Tag Archives: odd

Real Klingons Wear Pink in Star Trek: The Animated Series

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Star Trek: The Animated Series

Star Trek: The Animated Series

Giant pink tribbles. Spock casting magic spells. The crew turning into babies, growing gills, or shrinking. Is there no weirdness that failed to occur on Star Trek: The Animated Series?

No. No, there isn’t. And that’s why the show, which ran from 1973-74, is pure, unadulterated awesome.

Though it occupies a dubious position in Trekkie canon, The Animated Series is a must-see for fans, who will be treated to a succession of wacky events involving the almost the entire cast of The Original Series.

Inexplicably, Chekov is gone. Equally inexplicably, every single alien being sounds suspiciPink Tribbles?ously like Scotty, Nurse Chapel or Uhura. Actually, the explanation was saving money by not hiring extra voice actors or Chekov’s actor, Walter Koenig.

But this enabled them to do something the Original Series could never do, by crewing the Enterprise with more aliens. Foremost among them are the six-limbed Arex, who occupies Chekov’s seat most of the time, and M’Ress, a cat-woman communications officer.

At the time of the Original Series, I don’t think it would have been possible to have shown a guy with an extra arm and leg, like Arex had, and M’Ress would have had a somewhat wooden expression if she’d been a real person with a face covered with fur.

And then there’s the fact that one of the people working on the show was colorblind.

As a result, Klingons wear pink and purple, and Klingons in Orchid?the Kzinti, who are supposed to be terrifying telepathic cat-wolverine-people, do too.

Plus there are pink tribbles. Giant pink tribbles. If there were a way to market these to 12-year-old girls Earth would be drowned in tribbles in a matter of hours. Talk about weapons of mass destruction!

Then there’s the elevator-music theme song, which definitely is worse than the theme song from Star Trek: Enterprise, no matter what anybody says, although the animated Enterprise is so darn cute it’s easy to forgive the tune.

If you have Netflix and loved Original Series Star Trek, or just want to kill a few hours watching pure, undiluted insanity in the form of the loopiest plots ever seen in any flavor of Star Trek, check out Star Trek: The Animated Series.

For more information, check out Memory Alpha, the go-to place for online information on Star Trek, and also the source of every picture above.

The Weirdness That Is Gangnam Style

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If you haven’t heard of Gangnam Style by now, it’s a silly Korean pop song that went spectacularly viral online and has since become tremendously popular.

Its music video on YouTube has more than a billion views. Yes, that’s “billion” with a B.

It’s also spawned a number of versions and parodies, some of which are worth watching and others of which definitely are not.

  • Glee did a show choir version. There are also a couple of marching band versions, but I wasn’t able to find one I liked enough to link. Sorry.
  • Here’s an Inuit version. This is absolutely great, and incorporates a bit of actual Inuit culture into a silly fun pop song.
  • Someone set their Christmas lights to it.
  • And finally, there’s a mashup with M.C. Hammer. It works better than I would have expected, which is to say it works to any extent at all.

Any versions you like out there?

Edit:

  • Farmer Style is an awesome one! Well-filmed, tuneful and awesome! (via commenter thrivingmom. Thanks!)

Lost Letters, Awful Trends, and People Who Have Lost Their Heads

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As it’s the beginning of the year, bloggers and reporters are doing a lot of year-in-review stuff. I’m not, but here are a few things that have caught my eye recently.

  • The alphabet is pretty codified these days, and there’s no use trying to get them to squeeze an extra letter in there, or even a smiley-face. Here are some of the sad letters that did not make the cut. Alas, poor thorn, we hardly knew thee.
  • Here’s a list of trends that need to die in 2013. They are fashion trends, and while I don’t agree with all of them, I hope never to see another see-through lace dress prominently displaying a star’s underwear beneath. I don’t need to see your undies, ladies. They are not that interesting, and in fact, wearing that outfit makes you look like you accidentally put on a slip instead of real clothes this morning.
  • This gallery of photos of a defunct amusement park did not come from Pripyat, the city evacuated when Chernobyl’s reactor blew. However, it did come from a Soviet-style amusement park in East Berlin, and it’s quite haunting in its own right. (via BoingBoing)
  • Stellar health writer Anne Polta of the West Central Tribune chronicles the health-related things she’d like to see kicked to the curb along with the year 2012. All I can say is hear, hear.
  • This gallery of headless people is totally photoshopped. Actually, these headless photos were done long before Photoshop existed, but people still found a way to create comical and plain old bizarre photos of people holding their own heads, or loved ones’ heads. In other words, yes, Victorians did have a sense of humor. (via BoingBoing)

 

Bad Guy, Bad Hair

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Bad guys have bad hair.

