God said, "Sorry, Leonard, no exceptions to the analogy ban."
2: I did too. That should probably make you feel worse.
I had acronym interference with LDAP, but my inner-geek shined through.
Sad to learn that he's dead.
Boris Nemtsov was just reported shot in Moscow. That's frightening.
Star Trek really was a long time ago wasn't it.
8 - I'm sure Stephen Cohen is working on explaining Nemtsov's assassination as Obama's fault or possibly the doings of Ukrainian fascists.
I had acronym interference with LDAP, but my inner-geek shined through.
Wow, that's like your inner-geek battling with your inner-nerd for supremacy.
Lesbian Lizards, Attack the Plutocracy!
To scrub boldly where no man has scrubbed before.
Leaping Lords, Active Pimpology.
Indeed. That's why I brought my bat'leth.
Hokey weapons are no match for a blaster at your side, kid.
I've seen a lot of strange stuff, but I've never seen anything to convince me that there's an all powerful logic controlling everything.
I'll chase him 'round the moons of Nibia and 'round the Antares Maelstrom and 'round perdition's flames before I give him up!
He was a damn good guy as far as I can tell. I don't know how I'd know, really.
Oh man, in this interview he's talking about his first part, in a play that really moved him, in Awake And Sing!
Also: he talks a lot about how Spock's characterization came from being an intense, intellectual Jewish immigrant -- but a townie -- in Boston in the '30s.
His accent starts to slip out towards the end of the interview. God, this is great.
I don't know whether to be amused or sad that his last public statement was to quote from a show he'd been in 50 years ago, but it seems strange.
In this particular case, neither amused nor sad, I'd think. Nimoy wasn't pathetically living in the past, he was reasonably acknowledging that the role he'd played in the show he'd been in 50 years ago was culturally important enough that it had been the determining factor in making him still a public figure 50 years later: if he hadn't played Spock, no one would be putting his last words up on Facebook. And he had a perfectly reasonably successful career after Star Trek, he wasn't lurking in a basement full of memorabilia for fifty years, it's just that nothing else he ever did had anything like the same kind of effect.
I mean, it's sort of a funny sequence of events that a TV show should have had that kind of cultural impact, but there's no question but that it did.
I mean, and the way he grappled with and eventually accepted that legacy is a pretty famous thing about him, right? It's right in the titles of his two memoirs.
George Takei has had an amazing late life second act as the gay trickster God of facebook, but I imagine that when he dies all the articles will start with Star Trek.
When Shatner dies, it's going to be all about TJ Hooker.
35. I hope not. I think he does a much better and more important job as the gay trickster god of facebook.
If he cured cancer and then lead a genocidal attack against Canada and was killed in the attack by Prince Charles, the headline would still read, "Sulu Dies."
When Shatner dies, it's going to be all about Incubus.
37: But he couldn't have been anointed the GTGoFB without the Star Trek fame to kickstart it. Star Trek isn't the most important part of his life, maybe, but it's the cause of the rest of it.
George Takei has had an amazing late life second act as the gay trickster God of facebook
He really understands his audience. Or is a perfect fit.
40. And Winston Churchill could never have become Prime Minister if he hadn't been First Lord of the Admiralty to start with. But he's famous as a tolerably successful PM, not as a fuck up of a First Lord. Facebook is full of people who weren't born when TOS was screened, and they're not all SF nerds.
Churchill's brief World War II appearance in the role of First Lord of the Admiralty didn't quite make as much of an impact as the Star Trek movies did for linking Takei to Sulu.
But his rather more extensive tenure in WWI brought us the never to be forgotten Gallipoli campaign.
True, but it's worth remembering that Takei didn't stop playing Sulu in 1969. He stopped in 1991 if you count the movies. If you count guest appearance as such, he's never really stopped.
And Winston Churchill could never have become Prime Minister if he hadn't been First Lord of the Admiralty to start with.
Highly debatable. He was a fairly famous writer and MP, under-secretary for the colonies, president of the board of trade and home secretary, all before he was First Lord. The guy was on the fast track before he got anywhere near the Admiralty.
Plus 'fuckup of a First Lord' is a bit much. Yes, Gallipoli. But, on the other hand, the tank.
46. OK, pars pro toto. I meant that he had a substantial political career behind him. I said First Lord because it was the post he was in before he became PM and because, owing to the controversial nature of his tenure during Round One, it's the job that people whose grandparents were born in the 20th century are most likely to associate with him. He was also Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1924-29, lest we forget, in which position he arguably did more damage to the national interest than anything that happened in the Dardanelles campaign.
