Star Trek Discovery, In the Pale Moonlight

After getting home from traveling, I used a free week of CBS All Access to binge Star Trek Discovery. This is a spoiler review of the second season that harkens back to a great episode of Deep Space Nine called In the Pale Moonlight. There’s major spoilers including picking apart some of the Discovery plot points. If you really like the show, this take probably isn’t for you, but if you’re more critical about your sci-fi, read on. Spoilers abound.

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Does Travel Change You?

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”

Public Lust and Ear Plugs

I wrote this (mostly) a few days ago while staying in a backpacker’s hostel in Dublin.

I’m staying in a mixed (gender) room at a not-to-be-named hostel in Dublin, Ireland. I figured a mixed room might be an experience and it proved to be true.

Land of Ire

I’m headed to Ireland, and taking an extended trip into England, Belgium, and Switzerland. Originally, I planned to make a new website or blog of my journeys, but that never felt right. I did that when I went to Australia eleven years ago, creating a personal blog of my inner and outer journeys. I’m not sure these times are right for that kind of introspection. This journey feels too personal, and I’m a bit tired of writing about myself.

The True Varsity Blues

The university admissions scandal (#varsityblues) is one of those watershed moments that has me looking back over life and doing some rewriting. My autobiographical fiction books have some thoughts about ‘the death of universities’ in America, and some of those anecdotes come to mind. People have been saying that cheating is nothing new or it’s always been like this, but really it hasn’t, at least not to this degree.

Crooked Tucson Revisited

I got a ‘heads up’ call early last Monday. ‘Beware! The Feds may want to talk to you.’ An old boss had been led away in handcuffs and another was apparently on the lam. Crooked Tucson rearing its head again.

Star Trek Discovery Versus The Orville

If you follow Star Trek on Facebook, it has become a tiring spectacle to see self-professed fans of The Orville troll Star Trek Discovery (DSC) posts. There’s lots of whining and complaining about how Discovery isn’t ‘true’ Star Trek and The Orville is more like Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG). In American culture today, it seems like idiots are trying to force us to take sides on everything, and that’s a shame. There’s no need to suffer like idiots.

Following the Arts…?

Is there a difference between following the arts and running a business? I see confusion about this, and it appears these two things have become muddled, bled into each other. Maybe I’m the one confused, or maybe I see it differently because I studied business while having an arts degree, and I learned to look at these two things in different ways.

Of A Sexual Harassment Incident in Tucson

I’ve become aware of a sexual harassment incident in Tucson via Facebook. I don’t know any of the people involved directly, but I do know of the two establishments mentioned—as well as being friends of friends of the ‘victim’ on Facebook. Writing about such things always puts the scribe on shaky ground, and

NDT and PDA

Neil deGrasse Tyson (NDT) is having his #metoo moment. His response to the characterizations of him as a groper and an assaulter can be found on his Facebook page. It’s an eloquent defense, and frankly I find myself on his side, but I feel no need to defend him. Perhaps I will be accused of ‘mansplaining’ for this, and we cannot be sure what happened over a decade ago when he was in grad school, but the two other incidents he defends are in my mind an example of #metoo gone too far.