A. I. gets all chatty....

I've been tapping the keyboard here for many years.  Mostly of course just me sending thoughts out into the cluttered void that is the internet.  But I do get the occasional message back.  I have a link where people can send an email.  Usually of course it's just spam, but every few weeks somebody with similar interests drops a line.  Sometimes it is to say one of their relatives was involved in some local history topic I cover.  Back when I started deer hunting there was a vigorous discussion on what I should purchase for a rifle.  That sort of thing.

Mostly you can separate the wheat from the chaff with a quick look before either approving for publication or deep sixing it off into the spam folder.  But lately I've started to see far sneakier things.  Below is an example.  In part it is stealthy because the second line is "below the fold".  It sure seems like somebody with a similar interest in medicine, travel and ancient Egypt.....

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"It's interesting how the Waiting Room experience has evolved over time. From my days in the clinic, I remember the efforts to keep things neutral and avoid the clutter of biased pharmaceutical ads. The idea was to provide a calm and distraction-free environment, but even in places as historic as the Egyptian temple of Kom Ombo, where patients awaited healing, there are traces of this waiting culture. It's a reminder of how medical spaces, whether ancient or modern, share a common purpose: to offer healing, albeit with different approaches."

"########## offers a great opportunity, while those looking to optimize space can consider a ############ to make the most of their area."

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I of course have defaced and disabled the link, which was for some sort of office storage cabinets.  Or really, for Osiris only knows what.....

Clearly this and similar offerings are generated by an AI program that can analyze text, connect the dots regards context, and cook up a response that is clear, concise and well reasoned.  I have to study a few more specimens, but I suspect it is even copying some of my writing quirks.  It is synthesizing the perspective of a slightly nostalgic retired physician who was never fond of pharmaceutical company propaganda.  

If that is what AI can do today, what can it do in a few years?  I already know some smart people - OK, they are engineers - who advocate using this technology for business and other formal communications.

I disapprove.  

I've worked pretty hard to become adept at short form communication.  I find it carries over from written to spoken formats, as it is all just a matter of organizing ideas.  I'd like to think that I have a few distinctive touches....to compensate for my haphazard punctuation.  I'm not about to let some damned machine take over for me.

In Star Trek Captain Kirk went up against Artificial Intelligences pretty often.  Usually with a good talkin' to, supplemented with a phaser blast when necessary, they were defeated.

Strange New Star Trek - An Incomplete Review

It is difficult to explain the significance of Star Trek in our culture.  In its original incarnation it was a hastily produced, low budget weekly show.  But it captured something, likely by accident, and became iconic.*

In the decades since, Trek has waxed and waned.  Many consider Star Trek Next Generation to be the ultimate expression of the optimism tempered by recognition of our fallibility that defines what Gene Roddenbury was going for.  Everything else is at best mixed.  Deep Space Nine and  Voyager have their fans.  The corpus of Trek movies has one or two very good ones and a bunch more that are just tired, expanded TV shows featuring tired, expanded cast members.

And then there is what is collectively known as "New Trek".  As there is no longer any useful distinction between TV and movies in the streaming era this encompasses the Chris Pine reboot movies, Star Trek Picard, Star Trek Discovery, something stupid called Below Decks.....and Star Trek Strange New Worlds.  All of these, ahem, enterprises bear the fingerprints of a certain Alex Kurtzman.

The "movies" have some entertainment value albeit with plenty of Kurtzmanian flaws we'll discuss presently.  Discovery was awful.  Picard awful for a couple seasons with a degree of redemption in the finale.  And then there's Strange New Worlds.

The first season of "SNW" is on Youtube.  As it is free I can certainly claim to have gotten my money's worth watching most of it.  As an OG Star Trek fan going back to the 60's I'm rating it on three scales.

