From LeVar Burton’s twitpic account. With the Shat-man. Look at those OG’s! Super-cute!
It is obvious, accepted, manifest fact that LeVar Burton is one of the coolest and best human beings to walk the earth. Duh. Would you like to be as basically all-around amazing and centered and loving and a vessel of karmic groove in this universe Just Like Him? Then let’s talk about LeVar’s involvement with the extremely cool documentary The Science of Peace, dudes!
What if …
…science discovered a unified field of consciousness which affected the way people think and behave?
…we could find a way to consciously impact this field with our thoughts and feelings?
…a global media event would succesfully enroll millions of people to participate in an unprecedented world peace experiment?
Great minds from Tesla to Kant to Rosseau to Jung have believed in this tantalizing possibility of reaching a positive meta-energy which just might happen to be God’s will for mankind, so don’t dismiss it straight out of hand as tree-hugging hippie crap! There is some real Science to this, guys.
Hosted by LeVar Burton, The Science of Peace features pioneering physicists, biologists, and philosophers who are established in the emerging new field of Peace Science.
The film effectively illustrates how each person, when bringing peace in to his or her own life, becomes an instrument for global peace.
He is also the executive producer. Putting this post together lead meto some really neato-terrific and amazing sources.
Yes.
I hope to share more about Peace Studies soon but here is the essential lowdown on relative newcomer Peace Science, which is the subject of the documentary: it is a hard-science effort to unify the threads of ideas that run through the incredibly important social sciences movement of Peace Studies. The Peace Science Society has an explanation of the various philosophies and social sciences that comprise the touchstones of the “argument” for peace studies at Penn State, and it is always well-spent time to give the latest articles in The Acorn a spin. (The Acorn is the official journal of the Gandhi-King society. If you don’t feel like subscribing, it’s on ProjectMUSE and the JSTOR.)
Great picture with Nichelle Nichols. Remember on Dr. King’s Day when she came up? In case you forgot, the factoid that was related then was how she was thinking of leaving the TOS cast and Dr. King told her to stay because Lt. Uhura was a wonderful role model for people of color, especially women. Soooo great.
Anyway, check the documentary’s official site out and show some love by visiting the “How You Can Help” section — it’s too late to participate in the documented experiment, but you can still donate and help subside costs for production, travel, distribution, etc. Cool beans!
Oh, my gosh, guys! I don’t know how it happened, but Patrick Stewart’s birthday slid right past me this week with no acknowledgement.
“Time’s Arrow.” Superfly.
All apologies, dude. Here is an unlikely G posting to mend the riff.
It’s only when you’re going through screencaps that you realize, holy shit, Patrick Stewart looks g as fuck at all possible times. He is a serious G master and we can only learn from his flyness.
“The Game.” That’s the one with Ashley Judd in it.
Except possibly in that picture I just put up. It’s the only really, really horrible one. But he was merely expressing what the script called for, which was hokey mind control by a game. So you can see that really Patrick Stewart was still fulfilling his financial obligation as a performer on the show, which all good G’s know they got to use their skillz to pay the billz. Still G, see?
“True Q” — a post is coming soon that is related to this episode.
And yes, I was alerted to the oversight by @LeVar Burton‘s twitter feed. I also follow @TheRealNimoy and @WilliamShatner. Do I get the Biggest Dork award yet? I promise never to take it out of the package and decrease its value. (“I bent my wookiee.”)
I’m’a lead off this story with the reminder that I’m lactose intolerant. So. I was at a friendoh’s place recently and after some pizza I found myself with time on my hands in the bathroom. All there was to read was People or something like that, so I flopped it open at random.
I do not know who they are but I like the one on the right because she has Crazy Eyes.
The page to which I opened had the headline “Who wore it best?” and showed three women who were I’m assuming celebrities — I did not really recognize them because none of them were Muppets, former guest stars on Star Trek TNG, or playmates of the month — all wearing the same dress at various red carpet events. I thought, given the human tendency toward recognizing and enjoying that which is patterned and symmetrical, this is an intriguing premise — only what would be better is if they were not in boring clothes at a boring party.