TOS
I had acronym interference on this one. "Huh? What does Spock have to do with Pauly Shore?"
42, 45 -- To add to Moby's point, TV shows and movies can have a much longer life than just their original release. Even if she'd never done any of the reunion pix -- all far in the past and mostly forgotten -- I bet Dawn Wells will still be recognizable in 2025 to a substantial slug of people born after 1985.
Now rewatching the Columbo where Nimoy guest stars as a murderer heart surgeon.
42, 46, 48: Yet another excellent proof of the wisdom of the analogy ban!
The dueling claims to his legacy on FB are pretty amusing:
He was a veteran!
He was a 2nd-generation immigrant!
He was a Jew!
He was a Ukrainian!
He was a stage actor!
He took photos of naked ladies!
(Actually, my fat burlesque/sex worker friends seem to be the only ones not making bid for spockthenticity today.)
I hope Shatner does some kind of tribute that ends with "...Spaaahck"
|| After 40 comments, so: I meant to say this before, but ajay, I picked up War Before Civilization a few months ago on your recommendation. What an excellent book. Very informative, and it's done more than anything I've ever read to humanize people in "primitive" cultures. |>
It ain't Nemoy, but there is some fine Boston accent here.
53: one of my friends IMed me to ask plaintively "who will take photographs of zaftig ladies now?".
I assume you urged him to be the change.
I keep on looking at that tweet, because it's on the front page. And come to think, why does that make life like a garden? I mean, plants last for a while at least, and perennials last for years. If the idea is just nothing is permanent, okay, but then the analogy to a garden specifically doesn't add much.
Maybe he earned the right to make analogies generally, but that doesn't justify this one. Cutting him slack for the impending death and all, which may have been distracting, I still can't call it good.
(Nimoy taken as a whole, still a great guy. But as last words go, these aren't making it into Bartlett's.)
I think it just shows ogged has a shitty sense of profundity.
We all learned that from the laughter of the squirrels, no?
It's a sign of your benighted condition that you think such a thing as a good analogy is possible.
Sort of on topic: The first time I heard the phrase "sitting shiva", I thought it was some phony excuse made up by a group who decided to park like assholes for some reason.
A good analogy is like a breakdancing walrus.
the analogy to a garden specifically doesn't add much
Even if your garden is all perennials, shrubs and trees, moments of certain combined blooms and foliage happen only once a season, and the next year the garden is different even if the plants are the same, Zen Mistress.
67 would be one of the blog's HOF comments if not for the aniti-Semitism.
-i, because there is no "I" in anti-Semitism except for the other three.
69: YM "YOU CANNOT STEP TWICE INTO THE SAME GARDEN" HTH. HAND.
A good analogy is like a breakdancing walrus.
Really? Because breakdancing walruses are AWESOME.
Also, its clear that LB has never tried to grow a garden. It's a lot of fucking work. There are slugs and fungus and pests. And a lot of the stuff you plant doesn't even grow, or starts to grow and then dies or otherwise just disappoints you. But sometimes you get a perfect rose. And then it wilts. Its like life.
61. I thought it was a notably nice analogy, basically because 69 and 73. Most of the time, the fig leaves haven't come in yet, or there are so many weeds, or the wilted blooms on the jasmine look a mess, or the poppies are just not as nice as last year. But then there are moments, maybe once a year, maybe once every few years, where everything comes together beautifully, and it's those moments that you savor when you look back and think about how much you love your garden.
73 You forgot 'and then the goddamn deer eat it all.'
But can't you say the same about almost literally anything else that changes at all? Life is like a garden/time with your friends/a walk in the woods/cooking dinner for your family/yoga class/a political campaign. There's nothing peculiarly ephemeral about a garden that illuminates the ephemerality of life, it's just ephemeral like everything else is.
75: That kind of talk could start a deer holocaust.
Generous of him to leave "box of chocolates" for Tom Hanks.
76: I feel pretty confident in saying that life is not like a yoga class except in that a yoga class is an infinitesimal subset of the set "life", and I've never even been to a yoga class.
Life is like a yoga pants: pastel colored and loose, but with a tendency to accentuate your ass.
Life is like any other cereal. You put some milk on it, and blammo, meal. Sometimes you just grab a handful as a snack.
When I was a kid, I used to spoon sugar on Life cereal.
Life is like this thread: it'll probably peter out before any real resolution is attained.
Life is like a garden: you put in a ton of work on something only a few people will pretend to care about, and then it dies and you die and they die and no one remembers any of it.
I have deer in my yard every day. We need more lions.
