Yes, Team Atene Beat members, he’s back! Everyone’s favorite inadvertent celebrity, Brian Atene, has returned to the YouTubes with his Star Trek themed tour de farce City on the Edge of Atene!
Click to view, IF YOU DARE! Goddammit, Jim, I’m a blogger, not a Nielsen family!
Stay gold, Atene. Stay gold.
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Yes, Stacy Keach is a man of many talents. You may be familiar with him as an actor; you may have heard of his charity work; you may know him from his colourful personal history, but are you aware that this veritable Renaissance Man is also a qualified Jedi Master Chef?
Indeed, in the crowded ranks of celebrity Jedi Chef wannabes, only a rare few make it through to the revered rank of Jedi Master Chef. The years of training, the discipline necessary to wield a lightsaber or boning knife equally with not only a straight face, but a threatening one, the dogged pursuit of the scoundrel known as “Santa Clause”, and the ability to instantly recall the correct method for preparing non-weepy custard, are accomplishments beyond the ability of all but a rare, ascetic few.
Undertaking the way of the Jedi Chef is the choice of those remarkable individuals whose paths wind through tangled underbrush, dark valleys, and science fiction conventions.
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So, I guess this makes it official: tribbles are a meme. First there was the immortal Star Trek episode (and I’m sorry, but there was only one Star Trek) The Trouble With Tribbles. Then there was the immortal Internet sensation LolTrek. Now, renowned Gothic humourist and illustrator Edward Gorey brings us The Gorey Trouble with Tribbles, as channeled by Shaenon.
Well, they’re a helluva lot more intellectual than lolcats, it must be said.
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A hoary old classic of the intertubes, but one which is repeat-worthy. My particular favorites are #15, #85, and #87. Yours?
The Top 100 Things I’d Do
If I Ever Became An Evil Overlord1. My Legions of Terror will have helmets with clear plexiglass visors, not face-concealing ones.
2. My ventilation ducts will be too small to crawl through.
3. My noble half-brother whose throne I usurped will be killed, not kept anonymously imprisoned in a forgotten cell of my dungeon.
4. Shooting is not too good for my enemies.
5. The artifact which is the source of my power will not be kept on the Mountain of Despair beyond the River of Fire guarded by the Dragons of Eternity. It will be in my safe-deposit box. The same applies to the object which is my one weakness.
6. I will not gloat over my enemies’ predicament before killing them.
7. When I’ve captured my adversary and he says, “Look, before you kill me, will you at least tell me what this is all about?” I’ll say, “No.” and shoot him. No, on second thought I’ll shoot him then say “No.”
8. After I kidnap the beautiful princess, we will be married immediately in a quiet civil ceremony, not a lavish spectacle in three weeks’ time during which the final phase of my plan will be carried out.
9. I will not include a self-destruct mechanism unless absolutely necessary. If it is necessary, it will not be a large red button labelled “Danger: Do Not Push”. The big red button marked “Do Not Push” will instead trigger a spray of bullets on anyone stupid enough to disregard it. Similarly, the ON/OFF switch will not clearly be labelled as such.
10. I will not interrogate my enemies in the inner sanctum — a small hotel well outside my borders will work just as well.
11. I will be secure in my superiority. Therefore, I will feel no need to prove it by leaving clues in the form of riddles or leaving my weaker enemies alive to show they pose no threat.
12. One of my advisors will be an average five-year-old child. Any flaws in my plan that he is able to spot will be corrected before implementation.
13. All slain enemies will be cremated, or at least have several rounds of ammunition emptied into them, not left for dead at the bottom of the cliff. The announcement of their deaths, as well as any accompanying celebration, will be deferred until after the aforementioned disposal.
14. The hero is not entitled to a last kiss, a last cigarette, or any other form of last request.
15. I will never employ any device with a digital countdown. If I find that such a device is absolutely unavoidable, I will set it to activate when the counter reaches 117 and the hero is just putting his plan into operation.
16. I will never utter the sentence “But before I kill you, there’s just one thing I want to know.”
17. When I employ people as advisors, I will occasionally listen to their advice.
18. I will not have a son. Although his laughably under-planned attempt to usurp power would easily fail, it would provide a fatal distraction at a crucial point in time.
19. I will not have a daughter. She would be as beautiful as she was evil, but one look at the hero’s rugged countenance and she’d betray her own father.
20. Despite its proven stress-relieving effect, I will not indulge in maniacal laughter. When so occupied, it’s too easy to miss unexpected developments that a more attentive individual could adjust to accordingly.
21. I will hire a talented fashion designer to create original uniforms for my Legions of Terror, as opposed to some cheap knock-offs that make them look like Nazi stormtroopers, Roman footsoldiers, or savage Mongol hordes. All were eventually defeated and I want my troops to have a more positive mind-set.
22. No matter how tempted I am with the prospect of unlimited power, I will not consume any energy field bigger than my head.
23. I will keep a special cache of low-tech weapons and train my troops in their use. That way — even if the heroes manage to neutralize my power generator and/or render the standard-issue energy weapons useless — my troops will not be overrun by a handful of savages armed with spears and rocks.
24. I will maintain a realistic assessment of my strengths and weaknesses. Even though this takes some of the fun out of the job, at least I will never utter the line “No, this cannot be! I AM INVINCIBLE!!!” (After that, death is usually instantaneous.)
25. No matter how well it would perform, I will never construct any sort of machinery which is completely indestructible except for one small and virtually inaccessible vulnerable spot.
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At last a twisted genius has applied some higher math skillz to the age-old question of just how deadly is the red Starfleet uniform?
Answer: pretty damn deadly.
Probability of a red-shirt casualty= 53%
14% of fights ended in a fatality (with a 72% chance the fatality wore a red shirt)
Probability of a red-shirt “incident” when Kirk has a “conquest” = 12%
Which leads to some truly fascinating conclusions:
As the data shows, Captain Kirk “making contact” with alien women has an impact on the crew’s survival. The red-shirt death rate is higher when a fight breaks out than when Kirk meets a woman and a fight breaks out. Yet the analysis shows that meeting Kirk meeting women only happens in 30% of the missions.
Conclusion:
We can reliably improve the survivability of the red-shirted crewmen by only exploring peaceful, female-only planets (android and alien females included).
I particularly love the Powerpoint presentation. Surely, surely, those wizened old Admirals would enjoy the slides as well, for getting in those needed snoozes. Yes, the whole intricate and elegant article on the morbid red shirt is really a stalking horse, to distract you from the fact that, like it or not, you’re reading a comparative analysis of bar graphs vs Powerpoint vs pie charts. It’s as if the anonymous Fellini of the flipchart from Ross Perot‘s campaign finally busted a nerdish nut and this is the offspring.
May he live long and, yes, prosper.
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raincoaster 