Why I love the Internet.

Local Bus Tour Complaints Reframed as Anti-Palin Campaign

Short version, with background for non-Juneau residents: Most of the houses in downtown Juneau, including the Governor's Mansion, are on these tiny little windy streets that you can barely fit two cars side by side (and that, quite often, people park along one side of). Lots of local tour places take large buses full of cruise ship passengers along these tiny little windy streets to see the Governor's Mansion, thus causing all kinds of noise and traffic issues. Perhaps fearing a large increase of these tours spurred by our current governor's explosion onto the national stage, lots of residents of downtown Juneau have (quite understandably) started to put up "Stop Local Tours" signs in protest of this practice.

Somehow, in the blogosphere, this morphed into (and I quote from the article):

Chip Thoma, a convicted felon and drunk driver from Juneau, has a grudge against Gov. Sarah Palin and/or despises 8-year-old Piper Palin's lemonade stand, so as a veiled attack on them he mounted a grassroots campaign to eradicate bus tours in Juneau. Flaming, hyperbolic outrage ensues.

And, because everyone knows blogs are the New News Media, elements of this "story" have been leaking back into the mainstream news, and even the Empire's getting hate mail:

One reader - or letter writer, at least - from a far-flung end of the country wrote expletive-infused hate mail threatening the Empire's staff with physical injury for picking on Piper Palin and her lemonade stand, despite the fact that there's been nary a mention of either in these pages, save an Empire photographer's unrelated, incidental photo of the lemonade stand snapped with the governor's permission.

Why do I love the Internet? Because, with a medium for exchanging information (and misinformation) so quickly, it brings both the best and the worst of humanity to light in increasingly wonderful (and hilarious) ways. One hopes that, sooner or later, people will adapt to the onslaught of unfiltered content and learn to question what they read before reacting to it. Eventually.

Why I love the Internet.

Local Bus Tour Complaints Reframed as Anti-Palin Campaign

Short version, with background for non-Juneau residents: Most of the houses in downtown Juneau, including the Governor's Mansion, are on these tiny little windy streets that you can barely fit two cars side by side (and that, quite often, people park along one side of). Lots of local tour places take large buses full of cruise ship passengers along these tiny little windy streets to see the Governor's Mansion, thus causing all kinds of noise and traffic issues. Perhaps fearing a large increase of these tours spurred by our current governor's explosion onto the national stage, lots of residents of downtown Juneau have (quite understandably) started to put up "Stop Local Tours" signs in protest of this practice.

Somehow, in the blogosphere, this morphed into (and I quote from the article):

Chip Thoma, a convicted felon and drunk driver from Juneau, has a grudge against Gov. Sarah Palin and/or despises 8-year-old Piper Palin's lemonade stand, so as a veiled attack on them he mounted a grassroots campaign to eradicate bus tours in Juneau. Flaming, hyperbolic outrage ensues.

And, because everyone knows blogs are the New News Media, elements of this "story" have been leaking back into the mainstream news, and even the Empire's getting hate mail:

One reader - or letter writer, at least - from a far-flung end of the country wrote expletive-infused hate mail threatening the Empire's staff with physical injury for picking on Piper Palin and her lemonade stand, despite the fact that there's been nary a mention of either in these pages, save an Empire photographer's unrelated, incidental photo of the lemonade stand snapped with the governor's permission.

Why do I love the Internet? Because, with a medium for exchanging information (and misinformation) so quickly, it brings both the best and the worst of humanity to light in increasingly wonderful (and hilarious) ways. One hopes that, sooner or later, people will adapt to the onslaught of unfiltered content and learn to question what they read before reacting to it. Eventually.

Taking stock

As I'm sure many of you are aware, Brian and I've been suffering from one of those long, lingering "knock you flat on your back for a week" colds. It's especially frustrating for me, as I don't get sick often (and when I do, I usually bounce back quickly), but there wasn't really much I could do about it, so I basically just tried to sleep through it and convince myself that someday I would have the energy for more than stumbling to the kitchen for a glass of water now and then. (It's amazing how many parts of your life seem inconsequential or needlessly complicated when you can barely think.)

Anyway, now that I'm firmly back in the land of the living, I've been taking stock of things, trying to figure out where everything stands now. I'm short some leave time for our honeymoon, but I can deal with that - my job isn't exactly high-stress, and given that I'm Getting Married I don't think it'll be a problem if I want to take some leave without pay. Amusingly, I've also lost five pounds and stayed well within my budget for this paycheck - something about not going out to spend any money and Brian not being up for cooking anything, and me barely eating anyway. So while it's not been an experience I much want to repeat, at least it hasn't been a total loss.