Twins Maurine and Noreene via thesisterproject. I’m going with Noreene because she looks more fun (open smile, body toward camera).
Welcome to the inaugural edition of Showdown! where we decide between either a) two people in one picture or b) two or more pictures of people with something in common: age, hair color, a thematic prop, or, in special cases — such as today — which playmate has put forth the best of two similar photos.
The face-down twin in the background is totally “selling it” better than the one in the foreground, who looks more like “asleep while sick” than “dead from axe wounds.” Fuck, why did I use this picture, now I’m going to have nightmares.
In fact we have already done a Showdown! by accident, which I will put together and repeat as today’s Flashback Friday. Anyway, here is the inaugural outing of this thrilling new category: Showdown!: Yellow Rain Slicker edition.
I noticed that the same slicker was used in the photoshoots of Delores Wells, Miss June 1960 and Sheralee Connors, Playboy‘s Miss July 1961. (Spoiler: they are both coming up as Girls of Summer.) Who rocked it harder?
left: Ms. Wells ; right: Ms. Connors. Click either picture to enlarge.
The quote comes from “Proverbs of Hell,” a chapter in William Blake’s gnostic text The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
The book has been interpreted as an anticipation of Freudian and Jungian models of the mind, illustrating a struggle between a repressive superego and an amoral id. It has also been interpreted as an anticipation of Nietzsche’s theories* about the difference between slave morality and master morality.
*cf: in particular Nietzsche’s camel – lion – child model of human thought and behavior as outlined in Also sprach Zarathustra: Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen / Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None (1883-1885).
Portions of this post appeared originally on December 5, 2009.
In honor of Mother’s Day. After all, “A boy’s best friend is his mother” (Mr. N. Bates, Psycho).
The child’s relation to his mother, as the first and strongest object of love, becomes the prototype of all subsequent love relationships. The character of all later relationships is established by that first unparalleled love relationship. Whether the child is breast-fed or bottle-fed, whether he receives all the tenderness of a mother’s care or not, the development is the same.
No matter how long a child is fed at his mother’s breast, he will always feel that his feeding was cut short too soon.
These considerations of the relationship between mother and child prepare us for the intensity of what Freud has called “the Oedipus complex.”
(Hollitscher, Walter. Sigmund Freud, An Introduction. London: Kegan, Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., Ltd. 1947. 33-34. Print.)
Yes, Wesley. You should think about this.
PSA: Actor, writer, and renaissance man Wil Wheaton is awesome and hilarious and this is his website. If you merely think of him as Wesley Crusher or Gordie LaChance, you are missing out — check him out!
I have mentioned before that I follow me the shit out of some LeVar Burton on the twitter (for the record, the Red Cross “Haiti” texting thing is still on like Khan so think about donating, because the need is still very strong, especially as summer comes on and people have gradually stopped donating money needed very badly to keep plenty of clean, purified water around and sanitized conditions for the food getting to refugees, for example: to displaced children — a diptheria epidemic happening now among all those orphaned kids would basically be about the most disastrous and heartbreaking thing I can even think of, you know?).
From LeVar Burton’s twitpic account. With the Shat-man. Look at those OG’s! Super-cute!
I have these pictures up mainly to get your attention. It is obvious, accepted, manifest fact that LeVar Burton is one of the coolest and best human beings to walk the earth. Duh. Would you like to be as basically all-around amazing and centered and loving and a vessel of karmic groove in this universe Just Like Him? Then let’s talk about LeVar’s involvement with the extremely cool documentary The Science of Peace, dudes!
What if …
…science discovered a unified field of consciousness which affected the way people think and behave?
…we could find a way to consciously impact this field with our thoughts and feelings?
…a global media event would succesfully enroll millions of people to participate in an unprecedented world peace experiment?
