It’s Caturday, and I’m a Trek nerd, so here you go. And no, I won’t explain it.
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Phil Plait, the creator of Bad Astronomy, is an astronomer, lecturer, and author. After ten years working on Hubble Space Telescope and six more working on astronomy education, he struck out on his own as a writer. He's written two books, dozens of magazine articles, and 12 bazillion blog articles. He is a skeptic and fights the abuse of science, but his true love is praising the wonders of real science.
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April 11th, 2009 at 8:13 am
Boy, I’m a Trek nerd and I don’t get it. Then again, it appears to be a reference to the original Trek, which I have to admit that I haven’t followed closely for years…
Now if it were a Dr. Who thing, I’d have gotten it immediately.
April 11th, 2009 at 8:23 am
It is indeed an Original Series reference, and it’s hilarious!
April 11th, 2009 at 8:24 am
oh I get it, cats… love……… nope its gone… How good are pants though?.
April 11th, 2009 at 8:42 am
It’s more of a caturday Goa’uld, in my most humble opinon.
“TAU’RI! KREE! Rub your God’s belly and bring tuna fish!” [flash glowing eyes]
April 11th, 2009 at 8:43 am
LMAO!
Paging Dr Dehner, paging Dr Dehner
April 11th, 2009 at 8:50 am
For those who really must have an explanation, Gary Mitchell was that officer-turned-god-with-the-silvery-eyes from one of the original Star Trek episodes.
April 11th, 2009 at 9:01 am
It’s a reference to the original series Star Trek pilot “Where No Man Has Gone Before.”
April 11th, 2009 at 9:04 am
What does it say about my nerditude that I got this right away? Sigh.
April 11th, 2009 at 9:09 am
Took me a few seconds in Wikipedia, but once I read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_No_Man_Has_Gone_Before it all came back to me. Good one, Phil!
April 11th, 2009 at 9:11 am
It says you’re a nerd who appreciates the classics. Woohoo TOS!
We’ll just forget the whole “James R. Kirk” thing for the sake of continuity, though.
April 11th, 2009 at 9:25 am
Even before I read the bottom text, I was thinking “TOS reference? No, too obscure…” Then I remembered it was Phil.
April 11th, 2009 at 9:28 am
Sadly, I also got the reference right away. I prefer to think of myself as more of a geek than a nerd, though.
April 11th, 2009 at 9:32 am
Think pilot episode. Breaking through a barrier, people getting zapped. Eyes start glowing. Gary starts reading stuff really really fast.
April 11th, 2009 at 9:32 am
That’s “James R. Kirk” to you, Gary.
/hyper-obscure?
//not to Phil, I bet
April 11th, 2009 at 9:51 am
Hey Phil,
off topic, but you might want to check the Star Formation High Scores again. Last night was a good one for me.
April 11th, 2009 at 10:05 am
(That pilot, not the other pilot.)
April 11th, 2009 at 10:06 am
Where No Cat Has Gone Before.
April 11th, 2009 at 10:29 am
Very nice. Happily, I got it right away. Had I not, I would have had to turn in my nerd card.
April 11th, 2009 at 10:41 am
My geek status is confirmed as I, too, got it right away.
April 11th, 2009 at 11:32 am
RE: Pilot
Remember, unless you didn’t know it, that WNMHGB was a SECOND pilot, the one that introduced Kirk, kept Spock from the first (The Cage – edited into the two parter as “flashbacks”) and did NOT have McCoy as Chief Medical Officer (one of the problems I have with ‘canon’ in ST:TOS being violated).
I remember watching The Man Trap (there’s a truly nerd trivia, for those of us old enough to have watched TOS on original broadcast)
J/P=?
April 11th, 2009 at 11:35 am
Hi. I subscribe to Discover magazine and decided to visit. I like your blog, but I think I’m too old(71) and not quite smart enough. A point in my favor is that I’ve been a Trekker since 1966 and I raised my kids on the moral values of Star Trek. And they turned out pretty good. I’ll drop in from time to time.
April 11th, 2009 at 11:49 am
I suppose we’ll have to watch the episode.
April 11th, 2009 at 12:03 pm
Nothing like Trek to kick off a Saturday, thanks. Nice one Tuff Cookie!
April 11th, 2009 at 12:27 pm
no explanations required.
April 11th, 2009 at 12:46 pm
I was confused because I always think of that character as “Gary Lockwood” or sometimes “Frank Poole.”
And sometimes, when I’m very confused, I think of him as “Ensign Pulver.”
