Geek Days Are Here Again - Trekkie Edition

I've mentioned elsewhere how much of a Geek I am. Tomorrow will be a day I get my Geek on, a special day, a red-letter day.

One, it's my birthday. Two, it's the release of the Star Trek: The Reboot movie.

I need to note how much of a cornerstone Trek is to the Geek culture. There are a slew of different Geeks in the world - Tech Geeks, Anime Geeks, History Geeks, Political Geeks, High Fantasy Geeks (LotR geekdom started years before Trek did), Sports Geeks - and in some ways Trek touches upon them all. Fans of the West Wing noticed how the show brought out the scifi Geek in them and duh it's just Star Trek In the Oval Office, with Bartlet as Kirk, Leo as Spock, CJ as Uhura, Josh Sam and Toby as Scotty Sulu and/or Chekov, and Donna as Yeoman Rand (with the Republicans as Klingons). And the inverse of that is how the Original Series came as a parable of the Cold War era, the utopian ideal of JFK's New Frontier, with Starfleet as the West, Klingons as Russians, Romulans as Chinese. Star Trek VI is practically a Trek revisionism to the collapse of the Soviet Union: Praxis' explosion as Chernobyl, Gorkon as Gorbachev (destabilized via coup rather than assassinated), script filled with quoted references to Cold War dialog (my twin brother at this point still doesn't get the "Only Nixon Could Go to China" reference), the Khitomer Accords akin to the opening up of Eastern Europe and the Fall of the Berlin Wall.

Everything else in Geek culture owes something to Star Trek. Even Star Wars, a cultural behemoth in its own right. Trek was the first science fiction show to have dedicated conventions that actually got noticed (usually mocked from the 70s to the 90s) as a cultural phenom in their own right. Trek made geeking out over Tolkien and Hobbits more high-brow (snerk): before Trek, obsessing over Middle-earth was something kept to university coffee houses and halfling-weed-scented basements. Trek culture meshed and still meshes with Superhero Comics culture. Quoting from Trek is now so common people don't even blink or snicker when they do. Wearing Trek outfits outside of movie theaters and convention halls doesn't seem so weird anymore. We've even got serious (well as serious as current circumstances allow them) political commentators noting how much Obama is like Spock (that Obama shows signs of being an unabashed Geek (only a Geek would pose like that in front of a Superman statue) in his own right helps)... and that supposedly humorous Onion article that posits the BSG finale got Obama emotionally distraught? Probably was more accurate than the satirists thought... but I digress.

People who wouldn't even think of themselves as hardcore Trekkies or even hardcore Geeks could still quote heavily from the series magnum opus, Wrath of Khan - and not just Shatner's overemotive "KHHHHAAAAANNNNNN!" I'm talking knowing what a Kobayashi Maru is, that the Klingons have a proverb about revenge being a dish best served cold, that Ricardo Montalban didn't wear a chest prothesis for that outfit (yeah ladies, Mr. Rourke was BUFF).

Normal people know how to pronounce "nuclear wessels." People driving 90 MPH on the highway get pulled over by cops telling them they're speeding over Warp Factor 9. Regular people know Sulu got married... well, yeah, still don't know how he's gonna squeeze out a daughter though... Shakespeare is getting translated (back) into the original Klingon. Doctor Who knows of Spock as a TV character (which ruined the hell out of all those damn epic Crossover fanfic stories that had the Enterprise crew Trekkin with the Doctor! NOOOOO).

This is the Internet Age. Brought to you by computer nerds, bringing you information over the tubes, fashioning all Internet Traditions. And don't forget all those engineering techheads who designed mobile phones. Of course Star Trek is going to be all over this place. Soon, all will be Trek.

(Flashes the Vulcan greeting). Party Hard, fanboys!

NFL Draft Day Blogging 2009

Hola, to all three people who might even know this blog exists. :)
Today's a huge day for me as a Bucs fan, I'm gonna be following the NFL rookie draft this afternoon. I'm gonna see about liveblogging it, which means constant EDIT updates to this particular post. I'm gonna see if I can do it, and how many updates I can do before the computer decides to kill me for overloading its CPU...

Some notes beforehand, I've made my predictions (based mostly on the Bucs NOT trading down from the 19th spot, something they're hoping to do) and am now waiting to see how far off I am in mah guesswork.

I'm primarily hoping the Bucs go for Percy Harvin as a need pick for WR. But I'm not blind to the Bucs' needs at DT and DE, so if the team goes there (possibly DT Peria Jerry) I won't have any problems.

