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Rain. We need it anymore. But it is cold.
I watched most of this week’s return of “Alias.” Crazy. As usual. And, just a tad predictable. (well, I was one of those people who felt pretty sure that Agent Vaughn wasn’t really dead. But he was pretty darn close to dead, so I’m not sure how they’ll explain that).
The news is that J.J. Abrams, the creator of “Alias” and “Lost” (and the man behind the new “Mission: Impossible” movie), is going to be making a new Star Trek movie:

The as-yet-untitled “Star Trek” feature, the 11th since 1979, is aiming for a fall 2008 release through Paramount Pictures, the Viacom Inc. unit looking to restore its box-office luster under new management, the trade paper said.

The project will be directed by J.J. Abrams,

whose Tom Cruise vehicle “Mission: Impossible III” will be released by Paramount on May 5. Abrams, famed for producing the TV shows “Alias” and “Lost,” will also help write and produce.
Daily Variety said the action would center on the early days of “Star Trek” characters James T. Kirk and Mr. Spock, including their first meeting at Starfleet Academy and first outer-space mission.

Look, I applaud Abrams for “Alias,” and “Lost” and even for “Felicity” (well, I didn’t watch as much of that show as I could have), but I’m very skeptical of anyone’s pulling off a new Star Trek movie by 2008. I don’t pretend to speak on behalf of fans, but I’m still trying to get my Trek bearings oriented again and I’m of the view that Trek fatigue needs time to simmer. Plus, I don’t know if 2008 is too soon after “Star Trek: Enterprise.”

And, really, do we need yet another prequel?! Look, a prequel done well is all well and good, but I really have no big desire to see Kirk and Spock’s pre-Enterprise days. And, I could have sworn that Kirk and Spock did not meet each other during their Academy days? At any rate, I feel the need for something new and hopeful but relevant if I want to see new Trek again, not a re-visit or re-making of the past. I’m not asking for a return to “Deep Space 9” or “Next Generation” or “Voyager” either. I just want some well-done Trek. It’s a big thing to ask, I guess.

And, speaking of a blast-from-the-past, apparently, “Captain Planet” is coming back on a Time Warner’s network. In honor of Earth Day, Boomerang network will air a “Captain Planet” marathon:

His shaggy green mullet gives away his age, but the animated superhero Captain Planet is, improbably, mustering enough midlife energy to fight a few more villains seeking to destroy the world.
To commemorate Earth Day today, Boomerang, the digital cable and satellite channel, is showing two commercial-free marathons of 13 “lost” episodes of “Captain Planet and the Planeteers,” Ted Turner’s sometimes ridiculed pet television project for teaching environmental issues to children. First shown in 1990 on Mr. Turner’s TBS network and in syndication, the series, which tried to make children environmental crusaders — its slogan is “The Power Is Yours!” — ran for five seasons in the United States. [….]

Except for an episode in which villains try to renew the cold war, the plotlines of the sixth season are surprisingly topical, considering that they are 10 years old. The five international Planeteers, who invoke powers of wind, fire, water, heart and earth, combat evildoers like Dr. Blight and Looten Plunder, who are clear-cutting old-growth forests, running puppy mills, destroying the Mississippi Delta, even running for president. The messages are hardly subtle. In the “Twelve Angry Animals” episode, the Planeteers are tried for humanity’s crimes against their fellow species. “Fry ’em, fry ’em,” cries a raven when the humans are found guilty.

As one of the last vestiges of Mr. Turner’s slate of cause-related programming, the “Captain Planet” episodes are as much artifacts as entertainment. Not content just to devote his wealth to foundations, Mr. Turner in the 1980’s and 90’s also loaded his networks, including CNN, with programs and shows promoting his favorite concerns. [….]

Yeah, I remember “Captain Planet” as a campy kind of cartoon back when our local syndicate showed it. But, I really like that Ted Turner had his good intentions. Environmentalism is tough stuff, and if we can teach kids via a weird cartoon, so goes it.

From watching too much Ghost in the Shell on Adult Swim at 3 in the morning:

towards the end of spring
existentialist complex
stands alone with you

“I’m the Taxman… Ye-ah, I’m the Taxman…”

– The Beatles

Well, I already did my taxes, so whatever. 😉 Pity the other poor New Yorkers who are hoofing to the main post office at this hour, probably still figuring out what deductions or whatnot. (one word: TurboTax!)

Then again, what right have we to moan about last minute tax filing? we New Yorkers got the extra 24 hours thanks to Patriot Day in Massachusetts, the state where NY’ers’ taxes get processed. NJ and CT folks were not so lucky.

Hawaii’s little fish with the long name gets to be the state fish again. I still don’t understand how this fish lost its title as state fish in the first place.

