Star Trekkin'

Robbie, Thomas and I went to see the new Star Trek movie last night at the Alamo Downtown.

On a side note, I still don't see how (1) nobody else had ever thought of having a movie theater where you could enjoy real - and not overpriced - food and adult beverages during the show, and (2) while the Alamo was going about delivering this heretofore unrealized necessity of existence to the masses, regular movie theaters decided that they didn't suck quite enough, and therefore that you should have to sit through so many loud, big-screen commercials before your movie starts that by the time the opening credits roll, you just want to go home and have a Tylenol, or perhaps some heroin.

In my college days, I remember, the Dobie used to play artsy slideshows before the movie started. These consisted of photographs with meaningful words or phrases scratched onto them with a pin. OMG. SO 80's.

The Alamo plays features for you before the film starts, but the features are AWESOME. Like, last night, they played a montage of (probably not quite) every instance and configuration in which DeForrest Kelley delivered the "Dammit Jim, I'm a doctor, not a _______!" line, all back-to-back. And they played the "Star Trekkin'" video, which I highly recommend if you haven't seen it. They also ran the popularly acclaimed "worst fight scene ever made," from the Star Trek episode "Arena," where Kirk engages in hand-to-hand combat with a large rubber lizard creature wearing a leopardskin sheath in which Thomas suggested I'd look quite fetching (unless he actually meant the rubber lizard suit, I'm not sure). The fight scene leaves you wondering if perhaps the actors thought the studio would play the clip at double-speed when the episode was actually produced. And they played an Onion spot about how echt Trekkies were all bent out of shape because the new movie has good acting, special effects, and action sequences, and therefore has diluted the brand by appealing to the kind of people who don't even speak Klingon.

(Actually I can relate to that - it's why I don't like the new "Doctor Who." If you can't see the stagehands' feet scampering along beneath the advancing Daleks, what's the point? What's the point???)

And they played this.


Live long and prosper, dude!

Istanbul Was a Wafer Fabrication Facility

I'm sad that Sematech sold out, shut down, and shipped off to Albany. Doesn't that sound like a song? I should write a poem about it.

From November 1991 till September 2001 I worked there, so the place, as it was at the time, remains my ideal of what the corporate workplace is supposed to look like. Overall I had fairly few complaints. Just like with any place - Austin certainly springs to mind - as the years passed and the culture changed, I joined in the chorus of complaining about how things wasn't like they used to be.

Anyway, in late December 1991, I had been there a month and a half, and was (as I would be for nearly two more years - remember the "disposable workforce" of the 90s?) a temp. I attended my first company Christmas party. And the CEO and the whole executive staff opened the evening by coming out on stage in cleanroom suits, top hats, and canes, and singing a song about how Sematech was "Puttin' Out the Bits." I wish I remembered more lyrics than,

"Strolling through the shoeroom so happy,
In our bunny suits so white and flappy,
Very snappy!"

Totally random memory, but what a cool place to work, eh wot?

On the other hand, several years later, when one of the AV guys and I collaborated on a short video opening sequence for all-employee staff meetings, we ended up self-censoring all our best ideas, like having a Dalek-like trash receptacle exterminate someone who had left banana peels on the conference room floor, or getting the mailroom guy promoted to CEO for his exemplary pager use etiquette, or asking the COO to strut down the cleanroom hallway to "Stayin' Alive." And what we came up with instead - though I still have a copy of it on videotape! - was not nearly as cool.

Things just weren't like they was used to been.