What I will have a problem with is if the Bucs go with selecting a rookie QB like Josh Freeman with the 19th overall pick. Half the scouting boards (including that pompous ass Mel Kiper) have the Bucs going that way even though 1) Bucs have a decent roster of veteran QBs already and 2) Bucs have needs elsewhere. These jokers can't even argue that picking Freeman would be a Best-Available Pick (as opposed to Filling-Need Pick) because Freeman is ranked around the 50th spot with most scouting boards. These scouts seem to think the Bucs are screwed at QB because they don't like Leftwich or McCown or Griese. Phooey on that.

Early notes: Detroit has locked up the first overall pick to QB Dennis Quaid, uh Matt Stafford. Teams looking to trade up include the Giants who are hoping to snag WR Darrius Heyward-Bey before he goes to other WR-starved teams. Arizona has WR Boldin on the trading block, and apparently are dropping their demands so much that a smart team could snag Boldin, keep a decent early pick and still get a rookie they wanted. So DON'T expect the Bucs to make that move. ;-)

Draft officially starts in 4 hours. I will post UPDATES! Stay tuned.

Update - 3:42 PM. Currently at a Buffalo Wild Wings. Wireless works. Laptop now on battery power. See how long it lasts.
Most of the talk on the car radio was on the ridiculously rich contract Stafford got, and for the locals arguing about the need to trade down with the two teams most wanting to trade up (Arizona, NYGiants).

4:52 - Big shock with the Jets trading up to get Sanchez. Big question now is how this affects the next QB on the list (Freeman). With DE Jackson going ahead of other big names at the DE spot, there's a possibility the DE lineup will see a lot of activity with the next 12 spots...

5:37 - Didn't realize Denver needed RB. Wonder if the Bucs have a shot at LB Cushing... Biggest shock so far is still the Jets trade, but seeing some of the DEs slip from Top 5 to tenth and eleventh means there'll be more defensive end players on the board to tempt the Bucs...

6:01 - I call riot. FREEMAN?!?! WE TRADED UP FOR FREEMAN?!?!?! WE NEEDED DT! WE NEEDED WR!! WE COULD HAVE TAKEN OLB FOR GODS SAKE!!!!! GAHHHHHHHHH!!!!

It's official. We suck.

9:00 - I doubt the Bucs can work out a trade to get back into the Second Round, so this is it for the day. My grand experiment in liveblogging the event kinda goes nowhere and I end up frustrated with the team once again. Sigh. It's a good thing there's a Star Trek movie coming out on my birthday I can geek out over in two weeks...

So I obsess over a few things

I'm a geek. You might not have noticed by now but... yeah I kid. All four of you noticed on Day One.

I'm a comic book geek, movie geek, scifi geek, Trekkie (yes, I accept the term), XPhile, lit geek, cat geek, cheese geek, tall-long-haired-brunette-with-huge-tracks-of-land geek (I have a fetish, so? especially if she looks great in a Wonder Woman cosplay uniform), and sports geek.

I know that last bit sometimes doesn't square with all the other geekdoms - well other than the cheese and the tall brunettes with yabbos geekdoms - but, yeah, I get it from my mom's side of the family (poor Grampa was a Cubs (or was it teh Braves?) fan, Mom knows ever syllable of the War Eagle fight song). And having grown up in the Tampa Bay region from 1977 on, I got hooked early to the Tampa Bay Bucs pro football team (having them go to the playoffs when I was nine started the fan crush). So yeah, I follow a lot of football, college and pro.

I also obsess over the annual NFL rookie draft.

Not everyone gets the draft, I know. It's a hyped-up non-event in their eyes. No game is actually played out. No one really wins, or really loses (unless you're the Browns or Lions or Raiders, they haven't drafted smart in years!). It's a real-life version of Fantasy Football where REAL team owners get to select newbies to fill out their rosters, nothing more.

Except, except, except... There's a reason thousands of fans do follow Draft Day, or at least the First Round.

How the teams draft can tell you how the coaches and owners are thinking about their team's chances for the coming season. Who a team drafts can tell fans what to expect, what holes in the team line-ups needed to be filled. Like a few other team sports (baseball and hockey for example), pro football has a whole line-up of diversified player positions that require specific skills, so a team drafting a Wide Receiver with their first overall pick is telling fans they're trying to upgrade their passing attack. Like basketball, football draftees can immediately see playing time on the field their rookie year (baseball and hockey both have farm systems in which rookies can hide for years before seeing pro-level play time), so a top draft pick can become an immediate star first game of September.