April 11th, 2009 at 12:58 pm
o.o
April 11th, 2009 at 1:33 pm
Funnily enough I just rewatched that episode recently. The wife and I decided to watch everything from the original series through DS9 (and then stop, like sensible people, before Voyager).
April 11th, 2009 at 3:03 pm
The ST:TOS novel Strangers in the Sky (never canon, and eventually contradicted by canon material like the First Contact movie) explained away McCoy’s absence by saying he temporarily left the ship for another assignment on the Aldebaran colony. Explanations I’ve seen for the “R” in “James R. Kirk” include the idea that Gary Mitchell was just mistaken, that Kirk had a nickname in the Academy which began with R, and that the episode takes place in a parallel universe in which Kirk’s middle name is “Riberius”.
(In an earlier century, people like me had to become rabbis.)
April 11th, 2009 at 3:04 pm
Pray to me!
April 11th, 2009 at 3:40 pm
I knew the reference straight away as I remember looking forward to, then watching the first Star Trek episode and thinking how cool it was their first baddie had the same first name as me, that sold me on the series right from the off.
April 11th, 2009 at 3:53 pm
Caturday… Phil, do you lurk on 4chan?
April 11th, 2009 at 4:19 pm
Treknerdery … painful … someone … beam … me … out.
April 11th, 2009 at 4:42 pm
The cool thing is, whenever he meyows, he does it in that weirdly amplified, heavy reverb way… (Scares the crap out of the dog, too…)
April 11th, 2009 at 5:02 pm
HAAAA HAAAA HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!
April 11th, 2009 at 5:11 pm
Gary Lockwood (and Keir Dullea), along with Phil, were guests at Spacefest in February. Gary tuned 72 while there. The two of them (Keir & Gary) are like a comedy team.
KP
April 11th, 2009 at 6:25 pm
http://www.cbs.com/classics/star_trek/video/video.php?cid=619493214&pid=UxmvXPz_Cbq6vfEzGVrWpnUz0kUAiNsd
April 11th, 2009 at 6:59 pm
Classic. Love it!
April 11th, 2009 at 8:03 pm
I got it right away too, after I translated the spelling.
It’d be a good test for fellow Trekkers/Trekkies to see who can get this!
April 11th, 2009 at 9:55 pm
I got it instantly… it is quite funny, both from the perspective of a life-long Trek fan (I don’t remember ever NOT watching Trek in some form or another [born in 84]) and a cat owner.
April 11th, 2009 at 10:05 pm
The sad part is, I remember entering a trivia contest on the opening day of ST2 when I was about 12 and winning a pair of tickets to E.T. because I was the only one there who could answer all of the obscure trivia. And now it’s all gone.
Should I be sad?
About two years later, I won a Doctor Who trivia contest because I was the only one who knew the coordinates to Gallifrey. And those are stuck in my head to this day, like some twisted variation on pi memorization.
Boy, now I am sad.
April 11th, 2009 at 11:34 pm
“Above all, a cat NEEDS compassion!!”
April 11th, 2009 at 11:48 pm
What’s with that cat? And who is that cat?
April 11th, 2009 at 11:49 pm
Hold on a minute.
Is that your cat?
April 12th, 2009 at 12:30 am
I got it! YAY! I think… (Funny, just when I think I’m over Star Trek, I slip back a ways. Soft spot for the classics, I guess.)
April 12th, 2009 at 1:25 am
I’m a major Trek geek, but I don’t get it. Then again, TOS is my least favorite Trek series.
April 12th, 2009 at 2:48 am
Was supposed to be pilot episode of spin off series.. fortunately, it never took off
April 12th, 2009 at 4:44 am
You know what’s really pathetic? I not only got the reference right away, but I found out that they have a “sequel” to that episode, in comic book form, where the crew of the original series meets the X-Men.
Even worse, you can download it here.
There, I’ve just out-geeked all of you.
That’s not really a good thing, is it?
April 12th, 2009 at 7:42 am
I got it.
I need to get a life, though
April 12th, 2009 at 9:37 am
TOS LOLCAT … Excellent … I Can Haz Antim8tr? I Needz It Fur Timez Experimentz!!! (insert warp engine overload sound)
April 12th, 2009 at 10:10 am
@ Michael L
Spin-off series? Are you sure you’re not thinking of the ‘Gary 7′ episode that came much later? THAT Star Trek ep was supposed to be a pilot for a spin-off series… (GARY Mitchell, GARY Seven: two Garys, but two entirely different characters.)
April 12th, 2009 at 2:54 pm
I got it. But I yield to the uber-geekiness of Reynold.
