? But of course- he let his fingers do the walking on something other than Lt. Mira Romaine (lettuce pause before the next joke;)-
Who'd have expected in 1986 that phone books would be obsolete even before Zefram Cochrane was born about 10 years from now? (Continue below for a brief story about another popular media from around then I was just reminded of.) But finally I understood, through a present-day conversation, why 2020-era technology seems to have disappeared from the Federation by the time of its original "historical documents" being shown on US television in the 1960s.
I was messaging my friend Howard Weinstein about all of the above and his connection to this film. (He appreciated the love from![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
dauntless_heart and would be happy to join us one of these weekends.) A few small samples of what I tried to send him:
Re-watched Star trick for last night for the first time in a long time. I’d forgotten how fun it was the things that I’ve already become anachronistic, like Scotty finding the tank manufacturer by seeing an ad for the Yellow Pages
Nice trick there, Siri:P
A friend of mine saw that and mentioned that she has a read and really likes some of your truck novels. Not truck, computer. Trek.
I had to correct that on a keyboard. How quaint.
We finished without many more errors or accidental launches of acalm bomb from a nuclear wessel.
----
The other quaint memory came in Monday trivia, when I stared at this question way too long:
I ran through obvious ones that were wrong: Denver. C-Springs. Boulder. El Paso (the county where the nightclub shooter kept his arsenal because the sheriff there doesn't believe in red-flag laws and won't narc on heavily armed crazy people). Aurora. Is Adobe a county? At last, though, an old brain cell fired off:
( The town in this 70s-80s public service ad.... )
It's one of those zip codes burned into my brain, like the famous Spiegel catalog's 60609, the Hills's 90210, and Car Talk Plaza's Fair City of 02238. The advertisement for the Consumer Information Catalog ran all over television for a good 20 years of my watching it, offering helpful government publications on buying a used car, planting a garden, maintaining your home, and dozens of other things. I can't remember if I ever sent away for it, but then I never ordered a Spiegel catalog, either. Despite the advent of the internet as the source for such searching, the gummint kept printing this pub all the way into 2016 before converting it into an online-only site you can still poke around in.
So if you ever need helpful stuff, Remember....
----
Two other updates, about one earlier and one later post:
Remember the Pu.... dead guy who filed a claim for just over 5 grand with Bankruptcy Court? Course you do. I narc'd on the claimant, and discovered the following court notification filed in the case earlier this week:
PLEASE TAKE NOTICE that a hearing will be held:
DATE/TIME/LOCATION OF HEARING
December 12, 2022 at 10:00 AM
Robert H. Jackson U.S. Courthouse
2 Niagara Square
5th Floor − Orleans Courtroom
Buffalo, NY 14202
to consider and act upon the following:
An Application for Payment of Unclaimed Funds was received by the Court on November 17, 2022. There
is purported evidence that the claimant as listed on that application is deceased. The Court will therefore set this
matter down for a hearing at the date, time and place listed above. INPERSON APPEARANCE IS REQUIRED;
appearance by telephone will not be allowed for this hearing. Failure to appear in person may result in denial of
the application.
Hmmmm. While the claimant may not be allowed to appear by phone, it's on a regular scheduled calendar a week from Monday and I can, and indeed will, call into it to listen to the fun that may ensue.
Curiously, the older, larger pot'o'money mentioned in that earlier post that I had a teeny involvement in from 30 years before, where someone just filed a claim to the 120 grand on deposit there? I narc'd on them, too, and no such notice of a hearing has been docketed. Yet. The court already dealt with that one as it deals with just about everything- by issuing a deficiency notice to the claimant, which will deny their claim without even giving them a hearing. I'm staying tuned in case anything pops up in that one.
----
I had better luck with a smaller gummint.
Yesterday's charging station fail? I took my shot, moved on, posted about it, but this morning my own brain had sufficiently recharged to remember something:
I know the supervisor of that town. His office is in the same building as the library the station is next to.
He's a Rochester lawyer in addition to his town supervising, and he's friends with me and several others I know there. I just saw him at the shiva I went to last month. So I pointed him to my little tale of no-charge, and within minutes got this reply:
Ray thanks for the heads up. I’ll have one of our facilities people take a look.
So, hey. I'm not going back there anytime soon, but it'll help the next people. And if my wife, sister or daughter asks you how I feel about that?
So. Two nights ago, the long overdue rewatch of the fourth and funniest of the original case Star Trek films, made and largely set in 1986. While the costumes and hairstyles still had some 80s dating to them, the story itself held up pretty well. The first half hour or so is most of their CGI and Industrial Light-type magic, featuring a Doomsday Machine with truck nuts destroying everything in its path until reaching 22nd century Earth, blasting out whale songs, and getting mad when nobody replied with the countersign So long and thanks for all the fish. Our Heroes need to slingshot around Sol to bring themselves back to 1986 to find some whales to bring home for the chat, some nonexistent transparent aluminum to hold them, and some "nuclear wessels" to recharge the cloaked ship's batteries to they can get home.
