On the DEWLine 2.0: Dwight Williams

Okay, so I've got a Zoom meeting with Ottawa SF Society - OSFS - people in a little over half an hour as I type this. If you want in on these things, we have a mailing list you can sign up for and chat with other OSFS members about. Contact and sign-up details over here. We're trying to stay compliant with the various forms of privacy law here, and we figure it's better to advertise and be ignored than to sign people up by ambush.

Playing e-mail tag with the company set up to sell me a new CPAP machine instead of the one I've been borrowing for the last eight months. Among other issues related thereto.

Lower Decks is okay, for Trek shows, cartoons, and sitcoms. I'm not sure it's been a wise idea to roll all three - Trek, animation and sitcom - into one TV series, but it does seem to be finding its own dedicated audience. I'm uncomfortable with the idea of trying to chase them off and shut the show down out of some misguided loyalty to "pure" Trek, whatever that is.

Picked up some comics over the weekend. Mostly catching up on stuff I've been missing.

More as it comes to mind.

"What I've learned about myself is that there is no amount of time that can pass, there is no break that can happen. I just will never clean up the basement." - Mercer during an interview with Tom Power on Q, date currently unknown to me. Source: Sunday Edition essay by Michael Enright.

...is with Sheila McCarthy on "Discovery: New Eden".

Could someone with a contributor account at Memory Alpha remedy the lack of mention of Little Mosque, please?

I was going to explore my reactions to Star Trek: Discovery(AKA "DSC") in greater depth, and you may expect that later in this entry. For the moment, a surprising bit of news from closer to home arrived this morning: Rick Mercer's announcement that the Mercer Report will be closing up shop at the end of what will be its fifteenth season CBC Television.

Allow me to share his announcement via his own recording...



I admit that I see this as another sign of something akin to a Canadian Apocalypse. Some of you who've been watching this weblog for a while will be making informed deductions and/or guesses as to what some of the other signs are.

I'm not happy. But it's Rick's choice to make. Not mine. Not CBC's.

Okay, on to DSC.

What we ended up getting on Sunday night, after delays thanks to CBS' contractual obligations to the NFL impacting on BellMedia's obligations to CBS, was the first two episodes of DSC. Aired back to back, with "The Vulcan Hello" followed immediately by "Battle at the Binary Stars". Together they form what you might call either a prologue or a full Act One of the first season's larger story.

Without giving away too much, it's a good setup for whatever else we're about to get this year.

I'm still getting over my bout of design history dissonance considering this is supposed to be happening about a year after the events of "The Cage" and ten years before "Where No Man Has Gone Before". The uniforms, the user interface designs, the starship architecture...all seem a bit out of place with those two episodes of the original series. We're being promised explanations and evolution over time, to be sure. How fast the production team delivers is up to them. Our reactions to that speed - or the lack of it - are up to us.

Just about everything else: the scripts, the performances of the live actors, the visual effects work...all meet my hopes.

That visual dissonance remains. For now, anyway.

One bit of advice to CBS and its production partners: please show the episode titles in the episode itself.

Don Ferguson's latest visit to Ottawa. I photographed it.

https://secure.flickr.com/photos/dwight_ew/sets/72157627985348428/

A bit of historical archeology about dead hockey rinks:

http://spacingottawa.ca/2011/10/26/the-rink-that-was-in-centretown/

james_nicoll, I think this might cure your latest ear-worm problem. Whether it's a favour or not, I leave to you to decide.

http://runesmith.blogspot.com/2010/06/if-i-had-billion-dollars-video.html

If you want to know what some of our flaws up here as a country are?

Tonight, I'm of a mind to suggest that you go see Denis McGrath for a diagnosis on what ails us right now. Sometimes, I've fallen prey to this particular form of attitude problem myself. And likely will again from time to time.

More on other stuff, later on...

I just read the latest off of CBC Web News re: the Canadian Television Fund(CTF):

http://www.cbc.ca/arts/tv/story/2007/01/25/ctf-funding-response.html

As a Canadian citizen and a regular viewer of Canadian drama content on TV, I want you to cease and desist in this behaviour. You have responsibilities to the rest of us in this country as part of your licenses, and I expect you to honour them.

(Cross-posted to canadiantv)