1. Wokeness.  This is a ridiculous word that even its proponents are starting to shun.  But Star Trek actually has always had a Progressive streak to it.  The first episode of SNW had a few egregious moments, probably the sort of thing thrown in when you are trying to sell a pilot in Tinsel Town.  The big 21st century war that is often alluded to in the Star Trek canon is blamed on MAGA.  Also, the degree of "Mary Sue"- emphasizing the incredible abilities of women in all things - is pretty heavy.  In fact Captain Pike and even Spock are rather Beta males.**

2. Originality.  This entire series is derivative in a sense.  Pike is Kirk's predecessor as captain of the Enterprise and appears in the original series when a previous rejected pilot episode featuring him, Spock and a first officer referred to as Number One was cut up and repurposed as flashbacks.  

But I also rate things on how often they recycle old themes.  Sure, there are only a limited number of story archetypes, but still...

We get not one but two "hiding in a nebula" episodes, oft done in Trek and honestly just your basic WWII submarine movie.  There is effectively a holodeck episode where Stories Come to Life!  Outside the Trek canon but instantly recognizable is an episode that is essentially "Aliens".  We also get Landing Party in trouble.  And Space Pirates.  In fact there was exactly one episode that had the veneer of originality, one in which a remarkable child was taking on the responsibility of saving his planet.  But I recognized it.  It took the idea straight from an Ursula K. LeGuin story*** called "The ones who walk away from Omelas"

Kurtzman and his writers create nothing new.  Is it not allowed or is it beyond their abilities?

3. Memorable characters.  OK, I'm conflicted here.  It makes sense to update some aspects of characters to reflect the half century since James Testosterone Kirk swaggered around ogling crew women in miniskirts.  Any script that does not reflect modern sensibilities will not get green lit.  That being said most of the female characters have very similar traits that make them interchangeable and therefor uninteresting.  Capable.  Lost their families tragically.  Flawed but tough.  Hiding something.  Oddly while this applies to the communications cadet Uhuru, to the pilot, security chief and First Officer.....I can't recall any of them doing anything that struck me as very remarkable.  I guess a batch of totally efficient people - like perhaps highly trained Starfleet crew - would not leave plot holes that give them disasters to cope with.

The character of Nurse Chapel is weird.  Originally a stock character who got the job because she was Gene Roddenbery's wife she now has a spiffy unique uniform, the usual spunky attitude, and apparently the ability to just change people genetically.  She does way more than the doctor.  It would totally be in Trek canon for her to be an MD.

I did find the actual doctor interesting.  Smaller role than McCoy but he plays it well.  He has a daughter with a fatal illness that he is hiding and keeping alive surreptitiously. 

The Chief engineer is blind.  Gee, has that happened before?  But he is a gruff and interesting character.  Killed off in season One.  Too bad.

So how to rate all this....  It had some interesting moments.  Pretty sad when the first thing that occurs to me in summation is "It was not painful to watch".  But it lacked a sense of wonder, of exploration.  The entire plot arc involves Pike having foreknowledge of his eventual fate.  How can he function as a Star Ship captain when he knows his actions have no consequences?  Go ahead, do any damned thing, you won't have a scratch on you because you are destined to be in that reactor accident in a decade or so.  No stakes, no actual agency.  You are but a puppet of Alex Kurtzman and his hack writers.

Season two is now available on a streaming service that I have no intention of buying.  Perhaps I'll check it out when they eventually Youtube it in an attempt to hype season three.

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* Iconic is not the same as Iconian.  Oh, I do know my high level Trek cliches...

** Beta is not the same as Betazoid, although all male members of Counselor Troi's telepathic species do seem pretty "soy".  A society where men and women can see each other's thoughts and emotions all the time.....that would be an interesting one to explore satirically.

*** I thought I was pretty clever to have nailed this one but when discussing this over a beer with one of my sons he came up with the name of the short story sans recourse to Google.

A hallmark of "New Trek" is the gigantic, dimly lit, thinly populated bridge.  Can't have a vibrant, interesting, cheery world view.  Nah.  Conjure up dystopia and centuries of social distancing.  What the hell does that say about their perceived audience?

Alas and Alack

It's rare for current events to creep into an etymology posting.  But in a recent email I used the phrase "Alas and alack" and then realized that I did not know where it came from.

Well.  In each case the "a" is the equivalent of a sigh.  So think of it as (sigh)las and (sigh)lack.

