If only this were the main romantic pairing in the series.

A lot of ink has already being spilled about the juggernaut of a movie that opened this weekend — New Moon, the second installment in the Twilight series (or “saga” or whatever). And the column inches will continue to rack up, and believe it or not, I’m not unhappy about that. Sure, I find Twilight, its premise, and the vast majority of its characters offensive on a visceral level. But, as many critics are today noting, New Moon’s utter domination at the box office this weekend means that what the industry dismissed as woman-oriented “flukes” over the past year (Mamma Mia, Julie and Julia) possibly weren’t, and it’s not just hormonal young men who want to go to the movies (I’ll skip the Megan Fox invocation here).

Here’s what Melissa Silverstein at Women & Hollywood had to stay on the subject:

It seems to me that while Hollywood felt comfortable dismissing Sex and the City, Mamma Mia (because the audiences for those were primarily over 25), and even Twilight (as a one time wonder), there is no way that these numbers could be dismissed as a fluke.  THEY ARE JUST TOO BIG.  Women and girls are looking for material that they connect with just as much as guys and boys are, but they thing that blows me away about the success of New Moon and even The Blind Side [Sandra Bullock's new-benevolent-white-lady-saves-poor-black-kid movie -J] is that the theatres were just packed with women not caring if the guys came with them.  This was a weekend where the gals went in bunches and left the guys home cause they wanted to see this movie more than they wanted to see whatever their boyfriends or guyfriends wanted to see.

Frankly, despite my personal distaste for all things Twilight, I’m glad the movie did well. If Hollywood things women go to movies, then presumably more movies with women characters will be made. And while Twilight is full of feminist fail — a “heroine” who has no interests or hobbies beyond cooking dinner for her dad and being rescued by her undead paramour, for example — I’m going to take it as a baby step.

Let me be clear that if Twilight is your guilty pleasure, I won’t hold it against you. It’s OK to like bad things. We all do, from time to time. And I accept that the story, for some, is far more true-to-life in its emotional resonance. Read Molly Langmuir’s excellent post at This Recording:

Most of the teenage girls I knew at the time experienced some version of this story as well. But most of us also managed to eventually grow out of our teenage versions of romantic bliss (and move on to the version embedded within Jennifer Aniston vehicles, but that’s a whole other story). The movie makes no room for this reality, though, and simply goes about affirming my early conceptions of love with the delicacy of a chainsaw.

Let it be said that I tried to read Twilight; I even purchased a copy, back when I was hearing rumblings about how so many people loved it. Then I started reading and could NOT get through that damn books, because it’s so boring. Nothing happens in it. So I abandoned it in favour of reading Cleolinda Jones’s recaps. Cleolinda’s gotten a good amount of mainstream exposure recently, and deservedly so, because her work is hilarious. How she sums up the phenomenon:

Emo teenage girl moves to new town, meets mysterious boy, realizes he’s a sparkling vampire; Greatest Love of All Time Omg ensues. In later books, a love triangle forms with the addition of a werewolf. Babies are of paramount importance; going to college is not. Some readers rank the series up there with Pride and Prejudice and the works of Shakespeare; some readers… beg to differ. Severely.

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Let’s leave the world of massive media events and return to the humble burg of Winnipeg, where my activities this weekend, regrettably, did not include going to the annual Art from the Heart sale. My pal Mama Cutsworth was DJing the soirée, and I’ve always wanted to go. Thankfully, Ariel Gordon has  a recap of the event.

My own weekend activities were the following:

• Going to the Lo Pub on Friday night to celebrate a friend’s birthday; appreciating that even an onslaught of ridiculous hipster bands can’t cancel out the establishment’s inherent comfortableness.
• Playing mermaid toys and paper dolls with a bilingual three-year-old. (Click here for a photograph of the homemade mermaid paper dolls, which the young one took home and, according to her mother, who made the photo, is still enjoying
• Eating pizza and watching Star Trek on a big-screen TV with my brother
• Setting up my first ever personal Christmas tree. (A process that is, of now, incomplete; details and photos to follow.)

It’s been a Star Trek kind of day for me. Well, let’s face it, most days are Star Trek days for me, and have been since the early ’90s when I reached tweenage and, instead of being annoyed with my dad for watching Star Trek: The Next Generation on Friday nights, began to adopt this branch of sci-fi as one of my personal favourite escapes from reality.

The Trekness today began when I was surfing some music blogs in preparation for my radio show and visited what is arguably one of the best music blogs of all time, Said the Gramophone, and found this picture accompanying one of the posts:

As per the watermark, the image originates at another blog I follow: The Drex Files, written by Doug Drexler, an illustrator, designer, and visual effects artist who has worked on Star Trek stuff since the ’70s. His blog is a treasure trove of Trek-related trivia, memorabilia and miscellania, so it’s no surprise that he’d feature this rad photo of Leonard Nimoy in costume on the Paramount lot, leaning in a decidedly GQMF-style against a car of unknown vintage, make and model (it’s discussed, but not resolved, in the comments to the original Drex Files post).

Not an hour after this photo popped up on my screen did this video. It’s a fanvid created by starcrossedgirl that mashes up Original Series footage with Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit,” throwing in a little Alice in Wonderland footage for good measure. The hyperdramatic acting styles of Shatner and co. lend very well to this kind of “crack”-vid.

Watching Original Series footage of any kind, lately, makes my mind jump to another televisual love of mine, Mad Men. The celebrated period drama is currently set in 1963, three years before Star Trek first aired. But I can’t help contrasting the straight-laced lives of the Mad Men characters with the fantastical divergence of Star Trek. I wonder if modern audiences, both self-professed sci-fi fans and not, are more sanguine about the fantastic than mid-century audiences were. I mean, we’ve had 50 solid years of colour motion pictures telling sci-fi stories, showing us wildly alien aliens, strange new worlds and larger-than-life heroes and villans and, more recently, heroes who sometimes are also villains.

Not to mention the fact that science fiction has become science fact. My flip-up cell phone looks an awful lot like Captain Kirk’s communicator. And you can’t tell me that this:

(GE portable ultrasound machine)

Doesn’t look a lot like this:

(Dr. Beverly Crusher with medical tricorder)

That is all.

(Zoe Saldana and Chris Pine, a.k.a. Lt. Uhura and Capt. Kirk)