New Star Trek Pics

Paramount has released some new pictures from the forthcoming Star Trek 11.







I think there is no doubt the movie is going to look fantastic, but I'm still nervous about everything else. Especially when I read this new interview with director J.J. Abrams. Here is an excerpt that troubles me.

Plus, at heart, Abrams is still more of a Star Wars guy. ''All my smart friends liked Star Trek,'' he says. ''I preferred a more visceral experience.'' Which is exactly why he accepted Paramount's offer in 2005 to develop a new Trek flick; creatively, he was engaged by the possibility of a Star Trek movie ''that grabbed me the way Star Wars did.'' That meant a bigger budget and better special effects than any previous Trek film, plus freedom to reinvent the mythos as needed. ''We have worldwide aspirations and we need to broaden [Trek's] appeal,'' says Weston. ''Doing the half-assed version of this thing wasn't going to work.''

The best of Trek - "City on the Edge of Forever," "Devil in the Dark," "Amok Time" - was at its best precisely because it engaged the viewer's head. That was its appeal. Of course there were great action packed episodes, too, and The Wrath of Khan amongst the movies to give Trek some rousing excitement, but it was not the heart of the show. It was icing on the cake. The writers of the new movie claim to be fans of the original series, but if Abrams takes the new movie too far away from what made the series great in order to offer a more "visceral experience," then he is going to disappoint a lot of people.

Of course, maybe that's what he wants. After all, The Voyage Home (non-fans know it as "the one with the whales") is the largest grossing Trek film to date. Most fans of the show, including me, do not find it to be the best of the films because of the forced humor. But that humor helped it find a larger audience. If only the studios were more concerned with making quality films instead of films that make lots of money, but that's another rant.

Oh, and for the record, I am also a huge fan of Star Wars

Me No Spel Gud

The push to simplify our spelling seems to come up every few years and sure enough, it has reared its ugly head once more.

Most teachers expect to correct their students' spelling mistakes once in a while. But Ken Smith has had enough. The senior lecturer in criminology at Bucks New University in Buckinghamshire, England, sees so many misspellings in papers submitted by first-year students that he says we'd be better off letting the perpetrators off the hook and doing away with certain spelling rules altogether.

Good spellers, Smith says, should be able to go on writing as usual; those who find the current rules of English too hard to learn should have their spelling labeled variant, not wrong. Smith zeroes in on 10 candidates for variant spellings, culled from his students' most commonly misspelled (or mispelled, as Smith suggests) words. Among them are Febuary instead of February, twelth instead of twelfth and truely instead of truly — all words, he says, that involve confusion over silent letters. When students would ask why there's no e in truly, Smith didn't really have an answer. "I'd say, 'Well, I don't know. ... You've just got to drop it because people do,' " he says. Smith adds that when teachers correct spelling, they waste valuable time they could be spending on bigger ideas.

This notion always strikes me as ludicrous. Maybe it's because I'm an intellectual snob or maybe it's because I've never had trouble with spelling. Whatever it is, I can't see why we should reshape our language because some people have trouble spelling. What's next? Simplifying algebra because it has too many equations? Fewer countries on maps so there's not so many to learn?

If you are someone who has difficulty spelling, I'm sorry, but you should just have to deal with it. Get a dictionary. Practice. I'm sure you have talents that someone else who can spell really well does not. But the idea of changing large parts of our language for the people who struggle with it is ridiculous. Or just, plain dum.