Taking stock

As I'm sure many of you are aware, Brian and I've been suffering from one of those long, lingering "knock you flat on your back for a week" colds. It's especially frustrating for me, as I don't get sick often (and when I do, I usually bounce back quickly), but there wasn't really much I could do about it, so I basically just tried to sleep through it and convince myself that someday I would have the energy for more than stumbling to the kitchen for a glass of water now and then. (It's amazing how many parts of your life seem inconsequential or needlessly complicated when you can barely think.)

Anyway, now that I'm firmly back in the land of the living, I've been taking stock of things, trying to figure out where everything stands now. I'm short some leave time for our honeymoon, but I can deal with that - my job isn't exactly high-stress, and given that I'm Getting Married I don't think it'll be a problem if I want to take some leave without pay. Amusingly, I've also lost five pounds and stayed well within my budget for this paycheck - something about not going out to spend any money and Brian not being up for cooking anything, and me barely eating anyway. So while it's not been an experience I much want to repeat, at least it hasn't been a total loss.

Crowdsourcing

Okay, I'm honestly stumped here, and Google isn't being much help. I know I've heard this song before, and I think it was either a movie, YouTube clip, or game soundtrack. But I can't for the life of me figure out where. So, help me out here - does anyone else recognize it, or am I just going nuts?

Crowdsourcing

Okay, I'm honestly stumped here, and Google isn't being much help. I know I've heard this song before, and I think it was either a movie, YouTube clip, or game soundtrack. But I can't for the life of me figure out where. So, help me out here - does anyone else recognize it, or am I just going nuts?

Star Trekkin', across the universe...

Depending on how long you've known me, you may or may not be surprised to discover that I used to be a hard-core Trekkie. I knew all kinds of trivia, burned my way through a goodly portion of the novels that were published at the time (tail end of the 90s, so well over a hundred), and had all sorts of magazines and reference books and other memorabilia that, combined with my cross-reference connection-forming brain, formed a rather impressive concordance. (One of my cherished memories from when I was 16 or so was reading a memoir written by the husband of an actress, who at one point is mentioned as having been in Star Trek - so I immediately put the book down and look up her name in one of my reference books, which gives me the name of the episode to look up in the episode guide, and as I'm reading about it suddenly realizing "Oh! There was an article that had pictures from this episode in one of my magazines!" and pulling that magazine off the shelf and finding a picture of the actress in question right there. It was like having my own personal Star Trek-themed Wikipedia, back before...well, before Wikipedia.)

Somewhere along the line, my enthusiasm for it all just waned. It probably coincided strongly with moving to Barrow at 17 (and getting rid of most of my books as part of the move). I still enjoyed the shows and the stories therein, but I no longer actively sought out obscure trivia, I no longer spent all the money I had on toy phasers and the like, and I grew tired of the (mostly mediocre) novels. And after I graduated high school and went to college and such, there were other things to hold my attention. And of course it didn't help that the franchise itself was flailing at that point - what with the sadly-uneven Voyager having ended, the red-headed stepchild Enterprise never really finding its tone and eventually getting cancelled, and the largely-execrable Nemesis grinding the movies to a halt. Star Trek had ended with a whimper, it seemed, but it had ended, and I'd moved on with my life, and that was fine.

So it was with not a little trepidation that I received the news that there was a new film coming out. And as further information became available, said trepidation only increased - sure, the previews looked promising, and the casting seemed pretty spot-on (holy Christ Sylar looks just like young Spock!), and it all sounded like it could be great, but did we really need more Star Trek? Was it really possible, after how long it had been around and how completely bogged down the series' various incarnations had gotten, to give it vitality and youthful vigor again, and - most importantly - to make us feel excited about Star Trek again?

Apparently, yes.

The achievement that J.J. Abrams and his cast have pulled off with their re-imagining is nothing short of astonishing - not only have they given the aged and creaky franchise a hypospray full of adrenaline, steroids, and the Waters of the Fountain of Youth, they've done so damn near seamlessly. Sure, it's a bit jarring at first matching up the unfamiliar faces with the oh-so-familiar names, but the actors slip into their personas almost distressingly well. (I know lots of other folk have said it before me, but Chris Pine deserves special props for managing to so perfectly channel James T. Kirk without ever channeling William Shatner - I frankly think he makes an even better Kirk than, well, Kirk did.) The story is a mess, both pseudo-science- and plot-hole-wise, and the villain barely even one-dimensional, but somehow you don't care; the film makes it very clear that its whole reason for existence is to get your favorite crew together, and you go with it - because it's fun!

