The Butcher Shop

H.P . Lovecraft Cthulhu Pop! Vinyl Figure : The Evil One... he slinks about in the shadows, looking to devour souls and drive the weak-minded to insanity. The other Pop! Vinyls better watch out when you bring this little demon home! The H.P . Lovecraft Cthulhu Pop! Vinyl Figure measures approximately 3 3/4-inches tall.

Episode 12: "The Living Legend--Part One" The Battlestar Pegasus! The irascible Commander Cain is played by Lloyd Bridges. While on patrol, Starbuck and Apollo encounter a patrol from the Pegasus. "That's impossible! We're the only ones left alive in the entire star system!" Starbuck says the Pegasus was destroyed two years ago in the Battle of Molocade with the Fifth Fleet. Starbuck and Apollo are taken aboard to meet Cain. Meanwhile, the Galactica and the fleet are running out of fuel. We learn eventually that Cain turned his ship out to deep space after the Battle of Molocade and has been running raids and sorties on Cylon bases. Wouldn't he have to report? Is he renegade like Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now? The Delphinian Empire?? The Cylons control an old Colonial fuel base, the most remote in the Colonies, named Gamore. Another inconsistency in that they have said before that nobody has been out this far. Cain wants to attack--Adama wants t...

"Turnabout Intruder" Season 3, Episode 24. This episode was the finale of The Original Series, and what a horrible way to go out. We get to see Kirk prance around like a woman. The Enterprise is sent to rescue archaeologists studying the ruins of a dead civilization on Camus II. One of the scientists is Dr. Janice Lester, a woman from Kirk's past and a one-year love of his. "Your world of starship captains doesn't admit women," she says. And that is why she hates Kirk now, with a passion to rival the wrath of Khan. Apparently, it's a setup because with the help of those ruins, she switches bodies with Kirk. Lester in Kirk's body says, "It's better to be dead than to live alone in the body of a woman." But she is interrupted from strangling Kirk in Lester's body. She says she has studied for years to take over command of a starship. It's funny to watch Kirk put an emory board to his fingernails! I don't know if they a...

"The Mark of Gideon" Season 3, Episode 16. Kirk is abducted, sent to what appears to be an empty Enterprise . (Lots of negative talk about "diplomats and bureaucrats" in this episode.) Altogether, it's an interesting puzzle you have to find the answer to. Kirk has been abducted to infect the Gideon population with diseases in order to fix the overpopulation problem. (Ahh, couldn't they just get some virus samples?) There's a real contradiction here from the aliens about loving life by not preventing conception yet being able to kill people to fight overpopulation, and it doesn't make any sense. They want to change their life cycle, from long perfection to a shorter duration. This reminds me of that one Next Generation episode with the Bynars where they stole the Enterprise-D without asking because they "may have said 'No.'" In all honesty, the creators skirted all the real issues that they brought up in this episode. It would m...

"The Corbomite Maneuver" Season 1, episode 10. This is a great early episode. Something is chasing the Enterprise to keep it from going about its mission. Amazingly Kirk wants to go around it and leave it alone until he can't. Mr. Bailey, a navigator before we ever encounter Chekhov, was a back-talking, yelling, scaredy-cat. And he is never seen again in Star Trek. Bones says Kirk must have "seen something in him" akin to Kirk eleven years ago, which is reminiscent of several characters in Trek episodes that Kirk likes to prod along. You just know that Bailey is going to blow up later in the episode, and you're right. Kirk's solution to the problem at hand is one of the best moves in all of Star Trek (and I think he has said it once before in a previously commented-upon episode, but for the life of me I can't remember which one now). Balok the alien says, "It was a pleasure testing you." Yet another super-entity with awesome technology...

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Week 9 Carolina Cincinnati Cleveland Dallas Philadelphia Kansas City San Diego Washington San Francisco Denver Seattle Indianapolis Baltimore (late blogging but already picked in the ciproud game online--and with the game being on NFL Network only, I haven't seen result yet. Did Carolina win?)

