Talk Thursday (the following Monday): Priority Mail

Interesting topic for a Talk Thursday. More so in that I spent much of the last several days wishing it were possible to mail human beings from one place to another. Here's the thing - I like going places, but I hate going places. That is, I hate the physical packing of a suitcase, finding a neighbor to watch after the cats, finding the cats so they can be watched over by the neighbor (with apologies to Douglas Adams), the hauling of me, Joan, the suitcase, and assorted accoutrements to the airport, the stuffing myself into an airplane seat, the stuffing Joan in next to me, the dirty looks from whoever has the misfortune of being stuffed in next to us (this last lady actually got up & moved; hey, if it's not a full flight and she'd rather sit next to a whiny four-year-old with a cold than me, well, God be with her) and then the doing it all in reverse on the other end. It would be much easier if we could just hop into an envelope, stick a stamp on our butts and emerge instantaneously on the other end. I keep wishing somebody would invent transporters, but particle physics keeps telling me that while it's technically possible, what it would actually be is not transportation but duplication. And the last thing we need is another one of me running around.

All that said, however, we spent an interesting weekend in Salt Lake City with my folks. Interesting because my folks are always interesting. For one thing, they're nomadic. They just happened to be in Salt Lake City this particular weekend. They have a house there and another one in Arizona but they're most often found at none of the above; Glacier National Park, Boise, North Dakota, Germany on one occasion, California, Las Vegas and various points between. But, this weekend they were in Salt Lake City. My sister and her husband, who also tend toward the nomadic, were there too, and that was pretty cool. We're not very often all in one place.

Salt Lake is the city of my young childhood, and it's changed quite a bit. For one thing, they have Starbucks now. For another thing, they have a baseball team, even if it is minor league. So we took in a game. The Bees vs. the Reno Aces, victory to the Aces. Oh well. I didn't get my baseball fix this past Fourth of July and we got to ride the train there, so it was all pretty cool. Besides, minor league baseball is fun. The players aren't as polished, so they make more mistakes and the games are a lot more unpredictable.

We also saw a play, Saturday's Voyeur. If you're anywhere near SLC and you speak Utah politics, you will probably want to see it. I didn't catch a lot of the in-jokes, but since many of them were national news, I picked up on the rest. It's a weird place, SLC. Even weirder than Texas. No, really. I am not making this up.

Major high point: Driving up Big Cottonwood Canyon to the Silver Fork Lodge to have the world's best sourdough flapjacks. Major disappointment: Not getting to see JulieAnne because she was busy with family stuff. Oh well. Maybe next time.

And then it was time to repack the suitcase, stick another stamp on myself and mail myself home again, home again. And here we are. The cats are fine and even still speaking to us. Will wonders never cease.

Still, I'd kill for a transporter. Beam me up, Scotty!

Star Trekkin'

Playing in the background: Really loud frickin' thunder. Eep.

Forgot to mention in all the excitement that Joan and I went to see the new Star Trek movie. I was blown away. I mean really seriously impressed. I wouldn't call myself a Trekkie or a Trekker or whatever they wanna be called these days, but I do like the show. I was a little worried about this whole rebooting of the series thing. Well, we can put those worries to rest. There were tons of in-jokes for the fans, non-fans will still appreciate the wry humor and killer story line, and best of all, we end up with two alternative timelines at the end. So, if you wanna reject the movie entirely and say, "Okay, it couldn't have possibly happened that way," fine; there's a timeline for that. Also, if you wanna say, "Okay, the movie was much cooler than the stuff that went before it, well hey, there' s a timeline for that too. You gotta love time travel movies for that sort of thing.

One minor quibble. If Spock went back in time and gave Scotty his own formula for teleporting to a moving starship in warp drive, does the formula actually exist? I mean, Scotty had to write it in order for Spock to know it to come back in time and tell Scotty about it, but if Scotty didn't know about it in the past, then Spock wouldn't have had it in the future so he couldn't have come back into the past to give it to Scotty and ---never mind. My sister's better at stuff like this than I am.

It should not be a spoiler to mention that the story line is about Spock, and I think it's also pretty well known that Leonard Nimoy shows up as a much older Spock. (Vulcans live a long time, you know. Around 180 years, I think.) Spock's mother and father also show up in the movie. I think they were only in one, maybe two original episodes (Trivia moment! Mark Lenard, the actor who played Sarek, also played a Romulan on an earlier episode!). Howsomever, through fan fiction and subsequent serieses and so forth, the story of Sarek and Amanda has been pretty well told by people other than me. There are entire Web sites and archives dedicated to the Sarek and Amanda story. Brief overview: Vulcan meets human, Vulcan loses human, Vulcan goes through hell and Romulans and Klingons and severe warp displacements and cracks in the space time whatever to get human back, marries her and has a kid. I ought to know; I spent most of high school being regaled with Sarek and Amanda tales by my dead friend, Burt.

That's Burt, short for Roberta. She was a Trekkie, or a Trekker, or whatever they like to be called these days. She could do the dialogue from the original episodes along with the characters (which was a lot of fun on the minor eps, like "A Piece of the Action"). I remember she was not all that happy about STNG but gradually got on board when it turned out to be a pretty good show. She missed Deep Space 9 and Voyager because she died in 1996 of a brain aneurysm. (A what? I dunno. Somebody told me what it was but I've kind of forgotten.) She was about 26, was married and had a kid, Thor, who'd be about 14 now.

The whole time I was watching this movie I was thinking how much Burt would have loved it. I got to thinking, are there movies in heaven? Or am I gonna have to wait until I die and then tell her all about it? Yes, technically I'm talking about the Christian Heaven and since I'm a Buddhist, that may or may not apply. Still, I'd like to think she gets to see the movie, even if she has to do it as, I dunno, a third grader in Beijing or something. You spose humans can be reincarnated as Vulcans? That would be great. And don't tell me Vulcans don't exist. Well, okay, you can tell me that. Just don't tell Burt. She'd beg to differ and probably hit you with a nerve pinch.