THE DAILY BLADE: One Campaign Cliché Bites The Dust
Thankfully, we shall never again have to hear that MO is a “bellwether” state and “as MO goes, so goes the nation.” When all the votes were tabulated, the nation went Obama but the state went the other way with McCain edging out his rival by 3,632 votes out of more than 2.9 million cast (that’s 0.12 percentage points for you math geeks). Reports The Associated Press, “McCain's narrow victory over Obama breaks a bellwether streak in which Missourians had picked the winning presidential candidate in every election since 1956.”
For other campaign clichés The Stiletto doesn’t want to hear or read (or write!) anytime soon, click here, here and here.
Merry Tossmas
Is your Christmas budget stretched really tight this year? This video from Focus on the Family will help you decide where to spend your hard-earned dollars:
I love this time of year when the nation’s retailers fill my mailbox with catalogues wishing me a happy non-specified holiday. Shutterfly tells me “It’s that time again” but never tells me exactly what time that might be. They even offer a card that just says “Happy Everything.”
I visit Old Navy online but all I could find was the holiday collection. Wendy’s gave my little boy a holiday gift kit with little bitty cards inside wishing people a happy holiday and season’s greetings. It’s funny because the side of the bag offers three dollars off “A Charlie Brown Christmas.”
The nation’s retailers might want to know that people all over American are now celebrating a little holiday that I invented. We call it “Tossmas.”
Editorial Note: This brings The Stiletto to another one of her pet peeves. From the day after Halloween decorations are taken down (which is when retailers have decided unanimously that the “holiday” season begins) to Christmas Day, The Stiletto is forced to endure repeated playings of John Lennon's “Happy XMas (Was Is Over).”
It may have the word “Christmas” (AKA Xmas, to some) in it, but this is not a “Christmas” song. Instead of celebrating the miraculous birth of Christ, Lennon mocks Christmas. First, he guilts you – you've done nothing all year to make the world a better place, you bourgeois pig, but hope you have fun on Christmas anyway! And since when does Christmas have anything to do with fear? It's all about hope and love. Finally, "the world is so wrong" about what? Jesus?
Read the lyrics for yourself. FOX News commentator Bill O’Reilly has made headway with his “We say Merry Christmas” campaign. Maybe if enough of us raise his consciousness about how unChristmas-like this song really is he will lead a campaign to keep it off the airwaves during the “holiday” season.
Click here (second item) and here to read about two of The Stiletto’s other pet peeves (there are more to come in future editions of this blog).
Life Imitates “Star Trek” (Again)
A new study published in the peer-reviewed journal Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion suggests that it is possible to build a portable magnetosphere – much like the deflector shield around the Starship Enterprise – around a spaceship that forces DNA-damaging cosmic rays and radiation from solar storms to curve around the craft without penetrating its hull, reports Space.com. Lead scientist Dr. Ruth Bamford, of England’s Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, tells Space.com, “In the early Apollo missions, the astronauts were very lucky to not be in space during a radiation burst. There was a storm between Apollo 16 and 17, which would have been fatal if the astronauts had been in space.”
Editorial Note: Speaking of “Star Trek,” The Daily Mail (London) got stills from the latest edition of the saga, helmed by J.J. Abrams and scheduled for release May 8, 2009. The film stars Chris Pine as a young, impetuous James T. Kirk and Zachary Quinto as a young, not-quite-yet impassive Mr. Spock and tells the tale of how they met. You can watch the trailer here.
Meanwhile, “Star Trek” fans can also revel in a new independent Web-only feature, “Star Trek: Of Gods And Men,” reports The Christian Science Monitor, that was bankrolled “by a single fan and made outside the aegis of franchise owners Paramount Pictures and CBS” and stars Nichelle Nichols and Walter Koenig, Uhura and Chekov from the original series:
"The 40th anniversary of 'Star Trek' was coming up and it didn't appear at the time that Paramount was going to do anything about it," says Sky Conway, the film's producer. "This was a way of looking back ... to celebrate this modern mythology that Gene Roddenberry created."
To film the story, which depicts several Starfleet members trapped in an alternate reality, the crew had to boldly go to what seemed like the final frontier: an abandoned automotive garage in upstate New York. There, in a barnlike structure 30 minutes away from Port Henry, a "Star Trek" hobbyist had painstakingly created a $100,000 replica of the USS Enterprise's bridge. …
Koenig stresses that "Of Gods and Men" is several steps above amateur fan films, one of which he starred in back in 2006. Veterans of shows such as "Deep Space 9," "Voyager," "Enterprise," and "The Next Generation" worked for minimum pay on the difficult shoot. Without air conditioning, the July temperatures were hot enough to melt a dilithium crystal.
You can watch the film for free at startrekofgodsandmen.net.
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