"The Return of the Archons" Season one, episode 21 Classic Trek. A dystopian society in which Kirk must go against the Prime Directive to battle what is right. Kirk says the Prime Directive "refers to a living, growing culture--do you think this one is?" Especially enlightening in that I just watched The Next Generation episode entitled "Justice" where Picard must violate the Prime Directive over what is right--remember Wesley falling into the flowerbed and being sentenced to death? In "The Return of the Archons" no one dies--the lieutenant that was absorbed by the machine comes back safe and sound after the final conflict. One puzzling aspect is that they never completely explained "the Red Hour" unless it was simply a release for the enslaved people of the planet.

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Doctor Who: The Blood Cell By James Goss As an English teacher, I read a lot of fiction. As a Doctor Who fan, I have read quite a few of the books. The Blood Cell by James Goss is one of the best that I have come across. This book has something different from most Who books--it is told as a first person narrative from the “Governor” of the prison asteroid. I find this to be a great plot device, especially with hardly knowing the Twelfth Doctor very well yet. It seems to me that books like this sort of disguise which Doctor it is written for because it doesn’t really matter. Telling this one in first person hides that fact very neatly. Also, the reader does not really have to know Doctor Who at all in order to enjoy it. This could be one of those books you give your non-Doctor friends in order to have a go and see if they’ll join you for more. It reads like a screenplay. I’d be willing to wager that some of these books were just not optioned for a tel...

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"Patterns of Force" Season 2, Episode 21. The Enterprise is sent to the planet Ekos to investigate the disappearance of Federation historian John Gill. He studies history by "causes and motivations" and not "dates and events." This episode completely shows the danger of violating the Prime Directive. Bones injects "subcutaneous transponders" in the event they lose their communicators. What the hell!? Where did this great invention go!? John Gill has imposed himself as the Fuhrer of a Nazi regime he has created on this planet. Spock says to Kirk after they steal uniforms, "You should make a very convincing Nazi." Spock and Kirk take out their transponders to create a crude lock-picking laser. While the premise seemed cool, I think the episode quickly degenerated. Instead of just beaming McCoy down in a Nazi doctor's uniform, why didn't they beam down like 200 guys with phasers and set on stun? The planet has already been...

"Elaan of Troyius" Season 3, Episode 13. A top secret diplomatic mission, bringing two strange races together. The "queen" Elaan is a super-bitch is to be brought to the other planet into a political marriage. It becomes Kirk's job to "tame" her. She actually stabs the Troyan abassador! There's a Klingon ship following them. Elaan's tears are said to be some kind of super love potion that ensnares men. And of course she ensnares Kirk. One of Elaan's guards, Kryton, ends up being a Klingon spy and sabotages the Enterprise . I was watching, thinking to myself how the hell does this guy have the run of engineering, able to get to and disable the warp drive and dilithium crystal. He snaps the neck of Watson, a redshirted engineer. Kryton is soon phasered to death by a security guard--ahhhhh, why the hell weren't phasers set on stun there?? The Klingon ship attacks. I understand why there is no phaser power but are the photon torpedoes ...

"The Empath" Season 3, Episode 12. What a horrible episode. Boring. A sun is about to go nova and Kirk, Spock, and McCoy are beamed away from their mission on the alien planet by alien tech. They are kidnapped by aliens with big heads and robes who look remarkably similar to the aliens on Talos IV in "The Menagerie." I guess they were bored in coming up with a new-looking alien. There is also an "empath" being there, mute but healing injuries with a touch. These aliens, the Vians, are testing the girl empath--according to Memory-alpha: "they explain to Kirk, Spock, and the dying McCoy that they have been part of an experiment. They have the power to save one species from the impending nova, and so they wished to test whether Gem's species is worthy of being saved. Apparently the Vians want to be certain that she has learned the principles of self-sacrifice, the will to survive, the passion to know, and the love of life from her contact with ...