Great minds from Tesla to Kant to Rosseau to Jung have believed in this tantalizing possibility of reaching a positive meta-energy which just might happen to be God’s will for mankind, so don’t dismiss it straight out of hand as tree-hugging hippie crap! There is some real Science to this, guys.
Hosted by LeVar Burton, The Science of Peace features pioneering physicists, biologists, and philosophers who are established in the emerging new field of Peace Science.
The film effectively illustrates how each person, when bringing peace in to his or her own life, becomes an instrument for global peace.
He is also the executive producer. Putting this post together lead meto some really neato-terrific and amazing sources.
Yes.
I hope to share more about Peace Studies soon but here is the essential lowdown on relative newcomer Peace Science, which is the subject of the documentary: it is a hard-science effort to unify the threads of ideas that run through the incredibly important social sciences movement of Peace Studies. The Peace Science Society has an explanation of the various philosophies and social sciences that comprise the touchstones of the “argument” for peace studies at Penn State, and it is always well-spent time to give the latest articles in The Acorn a spin. (The Acorn is the official journal of the Gandhi-King society. If you don’t feel like subscribing, it’s on ProjectMUSE and the JSTOR.)
Great picture with Nichelle Nichols. Remember on Dr. King’s Day when she came up? In case you forgot, the factoid that was related then was how she was thinking of leaving the TOS cast and Dr. King told her to stay because Lt. Uhura was a wonderful role model for people of color, especially women. Soooo great.
Anyway, check the documentary’s official site out and show some love by visiting the “How You Can Help” section — it’s too late to participate in the documented experiment, but you can still donate and help subside costs for production, travel, distribution, etc. Cool beans!
Last week was a rough one, so I asked my husband to mail me some of the DVDs sitting around our house in Portland and he graciously did. One of them was Mean Girls (Mark Waters, 2001), a movie that I am not ashamed to call a guilty pleasure. Introducing … Mean Girls Monday! A maybe-weekly feature directly or indirectly referencing the film. Because I can.
First Edition. What if every movie were Mean Girls? As Picard would suggest, make it so. This is a wonderfully dorky meme that’s been floating around where people juxtapose lines from Mean Girls with screencaps from other flicks and I’m loving it. Thought I’d kick it off with a little classic Gone With the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939).
(God, Vivien Leigh’s faces are so priceless. I’m planning an upcoming The Way They Were on Vivien and Laurence Olivier. Mad love for my Vivs for-evvvv-errr.)
Happy birthday, I guess, to Gates “Dr. Beverly Crusher” McFadden, who turns 61 today.
Still from Star Trek: The Next Generation. “Thine Own Self,” Season 7, Episode 16.
This was the one where Troi must undergo the holodeck test to become a commanding officer, proctored by her pigdog ex Riker, and the first time through the simulation, everyone dies — including the doc, here — but the second time, after really annoying counsel from a predictably arrogant and slimy Riker (get this, he squints and tilts his head lecherously! wow! the moves!), Troi forces Geordi to sacrifice himself and everyone else lives.
Insert some kind of “Riker’s boner” joke here. Pigdog.
Lesson being greater good kind of stuff. That’s what matters. Not the first picture, which I mainly selected because, in it, Dr. Crusher has a typically bitchy look on her face. (I am a big anti-Crusher guy from Way Back, so I approach her scenes with a bias. Sorry.) That was the subplot, actually; the main thing of the episode was Data’s memory crashed and he was stranded on a planet where people thought he had the plague.
Actually, in my search for the above shot, I found the below one, and I take back almost all the mean things I’ve said over the years.
I said goddamn, Gates McFadden. Haters to the left. And this time, that’s me. Happy birthday, madame!
Oh, my stars and garters, yes. I hate the telephone. I had to spend all kinds of time on the phone yesterday wading through officious folklore and bureaucratic shenanigans, and, as a consequence, I’ve kept my phone off almost this whole day. I only turned it on when Miss D, knowing me too well, alerted me to the fact that she’d be calling in the late morning and I ought to turn my cell on at least until I heard from her. I did, and, once she called, I silenced it again.