Another thing is that NFL Draft Day is a time when both the college level fandom and pro level fandom intermix. College football fanaticism is actually bigger than the pro game (more schools, more regions, more history), and not all college fans are pro fans (and vice versa). Draft Day is when fans from Wake Forest can gather to watch a top-rated Defensive linesman can get taken by the Green Bay Packers, or the Oakland Raiders, or the Cincinnati Bengals (poor guy) or the New York Jets (whose fans will boo him anyway. Lord, those guys would boo the Pope if they could).

Draft Day IS a day for the fans, because it gives fans a chance to gather at local watering holes (or at a team's draft party, or AT the draft in New York City itself) and bicker and whoop and praise and curse the team they follow.

It's a HUGE day for me, because like I told you earlier the Bucs are mah team. And from 1984 to 1996, the Draft Day was really the only real fun day a Bucs fan could have, trust me we were THAT bad a franchise those years. So yeah, I'm into the draft.

This April 25th, I hope to gather with a few Bucs fans in the bay area (perhaps Oldsmar, there's a Buffalo Wild Wings there that might have wifi handy), and maybe even liveblog it from this blog. Hope you don't mind... but it's not like I've got a lot of reasons to write about librarianship these days...

Time flies when you're plugged in

It was ten years ago this month when The Matrix came out.

As a Gen-Xer who measures time by cultural milestones, this is yet another moment where I sit back and realize that DAMN I'm getting old. My 20-year high school reunion kinda worked the same way.

How can I describe 1999 (or 1985 for God's sake) to those who weren't there? That was a crazy-ass year. Everyone, well every geek, was waiting for Star Wars I - The Phantom Menace to come out that summer: a brand-new website called Countingdown.com was practically created to flash a timer waiting for the day we'd see Anakin Skywalker start on his destiny. The only summer film that looked to compete with the Force was this Austin Powers sequel. There was this buzz about a small indy project called the Blair Witch Project that had this weird-ass website of background info. Meanwhile in the real world, politics was getting all screwy with the Clinton Impeachment over Blowjobs fiasco that was wiping out Republican leadership instead of the Clintons themselves. Bush and Gore were lining themselves up as the de-facto party choices for 2000. There were Melissa Worms and Napster and everyone waiting for Y2K to erupt on New Year's. Stephen King nearly dies in a hit-and-run accident. Enron starts messing with California's energy supply. And on April 20, 1999... that was a bad day all around.

Into all of this came The Matrix. For all we knew or heard about this film, it had something to do with computer hackers figuring out something, not sure what, about the universe and reality in general. Nobody I knew who were into films had much information on what this was about. Warner Bros. was kinda releasing this film with almost little fanfare, in early April of all times rather than the more lucrative summer months as though they wanted it done and out of the way before Star Wars cleaned up the market.

For meself... Two hours after going in, for myself, every geek I know, and every geek I knew existed out there on the planet, had to have exited that film with OUR FREAKING MINDS BLOWN!

It had hackers saving the world (nice ego-stroking there). It had questions about reality, about our senses, our perceptions. It had proto-goth culture mixed with techno-shoot-em-up culture mixed with Far Eastern mysticism and every form of kung-fu (Jedi, wire-fu, gun-fu, hack-fu, wtf-fu) you had ever seen. It had Christian parables and messanic overtones. It had Keanu Reeves saying "Whoa" and actually SELLING THAT LINE! It had Hugo Weaving owning the title of "Badass" (even in good-guy roles like Elrond!) for the next decade (would half the people who even moderately tolerated V For Vendetta even been that way if it didn't have Hugo Weaving's near-perfect dark voice as the anti-hero?). It had Laurence Fishburne as Morpheus, out-mentoring Yoda in some of the best kung-fu sparring you'll ever see. It had Joey Pants as the one sensible jerk in the whole universe ("Why didn't I take the Blue Pill?"), who of course turns out to be a total -ssh-l- because in a war against the Machine you need to accept the Red Pill and accept the reality that we are all brains in batteries.

Those who came after this movie came out can't begin to understand how the Matrix warped our geekhood. We came to quote from Morpheus and the Oracle more than Yoda. It also hurt that when the Phantom Menace finally came out - Jar-Jar??? Mitichlor-whats? Anakin crushing on Padme even though he's clearly 8 years away from hitting puberty? What??? - that a lot of geeks felt betrayed (ten years later, IT STILL HURTS) by Lucas' lack of understanding his own vision (the geeky response of The Phantom Edit tells you all you needed to know: if only Lucas had the supporting staff he had back during the 70s-80s trilogy, people like Gary Kurtz at producer and Lawrence Kasdan at screenplay who could have pulled back on Lucas' worst indulgences, the prequel trilogy could have been SO AWESOME).

