Finals are over, graduation ceremony over. Dr. X (see 2 posts previous) sent me only one more tacky email, but now he is gone, turned in his keys, left Dodge for good. Summer school has fallen into place. The last big (all day long!) committee meeting has been survived. If you saw the movie "Airplane" and remember the lady that hanged herself because she was sitting by the guy that wouldn't shut up, you have some idea how I felt in that meeting. But, no more meetings until August. I hope.
Now to tackle all the stuff I delayed to do in the summer, including one last heroic effort on my textbook in progress. There seems to be ZERO textbooks in computer science education. I would like to increase that count to one.
I even treated myself to the new Star Trek movie. It was entertaining, but, gee whiz, why can't they find some writers who can do something original?? I don't mind that they brought back a previous bad guy, but a dramatic part of the script was plagiarized (at least in concept) from that earler movie, also. And that part really had nothing to do with the bad guy - they just used it anyway.
Speaking of scripts, I just re-watched last year's Star Trek and was reminded of this dramatic device called Red Matter. It's red, and it makes black holes. I can just see the script writers around a table trying to figure out how to imagine a technology to create black holes, and someone says "Let's just have some red stuff, and we don't have to explain how it works." And everyone says "Great! Except Red Matter sound better than Red Stuff". And there we are.
You say plagiarize, I say homage. I thought it was fairly Trekworthy but achieves new heights in silly. Abrams usually manages to work red balls or discs into his movies, although not usually so overtly. Note that the theatre I saw it in (the Warren in Moore) got blitzed by the tornado. They used it for triage.
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