Las comes from the Latin lassus meaning weary or tired. The underused word "lassitude" for laziness, comes directly from the Latin source. Lack is fairly self explanatory, it is a Middle English word meaning "loss, failure, fault, reproach, shame".   

So Alas and Alack means you are tired, weary and feeling a bit short changed.

Related words are surprisingly few.  You'd think there would be other expressions that would be amplified by a preceding (sigh).  There is a rare word "alackaday" that means regret of a day.   And of course from it, "lackadaisical" which is a satiric derivation of same.  Evidently at some point in the 1600's the use of the phrase alackaday became associated with over emoting on a Shatnerian scale.

Coincidence? I think not.

The robotics team does not do late night marathon sessions.  Nobody does their best work under those conditions although in our adult careers we often do highly necessary work that way.  But our gracious hosts and sponsors always have plenty of Mountain Dew on hand anyway.  It comes in cube shaped 24 packs.  

They remind me of this:

Caffeine, sugar and green food dye.  Resistance is Futile.

The Time Travel Alley

I mentioned in my meandering New Year's post that I've been thinking about Time.  So here's a little mental exercise.  Take five seconds to envision a scene where a time traveler comes to 20th century earth. 

Got it?

You probably set the scene in a dingy alley lined by brick buildings.  A wino/street person may have been involved.  The police turn up.  Why?  Well now.  It starts right here:

This is from a 1964 episode of The Outer Limits called The Soldier.  Written by the brilliant if mercurial Harlan Ellison it has a plot that involves two combatants arriving from a dystopian future.  And the arrival point is this dingy alley.  An encounter with the police ensues... 

Fast forward to 1967.  No doubt these guys are familiar.  They have just stepped through a time portal in the classic Original Series episode "City on the Edge of Forever".   The portal opens into a dingy alley.  And, since they can't go walking around 1930's New York City dressed like that, they've just stolen some clothes.

A beat cop shows up but instead of more vigorous measures Spock just gives him the ol' Vulcan neck pinch.  Of course McCoy had turned up in the same alley earlier and a homeless/hobo type person was accidentally vaporized by his phaser.

If you think these two scenarios look and sound quite similar, well you are correct.  The unifying link is that Harlan Ellison also wrote the much beloved "City on the Edge of Forever" episode.  And, as is only appropriate in a time travel scenario, let's jump again....to 1984 and the original "Terminator".  Here Kyle Reese, the human half of the pair coming from a dystopian far future, materializes.  In a dingy alley.

I can't actually claim to have "met" Harlan Ellison.  That would suggest that our brief encounter was enough to do more than confirm the conventional wisdom that he was a brilliant, talented....jerk.  But even a person of serene temperament might look at the Terminator plot and conclude that a teeny bit of idea swiping was involved.  Harlan sure felt that way.  He threatened to sue.  (To be fair, he was pretty notorious for either suing or threatening to sue people.  It was usually not about money...just ego.).  The particulars of the case are still debated among sci fi fans but evidently there was enough merit to his claims that a modest cash payment and a special credit at the end of the Terminator film were forthcoming.

Ugh.  I'd rather ignore any of the more recent attempts to reboot the Terminator franchise.  But the video above has a side by side comparison of Terminator and Terminator Genisys.   Of course the latter was a lame effort to reprise/reboot the original material but the same alley as a time portal theme is again front and center.

At first I thought the look of these Time Travel Alleys was so similar that they must be the same location.  But no.  The Outer Limits ep was filmed at Paramount Studios, the Star Trek episode on the now defunct Desilu lot.  Terminator went with an outdoor shoot, here's the alley in downtown Los Angeles.

I won't bother trying to track down the later versions of this scene.  After all, we've seen it time and time again.

Dispatches from an Alternate Work Shop

My long years of involvement in student robotics projects have taught me a lot.  For instance, Sharpie markers....you never have enough of them.  They end up on the floor, in seldom used parts bins, in people's pockets.  So when you need one it is always a time wasting scramble.  

In fact, one question I pose to new roboteers is:  "Is it possible to ever have too many Sharpies?".  I have always held that the answer is, no, this is not possible.

