Archive: August 2026
SNW 406: Off-Hour
This week's Strange New Worlds episode is more like Star Trek than anything since the season opener has been, and it may well be the best episode of the season thus far. That said, it's also another empty-calorie episode that doesn't leave us with anything to think about after it's done, at least not in a big-picture kind of way. The stuff we have to think about after is more like, why was that guy there, or is the macguffin of this story plausible, or can we accept the implausibility of the macguffin.
The gimmick of the week—what, you thought they were done with that? If only—is real-time countdown. It's a disaster/action movie, one part The Poseidon Adventure one part Speed, one part 24 (the TV show). Trek homages to other stuff is nothing new, of course; nothing inherently wrong with doing a riff on another film if done well. And this one is better than just OK.
Let's get into it.
See full post: "SNW 406: Off-Hour"...
Tagged
Star Trek,
TV,
Posted on August 30, 2026 at 9:23PM | Permalink | 
| 
Umpire Diary
I umped on Sunday night and last night, and I'm a few minutes away from heading out to umpire tonight as well. Then I'm likely finished umpiring for the year.
The league is winding down its softball offerings until winter ball, but there's still a few weeks to go; I, however, will be heading to California within a week for an undetermined length of time to help Marty out with taking care of my dad, so I begged off my shift for this Sunday and the next two weeks. I suppose if it turned out that I'm back before things are wrapped up entirely I might have one or two more before January, but it looks as if tonight will be it for me and softball for 2026.
Sunday's games were good, a nice crop of players to work with, although I was disappointed that one of the games, the score of which was 19-2 heading into the final inning, did not end at that score because that would have been a nice symmetry with the Mariners' loss to the Cubs by that same score earlier in the afternoon. Why did they have to go and score four more runs? Alas.
Las night was an even better group of folks, but at the lesser location of Dahl Ballfields, which is not especially well maintained. Games were fun—one back-and-forth affair that ended 19-18, one utter blowout of 34 to something far less than 34—but during one play I tripped on one of the may ruts in the field while hopping backward to adjust me view of the ball. I fell on my backside and somehow sprained my wrist trying to stop my fall. It's minor, as such things go, but I'm sitting here typing with an ice pack strapped to my forearm to keep it from hurting too much.
Anyway, tonight's crop of teams is a mixed bag or people I don't much like to work with and some that I do, but I'm hoping to go out on a trouble-free evening. Odds favor it, I would think.
It's been an uneven year for umpiring, with some hassles and some fun, but on balance I'm glad I've kept doing it and I'll be back at it in ’27.
Off I go. Tallyho!
Tagged
Umping,
Posted on August 25, 2026 at 4:50PM | Permalink | |
SNW 405: Level-Five Transporter Accident
The writers of Strange New Worlds just can't help themselves. They get a nutso idea in their heads and go at it with no hesitation, no filters, no pesky need to respect what came before. In a way, that's admirable—take chances; "risk is our business," and so on. In another, it's frustrating as hell—know your subject matter, keep its values, don't throw it all out for a gimmick. In the case of this week's episode, it's both admirable and frustrating.
The nutso idea this time is "what if the crew of the Enterprise were muppets?"
This season alone we've seen Enterprise crew fights dinosaurs, Enterprise crew boards a haunted ghost ship, Enterprise crew gets high and loses their shuttlecraft, and Enterprise crew does black-and-white film noir, so why not Enterprise crew does The Muppet Show?
One reason why not is that it's so much more absurd than anything else they've done, but it ... kind of works? And when it works it's mostly for non-puppet reasons?
Let's get into it.
See full post: "SNW 405: Level-Five Transporter Accident"...
Tagged
Star Trek,
TV,
Posted on August 20, 2026 at 9:29PM | Permalink | |
SNW 404: A Case of Chiaroscuro
You're looking a little ashen, Number One, are you feeling OK?
T
his week's episode of Strange New Worlds brings to mind this exchange from the 1967 Star Trek episode "The Squire of Gothos":
KIRK: You don't find this unexpected, Mister Spock?
SPOCK: That his food has no taste, his wine no flavor? No. It simply means that Trelane knows all of the Earth forms, but none of the substance.
Substitute "Myers/Goldsman" for "Trelane" and "Star Trek" for "Earth" and Spock would be accurately describing this fourth season (and the third) of SNW.
