Professor Higgins, call Star Fleet

A few days ago my wife was watching a rerun of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The Klingons were mad at the Romulans, or maybe it was the other way around. Everyone was arguing.

I started laughing.

“What’s so funny?” Valerie asked.

“Are you kidding?” I said. “You don’t see – or better yet, hear, what’s so funny?”

It was the way they were talking. I’ve been listening to the dialogue on the various incarnations of Star Trek for about 40 years now. It never ceases to amaze me how, no matter where the starship Enterprise goes in the entire galaxy, everyone, and everything, the crew encounters not only speaks perfect English, but the kind of perfect English you might hear in a Saturday Night Live skit satirizing the Royal Shakespeare Festival.

You know what I’m talking about. The Emperor of the Zorcons, warrior caste of the Planet Detox, addresses Captain Kirk or Captain Picard, who is trying to mediate a genocidal war between the Zorcons and their rival caste, the Kazoobicons. It sounds something like this:

“I see that you have spoken the truth, Outworlder. And as you were speaking, I saw fear in the eyes of the Kazoobicon. We will take your advice and submit our dispute to the judgment of your federation. For it is written in the ancient books that the Kazoobicons can only be trusted in negotiations if a disinterested third party is holding the french fries.”

Sound familiar? You bet it does! The one common denominator in virtually every science-fiction TV show ever made is that everyone except the humans makes speeches instead of talking. Did you ever notice this? I sure have.

It never fails to make me think of the funniest review of a TV show I ever read. It was in TV Guide, in, I think, 1983. I don’t remember who wrote the review, but I wish I had saved the person’s name because I never read two more accurate – or funnier – sentences.

The show being reviewed was a spectacularly silly sci-fi series, which only lasted one season, called The Man From Atlantis. The man from Atlantis was a visitor from another world. The usual stuff: he had unearthly powers and used them to solve earthly problems every week. I don’t remember what all of his powers were; I think one of them was that he had gills like a fish and could live underwater.

In any case, the review started out something like this: “It’s always easy to spot the visitor from another planet in a TV show. He’s the one with no sense of humor who speaks better English than everyone else. Maybe someday television will give us a space alien who says ‘ain’t got no’ and tells mother-in-law jokes. In the meantime, we have The Man From Atlantis.”

Of course a lot of this is budget-driven. TV shows usually have tighter purse strings than feature films. In the Star Trek movies, or in other space operas like Star Wars, a touch of interstellar verisimilitude is sometimes provided when you hear one of the Glorks actually speaking Glork – with subtitles. Remember the guy Han Solo zapped under the table in the first Star Wars movie? He was speaking Glork or Oobsheek or whatever, and the audience was left to conclude that Harrison Ford’s character had picked up enough of the alien’s patois to follow the threats that were being made against him, right up until the moment he pulled the trigger and blew the Glork right through the wall.

TV usually can’t afford to do this, and has to resort to such cost-cutting sleight-of-hand as the universal translator in Star Trek: The Next Generation. This swoopy gizmo enables the crew of the Enterprise to understand everyone from the Gloobs of Planet Sneeho to the Icky-Yuck Fish People of Beta Arcturus 16. Eliminating the curse of Space Babble smooths the way, after the requisite number of jeopardies and space explosions, to yet another victory for the forces of galactic niceness.

But shortcuts to universal English aside, there remains that other problem. The entire crew of the Enterprise, even its non-human contingent—Spock in the first series, a whole array of extraterrestrials in The Next Generation—was capable of human banter. Even Worf, the Klingon on the bridge in the second series, while not likely to show up wearing a flower that squirted water or making jokes about the vagaries of dating Klingon women, every now and then got off a riff that scented of wit.

However, and this is as true for the other incarnations of the series, Voyager and Deep Space Nine as it is for the first two, most of the time non-human characters appear, they talk like Roman generals making battlefield speeches in the pages of Titus Livius. And the longer I watch these shows in syndicated reruns, the funnier it seems.

Are there other civilizations in the universe? I’m not the guy to ask. 40 years ago it was largely assumed that, given the billions of stars that make up a galaxy and the billions of galaxies that make up the universe, other civilizations must exist, somewhere. But the Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has been combing the heavens for decades and hasn’t heard a peep from anything that sounds like it might be sentient. And recent biological and chemical research is moving in the direction of establishing that the conditions necessary to foster and sustain life are in fact extremely rare in the cosmos. Earth may indeed be a fluke. We may, indeed, be alone.

