Star Trek rewatch

Some cable channel that we seem to get is undertaking to strip through the episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series, as it's now retroactively called, and B. is taping them. I decided to watch a couple first season episodes; this is the first time I'd seen any TOS episodes since, probably, my own childhood, and it was interesting to see how they held up.

The first episode was "Miri", in which the Enterprise discovers a planet identical to the Earth - probably so that the inhabitants will speak English (the "Earth" language, I guess) and to enable Dr. McCoy to make sarcastic cracks about the architecture of the studio backlot - except that all the adults are dead and the children are aging very slowly, until they reach puberty, at which point they contract the disease that the adults had and die too. I picked this episode because it stars Michael J. Pollard (then about 27) and Kim Darby (then about 19) as the chief purported pre-adolescents.

The other was "Mudd's Women," which I picked for its colorful guest star Roger C. Carmel. Other than that, you don't want to know about this episode. You really don't.

I found that the acting, though sometimes over the top, particularly from Shatner, is mostly pretty good. Even the plotline whereby Darby, as the eponymous Miri, falls in love with Kirk but the Hays Code keeps them apart, while boring is not wincingly bad.

The problem with the show is its pacing. The plots grind to a halt and keep spinning in place, occupying time so that the story won't end before the episode does, or move glacially. Repetitious, self-congratulatory dialogue such as this doesn't help (actual example):

SPOCK: According to their life prolongation plan, what they thought they were accomplishing, a person would age only one month for every one hundred years of real time.
JANICE RAND: One hundred years and only one month?
SPOCK: Exactly, Yeoman.

In "Miri," the party of top officers, plus a couple of anonymous redshirts (their only name is "guards") who, surprisingly, don't get killed, is stuck without any way to evaluate their vaccine to stop the adult-killing virus from which they're all now suffering, and the reason they have no way to evaluate it is because they have no contact with the ship's computers, and the reason they have no contact with the ship's computers is because the elusive children taunted them all into rushing out of their lab in search of said children, and then while they were out Michael J. Pollard - who'd expected them to do this - snuck in and stole all the communicators which they'd stupidly left sitting out on the tables.

Insert, in a desperate attempt to get the communicators back, William Shatner in the Speech Least Likely To Persuade A Group of Wilful Kids to Do What You Want.

So Dr. McCoy gets tired of waiting and injects himself with the vaccine, without knowing what the dose should be, and when it cures him instead of kills him they know it's OK. This is a vaccine, mind you. Vaccines are supposed to prevent not cure ... oh never mind.

One thing that interested me, because it's something I've never seen discussed in a half-century of Trek trivia, is that when the top officers depart, they leave the com in the hands of a lieutenant named Farrell, who also plays a secondary role in "Mudd's Women." Had you ever heard of this guy? You will find him listed in sufficiently detailed Trek catalogs, but he seems to play no role in the mythology. I seem to recall that, in later years, only big-name characters could take the com, that if everybody else was gone then Scotty had to be on the bridge, even though he'd be better off in the engine room fretting about the dilithium crystals which is what he does in "Mudd's Women." I prefer the acknowledgement that there's a whole lot of crew members on the Enterprise besides the ones we know.

entering the building

I get my medical work done at a large complex containing a medical office building - exam room clinics, labs, pharmacy, many specialty offices including eye clinic and optician - and a hospital, the latter of which also contains some clinics including radiology.

They're separate buildings but also connected. There's a ground-level breezeway between the office building and a side entrance to the hospital, and the buildings are directly connected on the second floor.

Restrictions for entering the office building have been relaxed since the earlier days of the pandemic, but the hospital's have been tightened up, and the line in front of the hospital main non-emergency entrance is very long.

The e-mail announcing the rule changes said that you don't have to go through the restrictive procedures if you're just headed for one of the clinics like radiology, but it didn't say how to do so.

I looked at the line at the main entrance. I didn't want to walk past it and earn the irritation of those who'd queued up, even if the folks at the door would let me in. I remembered the side entrance. Surprise, it now says "Employees only," which it didn't the last time I tried this.

But! There's still the second floor corridor. So I turned back from the hospital side entrance, went into the office building, hopped it up the stairs (the elevator is at the other end of the office building) to the second floor, and walked down the corridor, where there was nobody at the hospital end but one guard at a desk. I said I was headed for radiology, and he told me how to take the hospital's elevator back down to the ground floor, not that I didn't already know where to go.

Thing that I'm glad I took with me to radiology: an e-book reader. Thing that I wish I took with me to radiology: shoes that will easily slip on. Thing that I'm glad I only had to do once at radiology: hold my breath for 20 seconds.

take me to your census

Finally, last year's census results - basic population info on states, counties, and larger cities - has been released. Here's the lookup table.