"Return to Tomorrow" Season 2, Episode 20. A distress call brings them to an alien planet of telepaths, with prophetic words about all mankind perishing. Kirk's log will take three weeks to get to Starfleet at this distance. The powerful-enough alien named Sargon turned off the power of the entire Enterprise in order to communicate that Spock should beam down too, yet the alien talks other times. Dr. Ann Mulhall (played by the actress that plays Dr. Pulaski in The Next Generation) is an astrobiologist that comes along. Sargon keeps calling Kirk's crew "My children" saying that 6,000 centuries ago they were colonizing the area. His race could be the Adam and Eve. These aliens are now just thought, disincorporated from any body. Then Sargon takes over Kirk's body. They want to borrow the bodies in order to build robotic bodies. The crew agree to it! Spock says, "With their knowledge, mankind could leap ahead 10,000 years." They never eve...

"The Deadly Years" Season 2, episode 12. The crew comes down with some kind of accelerated aging sickness after visiting a planet. This is one of those episodes that seem to just go through the motions, almost like they just come up with a concept and write up what would happen. This week it's getting old, one week it was getting a virus that made them too happy to do their work, next week it could be getting young or reverse aging. It's almost like you don't have to watch. But they have to do these episodes. One woman does die from the excessive aging. And, just to add a touch of stress and danger, Commodore Stocker assumes command and takes them into the Romulan Neutral Zone. But everything is cured in the nick of time.

"Day of the Dove" Season 3, episode 7. You have to love the original series Klingons! Another malevolent space entity feeds on the emotions of hatred from the crew and Klingons. The entity can also transmute matter into swords. They said a lot of bigoted things in this episode but had the courage to combat the racial bigotry head on. "Intraship beaming" is only a theoretical possibility in this episode, but it works.

Starring William Hartnell as the Doctor. Zarbi!

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Last week (week 7), I went 10-5. Remember, I'm still picking Chicago even though I shouldn't. There were some upsets that I didn't see coming. That puts me at 73-32 for the season, or 69.52%. Not bad considering I am not a paid commentator. Week 8 picks Denver Detroit Seattle Baltimore Miami Kansas City Chicago (ugh--I should not be picking them here) Jets Tampa Houston Cleveland Indianapolis Dallas Arizona Green Bay I am probably going to kick myself in picking Arizona over Philadelphia, but I have a feeling, and the Cardinals are at home.

October 21, 2014 at 06:01AM via Facebook

"A Taste of Armageddon" Season 1, episode 23. (Off topic, it is funny that the commercial on the CBS.com website for this one was for Benefiber, the clear "tasteless" fiber supplement--is it a coincidence?) This Star Trek installment has a strange but interesting logic about it. That's what makes a great episode, where you can honestly see the point on the other side of the argument, whether you agree with it or not. The planet had made war "neat and painless," as Kirk says. You can kind of see the strange logic if your culture was somehow stronger than individual lives. This is another episode where a code word would be efficient, and they have a voice-analyzer in this episode--where that one goes in subsequent episodes, I don't know. Spock manages to do some kind of Vulcan mind-touch thing through a wall! Compare this episode to The Next Generation episode "Justice."

Episode 11: "The Young Lords" While on patrol, Starbuck is shot down. He is forced to land on a strange planet. This is already a pattern on this show and this is only flipping episode 11. Of course, Cylons are on this planet in full force. After crash landing, Starbuck is captured by the Cylons. A tribe of kids riding unicorns rescue Starbuck--no, I ain't kidding. Colonel Tigh says, "The Cylons have penetrated more deeply than we imagined." Yet, this colony knows all about the Galactica again! They say they learned it from the Cylons. Starbuck actually mentions taking them back to the Galactica . The leader of the kids wants to trade Starbuck for their father. The Cylons, of course, renege of the deal, but so do the kids. Starbuck creates a rescue plan by creating and chanting nursery rhymes. The kids free the father in a nice little plan; however, I'm not really sure about only one girl lobbing bombs at the Cylons on the bri...

