From the new Trek, this confrontation between hardass Spock and wiseass Kirk looks like fun. (The other two clips – a drunken Kirk trying to pick up Uhura in a bar, and an even-more-paranoid-than-the-original McCoy spazzing out about space travel – grab me a bit less.)
Author Archive | Roderick
Sweet Home Maersk Alabama
What’s wrong with this story?
Andrea Phillips, the wife of Capt. Richard Phillips of Underhill, Vermont, said her husband had sailed in the waters off Somalia “for quite some time” and a hijacking was perhaps “inevitable.” …
Merchant crews aren’t supposed to fight pirates, short of using high-pressure hoses to try to stop them from climbing aboard, said John F. Reinhart, president and CEO of Maersk Line Ltd. “They (the crews) don’t have any weapons ….”
The Pict of Hyborian Gray
Just came across this discussion of my old Robert E. Howard posts He Picked Picts to Depict and From Bangles to Broadswords. Cool – though they do get my name wrong (and their links to my blog are now sadly obsolete).
Mystery of the Batwoman
I haven’t been able to discover who drew this poster (which I suspect looks better than, and bears little relation to, anything in the movie), but I sure have a hypothesis.
Doctor Thing
During his famous run on Swamp Thing, Alan Moore turned the hero into an alienated, vastly powerful cosmic being who teleports himself all over the universe – his only remaining emotional link to humanity being his girlfriend Abby Arcane, who lounges around idly in the swamp waiting to provide him with sex and nurturing whenever he drops back in.
In other words, the relationship between Swamp Thing and Abby prefigures the later relationship between Dr. Manhattan and Laurie Juspeczyk in Watchmen – the big difference, of course, being that while the first relationship was presented (somewhat tongue in cheek, I assume – or hope!) as idyllic, the second is portrayed, more realistically, as deeply frustrating and dysfunctional. So in Watchmen Moore in effect took the opportunity to deconstruct, under new names, the relationship he’d previously created.
(In related news, Swampy’s manipulating matter to create his own world on the Blue Planet [Saga of Swamp Thing #56] likewise prefigures Doc M’s doing likewise on the Red Planet – though of course one’s exile is chosen and the other’s is not.)
Democrats For Plutocrats
Left-leaning libertarians and libertarian-leaning leftists have been saying for years that “liberals” (in the mainstream sense), far from wielding the club of governmental regulation against big business, have been among the chief enforcers of corporate interests.
Now we get confirmation straight from the horse’s mouth. According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (Conical hat tip to Lew Rockwell and Ralph Raico), Obama, Biden, and Clinton all have a higher “pro-business” record than Ron Paul – because (and give them credit for their honesty) the Chamber’s criterion for being “pro-business” is support for corporate subsidies and special privileges, not support for free markets.
The right-leaning Washington Examiner’s story makes it sound as though it’s liberals rather than conservatives that are pawns of the plutocracy (hence their headline “New Chamber index shows conservatives aren’t corporate pawns”), but a look at the winners of the Chamber’s “Spirit of Corporate Welfare Enterprise” award shows Republicans and Democrats both eagerly filling the trough – with my own state’s Senator Richard Shelby at the top of the list.