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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)

Because the end of last week turned into a cavalcade of obligations that prevented me from doing my normal end-of-week blogging, here’s a video to start off the week.

Elyse Sewell was a finalist in the first cycle of America’s Next Top Model; to date, she’s pretty much the only ANTM alumna to pull off any sort of career in high fashion. Currently, Sewell lives in China, about which she blogs with erudite words and pictures at elysesewell.livejournal.com. If you don’t read it already, I recommend you do. She chronicles her adventures in dining, where she faces live octopus dishes with gustatory fearlessness, as well as her daily travails in “ladypose,” modeling outlandish outfits and in various ridiculous situations.

Today she posted this video, entitled “Shanghai Slice.” It’s typical for her in its fascination for and loving amusement with daily Chinese life.