I was able to download the county population figures and plug them into a database of previous decades. I like using counties because they're of a useful size and fairly stable in area across the decades, so comparisons are possible.

The first thing I noticed is that 53% of US counties lost population in 2010-20. Considering that only 35% did in 2000-10, that's a hefty number. And they're mostly smaller, rural counties. Even in smaller states, the major urban areas grew while the rest of the state languished. To put a number on it: nationwide, of the 100 largest counties in 2010, 96 gained population in the next decade; of the 100 smallest, only 24 did.

Truly, to those that have, more shall be given.


The orange counties lost population; the rest gained, the darker the blue the greater the gain.

A quick calculation enabled me to determine the fastest-growing counties in the US; this privileges smaller ones, as fewer people are needed to make a big percentage dent. The two fastest-growing counties in the US were North Dakota oil boom counties (this isn't unusual: in the 1920s and 30s almost all of the biggest-growth counties in the US were Texas oil boom counties), and the rest of the top ten mostly on the suburban edges of growing urban areas: San Antonio, Austin, Orlando, yes, but also Des Moines and Sioux Falls. It's around 45-55% growth for these. The county with the greatest absolute growth was Harris County, Texas, but that's already huge (it has Houston).

The county losing the greatest percentage of population was Alexander County, Illinois (36%). Focused on the town of Cairo, it's probably never quite recovered from the 2011 Mississippi River floods. Ten years ago the big loser was a Louisiana rural parish wiped out by Katrina, but now that one's growing back. However, now with Ida they may have to start all over again.

the opening

I wonder if other people have this problem.

You buy a food - in this case it was slivered carrots, but it could be many things - that comes in a commercially-labeled plastic bag. Across the bag near the top is a resealing strip so that you can seal up the bag after using some of the contents and keep the rest fresh.

But there's no immediate access to the resealing strip. Above it the bag edge folds over onto itself on the other side of the strip. Sometimes there's a perforation to pull the top of this off, but most times you need to get a scissors to cut it off.

Now you have two loose flaps, and it should be easy enough to pull them apart, thereby opening the resealing strip and gaining access to the juicy contents.

But it isn't! Flip and flip over, you can't get the two sides of the bag apart at the top edge. Try grabbing the two sides of the bag just below the resealing strip, where they separate to allow space for the contents, and pulling them apart. Doesn't work either, the strip is too firmly sealed.

Resume the scissors and cut further in the area above the strip. Eventually you get to a place where the flaps separate, but now there isn't enough material to grab to pull the strip apart.

Repeat various of these in increasing desperation. Meanwhile the recipe to which you need to add the carrots is getting stale on the counter.

Finally - finally! - resume the scissors and cut the whole resealing strip off. Now you'll never be able to seal the leftovers up again, but at least you can OPEN THE BAG.

Latin lingo

So I'm used to various Latin terms and abbreviations in scholarly papers, but the paper I'm editing now had one I'd never seen before and wasn't even sure what it meant. I couldn't find it in a dictionary for any relevant meaning, and it wasn't in any guide to Latin scholarly terms I checked online, which is enough reason for getting rid of it. My colleague was eventually able to track down its meaning, so we just translated it.

I'm not going to reveal it, because this post isn't about that. It's about a very impressive Latin terms guide that I checked. This is, for instance, about the clearest explanation of the difference between e.g. and i.e. that I've seen.

The main page has links to a number of other useful guides. They go not just into the rules, but why in actual practice you'd want to do one thing rather than another. When to use first person; how to paraphrase without plagiarizing; when it makes sense to use the passive voice; and so on.

Catwoman with real cats

Catwoman? No! Cat Lady!



publicity photo of Julie Newmar, 1966

sympathy for the drummer

For everyone who's mourning Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts, here he is. Satisfied?

what am I doing here?

"Here" is one of the pods of a movie-showing multiplex in a nearby downtown. I haven't been in a movie theater in 19 months, and that wasn't a multiplex, and I hadn't been planning on going back to one soon. But our nephew and niece, a married couple who have waxed fat (not physically) on Silicon Valley largesse, rented out this pod for a private showing for just family members, siblings and parents and an aunt and uncle or two, that's us. So thanks, E. and L. and anybody else whose idea this was.

The movie we saw was Free Guy, the prospect of which made me a little nervous. My knowledge of video games only goes up to about the time of Pac-man. Would I even be able to follow this story of a non-player character in a contemporary multi-player video world who becomes a self-aware AI?

