Jun152004

What Is It About Star Trek?

Today’s post is going to be another of those minimal-content quickies, for which I sincerely apologize. I don’t mean to keep teasing you loyal reader types. However, I do want to draw your attention to a nice essay that was referenced today on Wil Wheaton’s website, which is one of my daily stops on this Internet crazy train.

Wheaton, as you may or may not know, played Wesley Crusher in the first four seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The piece that he references, A Love Letter to Star Trek, is another blogger’s thoughts on Trek and the effect it has had on her and her young sons.

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Jun132004

LiveJournal Book List

Life has gotten pretty busy for me lately and it promises to remain so, at least for the rest of this week. This has left me in the frustrating position of having many things I’d like to write about here at Simple Tricks, but not enough time to actually do the writing. Rest assured, my loyal readers, that there is some actual content in the offing… it just may take a while to get here. In the meantime, I thought I’d throw you a bone by offering up the following examination of my personal reading habits.

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Jun102004

Ray Charles

There’s an old cliche that says you can’t sing the blues if you haven’t known pain. I don’t know if that’s literally true, but it’s pretty obvious that those who have suffered and overcome hardship are able to inject a certain richness of texture into their work, a level of emotion and complexity that other, more naive artists have a hard time achieving. If you want proof of that, have a listen to Ray Charles’ best-known song, “Georgia on My Mind.” If you have the means, listen to it on vinyl, with all the organic pops and scratches that come with that format. It’s a melancholy tune of lost love; performed by any other musician that’s all it ever could be. But when Ray sang it, there was much more going on there than mere sadness.

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Jun082004

Trolley Corners closes

I’m still working on a couple of additional entries about CONduit, but I wanted to note that the last of the Salt Lake movie theaters I remember attending as a kid, Trolley Corners, quietly closed its doors on Thursday after 27 years of business.

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Jun032004

CONduit, Day One

I didn’t know what to expect from CONduit. I was looking forward to satisfying my curiosity about a large, general-interest science fiction convention, but I was also apprehensive. I feared that the con would be lame, that I would end up feeling like I’d wasted my time and money. Even worse, I feared that I would feel ashamed of myself for being associated with something so… geeky.

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Jun012004

What I Did Over Memorial Day Weekend

I was in the art gallery, peering closely at a painting of Hobbiton as reflected in the brass doorknob of Bilbo Baggins’ home at Bag End, when a sniggering, adolescent voice intruded upon my thoughts. The owner of the voice was trying to sound Evil and Menacing, but he reminded me more of Beavis than Beelzebub.

What the would-be Dark Lord Beavis said, in melodramatic, B-movie fashion, was, “I will rule your world with fear and pain, heh heh heh.”

He paused for dramatic effect, then added, “Pull my finger.”

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May252004

B5 Loses Its Doctor

Man, I hate how these things always seem to happen in cycles — you go for a while without hearing about anyone dying, then all of a sudden one day, familiar faces from our extended TV-and-movie family are dropping all around us. Today I read that actor Richard Biggs, who played Dr. Franklin on the TV series Babylon 5, died suddenly over the weekend. If you’re a fan of that show or of Mr. Biggs, you can read more about his passing here. I have to admit that I was only an occasional viewer of B5; I just never seemed to find the time for that one. But from what I saw of him, Franklin was a good character, a flawed man with an essential core of decency, and Biggs did a consummate job of bringing him to life. He was only 44 years old, just ten years older than myself. A damn shame.

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May252004

The End of Abu Ghraib

If anyone out there is wondering what I thought of the President’s speech last night about the present and future of Iraq, I have to be honest: I didn’t watch it. I don’t know what he said and I have no opinion about it at the moment. I spent the evening stuffing myself with Italian food in honor of my friend Amber’s birthday, and, aside from a little good-natured ribbing of the one and only fan of GeeDub who was present at our table, politics was the farthest thing from my mind. This morning, however, I have heard that Bush called for the demolition of the Abu Ghraib prison and the construction of a new facility, untainted by the memory of either Saddam’s atrocities or our own. That’s absolutely the correct move to make, symbolically speaking. It’s just too bad that it’s being done now instead of a year ago when the symbol would have been seen as a proactive gesture instead of damage control. Now it’s nothing more than a classic case of closing the barn door after the cow has escaped.

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May222004

Architecture is Dead

For those who may be keeping a list, another of my random interests is architecture. I’ve never taken any classes in the subject and don’t have the vocabulary to articulate many of my ideas about it, but I nevertheless have some strong opinions. I tend to approach the subject like I approach art — I may not know who painted something or why it’s considered important by the initiated, but I can tell you whether or not I like it, and whether or not I’d want it hanging in my home. And I have to say that, for the most part, I don’t like what passes for public architecture these days. (I’m not too keen on modern domestic architecture either, but today I’m talking about a public building.)

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