As soon as Kirk bounds down the stairs with Everybody remember where we parked, the fun is on. Director Leonard Nimoy chews his own scenery, Spocking a "punk on the bus" who was actually one of the film's producers (a scene the dude himself recreates in the latest time travel mess in Picard), failing at cursing, and probably appearing more human than he ever did before or since. Scotty pulls the biggest "there I fixed it" for the whale tank, not only engineering a lightweight transparent tank but neatly breaking the Prime Directive in half before our eyes when he gives the formula to a 1986 engineer centuries before its discovery: How do we know HE didn't invent it?
Our bonny chief engineer also shows us one of the unexpected retro-anachronisms of the film. How did he find this future discoverer of the necessary product? But of course- he let his fingers do the walking on something other than Lt. Mira Romaine (lettuce pause before the next joke;)-
Who'd have expected in 1986 that phone books would be obsolete even before Zefram Cochrane was born about 10 years from now? (Continue below for a brief story about another popular media from around then I was just reminded of.) But finally I understood, through a present-day conversation, why 2020-era technology seems to have disappeared from the Federation by the time of its original "historical documents" being shown on US television in the 1960s.
I was messaging my friend Howard Weinstein about all of the above and his connection to this film. (He appreciated the love from
dauntless_heart and would be happy to join us one of these weekends.) A few small samples of what I tried to send him:Re-watched Star trick for last night for the first time in a long time. I’d forgotten how fun it was the things that I’ve already become anachronistic, like Scotty finding the tank manufacturer by seeing an ad for the Yellow Pages
Nice trick there, Siri:P
A friend of mine saw that and mentioned that she has a read and really likes some of your truck novels. Not truck, computer. Trek.
I had to correct that on a keyboard. How quaint.
We finished without many more errors or accidental launches of a
----
The other quaint memory came in Monday trivia, when I stared at this question way too long:
I ran through obvious ones that were wrong: Denver. C-Springs. Boulder. El Paso (the county where the nightclub shooter kept his arsenal because the sheriff there doesn't believe in red-flag laws and won't narc on heavily armed crazy people). Aurora. Is Adobe a county? At last, though, an old brain cell fired off:
( The town in this 70s-80s public service ad.... )
It's one of those zip codes burned into my brain, like the famous Spiegel catalog's 60609, the Hills's 90210, and Car Talk Plaza's Fair City of 02238. The advertisement for the Consumer Information Catalog ran all over television for a good 20 years of my watching it, offering helpful government publications on buying a used car, planting a garden, maintaining your home, and dozens of other things. I can't remember if I ever sent away for it, but then I never ordered a Spiegel catalog, either. Despite the advent of the internet as the source for such searching, the gummint kept printing this pub all the way into 2016 before converting it into an online-only site you can still poke around in.
So if you ever need helpful stuff, Remember....
----
Two other updates, about one earlier and one later post:
Remember the Pu.... dead guy who filed a claim for just over 5 grand with Bankruptcy Court? Course you do. I narc'd on the claimant, and discovered the following court notification filed in the case earlier this week:
PLEASE TAKE NOTICE that a hearing will be held:
DATE/TIME/LOCATION OF HEARING
December 12, 2022 at 10:00 AM
Robert H. Jackson U.S. Courthouse
2 Niagara Square
5th Floor − Orleans Courtroom
Buffalo, NY 14202
to consider and act upon the following:
An Application for Payment of Unclaimed Funds was received by the Court on November 17, 2022. There
is purported evidence that the claimant as listed on that application is deceased. The Court will therefore set this
matter down for a hearing at the date, time and place listed above. INPERSON APPEARANCE IS REQUIRED;
appearance by telephone will not be allowed for this hearing. Failure to appear in person may result in denial of
the application.
Hmmmm. While the claimant may not be allowed to appear by phone, it's on a regular scheduled calendar a week from Monday and I can, and indeed will, call into it to listen to the fun that may ensue.
Curiously, the older, larger pot'o'money mentioned in that earlier post that I had a teeny involvement in from 30 years before, where someone just filed a claim to the 120 grand on deposit there? I narc'd on them, too, and no such notice of a hearing has been docketed. Yet. The court already dealt with that one as it deals with just about everything- by issuing a deficiency notice to the claimant, which will deny their claim without even giving them a hearing. I'm staying tuned in case anything pops up in that one.
----
I had better luck with a smaller gummint.
Yesterday's charging station fail? I took my shot, moved on, posted about it, but this morning my own brain had sufficiently recharged to remember something:
I know the supervisor of that town. His office is in the same building as the library the station is next to.
He's a Rochester lawyer in addition to his town supervising, and he's friends with me and several others I know there. I just saw him at the shiva I went to last month. So I pointed him to my little tale of no-charge, and within minutes got this reply:
Ray thanks for the heads up. I’ll have one of our facilities people take a look.
So, hey. I'm not going back there anytime soon, but it'll help the next people. And if my wife, sister or daughter asks you how I feel about that?