The latest episode is yet another gimmick-of-the-week installment that fumbled along through its runtime without actually delivering anything significant. The gimmick: Film noir. Sort of.
The entire episode is shot in black-and-white and the bulk of the story takes place on a Klingon-occupied subject planet that looks like Fritz Lang and Tim Burton designed it. It's also home to people who are not only for all intents and purposes humans, but humans with a 1940s sense of style. It's a Star Trek version of Casablanca, without the romance and with the doppelgänger plot of Hollow Triumph thrown in.
It could have done something interesting. I mean, our characters find themselves wrapped up with the resistance movement of a society under the thumb of an authoritarian occupying force—seems like there might be some good allegory to be had if a little thought were to be put into it. The film noir movies generally involve not just mysteries and capers, but characters navigating moral grey areas and hard-choice dilemmas; all of that is here, but only at a surface level—nothing resonates. Once again, the SNW writers' room thought the gimmick was enough, the underlying structure could just be phoned in.
Let's get into it.
See full post: "SNW 404: A Case of Chiaroscuro"...
Tagged
Star Trek,
TV,
Posted on August 17, 2026 at 8:51PM | Permalink | |
What a drag it is getting old
I've been thinking about aging recently. More than I usually do, I mean. Mostly that's because my dad, now 83, isn't doing very well in a number of ways, and when one is 83 and in not very good shape and has preexisting issues, one new event can beget a cascade of things getting worse.
He had a fall a couple weeks ago that broke his shoulder and required a relatively minor surgical procedure to put the bone back together, but it was a general anesthesia surgery and there is a thing I now know about called "postoperative delirium" that is common in elderly folk. The anesthesia can have a delayed effect of kind of scrambling your neurons, all the worse if you've already got some sort of cognitive decline issue. It's usually temporary, but, again, if one already has an issue it might just accelerate that.
Who knows. I certainly don't, I'm just learning about these things as they come up. Anyway, Dad's had trouble recuperating and is back in the hospital with balance issues, having fallen down a few more times, and with evident postoperative delirium. His memory's been wonky for a while now, but now he's being especially weird, according to my sources.
So there's that. He and Marty were up my way a little over a year ago, and that was the first time I had truly clocked how frail Dad had become, but he was still managing cognitively. Memory was a little suspect, but to a relatively minor degree. I went to visit them last fall and things were worse but still following a kind of expected track. With this latest series of events, "expected track" is just a meaningless phrase.
I may head down to see them ahead of schedule; I wasn't planning on it until October, but I may well move that up. We'll see.
Meanwhile, I, too, am getting older, but thankfully my issues are more on the "annoyance" end of the scale, at least so far. For instance, my sprained finger still hasn't completely healed. That's annoying. I now weigh 10 pounds more than I did 15 years ago and 40 more than what was locked into my brain as my normal mass from the time I was a teenager until at least my mid-thirties. I have a protruding midsection. Not like many Americans do (certainly many in my age cohort), I still have no trouble fastening my 30" waist jeans, but it nevertheless feels "not-me." My bad cholesterol is high despite not having eaten land meat since 1987 (for which I blame genetics—Mom was always rather slight and she had the same issue).
So to maybe address these things (not the sprained finger, but the rest) I've been making a point to be more active than I have been. I'm a long way from the days when I bicycled everywhere, and I've no illusions about doing that again, but I have been getting out either on the bike or on foot (or in a pinch using the indoor stationary bike) for an hour or more a few times a week. Generally, it feels pretty good.
Not today, though. Today I got a reminder of something that is not related to getting older, it's just a thing I've always dealt with—overexertion. I think this is related to my lower-than-normal blood pressure, which has been relatively constant for me, but again, I'm only semi-informed about such things. (I do know it's not a heart problem, as I had a doctor once order me one of those treadmill stress tests, which achieved making me overexert and barf all over the machine but also showed no cardiac issues while doing it.) Anyway, for as long as I can recall if I pushed myself beyond a certain threshold of exercise—usually while biking, but once on a hike up Tiger Mountain (on a date—that was embarrassing, and there was no next date) and a couple of times playing ultimate frisbee—I feel overheated, slightly dizzy, and eventually nauseous. The remedy is to lie down and breathe deeply until the heat escapes my head and functionality returns; sometimes there's also barfing.