Turns out I found the movie passingly enjoyable, and I didn't have any trouble grasping the outlines of the plot, the difference between the game world and the real world and how they interacted and shaped each other. And I got jokes like the unfinished NPC hastily dumped into the game whose catchphrase is "Catchphrase!" and whose list of favorite activities includes "TBD." I was kind of skeptical of the way the evil game designer planned to destroy his own work in order to launch a non-backwards-compatible sequel, killing off everything the players had accomplished in the game, and my nephew the computer professional confirmed that this was a little implausible, but what he found most unbelievable was that the servers were in the same building where the programmers worked.

However, there were a number of things about the practice of playing the game that confused me. I didn't understand, when the hero first puts on the data-display glasses, that one of the things he sees is a bouncing first-aid kit. What was that for? Nor did I understand the purpose of the snatches of popular songs that would appear briefly. B. tried to explain these things to me afterwards, so you needn't worry over it.

But what most puzzled me was this. (Mild spoiler.) On one hand, an appearance, grabbed out of some electronic storehouse, of Captain America's shield, plus a cameo shot of a startled Chris Evans watching the game (B. whispered to me that that was the actor who plays Captain America: I did recognize the shield by myself), passes by entirely without explanation. But when, a moment later, we get a light saber, complete with a crashingly obvious hint in the form of a background playing of the Star Wars theme, the watching characters tell us about six times that that's a light saber. Y'know, from Star Wars. Has Star Wars really passed so far into the background of today's culture that viewers need to be told six times that something is a light saber before they recognize it?

a great symphony

After recommending their Shostakovich last week, I was exploring the other videos that the Frankfurt Radio Symphony has up, and was knocked over by their Sibelius Third. Here, listen to this.

Notice particularly the timpani at the key change in the slow movement (20:00) and the remarkable sound of the violas throughout the finale, especially when they take the lead at 26:30.

The Third is Sibelius's greatest symphony, but people rarely pay it much attention. They will after they hear this.

a public service announcement

Normally I stay out of political opinionating in my public posts, but this one is a rebuttal to which I want to give as much airing as I can. It's addressed to California voters who are against the gubernatorial recall; everyone else can skip to the next post.

We know you're going to vote "no" on the recall; the question is, how are you going to vote on the other ballot measure, the one to choose a replacement governor in case the yes votes win on the previous measure? You get a vote on this regardless of your opinion on the recall itself.

There's very little guidance on this. No prominent Democrats have filed; neither major party has endorsed a particular candidate. You can't write in the name of the Lieutenant Governor because they won't count those votes, despite the fact that she's the logical candidate: in any other case if the governor leaves office midterm, the lieutenant governor replaces him; that's what we have a lieutenant governor for.

I've seen at least four courses of action recommended, and three of them strike me as just wrong for an anti-recall voter.

1. Leave the second question blank. This is the course recommended by a lot of official-sounding Democrats. Don't do this. You are not going to stop the recall by boycotting it; all you're doing is abdicating from your chance to make a vote, and you're letting the Republicans decide. The reason the Democrats are pushing this option is because they're afraid that if they back an actual candidate, it'll encourage people to vote "yes" on the recall so that they'll get that candidate. That's silly. If voters are minded to take your advice for a candidate, they could also take your advice to vote "no" on the previous question.

2. Some say, vote for Kevin Paffrath, on the grounds that polls say he's the leading Democrat. Never choose your vote by what the polls say; you'll only make a fool of yourself when you lose to Larry Elder. Paffrath is only prominent because of name recognition, an even more dubious basis to choose a candidate. As a candidate, he's Trump-like in his amateurness, full of naive and dubious plans which will make a horrible crashing sound when they collide with reality.

3. The LA Times recommends voting for Kevin Faulconer, on the grounds that he's the Republican who will do the least damage. That's kind of like "the least bad Stephen R. Donaldson novel" – by Democratic standards it's still very, very bad. Furthermore, by dint of being the least objectionable Republican, Faulconer is the one most likely to win re-election next year. (Remember Arnold and what happened to him?)

4. There's one progressive Democrat with political experience on the ballot. His name is Joel Ventresca. He only got 7% when he ran for mayor of San Francisco, and he's not an ideal candidate, but there are no ideal candidates. At least his education and work experience are in public administration, and he's served as a county environmental commissioner. He was a strong Bernie Sanders supporter. Various progressive outlets, like The San Francisco League of Pissed-off Voters, haven't formally endorsed Ventresca but consider him the best candidate, and individual progressives I respect have said they're voting for him. There are other progressive candidates, but they have far less experience and look considerably more flaky. So I think he's the best we've got, and he has support.