Starbase 66, Episode 3

Rick, Karen and I were joined by Mark, all the way from California, for the latest episode of Starbase 66, in which we look at how gay and lesbian characters have been treated — or not treated, as it were — in Star Trek and science fiction.

Starbase 66 is warping right along — we’re getting great reviews, and our listening base is growing with each episode. Best of all, we’re having a ton of fun doing this.

Mark also helped me out with the latest episode of Big Bad Hair, a talk about Prince’s landmark Purple Rain album.

Both podcasts are available via iTunes, or you can visit the sites to hear them. Give us some feedback — we love hearing from listeners.

Thanks.

A Look At The Future That Never Was

I would like to share with you one of my favourite blogs: Paleo-Future. It was featured on Digg’s front page today, which is great, as this kind of thing doesn’t get the attention it deserves.

The blog is an exploration of what people of the past expected to see in the future. And it’s lushly illustrated, wonderfully written and always entertaining. From Victorian postcards (like the one above, showing how schools would operate) to classic advertisements and videos, it’s a fun look at what people thought might come.

Sometimes you’ll laugh. Sometimes you’ll raise an eyebrow, wondering how they guessed that. But you’ll be absorbed, I tell you. It’s that good.

There’s a coffee-table book lurking in this blog, and I hope to see it in print one day.

Venture into the past of the future here.

Lost: Benjamin Linus

(Indulge me. As we near the Season 5 premiere of Lost, I’m going to run through the current crop of main characters. There are spoilers.)

When we first met him, in season 2, he claimed to be Henry Gale, an adventurer whose balloon had crashed on the island. With his owly face and nervous disposition, he hardly seemed the type … and he wasn’t. By the end of that season, we knew exactly who he was: the creepy, commanding leader of the Others, the Island’s supreme dealmaker.

Originally intended to be a guest star, Michael Emerson very quickly became a force of nature on Lost and by the next season was a regular. His role has grown from villain to victim to master manipulator, the puppet-master and mad scientist of the island.

When we last saw him, he was off the island — having turned the frozen donkey wheel, forced the island away and teleported across time and space — and was recruiting Jack to mount a return. This deal was made over John Locke’s casket, because to Ben, that’s just the right ambience.

Highlights

• His first appearances, locked in the hatch, prisoner of Locke, Jack and Sayid. Tortured, grilled, beaten and tied up, he kept his cool and insisted he was Henry Gale … until he fires that one look at the camera and you know something more is going on. You know what I’m talking about.
• That breakfast on the beach with Kate. Talk about menace … every word, every shot of those icy eyes just screams evil.
• Taking his father out of the equation. That scene, in the Dharma bus, was one of Lost‘s finest and most pivotal, and another example of how well Lost handles two-handers. His chat with Widmore in London is another.
• Kicking some Tunisian ass with his pocket-sized combat baton.
• His leisurely stroll out of Locke’s house, holding his bedding, saying “Hi, guys!” to Hurley and Sawyer. Priceless.
• Emerson’s face as he turned the wheel. The anguish and the pain he felt, knowing he would never come back, is clear.
• “So?”

Problems

• Once again, a Lost character flips back and forth a little too easily. One week he’s the most dire villain on the planet, the next he’s just one of the gang.
• Sometimes his lies are never explained adequately, and it seems like the writers are just adapting to earlier errors. Like the “Born on the island” bit.

The Second (or third?) Coming of Cracked

I loved magazines as a kid. Comics, of course, but magazines, too. And I was lucky to have a mother who felt the same way. So our home was always filled with stacks of all kinds of magazines: news, geography, science, politics. Maybe that’s why I know so many useless things; I was reading National Geographic, Popular Science and Macleans (the Canadian version of Time) every day.

But my favourites were the humour mags: Mad, Cracked and Crazy. Mad was the kingpin; when I pick up the odd issue now I almost weep for what was. Boy, it was funny back then. Cracked and Crazy were not monthly must-haves for me, and looking back, Marvel-owned Crazy was actually pretty terrible.

Cracked had its moments, though. And a couple of years ago, I was surprised to see a new Cracked No. 1 on the rack at my pharmacy. It featured Tom Cruise in parody of the 40-Year-Old Virgin poster, so, of course, I had to buy it. And it was pretty good. It was less a humour magazine than a magazine about humour, with a lot of stuff about standups and things like that.

It was the only issue I ever saw. I don’t know what happened, but in the ensuing time, the magazine has become one of my favourite websites. I don’t know why it works for me — it’s likely the list-based articles, which are unfailingly brilliant — but the tone and the intelligence of the humour at cracked.com is something that gets me through these rotten times.

Here’s an article that really impressed me, and the reason I’m telling you about this now.

This is probably old news to you. But if you haven’t toured cracked.com, give it a look.

Meanwhile, here’s a blog reviewing old Crackeds.

Today’s Moron: Leroy the Drug Mule

Today’s moron is an American who wanted to smuggle drugs into Canada from Washington State. I laugh just thinking about this: Leroy Carr turned up at the U.S. Customs station at the border crossing in Sumas, Washington, and told the border guards he had stashed 12 kilograms of cocaine nearby, but now it was gone … and he asked the border service for help. He wanted them to issue a press release about the missing drugs. Think about how that went:

• Leroy: “So, like, can you dudes help me find my stash?”
• Guard: “Are you on drugs?”
• Leroy: “Yes. So, like, could you dudes call the newspaper and put out an APB on my drugs?”
• Guard: “I feel guilty about drawing a paycheque for this. You’re under arrest.”

See, he wanted his drug kingpin overlords to know he hadn’t stolen the drugs himself, which I guess is kind of smart, but in the end, pretty stupid. And he got 14 years in prison.

At his trial, he told the judge he had never actually had the drugs in his possession, but the prosecution just held up his hand-drawn map to the stash site, and the judge snickered. Also, it was brought to the court’s attention that Leroy had been noticed by the border patrol several times; he had been seen in the forested border region, hauling around night-vision goggles, a GPS unit and piles of cash.

The British Columbia/Washington state border is a tough one. It’s a wild, mountainous region, and smuggling is a regular occurence. So is camping, which is how the drugs in question ended up in the hands of a Boy Scout troop. Somewhere out west there’s a gang of kids who earned their Drug Busters badges.