Okay, I gotta ask. What's with the lack of capital letters?

A guy built a LEGO railway through his house.



Up stairs, through a pool, through a glow bracelet tunnel, through a mini forest, everything!

I can't believe that I haven't shilled A Cappella Trudbol before, but the search function isn't returning anything. He does barbershop quartet versions of old and new songs.



I Want it That Way


I still have a fondness for the boy band era, however flawed it was. It definitely falls into the category of "it's not supposed to be fancy or intellectual, it's supposed to be fun."



And now to inflict some turn of the millennium cultural junk food on you. Mickey's Dance Party. A cheese level that's off the charts, but it's a CD that I'm glad I bought.

Cinema Snob review of Soup For One


I don't recommend the movie itself, I don't watch or follow sex comedies, but I was surprised at all of the cameos by Trek guest stars. We have Saul Rubinek AKA Kivas Fajo, Gerrit Graham AKA Quinn, and Richard Libertini AKA Akorem Laan (the substitute Emissary from the past).


I mean, of course these guys must've had other parts besides Trek (I know Rubinek best from his run on Frasier), but you don't expect to see these careers intersect in a movie from 1982.

Because Star Trek: Picard screwed up the novelverse's idea of the post-TNG years, Pocket Books is releasing a trilogy of novels to close that version of the novelverse to avoid confusion.


I gotta ask, how many people watching STP are reading the novels? This seems unnecessary. And more than that, it seems like another piece of ammunition for the old-school Trekkies to use to attack the recent Trekverse.

Today's post is in honor of the Fourth of July. Schoolyard chants based on well-known songs are nothing new, but let's talk about variants of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic."



The version I'm most familiar with is from Garrison Keillor's "A Prairie Home Companion":


Mine eyes have seen the glory of the burning of the school,
We are torturing the teachers we are breaking every rule,

We broke into his office and we tickled the principal,
Our truth is marching on!


Glory, glory hallelujah
teacher hit me with a ruler
I bopped her on the bean
with a rotten tangerine
and she ain’t gonna teach no more“


But there are many, MANY variants.



Did you hear any such variants as a child?

Spock cameos on the Carol Burnett show.


Well, that was weird...

We seem to have some cat fans in the audience, so here's a TNG/cat joke from Facebook.

Element 14 makes a tricorder from a kit.


I am disgusted at how little that thing looks like a real TNG tricorder. I hope the real explanation is that this thing isn't officially licensed so they couldn't get too close to the real design.

Half as Interesting talks about elevator systems in really tall buildings.


Like many others I was gratified to see the SimTower graphics. I love that game...

Doomed: The Untold Story of Roger Corman's The Fantastic Four


I've been waiting to see this one for years, but it was behind a paywall for the longest time.



And if you want to see the actual movie...

All of the actors who were on TOS and Batman 1966. I knew about some of these, but not all.

You don't expect to see that many TNG/Scooby Doo memes, but here's one...

Trekkies in Night Court


I get the "Trekkies are losers" gag, especially given that it's the eighties, but I can't forgive how amateurish their uniforms are. They can't even make them the right colors? Since when was orange a division color in Starfleet?


And of course if you bring up Night Court in a Trek setting you have to link to one of Brent Spiner's cameos. It's the law. Regulation 47, I believe.

2023's STAR TREK Film Lands a Director

trekcore

Discovery and Lower Decks nominated for Five Emmys


Makeup, sound editing, visual effects. In other words, they shouldn't be that excited. Get back to me when the writing is nominated. I should be comfortable in my seat at Milliways when that happens.

Steve Shives tackles TOS's Earth duplicates (AKA examples of Hodgkin's Law of Parallel Planet Development).



If you believe the Shatnerverse, all of these duplicate Earths were the result of a Preserver plan, but I'm not sure how much I like that idea.



I'm okay with Hodgkin's Law in general, but not duplicate Declaration of Independences or stuff like that.


Incidentally, I don't call any planet with identical to human natives a duplicate Earth. That's just '60s budget constraints. Just like I'm willing to say that Klingons always had ridges, we can say that these species had out-of-budget differences. Different numbers of fingers, odd eye shapes, that sort of thing.


"A Piece of the Action" isn't a duplicate Earth, it was made that way by the the book the Horizon left. He also cites "The Royale", which was again, an intentional duplication.

Certifiably Ingame asks if Vic Fontaine is truly sentient, or just a very sophisticated puppet.


He concludes the latter. I disagree. He was made to be fully sentient from the get-go.


Then again, I suppose you gotta ask where the line is. Holodoc was arguably not fully sentient at the start.

Someone uses Python to simulate a million Monopoly games to see how often the game turns into an endless balance.


I'd argue that this is of minimal usefulness as the player's strategy seldom operates according to strict logic.


I also argue that the real reason Monopoly has gotten the reputation of super-long and boring is quite simple: nobody plays by the real rules.


The point of the game is getting all of the money on the board back to the bank or the winner's possession. Not using interest when selling back houses, Free Parking, not conducting auctions, and all the other house rules are antithetical to that purpose. The game is set up to drain money from the player's hands back to the bank at a reasonable rate. Not doing that increases the odds of an endless game.

Two British universities have done studies on how the usages of split infinitives has evolved and declared that they're now okay to use.


So now you can ignore all those idiots who insist that it should be "to go boldly".



And of course we all remember that in the old Galactic Empire men dared to boldly split infinitives that no man had split before.


Incidentally, an infinitive is when you use the original form of a verb, i.e. "to go", the split is inserting "boldly."


In Latin the "to verb" form is one word, so you couldn't split it even if you wanted to. It still makes sense in Romance languages, but English is a Germanic language, so it's okay to split.