I have to agree. That announcement is dreadful. I’m particularly appalled that the execudroid who wrote it felt comfortable including this sentence: “This will involve structuring the organization around the core capabilities that drive the business, and leveraging these core capabilities across new and emerging platforms.” Does he really think there is a single person on the Star staff who won’t instantly recognize this as a content-free string of pompous buzzphrases? It’s impossible to read a sentence like that without thinking of Dilbert’s pointy-haired boss.

Driving drunk is dangerous. Making calls on your cellphone while driving is also dangerous. Calling someone on your cellphone while driving drunk would seem to be the height of insanity. But what if you’re calling 911 to report yourself for driving drunk? Is that a bad thing or a good thing?

I can think of one other method of sending a message to a high-profile blogger that virtually guarantees it will be read: write him a letter. On paper. Address the envelope by hand, and stick a stamp on it instead of using a postage meter.

Such a message will almost certainly be read for two reasons. First, it will will be noticed, because almost no one is going to go to the trouble of doing this; e-mail is so much easier. Second, it will get past the recipient’s perceptual junk-mail filter, which looks for things with machine-printed address labels and bulk-rate postage. Your envelope will be perceived as a letter and opened.

This method does require you to obtain a postal address for the recipient. That can be a challenge, but it’s usually possible if you’re creative. For example, I think my chances of finding a home address for Glenn Reynolds are pretty low (although a search of phone directories for Knoxville and its suburbs might work). But a letter addressed to him at the University of Tennessee Knoxville Law School will end up in his faculty mailbox. Mail sent to him care of Thomas Nelson Books (his publisher for An Army of Davids) will also reach him, although it may take a while.

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has taken new pictures of the Apollo 17 landing site. They show not only the LEM descent stage, but also the flag planted by the astronauts.

During our last face-to-face conversation, it was clear that none of us was quite sure which features are included with which version of Windows 7. Fortunately for us, Paul Thurrott has compiled a table that answers all such questions.

Now it all makes sense:

The Nobel Peace Prize was an important step in giving global legitimacy to President Obama in making an extraterrestrial disclosure announcement. Obama is therefore poised to play a prominent role in the increased global governance that will be necessary after an extraterrestrial disclosure announcement. The timing would most likely coincide sometime soon after his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech on December 10, 2009 in Oslo, Norway.

Yes, that’s right. President Obama is about to announce the existence of extraterrestrial life. And we’ll have to take his announcement seriously, because he won a Nobel Peace Prize.

The article also explains why the LCROSS impacts on the moon didn’t create a plume of debris as expected. According to conspiracy theorist and space lunatic Richard C. Hoagland, “the probes struck a building which swallowed the effects of the explosion.” (How Hoagland learned about this building is not disclosed.)

Did the original Star Trek series ”manage to comment on current politics in a relatively even-handed way?” I would say so, but that element of the show has been exaggerated. I think that’s because fictional TV shows before the 1960s didn’t acknowledge current events or political issue in even the most indirect, allegorical way, so when a few Star Trek episodes did so, that was a big deal. (Only a few years later, sitcoms like All in the Family had characters openly arguing about politics, and M*A*S*H was an ongoing critique of the Vietnam war.)

With that said, let me try to point out where Star Trek did employ allegory to comment on current events. I don’t see any episodes in the first season that address specific events, but “Dagger of the Mind” is all about brainwashing, a meme that had lots of people scared during the Korean War (see The Manchurian Candidate). “Balance of Terror” has a definite Cold War flavor to it, but it’s really more of a retelling of World War II submarine movies in which an Allied ship’s captain and a German U-Boat commander try to outthink each other—a theme that it shares with Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. (It’s also the episode that introduced the Romulans, and my personal favorite.) “Arena”, “A Taste of Armageddon”, and “Errand of Mercy” all have antiwar themes, but only in the most general way.