"The Menagerie-Part 1" and "The Menagerie-Part 2" Season 1, episodes 11 and 12 (and for some reason, here the CBS.com internal episode numbering doesn't work, as there was another episode 12 of season 1 on another page; however, "The Menagerie" being the only two-parter of the entire series could throw off the numbering system.) This one was written by Gene Roddenberry, apparently trying to incorporate all that footage from the original pilot episode called "The Cage," the one that was deemed "too cerebral" for television. Spock gets away with quite a lot of shit sometimes--hijacking the Enterprise to take previous captain Pike to Talos IV, faking orders and Kirk's voice, and assaulting Starbase personnel. We find that to visit Talos IV is the only death penalty left on the books. They basically just sit around and watch "The Cage" for the bulk of the story, during Spock's court-martial. Then all is hunky-do...

"By Any Other Name" Season 2, Episode 22. A distress call. Two humanoids who with the touch of a button on a device on their belts make the entire landing party immobilized. They want the ship, to hijack it to the Andromeda Galaxy. The alien leader, Rojan, says that the Kelvan Empire has sent out ships to find a new galaxy to take over because within ten millenia radiation in Andromeda will make it unlivable. They take over the Enterprise with ease. Kirk does say that they should take their problem to the Federation, that there's "no need to do this by force." Rojan says that is not their way, that they only conquer, like a big crybaby. The Kelvans came on a multi-generational ship and it was fast enough to travel between the galaxies within only 300 years, not the thousands of years Kirk says it would take by Starfleet standards. The Kelvan ship was destroyed by that Galactic Barrier. (SIDEBAR: I am sitting here watching, thinking, the Kelvans could coloni...

"The Lights of Zetar" Season 3, Episode 18. I can see how Star Trek starting losing it during the third season. Sometimes, you can tell that the writing was just disinterested. That's because this episode was written by none other than Shari "Lambchop" Lewis and her husband. Not kidding. She even wanted to be cast as the lead, Lt. Mira Romaine, but thank goodness they didn't. The Enterprise is en route to the total and complete library at Memory Alpha, sort of like a Star Trek Library at Alexandria, and is the inspiration for the cool Star Trek wiki site Memory-Alpha.org. Scotty falls in love with Mira, and even after the events of this episode is never seen or heard from again (except a novel that is a sequel called Memory Prime by good Star Trek writers, Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens--I haven't read that one). On the way, the Enterprise is attacked by some kind of unnatural light storm--hey they don't have a better name for it either. ...

October 18, 2014 at 07:05AM via Facebook

"The Paradise Syndrome" Season 3, Episode 3. I think that if I had been watching Star Trek as it was first running, this episode would have made me turn it off and never turn it back on, sort of like my feelings towards the killing of another of my favorites, the UPN TV series Seven Days and its third season premiere episode was so stinking bad that I never watched it again. I think this episode would have done it for me. Kirk, Spock, and McCoy beam down to an idyllic little planet similar to Earth. An asteroid is due to hit the planet in two months and they have been ordered to divert it. (Now, that is the part I don't understand-- 1) isn't it the part of Starfleet not to interfere--imagine if someone had diverted the asteroid on Earth 65 million years ago 2) if they were going to divert the asteroid anyway, why did they go check out the planet first???) The lifeforms of the planet are so basically like Native American Indians that we might as well call them...

