Various Star Trek Idiodicness

"I feel compelled to confess that our private conversations consisted almost solely of detailed discussions of favorite Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes and characters (Tim, strangely enough, is a Riker man). I just feel better getting that out there."

-Tom Spurgeon, from his Comics Reporter interview with me

 

A selection from what let's euphemistically call the artist's sketchbooks (in actuality a pile pf typing paper I doodle on while watching movies or listening to radio shows). Consider this a sop to you readers who write in to bitch at me, with varying degrees of grace, for not posting anything for months on end. It's also an embarrassing little glimpse into the puerile psyche of our author, who, when not under deadline, basically doodles the same sorts of things he did when he was ten: the Enterprise, Draculas, Darth Vader, Batman, etc. One of the editors of my essay collection urged me, in the strongest possible terms, to excise all Star Trek references from my prose. "I'm trying to help you get laid here," she pleaded. There were a surprising number of them, I had to admit, once she pointed them all out to me. Star Trek just offers so many useful metaphors for a variety of situations in life. Still, I could see her point. I removed them all but the one about the sluglike symbiotic organism Dr. Crusher fell in love with, which was just too relevant to the topic at hand.

As long as I'm coming out of the Star Trek closet I may as well just go ahead and unveil my own lyrics to the theme from Star Trek: The Next Generation. (Note: this is to be sung to the accompaniment of the main theme from Star Trek: The Motion Picture, not the shortened TV version.)

 

Star Trek the Next Generation
Exploring new worlds for the United Federation
Jean-Luc Picard is our captain
Because of his years of Shakespeare-ian acting

First officer is Will Riker
Quick with fists or caresses
Deanna Troi is a Betazoid
And she wears low-cut dresses

Data still longs from afar
To one day be a man (though he did fuck Lieutenant Yar)
Worf fights for his father's name
He has no room in his heart for shame!
*

Dr. Crusher is true in her coat of blue
All this, yes, and Geordi too!
To seek out new life we must go--
Warp one on my mark Mister Crusher now watch as we suddenly streeeeeetch into space--
Make it so!

*actual line from Star Trek episode

 

Okay that is quite enough of that I am sure we all agree. These dumb cartoons do at least make a convenient segue to announciing that I'll be giving a slideshow/reading of some of my cartoons about science and space next Wednesday, the 5th, about which see more below. (My friendand colleague Roxane Palmer will also be appearing, debuting a cartoon based on an idea I gladly handed over to her, conflating the Kardashians and the Cardassians. I look forward to seeing the result.)

I've been kind of melancholy about the state of science in the U.S. lately, what with the end of the manned space flight program and Republican presidential candidates still in denial about global warming. I am cheered up considerably by just the dubious possibility of neutrinos traveling faster than light, tenttively announced by scientists at CERN last week. A friend of mine who's a science reporter at NPR assures me this is all bullshit and will surely prove to be faulty data. But I can't helped but be cheered anytime something threatens to prove everything we know--and if we can claim to know any one thing for sure these days, it is not cogito ergo sum or even the certainty of death and taxes but that the speed of light is an absolute constant not to be exceeded, evaded or fucked with in any way--especially if that thing opens up at least the theoretical possibility of warp drive. Doubtless we'll learn it was all a lot of excitement over nothing soon enough, but for the moment, skepticism be damned--engage!

 

Pain News

  • I will be appearing at this event:

  • I have finished my book of essays for Free Press at Simon & Schuster, We Learn Nothing. It is scheduled for publication in June 2012, should the publishing inductry last so long.
  • I published another op-ed in the New York Times, on the lost pleasures of unavailable information.
  • My latest collection of cartoons, Twilight of the Assholes, remains available for order at Fantagraphics Books. It includes all my best political cartoons and essays from Term II of the Bush administration. It is a mere $28.99, money you know pefectly well you'll otherwise just spend on booze.

For more information, see our new FAQs page.

 

 


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