chicks, rain, Star Trek, sexism

-- Yes to the Nano. She gets it tonight, we think.

-- Last Friday I called Amherst Farm Supply about getting a wood stove for the living room. The recorded message I heard had this peculiar noise in the background, very loud, and as I listened, I quickly realized what it was. The message said, "The chicks have come in and you must pick them up today." The sound I was hearing was the peeping of what must have been thousands of baby chickens, just a day or two old. I never heard that when I called Home Depot in Brooklyn.

-- The weather is a drag. I mean, it's very cool and that's lovely. I can even deal with the gray, and the rain. But we aren't getting that wonderful warm, sunny, seventies weather I'd looked forward to in February and March. My fear is we will wake up very soon and it'll be in the nineties. From the fifties to the nineties overnight just isn't fair. On the other hand, the trees have all leafed out, and that's just thrilling. How do they know to do that, every year, right on schedule! Incredible.

-- Last week we saw the new Star Trek movie, the four of us: Lily, Dave, me, and Dave's mom. It was the first kind of adult movie we've taken Lily to in the movie theater. She's seen stuff on Netflix at home, movies like the remake of The Ladykillers, which Dave ordered by mistake, thank goodness. I loved the original with Alec Guiness and wanted to share it with my family. This remake was by the Coen brothers, so you can't go too wrong there, made in 2004, and set in southern Mississippi. It was really great, not too violent. But every other word out of one character's word was the f word or the mother-f word, or other street angry lingo. Lily and Dave were a bit uneasy with all the language, but I figured I'd seen Cabaret when I was 11 and Lily would be okay with a more sophisticated movie every now and then. I intend to take her to Harry Potter 6 when it comes out this summer.

At any rate, the Star Trek movie was a lot of fun, especially for someone like me, who gets the Scotty and McCoy jokes, but doesn't know enough to care that Kirk's brother saw him off when he went to the academy - there's been a time warp yet again -- gosh those black holes come in handy! -- and now the Trek movies can go off onto an alternate reality. I suppose that means that Kirk could be a very different person from the one we saw in the sixties; it'll be interesting to see how that plays out in the sequels.

The cast was great and the special effects really awesome. This is the kind of movie you need to see on the big screen, although Lily wanted them to turn it down, said it was too loud. With any luck she'll keep her Nano turned down enough so she doesn't burn out her eardrums by the time she's 20, like everyone else.

And now Lily wants nothing more than to watch reruns of the original Trek. I've been watching a few with them, and they are great, campy and fun. But you know, I can see why I never gravitated to them. They are so unbelievably sexist, it's painful to watch. Every girl and woman wants Kirk, and he accomodates them as much as he can. Every woman is an idiot in short skirts, at least the shows we've seen so far. I love how Gene Roddenberry gets so much credit for having black and Russian and Chinese crewmen in the sixties--but the women are in their same old boring role. What a bore. It's hard to stomach.