Episode 10: "The Magnificent Warriors" As you can tell by the title, this one is the BSG ripoff of the movie The Magnificent Seven (which I guess itself was a ripoff of a Kurosawa movie). It starts with a pitched space battle with no idea what's going on. Apparently, it'sn attack to take out the Agro-ships. Cylons took out 2 of the 3. Now they need new seed to feed the fleet. And they just happend across yet another small human settlement to trade with. In retrospect, wouldn't these Cylons be destroying all these human settlements after the Galactica leaves? Aren't Adama and company actually doing the work for the Cylons? In order to get seeds, they need an Energizer to trade with, and only a woman named Bellaby has one. She makes Adama promise to "court her" for the Energizer. Yeah, the entire human race is running from the Cylons and they are worried about dates. Even Adama's reticence to dating her is stupid--do anyth...

Episode 8: "The Gun on Ice Planet Zero--Part One" It's Guns of Navarone in space! The Galactica is being herded into a certain sector of space. On one side are Cylon fighters. On the other side is some big pulsar cannon that shoots ships in space. Two Vipers get destroyed by the cannon. Another crashes on the surface, a Cadet Cree. It's an ice planet, long before Hoth in Empire Strikes Back. And I am sitting here thinking that this is space, three-dimensional space! You can go anywhere! You can go around the obstacles. It is not like the idea of the gun in Guns of Navarone . There, it is a sea channel that you can't get around during World War II. That makes sense. No, here they get together a crack squadron of prisoners and criminals to take out the gun. And I can't help but thinking, "Why don't you fricking go around it??" Even the best gun cannot shoot below the horizon if you come at the planet from the opposite side or s...

"Bread and Circuses" Season 2, Episode 25. The SS Beagle is destroyed, just debris in space. Kirk knows Captain Merrick from the Academy. The wreck leads them to a pre-atomic world but with their sports as gladiator fights. It is twentieth-century Rome. Kirk discovers that the barbarian in the fight is Flight Officer William B. Harrison. The crew of the Beagle have violated the Prime Directive. Kirk gets captured again! Isn't it amazing how many sci-fi shows have our heroes captured in order to learn the lay of the land? Kirk mentions Hodgkins' Law of Parallel Planet Development. There's a great scare when their little party is behind a group of trees and gets shot at by machine guns. It's a great idea to imagine the Roman Empire lasting until the twentieth-century, with guns and cars. The bad guy proconsul, a native of the planet, uses the Prime Directive against Kirk quite well, knowing they can't just phaser their way through the world. And th...

"The Immuity Syndrome" Season 2, episode 18. The Enterprise battles a giant space amoeba! Spock "felt" the death of the 400 Vulcans on the Intrepid just like Obi-Wan Kenobi felt the deaths on the planet Alderaan. How often do they come across "something I've never seen." Answer: every episode. They have no idea what it is but they go in anyway, even knowing that the Intrepid was destroyed by it. They figure out a way to destroy it. Just another "Thing-in-space-we-have-to-destroy" episode. SIDEBAR: "Probe will hit in 7.3 seconds." It takes longer to say the "point 3" then the "point 3" lasts, doesn't it? Then it is said again: "contact in 18.3 seconds." I know they are trying to be anally scientific like when Spock computes ETA at something like 5.2 hours. But that's okay because "point 2" hours is appreciable time. "Point 3" seconds is not. You can't even see the...

Last week, I went a great 12-2. I completely blew the Houston pick, and I bet everybody picked Seattle to win. Week 7 winners New England Baltimore Chicago Detroit Green Bay Cincinnati Cleveland Seattle Washington San Diego Dallas Arizona Pittsburgh Denver

I listened to the Grammar Girl podcast's recent cast on swearing in Maze Runner and then read this one on swearing and I am having a debate now with my fellow teachers--is making up swearing still swearing? Can the kids in school say FRICKING instead of the F word and get away with it? When you are clearly substituting one word, changing one phoneme--isn't it the same thing? When Battlestar Galactica used FRAK, it's still swearing. So taboos aside, we are riding a slippery slope when the guy who creates SHUCKFACE does it on purpose to stay in a library when Salinger comments on the F word in graffitti in The Catcher in the Rye and gets kicked out of the library for doing it.