Life is like a lion: you always want one, but then when you have one, it eats you and then suns itself while licking its genitals.
Life is like a secret garden: whether you get the Frances Hodgson Burnett version or the Nancy Friday version depends a lot on what section you're looking in.
Life is like male genitals: sometimes a source of great pleasure, sometimes a source of great pain, but all the while slowly approaching the ground, until someone decides to just bury them already.
Life is like your mother: solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
Life is like female genitals: great, except as a topic for Etsy crafters.
Life is like female genitals: deep, but not as deep as you think.
61: Shorter LB: It shares the flaws of the genre and is also independently not good.
76 seems to profoundly misunderstand not only the original tweet but also the very good explications in 69/73/74.
My life is like a Bugatti Veyron : fast, luxurious, and better than yours. #SWPLtrolltombstone.
Life is like genitals: one way or another, yours will end up on the internet.
Life is like a sewer: what you get out of it depends on what you put into it.
Bugatti Veyron
What is this foreign nonsense? At least go with a Hennessey.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWAavCjVQvM
Are the Hennessey seats poop-resistant? Because they'd have to be.
101: Right? The way that car just so casually goes north of 200 and keeps accelerating is crazy.
Vomit comes out of regular car seats, but it takes some doing.
Speaking of life and cars, I thought I was gonna die in a car wreck today. We were heading down the interstate as freezing rain started. We hydroplaned, zig-zagging across both lanes. Miraculously, we came to a stop facing the wrong direction but off on the shoulder. It was harrowing.
Yikes, that's scary. Glad to hear you were okay.
Thanks. It was pretty scary. I guess if I wanted a pithy thing to say about life, it'd be about the stuff that flashes before your eyes in those moments. For me, today, it was: my girlfriend standing in front of her lovely bungalow on a sunny day, then inside the bungalow, her daughter and her dog.
Your girlfriend's a versatile stander.
The choice of tense in 69 is especially SWPL.
Glad you're OK, Stanley. My mother & aunt just roadtripped to Key West and back, missing all manner of disastrous weather by a few days (including a highway-closing Texas storm in each direction). They say Key West is no longer wierd & they won't be going back.
As I'm sure everyone who is friends with me on FB is sick of hearing, I was stuck at the Bering Strait for most of last week on account of weather. Freezing rain was one of the problems, as was volcanic ash, but high winds and snow were the main concerns.
What did you do all week? The idea of being stuck somewhere that remote is nightmarish/fascinating to me.
Hung out at the school, mostly. It was actually fine.
Weren't you just a little tempted to walk to Russian? Not in a gonna-do-it way but just like oh hey I am RIGHT BY RUSSIA? Also what do people eat at the Bering Strait?
Not really tempted to walk, no. As I mentioned on FB, there are lots of big gaps in the ice so it isn't really possible, plus there was all the snow and wind to make stepping outside seem inadvisable in general.
As for food, we mostly ate highly processed cafeteria food (again, we were at the school), but local people there seem to eat a lot of seals and reindeer. They get whales occasionally, but that doesn't seem like a regular thing the way it is further north.
It was definitely cool to be so close to Russia, though.
After looking at your incredible picture I read up a little bit on attempts to walk across the Bering Straight in winter. Apparently it's just barely possible but incredibly dangerous because the current breaks up the ice and you have to jump from ice floe to ice floe, like the world's most dangerous game of Frogger, to get to the other side.
Also it turns out that because of wind currents etc the part of Russia you end up in is much, much colder than Alaska, with extremely high winds and some of the lowest temperatures on earth.
I am disappointed that you didn't kill a reindeer and live off of it for a week.
I bet the world has many lethal games of Frogger.
The original inhabitants of Alaska have 100 words for Frogger.
But not a single word for the water around him slowing heating up to boiling.
Frogger, frogger, all around me, but not a hot wet drink.
Birth of a Frogger. (Relevant parst start some way into the clip.)
my girlfriend standing in front of her lovely bungalow on a sunny day, then inside the bungalow, her daughter and her dog
Reading a book, reading a book, probably not reading a book, definitely not reading a book.
As I mentioned on FB, there are lots of big gaps in the ice so it isn't really possible, plus there was all the snow and wind to make stepping outside seem inadvisable in general.
Oh I was just being silly. And then I fell asleep.
Also from what I have read you get deported immediately and emphatically.
"So that's what that cannon is for."
What does Zoé Lafontaine, FOTB, make of this? The likeness is striking.
That's really good. I want to go to Canada just so I can do that. Also, I heard that they have some nice lakes.
