To Boldly Go....now where was I going?

 The other day I spotted this:



This was overlooking a road house tavern that might require a little boldness to wander into....

 I did a little looking about and discovered that it was part of an ad campaign that had been going on for a while. 

Here are Patty Duke-she of Patty Duke Show fame-and George Takei encouraging Baby Boomers to sign up for Social Security.  By the way, kudos to Ms. Duke, it is really hard to do that Vulcan thing with your left hand.  Or is she left handed?

Takei, for you non-Trekkies-was of course Mr. Sulu in the original series.  I immediately thought of the episode "The Deadly Years" in which the crew of the Enterprise contracts an alien virus that makes them all prematurely age.  Hah! lets just see how ol' George has held up compared to movie make up geezer Sulu!

Alas, I could not find a picture of him.  Fact is, the original series was characterized by William Shatner hogging the camera to the extent that minor and even sometimes major characters fumed in the background, off camera for an entire show.  But, can we find modern day Shatner and Kirk in special effect wrinkles?  Well, yes. 

Shatner, 2011

Imagined Geezer Shatner.  Probably with less makeup.

If Shatner is perhaps the least likeable of the hopelessly typecast Trek alumni, the popular and ever cheerful Takei is the one who seems to have had the most fun with his inescapeable celebrity.  You can read more about him at:
http://www.georgetakei.com/

Takei has been a good sport about appearing in all sorts of spoofs of his former self on the Simpsons, Malcolm in the Middle, Futurama and so forth.  He is also openly gay, which would have been unthinkable back in the 1960s, but now is no big deal.  In some ways we as a society actually have moved forward in recent years.

Huh.  I am not actually sure how I got from a thought on baby boomers retiring to a conclusion that we have become a more tolerant society across the political spectrum.  But you must remember that my amount of grey hair is somewhere between 2011 Shatner and Geezer Kirk, so on occasion I do find it necessary to ask myself: "now, where was I going?"