Wed 25 Oct 2006
In this show:
* Radio technique and annoying television journalist voices.
* Jana hates Philip Adams.
* And a new Things that are Dumb.
Wed 25 Oct 2006
In this show:
* Radio technique and annoying television journalist voices.
* Jana hates Philip Adams.
* And a new Things that are Dumb.
October 25th, 2006 at 10:08 pm
TTAD: Futurology - excellent!
Here’s some trivia: The Mongol Emperor Genghis Khan (1162 - 1207) had a penchant for sleeping with any princesses and young noblewomen from the peoples conquered as his hordes passed through the Asian continent, sweeping from what is now China to Turkey. As a result he fathered an enormous number of children by all these women, and he now has the most direct descendants of any known person - well over a million already. That’s probably more likely to influence the average jaw shape than eating processed food…
And a masterly analysis of Star Trek moral values, but I have a caveat. You are looking at this 1960s show through young, modern eyes. It is a mark of how much the world has moved on since then that we now embrace what you say.
Bear in mind that Star Trek was originally made for US consumption, and everybody likes their values and prejudices confirmed so it is a creature of its time.
Also, when the show was first proposed the budget was incredibly small. The producers even wanted the director to use a cigar-shaped spaceship, as the Enterprise shaped model cost a bit more to make, for instance. That there was any budget in the first series at all for alien makeup is a plus!
Try looking at it through 1960’s eyes - people who were happy to say “Treacherous Japs!”, people reeling from the perceived Communist threat, terrified of the H bomb, the Cuba crisis, Kennedy assassinated, man was still only in the process of getting to the moon and the Vietnam war in full swing - and Star Trek looks remarkably culturally enlightened. Why, there’s even a “Communist-looking” Mr Sulu on board, and not just as a token, he’s sitting on the Bridge with the other officers!
The trouble then was that the show was incredibly successful worldwide. Hollywood doesn’t mess with success, so the original style of the show set the mould for all future Star Treks and its spin-offs.
October 26th, 2006 at 5:07 am
I don’t know this Phillip Adams guy and haven’t listened to the show yet, but a scanning of his webpage reveals someone who certainly sounds like an asshole (”a collector of rare antiquities”> and has made some very Engrish-sounding movies. “We of The Never Never”? “The Getting of Wisdom”? Personally, I want that last one put on a shirt.
October 26th, 2006 at 10:00 am
Ooh, ‘masterly’! How nice. Zebulon, you’re quite right about Star Trek being very much a product of its time - a time of Cold War military adventurism in strange countries, the space race, and hopes amongst socially liberal Americans for racial equality. (I always thought the mismatch between the level of enlightenment on racial and gender issues in the old shows was funny: Capt. Kirk and Co. would have strange aliens to tea on the Starship Enterprise, but the entirely male participants would be waited on by silent women in miniskirts.)
However, I think the continuation of that dated ideology isn’t just the result of sticking with a winning formula (although that’s clearly part of it). I think it’s also a result of popular understandings of these issues not having progressed very much since the 1960s. If these sorts of issues were widely understood in a different way today, then the makers of the show would have had to adjust to avoid criticism or ridicule. As I said in the show, I’m extremely hostile to the ‘colourblind society’ brand of racial tolerance, and one of its problems - perhaps its greatest - is that it’s an exercise in sweeping racial issues under the carpet. Because everyone pretends not to notice that racial difference is there, racial issues tend not to be discussed or debated, and anyone who actually mentions race is immediately branded racist by all the other people busy pretending not to notice it. This problem was most strongly brought home during the notorious Pauline Hanson furore in Australia, when one person suddenly found a forum from which to spout racially prejudiced views, and some people applauded her for having the guts to speak out in the face of political correctness. The colourblind approach allows ignorance and prejudice to fester because no-one openly discusses or debates these issues; it also means that a lot of people with the best intentions feel like they’re doing ‘the right thing’ without being part of a debate which highlights the problem with what they’re doing. Acknowledging difference is immediately branded racist, shutting down any discussion of why acknowledging difference can be very positive.
As far as Communist paranoia goes, Star Trek had to wait for the Borg to get what looks today like a Sci-Fi representation of anti-Communist paranoia: the hive-minded collective spreading through the universe, removing all individuality with ruthless efficiency. However, the baddies of the old shows were the Klingons, representing an older paranoia about the ‘yellow peril’, portraying Asians as a barbaric horde threatening to overrun the West. It should be remembered that, in the time of Stalin and just after, this representation of the USSR as a despotic ‘Asiatic empire’ was actually quite common.
Most interesting of all, the real-world Asian race the Klingons look to be most closely modelled on given their appearance is - you guessed it - the Mongols. Perhaps Gene Roddenberry subscribed to the Genghis Khan school of futurology.
October 26th, 2006 at 10:07 pm
Many years ago, long after the first series aired, I saw what must have been a rejected early pilot for Star Trek. In it, the bridge was very dark. Captain Kirk barked orders to the rest of the officers like he was on a navy ship in World War II, and they all snapped to attention when being addressed and saluted “Yessir!”. It was totally unlike any other Star Trek I’ve ever seen. Has anyone else seen this? I’d love to track it down and see it again.
Anyway, in 1981, a Financial Times journalist called Nico Colchester brought the idea of using the Mars Bar as a unit of currency to the world’s attention. A MArs Bar is made of a stable basket of commodities - sugar, chocolate, fuel, transport, marketing, retailing costs etc. - that has remained unchanged since the 1930s. You can use the price of the Mars Bar over time as an index to see how the values of other things change.
http://specials.ft.com/nicocolchester/FT3WNIFSEIC.html
For example, the cost of a Rolls Royce in 1940 was £1,100, which would have bought 204,000 Mars Bars at the time. A Rolls Royce now costs £175,000, which converts into 388,888 Mars Bars at today’s price. So, we can see at a glance that real the price of a Rolls Royce has nearly doubled.
When looking at repeats of the earliest series of Star Trek, apart from giggling over how young they look then vs. how old-looking, fat or dead they are now, as you pointed out it is surprising to note just how little the cultural formula has changed across the years. Perhaps one could use Star Trek in much the same way the unchanging Mars Bar can be used as a yardstick?
You would need to analyse all the series and spin-offs to work out the patronising strength of each episode compared against the date to derive a sort of cultural cosmological constant (CCC).
Perhaps a points system for each episode: 10 for the presence of mini-skirted aliens, 15 for insulting an alien race, 20 for ’solving an alien cultural problem’ and so on. It can’t be that hard to establish the CCC value - the CCC of Star Trek (ST) has drifted very little over time.
