Courtesy of an e-mail from my dad. Apocryphal? Maybe, but funny:

From yesterdays Bristol Evening Post:

Outside Bristol Zoo is the car park, with spaces for 150 cars and 8 coaches. It has been manned 6 days a week for 23 years by the same charming and very polite car park attendant with the ticket machine. The charges are £1. per car and £5. per coach.

On Monday 1 June, he did not turn up for work. Bristol Zoo management phoned Bristol City Council to ask them to send a replacement parking attendant.

The Council said "That car park is your responsibility." The Zoo said "The attendant was employed by the City Council... wasn't he?" The Council said "What attendant?"

Gone missing from his home is a man who has been taking daily the car park fees amounting to about £400. per day for the last 23 years...!

.

So I no longer feel oppressed by the JJ Star Trek movie, in case you were worried. I've been watching various TNG eps this week, not in any particular order, just browsing around for episodes I haven't seen in a while or for ones I especially jonesed for. And so at the end of the day I realize I'm just blissed out now because there IS a new Star Trek movie, and what's more I haven't SEEN it yet, which means NEW STAR TREK for ME!

How long has it been?! Years, I say. And the last thing we got was Nemesis anyway, which, okay, some of you may have enjoyed but I personally found painfully stupid.

Anyway, NEW STAR TREK! By all accounts, AWESOME new Star Trek, by the ultimate fanboy JJ.

Now it's just about getting my everlovin' arse to the theater.

I am the old school sort of -- started in 1987 with the first season of TNG -- Trekkie who grew up on the shows, entered fandom through Trek fandom, entered sci-fi through Trek sci-fi, and so on and so forth, I've seen every episode of every series (except "Enterprise") about four point four zillion times and am in fact one of those people who knows why the Justman was named for Justman and why the Jeffries tubes were named for Jeffries...

So why have I not seen the JJ movie yet? I even BOUGHT tickets for it at the Arclight, then couldn't make the show and now have free vouchers sitting around in my wallet just waiting for me.

I have so much Trek in my blood it runs Vulcan green some times. So why haven't I seen this movie yet?

I can tell you the name of Kirk's fiance, Picard's nephew, Sisko's father, Janeway's dog.

So, what? Is it because movies are dead to me? Is it because I love teevee so much and Trek teevee so much (yes, yes, the orig. even-numbered movies are still acceptable, TOS: The Voyage Home and TNG: First Contact are the best of the batch) that I'm not ready to translate it to a 21st century big screen? Am I just afraid of Karl Urban as Bones? Do I just lack the attention span to sit through a movie? Am I afraid of tumbling fully formed and wiser with experience into the new bounding Trek fandom? Are we ALL going to collapse under its weight? Is the new spate of Kirk/Spock fics making me defensive for the old Greywolf the Wanderer ouvre? Am I just being a BOFQ?

*holds head*

Seriously, what's wrong with me???

My remixthedrabble drabbles are off to that great drabble inbox in the sky (sophinisba) and waiting for the reveal.

I may or may not be bailing on my first multiverse5000 prompt in the favor of doing a better job on the second one. Punk's on board to help me decide.

I signed up for the Remix/Redux, my favorite time of year. And if I do kink-bingo it'll just be the last two from LAST year's bingo. I bet thingswithwings will let me sneak it in.

*

Because the thing is, it's not really about word length. I mean, the Multiverse stories have no minimum length, and the drabbles were exactly 100 words, but a COMPLETE fic is not necessarily a GOOD fic.

( in which I make some noise about writing, remixing, Multiverse, and the Flying Spaghetti Monster )

Facebook asked me to assemble a team of five people to save the world. I picked Ten, of course, and also Greg House (in case there's a crazy brain worm epidemic), Martha Jones (she did it once before pretty well), Captain Kathryn Janeway (who also saved the world a couple times before, and is quite fond of Earth), and Rodney McKay, for obvious reasons.

I did point out that until House and Rodney shut their traps and let the Doctor be in charge (BECAUSE HE'S A TIME LORD, WHAT) we'd mostly just be left to languish in an apocalypse, but I figure Janeway's the one with the military background who'll snap them to attention pretty quick, and she's smart enough about aliens to know to trust the Doctor.

And then, seriously? Ten, House, Rodney, Martha, and Janeway saving the world? I PITY the apocalypse that tries to take their asses down.

Now, will someone write me that XO?

In reality TV news:

( the amazing race )

( survivor )

And if it means anything to anyone: GO PAULA, in that atrocity that is Hell's Kitchen.

Holy crap, kids! It's the thirtysomething DVDs! At long, loooooooong last!

