Still Smiling

It's been a hectic week at work, which I pretty much expected going into it. But I'm still smiling about my birthday weekend, which - along with some (if I do say so myself) pretty darned good coding efforts has kept my spirits up through hump day today.

My birthday has felt special to me for years now. Along with Christmas, it's really the only day of the year about which I tend to get sentimental. I remember back my freshman year of college when my birthday fell just after I got back from winter break, and many of my fellow students weren't back yet. To "celebrate" I ordered two pizzas (I think a Domino's special) and ate both of them. Oof. (Wow, remember back when you were a teenager and could put away two pizzas without much trouble? I can barely imagine it now.)

What Christmas and my birthday have in common, for me, is that they're two days in the year in which I can just do nice things and be completely carefree for a day and not feel guilty about it or feel any pressure about it (even if someone tries to give me some). Christmas is a family holiday - spending time with my family and doing what we want. My birthday is for me, and I can have a party or just sit around and be mellow or whatever I want. It's a liberating feeling.

Throwing a party is a bunch of work, but it's always rewarding. It sounds like everyone had a fine time at my party this year. And I throw it because I want to, because the time and money spent is well worth it. Plus I get off on doing something like that and seeing everyone enjoying it.

And, of course, it's always nice to receive presents and to be able to spend a whole day enjoying them.

So it was a weekend which left me with a number of good memories. And don't we all need weekends like that?

I forgot to mention that on Sunday - my actual birthday - Debbi and I went out to my car to go to dinner, hit the garage door opener and... the door didn't open. Turns out one of the two lift springs had snapped, which - Debbi realized - explained the loud sound we'd heard earlier in the afternoon and couldn't locate. (We'd been sure it was one of the cats, but they were all upstairs asleep.)

This happened a few years ago, not long after I moved in, to the other spring. So we went to OSH and bought a replacement spring, and installed it, and had it all fixed up in less than half an hour.

Are we good, or what?

One of my birthday gifts was Star Trek season one, which I've been watching a few episodes of this week. It's a show I grew up with, and Kirk and Spock were boyhood fictional heroes of mine. It's taken nearly 40 years for it to show significant signs of wear to me, yet it holds up surprisingly well.

It's still a little eerie how its view of the future seems so prescient for its day: Everything's computerized, with voice access, even. Everyone had a cell phone. Miniature cards with flash memory are ubiquitous. Human voice synthesis is not quite routine, but is a solved problem for advanced computer techs like Spock. And many alien races have gone through the technological singularity and evolved into something us mere humans can't really understand.

Not to overlook the many anachronisms and moments of poor vision in the series (they can create a wheelchair which responds to human brain signals, but can't tie it in to their voice synthesizers?), even in the better episodes, but still.

I started off by watching "Court Martial", in which Kirk is tried for negligently causing the death of a crewman. It's a gimmick story - Spock figures out what really happened, and renders the courtroom theatrics moot - but it effectively illustrates the characters of Kirk and Spock. "Nothing is more important than my ship," says Kirk. And Spock dispassionately proves to his satisfaction that the facts of the case are actually wrong. The impassioned pleas of Kirk's lawyer seem naive yet touching, but overall it's still pretty good television.

As is "Arena", based on a famous short story by Frederic Brown. Kirk and the alien Gorn commander are forced to fight by the superhuman Metrons to resolve their differences, the loser's ship to be destroyed. Kirk demonstrates - again - that brains win out over brawn (though you'd think the Gorn could come up with a better tool than a knife; his people created starships, too) and that mercy is its own reward. But mostly it's an enjoyable pressure-cooker for Kirk, physically rather the psychologically this time.

Finally, there's "The Menagerie", the two-parter crafted out of Star Trek's original pilot, "The Cage". Former Enterprise captain Pike being crippled, Spock hijacks the starship and Pike to travel to the forbidden planet Talos IV. Forced by Kirk's suicidal pursuit of him to rescue his captain, Spock is put on trial, where Pike's experiences on Talos IV 13 years earlier are revealed. The framing sequence is cleverly staged, but becomes paper-thin once the "Cage" sequences begin. Fortunately, "The Cage" is one of the best Star Trek episodes ever, with angst (Pike was tired of command and wanted to retire), science fiction devices (telepathy and illusions), and motives within motives, with a tragic ending which was turned into a redemptive one by "The Menagerie". (And doesn't Jeffrey Hunter - playing the young Pike - make you think of a livelier Michael O'Hare from Babylon 5? Right down to the hair!)

I often wonder what Star Trek would have been like had the series been greenlighted from "The Cage". Probably very similar, albeit with different characters. But then, when you come down to it, it's the characters that made the show. Which is why none of the sequel series have come anywhere near equalling the quality of the original. I'll take it over any of 'em, warts and all.