So here we are, 10 years later. I'm getting to 39 years old, plugged into a computer messing with blogging and Facebook and a bunch of other things other than having an actual, you know, social life, pretty much like the USENET threads and emailing of days past. Has anything really changed?

Oh, and there's a rebooted Star Trek movie coming out. Gasp drool worship. Some things definitely never change...

St. Patrick's Day reminder WITH SPOILERS

Remember your Marquis of Queensbury rules. Um, just who was the Marquis of Queensbury anyway?

The link is to the most famous scene from John Ford's classic romance film The Quiet Man. Ahhh, every St. Patrick's Day I break out the DVD and watch this film. The romance involved isn't so much Sean Thorton (John Wayne) courting the fiery redhead Mary Kate Danaher (Maureen O'Hara), it's director John Ford being in love with Ireland itself. Ford was the son of Irish immigrants, and the theme of "Those Who Are Irish, and Those Who Wish They Were" pops up a lot in his films. Actually, I kid: Ford's recurrent theme throughout his films was Community, be it an actual town, an outpost of U.S. Calvary, or a band of brothers of some form.

Alert: here on there be SPOILERS, I do give away a lot of the film's plot. Still and all you should see the film, it's near perfect.
Here, the community is Innisfree, an idyllic coastal village two steps removed from Brigadoon or Avalon. Thorton is returning to the home of his parents from the United States, bringing with him wealth but a troubled soul. He wants to find heaven, which Innisfree has become for him, and he just wants to settle in his father's abandoned house and grow roses. Conflict immediately rises up when he repurchases the property from the Widow Tillane, drawing the ire of "Squire" Will Danaher who coveted the land (and the widow). Thorton had also come across Will's sister Mary Kate ("O that red hair of hers is no lie") and becomes smitten with her (and she with him), but being American is unschooled in the then-Irish customs of matchmaking and courtship. Will, as head of his house, refuses to let bygones be and allow his sister to even look at Sean. So the townfolk of Innisfree, coming to think of Thorton as "the best man in Innisfree" (another reason Will Danaher hates him), decide to help out by tricking Will into thinking the Widow Tillane won't marry him until Mary Kate leaves his house. The ruse works well enough to lead to Sean and Mary Kate's wedding... but then Will Danaher finds out he'd been tricked and refuses to pass on Mary Kate's dowry. Sean, having his own small fortune, doesn't see the bother: Mary Kate, knowing the money is her sign of independence from her brother, is infuriated her new husband won't fight for her rights. Their passionate love turns to equally passionate anger, and the Innisfree folk share the doldrums. It's just that, other than the Protestant minister who follows the sport of boxing, no one knows that Thorton had accidentally killed a fellow boxer during a fight ("For what? Lousy stinking money.") and has been guilt-ridden about throwing a punch ever since.
Things come to a head when Mary Kate shames Sean by running away: finally angered up, Thorton chases after her and drags her from the railroad station. Having interrupted a squabble already in progress, the train crew and just as quickly the whole town of Innisfree come arunning to witness the confrontation. Thorton openly calls Will Danaher out for the dowry in front of the whole community, and when he refuses Thorton calls the marriage quits. Now embarrassed that his sister could be shamed by the annulment, Will tosses the money at Sean's feet and curses him.
Sean takes the money and heads straight to a nearby kiln. Mary Kate meets him there and opens the oven, letting her husband toss her dowry into the fire. He's proven he has the backbone to stand up for his love: she's proven she had no interest in the money, just only the integrity of being his wife. All demons are resolved except one, and that leads to the epic donnybrook between Sean Thorton and Will Danaher.
The fight quickly proves to be more comedic than tragic: Will is physically fit enough to trade blows with the more professional Sean, and the two quickly figure out it's not really a fight to the death. What really happens is that the town of Innisfree is rejuvenated: the town elder (played by the director's older brother Francis) literally springs from his deathbed to watch the fight; the local police are more interested in tallying bets from other agencies; the Protestant minister wagers (a bit unfairly as he knew Thorton's rep) with his visiting bishop; and the Widow Tillane finally expresses her love for the bull-headed Will. The film ends with a reaffirmation of the community (and a shot of Will Danaher and the Widow Tillane on the courtship cart), with all the major cast members waving Hello to the audience.