Some tv commentary – I’ve taken to watching “West Wing” again (I know, I know, I’m foresaking “The Simpsons” on Sundays to do this, but frankly, “The Simpsons” will be back next season; “West Wing” won’t). Leo’s funeral wasn’t really shown, and it would’ve been nice (but then, NBC’s budget probably couldn’t afford giving all the necessary guest stars speaking lines, so the West Wing producers and writers did what they could). Rob Lowe – where are you already? They couldn’t get Rob Lowe’s Sam Seaborn even an appearance in the Leo funeral portion? But, the preview looks like Sam’ll be on next week, with Josh offering him Josh’s own old White House job (Josh has been offered Leo’s old post, as White House Chief of Staff, and Josh isn’t sure yet about accepting, but he’s sure going through the motions of it anyway; and so he goes and offers his old Deputy White House Chief of Staff job to Sam? Good Lord, imagine if there had been another season (besides that Rob Lowe wouldn’t agree to return, but if he did) – it could have been a return of the old Sam and Josh hijinks? Aww, man! I’m getting the Best of West Wing nostalgia).

And, by the way – ABC’s recent re-make of “Ten Commandments” – umm, sorry, I only caught part of Part one, and it wasn’t very good. I missed the corny yet charismatic vibes of Charlton Heston and Yul Brynner. Plus, the remake only made the gaps of the original that much more obvious (i.e., the re-make’s showing of how Moses went from Prince of Egypt to living in the desert to seeing the burning bush in a few quick scene changes couldn’t get me to suspend my belief in reality at all). Fortunately, ABC still showed Charlton Heston and Yul Brynner anyway, and I managed to catch two scenes (the Red Sea part and the part where Yul Brynner’s Pharoah couldn’t believe that Moses’ God would kill all the Egyptian first-born sons). My annual thing done.
Slate’s tv critic Troy Patterson reviews last night’s Celebrity Cooking Showdown. I caught a glimpse of it – I mean, really, Alan Thicke (of the ex-“Growing Pains” fame) as host? Total turnoff (no offense to you, Alan Thicke, but I can’t go back to my childhood to regain my fondness for your old show). And, they made it look like Iron Chef but with soap stars. Huh?

I watched “How I met your mother” on CBS instead. Very funny show. Neil Patrick Harris (the ex-Doogie Howser) has really stolen the show with his character’s antics (and just a hint of angst).

After a long time away, I’m involved again in a small thespian production. I actually only have about 4 lines, but I do a lot of behind the scenes stuff. The good things about a theater production are that they tend to bring people together, and I think that it will do that here. I really do miss it.

A self-imposed hiatus, wherein life got busy. (and taxes had to be done).

April reading: P.S., I Love You – by Cecelia Ahern (the daughter of the Prime Minister of Ireland; a rookie writer, this having been her 1st book; she’s got two or three since, and she’s still only in her 20’s!). Protagonist Holly is only 29, and her husband Gerry – the love of her life, her soulmate and best friend – has died of a brain tumor. She spends the next ten months trying to live with the grief and love and laughter, as Gerry’s final letters – meant for her to open each month after his death – helps her with the transition. A chick lit book, but not a typical one, where the girl isn’t about getting a love (she had one), but about getting a life. A pretty good subway read.

Ah, too bad Brooklyn Restaurant Week ended. Managed to do Shinjuku on Atlantic Avenue. Pretty good food. Liked the shrimp tempura – very tasty. Me and the fried food thing.

On Monday night, 4/9/06, I was at the Korematsu Lecture, sponsored by the AALSA of the NYU Law School; Congressman Honda (D-Cal.) was the speaker. Very inspiring.

Fascinating NY Times reading: Fibonacci poetry. Sort of like haikus, but even odder.
The passing of Rev. Williame Sloane Coffin, a former chaplain of Yale/Vietnam War protester/Civil Rights advocate – and one who inspired Garry Trudeau to create Rev. Scott Sloan of “Doonesbury” (the too-cool-for-coolness pastor who counsels the Doonesbury gang).

Speaking of “Doonesbury,” Mike Doonesbury’s daughter, Alex, has been accepted by all the colleges she applied (the tech schools: Cal Tech, RPI, RIT, MIT, the Ivies, Mike’s alma mater the somehow accredited Walden, etc.). Now, it’s just a matter of Alex’s deciding. She might even shock Mike by not going to any of the schools – since she dropped the bombshell on Saturday’s comic that she might want to take a few years off. Oops… 😉

The curious nature of the incidences wherein the Supreme Court Justices blab to the public – Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick worries about what this means:

Because the Supreme Court justices want to be a part of the national conversation—and especially where that conversation pertains to Supreme Court justices—they often launch these little speech bombs into the ether. Since there is no Supreme Court blog, no cable television show about them, and no way to insert “Shut up, Tom DeLay” into a written opinion, the justices are left with the most roundabout modes of communicating: O’Connor talks to John Cornyn through the students at Georgetown, with an assist by Nina Totenberg. Scalia talks to Stephen Breyer and John Paul Stevens through the students at the University of Freiburg in Switzerland. And Justice Kennedy talks to editorialists through international lawyers.

