Where you would rather live: Warp Drive, Picard Lane, Crusher Avenue, Federation Court, or Ryker Court?  I feel pretty confident in assuming that nobody ever chooses Ryker Court.

I was watching the third episode of the fourth season of Project Runway and was amused by Heidi Klum’s seemingly Star Trek inspired hosting outfit:

You can now all mock me for watching Project Runway.

Whenever CNN runs a sidebar like this:

I always wish they were really running one like this:

It’s their own fault for making the headline ambiguous… is Miles O’Brien speaking on (about) the shuttle landing, or is he physically on the shuttle landing? A clearer statement would remove the Miles O’Brien or Miles O’Brien uncertainty.

Two quick notes about the aforementioned Planet X:

1. The book, frustratingly, keeps referring to some incident in which all the characters met in the past.  Planet X is apparently a sequel to Star Trek/X-Men: Second Contact (a comic book also featuring the X-Men and the cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation) which was itself a sequel of sorts to Star TreX (another comic book featuring the X-Men and the cast of Star Trek: The Original Series).  Who knew?
2. The book is infuriating.  It’s just wrong.  I can’t really flush out why, but having Star Trek characters have full conversations with X-Men characters in an official piece of Star Trek fiction is irritating.  It’s not like it’s some blogger’s fan fiction or something.  Each time they interact I want to close the book and walk away.  These groups were never designed to talk to each other and efforts to make them do so feel forced and strange.  It would be like throwing the Simpsons into an episode of NYPD Blue and expecting all the characters to continue to behave in their traditional manner.  It just wouldn’t work.

Writing this makes me feel extremely dorky.  Also, reading the book makes me feel extremely dorky.

The New Yorker pointed me, about a year ago, to what has to be the most confusing book ever written. This weekend I finally got together enough gumption to buy Planet X, the Star Trek: The Next Generation/X-Men crossover book. You read that right, somehow the cast of ST:TNG, putzing about in the 24th century, manages to bump into the cast of the X-Men who are traditionally tied down to the much nearer future. There’s some sort of mutant alien planet or something.

Amazon’s description makes it seem exactly as unlikely as I would have expected:

On the planet Xhaldia, ordinary men and women are mutating into bizarre creatures with extraordinary powers. But is this a momentous evolutionary leap or an unparalleled catastrophe? The very fabric of Xhaldian society is threatened as fear and prejudice divide the transformed from their own kin.

Dispatched to cope with the growing crisis, Captain Picard and the crew of the Starship Enterprise™ receive some unexpected visitors from another reality — in the form of the group of mutant heroes known as the uncanny X-Men®. Storm, leader of the X-Men, offers their help in resolving a situation that is agonizingly similar to the human/mutant conflicts of their own time and space.

But when hostile aliens appear in orbit around Xhaldia to try and abduct the transformed for use as a superpowered force in an attack on the Federation, even the combined forces of the crew of Starfleet and the X-Men may be unable to prevent an inferno of death and destruction.

Starfleet’s finest crew and Earth’s greatest mutant heroes will need all their powers and abilities to save the Xhaldian people and stop a deadly threat to the Federation.

I often wish I could “receive some unexpected visitors from another reality” in order to solve my problems.

Obviously the biggest question is, what would happen if this book were made into a movie? Would Patrick Stewart play both Captain Jean-Luc Picard and Professor Charles Xavier? Man, I sure bet Riker would hate Wolverine… or something. This book seems like it was written on a dare at Comic-Con and subsequently published without anyone really considering the ludicrousness of the crossover proposition. This isn’t the Jetsons and the Flintstone we’re talking about here. I can’t wait to get to the page where Wolverine cuts his way out of a spaceship! You know it’s coming!

This book does provide some support for my long running theory that all characters in books and movies exist in the same single fictional universe. I finally have something to use in my lengthy essay’s footnotes!

Earlier we asked “what does God need with a starship?” Today we ask a slightly different question:

Again, if only I were a video editor, this could have actually looked decent.

I’m almost finished reading River of Gods which is sort of like what Blade Runner would have been if it had been set in India and dealt more with AIs online rather than in robot form. The books uses a hell of a lot of Indian-based words and concepts, which were mostly lost on me, at least partially because I didn’t realize there was a glossary until I was four/fifths of the way through the book.

The glossary briefly mentions that Star Trek has a habit of filching the occasional Hindi word for use in alien languages. The author only offers two examples, though I’ve scrounged up one more.

Star Trek, the Original Series episode title category from Jeopardy. Fill in the blanks:

1. The Trouble With ______
2. _______’s Brain
3. The City on the Edge of ________
4. Where No Man has ____________
5. For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched __________

I got four right (three I basically knew, one was a guess), one I couldn’t get. Can you beat me?

Thanks jbg.

I find the fact that Daddy Day Camp, a sequel to Daddy Day Care, maintained the characters from the original but hired different actors (who look kind of like the original actors) fairly disturbing. It’s not like Bewitched or Roseanne where they changed the actor playing one character but everybody else remained the same; they changed EVERYBODY. Charles in Charge switched families at the end of season one, but at least they treated the audience with enough dignity to make up same lame excuse to explain why. Even Star Trek had to address why Klingons changed from merely dark-skinned to incredibly crag-faced with a throw-away “we don’t like to talk about it.”

Daddy Day Camp, presumably, doesn’t even do this much.

The only tolerable explanation I can conceive of is if Daddy Day Camp spent the entire first forty five minutes of the film recapping how each charcter had, since the exploits of Daddy Day Care, been involved in separate but equally traumatic car accidents which required each character to undergo mildly drastic plastic surgery. Not so much surgery that they’d, say, change races or lose weight, but enough so that they’d look (and sound) different.

Charlie Hinton is played by Cuba Gooding Jr. & Eddie Murphy

Phil Ryerson is played by Paul Rae & Jeff Garlin

Kim Hinton is played by Tamala Jones & Regina King

Ben Hinton is played by Spencir Bridges & Khamani Griffin