star trek

Chris Knight's avatar

Senator Tom Coburn from Oklahoma has been digging into the details of the federal budget. Among the things our government is spending our money upon: inventing roll-up beef jerky, the study of goldfish swimming patterns and an iPhone app for scheduling coffee breaks.

And then there’s this: $100,000 of taxpayer money to look into the question of whether Jesus Christ died for the Klingon race. Yeah those ridge-headed alien warriors from the Star Trek franchise.

Incidentally, all of the above examples were found in the United States military’s budget.

From the story by Heather Clark at Christian News Network…

An Oklahoma senator has released a report outlining what he believes is some of the Pentagon’s most wasteful spending. Among a number of odd items includes a workshop on how Christianity would be affected if aliens were proven to exist.

Senator Tom Coburn is known to be the “waste-watcher”

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Chris Knight's avatar

Last night during Conan O’Brien’s show on TBS, J.J. Abrams was a guest and he brought along the very first bit of footage from Star Trek Into Darkness that Paramount allowed him to show the public!

Want to see? Here it is!

Star Trek Into Darkness, the sequel to 2009’s Star Trek, warps into theaters on May 17th 2013. Until then, this clip will have to tide us over for the next seven months....

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Forty-three years after it first aired on American television in 1968 as part of Star Trek‘s second season, “Patterns of Force”, the episode that had Kirk, Spock and the crew of the Enterprise looking for a Starfleet historian and finding an alien civilization modeled after Nazi Germany instead, will be broadcast for the first time tonight on public television in Germany.

Why hasn’t “Patterns of Force” been widely aired (it was made available as a pay-per-view episode previously) until now? The official reason is that later in the episode, the Nazi era is described as “the most efficient society” in Earth’s history. But widespread consensus is that the extreme hesitancy regarding “Patterns of Force” mostly has to do with what remains the shocking and startling image of James T. Kirk in an S.S. officer’s uniform (along with Spock’s similar attire, before being captured and tortured in the ...

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This is a momentous week for two of the greatest pop icons of our generation… or any generation. A few days ago William Shatner turned 80 and today his fellow Star Trek shipmate Leonard Nimoy gets to enter his ninth decade!

Shatner and Nimoy: the men who brought James T. Kirk and Mr. Spock to life. May they live long and prosper!

Hey, let’s celebrate with some music! How about Nimoy singing “Proud Mary”…

And who could ever forget (seriously, who can forget that this happened?) Shatner doing his cover of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”…

Truly going where no one has gone before 😛

Seriously though: Happy 80th Birthdays to Shatner and Nimoy!...

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Jay Rob took an old-school Star Trek phaser gun toy, cannibalized the innards of a Blu-ray player to get at the laser diode, and pulled off one of the kewlest hardhacks I’ve ever seen. The result: a phaser that seriously works!

Okay, it doesn’t actually disintegrate anything and there’s no “stun” setting… but Jay’s phaser is powerful enough to pop balloons from across the room.

Watch it in action…

And if you’re of the tinkerin’ sort, Jay has posted detailed instructions on how you can build your own “phaser”.

Great job Jay! Now, can you get to work on constructing a real working lightsaber? 🙂...

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Chris Knight's avatar

An expert at linguistics used nothing but the fictional Klingon language from the Star Trek franchise when he spoke to his son for the first three years of the kid’s life.

Dr. d’Armond Speers wanted to observe whether baby Alec would pick up Klingon as naturally as most babies learn English or any other real language. Speers was especially giddy about the prospect of Alec’s first word being “vav” (the Klingon term for “daddy”). Although Alec, now 13, doesn’t speak Klingon at all, at the time “He was definitely starting to learn it… When Alec spoke back to me in Klingon his pronunciation was excellent.”

This dude should have tried getting his son to speak fluent Sindarin or Quenya. Now that would have been impressive!...

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If you saw Star Trek over the summer then you’ll remember that stunning shot of the Enterprise rising out of the atmosphere of Saturn’s moon Titan. Diamond Sky Productions has just posted two VERY high-res images from that scene: one of the Enterprise‘s engine nacelles breaking through the clouds and a second of the Enterprise emerged in all her glory. The image at right is just a small preview of the entire picture. I’d already had a pic of Enterprise with the shuttles arriving as my desktop wallpaper for the past few months, but I’ve already changed it to this one. Dunno how long these’ll be up, so grab ’em while you can!...

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With Star Trek still going warp speed at the box office, it’s hard to grasp a time not long ago when the entire Star Trek brand had been written off by many people as a thing that had completely run its course. The previous few movies in the series had been severely lackluster and Star Trek: Enterprise failed to garner appreciable ratings on television.

Such was the state of Trek five years ago in 2004. And at the time J. Michael Straczynski (the creator of Babylon 5 and writer of the recent film The Changeling on top of many other terrific endeavors) and television producer/writer Bryce Zabel (The Crow: Stairway to Heaven, Dark Skies), recognizing the franchise’s foundering, conceived of an ambitious plan to “reboot” the entire shebang. A few years later Paramount handed Trek over to J.J. Abrams and Bad Robot. We already know how much ...

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The 10 p.m. show was sold out at the Wachovia IMAX in Raleigh. Thank goodness for Fandango!

And you still have a week to catch it in its limited IMAX run. However it is that you see Star Trek (click here for my review) I’ll definitely recommend watching it in a theater with others. The crowd was just as enthusiastic about Star Trek yesterday evening as they were on opening night a little over a week ago and we found ourselves catching stuff that we didn’t notice the first time around....

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