It isn’t until the middle of the second season that we see a strongly allegorical episode. I’m referring to “A Private Little War”, which is unmistakably about Vietnam. Specifically, it’s about a primitive planet where the previously existing rivalry between two factions, the Villagers and the Hill People, is exploited by the Klingons, who arm the Villagers with muskets. Kirk is reluctant to interfere in the planet’s affairs, but decides he has to provide equivalent weapons to the Hill People in an attempt to restore the original balance of power. This is a clear reference to the Cold War practice of proxy war, in which one side would be backed by the USSR or China, and the other by the USA.

“The Omega Glory” takes place on a planet where the Kohms (communists) and Yangs (Yankees) have already fought a global war, which the Kohms won. The allegory is rather unsubtle, especially when the Yangs’ most sacred text is revealed to be the U.S. Constitution.

“Assignment: Earth” isn’t allegorical at all; it takes place on Earth in 1968, so the references to the Cold War tensions of that period are explicit. Enterprise is there merely to observe and record events, but stumbles across a human agent of highly advanced aliens, who is deliberately interfering in terrestrial affairs. Is he trying to help or harm Earth? The question becomes urgent when he sabotages the launch of a orbital nuclear weapon by the United States, bringing the entire planet to the brink of World War III. (Another of my favorites; this episode was also the pilot for a proposed spinoff series that would have been a lot of fun, but didn’t sell.)

In the third season, we get “The Enterprise Incident”, a galactic retelling of the Korean War Pueblo Incident that also introduced Romulan cloaking technology. “Day of the Dove” is another antiwar story. “Wink of an Eye” is about pollution, “The Mark of Gideon” about overpopulation,  and “The Way to Eden” even has space hippies. “The Cloud Minders” is a sort of vaguely political story about social injustice in a world of Haves and Have-Nots, but it never manages to articulate any sort of message except “inequality is wrong”. And the final episode of the series, “Turnabout Intruder”, is sort of about sexism, implying that even in the 23rd century, women aren’t allowed to be starship captains. But the woman in question is mentally unstable and clearly not qualified to command anything, so the episode fails as a feminist manifesto.

But by far the most memorable allegorical episode is the third-season “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield”, which is about race relations. The two guest characters, Bele and Lokai, are essentially Javert and Valjean from Les Misérables—except that instead of being a petty thief, Lokai is a political criminal from a planet torn apart by racial conflict. The planet’s two races are each half black and half white, but one is black on the left and white on the right, while the other is vice versa. The episode’s depiction of racial strife is remarkably bleak; by the end of the episode, Bele and Lokai are the only two survivors of their civilization, the rest having annihilated each other in a global racial apocalypse.

Those are all the examples I can think of. Bob, have I missed any?

Well, yeah. That’s the answer to Ben’s question. “What about, I don’t know, raising the price of the yearbook?” That would give students a choice. They could buy the yearbook or not, depending on whether they thought it was worth the money.

Choice is bad. If they let you make your own decisions, you might not choose correctly. It’s far better for them to force you to do what they know is right.

No, you will get a yearbook, and you will pay for it. It’s for your own good, you ungrateful peasant.

In answer to your IM query, I did indeed know about Strange New World. In fact, I have seen it. It’s awful. I don’t count it as a Roddenberry pilot, since GR was not actually involved in its production.

I wasn’t impressed by the article. The author seems to be rather clueless about Planet Earth. It wasn’t a “sequel of sorts” that “borrowed many of its ideas” from Genesis II; it was a second pilot for the same series. Except for some recasting and a change of uniforms, it is 100% consistent with the first pilot.

As for Andromeda, there’s no connection except that the name Dylan Hunt was recycled. The two characters bearing that name don’t resemble each other at all.

And the comments are loathsome. The standard-issue jackass fan attitude (“My standards are so high that I hate everything”) is on display throughout. Why do so many people aspire to be the Comic Book Guy?

I definitely want all of those. But what about Roddenberry’s other ’70s pilots, The Questor Tapes and Spectre? I’ve never even seen the latter.