damn it, janet

Way back with the elevation of US president-elect Reagan—a seismic shift that really marked the change in the country’s political landscape with a new partisan permanency that few could see as lasting, in the late fall of 1980, a satirical comedy programme lampooned the whole frightening opera with an extended sketch—a spoof within a spoof, called the “Ronnie Horror Picture Show.” Vice-President George H.W. Bush also makes an appearance as man-servant Riff-Raff. The production is fraught with clever references and well-staged musical numbers, and one can watch the late-night double-feature at the link in its entirety. Be sure to visit some of Dangerous Minds’ other brilliant vignettes as well.  Someone ought to adapt this for today’s ideological battlefield.

mulder and scully

Although Wired!’s sneak preview of the return of the X-Files only mentions the changing face of technology in its headline (“and now it has smartphones”), I am grateful that at least one other person is recalling the state of connectivity at that time. Admittedly, I was a late-adopter and really only had a cellular phone for emergency purposes, but back in college (when the original syndicate had its run) I can’t remember anyone having a mobile phone, much less using them ubiquitously and gratuitously.
The dormitories weren’t wired for landlines and we had a sheltered computer lab for word-processing and for those cognoscenti, to access the World-Wide Web. One day, queuing up at the cafeteria, I remember having to awkwardly juggle my tray to try to answer an incoming call and holding up the line behind me. The lunch-lady told me to take my time, “It’s alright—X-File.” I wonder if the show helped to introduce and normalise the way we use the wireless today—especially given that, for people of a certain age bracket, our only other formative exposure came with pagers—in MTV’s The Real World—which are not for presumptive drug-dealers. The cultural influence, spin-offs and perhaps distrust certainly cannot be underestimated.

andorian ale

Thanks to Wikipedia (and it cannot receive enough encomnia in my opinion) I learnt that the producer of Star Trek—unlike inventing the teleporter to forego having to film landing scenes, insisted that the series be shot in colour and thus placing it in the prime-time schedule (because of the expense) of America’s pioneering broadcasting triumvirate so audiences could appreciate the green skin of the Orion slave girls.
Later contributors to the programme considered the Orions a little too risqué and perhaps deviant to afford them continued appearances. The Andorians, although founding members of the Federation of Planets and acclaimed for their libations, were excluded as well. In the expanded Universe, however, they became symbols of sexual liberation and figure large in stark opposition to the predominantly heterosexual milieu and deflector shield ceiling of the canonical storyline.

we are a culture, not a costume

The discovery of a class of bacteria—which are everywhere, in the soil and among our beneficial gut population—which can only be described as vampiric took place several years ago and while I am not sure what direction the research has taken, this strain seems especially timely given that one local hospital was found to be harbouring Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA oder Multiresistante Krankenhauskeime) in some of its wards.
News like that incited a panic among some of the clientele, battle-weary from the likes of Ebola—even though it’s endemic to most treatment facilities already and all would forego the negative publicity. These Micavibrio aeruginosavorus and related specimen called Vampirovibrio chorellavorus are purely predatory and cannot live even in nutrient-rich environments, shunning them, unless there are some other hapless bacteria to feed on—making their study rather difficult since the sample is always a contaminated one, latching on to their victims with enzyme fangs and sucking the life out of them. Subsequent culturing made pathologists hopeful that a living, evolving antibiotic agent could be used to combat those familiars (coming from the word midge, a nigget is a small insect—perhaps like Jiminy Cricket or a flea-circus—that was used as a witch’s minion, and I bet that the same terminology could apply to tinier things like germs) of our own drug abuse and hygiene.