But even in my dotage I am seeing new things, learning new things.  It may be that I spoke too hastily and from too narrow a mind set.  I mean, is it theoretically possible that in some peculiar alternate universe where things are similar to ours but also radically different, that there might be Too Many Sharpies?

Well, perhaps.  But since we are not living and working in the Alternate Star Trek/Bearded Spock Universe, there will never be enough Sharpies.  So a few days before build season I decided to make a little "shop warming" present for the team.

My scrap pile included this piece of 80/20 extruded aluminum stock.  Oh, I should mention up front that it is probably not a good idea to scrutinize odd corners of the workshop that might be glimpsed in some of these photos..

Next, mark it up with - of course - a Sharpie.  And onto the drill press.

It's a good sized drill bit and it tends to chatter going through the upper gap space.  So go slowly while occasionally adding needed lubrication for both tool and operator.

Final result: a 13 space Sharpie holder that can be mounted on any workbench, robot, wall that is desired.

So will a Baker's Dozen Sharpies actually be enough?  Oh, of course not.  In our universe there are never enough Sharpies.

An Eccentric Museum

On our way back from excavating at Vindolanda I proposed a stop to our gracious drivers.  The Museum of Classic Science Fiction in Allendale. 

Allendale is an odd town.  It is a tidy little place full of stone buildings...in the middle of what looks to be barren wastelands.  In times prior there was a lot of mining in the area but this is now gone.  

It is also the home of a little museum that is the brainchild/labor of love of one man, Neil Cole.  

It is not hard to find the museum, parked out front is a rally car with a built in TARDIS.

On a more contentious note, the Dalek in front of the museum has apparently drawn the ire of some elements of the community that find it a bit....incongruous.  Here Mr. Cole holds forth with members of our little band of travelers.  I suggested he consider aiming the Dalek up the road at its main adversary just to see what might happen.

The core of the collection is vintage Dr. Who material but I found the other items more interesting.  An Ape, from the planet of same.  That's the one in back btw.

A Klingon head appliance used in one of the better Star Trek movies.

And speaking of Star Trek, this is part of the "Borg" costume worn by Patrick Stewart in Star Trek Next Generation.  I observed that the  crotch of this costume seemed quite outsized.  Mr. Cole confided that, no offense to Sir Patrick, it is all padding.

There was even a case of costume parts from Alien and from the later and lamentable Prometheus, a movie Mr. Cole, and I, both hold in disappointed disdain.

You learn a lot talking to a True Enthusiast.  I had not for instance known that Peter Jackson is a serious collector of Sci Fi memorabilia. 

I also learned that a regular visitor to the museum is a man called "George the Klingon", who rides the bus up from Newcastle.  In full Klingon regalia naturally.  George is said to be entirely fluent in Klingon.  I neglected to ask if he spoke anything else.  But I should think that if he was a true son of Newcastle and spoke the local "Geordie" dialect that it would take a full Professor of comparative linguistics to tell the difference between that and Klingon.

Walking into the Past

We met up with some old friends from Residency recently.  Three decades and change since we'd seen each other.  Lots to talk about.  We did a variety of things one of which was a walk at the University of Minnesota Arboretum on a day when unwelcome snow was melting fast.  

There was a sculpture garden section and I had to pose with this one.  It was just so very, very familiar.....

Oh, c'mon, you've seen this before.......

From the original Star Trek series I give you "The Guardian of Tomorrow", an alien device able to transport you through time and space.  It did not seem to be powered up when I walked through it.

I actually did a bit of internet searching, trying to figure out what happened to the original prop.  Since Trek was cancelled unceremoniously and with scant possibility of revival it is reasonable to assume this was just scrapped.  But nobody seems to know for sure.  

The the sculpture is called, rather prosaically, "Stone Arch" It was supposedly built in 1995 but with an artifact able to bend space and time such information is meaningless.

Worm Hole Aliens

Fall in the air so on a recent weekend it was time to get the "Up North" place ready for winter.  The dock is now in, the firewood stacked neatly, a bit of needed painting attended to.

There was a little time left over for leisure pursuits.  So we harvested hazel nuts.