Knowing this constant, you could then express other long running TV shows as being e.g. “ST6,200 in 1990, but ST 3,150 now”, i.e. only half as patronising. I’m sure someone could get a PhD in Media Studies out of this.
Finally, as an aside, I’m sorry, but if I was the person writing the Pauline Lee Hanson story on Wikipedia I would have left out the “face of Donut King” bit. She isn’t obviously male or fat, and from an audience viewpoint this makes her character very difficult to connect with…
October 27th, 2006 at 2:56 am
Well, Star Trek did attempt to deal with racism in the episode Let That be Your Last Battlefield in which aliens with black on one side of their face and white on the other have a race war with another race (of the same species) who is their mirror image. Interestingly, according to Wikipedia: “There is some evidence that this script evolved from [an] unfilmed first season script A Portrait in Black and White. . . . and would have featured Uhura and McCoy trapped on a planet where white people were slaves and black people were the masters.”
October 27th, 2006 at 11:46 pm
Hah… enjoying your banter about radio. I used to do that for (nowhere near) a living. Every once in a while I’ll break into very exaggerated ad-libbed patter for humorous effect amongst friends/family. Maybe I’ll Skype you and throw some in one of these days.
—
“We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future.” - Criswell, Plan Nine From Outer Space
I think one of the Disney parks here in the states has put some of their previous World Of Tomorrow displays back on display. It’s pretty hilarious to see the goofball predicted designs from decades past, esp. now that the year they were aiming for in the display has passed.
My fear of the future is that we all will end up wearing single-piece jumpsuits adorned with gold stripes, belts etc. We may all be forced to wear wacky necklaces, wrist bands and wrist computers.
As you guys are sort of getting at… the only way a lot of changes will take place is if death or reproduction is determined by a trait or mutation. Otherwise, for example, we’ll never get a race of people who are much better at trivia games unless we start killing losers at Trivial Pursuit… and doing so over thousands and/or millions of years. Duhhhhhhh! How hard is that for so many people to comprehend? (Of course purely by accident or cataclysm some traits or abilities could be wiped out or added into the mix… but you obviously understand.)
Ahhh Star Trek, topic of endless conversation in college dorms the world over.
The production crew behind the recent reincarnation of Doctor Who were laughing at the fact that budget restrictions at the BBC used to mean that the majority of other planets out there looked like quarries!
Right now, lots of sci-fi shows are produced in Canada as it is cheaper to do so. I like to joke that on Stargate they will finally come to the conclusion after a few more seasons how peculiar it is that all other worlds look like Vancouver. (X-Files did similar things… Vancouver passed for every city in the world)
Yeah, the presence of Asian, black aliens was always explained so clumsily on Trek.
You’ve figured it out! In the future, the whole world will be American!! It is a plot that we’ve kept a secret but now that you know, you will have to be eliminated.
Soon you too will be marched to a camp to become American! First stop, accent erasure!! Then after that you will be re-educated. You will KNEEL BEFORE OPRAH!!
Of course if there was another nation as prodigious of sci-fi programming as the U.S.A., I’m sure we’d see future/sci-fi with a much more contrasting slant to what we see now. (hah… A few minutes after I wrote this you made that exact point. Get out of my brain!)
Great topic, you two!
I really enjoy how “of the time” sci-fi programs/movies are over the last century. It’s just great to pick apart the ideologies, intentional or otherwise. (Well for me anyway. My major in collij was Media Studies)
I’m really enjoying the new Battlestar Galactica for the occasional injections of contrasts/reversals/similarities to modern cultures and ideologies. This season has been especially reflective of contemperary dilemnas (Iraq, Guantanomo Bay, Israel & Palestine, monotheism vs. polytheism etc.).
As far as world travel goes, I am frustrated when I go somewhere and find out how homogenized culture and commerce has become… even just over short increments of time… There is less uniqueness to many places with each passing year. Sort of sad. Blame Starbucks and McDonalds etc.
Oooooh! A Halloween show!! Will you guys be in costume as you record?
Thanks for another great conversation.
October 28th, 2006 at 4:12 am
Loved Jana’s rant on boring or annoying radio people. College radio is only real radio I really listen to anymore, and I thought StrongBad from Homestar Runner perfectly summed up college radio in five words: “Dead air, uhhhhh, dead air.” It takes a lot more to be a good podcaster than it takes to be a good DJ. On the radio, you can play a bunch of music, and talk only when you feel like it. In podcasting, you don’t get to take those kinds of breaks. So it’s amazing how truly awful some DJs have to be to sound bad even with CDs there to rescue them.
I love revisiting our futures of the past. Especially like Kevbo said, the 1950’s World of Tomorrow version. But Kevbo, are you thinking of Disney’s Carousel of Progress? I couldn’t remember the name of it either. I still want to live in a house that’s the 1950’s version of the future: All pointlessly curvy furniture, robot butlers, telephone controlled washing-machines, and most importantly, audio-animatronic family members.
Plus, from the Jetsons we know that it’s okay to pollute our air and water until it’s unliveable, because we can just build houses on very tall stilts above the smog. So I think we do have some things to learn from those old TV shows. We can, and should, pollute and produce tons of garbage, because that will spark new innovations in architecture and transportation. Although, if I was in Melbourne, I’d be wondering where the Jetsons got all their water from. Perhaps they harvest it from rainclouds. Maybe it’s piped up those tall stilts from huge underground wells. Or maybe they just recycle human and animal urine. Who knows?
I find the evolution theories put forth by that economist completely implausible. You can tell he’s not an expert. It’s like he never even stopped to consider the impact of human-animal hybrids, which, I’ve been told, are not far off, and their human/human-animal hybrid offspring. The President told us they are coming in his State of the Union Address. Surely this will result in some beaked humans with gecko feet, at least.
You should post a picture of the genetically inferior humans from 100,000 A.D. The description sounded hilarious, but I can’t find the article online.
October 28th, 2006 at 2:55 pm
Dear Zan and Jana,
I’m sorry, but I have to disagree on practically every Star Trek-related statement in the last show, and especially about how the future is dumb.
It probably isn’t worth my time or yours to address Zan’s opinions point-by-point, but I have to say, I love your show, and I think if we ever visit Melbourne again, my wife and I would love to buy you both a beer or two, and have a nice time getting to know each other.
So many of the points seem utterly wrong. I don’t know what’s more disturbing to me, the Star-Trek-as-American-Liberalism idea, or the Our-Future-Sucks idea. Probably the latter. I believe deeply in the promise of the future, and Gene Roddenberry’s idealistic, utopian view may only be a showbiz, Hollywood, comfortable illusion, but it is so much more hopeful than what the nightly news would have us believe.
