Culture
Voyager’s Garrett Wang to Lead Dragon*Con Trek Track
Dragon*Con, North America’s largest fan-run SF convention, has hired a pro — actor Garrett Wang of Star Trek: Voyager — to lead its popular Star Trek track at this year’s event.
Sizing Up the Oscar Noms
It’s Oscar season, with the first 10-nominee Best Picture category ever. Here’s my take on the competition in all but the technical categories as we leave the starting gate.
‘Precious’ Both More and Less Than You Expect
Precious is so much more than the depression fest you expect. It provides a shocking and enlightening view of life in the inner city, where faith in the power of literacy and creativity can wring some small bit of hope from the crude morass of poverty and abuse.
Help Make Sense of Haiti
Refusing to be paralyzed by Haiti’s tragedy or overwhelmed by the jumble of information spurting forth in the quake’s aftermath, Kellie Walsh is sorting through the noise to find some signal. You can help.
I Love the SarcMark :-|
Sarcasm shouldn’t require a neon sign. The SarcMark, too artificial and inauthentic to convey true sarcasm, will be the Esperanto of punctuation — a seemingly good idea when invented, and with its own (small) cult of adherents — but ultimately irrelevant.
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Celebrated Jumping Frog Leaps Again (Electronically)
Though long in the public domain, there’s no complete electronic version of Mark Twain’s debut book, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches, and Amazon’s Kindle store and iPhone app proved disappointing. So I took matters into my own hands.
Connections: The Blindness of Cultural Arrogance
What do these Amazon natives have to do with the length of newspaper articles and white people’s Messiah complex? Connections is my attempt to make sense of some of the seemingly disparate things I learn in a given day of Web surfing.
My ‘Blood and Fire’ Wins TrekMovie’s Best of Year
TrekMovie.com awarded the Star Trek: Phase II episode I co-authored with noted scifi author David Gerrold the Best Fan Production of 2009. “Blood and Fire, Part 2″ is based on a script Gerrold wrote for Star Trek: The Next Generation but was never produced because producers deemed it too controversial.
Virtual Ennui
Twitter. Tumblr. Social media can ensnare us alongside only those who agree with us. When those who disagree with us are automatically silenced we can fall prey to a virtual ennui.
Random Things
Catchphrases that have jumped the shark (hasn’t ‘jumping the shark’ become a bit tired as well?), a holiday commercial that worked for me, leftie whining about commercials, how do you pronounce ‘niche’? And are Leonardo DiCaprio and Julia Stiles the same person?