Usually it takes a bit to get me interested in this sort of Granola/Paleodiet/locovore type nonsense but it was a gloriously sunny day, and besides, I remembered finding hazel nuts in perfect preservation down in the 18 century old anaerobically preserved layers back in my archeology days.

Here's what they look like au naturale.

When you pull off those brownish clumps you get little clusters that look like this:

We ended up with three good sized grocery bags full of these.  The next task is to shuck out the smooth brown nuts and discard the husks.  It was a time consuming process.  Guess I know now what the pioneers did before any sort of modern entertainment technology.

As you sit there automatically husking these things a sort of trance state sets in.  And darn it all I  found myself staring at the pods and thinking....hey, these look familiar. Lemme just take a closer look....

Happily nothing jumped out and grabbed my face, but hazel nuts do have a sort of peculiar Sci Fi connection.  Because not infrequently you encounter:

Yep, a Worm Hole.

End result of three bags of pods was about 5 quarts of hazel nuts.  Once we crack 'em open and get the actual edible part out I figure we can boil it all down and make one jar of Nutella, stuff I don't actually much care for anyway....

Star Trek Discovery. A Review and a Performance Review

I have been a fan of Star Trek since the beginning.  I watched the first episode of the Original Series when it premiered and have been at least a moderate fan of even the recent, lesser incarnations of the franchise.  Admittedly it takes a bit for me to get enthused about the frenetic J.J. Abrams reboot movies.

So, here we are in the fall of 2017 with a brand spankin' new Star Trek series.  And for the moment most people will only see, and thereby judge it by, the first episode.

Star Trek Discovery is a creation of a network (CBS) that is trying desperately to remain relevant by becoming something else (Netflix. Also the Huffington Post I think). After the first episode fans hungry for more will have to sign up for their premium streaming service at six bucks a month.

One would think that this being their big chance the bright minds at CBS would have done what it took to create a - ahem - stellar pilot episode.  Alas, not.

The plot was generic.  A Federation communications satellite goes off line.  The Not Enterprise goes out to investigate. Klingons are found lurking.  The very twitchy first officer puts on a space suit to investigate.  She gets a really bad sunburn, kills a Klingon warrior about twice her size and then decides to start a war.  She assaults her captain and takes over command of the ship. Nobody stands up to her because her immediate subordinate is written to be the ultimate timid Beta Male.  And nobody else has any personality at all.  They sit at their stations peering up like browbeaten inhabitants of Dilbert's Cubicleville.

I assume that the First Officer character got the following Performance Review:

"Commander Burnham demonstrates complete dominance over the officers and crew under her command.  Her interactions with other members of the command hierarchy range from visible contempt to active violence.  She assaulted and incapacitated her captain at a critical moment in order to give the command to fire upon a vessel that had shown no hostile intent.  While we do find fault in her failure to actually kill her captain the overall performance of this officer is considered exemplary."

"She is recommended for immediate promotion."

Krall
Klingon High Command

The rest of the cast are as I mentioned non entities other than the captain.  She is played by an Asian woman whose depiction of a star ship captain as a serene monk is interesting....but whoever did sound work on this show made her lines mushy, very difficult to understand.  How I miss Patrick Stewart's rich English accent!

Prior to its premier this program was getting a lot of attention, much of it negative, for the degree to which it went down the Social Justice Warrior track.  Don't get me wrong, Star Trek has always been more about the problems of our times than it has been about any kind of plausible future.  And when it is done well it makes for thought provoking and entertaining stuff.  But in the unfortunate footsteps of the Ghostbusters reboot, when you make the "Message" about as subtle as smacking the viewer in the face with a halibut it is off putting.  Let's review, shall we?

Strong female characters, and ethnic females to boot, who are in charge of things and able to slay huge Klingons.

First male character introduced is an alien whose people are genetically programmed to subservience and fear.

Upcoming male character - per trailer during the show - is the fellow who played the sneering, evil, bigoted Lucius Malfoy in the Harry Potter Universe.

Klingons who are just going about some obscure religious practices. At the end of Episode One they were about to be fired upon by an irrational, hostile Star Fleet Officer who had just usurped the legitimate authority of Captain Al Gore.  (alright, the captains name was actually Giorgiou but its almost an acronym.)  Have a little War on Terrorism vibe going on here?