Did warn you about the SPOILER, but you should still see the movie. As I mentioned earlier, it's John Ford's love letter to his old family's homeland of Ireland, and of the four Directing Oscars he'd garnered over his career I'd wager the one he got for Quiet Man had to be the one he most prided on. If you see enough of Ford's films, you'll notice he works like a canvass painter: scenes staged with almost snapshot-framing precision; vast landscapes in incredible detail (every director loves to film in Monument Valley: Ford's the only one to ever do that place justice); characters posed (sometimes rather stiffly) as for portraits to hang on museum walls. The Quiet Man is Ford at his best. It was filmed almost all on location (a rarity in those days when it was cheaper to film in California and pretend it was Toronto: now it's the other way around), and Ford's eye captures the beauty of the landscape. The cinematographers (Winton C. Hoch and Archie Stout) also won Oscars for their work on this film as well. The location scenery caught in Technicolor was so gorgeous that it actually causes a problem: for certain shots Ford had to film 'outdoor' scenes on a stage, and the switch is so noticeable (especially during a horse race and especially the rousing fight) that it jars the viewers. It's the film's biggest flaw.

You can tell it's a love letter because the film is really an American's dream of an ideal Ireland. People of Innisfree may be improvished but they're happy. Most mentions of the Troubles are practically asides: the local Sinn Fein plotters are more concerned with the next lager than with blowing up buildings. There's an elderly gent in some scenes, upper class gentry, and I think he's meant to be an implanted English lord. There's a running gag of seeing this guy in the background completely oblivious to the going-ons, while the Catholic priest played by Ward Bond and the leprechaun-like matchmaker played by Barry Fitzgerald are the true town leaders. The film ends with the mostly Catholic townfolk cheering on the Protestant minister in order to convince his bishop to let the minister stay: only an Irish-American long separated from the religious divisions that still rack Ireland and Northern Ireland would conceive such a scene back in the 1950s.

What makes this movie near-perfect is also the cast: the biggest problem in a lot of Ford's films is that the actors' performances tend to be a bit stiff, but in the Quiet Man nearly everyone is relaxed and you can tell the cast are enjoying themselves. The performance that will shock you the most is John Wayne's: while he's usually the hero and 'gets the girl' in a lot of his films, the Quiet Man was the first one (maybe the only film) where he's genuinely a romantic figure first and action hero last. His acting alongside Maureen O'Hara, especially the tender scenes, and the wordless flashback to his boxing accident showed actual acting chops. Usually it's John Wayne starring as John Wayne: here's, it's John Wayne as Sean Thorton. That Wayne didn't even get nominated for an Oscar for this role remains one of the Top 10 Injustices in Hollywood History (it ranks below Edward G. Robinson never getting an acting nomination at all, and above Annie Hall beating out Star Wars for Best Picture).
Maureen O'Hara, by the time of this film, was one of Hollywood's most beautiful leading ladies, probably the most beautiful redhead in film history. Her performance in Quiet Man is all passion, nearly combative with every character but with firm purpose and with genuine desire. Her pairing with Wayne here is considered one of filmdom's greatest romantic performances ever (Speilberg payed homage to the kissing scene in E.T.).
As for the rest of the cast, well. Ford was well-known for working with a standing company of regulars, and for each of them this was a good time for them to dust off their comedic skills. Victor McLaglen is usually a clownish figure in a lot of them: here it's put to good use as the bullying brother who needs a good bop on the nose to put him in his place. He received a Best Supporting nomination here. Equally up to the task were the likes of Ward Bond (who serves as narrator as well as the head priest Father Lonergan) and Barry Fitzgerald (as the matchmaker Michaleen Ole Flynn). You have to watch Fitzgerald's slow burn when he finds the newlywed's bed in shambles. The rest of the cast was pretty much related to everybody else (Maureen's brothers played the young priest and/or one of the Sinn Fein drinkers, uh plotters). As another sign of this being John Ford's love letter, his older brother Francis gets a lot of prime scenery-chewing, and at the end Francis gets the only solo shout-out to the audience.

My film-viewing fare tends towards science fiction and action thrillers. The Quiet Man is one of the few romances I even openly admit to having seen, and one of two I own on DVD. 'Cause there's nothing wrong with that: it's one of the best movies ever. Makes you wanna finish up filing for a passport so you can go visit Innisfree!

Checking in 02/2009

Still job hunting.

There's not much else to say or do at the moment, other than to say that for all the resumes I've sent out there's a lot of waiting time for any responses...

There's also the US Census jobbers: I had taken the civil service exam, passed it, but now I'm waiting for the call if it ever comes.

Sigh. Tons of.

Form of Things Unknown

Pardon for the last post, I was trying to get something aligned between this blog and the Technocrati site. Don't think it worked...

Currently, I'm still job-hunting, checking out every opening in the state of Florida for librarian spots, and kinda keeping an eye open on the other states as well. Otherwise, not much else to report other than pleading with God about my hair... double crowns, YOU had to give me double crowns...