April 12th, 2009 at 3:37 pm
Somebody remastered season one of the original Star Trek. Besides using the original film (far clearer and sharper than the TV broadcast resolution), certain bits were redone with CGI. The outside-the-ship bits are superb.
This episode (Where No Man Has Gone Before) was particularly well served. The scenes when Enterprise enters the energy barrier are gorgeous.
Why anyone thought there would be any kind of energy barrier at the “edge” of the galaxy is beyond me, but it’s still a fun episode.
April 13th, 2009 at 8:34 am
I havn’t given that episode much thought for a while, so just realized that the energy barrier starting as a dot and getting bigger must be a relativistic tunnel-vision thing.
April 13th, 2009 at 8:57 am
Since when did Caturday become a thing outside certain websites?
April 13th, 2009 at 1:31 pm
Weird that some cat’s eyes glow yellow, while one of my cat’s eyes glow very bright green in photos, and our (human) eyes glow red.
Probably a simple explanation of it, but I’m not that familiar with the structure of cat eyes.
April 13th, 2009 at 4:50 pm
@ Chanelle:
I’m not a biologist but there are two more or less famous facts on eyes that we can check the web for.
First, the tetrapod (landliving vertebrate) eye is twice backwards, compared to cephalopods.
The blood supply in vertebrate eyes comes from the front, with oxygen and cooling (due to the light!), so they cover the nerve receptors for light (and especially makes a blind spot where the blood vessels enter the eye).
And they force the receptors, placed as the 9th or so cellular layer down, to face away (!) from the eye entrance.
Second, the layer beneath the receptors is usually a light absorbing black (or brown, in humans) layer, to avoid light from destroying light-sensitive biomolecules necessary to feed the receptors and to enhance acuity by suppressing scattered light.
But despite that cats (as dogs and many other animals) have a reflective layer behind the retina, to give the infalling surviving photons a second chance to reach a receptor. Less acuity, more sensitivity.
So especially in humans, but also other animals we have a red-eye effect, when we see the brown retinal pigment. And then we have other colors, when reflected in reflective layers of various kinds.
[At this point I had to check:
"White eyeshine occurs in many fish, especially walleye; blue eyeshine occurs in many mammals such as horses; yellow eyeshine occurs in mammals such as cats, dogs, and raccoons; and red eyeshine occurs in rodents, opossums and birds.
The human eye has no tapetum lucidum, hence no eyeshine. However, in humans and animals two effects can occur that may resemble eyeshine: leukocoria (white shine, indicative of abnormalities including cataracts, cancers, and other problems) and red-eye effect (red shine, apparent only in flash photography). [...] Cats and dogs with blue eyes (see Eye color) may display both eyeshine and red-eye effect. [...] Individuals with heterochromia may display red eyeshine in the blue eye and “normal” yellow / green / blue / white eyeshine in the other eye.”
I assume green eye-shine could bee a yellow-red mixture (“both eyeshine and red-eye effect”) so your cat is likely a blue eye?!]
April 13th, 2009 at 5:06 pm
Oops, I may have gotten the last part backwards – perhaps these are exclusive effects.
See Wikipedia for odd-eyed cats: “An odd-eyed cat is a cat with one blue eye and one green, yellow or brown eye. [...] As all cats are blue-eyed as kittens,[6] the differences in an odd-eyed kitten’s eye color might not be noticeable save upon close inspection. Odd-eyed kittens have a different shade of blue in one eye. The color of the odd eye changes over a period of months, for example, from blue to green to yellow, until it reaches its final, adult color.”
Nice pictures too, showing a red-eye and green eye-shine young odd-eyed cat.
So now my hypotheses is that your cat is a sub-adult youngster, not yet reflecting yellow eye-shine.
April 14th, 2009 at 12:23 pm
. . . ‘And sometimes, when I’m very confused, I think of him as “Ensign Pulver.”’
Harold you must be REALLY confused, because Ensign Pulver is Charlie Evans from Charlie X, not Gary Mitchell.
I hope we’re not the only two people that understand what I wrote
April 16th, 2009 at 4:06 am
John Byrne just made a short Gary Seven comics series for publisher IDW. (I think he does all of the separate comics production jobs except for colouring – he’s colour-blind – and yelling because the finished pages are late. And not necessarily this time.) Pretty good stuff, I think. I don’t know if there’s (yet) a collection, but I got ‘em. One episode is written around the Enterprise’s -other- on-screen visit to the twentieth century. (I said Enterprise, so “Voyage Home” doesn’t count.)
If you’re aware of the Scottish John Byrne, this is the Canadian John Byrne.