And so forth.  

Hey, there's a market for all points of view and for all forms of entertainment.  But will this level of technical mediocrity and indolent, hackneyed script writing launch CBS into the financial promised land of profitable media?

Hmmmm.....if so it will be without my contribution.

The Thrift Sale buy that (fortunately?) got away.

Now there's something you don't run across at your average yard sale....a deep fryer.

I hesitated and did not grab it at the first opportunity.  When I came back later it was gone, albeit at a price I probably would have balked at.

Likely for the best.  It seems a bit small for turkeys to begin with, and of course you remember every Thanksgiving seeing photos and videos of what happens when you drop a bird into a cauldron of hot sizzlin' fry grease...

 

First Contact - 16th Century

For your consideration today, one of of those little finds that has the potential to entirely revise our view of history.

As mentioned, Villa d'Este is a marvelous Renaissance palace with breath taking gardens.  It also has some very nice interior decorations and in one painted wall I noticed something.

To appreciate this you must be at least a moderate Star Trek fan.

If so you would certainly know about the Ferengi, an alien race of short, greedy, big eared grifters.  In the Star Trek universe we don't encounter them until the 24th century*.

 Well OK then.  How do you explain this!

* Star Trek fans of an obsessive nature of course know that contact with the Ferengi actually happened near Roswell New Mexico in 1947 (See Deep Space Nine, season four) but was covered up. 

Decloaking

I have been blogging for six years or so, and on Facebook for about half that time. Essentially in this and all internet activities I have written under one or another pseudonyms, or "nom de cursors" as I like to call them.

This was not for any reasons nefarious.  But rather for reasons of a pragmatic nature.

When practicing medicine, especially in a setting such as the ER, it is just not ideal to have total transparency.  I mean, if the patients out in the waiting room are wondering why it is taking so long to be seen, would you really want them to Google up your name and find pictures of you lounging about in a pub with a pint of ale?

No, I thought not.

But I am now officially retired.  Whatever professional reputation I had in that prior life is now practically past the point where significant burnishing or tarnishing is likely. I was good at what I did.  Not perfect of course, nobody ever is, but I worked hard, I cared about the patients, and I always tried to do the right thing.

And in a non professional life it does not matter if people think I am eccentric.  I rather enjoy it in fact.

So, away with the pseudonyms.  I will keep the Dagmar Suarez email for communication but I am going to see if Tacitus2 and Badger Trowelsworthy* can have an offical name change to the more correct, if less colorful moniker that I have carried around for lo these many decades.

For those who know me only from Detritus of Empire allow me to introduce myself.

Hi, I'm Tim Wolter.

*Badger Trowelsworthy was a pseudonym that took on enough life of its own that the old boy deserves a proper send off.  It is forthcoming......

Dr. Who Saves the Enterprise

I don't make a big deal out of the fact that I am able to travel back and forth in time.  Most people find my stories implausible.  The ones who do believe me sometimes ask which of "The Doctors" I am but acknowledge that the ability to bounce around and alter time lines makes it an irrelevant question.

In the 1970s I was kept pretty busy.  It was a crummy decade and I did what I could.  Sorry about Pet Rocks and Disco, I tried, oh how I tried.  But there is one success story that I feel I should share.

After the Apollo program NASA was in a real funk.  The Space Shuttle program was teetering on the brink of cancellation.  I mean, it was cool but really less useful than cheaper unmanned vehicles.  

The truth can now be told.  I organized the letter writing campaign that got the prototype shuttle named "Enterprise".  And once we got "most" of the cast of the original series to show up for that roll out ceremony in 1976 the survival of the program was assured by a great tide of public affection.  Ah, good times.

I'm there of course.  I wanted to share the moment without stealing the spotlight.  

That's me standing behind George and Nikky.  Here's another photo of me from about the same time, as if time really has any relevance for the owner of a TARDIS tricked out to resemble a simple garden shed.

Bill Shatner of course didn't show.  What a putz.  You can be sure I remembered that incident when I wrote it into the screenplay for Galaxy Quest 23 relative years later.

