I Hate Research! No. Wait, I Thought I Loved It

Research: Boon, or Bust?

I'm one of those people who delights in "torturing" librarians with incessant pleas for better research books, hitting the card catalog, and nearly murdering library computers with my intense search methods.

I delight in a printout that's a mile long. I'll take it and gleefully shred it until I find exactly what I'm looking for. If I find something strange along the way, it only fuels my greed. I must find the buried treasure! That nugget that no one has seen or thought of or paid attention to for 30 or more years!

The Internet surely helps, especially when it comes to tracking down people. Thus, I shall explain to you my current dilemma: hunting down every soul that ever worked on Star Trek the Original Series, and bugging them for an interview. "This, I can do!" I thought.
But no, I've gotten fifty names in and I'm hitting the wall. There are too many dead, deceased, passed on - and those that haven't are increasingly hard to find! Sure, they're retired, but to where? One may still be in jail, others - vanished off the planet (or at least off the Internet) with nary a sigh.

That's where I am right now - and I had to take a break.I find it easier to sit here and type about it as therapy than to continue today. I've worked through the morning into the evening and now I just can't...do...one...more!

The upside of this is that I'm very happy with some of my results. It doesn't really matter that I've been turned down already (yes, I've fired off several emails already, requesting a chat). It's that I actually found some people! Not stars, not crazily of note people but people who worked on Star Trek and actually made a difference in someone's life.

Even if I can't find someone to interview, I'll at least post my results for the websites that I can find, and compile them into a nice page for Trek fans to ogle and click to their hearts' content.

Photo by Square87 and Ubcule; Wikipedia.

"Winter's Tale": Fantasy and Hope Combined

Read this article to see what I'm talking about:
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/feb/23/new-york-winters-tale-review

I can't believe how rotten some critics can be when they don't enjoy a good mythical romance movie. Colin Farrell's latest - "Winter's Tale" is enjoyable finery that will transport weary souls to an adventure set in the Victorian era and the modern-day.

"Winter's Tale" is similar to other films that I've liked with Farrell - check out "Ondine", a story about a woman who may or may not be a mermaid. It combines the dreary lives of ordinary people with the extraordinary mist of the unknown and unseen; something that many people ignore, call fanciful, and attribute to idiots. Nothing could be further from the truth. It's creative people who dream that give us something to think about, tales to tell our children, and dreams that transcend the boredom of endless movies about money, wealth and power.

Farrell carries out the chore of being a leading man and a romantic figure with grace and humility, his sometimes handsome and other times ruggedly animalistic face are an endless well of well-acted emotions that drag the viewer in and capture every moment of every scene.

The additions of Russell Crowe and Will Smith are humorous and rude in the extreme, casting Crowe as a demon and Smith as Lucifer for laughs and the underside of their own personal traits was genius. Crowe plays the demon to perfection, reeking of misery and anger, he is revolting. Smith as Lucifer could have been a bit smoother; instead of a t-shirt he might have worn a shark-skin suit and been a little more suave (like Pacino's in "Devil's Advocate"), but he was adequate for the task.

Jessica Brown Findlay was charming, but was so beautiful and so perfect that she goes somewhat unnoticed as an actress. She appears as a bit of fluff, a pretty feather, and fails to make an impression until her death scene. Looking more sick would have given her some credulity, but the makeup team somehow thought that keeping her "flush with fever" might accentuate her role. When Jennifer Connelly steps up later as the lead female she's hardly makes an impression; she's yet another piece of fluff in a movie that needed much better actresses. One female cast member who was on screen for only a few minutes managed to eat up the scenery, outshining even Farrell, and that was Eva Marie Saint. Her every move was perfection, her diction perfect, her performance so material that one could reach out and grasp it.

The overtones of reincarnation and "star-stuff" were fanciful, but the general idea of the movie was one of hope - something we are desperately in need of today.    

My Journey Into Blogging - Fast and Furious

What did I know about Blogging? Nothing.

That's right, folks. I'm starting out from scratch. Sure, I had a "blog" on MySpace, where I wrote down lots of stories that I remembered from "the old days". I must remind myself to save them before they're irretrievable. As if! they're practically gone right now - it takes an hour just to get past the horrible ads there.

So as a result of becoming annoyed at PayPal for revoking my account, mad at MySpace for making it too hard to even reach my pages, and becoming disillusioned with the whole "you can earn $15 if you write this type of an article for us!" on Yahoo, I've decided to go my own way.

Stumbling through this process, I've already had my AdSense account denied, clicked too many times on my own blog, and had occasional computer freeze-ups due to the impossible amount of traffic on cable service here. As soon as everyone returns home from their jobs they all jump on the Net, sucking the life out of my connectivity.

Nevertheless, I shall persevere. I've got my Customer Service and Enterprise Outpost pages up, and thanks to Reddit, it looks like I might have something going on. Enterprise Outpost has already hit 222 reads, only a half a day since I publicized it.
That's not bad for a first try. I know my all-time high for readership was something on the order of 20,000 views in a day, which worked out to a grand total of about $50 bucks. Whoopee! *snort* I think not.

In creating these pages, I hope to offer some smarts, some fun, and hopefully, a full-time career. For that I pray, let me tell you! I'd much rather be tapping away at my keyboard in my pajamas than having to commute to a job where I'm under-appreciated and underpaid.

So stay tuned. You never know what might happen. In the process I'll give you all a blow-by-blow account of how it all blossoms or ditches.