Ragtag Giggagon

Some of the random arguments for Trek being a God-Awful franchise that we ought to best forget: (This is based on a question put to me in Lynn Lamb 's wonderful interview here .) People are revisiting Star Trek on Netflix lately , or geeking up for the first time. I am recommending that you don't s quander your lives. I am a Trekkie . But I won't defend the fau lts t hat gi ve me a dose of the rageface, unlike th is pair of happy Caro ls . I argue here mainly about the incarnations of Trek that come aft er The Original Series, and all views are free to be challenged.   I do recomme nd The O riginal Series as a cultural cornerstone. But TNG coasted along for three execrable seasons under the Trek name before improving slightly for its latter four. It really mil ked the cistern. S ystem ? As a n ew show, it would never have made it out of the gate without the Star Trek banner. DS9's final season - which thrill ed fans at the time - act ually de...

HOW DO I MAKE MYSELF EVEN ANGRIER? How do I see the full question, instead of just the "title" on here? I am looking at stupid questions like "How do I tell my daughter she's as dumb as she looks without hurting her feelings?" and I am so angry that I want to read the FULL question in order to be even angrier, with the clarifications and everything. I can only see the question title. SO HOW THE HELL DO I SEE THE FULL DAMN QUESTION? Is it okay to get out of my vehicle? I stopped for gas and - ironically enough - attempted to release some gas of my own as I came into the station. Call me old-fashioned, but we'd all be better off letting it out in the cab than while we're paying for our fuel, right? Unfortunately, what came out was not gas alone; and it certainly wasn't a solid. If plasma is one of the states of matter, I think my little emission qualifies. Does plasma burn? I have a twenty minute drive home, and I'm running on an empty tank. Sh...

The newspapers reported a while back: "World's first camera placed on a basking shark".  It must have been a lot of trouble, to get that camera out of the museum. I think they've outdone themselves.  Mounting that cumbersome nineteenth century contraption onto that shark might be all cool and "steam punk", but it's cruel at best. They should've used a brand new camera, the latest technology. Just because these scientists can do something doesn't mean that they have to do it.

The Good Liar by Nicholas Searle (available on Amazon US and UK ) is making its way into paperback format this month  (August 2016). As I read through, I am enthused to see in Searle a scribe who can pen a (somewhat) memoir-like piece of long, (recent) historical fiction, with the panache of an old gentleman such as Graham Greene. UHQ-literary style is a rarity in thriller fiction today; Banville could be cited as an example, but his novels - if thrillers at all, and some involve murder and conspiracy - are finely wrought outliers.  There is action in The Good Liar - not frenetically paced, much of it well timed to be surprising - and certainly more than enough violence to punctuate the humorous or cogent discussions of and meditations on infirmity, duping, history and politics.   I found the Grumpy Old Man at the novel's core to be somewhat endearing; he has much of the same shtick as a typical moaner. Searle's work matches style with great plotting. Dickensian-Gothi...

The Left are the moral defenders today, beardy thinker Slavoj Zizek says on youtube , not the Right. I'd like to echo some of his thoughts here. His remarkable ideas have had me thinking for days. The Right talk of the erosion of rights and liberty. Yet - leaving rights related to social policy aside, which conservatives generally oppose - the Left are protecting the workers and the common people; the Right's economic policy undermines worker rights. Part of John Kerry's policy platform running against George W. **** in the middle of the last decade was to return multinational corporation jobs to American territory, rather than farming them out. The same argument has been embraced more recently by US conservatives. A tax regime both punitive and incentivising could easily undermine outsourcing culture. It's not something one would have expected to hear from a Democrat, but it was pro-industry as well as pro-worker in many respects.  Increasing the wealth of the one perc...

This is a small list of my ailments. I only deal with one indepth here, but they are all very worrying concerns in their own way. Magical Lopsided Butt-Wiping Tendencies The Magical Lopsided Butt-Wiping Phenomenon is where you wipe your bum, and a streak appears on the tissue off to the side a little, and then you compensate by wiping that specific area in the next wipe, and then it appears very clean as if the area has been wiped thoroughly. So you do one more courtesy wipe up the central trench, and the streak appears off to the side again. I mean, is the poop there or not? It's MAGIC[ al Lopsided Butt-Wiping ]! BY THE WAY: Anyone who says I'm being disgusting talking about all this re-appearing poop because they don't even LOOK at the toilet paper can kiss my nice clean ass - and your bum is probably dirty!!! That's right - your repulsion and revulsion for poopy things are manifestations OF YOUR OWN FILTHY ASS!!! Anyway, my other ailments include: Sore (Itchy) W...

Here is a photograph of my great-great grandparents, Nana Kaka and Papa Poo. Nana Kaka's real name was Katherine, but her younger brother Glascott couldn't pronounce "Katherine" when he was a baby and he used to call her Kaka. So she held onto the name all of her life. Her husband's name was Roderick. But Papa Poo's younger sister Prunella couldn't pronounce his real name either. She just called him Poo rather than Roderick, but it was more because she was trying to get to grips with her own name, and her toilet training. She called everyone Poo. In the end, Poo stuck to him for the rest of his life. Poo and Kaka got married in the year of our Lord 19XX. The Xs are Roman numbers that they had back then, because everything was pre-decimal. The next daguerro type of rendering is of my other great-great-grandparents, the ones on my Step-Nappy's side.  Gampy Donie Dinny, Nanu Pinky and Granna Donna Moodoo. They led a sad and depressing life, which they had...

I suffer from a number of ailments. I call this ailment WATCHED EPISODE SYNDROME A TV show might have been running for three or four or even ten seasons, but this is generally what happens to me:  I flick onto the tv show, and I see at the bottom of the screen what show it is, and I think "Oooh, I must watch another episode of this" because I've only watched one episode two years earlier and it looked good. But then it turns out that this show is a repeat, and IT'S THE DAMN EXACT SAME DAMN EPISODE I HAVE ALREADY SEEN! GOD!!! DAMN IT!!! My other ailments include: Sore (Itchy) Writing Finger TV Remote Confusion Magical Lopsided Butt-Wiping Tendencies Small Poop Production (or Rabbit Faeces Disorder) Anti-French Bias  Legitimate Hand-Eye Coordinative Crapness A Fierce Intolerance of Conservative American opinion  Guitar-String Tone Deafness Sixpack Prevention Candy Eating Syndrome Hispanophonic Incomprehension (or "Ack-ack-ack Phobia")

These lovely ladies can fight it out over me! And if I get my hands on that Loudmouth Martin!!! MARTIN!!! GRRR!