I never really thought about this until BoingBoing linked this great article from The Awl, which features a ton of pictures from various movies, all of whom have bad guys with bad hair. There’s even a neat characterization guide to which bad guys wear which kind of bad hair.

I thought, immediately, of this:

That’s the oily sidekick in the terrible Snow White and the Huntsman movie, the brother of the Evil Queen who’s the real villain.

He hits the Eerily Unnatural Dye Job and the Dorky Lackey.

Of course, in real life it’s not always so easy to tell the good guys from the bad guys, or the good hair from the bad hair.

Replacing Furniture… At Last

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Today I laid out a considerable amount of money in order to replace a very old piece of furniture.

While there are various chairs and sofas out there taking the name of various French kings named Louis, my bed seemed like the oldest actual piece of furniture still in use by actual human beings.

At 28 years old, that bed is older than some of my coworkers. It’s only about three years younger than I am.

When my wonderful, wonderful coworkers helped me move, they teased me a little bit about my early-80s-styled bed, its hideous brownish flower motif (why was everything brown in the early 1980s?) and its horrible, horrible habit of squeaking every time someone sits on it, lies down on it or looks at it funny.

And we’re not talking a delicate little cute mouse squeak. We’re talking about the cryptkeeper’s door squeak, the kind of squealing squeak that usually only occurs in scary movies when you think the monster is coming for the heroine, but it’s actually the best friend and the real monster is right behind her.

Last time my mom visited she even commented on it. It’s extremely squeaky.

But lest it be said that I’m susceptible to peer pressure, mostly I just wanted a new bed because I’m afraid I’m waking up people in the other apartments near me by turning over in my sleep. I’m a restless sleeper. I once tried to escape my house in my sleep, I saw the Northern Lights in my sleep and I’ve had whole conversations in my sleep without any participation whatsoever from my conscious mind.

And with my old preschool bed, I’m pretty sure I also squeak in my sleep, every time I turn over or kick or have a dream boxing-match with a flying cow who has Morgan Freeman’s voice and Spock’s face. If I reach for the alarm clock in the morning? EEEEEERREEEEIII. If I check the heating blanket settings? EEEEEERRRRRRREEEEEEIIIIIE. If I move? EEEEEEEEEEEAAAAIIIIEEEE.

The only way to avoid the squeak is to hold very still and try not to breathe too emphatically.

So! Out with the old and in with the new; this week I’ll be getting a new bed, thanks in part to birthday funds from my parents, and all of my wonderful grandparents.

I wonder if I’ll miss the squeak.

Poison, Snakefighting, Racial Slurs, and Deathtraps

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Life is really kind of weird, when you think about it.

Today I got yet another shot–this time, a flu vaccine.

I don’t get these for myself, so much, as for other people I might come into contact with. My own immune system is pretty effective against these types of things, but apparently 90 percent of people who die of flu and flu-related causes are age 65 or older. And I do meet a lot of older folks, and would prefer not to make them sick. Plus there are infants and other people out there who can’t get the vaccine, and I don’t want to make them sick either.

It’s just a little strange to think that putting a little bit of a dead virus into your system can rile up your immune system enough to stop a live one. But it works, and it saves lives and misery.

Here are some other things that make very little sense, at least at first glance. … some of them make very little sense at last glance either, or at all the glances in between.

  • Why do people think natural is good? Cyanide is natural. Arsenic is natural. As far as I can tell, nature pretty much wants to kill us.
  • No, kindergarten doesn’t lead to a life of crime and debauchery. It may very well lead to a life of longing for naps and playtime, though.
  • If every major university made you defeat a snake in order to get your doctoral degree, you’d get… well, you’d get a site with helpful advice for scholarly snakefighting. Now I wonder how my dad subdued his assigned snake in order to become an official Ph.D.
  • The term “Monday” is apparently a racial slur. I honestly hadn’t ever heard that one before, and it’s kind of sad; Mondays (the day of the week, please) are already universally hated, and now here’s another little bit of odium to heap upon them which they haven’t even really earned.
  • When Switzerland isn’t being persistently neutral, producing cool folding knives and protecting the pope, it is apparently a deathtrap.
  • Finally, the Library of Congress has a notation for Klingon. But does it have Shakespeare in the original Klingon?