Thanks to bethctg2 for the head's up -- I wrote her a thirtysomething Yuletide story two years ago and she sought me out to give me the good news.

And such good news it is!

1. Don't have a Dreamwidth acct yet but plan on buying one in May, just for namesquatting slash exit strategy. But I ain't leaving LJ. I like it here. Also Dreamwidth is Dth in my head, not DW, which is and will always be Doctor Who. Any chance of starting a trend? So... who's got a Dth invite? *g* Use it learn it love it! Use it three times and it's yours! Woo!

2. Though I do a lot of my brain-spewing over on Twitter... I was suspicious of folks who ship their twitters to LJ until I realized it's for archival purposes, not just noise, and then it made lots of sense. Twitter isn't searchable and doesn't have any useful archive properties. Which is to say I'll probably be shippin' my tweets here but will keep 'em behind a cut once I figure out how. So, people, what's your favorite tweet-shipper?

3. I forgot what 3 was for.

4. In re: mini XF renaissance, and without getting into a whole to-do... canonically it's safest to assume Mulder and Scully started sleeping together somewhere between "Orison" and "all things", yes? I mean, it was pretty blindingly obvious this time through, much as my fannish brain can of course put it anywhere -- around "Anasazi" is good, as is, of course, before "Never Again." But in canon, this time through, I don't even think it was subtext. Or maybe I'm giving them too much credit, or maybe David and Gillian just took over, but I think it's pretty clear there is some commencing-of-sexual-relationship just after Orison and from there through Requiem. My guess is that David and Gillian consciously played it that way. Does anyone (frey_at_last) have any interview material, etc, to back this up?

5. Speaking of post-Orison, do what I did, and go back and read Anyone with a Gun, the Orison post-ep runpunkrun and I wrote as our combined cool-headed alter ego, V. Salmone (a professional and well-educated woman from Corpus Christi, TX, in case you were wondering; she has a backstory and everything... and a desk). Not to toot our horns, but when Punk and I put our heads together, sometimes good stuff comes out, and in this case, somehow, it was just right. At least in terms of my most current XF rewatch. Felt good, is what. High fives all around.

6. I fell asleep outside in the sun and my retinas have not yet forgiven me.

7. Who watches "Hell's Kitchen"? What a car crash of a show. But yet I can't look away.

Here are some shows I'm watching that you're not (and some I'm watching because, earlier, when I was looking for shows YOU were watching that I was not, certain shows expectedly crossed consciousnesses and are MINE NOW) and maybe want to be, or maybe want to catch up on when all our regular season shows wrap themselves up two or three eps from now.

( fig. 1, The Unit )

( fig. 2, Better Off Ted )

( fig. 3, Breaking Bad )

( fig 4. The United States of Tara )

And while I'm at it, the latest flailing from the reality-show sector (spoilers through latest eps as always):

( survivor, or, my GOD are you trying to KILL ME? )

( the amazing race, or, I TOLD YOU SO )

I'm watching some other things, so, as always, keep your antennas tuned to EHCA... oh, wait. We're digital now. Please to be buying new electronics, America.

I'm going through a minor league XF renaissance, which mostly means I'm watching it very quietly for the first time in years, for the first time since I started hating Chris Carter and how he totally fucked us like cheap whores. But recently I watched all of Supernatural by accident, and somehow just enjoyed it as a show about paranormal stuff, without really caring about the boys or the emotional arc or the drama. And I thought, wouldn't it be great to have a show with paranormal stuff, but starring a hot heterosexual couple who fight hard with each other but love each other till the very end?

So you see what happened there. Out of respect for an earlier time, when I loved the X-Files with a fiery passion, and in honor of this current rewatching where I'm not only enjoying the simple pleasures of Mulder and Scully and the show but I'm also remembering a simpler time (there's seriously a line in 1998's "Triangle" where Mulder insists to the WWII era officers that the should come to '98, the world's at peace, the only drama is Monica Lewinsky! and I experienced pre-syncope just remembering what that felt like [yes, now in a more enlightened time I realize we were all managing to ignore atrocities in Africa and elsewhere in the early 90s]).

Enjoy, if you're interested, the newly archived, found via the wayback machine, very first X-Files story I ever wrote. I wasn't even in the fandom, I just sat down and wrote an X-Files story and then went to the internet to find where people were posting those things. As I said, a simpler time.

(Rain, and the Mistaken Messiah [MSR, 10k words, rated R, old-school to the nth degree])

I'm going to stop watching at the beginning of season 7 so as not to harsh my renewed squee. I mean, right?