I’ll say just a few things about Star Trek. I’m a big fan, especially of the modern versions, but not so much that I can list the episodes or anything. I’ve thought of a bunch of comebacks to Zan’s criticisms. I think the original series was as close as 60’s American TV came to combining entertainment and social commentary. Tvindy made a good point about the episode “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield.” In response to Zan’s complaint that every new species was just a variation of a human with a new rubber appliance glued to their head, I have to point out, “Devil In The Dark,” (I hope that’s the name) where a silicon-based, rock-like being was being persecuted, hunted, and its eggs stolen by humanoid miners, thinking the creature was a killer and the eggs were unrelated, pearl-like valuables. It was a morality play about judgement of things we don’t understand, and the aliens were truly alien, and “we” (humanoids) learned an important lesson, rather than imposing our values on others.
If we were to include the later series, some life forms were crystalline, considered us a grave threat worthy of killing, and referred to humanoids as, “big ugly bags of mostly water.”
But beyond all that, an optimistic view of the future may be all that might save the world today. I truly believe that Gene R’s main message was about the best in humanity, even through his late-60s, admittedly-American lens. I also deeply believe that this notion transcended American Liberalism, and touched a possibility deep within everyone on the planet.
Beyond Star Trek (and again, so much more depth came from the less-campy Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager (a female Captain, Zan, not just a waitress!), and Enterprise. Keep in mind that the latter was humanity’s first, faltering steps into the interstellar community. And yes, they were bitter about the way the Vulcans held humanity back for a century, in the same way an adolescent will rebel against a controlling parent. Remember that the most powerful beings in the universe, the Q, feared humanity’s drive to learn, experience, and expand our horizons in a way they had lost.
Oops, OK, *beyond* Star Trek. The future. If we all give up on the future, there truly will be no future worth living. I write a blog under my real name, and I’m working on an unusual essay about how it’s a good thing that time passes, and generations pass on. My grandmother, bless her heart, was a product of her time, and believed that “colored people were naturally inferior–it wasn’t their fault, it’s just the way God made them.” I loved her as my Gramma, but in a sad way, it was good that her generation left the Earth, and took their bigotry with them. It is the way of things. Much of the current older generation has a similar blind spot with homosexuals, who also deserve equal rights as everyone, in my opinion. Not pedophiles, which the media tend to lump in with gays, but loving, law-abiding, same-sex couples deserve every right to marriage and union as I.
I have a daughter and grandchildren, and I can’t believe there isn’t something better we can make of the mess we’ve all created. You both will soon have a vested interest in the future being better than it looks. Believe me, it changes your world in more ways than you can imagine. I’m going to bury my worst fear about you two in this long paragraph–if I were you, I’d be too exhausted and busy to even think of podcasting once a new baby arrives. It’s something that you can never comprehend until it happens to you. The future is ever elastic, and only what we believe it can be and what we make it.
Again, I’m sorry for the out-of-character serious tone, but many things about TTAD just landed 180 degrees out-of-phase with things that feel self-evident to me. You two are my #1 favorite couple to listen to (even though Jana prefers brown penises, and mine is, well, more pink, which she dislikes–hey Zan, you’re not aboriginal, are you?). OK, seriously, you both are terrific, entertaining, and a joy to listen to. As I said in the beginning, I thing you two and Mrs. Vibeeen and I would make great friends. But I needed to say something, contrary I guess, about last week’s TTAD.
Sincerely,
Vibeeen
October 28th, 2006 at 3:27 pm
“Disney’s Carousel of Progress”
That must be it…
It was much more well received by the public than the Whirling Lazy Susan Of Existential Apocalypse.
October 29th, 2006 at 3:25 am
Like Vibeeen, I was compelled to respond to so many of the points raised in this episode that I ended up calling in and leaving three horrendously long voicemails before finally forcing myself to stop. I haven’t yet heard the Halloween episode, so I don’t know if they were played, but I did have one final point to make in my defense of Babylon Five. Check out The Deconstruction of Falling Stars, which is the last episode of season 4. It shows events that will happen 100, 500, 1000, and 1000000 years after the time in which the series takes place. Most notably, after 500 years a stupid nuclear war on Earth blows humanity back to the Stone Age and cuts it off from contact with alien civilizations for hundreds of years. The aliens go about their business and continue to progress while steering clear of pathetic and useless Earth. 500 years after that, the Rangers are trying to gradually sneak in more advanced technology to jumpstart a recovery. One of the goals at that point is trying to stimulate Earthlings to reinvent the internal combustion engine. My point in bringing up this episode is to demonstrate that Zan is wrong when he states that Babylon Five portrays humans as superior to the other alien races. In many ways, humanity is shown to be quite pathetic.
October 29th, 2006 at 12:02 pm
Vibeeen, you certainly have been treated badly by BYU - Jana even insulted your penis, which must be hard for any man to take. I certainly don’t object to having people strongly disagree with things I say, least of all in a Things that are Dumb segment, whose whole point is to rant in an extreme way about a contentious topic.
However, on the topic of the future in general, I think you may have taken some of what I said the wrong way. Comments like ‘I can’t believe there isn’t something better we can make of the mess we’ve all created’ suggest to me that you understood me as painting a negative view of what lies ahead of us all, a misapprehension I probably invited with the title ‘The Future is Dumb’. As Zebulon noted, ‘Futurology is Dumb’ probably would have been more accurate: as I said at the beginning of the segment, ‘the future’ is really a figment of our imaginations, the result of attempts to hypothesise about what will happen, and it’s these imaginings I argued tended to be dumb, not the actual truth of what might happen one day (which may, or may not, be dumb, for all I know about it).
I haven’t listened to Tvindy’s voicemail yet (we’ll get to it next week), but I’m certainly not surprised at people taking offense at my diatribe about Star Trek et al., given the loyal following these shows have. I’m no expert on them, and I’m sure there are dozens of specific examples from these shows which undercut what I said, but I still maintain my basic point and don’t think anything raised in opposition actually undermines my argument.
Firstly, Vibeeen, I completely agree that it’s a good thing that time passes and things change. My central criticism of the way in which Star Trek and similar imagine the future is that, because they result from people in the present projecting themselves into the future, the future tends to just repeat and reinforce the beliefs and assumptions of the present and doesn’t actually show anything fundamentally different, for all the space ships and aliens and so on. In other words, if your Gramma had written episodes of the show, they would presumably depict a future when it was accepted that black people were inferior, because that’s something she believed to be objectively true and so not available for review.
