My Minimal Blog Presence

This has been bugging me for a long time. Am I the only person to ever notice this? The original Star Trek episode "Assignment: Earth" has a strange double coincidence with real-life events. Spock mentions that the same day the US is launching an orbital nuclear warhead platform there will also be an important assassination. The missile shown in the episode is actually stock footage of the launch of Apollo 4, the first unmanned test of a Saturn V. Less than a week after the episode's first airing Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated the same day as the launch of Apollo 6, the second unmanned test of a Saturn V. Spock's other "prediction" of a government coup in Asia did not happen that day.

I discovered this around ten years ago when researching the source of the famous inter-stage separation footage from Saturn V flights. Its appearance in this Star Trek episode nails Apollo 4 as one of the sources, since it was the only Saturn V flight to predate this.

Others have noticed the King assassination coincidence, but as far as I know my observation has been unpublished (other than in my own e-mails to friends). Until now.

And I'm adding it to Wikipedia. Then it will turn up everywhere....

I've been pretty lackadaisical posting here lately, but I just had to get this one out.

Twice today I have seen the current time referred to explicitly as "Eastern Standard Time." One was Google Calendar's invitations, and the other was a Hoops & Yoyo e-card celebrating the impending start of summer on June 21st (and they even said 8:23 pm rather than the correct 8:26 am!).

What is going on? Have people forgotten the distinction between EST and EDT? Do people think that the timezone is "Eastern Standard" rather than "Eastern?"

This must be nipped in the bud, most vociferously!

Jonathan Schell in The Nation writes:

There is a name for a system of government that wages aggressive war, deceives its citizens, violates their rights, abuses power and breaks the law, rejects judicial and legislative checks on itself, claims power without limit, tortures prisoners and acts in secret. It is dictatorship.

I heard this on XM Radio's "Fine Tuning" the other day, and I thought, neat, they're playing a track from the "Apollo 13" soundtrack. But it wasn't. Is it a rip-off of Aaron Copland ripping off some folk melody?

The NASA channel keeps showing video of Dryden Flight Research Center chief engineer Marta Bohn-Meyer that really gets at me. First I should say that she died in the crash of an aerobatic plane in Oklahoma. Part of the video they're showing looks like outtakes from training videos she may have made, and it's made especially creepy/compelling that in some of the clips she is talking, but there is no audio. A couple of the clips like this have her standing and even lying on top of an SR-71. We also see her go through the ritual of wearing a necktie under her partial-pressure suit and then having it cut with scissors after she completes what is presumably her first flight in an SR-71. Somehow it reminds me of Kirk seeing the clip of Deela at the end of "Blink of an Eye," or James Caan's character deleting the multi-screen video of his wife in "Rollerball."

I caught this on the "Moment of Zen" on "The Daily Show," and had to look it up to figure out why there was a penguin in Edinburgh, Scotland named Nils Olav who holds the rank of Colonel in the Royal Norwegian Guard. There's a definite penguin vibe going on: the most recent previously-unseen-by-me episode of "Wonderfalls" I saw on Logo was "Wound-Up Penguin," and we all know about "The March of the Penguins." I saw that at the last-ever screening of anything at the old Carolina Theatre in Chapel Hill. *sniff*