Signs of the Times - Medical Edition

With overseas travels behind me and only a couple of road trips for the foreseeable future I figured I might as well go back to work a bit this summer.  It keeps me out from underfoot and hopefully will allow us to live on a higher quality of cat food when we are impoverished oldsters.

One of the sites I work at opened a brand spankin' new clinic since my last stint there.  It is quite nice albeit with a sense of being heavily engineered for maximum Provider Productivity.  I don't think I have operated out of a cubicle since residency.

Of course my sense of humor being what it is I had to wander about and marvel at things.  Here are a few images of State of the Art Medicine in 2016....along with the odd things that they brought to my mind.

I know we live in unsettled times, times in which bad things occasionally happen in work places.
A big Red Button does make sense.  A big red non functioning button makes less sense.  And I would have hesitated to call it a "Duress Button" instead of the more descriptive "Panic Button".  Maybe they don't want anyone to panic.  But even with a very good employer such as these folks, don't you think employees might, on the occasional bad day, feel like pushing the Duress Button when they are being forced to comply with some silly directive from management?

Ah. Close your eyes and breath in deeply.  Smell the varnish and wood stain?  No?  Oh, that's because this "pod" of patient care rooms is designated Oak.  This is the minor procedures room.

Health care facilities have for some years now been on the front lines in Americas war on obesity. As a result chairs keep getting wider and stronger.  I looked at this and thought, "Huh.  Looks like Forrest Gump's Bus Bench". On the bright side you sometimes find parents and kids snuggled up on it reading a book.

I felt a little badly taking a picture of this one.  It was right next to Administrator Country.  But I could not resist a quick, blurry shot:

I doubt my ID badge would open this one, and I'm not about to give it a try.  I am absolutely sure that if I did open it, this is what would pop out:

I'm just as happy for Data to stay "in the closet".

Politics Star Date 2016

One of the problems with American politics in 2015 is that increasingly people of differing political viewpoints lack a common language.  "Justice, Freedom, Equality"...these are all concepts that both sides of the political spectrum cherish and hold dear, but they may have differing and at times incompatible ideas of what these things mean.

Here at Detritus of Empire politics is far from a staple, but in the interests of helping bridge the cognitive gap that keeps my fellow citizens from engaging in meaningful discourse I think it is time to introduce a perspective that is in our culture well neigh Universal.

Star Trek.

I mean really, is there anyone who was born after about 1950 who is not familiar with it in its various incarnations?

Lets consider a cast of characters.  I highlight these in a neutral sense, with neither endorsement nor condemnation.

First, from Star Trek Deep Space Nine, we have Morn.  Thoughtful guy, never says a word.

In modern day America he has an equal but opposite Twin.  (Serious Star Trek fans will of course at this point say..."Ah...the Mirror Universe!").

In most of the Star Trek series there were semi-comical characters called Ferengi.  Shamelessly selfish, they put the interests of business and commerce ahead of all other considerations.  The ultimate Supply Siders...

OK, I am now going to be admittedly unfair to Paul Ryan, whose pro-business leanings fall somewhat short of Ferengi standards, and whose ears while unquestionably large, only rise to the level of comparison with an atypical photo...

Next lets check in on a woman who has endured in a hostile, male dominated environment.  A strong woman who has no fear of speaking her mind.

It is a sad fact that the women who played major roles in Star Trek seldom go on to have long acting careers, Hollywood being less tolerant of the effects of maturity on females.  But honestly now, Major Kira has added some wisdom and gravitas, changed her hair color a bit, and become:

Carly Fiona.

Everyone of course knows the main figures in the Political and Trek universes, but some of the more interesting figures are the bit players, the supporting cast.  They add color and diversity, they serve loyally in minor roles hoping someday to make the grade as First Officer, or Vice President. Consider for example, Mr. Sulu, shown here having a bit of fever induced out of character swashbuckling fun:

And his 21st century counterpart?  Here in a less frenetic pose is Julian Castro, of whom much is whispered as a Veep candidate.  As a counterpart, presumably, to an elderly "Captain" he would be expected to provide youth and energy.  A fencing sword actually might not be a bad prop....