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Vintage mechanical Dalek

October 12, 2014 at 03:53PM via Facebook

Episode 7: "The Long Patrol" The Galactica is leaving its galaxy, its star system, they say. I honestly don't think they had any idea what those terms meant! Or the distances involved. There is still no feeling that the entire human race has been extinguished. That must be the case because they find another planet of humans. Planet Crodin. Starbuck's new patrol ship has a talking computer named C.O.R.A. that has a personality. She can run the ship on her own so I'm wondering what the hell Starbuck has to be there for at all! She is like Knight Rider's K.I.T.T. for a Battlestar Galactica Colonial Viper. I'm also sitting here wondering--just a couple episodes ago, they were worried about women flying the Vipers. If they had even half of the self-operating intelligence of C.O.R.A. anyone could fly the damn things. Starbuck meets a smuggler and says he is from the "Sirinus Galaxy" but he may have been lying because he called...

October 11, 2014 at 05:47PM via Facebook

Alfred Hitchcock directed silent films first. Some very interesting things come out of his movie Downhill from 1927. First of all, the plot is quite intense. When you think of this coming out in 1927, it must have been very progressive. Then there are quite a few cool filmmaking tricks that definitely show where Hitchcock was going. His future seems strong with such great segue ways from scene to scene. Some nice symbolic moments are present with the downhill ride on the escalator and going down on the elevator. The symbolism is progressed at the end with more downward climbing of stairs. The ending is quite avant garde too, clearly shaping such classics as Spellbound and Vertigo . He sees his father as a sailor and others, sees the women again, the record in his life. Well worth watching for Hitchcock fans.

I went 12-3 last week. Pretty darned good. Granted, I still picked Chicago even though I wouldn't have. Week 6 picks Houston Chicago New England Cincinnati Cleveland Green Bay Detroit Denver Baltimore Tennessee San Diego Arizona Seattle San Francisco

"Shore Leave" Season 1, episode 15. A strange episode, simply for the ramifications unto the Star Trek universe. An idyllic shore leave situation on a strange new world turns into a nightmare. Bones mentions Alice in Wonderland and then sees the rabbit and Alice in a rather goofy scene, even for Star Trek. We Trekkies can take badly costumed aliens, but throw in a white rabbit with a waistcoat and pocket watch shouting, "I'm late!" and we cringe. Kirk thinks about and then sees two people from his past, Finnegan and some girl named Ruth. (Another aside: How does Kirk manage to get another beautiful yeoman every other week? Why couldn't they stick around? Does Kirk engage in hanky-panky and the girls quit? Is that what happened to Yeoman Rand?) No matter how strange this episode, because as I sat there, I just couldn't help thinking of what would have happened if someone started thinking about naughty things, like when Bones is snuggling up to Yeoma...

"Miri" Season 1, episode 8. Another Earth with the same continents and everything is discovered. The one rotten thing is that the story never explains why the planet was a duplicate of Earth, or even why the story called for that. It was like they wanted to do a time travel story of the future of Earth, but then switched it to another planet. This one, a really good episode actually, brought up a couple stupid geek questions. 1: How are three punches to the face better than being stunned by a phaser? The opponent died immediately thereafter. Whether he was attacking or not, how are physical punches to the face less damage than the phaser stun? 2: Kirk and the party contract the disease. This brings about the most obvious science fiction question asking if we have learned anything from H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds , or learning from the Aztecs being decimated by disease from the New World. Let's just beam down anywhere and hope we don't contract anything...

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Great pics, featuring Patrick Troughton as the Second Doctor and a great Dalek. Doctor Who

Doctor Who. The Fourth Doctor and the Tardis.

Superman starring on Action Comics #22

Winners Green Bay Chicago Dallas Detroit Indy Pittsburgh New Orleans New York Giants Philadelphia Cleveland San Diego San Francisco Seattle Cincinnati