Certainly the original Star Trek can be commended for its progressive racial views; while it wasn’t actually saying anything new, it was putting forward a perspective that not everyone at the time agreed with. However, that was quite some time ago, and subsequent incarnations of the show certainly haven’t put forward anything challenging or progressive in terms of social views, as far as I can see.
OK, so Star Trek has depicted alien life forms which are completely different from boring old carbon-based life, but (without having seen these episodes in my limited viewing) I find it hard to believe that the way these creatures lived provided a possible critique of or alternative to the values depicted as desirable by the show (I understand that the treatment of these creatures might have illustrated ways of behaving which the show’s values consider undesirable, but that’s a very different thing). What I’m talking about is a set of values which could be valued and respected as a genuinely alternative way of life, not some lesser version of the values espoused as ‘human’ by the show.
This idea of ‘human’ values is what underpins my fundamental objection to the show. I know using the term ‘liberal’ has a very specific set of associations for an American listener, but more than the specific meaning usually attributed to the term in the USA, I was referring to liberal humanism, the set of western values which underpin the political philosophy of pretty much all mainstream western thought (including what you’d call conservative in opposition to liberal). There’s plenty that’s good about liberal humanism, but it’s not a universal human belief, rather arising largely in 18th century Europe, providing the philosophical underpinning of such important events as the American War of Independence (even if the more pragmatic motivation for that war was more economic than philosophical).
You talk about ‘humanity’s drive to learn, experience, and expand our horizons’ and, more than anything, it’s this view of humanity which underpins the smug sense of superiority which these kinds of shows sell us, and which itself comes from humanism. Let me say a few things about human beings’ supposedly natural drive to explore and invent, which shows like this portray as the innate gift which destines us for greatness.
The title sequence of Enterprise sets up a narrative of humanity’s eternal drive to explore throughout history. (Incidentally, what I find gob-smacking about this sequence is how selective it is. Only American space heroes are depicted, as far as I can see; Yuri Gregarin, the first man in space and therefore surely the greatest space hero of all, is written out of this history, presumably because he was a dirty commie.) The fact is, human beings don’t have an innate drive to gratuitously invent new things and explore new territories. For the vast majority of history the vast majority of the human race has simply maintained its traditions and existing ways of life, occasionally innovating or moving into new territories to solve particular problems such as competition for resources. The idea of exploring for no other reason than to see what was out there (best encapsulated in New Zealander Edmund Hillary’s motivation to climb Mt. Everest ‘because it was there’), or the idea that scientific invention was a self-sustaining and unstoppable fact of life really only gained currency in the 19th century, sustained by a belief that it was human destiny to map, measure, tame, subjugate and exploit the natural world.
This idea was a product of the golden age of colonialism and imperialism, making the constant quest for new resources to exploit and new territories to conquer the result of natural human curiosity. Any other cultures which - like most people for most of history - weren’t engaged in this project, but rather maintained their traditional relationship with the world around them, maintaining a stable, non-expansionist way of living, were considered uncivilised and a lower form of human life which would have to either take on these new values or be erased by the march of history (as an American, I’m sure you’re familiar with the concept of ‘manifest destiny’ which encapsulates precisely this idea. Australia was colonised with the same justification, associated with the term ‘Terra Nullius’ or ‘empty land’; that is, if no-one in a place was exhibiting the drive to tame and make use of the world around them, then the land was effectively uninhabited, and colonists could help themselves to it, even if there were already people there).
Of course, people explored the world before the 19th century, but they weren’t kidding themselves that they were doing it in the service of an innate human curiosity. Christopher Columbus’s famous voyage was motivated by economic factors, and the conquistadores certainly didn’t set off for the New World just to see what was there and then come home. The US space programme was a kind of proxy war fought against the Soviet Union after the Soviets humiliated American science by putting the first man-made satellite, and then the first man, into orbit around the Earth. Although Werner von Braun, the father of the US space programme, had always wanted to build rockets which would go into space, most of his progress in rocket building had been directed towards creating weapons the Nazis could use to murder civilians - again, these things don’t just happen because of some morally neutral and innate ‘human drive to expand our horizons’. Of course, once the Cold War was over, NASA continued to enthusiastically hawk this idea of human destiny because there was no longer any pragmatic reason for the US government to fund it. Yuri Gregarin became a celebrity and national hero, but, in addition, I’m sure the Soviet news media largely depicted this historical milestone as illustrating the value of harmonious co-operation amongst people who each make a contribution based on their particular skills, rather than seeing the conquest of space in terms of individual curiosity and competition as the US media would.
Labeling certain kinds of values as simply ‘human’ and erasing their history tends to both perpetuate the kind of thinking they’ve justified in the past (although once ‘America’ becomes ‘humanity’, of course, the inferior other cultures become ‘aliens’), and it also it works against the kind of movements in history you talk about being valuable. That is, if a certain, culturally and historically specific way of thinking is believed to be an innate part of being human, then it isn’t available for review, because it’s considered to be natural and inevitable, and we believe that, in a thousand year’s time, our society will be fundamentally the same as it is now. Whether it features silicone-based life or not, Star Trek has never, to my knowledge, ever suggested anything other than that the liberal humanist values of its creators are the perfect and ultimately inevitable human outlook, and, furthermore, that all other values are inferior to them. All other cultures have something to learn from those who hold these values, while those who hold these values have nothing to learn from other cultures. If anyone has an example of a Star Trek scenario which disproves me on this, I’d be happy to hear it - after all, I’m a long way from having seen every Star Trek episode. If not, then I’ll maintain my position (while at the same time, of course, enjoying and respecting the differing opinions of all BYU listeners).
October 29th, 2006 at 3:42 pm
Man, am I glad I’ve never seen a Star Trek episode. It might have poisoned me, or at least made my head explode.
October 29th, 2006 at 4:24 pm
Hi Zan,
Wow! I’m going to have to read your reply several times to get all its meaning. I do want to apologize for the penis reference. I’m not sure if I offended with it, or if you were speaking tongue-in-cheek, but… well, stupidly, I was pretty drunk at the time. I won’t do that again, no matter how important I think it is to speak up!
I also hope I didn’t offend by asking if you are of aboriginal descent, since you don’t seem to have answered (honestly, I only scanned the last 25% of your reply so far). I know “abbo” is considered a racist label, so I avoided it, and I asked the question in earnest. Between Jana’s “brown penis” remark, and her fanatasy threesome with three clones of a handsome black actor, and her obvious love for you, I just wondered. You once called my hypothetical polyamory question “confrontational,” which here connotes aggressive, combative intent. I re-interpreted your remark to mean “cheeky,” or “forward,” but now I wonder if I crossed a line. If so, please accept my apologies.