Anyway, I went out around the neighborhood on the bicycle late this afternoon and, knowing I'm not in the kind of shape I used to be in, tried to keep to as flat a route as I could. This is greater Seattle, so nothing is going to be flat, but I intended to avoid more challenging hills. This was going OK until I found myself across the border to Edmonds and didn't know the best way back; before I knew it I'd committed to a stretch of downhill that I knew was going to be a problem. Then my available options all had inclines. I took a breather for a couple of minutes and opted to walk the bike up the shortest of the options, a steep one-block length that would get me back on relatively flat ground soonest.
It probably was the best option, but when I reached the top of the hill I had to lie down, just off the street in the dirt and dead grass near someone's front yard. After about ten minutes I was able to get up again, drink some water, and proceed on my way home, opting not to stop by the store on the way as originally planned. When I reached my garage and got off the bike, yep, dizziness and vomit. Didn't even make it inside first. The upside is that after the vomit stage, things get back to normal pretty fast, so I came inside, cleaned up my face, and watched the Mariners win for once and all is well.
Except I still have a protruding gut.
Tagged
Health,
Dad,
Aging,
Posted on August 15, 2026 at 10:15PM | Permalink | |
Zero to sixty in 0.1 seconds
Yesterday was another of the hated five-game umpiring shifts. It was also at one of the fields that has no shade. It also involved two of my least favorite teams to umpire. They both had doubleheaders. It was a recipe for a meltdown.
As meltdowns go, it was pretty tame; still, I'm not proud of my blowing up and I'm also not saying the players involved didn't deserve some shouting at. Mostly I point to it as a reason five-game shifts are generally not a good idea.
It wasn't really a big deal to start with. There is a notation in the rules of this league that if someone hits an over-the-fence home run, they don't have to run the bases, we just count the runs and move on. That's all well and good in theory, but in practice when there are already runners aboard they too just leave the field rather than come around to score. So in game four of the day, someone on this team I don't like very much hits one out with runners on and doesn't run the bases. Later on they belatedly complain that I have the score wrong, they say they have one more than my tally shows. We trace that to the aforementioned homer, which I tallied as a three-run shot and they claimed was a slam. I let them have the run, because this tends to happen: baserunners see the ball hit and just leave the field, while I watch the ball to make sure it clears the fence, then tally the runs, and if one or more runners is already in the dugout by that point they don't get counted.
I'm six hours-plus into the shift by this point, they're pissy, and I have no patience. "This is what happens when you choose not to run the bases," I say, loudly, in response to more bitching. "Someone leaves the field before they're counted! That's the risk you run!" This is misinterpreted, of course, as me telling them none of their runs-on-homers count and there's arguments about how that's not how it worked last time and it starts going in circles.
After the inning, I go to their dugout again to try and smooth things over and better explain, but instead three of the team's number double down on hostility. "Show me in the rulebook where it says we have to run the bases!" "You should just know how many runners are on all the time!" "None of the other umps ever take runs off the board because of this!" So instead of smoothing things over I shout back. "This is how you want to play it? I've been out here for 6½ hours, imagine how much patience I have for shit like this! Just don't leave the damn field before you're counted and there's no problem, you got it?!"
I considered going to the adjacent field and swapping games with the new guy who's working that field, but dismiss the thought as unprofessional and unfair to him. I stuck it out. One of the problem guys hit another home run later on and turned to me and pointed to the fence and said "that's a home run," condescending as he walked to the dugout. In their second game he was on base when someone else hit one out and did the same thing, and I said, "Dude, are you trying to get thrown out of the game? 'Cause I'll oblige you." He shut up and later came up to me and pretended he was only saying those things to make sure I had the run count right, which is undermined by the fact that he never mentioned the run count, but hey, he's trying to smooth things over in his own CYA kind of way and I just want the game to be fucking over, so I say fine, all good, play on.
There was also shouting and hostility about a play involving the infield fly rule. This same team was batting, runners at 1st and 2nd with no outs, and the batter popped one up. "Infield fly, batter's out!" The defense let the ball drop and the baserunners—not knowing the infield fly rule, apparently—try to advance and the defense—not knowing the infield fly rule, apparently—try to claim a double play because they threw the ball to first and stepped on it, thinking they got an out because the runner didn't tag up. "Not how it works," I said, and explained that all the infield fly rule means is that the batter is out and thus the runners aren't forced to move. That's all. Play is live, runners can do what they like, and tagging up would only apply if the ball had been caught. More yelling, more bitching, more overheard comments from the dugout about how I cheated them out of something. More of my patience worn away forever.