Ah, Science: Redheads, Booze, Booms and Shots

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My list of interesting links has once again swollen to monstrous proportions, so much so that my whole computer is threatening to just lie down and cry.

Instead of playing a game of Klingon Monopoly to determine what happens next, I’ll just do the responsible thing and share the links with you folks.

Candy-corn Oreos and Other Things to Be Skeptical About

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Don’t get me wrong, I actually appreciate the multi-Oreoed world we live in, and the diversity of delicious cookie goodness available to us: Double Stuf, mini-Oreos, Neapolitan Oreos, Mint Oreos… there’s a lot out there.

I’m really not sure candy corn Oreos were a good choice, though.

Does anyone really love candy corn? I mean, I usually take a few when they’re out, because it’s one of those seasonal things you’re practically obliged to eat at the proper time, but… they’re a bit of a blank slate, flavor-wise.

Mostly what you get out of a piece of candy corn is the waxen texture, with a bit of vague sweetness that doesn’t really taste like anything much.

And in other news, more to be skeptical about:

  • Gendered crayons. Now that I have a number of family members and friends who are having babies, I’ve noticed the dearth of gender-neutral outfits and toys for babies and small children. I have nothing against pink and blue, but what happened to green, yellow, black, orange, red and brown? Babies don’t even know they have hands, let alone girl/boy bits, do we really have to ram gender roles down their tiny throats before they’re even on solids? I say this as a girl who loved purple and wouldn’t even read books about boys when I was young, but I like to think if I’d preferred “boy” toys, my parents wouldn’t have forced princess crayons on me. Besides, everyone knows the packages of 100+ crayons are the Cadillac crayons anyway.
  • World War I recruitment posters. “Daddy, what did you do in the Great War?” “I could tell ya, but I’d have to shootcha, kid.”
  • The Plagiarism Checker! Not that I’m skeptical of that, but there’s been a rash of plagiarism stories about reporters. Who should definitely know better.
  • The Case of the Upside-Down Woman. Normally my BS-detector goes off when I hear weird-medicine stories like this, but the tale of the woman who was brought into the ER being held upside-down by her enormous husband is pretty convincing. The body can be pretty weird.

I Got Engaged Last Night

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I got engaged last night, but only in my dreams. Literally in my dreams.

I dreamed I was preparing for my wedding, and for some reason my aunt was in charge of the big event. (This actually makes a little bit of sense; all three of her children have gotten married and she knows how to do a slam-bang event.)

I was busily deciding what type of decorative flower should go on my wedding cake when it occurred to me to wonder who I was marrying.

I realized then that I had absolutely no idea who I was getting married to. Literally no idea. Now if this happened in real life, I’d freak out, but in the dream, I very calmly looked it up online, and found out I was engaged to someone who had in fact died in an accident. And if that had happened in real life I’m sure I’d be very upset, but in the dream I just wondered how my aunt was going to react when I told her the wedding was off.

I also wondered if we could still do the cakes.

After all, I’ve got my priorities straight.

I’m pretty sure the dream was a remix of some of the episodes of Poirot I’ve been watching lately. In one, a woman says “But then you never really know what someone’s like until after you’ve married them,” or something of that nature. In another one a pilot disappears and is presumed dead, and who precisely was engaged to him becomes a vital plot element.

So I think my brain squashed all these things together, fished up the memories of my cousins’ weddings and my own brother’s, and did a sort of bizarre mashup.

I suppose I was just lucky I hadn’t actually murdered my fiance in the dream. That really puts a damper on wedding fun.

Lefties Unite! With Your… Weird Scissors and Stuff

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Today happens to be Left-Handers Day, dedicated to all you weirdos who use funny-shaped scissors and golf clubs and stand on the wrong side of the mound in baseball games.

Not being a lefty myself, I don’t have a lot to say about it, but I do like the old phrase “Only left-handed people are in their right minds,” due to the way the different sides of the brain control their opposite sides of the body (the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body).

There’s all kinds of interesting studies about the corpus callosum and what happens when it’s partially or fully severed, enough to make a person very glad that regardless of whether he or she is a lefty or a righty, at least the two sides “talk” to each other.

If you’re interested in how different parts of the brain influence how we think, I highly recommend “Brain Sex,” which focuses on gender but also covers a number of other issues with brain parts, such as the left-right stuff. Quite interesting!