But if we’re not, and if SETI does indeed one day detect evidence of intelligent life somewhere else in the universe, some scrap of an ancient radio broadcast from M31 or a television program from the Horsehead Nebula, I hope and pray that whatever we hear won’t be on the order of “We must move swiftly to prevent the Woobles from invading our Horsnick sector.”

I hope it will be something more on the order of, “Lucy! You got some ‘splainin’ to do!!!”

Footballius Ridiculum

I sweat the small stuff. My wife only gets upset about the big stuff. We complement each other that way.

We had a fire last week at a property we own. Valerie nearly cried. I was upset, but not as much as I am when, say, I see some moron running a red light because he's too busy talking on a cell phone to notice that he just ran a red light.

Which brings me to the subject of the Super Bowl.

I haven't actually watched the Super Bowl in years. But that doesn't matter, because we've reached that time of year when the Super Bowl is looming larger with each passing day, everywhere you look. Here it comes: the annual two-million-dollar-a-minute festival of TV ads. Let's be honest, For a lot of people that's exactly what the Super Bowl is, not so much a sporting event as a showcase for expensive advertising. Come to think of it, I suppose an evening of multimillion dollar one-upmanship on the part of Coca-Cola, Pepsi and the Ford Motor Company does qualify as a kind of sporting event.

I'm not a football fan, but if I were, I'd be more likely to follow college football than the NFL. In fact there have been autumn Saturday afternoons when I felt that I was missing out on something in not following college football, when I look around and see how much fun a lot of other people are having watching it. My biggest problem with college football is that there are so many teams out there I can't keep track of all of them. What team would I root for? I can't even wade through the alphabet soup of the universities they represent. I went to San Diego State, but somehow never became a fan of the Aztecs. They turn up on TV so seldom, especially since I left the San Diego area, that following their fortunes hardly seems worth the effort.

Why would I be more likely to follow college football? Incredible as it might sound, given the amount of money that college athletic programs suck up, it's because college football is so much less blatantly showbiz than professional football. Professional football didn't even acquire a mass audience until the advent of television, and I think that says a lot. Baseball had a mass following even before radio, and when radio came along, that medium and baseball seemed made for each other, at least once the hysterical fears of team owners, who thought radio would hurt ticket sales, was overcome. There are still people around who think radio is a better way to experience baseball than television. But the NFL would be nowhere without the Tube.

TV equals Hype. Hype equals marketing. Always has. And the "little thing" that gets my goat every year about the Super Bowl is directly related to the hype that is marketing and the marketing that is hype.

I'm talking about those damn Roman numerals.

The first Super Bowl was played in January, 1967. NFL historians out there may correct me if I'm wrong, but the Super Bowl grew directly out of the battle for television. For decades there was only the National Football League. Then, in 1961, a new league was created, the American Football League. Football borrowed a page from baseball: two leagues, the National and the American. Not a bad idea at all. More competition, for one thing. More jobs for professional football players. More ticket sales.

More television contracts. There's the rub, by the way. The AFL knew it was competing with the older NFL for eyeballs on screens, and it hit upon a brilliant play: changing the style of the game. The AFL, with new, young teams like the New York Jets, Boston Patriots and San Diego Chargers, began playing a more pass-related game than the NFL, which still laid its heaviest emphasis on running. It worked better than might have been expected. After a few seasons the upstart AFL was stealing major market share from the NFL. Then came the first Super Bowl, football's equivalent of the World Series. The best team in the AFL would play the best team in the NFL.

Then the AFL won. If you're old enough to remember, it was January, 1969. Joe Namath predicted -- no, guaranteed -- that his high-flying Jets would win the Super Bowl from the hard-charging Baltimore Colts. The Jets won that game, 16-7. The NFL panicked. This was TV money we were talking about! The following year the two leagues were joined under the NFL umbrella as the AFC and the NFC. All the money was going into one place again.

That big victory by the New York Jets was in a game called Super Bowl III. Not just "the Super Bowl," but "Super Bowl III."

The Lords of Football aka the Lords of Television aka The Lords of Marketing and Hype decided that this big football game somehow had to be imbued with an awe-inspiring sense of historical significance, as if this were some epic clash stretching back for centuries and not something that had just been cooked up for TV. So they inaugurated the ridiculous annual marketing tradition of assigning a Roman numeral to each Super Bowl game, you know, to give it Weight, as in World War I. World War II. Pope John XXIII.

