Stars On Pushbikes No.10

As convention anecdotes go, being personally told by Martin Luther King Jr. not to quit your job because you're a positive role model surely beats "And when I turned around, everybody was wearing eyepatches!" into a cocked hat?

 

When I fell hopelessly in love with Nichelle Nichols at an early age, I never realised all the utterly groundbreaking stuff concerning her career that my modern adult brain now marvels at. And despite all the behind-the-scenes feet-of-clay personal failings of people like Gene Roddenberry, it's fairly safe to assume that I grew up happily mystified by racism, sexism and a few other -isms besides, as a result of shows like Proper Star Trek.

 

 

And Proper Doctor Who as well, let's be fair. But Nicholas Courtney's eyepatch still can't hold a candle to the Doctor King approved Ms. Nicholls and a William Ware Theiss miniskirt uniform astride a pushbike...

Publicity Shots From Hell No.116

One reason why I don't like discussing music very much is because I don't like playing the genre game. While I obviously dislike chipping away at the edges of bands and artists in order to get them to squeeze into preconceived genre holes, I'm mainly embarrassed to even begin to vocalise some of the accepted terminology that has been coined by journalists.

 

I mean, what the fuck was someone thinking when they decided to name a particular musical style as "math rock"?
 

I gave a quiet mental shrug, and got on with the business of listening to and enjoying personal favourites such as NoMeansNo, Shellac, June of '44, Circus Lupus and Sweep the Leg Johnny, and thought no more of it. 

 

(That's not quite true, though. I extrapolated a little, and smiled when I realised that for the previous decade I should have been terming Voivod, Anacrusis, and Mekong Delta as "Math Thrash". Hey, they had the required odd time signatures in spades, and all that...)

 

And then I thought I could do better than the journalists at making up names.

 

 

Anyone for "Spock Rock"?

No Sir, There's Nothing Strange About Cosplay No.8

Yeah, it's all go at Starfleet Academy...

 

Kids, eh?

"I Would Like a Hat Like That!" No.26

In tribute to the late Leonard Nimoy, I was intending to focus on some very satisfactory gender-bending Star Trek cosplay.

 

However, that will have to wait until another day, as I have suddenly remembered something that I've been meaning to mention for some time... 

 

Readers who recall with affection the Luke Skywalker AM Headset Radio that was featured on these pages some time ago, may be interested in the Official Star Trek Space Fun Helmet.

Lacking as it does an AM radio feature, this was perhaps a slightly inferior helmet to its Kenner counterpart. However, Trekkies the length and breadth of the galaxy could delight in its Flashing Light Emitter with accompanying Pulsing Sonic Sound, as well as a solar visor, antenna and stick-on name labels.

 

In a perfect world, it would have been part of a survival kit in a Galileo Seven playset.

 

Space fun on a stick!

No Sir, There's Nothing Strange About Cosplay No.1

I might as well be honest about this from the start.

 

If you don't cherish extremely mild pornographic pictures of people dressed up as fantasy characters, or pictures of extremely fat people dressed up as fantasy characters, then this thread probably won't do much for you.

 

But a Leia versus Uhura bitch fight? Come on, people. What's not to enjoy?

25 Wonderful Things No.5

I alluded to this particular item the other day, but if one thing has had an almost paradigm-shattering positive impact on my life, it would have to be humble domestic Video Cassette Recorder.

Or VCR to it's friends.

Monday 5th December

For anyone that's interested (and I'm sure you all aren't), there is plenty of fascinating reference material online concerning the history and development of industrial and domestic video recorders. And I recommend you go and read a portion of it so I can keep this brief, as is my self-imposed, erm... brief.

I can't remember exactly when I learned that it was possible to record television programmes off the air to watch again and again, but I can only imagine that it blew my tiny young mind.

More importantly, you could watch your favourite programmes when your parents weren't around to make sarcastic comments. (A genuinely priceless advancement for any self-conscious young Monoid).

Anyway, I finally managed to persuade my parents to buy a VCR sometime around 1984. My first blank cassettes were AGFA E-180 in black slipcases with a flash of orange and blue, and the first tape I ever hired was the stupendous Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

And not having digested the instruction booklet very well, I ended up rewinding the tape on picture search, so it could be said that I soon knew the movie almost literally back-to-front.

But for a youth with a rapidly growing interest in archive television, it was the start of a long and exciting journey into realms once thought unreachable.

And I will never forget that.