I will re-read your reply in the morning (it’s 1:19AM Sunday right now, and the second 1:19AM of the night), and if I think I can extend the conversation meaningfully, I’ll respond.
Sincerely,
-Vibeeen
October 29th, 2006 at 4:49 pm
Vibeeen, by all means do that, but in the meantime, accept my reassurance that I’m not at all offended, and only being light-hearted. I can see that you’re worried about causing offence, but there’s nothing wrong with healthy disagreement - you don’t need to sound apologetic about not sharing my point of view on anything, and I enjoy the debate.
And no, I’m not Aboriginal (not that there’s anything wrong with that, as Jerry Seinfeld would say).
October 29th, 2006 at 5:54 pm
And no, Ryan, Star Trek isn’t that bad. It’s only responsible for about 25% of the world’s problems. Reality TV accounts for the other 75%.
October 29th, 2006 at 6:09 pm
Vibeen, don’t worry! We love you. It’s good for Zan to be disagreed with so eloquently, it keeps him humble.
Love Jana
October 29th, 2006 at 10:52 pm
Zan & Jana,
Thank you very much for your reassuring notes. I’m glad my unedited candor didn’t offend. I’m relieved, and reminded that you two are a very cool couple.
Sincerely,
-V
October 30th, 2006 at 2:45 am
One of the things I really like about Bob’s Yer Uncle! is how open it is to intelligent debate. I love being able to call in with voicemails that occasionally disagree with or even criticize aspects of the show and know that Zan and Jana won’t take offence. And I particularly like it when Zan occasionally criticizes my remarks on the air.
As far as Star Trek is concerned, I have the advantage of having viewed every episode of every series (usually several times) and seeing all the movies. (I’ve never read the novels, though.)
I agree with a lot of what you said, and one problem with Star Trek is that so many stories were generated over four decades with different writers espousing different world views. Arguing about the overall message of Star Trek is nearly as hard as looking for consistency in the bible.
One thing that I think really needs to be considered here is the Prime Directive, which was fairly vague in the original Kirk series, but by the Next Generation it became much more well defined and comes about as close to the opposite of colonialism as you can get.
Basically, the Prime Directive states that members of the Federation are prohibited from interferring in the affairs of less technologically advanced sentient species. This means they cannot make contact with them, which would reveal the existence of extraterrestrial life in the galaxy, since that revelation would probably have a huge (and possibly disasterous) impact on their cultural and religious beliefs (as it would on ours, no doubt). Furthermore, the Prime Directive prohibits introducing new technologies, new ideas or rendering humanitarian aid in any way. All the Federation can do is observe. In fact, Starfleet officers are expected to die rather than reveal that they come from outer space. The term “less advanced” is defined to mean that a society has not yet invented the warp drive. Once they can travel at warp, their society may not be ready for contact, but since it’s unavoidable, the Federation tries to contact them before their first voyage to give them an orientation and presumably warn them to steer clear of such hazards as klingons and massive cubes.
This ideology is unlike anything in Western history. Even modern anthropologists don’t try to hide their origins or advanced technology. Imagine if Columbus had set sail for the New World with a crew of European scientists. The ships are anchored several miles offshore out of site of indigenous eyes. Late at night a team of explorers is rowed to shore wearing only furs of local animals and carrying no tools or weapons. They are left there alone for several months with the intent of learning all they can about the local people. In the process, some of the Europeans are killed. The studies go on for many years. Only highly trained European scientists are allowed to make the trip to the New World. Centuries later, when one tribe begins perfecting the construction of large oceangoing vessels, a delegation is sent from Europe to make official contact and tell the tribe about Europe, its technology, and the other continents of the world, so that the people of the tribe can make an informed decision before their first great voyage as to whether or not they want to be part of the greater world. They have the option of saying no and even asking for all European observers to permanently withdraw from the Americas. Things went a bit differently in Western history, but that’s how it would have been handled on Star Trek.
October 30th, 2006 at 7:54 am
Nicely put, Tvindy. Your analogy of First Contacts past and future makes a good point about Star Trek’s value system. In this regard at least, it isn’t based on current or historical values, American or otherwise. Instead, it offers a hopeful future, born of searching for and nurturing every individual’s highest expression (similar to Maslow’s concept of self-actualization or Kohlberg’s theory of ethical development, the highest stage of which is operating on Universal Ethical Principles), in which all of humanity might learn to overcome our inborn, ego-centric, destructive tendencies and live as one.
“Imagine there’s no countries/It isn’t hard to do…” (Oh, sorry… I got carried away there…)
Zan, you make a very educated, well-thought-out argument. I’ve managed to understand a bit more each time I’ve read it. I probably will read it some more and respond in more detail. In the meantime, two quick points: You are right about the “Enterprise” intro, and I’m surprised. I could have sworn there was a shot of Yuri Gagarin in there, but there isn’t–the astronauts are all American.
Second:
Whether it features silicone-based life or not, Star Trek has never, to my knowledge, ever suggested anything other than that the liberal humanist values of its creators are the perfect and ultimately inevitable human outlook, and, furthermore, that all other values are inferior to them.
I would suggest that Vulcans do not toe the liberal humanist line, rather they actively suppress the “human” part of their selves. Unlike our planet, theirs is a matriarchy, and for all their high-mindedness, their mating biology turns them into killers, and their mating rituals institutionalize this brutal, violent aspect. And still, “Enterprise”-era adolescent rebellion aside, I’d say that modern and future humans consider Vulcans superior to humans.
-V
October 30th, 2006 at 8:28 pm
Tvindy, if you’ve seen every episode, did you see the pilot-like show for the first series I described in my comment (No 4) above? It was militaristic all the way through. If so, do you have any info on it, please, like e.g. the title?
October 31st, 2006 at 1:16 am
Hi Zebulon,
Until Tvindy checks in, I can add a bit here. There were two original pilots, neither of which were as you describe. However, there was an episode called, “Mirror, Mirror,” in which Kirk, McCoy, and Uhuru, during a transporter glitch, switch places with their counterparts from a parallel universe. That place is militaristic, cutthroat, and anarchic (but not anarcho-syndicalist… if you’re a Python fan). Parallel Chekov, for instance, is caught trying to assassinate (our) Kirk. When our Kirk refuses to wipe out a parallel planet and take their dilithium crystals (four out of five starships can’t tell them from regular dilithium… if you’ve ever seen Folger’s coffee ads), parallel Spock is ordered by the parallel fleet command to kill Kirk and become the new captain. Parallel Spock has deduced that our Kirk isn’t his Kirk, and decides to help our Kirk instead.