Did you watch World Series CIII last October? No. If you watched it at all, you watched "the World Series," period.

I didn't have a serious problem with this Roman numeral business for the first few years they were doing it. I, II, III, IV, V...most of us can deal with those caesarian digits -- after all, for 30 years now most of us have learned to associate them with "Rocky" movies. And when I was young, Hollywood for some reason used to use Roman numerals to assign copyright dates to television shows. If you're of a certain age (mine) you got used to seeing them after the credits. Super Bowl I was played in the year MCMLXVII. We were taught some of this in school, by the way, just to drive home what an important leap forward the discovery of the number "zero" was. (The Romans didn't have zero, and their math suffered accordingly.)

But I don't think it's being taught in schools anymore, because not much of anything is taught in schools anymore except multiculturalism and self-esteem. This year we're being sold Super Bowl XLI. Enough already! Yes, I know that XLI means "41," but I would be willing to bet that very few people under the age of 35 do. Most people under 35 can't find Washington, D.C. on a map, think the Civil War was fought back around the time of Babe Ruth, and spell the word "Cars" as "Car's." Don't try to tell me that they can read "Super Bowl XLI" and know what they're looking at. Or care. In fact a lot of them are only tuning in to see the $5 million Pepsi ad in which Jennifer Lopez is computer-morphed into a can of Pepsi and then sucked into a spaceship that promptly takes off for planet -- er, large object -- Pluto.

Before Super Bowl XLII rolls around, I would like to ask the Lords of Hype to re-think this annual insult to everyone's intelligence -- or lack of it. They won't of course, and I'd also be willing to bet that very few people share my curmudgeonly dislike for this bit of cultural effluvium. (From the Latin Effluere, to flow out.) But still I make my plea: let's dump this cheesy marketing ploy, guys! It it has no place in the year MMVII!

The Case For Staying Home

I took my wife to the airport yesterday, very early in the morning. (Why does everyone insist on flying at o-dark-thirty?) We live in Spokane, Washington, and she was on her way to Washington, D.C. for some business meetings.

All I can say is, I'm glad it was her and not me. I'm not all that crazy about Washington, D.C. myself, and I'm also a chronic fearful flyer. But neither of those, really, is the point.

It's not news to anyone that air travel seems to be getting more unpleasant every year. Yes, 9/11 has had much to do with it -- all that extra security hassle, the possibility that you might be selected out of the line for a special pat-down, and those TSA drones, some of whom are definitely of the "give her an inch and she thinks she's a ruler" school. You know the ones I mean, the ones who obviously get a woodie from barking orders at people.

But that's not the whole story, either. Once upon a time, (it was before my time, that's for sure) air travel was a genteel experience. My late mother was of the generation that saw the transition from rail travel to air travel, and in the 1950s when that transition was going on, people treated getting on an airplane as something of a special occasion -- they even dressed up to fly. Can you imagine such a thing? Look around an airport terminal today. There's a guy checking in what looks like a box of plumber's tools. There's a girl wearing her sweater inside out. There's a guy in flip-flops, with a backpack on his back and a pair of skis under his arm. There are two kids, one with green hair and the other wearing a faded Metallica T-shirt, their iPods clamped to their heads, dead to the world, eyes glazed as they wait in the endless line for check-in.

Yes, the quality of life in the air has definitely declined. You shoehorn yourself into that economy-class seat, your knees against the back of the seat in front of you, just in time for some guy with a carry-on bag the size of a Volkswagen Beetle to shove his belly into your nose as he in turn tries to shoehorn that monster bag into the overhead compartment. Then you have to unfasten your safety belt and squeeze back into the aisle so he can climb over your seat and get to his.

Then you get to spend an hour, or two, or five with your arms practically pinioned to your sides because that's all there's room for. When the plane hits turbulence (which in my experience always happens at the very moment they've put that tray in front of you with the tepid coffee and the peanuts) you don't even have room to panic. The person in the seat behind you has the music on his headphones turned up so loud it sounds like he's running an electric lawn edger. The woman across the aisle from you is travelling with two toddlers engaged in a screaming contest. (They'll scream until final approach, then, when the plane touches down, they'll both be asleep.)