I warned her that I think I am slowly transitioning toward abandoning phones as a method of communication altogether. It started with my hatred of texting and has steadily devolved since, to the point that I scowl any time I see someone with so much as a bluetooth earpiece strolling around. Ass, I think to myself, and actively begin to draw wide Borg comparisons. Go ahead, everyone else on Earth it seems, and do join the collective hive-mind of buzz and nothing-talk, but resistance is not so futile in my book. People will claim to hate their cell phones and act like it’s such a hassle to be tethered to everyone they know at all times, shrugging and alluding to the convenience of being able to instantly hear from colleagues or family, but the truth is mainly that you have just allowed the phone to become necessary, and to paraphrase Ms. Steinem, it is no more needed than a shrimp’s hipster fixie bicycle, even if he does have the coolest nalgene bottle evah, with a special attachment for him to hook it on the bike so he can take drinks at intersections and look like hot shit. (You know how shellfish care about appearances. Pfft. Sooo shallow. You’d never catch a catfish pulling that manner of chicanery.)
Look, I’m sure Alexander Graham Bell was a nice guy with nothing but good intentions who could not possibly have foreseen the midnight calls of drunk out-of-touch friends or robo-dialing mortgage adjusters who interrupt dinner, but when I run across him in Heaven, he’s getting a punch in the gut just the same.
Bonus Patricia Highsmith sketch because I can and she was the source of the quote that started this chain of luddite fit-pitchery. I do not have a Graham Greene sketch or I’d post one of him as well — The Destructors is a favorite short story from Way Back.
Computer is fixed!, day off with the littl’un!, Spring Training has begun! and it’s my favorite day of the year — 2/22! Historically, this is my lucky day. I’ve always liked this date best out of the rest of the calendar. Twenty-two is my lucky number from very, very far back, followed closely by two itself (twenty-two trumps just-two because what’s better than one two? two twos. three twos, as in two-hundred-twenty-two, are okay but still inferior because they are three and not two in number. do not attempt to unravel this logic) and this was also the birthday of my first friend, Alex; feeding ducks with her by the little pond at Noble Library in San Jose is one of my first memories of laughing just from being happy. I wish it stopped there with the whyness of twenty-two-ness, but I get kind of …. into numbers.
See also: my lucky time (10:22 PM, or 22:22); the pages of Treasure Island and Wuthering Heights on which I hide money (222 and 22, respectively); the exact uniform number of Robinson Cano and less auspiciously Roger Clemens.
Julie Newmar: “Batterrrr uuup!”
Ask me someday about my theory that he is two people, one the familiar Texan do-gooder and all-around nice fellow Roger Clemens we came to love, and the other an evil, lying, cauldron of seething rage named Rogero Clemenzetti. A wicked and long-dormant personality who will stop at nothing to satisfy his creepy id-like aims, Clemenzetti emerged after a rat bit Clemens in an otherwise empty subway car between Long Island and New York, and he has never been successfully suppressed ever since — it is a very sad case of Jekyll-and-Hyde and I’m surprised no one else has caught it.
Picture from Star Trek Movie Night at the Giants’ AT&T park via Trek Movie.com, taken 4/27/09. I did not attend, as I was at the zoo with my kidlet for her 5th birthday — but we went to the movie later that week and we both cried at the beginning; we are diehard fans of Treks TOSand TNG (not so much the soapier others), but we looooved the reboot and did not find it sacrilegious at all (hot boys don’t hurt neither, and it’s about time we got some girl fan service up in this piece!).
In other thrilling baseball connections, 22 is half of the jersey number of Hank Aaron and Reggie Jackson (4’s and 44 are goodish numbers because of their relationship with 2, being both the square of it and divisible by it, but 8, despite being not just a multiple but its cube is not as good, I feel less comfortable around 8 because it’s just getting too far from 2); 20 (an also-very-very good number because 2 + 0 = 2) less than the number of one of the sport’s greatest heroes, Jackie Robinson (being 42 which is a super-very good number because of DA); and, best of all, it is 20 + 2, 20 being Jorge Posada’s jersey number, though he wore 22 for a few weeks in 1997, before the re-acquisition of Mike Stanley (meh), when Posada switched to 20 so Stanley could once more wear 22 (again, MEH).