Is any of this sounding familiar?
In case you’re worried, in the end both crews fix their plot contrivance devices… I mean, transporters… and get everything sorted out. Before our Kirk leaves parallel Spock, Kirk mentions in passing that Spock could bring peace, freedom, and Other Good Things to the parallel universe if he chose. It would be logical, after all. (Zan, it was just a suggestion not a criticism!
They can still be selfish, murderous, mouth breathers if they want!) Then, everyone goes home. The End.
Ring any bells, Zebulon?
October 31st, 2006 at 2:56 am
Wow! Zan has sparked quite a conversation here. Okay, let’s see what I’ve got to add:
–Zebulon, I’m pretty sure you’re thinking of “Where No Man Has Gone Before”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_no_man_has_gone_before
That was the second Star Trek pilot. (The first was called “The Cage” and was even more militaristic, but it didn’t have Kirk.) In it Spock wore a yellow shirt and had weirder eyebrows. You can purchase a dvd with that episode from Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/Star-Trek-Original-Episodes-Corbomite/dp/6305513406/sr=1-5/qid=1162224805/ref=sr_1_5/002-7867102-0743267?ie=UTF8&s=dvd
Vibeeen, I would tend to disagree with you about the Vulcans. It’s made pretty clear that they are deeply ashamed of the Pon Farr. In fact they manage to keep it a secret from most of the human population until the Next Generation, and even then it’s not a subject any human would casually bring up with a Vulcan. The humans on Star Trek seem to be constantly goading Vulcans into admitting that they have emotions. Just look at how Kirk and McCoy treated Spock. (They were lucky that there really is no such thing as a Vulcan death grip.) T’Pol got hers as well. And there is an episode of Deep Space Nine involving a holodeck baseball game in which the climax is the group humiliation of the Vulcan coach of the winning team.
I do however, think that Deep Space Nine made a far greater attempt to show real diversity and its inherent difficulties than any of the other series. Besides the obvious example of the Federation and the Bajorans needing desperately to work together and finding it sometimes nearly impossible, I’ve always been intrigued by the portrayal of the Klingons, which were far less two-dimensional than on any other series but still maintained their edge. The idea of a Human-Klingon alliance and even Human-Klingon friendships without the Klingons becoming humanized was masterfully done. And then there was that whole Nog-Jake friendship, which was not handled as well but is still worth mentioning.
The mirror universe was further explored in both Enterprise and Deep Space Nine (which dedicated at least three episodes to it.) The interesting thing is the revelation of what occurred after Kirk left. Mirror Spock followed Kirk’s advice and started preaching peace. He tried to get the Empire to transform itself into a more benevolent influence modeled after the Federation in our universe. Apparently he was very influential, but the end result was that when the Empire became less repressive, many of the colonized worlds saw that as a chance to rebel. Humanity ended up being defeated and enslaved to an even more repressive galactic regime.
October 31st, 2006 at 6:58 am
Thanks ever so much for your help, Vibeeen!
There was me, thinking I had seen an unreleased pilot.
I have in my mind is a very strong visual picture of a single scene from it: a juvenile Kirk standing on the left barking orders to a crew who are jumping to attention, completely atypical of the rest of the programs.
The rest of the episode is so foggy in my mind I can’t bring it back, except to remember it continued in that vein. I suppose it was a very, very long time ago, and my memory has just selected one thing to remember clearly. Weird.
But Mirror Mirror does sound plausible. I’ll check it out. Thanks for the suggestion pointing me in the right direction!
October 31st, 2006 at 8:38 am
Zebulon, I think Tvindy is probably right. I’d say he’s on firmer ground where the pilots are concerned. Check out the links we sent and see if anything rings a bell. Tvindy, I was thinking of the “Jeffrey Hunter as Captain” pilot, vs. the aired pilot that spliced that pilot together with Kirk as Captain, and I don’t recall either of them being particularly militaristic or darkly-lit. On the other hand, Kirk wasn’t juvenile-looking at all in “Mirror, Mirror.”
Which DS9 episodes deal with the parallel universe? I must be blocking that plot line out. Thanks!
-V
October 31st, 2006 at 8:40 am
And thanks for your help Tvindy! I now have to see the episodes you have suggested to jog my memory.
I’ve been “whistling this tune” for at least 25 years now, and I’d just like to know the real title and story so I can lay the memory to rest…!
October 31st, 2006 at 4:02 pm
Given that this is comment 26, it’s probably time to wrap up this very animated discussion before the show turns into William Shatner’s Yer Uncle!. I’m sure we all respect one another sufficiently to agree to disagree, if that’s the only option left. Here are my closing remarks:
Tvindy, I understand the whole Star Trek non-interventionist deal, and obviously human history would have been very different if people had adhered to such a set of values in the past. It’s been argued that the terrible irony of western culture is that the Enlightenment, that great flowering of thought which gave rise to a belief in freedom, equality, rationality and progress, was only made possible by the unprecedented wealth and material resources available to Europe at the time, a wealth generated largely by colonialism and slave labour. In other words, for people to have the luxury of sitting around pontificating about each man’s right to live a free and equal life and determine his own destiny, it was necessary to plunder the rest of the world, depriving other people of their right to freedom and equality and robbing them of the ability to determine their own destinies. So, in your illustration of relations with the New World, not only America, but also Europe, would have had a very different experience, probably missing out on many of the greatest material and intellectual triumphs of western history.
But I want to make it clear that I know that Star Trek’s heart is in the right place. I’m not arguing that this show actually promotes or champions colonialism or inequality. My argument is that, despite its attempts to be socially progressive, it isn’t aware of the degree to which the values it uses to do so are themselves a product of thinking associated with injustice and exploitation in our history. I know the heroes of Star Trek don’t hoon around the universe subjugating and enslaving the alien species they encounter. (Imagine if they did; I’d quite like to see that.) Instead I’m arguing that the show hasn’t come to terms with the fact that it is still uncritically perpetuating attitudes which originated in justifications for this kind of behaviour, particularly through its implicit assumption that its own, culturally-specific values are above reproach and provide a position from which to judge the worth of other cultures.
