christmas eve

It's 7.30 Christmas eve and already thoroughly dark outside. (And inside: I'm working on the computer without a room light on, which I don't really need right now.) B. is off at Christmas eve vigil mass, so she won't have to go tomorrow which we intend to spend being secularly Christmassy.

I went down to the grocers at noon - usually I'm a bit earlier, about 11 am - to pick up the weekly grocery order that we'd submitted online for picking, and the parking lot was about as full and busy as I'd ever seen it. Took me close to five minutes to get out. Patience is a virtue.

A few nights back we did our quasi-annual drive around looking for lights that are festive and imaginative but not too overwhelming or flashy, I mean flashing. Were mostly in Santa Clara this year, and found some good ones.

So since B. was not practicing her violin in the living room tonight, I piggybacked on her watching of Star Trek: TOS episodes that she'd taped from a handy cable channel. Her marker was at the end of "The Doomsday Machine," Norman Spinrad's episode, so I rewound and watched that. Gripping story, good writing, good acting, like a lot of second-season episodes. My only question is, if they could beam Kirk back from the maw of the machine, why couldn't they earlier beam Decker? Or was it that he didn't want to go, and was frankly suicidal by that point?

I also remember that David Gerrold wrote that he was present for the filming of this episode, while waiting for "Tribbles" to come up. He says they were rehearsing the scene where Decker is telling Kirk about the machine. Shatner had a goofy grin on his face, and when William Windom as Decker mentioned its giant maw, Shatner said, "Its ma? Did you see its pa?"

If they'd kept that, it would have made three jokes in the episode.