Gwen Stefani: “Batterrrr uuup!”
As you can see, 22 is the best number there is, 20 and 2 being close seconds, and therefore 2/22 is the best day of the year. Period. Also: baseball.
Baseball players always have bubble butts. I do not know what repetitive motion it is they do that gives them woman hips, but they’ve all got ’em, except for lanky pitchers, who just have bad knees.
Sorry for the long and pointless diversion but if nothing else, I hope this has proven to you the depths of my numerical mania, and the next time I scoff at the zodiac, feel free to remind me that I have insanely detailed schools of superstition of my own and would do well not to throw stones.
If you think all that was bad, you should talk to my husband, who is medicated for obsessive compulsive disorder, some time about the Importance of Doing Things By Three. He will make a believer of you or die trying. It’s a passion that probably frightened away other, wiser girls, but actually endeared him to me.
First off, thanks to the — as of this writing — over 6,400 people who’ve swung by the site today! Super-cool!* I see you are being linked by a site called pussycalor.com. My thanks again to you for your visits, and a tip of my hat to the fine folks at the site referring you here for the, erm, clever wordplay in their company title (“Pussy Galore” + “hot” en español, I imagine, right? get it? … it’s a decent enough pun; I give it a 60 but I can’t dance to it).
Dawn Richard, Miss May 1957. Photographed by Ed DeLong and David Sutton.
However, now that you’re here, and I’ve got these vintage cheesecake Playboy centerfolds helping me hold your attention, LeVar Burton’s** twitter and I would like to bend your ear a tick on this whole Haiti earthquake and subsequent increased housing and famine catastrophe. This article in the Miami Herald details legit relief organizations through which you can help with time, money, and food donations the displaced and surviving persons affected by yesterday’s devastating earthquake in Haiti, which is unfortunately only going to compound their existing problems as a developing nation.
Miss December 1959, Pat Sheehan. Photographed by Sam Wu.
Those are all fine and worthy causes if you give the list a genuine spin, but I sense that if you have landed here, you are probably impatient to get on with other things, and I empathize to a point with you on the whole “utter-lack-of-attention-span” thing. (Everyone blames MTV but I think it started with cereal box-backs, because I never had cable and I’ve an awful itchy trigger finger in almost every situation) Here is the super-fast-easy way to seal the deal:
Miss January 1957, June Blair. Photographed by Hal Adams.
In America, text the word “HAITI” to the number 90999 to donate $10 to the Red Cross. It will automatically come off your phone bill. How easy is that? $10 is not that much, and this is coming from an extremely broke person. So why don’t you take your hand off your dick (only for a moment, don’t worry — I’m not asking for miracles), fetch up the cell phone you’ve undoubtedly parked in your pocket, and take a second to donate even the low amount of $10 to the Red Cross’s special fund, through which, guaranteed, 100% of your donation goes to Haitian quake relief efforts. The playmates you are gawking at would be super, super impressed. That is why they are all in red: for the Red Cross. (Yes, I have so many playmate pictures saved that I was able to cull out a few scantily red-clad ones for just this entry — and even then I narrowed it to these, my faves.)
Miss March 1957, Sandra Edwards. Photographed by Peter Gowland, a dear patron saint. Right on!
I am not telling you how to live your life, just saying it is a quick and easy way to ease suffering while we comfortably enjoy and count ourselves lucky another carefree, nudie-pic-seeking day. Thanks for your time!
*As I said to the Gentleman earlier today, “I have supported the porn industry for years. It’s about time they returned the favor.”