And Tvindy, I’m glad you disagreed with Vibeeen’s point about the superiority of the Vulcans, because they to me are the most striking example of that kind of chauvinism. The suggestion is clearly that the Vulcans think they’re superior, but this itself is just more evidence that they’re deluded hypocrites only worthy of being mocked by human beings — this seems to be the plot of almost 50% of Enterprise episodes. Last night we watched a truly remarkable episode in which the Vulcans were haranged for their bigotted attitudes towards homosexuals - sorry, I mean ‘mindmelders’ - and their resulting indifference towards the plight of those with AIDS - sorry, I mean those with some made-up disease which you catch from mindmelding. The predictable conclusion was Captain Archer berating the stoney-faced Vulcans for their double standards, prejudice and hypocrisy, leading one of the Vulcans to muster the courage to come out of the mindmelding closet, and then dialogue expressing a hope that, now that the crew of the Enterprise had tackled the issue, perhaps other Vulcans would have the courage to speak out against such prejudice.
I wish I’d seen it before doing the TTAD, because it really was the perfect illustration of my point.
November 1st, 2006 at 4:57 am
26 comments aren’t nearly enough. Let’s shoot for 150.
Zebulon, I think Vibeeen is right for all the reasons he gave plus the fact that as far as I can recall, mirror Kirk appears in only one or two scenes in the brig of the Enterprise in our universe, so he never gets to bark any orders. Also, I do recall the pilots as being much more militaristic. In them Kirk and Pike are far less buddy-buddy with the officers. In one of the pilots (I forget which) the captain orders the department heads (doctor, engineer, science officer, etc) to report to the bridge where they assemble and stand at attention. I also remember Spock doing a lot of shouting to the bridge officers. See if this looks at all familiar:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xe5SUxq25I&mode=related&search=
Vibeeen, I did some research and discovered that there are no fewer than five Deep Space Nine episodes dealing with the mirror universe. You can read about them all at this Wikipedia entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_Universe_%28Star_Trek%29
Also be sure to check out the Enterprise two-parter that takes place entirely in the mirror universe. In fact, it has it’s own opening theme. Zan, you have to watch this!:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fk1NK8AXepk
Zan, I actually do agree with most of what you say. I just think that there’s a lot more that needed to be said. I think it’s extremely significant and astonishing that a mainstream American television program actually successfully promotes something like the Prime Directive. I’m not sure what this says about the character of modern western society, but it gives me reason for optimism. On the other hand when the mirror universe episode of Enterprise ran, I noticed that scores of people on the Enterprise message boards gave it very high praise, wished that the entire series were changed to take place in that universe, and argued that that would be a much more desirable future for humanity. (And no, I’m not kidding.)
That AIDS episode of Enterprise is appalling, and I’m sorry you had to see it. In fact I apologize on behalf of my country for exporting such drivel to the rest of the world. In my opinion, that was the worst Star Trek story ever told. Being in Australia, you were probably spared the punchline. During the end credits T’Pol comes on with a public service announcement about AIDS followed by a 1-800 number you can call. In its defense (or perhaps condemnation) this episode was made in conjunction with several other primetime programs on the same network that agreed to release episodes dealing with AIDS on the same night. Later writing in the last season of Enterprise sought to implement extensive damage control to fix much of the incompetent writing that had gone before. The atrocious behavior seen in the Vulcans was explained by having Vulcan society go through a cultural renewal that transforms them into more modern Spock-like beings.
Oh, and here’s another interesting Star Trek clip, not really related to the discussion but quite interesting:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvfJRLTNmUI
November 1st, 2006 at 1:45 pm
Darn! I missed message #27 by that much. (With pologies to Get Smart.) 3 cubed. The most stable number, and my second favorite.
Thanks, Tvindy, for the lead on the DS9 episodes. I’ve seen them all, but I never connected that parallel universe to the original series’ parallel universe. I believe in infinite parallel universes anyway, so that might have led me astray. It certainly seems most viewers think the books and shows all refer to the same alternate universe.
I have a TiVo, which unfortunately had a hard drive crash with the last 8ish episodes of Enterprise on it. I’ve since recaptured those between BitTorrent and my new TiVo, but I haven’t finished the series yet. Now I’m really looking forward to it. “In a Mirror, Darkly” is one ep I’ve yet to see.
Sorry Zan and Tvindy, but I think you’re both A-1 wrongo about the Vulcan/human thing. You have to excuse the Enterprise-era humans’ behavior–as I said it’s adolescent and rightly so. The Vulcans are being solicitous mother hens, and the main Vulcan ambassador is kind of a prig. And the humans are inexperienced at interstellar relations, and yet are like over-eager puppies to get to the good stuff: flying into outer space, with no idea what they’re getting into.
Further, most of the Spock-ribbing you see in the Kirk era says more about human insecurity. The Vulcans are clearly our physical, intellectual, and spiritual superiors in that time. “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one.” I didn’t see any humans volunteering to save the ship at the cost of their own lives at the end of the second movie, just Spock. And his loss was more deeply felt by the crew (and viewers, I think) than any other in the canon, including Kirk and even Data (which only pissed me off as a cheap ploy to insure the next movie would be made). And while Spock and Dr. McCoy are polar opposites (for legitimate dramatic reasons), most if not all of the stories that use their conflict in the story line also end with the usual warm (for McCoy) or logical (for Spock) display of mutual respect on the bridge before the credits roll.
As far as the atrocious Vulcan behavior in Enterprise, don’t forget that Vulcans and Romulans share a common ancestry, and that Vulcans are on a constant mission to improve themselves and their culture, and rid themselves of the violent, ego-centric tendencies the Romulans embraced. If they were perfect from the beginning, I think that would be very dull to watch and to write. I agree that whole show is very unsettling to watch, as is the persecution of melders and the political maneuvering T’Pol’s mother suffers by (which is typical by modern academic standards, IMHO). Still, it makes an important point in the context of its time. And ours. A point we do not see in ourselves (as a group) nor do we make any effort to change that flaw in ourselves. Now that’s America, buddy! (With apologies to Firesign Theater.)
November 3rd, 2006 at 11:03 am
Vibeeen, you made a lot of great points about the portrayal of Vulcans, especially what you said about the death of Spock. You’ve pretty much swayed me to your opinion, at least as far as the Vulcans were originally conceived. I think later writers just weren’t up to the task, and I suspect some of them weren’t even that familiar with Trek history. (Enterprise has a lot to answer for.) It’s kind of similar to what was done to the Borg.
Here’s hoping that Zan and Jana come out with a special three-hour Star Trek edition.
November 5th, 2006 at 1:37 pm
Gladdies, from Wikipedia:
At times, Adams addresses his listeners as "Gladys". (This is Adams' half-humorous, half-serious way of expressing the idea that he may have only one listener, (ie, that his program is not popular); however, he also uses the plural term "Gladdies" in the same context.) In response to the numbers of people downloading the show as a podcast he now includes his "poddies" in the introduction.November 5th, 2006 at 7:15 pm
Hi Tvindy,
Judging from the “Australian Values” show, both Zan and Jana have checked out of this discussion. Which is a shame–I think a few worthwhile points have been made, and there’s at least one buried, non-sequitur message to the two of them that it sounds like they missed.