We also ran way late in the latter half of the day because of the other team I don't like to ump, who is incapable of starting on time or moving the game along at a normal pace, which is bad enough when they only have one game and is twice as bad when they play two. This is mostly because of one person, who is on the autism spectrum, but everyone who's been around a while knows that trying to rush them along is counter-productive because you risk a shouty delay of anger and sometimes crying. The opposing team, understandably, wants their whole time and doesn't want me to cut the game short because of the other side; I think that's a fair request, even though I would prefer to end the game on time anyway as a disincentive to that delaying team to keep pretending that it's fine to make things run late. So instead of wrapping things up at 7:30 like my colleague on the other field was, I still had half a game to go and wasn't done and leaving the field until nearly 8:30pm, tired, hungry, frustrated, sunburned, and a little upset with myself for losing my cool.
Wasn't entirely bad, though. The earlier portion of the day involved interactions with teams and players I do like, so for two games I had a good time. Third game was still OK. Wheels fell off after that.
I'm not on again until next Sunday as summer schedules are starting to wrap up, though I do have a message I've yet to answer about filling in for someone for one game tonight. Haven't decided yet. I can always use another $50, and it is just one, but I still have the headache from yesterday going. We'll see.
Tagged
Umping,
Softball,
Posted on August 10, 2026 at 4:42PM | Permalink | |
SNW 403: Human Best Friend
Does anyone know what I had tattooed on my face?
This week's episode of Strange New Worlds actually isn't terrible. Part of me does hate it, but it's the part that has been disappointed by the writing in so many streaming era and 21st century film installments of the Star Trek franchise; here we again have an episode that has little to no depth to it, another junk food meal of empty calories. On the other hand, I did find it entertaining despite my qualms. It's very much like last season's "Wedding Bell Blues" in that regard, though not as steeped in the series mythology and a whole lot more derivative.
Had I known in advance what they were going for with this one—it's a stoner comedy that borrows heavily from lowbrow films The Hangover and Harold & Kumar Go Wherever They Went; it could be titled "Dude, Where's My Shuttlecraft?"—expectations would have been lower than low given what came last season, in which case this post would be about how I was pleasantly surprised by the not-terribleness of it. But even though I kind of liked it, it does nothing to assuage my fears that the rest of the series is going to be frustrating. Especially knowing that both this season and the abbreviated next season was all either in production or the can before any of the flawed and troubling season three had aired (dropped? What is the proper terminology for the release of streaming internet TV?). I suspect that no one in this writers' room ever came to any realizations that last year had real problems before it was too late and all was completed. Thematic depth? Nah. Ethical quandaries? Meh, we might touch on them vaguely. Dumb humor? Oh, yeah, that's our jam, and if we can cheapen what comes later in the timeline, so much the better.
There is plenty of dumb humor and cheapening what comes later in this one, to be sure, but in large part—not entirely—I am choosing to overlook it because there's some fun to be had.
Let's get into it.
See full post: "SNW 403: Human Best Friend"...
Tagged
Star Trek,
TV,
Culture,
Posted on August 8, 2026 at 8:32PM | Permalink | |
Stuff other people said
A few quotes from other places on the interwebs before I head out for the evening...
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"It’s like hiring your divorce lawyer to become the marriage counselor for the entire country. And apparently his confirmation has come down to two departing Republican senators saying, ‘Look... we’re fine with most of the corruption. We just need this one piece of corruption to go away in writing.’"
—John Fugelsang, on the nomination of Todd Blanche for Attorney General being advanced out of committee in the Senate when Thom Tillis and John Cornyn accepted a meaningless written statement from Blanche saying there was no "slush find" for Felon47 to pay people off with.
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"The two senators are likely to puff out their chests and claim that they extracted a material concession. They held out, they made the White House sweat, they got it in writing. It is a tidy story, and every part of it that matters is wrong. They got nothing. Blanche gave up nothing. And the fund they think they killed is no less alive today than it was the day before Blanche put his name to that order."