This is not the smartest way to conduct a national dialogue about policy. It’s how parents fight in front of the children. (“Tell your father the litter box is full. Again.”) [….]
The problem with these accumulated extrajudicial comments is that they often happen in such liminal political spaces: in foreign lands, or unpublished formats, assailing unnamed adversaries, and through indirect channels. This sort of shadow-dialogue only fosters more resentment and criticism. Justices wishing to take part in the national conversation must stop pretending they aren’t really speaking, or that nobody’s really listening, or that their words don’t have consequences.

Perhaps it’s unfair to ask that Supreme Court justices speak openly and directly if we simply plan to call for their recusals whenever they do. But judicial attempts to speak from the shadows are plainly backfiring. If they want to be a part of the conversation, it’s time for the justices to step up to the mike and talk. [internal link is Slate/Lithwick’s]

Checked out the Macy’s Flower Show. Quite nice.

Great weather; happy Easter and Passover and spring!

The big news this week in the computer world was on the Intel Mac’s Boot Camp, which lets you run Windows on a Mac natively for the first time, if you don’t mind repartitioning your computer.

The behind-the-scenes news is virtualization. Microsoft is giving away for free their Virtual Server (which is really their repackaged versionof VirtualPC). To top that, also for free, I ran VMWare Player and the Red Hat Enterprise AS 5 virtual appliance on Windows XP. You need like 6 GB of space on your hard drive, and the more memory, the better, but I got about 3400 bogomips on a 1.5 GHZ Pentium 4, which isn’t fantastic, but it’s way more than enough to get the GUI fully operational and browing the X Windows version of Firefox without hesitation, without messing up my partitions, and with full sound support. This is the new frontier in computing!

NY Times’ William Grimes reviews a book on Julia Child, or rather, Julia’s memoirs that her grandnephew Alex Prud’homme, wrote with her and completed.

According to an article by Jesse Sheidlower in Slate, apparently it was very bad for NY Times to have the word “scumbag” in the crossword, in response to the clue “scoundrel,” as it turns out that “scumbag” has vulgar implications (i.e., its early English origins as the word for condom). Times puzzle editor, Will Shortz, himself said he was surprised. The article notes:

So, how did “scumbag” make it into the puzzle? Simple: No one realized it could be offensive. Evidence suggests that many people, especially younger speakers, are unaware of the sexual meaning (the Times’ 1998 allusion to Burton’s remark was particularly confusing to such people). All major general American dictionaries—Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, the American Heritage Dictionary, Webster’s New World College Dictionary, the New Oxford American Dictionary, the Random House Webster’s College Dictionary—include the word only in its “despicable person” sense, without any “vulgar” label or acknowledgment of its origins. The “condom” sense can be found only in the largest dictionaries, such as the Random House Unabridged and the Oxford English Dictionary, not out of ignorance or prudery, but because the sense isn’t very common. And it’s not even clear why “condom” is such an offensive concept.

If you didn’t know the word’s dubious history, you might be hard-pressed to discover it. And you wouldn’t be alone in your ignorance. In a New York Times forum, puzzle editor Will Shortz wrote, “The thought never crossed my mind this word could be controversial.” Lynn Lempel, the author of the puzzle, wrote in a crossword blog, “I’m dumbfounded—and also just plain dumb I guess. I was totally ignorant of its vulgar side.” Shortz said he would not include the word again.

The Times, of course, has every right to ban the word. As the Times‘ own style manual advises, “A larger concern is for the newspaper’s character. The Times differentiates itself by taking a stand for civility in public discourse, sometimes at an acknowledged cost in the vividness of an article or two, and sometimes at the price of submitting to gibes.” But the incident raises interesting questions. How offensive can a word be if people don’t realize it’s offensive? How many people have to object? Is gyp meaning “to swindle” OK to use if you don’t know it’s derived from Gypsy? And what about the opposite scenario, in which people are offended by something that’s not actually offensive? Niggardly is unrelated to the racial epithet it sounds like, and squaw is not actually derived from an Algonquian word for the female genitalia; does that mean we can dismiss objections to the use of these words, exemplified by the recent campaigns by activists to strip squaw from U.S. place names?

There’s a tendency among cautious folk to regard anything that might be offensive as offensive. But context should help us make these decisions. A nipple may be vulgar if displayed by a stripper, but it’s surely not if it’s being used to feed a baby. And in this case, the sense is unquestionably not vulgar. How do we know? The Times gives us the definition! If, once you come up with the seven letters, you’re still bothered, well, you’re the one with the dirty mind.

Rather good points were made in the article. (links within the blocked passage are Slate’s own links).

Sunday’s World News Tonight had Dan Harris as the anchor. He tries very well as the straight man anchorman, but he has this undercurrent of sarcasm I find amusing.

I really enjoy watching these reruns of the second season of “Alias.” This late Sunday night, the local channel showed the episode of the Bristow Family Vacation – that is, the episode where Secret Agent Sydney and her erstwhile CIA dad Jack, and her mom, the enemy agent Irina, are stranded in India and had to jointly shoot their way out of the situation – when, not long before, Jack warned Irina that he’ll kill her if she does anything, and Syd had to snap at her quarreling parents to quit quarreling. Quite an episode.