More on Scotty

Hank Steuver on the cultural impact of Jimmy Doohan's Scotty:

As Doohan and other cast members navigated that murky area between their own lives and the fictional lives that fans so desperately wanted to connect to, an even stranger thing happened: "Star Trek" improved, got deeper, taught philosophy and diversity. Even the movie versions got briefly better -- the screenplay for "The Wrath of Khan" (1982) has an almost Hemingway tautness.

Doohan showed up for "Khan" more visibly aged and heavier than the rest of the cast, but no less game. He broke our hearts three times in that adventure, on a voyage that really took it out of poor Scotty: He weeps when his cadets die in a torpedo attack from Khan; he begs Spock not to sacrifice himself to save the Enterprise from certain cataclysm; and he gets out the bagpipes for "Amazing Grace" at Spock's burial-at-space ceremony. (Ask your boyfriend what he wants at his funeral: "Amazing Grace" on bagpipes, please. Space-torpedo coffin optional.)

In spite of a generation of derision from those who never quite understood it (or its devoted fans), "Star Trek" took on an aura of class, and Doohan reveled in it. The cultural phenomenon would, in a way, bring him his third wife (who'd waited, groupie-like with a friend, to meet him backstage at a play he was doing in San Francisco), a marriage that lasted 30 years, until his death.

Doohan was Scotty; Scotty was Doohan, and an archetypal employee/colleague/friend was given a name: Scotty is the person in your office who swears that a project cannot possibly get done by deadline, then somehow pulls it out at the last minute. His favorite words: can't, won't, need more, impossible, losing power, can't, won't, overloaded, no way.

You have to let the Scottys blow off steam, and you have to remember what they always say in the end: Aye, aye, sir.

For those of you who plan to outlive me, at my funeral I want "Don't Fear the Reaper" and "One Particular Harbour" played. During the former, the assembled mourners will be given cowbells and asked to play along. And in the event that people aren't sad enough, She Who Must Be Obeyed has instructions to play "Don't Stop Me Now."

Beam him home

Looks like it's going to be one of those weeks:

James Doohan, the burly chief engineer of the Starship Enterprise in the original "Star Trek" TV series and movies who responded to the command "Beam me up, Scotty," died Wednesday. He was 85.
[...]
In a 1998 interview, Doohan was asked if he ever got tired of hearing the line "Beam me up, Scotty."

"I'm not tired of it at all," he replied. "Good gracious, it's been said to me for just about 31 years. It's been said to me at 70 miles an hour across four lanes on the freeway. I hear it from just about everybody. It's been fun."

Futuramarama

Good news from TVShowsOnDVD: A direct-to-DVD Futurama movie is in the works! Time to limbo!

Like something from Snow Crash, only less cool.

Last night She Who Must Be Obeyed was working late and, since she's the best wife ever, I was happy to drive downtown to pick her up when she was done. As I sat at a red light at close to 11:30 at night, a woman with short spiky hair, dressed in a sleeveless black top and black canvas shorts and with a mesh messenger back slung across her torso wheeled up alongside me on roller blades. By the time I decided to roll down the window and tell her she was the coolest thing I'd seen all day, she had decided to skate through the red light and continue on her way to wherever it was she was going. Weird.

RIP Jim Aparo

Via Fanboy Rampage comes news that longtime Batman artist Jim Aparo has died. Aparo's Batman is what I see when I think of the character, thanks to his lengthy run on The Brave & The Bold; I'd go so far as to say Aparo:Batman::Swan:Superman. There are some nicely done appreciations of his work here and here.

Terror and democracy

William Saletan's response to yesterday's terror attack on London is well worth your time. Here's an excerpt:

Now comes the message to "the British people" that "the British government" has brought more death on them. It's Blair's fault. It's Bush's fault. Turn against them, and the pain will stop. But it won't. As yesterday's message made clear, the bombers want us out of Afghanistan as well as Iraq.

Bin Laden's whole game plan is to turn the people of the democratic world against their governments. He thinks democracies are weak because their people, who are more easily frightened than their governments, can bring those governments down. He doesn't understand that this flexibility—and this trust—are why democracies will live, while he will die. Many of us didn't vote for Bush's government or Blair's. But we're loyal to them, in part because we were given a voice in choosing them. And if we don't like our governments, we can vote them out. We can't vote out terrorists. We can only kill them.

Commuting

Of all the images that came out of London yesterday, perhaps the most striking to me was a photo of a commuter who had been caught in the blast, tie askew, bandaged at the neck and forehead, covered in dust, with a blood-spattered newspaper still tucked under his right arm. It resonates partly because it seems a peculiarly British image, with the hardwiring for stiff upper lips called unexpectedly back into action. But it also reminds me of the guy She Who Must Be Obeyed and I talked to during the pedestrian exodus from D.C. to Northern Virginia on 9/11. He worked at the Pentagon, and was pretty certain his car had been caught in the crash, and didn't know anything more than what we'd seen on TV, except that if the crash was declared an act of terror his insurance would cover the car, but if it were an act of war it wouldn't. This struck us both as a grasping at something normal and pedestrian to make sense of the insane and extraordinary, similar to how a funeral focuses the mind on the most mundane details of life, like haircuts and dry cleaning and getting a ride to the airport.

I still wonder how that guy made out with his car...

Sartorial summer

Summer would be so much easier if everyone read this article:

Only in the summer do grown and usually well-dressed women don such juvenile and unflattering styles; only in the summer do professional and otherwise passably attired men dress as though preparing to clean out the garage. If you have left your home in the past few weeks, you have no doubt witnessed some of the season's more common missteps: exposed bra straps; bare, bulging midriffs; bad sandals. And you may have asked yourself why the first warm days of the year are like a Halloween costume party—a chance for people to wear whatever (or however little) they desire. After many such alarming sightings, I set out to catalog the worst summer fashion faux pas.