—Harry Litman, on the same subject.
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"It’s just one more thing that the next Democratic president’s Secretary of Un-Fucking All That Shit is going to have to deal with."
—Jeff Tiedrich, on something that completely escaped my notice before today: Felon47’s further destruction of White House grounds to build a helipad, and then ordering the work to be redone because he didn't like the look of it, in another absurd waste of taxpayer money on a vanity project.
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"There are days when it genuinely feels almost masochistic to keep exposing ourselves to the relentless barrage of terrible news. At the same time, if we are members of a functioning society, we have to remain connected to what’s happening because that’s the only way we can respond in meaningful ways."
—Mary Trump, articulating why I and others continue to follow the news when it's so goddamn maddening and depressing.
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"The fascinating question isn’t just who the Republican nominee might be. It’s whether Donald will ever acknowledge that anyone else deserves to lead. I don’t believe he can. His identity depends entirely on convincing himself that he’s indispensable."
—Mary Trump again, responding to a question about whether Felon47 will support someone else running for the Republican nomination in 2028.
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"It reminds me of an old Star Trek episode. A historian attempts to stabilize a troubled planet by modeling it after Nazi Germany. Eventually he realizes what he’s created is monstrous and wants to stop it, but the people around him drug him, prop him up behind a microphone, and simply replay old recordings while pretending he’s still leading. As absurd as that sounds, I can imagine something similar happening with Donald. Whether it’s a fake Oval Office, carefully staged appearances, or simply limiting his public exposure, the people around him have every incentive to preserve the illusion for as long as possible because their own power depends on maintaining it."
—Mary Trump one more time, scratching the nerd itch while talking politics, responding to the idea that Felon47 is becoming a mere figurehead as his dementia worsens.
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"The American League Central is like its own pocket universe. You’ve got five flawed teams bouncing around like lottery balls in that glass ball."
—Joe Posnanski, writing about the just-passed Major League Baseball trade deadline and how that division is anyone's to win. Same could be said for the AL West, BTW, though there it's three underachieving teams instead of five.
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"I don’t think there was an Iranian cyberattack."
—Felon47, the alleged President of the United States, after being shown voluminous evidence that there has been a cyberattack across the infrastructure of multiple states by Iran. Rest easy, America.
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"They’re Bizarro-world spidermen, whose great power confers no responsibility."
—Cory Doctorow, on Google and credit card giants that enable fraud and, in Google's case, aid and abet fraudsters by purposely enshittifying their search algorithms.
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Finally, I give you the entirety of Andy Borowitz's latest bit of satire:
FRANKFORT, KENTUCKY (The Borowitz Report)—Calling the situation “unacceptable to the people of my state,” on Tuesday Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear demanded to know whether or not Senator Rand Paul was brain-dead.
“I have viewed disturbing video taken last week in the US Senate in which Senator Paul appears to be brain-dead,” Beshear told reporters. “As governor, I demand that he inform Kentuckians about his status—if, in fact, he is capable of human speech.”
Beshear said he became “alarmed” when he viewed the video, in which Paul exhibited “brain activity consistent with that of a coma patient or Tommy Tuberville.”
The governor’s announcement was only the latest controversy to embroil Paul, just days after shocking evidence emerged that he may have been created in a lab leak.
All for now. Gotta run.
Tagged
Politics,
President VonClownstick,
Baseball,
Posted on August 5, 2026 at 5:28PM | Permalink | |
SNW 402: The Griffin Incident
The latest episode of Strange New Worlds is another "genre of the week" installment, this time the genre is "horror flick." It's not the first time Star Trek has gone this route, exactly, but it is more overtly in-your-face in terms of horror tropes and scenes of mutilation. Generally, I am most definitely not a fan of such things, and while I don't exactly hate it here, it's not good, either.
Which isn't to say the episode itself isn't good taken as a whole. It's...well, it's hit-and-miss, like most SNW efforts. There are some semi-interesting character bits, and some things that may or may not move a season arc along, but once again we have a script that wouldn't have been deemed ready for production under Gene Coon or Ira Behr.
Let’s get into it (spoilers and very nerdy nitpicks ahead):
See full post: "SNW 402: The Griffin Incident"...
Tagged
Star Trek,
TV,
Posted on August 4, 2026 at 5:26PM | Permalink | |