And as if all of this weren't enough, this current travel season we're in the middle of has been making headlines for its bad weather. We all saw the pictures on the news not long ago of Denver airport locked down by a blizzard, people sleeping on the terminal floor using their carry-ons as pillows, stuck in limbo like Tom Hanks in the movie The Terminal somewhere between Los Angeles and Atlanta, where they've already missed Christmas dinner at Aunt Irene's. And the horror stories, the tales of outrage. My favorite was the man who told the TV cameras that one of the airlines had instructed its counter personnel to remove their ID badges so that irate travellers wouldn't know the name of the person they were talking to, and could not, therefore, make specific complaints about rudeness or unhelpfulness. Welcome to the service sector, 21st century style.

For all of these reasons, I was glad to be the one driving the car to the airport. I was glad to be carrying the to-be checked bag into the terminal. I was glad to be standing in line just to keep Valerie company and then bestowing the see-you-in-a-few-days kiss, safe in the knowledge that while she would momentarily be joining the Corps of Flying Sardines, I would be returning to my warm little bed to recapture some of the snooze-time I'd lost by getting up at 4:30 a.m. to see her off.

It had snowed the night before, Interstate 90 was icy and the mercury was hovering around 18 Fahrenheit (minus 8 Celsius) as I drove Valerie to Spokane Airport in the dark. There was a bit of a breeze at the airport as well, which made that 18 degrees feel like, oh, maybe 7? (Minus 14 Celsius?) The airport was remarkably busy for 5 a.m. -- where were all these people going so early on a frozen Thursday morning?

And then came that little touch of the surreal that so often attends airport terminals, especially in the wee hours. I immediately noticed, queued up among all the parka-and-wool-cap wearing winter travelers, yawning, scratching themselves and oh, yes, even at such an hour, blabbering witlessly into their damn cellphones, one guy wearing shorts.

Where do these people come from? Did this guy just get off the interplanetary space bus from the Planet Gelato, where 18 Fahrenheit with a wind-chill of 7 is reason to bust out the Coppertone? Everyone else in this terminal looks like they're getting ready to go skiing; this guy looks like he's about to step off the Pacific Princess in Acapulco and go order a Mai Tai with an umbrella in it.

"What's up with that guy over there?" I said to Valerie. "Is he kidding with those SHORTS?"

"Maybe he's going to Miami, or the Bahamas," my wife offered.

Well, okay, fair enough. People do sometimes dress for their destination, not their point of departure. By the way, I did this once, in reverse and regretted it. I dressed -- and packed -- for my point of departure, which happened to be Cote d'Ivoire, west Africa, and not for my destination, which happened to be Washington, D.C. The month was March. Result: I arrived in D.C. with a suitcase full of shorts and muscle shirts to find that the east coast had just been hit by a blizzard and I was up to my expectations in snow.

Maybe this doofus was bound for tropical climes and figured why bundle up if he'd just have to take the heavy stuff off when he got where he was going?


He and Valerie were in two separate lines, and reached the baggage check-in counter at the same time. Both chose to do the automatic check-in thing, sticking the credit card in the little monitor and having their boarding passes spat at them by a computer. As Valerie was in the process of getting hers, I glanced over at how Mr. Shorts was doing.

Imagine my surprise when I saw what came up on the monitor screen. His name, Seymour K. Doofus, his POD, Spokane, Washington, and then his destination.

Buffalo, N.Y.

As soon as I got Valerie away from the ticket counter and we were walking to the security gate where we would have to part paths, I whispered to her (in a stage-whisper), "The guy in shorts is not going to Miami, he's going to Buffalo! Does he know something about Buffalo the rest of us don't?"

"Maybe Buffalo is having a January heat-wave."

Well, the east coast has seen higher-than-normal temperatures in recent weeks, but my reading and hearing of the news indicated that it had already ended, and more normal winter temperatures had returned. Perhaps it had been 65 degrees in Buffalo the week before, and this guy just hadn't gotten the memo that Old Man Winter had moved back in. Maybe. But in the age of the Internet, not likely.

I kissed Valerie goodbye. See you Monday. Then I walked back to the car.

"How are you today?" the parking attendant asked me when I stopped to pay for parking.

"How am I? I saw a guy in the terminal wearing shorts, and he was going to Buffalo."

Back out on the highway, headed back to Spokane, I said it again, out loud. "There was a guy in the terminal wearing shorts, and he was going to Buffalo."

And I was going back to bed. I think I got the better end of that deal.