Black Helicopters and a UFO

This claims to have been shot this week. Watch as two fighter jets chase a strange object over a boat. Watch as the object stops dead in the air, then suddenly dives beneath the waves, vanishing. Watch as a black helicopter then arrives, circling the boat as the camera keeps rolling. Then watch as some weird other stuff is added on.

I don’t know what this is, but it sure is interesting. Meanwhile, this report out of London claims China has some very interesting video of something in the sky …

Stargate 2: The Return of Kurt Russell

I like Kurt Russell. I think he’s a cool guy, a decent actor, and I suspect he has a lot of fun at work. Whenever I see a Kurt Russell movie, I get the sense that he’s just loving what he’s doing. Remember Captain Ron? Or Tango and Cash? Or Escape from New York? Wait: Big Trouble in Little China. Watch it again, and watch his face. He loves this. He loves doing what he does.

The only movie that made me think he wasn’t happy was Stargate. He was Col. O’Neill in the original film, playing a much darker version of the character than Richard Dean MacGyver Anderson would later play on the TV series Stargate SG-1. Russell’s O’Neill was a tragedy in fatigues, a man who had suffered a terrible crisis that caused him to leave the military and let his hair grow. Anderson’s O’Neill was a comedian in space. The fact that I didn’t get the sense that Russell was happy is testament to his acting.

Well, I guess he misses that chance to act dark and disturbed; Kurt wants back into the Stargate franchise. But he doesn’t want to be involved with the new series, Stargate Universe. He wants to star in a sequel to the original film, a sequel that ignores the TV shows and picks up where the movie left off. Apparently, James Spader is also okay with the idea. This opens a really cool door: a big, dark, grim Stargate 2 movie.

The movie has been greenlit based on the Russell/Spader interest alone. So it will probably be made, especially in this Hollywood climate of Remakes and Sequels Only. If it happens, though, I have five requests:

1. Let real time flow. Let this movie take place 15 years after the original, so we can see how the movie versions of the characters progressed outside of the TV show.
2. Give us an “it was a different reality” wink and nod so superfans don’t get all upset about the differences between the show and the movie. Abrams’ Star Trek did this quite well.
3. Do not put Amanda Tapping in it. I liked her on the Stargate TV shows. However, she looks a lot like someone I once got my flirt on with, but then never called again, only to have her angrily corner me on it a year later.
4. Do put William Shatner in it. He and Spader have a cool dynamic (check Boston Legal), and his presence would be a fantastic marketing nod to the whole Shatnerless Star Trek situation. I think it would be cool to have Shatner play the U.S. president.
5. Kurt has to have that haircut again, that crew cut so crisp you could sharpen your knife on it. I often think about that crew cut, and wonder if my life had been different if I’d had one like that.

Stargate 2 is scheduled for a 2011 release. Mark your calendars, geeks.

In unrelated news, we’re running a contest on Starbase 66, The International Star Trek and Science Fiction Podcast. Here’s how it works: over three episodes, we will pepper our conversations with blatant lies. After those three shows, we’ll ask you to list the lies. The first show with lies was the latest one, No. 32. Two more to go, people. You can talk about this in the Simply Syndicated forums. In fact, you should.

The person who identifies the most will win an autographed picture of me when I was a kid. It’s a good picture; I was wearing a diaper.

Deja Vu

I read a while ago that deja vu isn’t anything supernatural, paranormal or metaphysical — it’s just two parts of your brain receiving the same signal a microsecond or so apart, thus creating the momentary sensation that you’ve experienced something before.
But you might have had the feeling I was going to say that.

Laziness

I just realized that I didn’t write anything yesterday.

Today’s Moron: Great Tey Primary School

I would like to be able to go a few days without reading news coverage of a school scandal. But I don’t think that’s going to happen. Whether it’s bad-apple teachers souring the dedicated efforts of their non-moron colleagues, or administrators who put the school’s needs ahead of the students’, it seems something stinky happens almost every day.

Look, I don’t even go near the endless parade of teacher-on-student romance cases we hear about. I would have to launch a whole new Weather Station for that. Weather Station Sick? I don’t want to do that.

I just read about another rotten case (right after dropping my kids off at school), this time in Colchester, Essex, England. The facts are clear: a seven-year-old girl was tied to a schoolyard fence by several older boys and whipped with a skipping rope. She suffered injuries. The school told her parents that “an incident” had occurred, but did not elaborate further, citing privacy issues. The lunch supervisor, who found and comforted the girl, took it upon herself to tell her parents what had happened, and she was fired for breaching the school’s confidentiality.

Outrageous.

First of all, the school failed this child by not protecting her from older kids. Secondly, the school failed this family by closing ranks, rather than dealing with the problem. Were the boys disciplined? We’ll likely never know. And we don’t need to. The victim’s parents, though, have the right to see the outcome of this attack on their little girl.

The girl’s father, Scott David, has gone very public with this story, and has launched a campaign to have the lunch supervisor, Carol Hill, reinstated. Meanwhile, he’s yanked his kids from Great Tey and found them a quality school. Hill is gone. The David kids are gone. The bullies are still in class.

In a statement, Great Tey Primary School claimed its priority is to provide “the best possible education” for the children entrusted to its care each day. I have to call bullshit on that one. This school’s priority seems to be providing the best possible protection for itself, and if a little girl gets hurt along the way, fire the one person who dared do something about it.

UPDATE: There may be more to the school’s reasoning than originally stated. And this allegation makes the school sound even worse.

UPDATE 2: Nov. 29, 2009 — School governors uphold Carol Hill’s dismissal. Stupid.

Update 3: Jan. 16, 2010: The Lunch Lady speaks.

Update 4: Jan. 7, 2011: It took this long for common sense to prevail.

Happy Birthday, Rob

Today is my cousin Rob’s 40th birthday. He probably won’t see this, because he lives in Winnipeg, where he is a professional opera singer. No, I don’t know how those things go together either.

When we were kids, Rob and I shared a love of comic books and science fiction. We were great friends in addition to being relatives, and had a lot of amazing adventures in the northern city of Thunder Bay in the 1970s and 80s. Back then, kids our age could roam the city unattended, and do whatever we wanted, and we did. We’ve hardly seen each other as adults, because Winnipeg is stupid far from everywhere, but he was a big part of my kidhood.

I was reminded of this tonight when I found this page in a bedtime story I was reading my daughter. This drawing made me laugh out loud; it’s Rob to a T. I think he even had those pyjamas. I put this on his Facebook page, and I can guarantee you he made that face when he saw it. Classic!

Happy Birthday, cuz.