Jana was also right that this show, at 31 comments, is not the record setter. The record is 37, for “The Bad Sounding Edition.”
I get mixed messages from Zan about Trek. Sometimes he seems like a fan, sometimes not. Sometimes he whinges (that’s the first time I’ve used that word–I hope I used it right) about the American liberalism at the show’s foundation (though I’d use “idealism” instead of “liberalism”), and then he says it’s actually liberal humanism that began in 18th century Europe. Anyway, I’d hoped to give him some pause in his summary judgement of Star Trek, and respond with a more comprehensive contribution, but I guess he ran out of interest. I was disappointed that his favorite comment in this discussion was Ryan (I think) saying “I think my head’s gonna asplode,” or something like that.
Zan, if you’re still listening, there’s a whole other dimension to future dumbness that TTAD missed, namely chronocentrism. Like eurocentrics or androcentrics, chronocentrics see and interpret the world using a handy, local lens of which they’re not even aware. Unlike Europeans or men, which are subsets of humanity, we are all chronocentric, because we have no time in history but our own through which to judge the past and the future. In other words, we see reality through the values of our time as well as culture, etc., but we are rarely able to perceive this lens, much less transcend it. And so we are too easily shocked by the values and messages that come to us from other groups in other times.
A few easy examples: I just re-read a news story written the day Robert Kennedy was killed. It said something like, “Negro athlete Roosevelt Greir immediately overpowered and detained the assailant.” Kind of makes you uneasy, right? Here’s another. A friend and I found an old 1940s newspaper in her attic, and read much of it on a whim. We were very surprised to read the Help Wanted section in particular, where employers specified genders and even ages of the people they wished to hire, as their “Girls Friday,” for instance.
If you really want to immerse yourself in the experience of contemplating chronocentrism, consider the common practice in the Greek Empire, approx. 700-100BC, where homosexuality was considered normal, even superior to heterosexuality, and pederasty was quite common, practiced and even praised by philosophers such as Plato as a spiritual connection to the divine for the elder partner; and for the boy, a growing perception and appreciation in beauty beyond all Earthly means. Plato believed that homo-erotic love is related to education and gaining knowledge, and so was superior to all other forms of love.
Contrast this to the zero-tolerance policy we have here in the states, where every so often, a 3rd grade boy makes national news, gets suspended from school and sent to a psychiatrist for kissing a girl during recess. Auugh!! Sexual Harassment!!! Everyone PANIC!! And touching a child inappropriately? A one-way ticket to prison, where child abusers are everybody’s bitch.
I’ll give you that late 60s Star Trek was clearly a product of its time. Bigoted Vulcans will be a product of theirs. Futurists from the London School of Economics aren’t immune from boneheaded, speculative BS, either. We can learn from the past, and we can aim for a brighter future, even if people like me draw on Gene Roddenberry’s optimistic yet simplistic vision of the future for inspiration. It’s a start, innit?
One last example, since it’s now 4AM here, and I really must get to sleep… Many people today are afraid we’re on an unavoidable course to ruin, to depletion of natural resources like food, to runaway climate problems, and with nuclear weapons proliferating like never before, to eventually nuking the planet thanks to . Through our lens at this time, this would be A Bad Thing. And it would indeed be an immeasurable tragedy, and a final lesson in human folly. But maybe, just maybe it wouldn’t be bad bad. The Earth wouldn’t care, even if the top 100 feet of the entire planet were sterilized, life would go on. Life always wins, it really does. It wouldn’t be the first mass extinction, nor the last. Earth probably has another 5 billion good years in it. The radiation left over from a nuclear war would abate to tolerable levels after 300,000 years or so, and the Earth would have already started again. Maybe with surviving aquatic life from the deep seas, maybe with insects, maybe with the microbes we’ve recently discovered 2 miles beneath the surface. Maybe humans are like the colonies of fish that live in the puddles on Ayers Rock, here to dance our dance during our time in the sun, die off when our puddle evaporates, and unknowingly leave behind the seeds of the next generation which will renew life when the rains return the next year. Metaphorically speaking, of course.
Good night!
-Vibeeen
November 5th, 2006 at 7:18 pm
Argh! I screwed up my HTML in message 31. I wish there was a preview button. Oh well, it’s still pretty readable.
On the topic of site design… Zan, in my browser, sites that have been visited display in black text, which is almost indistinguishable from the dark grey text used in the body of the comments. Is there any way to change that, so the links don’t disappear?
Thanks!
-V
November 6th, 2006 at 2:31 am
Another problem I’ve noticed with the display of links that I add to my comments is that they appear in black and not underlined, so anyone reading them would not be able to see that they are clickable links. That’s why I now just type in the full address of a site rather than providing a link.
November 6th, 2006 at 2:46 am
Tvindy,
That’s what I was talking about. They’re black because you have visited them recently. If you clear your history they look light red, and others see them as light red as well, at least until they visit your link.
Zan might be able to fix this by editing the file http://the-corridor.info/bobsyeruncle/wp-content/themes/BobsYerUncle/style.css. There a bit that says:
a {
font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',Arial, sans-serif; color: #B01E63;
text-decoration:none;
}
a:visited {
color: #000000;
}
a:hover {
color: #000000;
text-decoration:none;
}
which are the three link colors: unvisited, visited, and when the cursor hovers over them. The latter two are set to black, so it should be an easy change. An underline could be added as well, with the “text-decoration:” specifier.
It would be nice to preview or even edit our comments, but I’m not WordPress-savvy enough to know if this is supported.
-V
November 6th, 2006 at 2:56 am
I just noticed that the comments system automatically converted my link to the CSS file to a hyperlink. I didn’t do that explicitly, as I normally do. Tvindy, you can see that it’ll look reddish when you first read that post. I see it as a slightly blacker black than the rest of my comment.
The other, possibly unknown, consequence is that your links have been real, red, clickable links. In message 27, I see them all as red today, even though I visited a few of them at the time. They must not be in my history list any more.
-V
November 6th, 2006 at 4:46 pm
lol. Actually the link looks black to me, because I was actually checking out Zan’s CSS code yesterday. Let me try posting a random link to see if it comes out red:
http://www.nakednews.com
November 6th, 2006 at 4:47 pm
Yep, it’s red (proving that I never visit that site).