For all of that, however, I think the real test of the newly-renovated franchise will be the sequel. It's quite the feat they've pulled off, yes, but getting things restarted and getting people excited about Star Trek again is only the first part. Trek's best stories have always been the ones about people and human nature. Rubber-suited aliens and computer-generated quantum singularities are all well and good, sure, but as plot devices rather than plot points. What's really interesting is how the people involved react to them, and how they deal with the inevitable misunderstandings and ethical quandaries that crop up (as always happens in human interaction), all of which was noticeably absent from this installment. I'm not saying that the next film has to be a stodgy and dour philosophy-fest - I think it's perfectly possible for the new version to maintain its gloss and youthful zip and still tell a deeper story. I just hope that it doesn't take all the excitement and goodwill that it's built up and just give us empty, flashy, Transformers-esque action without anything beneath to make you think.

But I admit to having a lot of hope. This particular franchise reboot is already miles ahead of, say, Superman Returns (which was equally glossy but frankly soulless and unengaging); J.J. Abrams has impressed me once, and I'd like to think he can do it again.

Star Trekkin', across the universe...

Depending on how long you've known me, you may or may not be surprised to discover that I used to be a hard-core Trekkie. I knew all kinds of trivia, burned my way through a goodly portion of the novels that were published at the time (tail end of the 90s, so well over a hundred), and had all sorts of magazines and reference books and other memorabilia that, combined with my cross-reference connection-forming brain, formed a rather impressive concordance. (One of my cherished memories from when I was 16 or so was reading a memoir written by the husband of an actress, who at one point is mentioned as having been in Star Trek - so I immediately put the book down and look up her name in one of my reference books, which gives me the name of the episode to look up in the episode guide, and as I'm reading about it suddenly realizing "Oh! There was an article that had pictures from this episode in one of my magazines!" and pulling that magazine off the shelf and finding a picture of the actress in question right there. It was like having my own personal Star Trek-themed Wikipedia, back before...well, before Wikipedia.)

Somewhere along the line, my enthusiasm for it all just waned. It probably coincided strongly with moving to Barrow at 17 (and getting rid of most of my books as part of the move). I still enjoyed the shows and the stories therein, but I no longer actively sought out obscure trivia, I no longer spent all the money I had on toy phasers and the like, and I grew tired of the (mostly mediocre) novels. And after I graduated high school and went to college and such, there were other things to hold my attention. And of course it didn't help that the franchise itself was flailing at that point - what with the sadly-uneven Voyager having ended, the red-headed stepchild Enterprise never really finding its tone and eventually getting cancelled, and the largely-execrable Nemesis grinding the movies to a halt. Star Trek had ended with a whimper, it seemed, but it had ended, and I'd moved on with my life, and that was fine.

So it was with not a little trepidation that I received the news that there was a new film coming out. And as further information became available, said trepidation only increased - sure, the previews looked promising, and the casting seemed pretty spot-on (holy Christ Sylar looks just like young Spock!), and it all sounded like it could be great, but did we really need more Star Trek? Was it really possible, after how long it had been around and how completely bogged down the series' various incarnations had gotten, to give it vitality and youthful vigor again, and - most importantly - to make us feel excited about Star Trek again?

Apparently, yes.

The achievement that J.J. Abrams and his cast have pulled off with their re-imagining is nothing short of astonishing - not only have they given the aged and creaky franchise a hypospray full of adrenaline, steroids, and the Waters of the Fountain of Youth, they've done so damn near seamlessly. Sure, it's a bit jarring at first matching up the unfamiliar faces with the oh-so-familiar names, but the actors slip into their personas almost distressingly well. (I know lots of other folk have said it before me, but Chris Pine deserves special props for managing to so perfectly channel James T. Kirk without ever channeling William Shatner - I frankly think he makes an even better Kirk than, well, Kirk did.) The story is a mess, both pseudo-science- and plot-hole-wise, and the villain barely even one-dimensional, but somehow you don't care; the film makes it very clear that its whole reason for existence is to get your favorite crew together, and you go with it - because it's fun!

For all of that, however, I think the real test of the newly-renovated franchise will be the sequel. It's quite the feat they've pulled off, yes, but getting things restarted and getting people excited about Star Trek again is only the first part. Trek's best stories have always been the ones about people and human nature. Rubber-suited aliens and computer-generated quantum singularities are all well and good, sure, but as plot devices rather than plot points. What's really interesting is how the people involved react to them, and how they deal with the inevitable misunderstandings and ethical quandaries that crop up (as always happens in human interaction), all of which was noticeably absent from this installment. I'm not saying that the next film has to be a stodgy and dour philosophy-fest - I think it's perfectly possible for the new version to maintain its gloss and youthful zip and still tell a deeper story. I just hope that it doesn't take all the excitement and goodwill that it's built up and just give us empty, flashy, Transformers-esque action without anything beneath to make you think.

But I admit to having a lot of hope. This particular franchise reboot is already miles ahead of, say, Superman Returns (which was equally glossy but frankly soulless and unengaging); J.J. Abrams has impressed me once, and I'd like to think he can do it again.