Some random musings on the new Star Trek movie

Saw the inventively named Star Trek yesterday afternoon and I enjoyed it. Not a complete classic by any means, but a good movie.

In lieu of giving away plot spoilers, some random thoughts about the film, in roughly chronological order: 

• the USS Kelvin didn't appear to have any warp engines - indeed it looks like the Enterprise without warp engines. I wonder how they got around. 
• Kirk's black cadet top looks way cooler than the traditional yellow 'tour leader' jersey that Shatner wore on TV. In fact, as they sussed out in the TNG movies, everybody should wear black. 
• Karl Urban as Bones - brilliant.
• Zachary Quinto as Spock - beyond brilliant. Uncanny. 
• Simon Pegg as Scotty - more Irvine Welsh than James Doohan, but good nonetheless. 
• Anton Yelchin as Chekov - come on guys, Walter Koenig's accent wasn't that ludicrous in the original. And where the hell was his Beatles/Monkees hairstyle? 
• the plot lacked originality to say the least - seemed to be assembled from a cut-up of The Wrath of Khan and Nemesis - but it was at least well executed and provides a convincing rationale for breaking series continuity (which was pretty strained to begin with after Star Trek: Enterprise)
• Thank God, no cameo for Scott Bakula (although 'Admiral Archer' is mentioned at one point.) 

And that's all I can think of at this precise moment in time. Star Trek looks set to be the box-office smash of the year, which means a sequel asap, I should imagine. People are lapping this stuff up. And good luck to them. I mean, to us.  

"Free London Lame?" (incorporating Hal's blog review #17)

I've been meaning to write this post for about three months and I've finally got round to it as I'm feeling a bit more energetic this week (for reasons unknown - I keep checking to see whether I have an illuminated orange ring round me like the Ready Brek kid from the old 70s adverts, but now that we are into March it is light by the time I get out in the mornings and I can't see any illumination, sadly). Anyway, back to the bloody point... if you work in central London you'll have seen various people in funny (sometimes purple, but not Barney the dinosaur) outfits handing out free papers. The evenings are worst. I walk from the Tottenham Court Road area to Liverpool Street most evenings after work, a journey of around 40 minutes, and I must see at least 20 of these people en route. The two evening papers being given out are:

(a) 'London Lite', which is derived from the Evening Standard in the same way that Dairylea processed cheese is derived from milk; chuck out all the good stuff, intensify the crap that's left into a glutinous mess and then hard-press it into bite-size pieces; and

(b) 'thelondonpaper', which is Rupert Murdoch's take on the same thing. (For an easy guide to what one of the contributors to giroscope thinks of Mr Murdoch, look at the picture with the red cross here and please ignore the religious information. I mean, respect going out to Glen A. Larson, creator of the original Battlestar Galactica, but I'm not a Mormon. I just thought it would confuse their stats a bit).

Both these evening free papers have enough celebrity tit-tat, Sudoku quizzes, and 10-second interviews with Ken Livingstone to fill column centimetres aplenty... and therein lies the problem. If this was just a daily email or txt sent to millions of Londoners it'd be a pain in the arse but we could just all delete the f***er or add it to our spam and you are Robbie's nephew. But paper is a scarce resource and these damn things are being given away, paid for by advertising revenue or even as a lossleader for Murdochville. It's a litter hazard and a waste of paper which could be used to print something that people might actually want to, god forbid, actually pay for? And some of the dispensers (you can't call them sellers as they don't actually sell anything) are pretty insistent in their pitch to get you to actually grab one of these damn things. I see people with armfuls of them, even more so in the morning, when there are yet more lame wares available - Metro, City A.M. (are we really paying City Executives 6 or 7 figure salaries so they can get their news from a free paper? HELP!!!), and some sport one which is so duff I can't even remember the name of it.

Anyway, capitalism throws up some odd anomalies a lot of the time - and this free paper war is one of the oddest - but the remedy is this: Do NOT under any circumstances accept one of these papers. Better still, if you see one on the ground, pick it up and either shove it into one of the racks that the Metro is put in in the mornings, or even better, give it back to the people in purple suits handing them out. Be subversive - give a thelondonpaper seller a London Lite or even a City A.M. Find one several days, or weeks, old, if you can. Let's beat the system by treating it like a goddamn MORON!! That's what it's doing to us.

(With thanks to The Ecologist magazine, which, as so often, published a very good article on this very topic months before I got round to finishing my little rant on it. Actually what a good name for a blog - 'My Little Rant' - has anyone grabbed it yet? Yes! But with only one post, dated 23 Dec 04, it's a tragic waste. The only blog I've seen where the 'about me' column is longer than the blog itself!)