**You’re darned-tootin’ I follow Geordi La Forge on the twitter. And I did not think it was possible he could be more of a nerd than I always imagined, but he is. He’s seen Avatar, like, five times. I almost stopped following him cause it was all he was on about for weeks. But I forgive him.
Fuck to the yeah: the Cappy and I are just doing the usual, chatting, but it happens to be while he packs to leave that hellhole, thank you very much! I could not oversell my happiness right now.
So we were talking about how he’s going to return soon to his apartment in Krautland after having been gone for a year, in this whole other life in this whole other country, like it’s a reboot to a previous setting of existence, and I can only think what a trip that is in general for any serviceman, but in the specific for my friendoh (hey, I’m selfish, what can I say). Especially emotionally, being in a different place in life and all now but with all these former trappings waiting for him.
Naturally, because we are awesome and you wish you were cool like us, we segued into discussing “Tapestry,” Season 6, Episode 15, Star Trek: The Next Generation. This is not the first time we’ve discussed this episode and the trend of do-overs in TNG. I’m serious: it came up earlier this year. We are consistent, okay? Plus, it also reminds me that I haven’t yet shared all my Ashley Judd pictures! I’ll get on that ASAP, I promise.
Elizabeth: we have, in the last thirty minutes, discussed chicken wings, heavy emotional shit, an episode of star trek tng that we’ve even discussed before, divorce, rebuilding one’s life, and legos
the Cappy: I rule. I know.
Yeah, legitimately, now I’m lego-shopping thanks to his link. I should totally get him some Star Wars ones for when he comes to visit at Christmas! ‘Cause it is making him happy to browse through this site, and I believe that everyone in the Army who is super-important and dignified needs quiet time with legos in the comfort of their own apartment, okay? Haters to the left. I’m just giddy that he’s getting out of the Middle East.
the Cappy: I’m glad you sent that
the Cappy: because I totally was thinking of the wrong episode
the Cappy: it wasn’t tapestry
Elizabeth: it wasn’t?
Elizabeth: which one was it
the Cappy: The Inner Light
the Cappy: its where the Enterprise finds a probe in the middle of nowhere
the Cappy: and it zaps Picard
the Cappy: and he ends up living this second life on another planet in his mind
the Cappy: and has a wife and kids and everything
Elizabeth: OH YEAH
I’m sorry, but your father and I talked it over. You can’t come back to the Enterprise ’til you cut your hair and get a job, Captain.
I totally see the comparisons. That’s a very poignant and moving episode, by the way.
PSA: Wesley Crusher’s Butthole is in Constant Jeopardy!
Did You Know?
It gets lonely in deep space, and Starfleet chicks are mainly bleah (we’ll spotlight non-bleahs as time goes by, don’t you fret). Consequently, Wesley Crusher’s butthole is in constant jeopardy.
PICARD
A bit of good news, as well.
We’re to rendezvous with a
shuttlecraft carrying Wesley
Crusher. He’s on vacation from
the Academy.
Riker reacts, pleasantly surprised.
RIKER
Wesley… good. We’ll need an
extra hand around here.
Picard smiles — it’s clear they’re both looking
forward to seeing Wesley again.
— Star Trek: The Next Generation, Season 5, Episode 106, “The Game.”
Makes you feel sorry for the kid, yeah?
Remember how I mentioned not long ago that I’d spent an entire morning downloading pictures of Ashley Judd in this and her other featured episode as Ens. Robin Lefler on TNG? Yeah, I’ve finally had enough private time with that, and I’m ready to share. So look for that!
I meant to write a lot today, to explore my feelings and seek some epiphanies, and schedule some of the usual ghost posts way ahead of time because I have a busy afternoon, but instead I have spent the entire morning downloading pictures of Ashley Judd as Ensign Robin Lefler in two episodes of season five of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
No regrets.
GEORDI
You know Robin Lefler.
RIKER
Of course.
GEORDI
Her performance around here has
been sensational. I’ve decided
to make her a mission specialist.
—Star Trek: The Next Generation, Season Five, Episode 106: “The Game.”
The Thought Experiment 