Health Update & Pop Culture Ramblings

I want to sleep yesterday at about 8 PM -- told ya I was unreasonably tired! -- and slept for ten hours. (Which, yes, put me up a little after 6 AM, which isn't such a great thing, because I'm switching over to night shift after today, and the last thing I need is to be getting up earlier. But, ah, well.) I think I feel better, although I'm not really awake enough to tell. My stomach still feels very slightly unsettled, but I'm keeping my coffee down OK, and I think I'm good to go into work (alas).

But I've actually got a little time before work, for once, so I thought I'd go into some of those pop culture ramblings that I'm sure are the reason why you all really read this blog, and which have been sadly few and far between of late.

So, in my brief period of lying-on-the-couch last night, before it became sleeping-on-the-bed, I was watching Futurama. I've been going through the Season 4 discs, which is really quite a treat, because I missed a lot of those episodes the first time. That was about the point where Fox started airing them at random and without warning, and by the time Cartoon Network began airing them in a more sensible fashion, I was already on the road to pretty much giving up on TV entirely.

My all-time favorite episode is still the Star Trek parody, "Where No Fan Has Gone Before." Hysterically funny, a brilliant homage to its source material, and so, so, so clearly written by someone who was a massive fan himself. Indeed, the commentary track to that one is fun to listen to because -- with the exception of Matt Groening, who claims never to have seen a complete episode of TOS -- all those guys are apparently big ol' Trekkies. There appears to actually have been some competition and jealousy over who was going to get to work on that one. In fact, at one point producer David X. Cohen is accused of having "played it very close to the vest" as to who he was going to pick to write it, and somewhat sheepishly admits that that was because he was hoping to find some way of making the time to do it himself. But, that proving impossible, he gave it to the writer who was clearly the greatest Trekkie among them, and, man, does it show.

Said writer, by the way, pointed out a couple of Trek references that "nobody on the internet got" when he went and looked at fansites after the episode aired. In fact, he actually wrote to the maintainer of one and pointed out that they "missed a couple." Can I just say how much I love TV staff who interact with their fans? For the record, the references were: 1) Kirk's "The impossible has happened," which apparently was from the first log entry Kirk made in the series, and which slipped by me entirely, and 2) Kirk's "There's no right way to hit a woman," which I did get. It was from "Charlie X." In your face, internet!

I used to have a quote from that episode in my sig: "I am Melllvar, seer of the tapes, knower of the episodes! Tremble before my encyclopedic knowledge of Star Trek!" I'm thinking maybe I should bring it back, even if my knowledge isn't nearly as encyclopedic now as it once was.