Yeah, I’m Paramount’s bitch. Or would I be CBS’s bitch, since they own Star Trek now? Hell, I’d like to think that on some corporate DNA level I’m still Desilu’s bitch.

From the moment I saw it on startrek.com, I knew I was going to the big theatrical screening of the remastered version of the two-part Original Series episode “The Menagerie.” To the uninitiated, what’s unique about that particular episode is that much of it is a diegetic flashback to the original series pilot “The Cage,” which featured a different cast of characters except for Spock.

I was momentarily deterred by the fact that the closest showing was at the horrible googolplex in Emeryville. As I’ve expounded on in the past, I hate those places, and if I have to deal with one I’d prefer it at least be in town. But, no. Evidently the Evil Ex-Sony Metreon and the AMC 16 (originally called the AMC 1000 in reference to its location at 1000 Van Ness but renamed a few years back because people wondered where the other nine hundred and eighty-four screens were) didn’t want to lose out any valuable showings of Bee Movie, so I had no choice but to leave the City and County of San Francisco. No choice, you understand. This was something I simply had to do. The opportunity to see an episode of the original Star Trek projected, from the season when the cinematography mattered, to get a close look at details that would be lost otherwise? Oh my yes. I anticipated spending much of the time studying the backgrounds and corners of the screen, much like I’d done in the past with The Motion Picture.

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Oh, we piss people off.

The schedule for the next few months is posted on flyers outside the theater, and on December 15, we’re doing It’s a Wonderful Life. There was already some internal conflict about it, and some anonymous wag wrote on one of the flyers: “It’s not a bad movie, you S.O.B.s!!!” With three lines under S.O.B.s, so we’ll know they mean business.

Yeah, some people don’t like Bad Movie Night so much.

Me, I do. It’s my baby. I didn’t create the show—that honor goes to Jim Fourniadis and Ty McKenzie—but I was there on the first night: Red Dawn, March 27, 2005. Coincidentally, I broke up with my girlfriend of seven years earlier that afternoon. As a result I almost didn’t go to the show at all, but I was looking forward to it, and the point of the breakup had been (among other things) so I could go do the stuff I wanted, and Bad Movie Night was very much the stuff I wanted to do. I became a frequent co-host, eventually weaseling working my up to de facto curator. It’s still the most fun thing I do on a regular basis.

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It’s the big sci-fi movie of my childhood, the one against which all others are judged. Watching it still gives me a warm fuzzy feeling. I couldn’t tell you how many times I’ve seen it, but it’s a whole hell of a lot, and I can quote lines or do entire scenes. I recognize that it’s a highly flawed movie, and for the most part I liked the rejiggered effects in the “Director’s Edition.” At least they didn’t try to shoehorn in bathroom jokes like the later, much suckier movies in the series.

Even if you haven’t already read the title or seen the accompanying picture, in this post-ironic age you’ve probably figured by now that I’m not talking about Star Wars. Instead, I refer without irony to Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

I can hear the witty rejoinders already: “You mean Star Trek: The Motionless Picture, don’t you?”

Yeah. That one.

Thanks to my family having remarkable taste (which also resulted in a lifelong love of The Beatles and Dylan), I’ve been a Star Trek fan from a very young age. Most of my fellow Generation X’ers hate the movie, though. As do Boomers. I haven’t asked any Millennials, but I’d gather that for them, Star Trek movies start with the Khan one, and they all kinda suck anyway. Story of my life, loving something everyone else hates.

Actually, I don’t know anyone who actively hates Star Trek: The Motion Picture. (Though I imagine a few haters will chime in in the comments section. Hello, haters!) Most people just dismiss it as “the slow and boring first movie,” even if they haven’t seen it in a decade or three. It doesn’t raise the well-deserved ire of the underbudgeted, poorly written and incompetently directed Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, or the overbudgeted, poorly written and incompetently directed Star Trek Nemesis, the latter being the one Trek movie I cannot sit through. Gods, Nemesis was horrible, so talky and unwatchable. (Irony alert: many people feel that way about The Motion Picture.) At least The Final Frontier has a certain ramshackle charm to its badness. Watching it can be like a parlor game: there’s something wrong with practically every scene, every shot, every line of dialogue. See if you can spot them all! Just be sure it isn’t a drinking game, lest you have alcohol poisoning by the time Spock plays “Row Your Boat” on his lyre. It’s like the Turkish Star Trek with a thirty million dollar budget, and I mean that as the highest praise.

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It’s no secret that our favorite music download service at ‘Loper HQ isn’t iTunes, but eMusic. Kirk discussed his reasons last year, and mine are pretty much the same: the wide variety of music, the great pricing, and the fact that I can do whatever I want with the music I’ve downloaded. No damn dirty DRM.

I’m not going to address the breadth and depth of the music itself, but rather the user experience. And to do that, I should very quickly explain how I use eMusic. It’s pretty simple actually: I pay $14.99 per month for 65 downloads (it’s a legacy plan), and every week, I login, go through the new music for that week, and save the things in which I’m interested in my “Saved For Later” page.

That way I don’t use up my downloads at the beginning of the month, and have to wait because something as awesome as The Hold Steady Live At Lollapalooza comes out the day after I used them up. (Of course, I could get a booster pack if that happens, but that’s not maximizing my music dollar.)

After doing it this way for the past couple of years, I’ve noticed some ways that eMusic could improve its user experience. Five ways, as it turns out, and here they are:

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The A.V. Club started out as what seemed like a weird afterthought. I first noticed it as a link from its parent site, The Onion. Given the name and the context, I assumed that it would be full of fake news about popular culture. Instead, what I found was straight commentary on popular culture — snarky, for sure, but sincere.

It felt out of place to me. After all, The Onion itself was so full of irony and snark, that an adjunct that was essentially straight-ahead pop culture commentary seemed, well, like a bit of a joke in and of itself. But it wasn’t, and over the years, the writing became sharper and more focused, and the A.V. Club became a brand in and of itself. I’m not sure when, exactly, but I’ll bet it was when they started tossing out high-quality content on a daily basis. That always helps.

So while I still don’t know exactly why it exists in the first place, I do know this: in the past couple of years, it has become one of my very favorite places to visit on the entire Web.

Here are nine reasons why:

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Several reports today that Apple has started its experiment with offering music that isn’t restricted by any Digital Rights Management. They are calling it iTunes Plus — I guess that the “Plus” is the freedom to do whatever you want with the songs you download.

Which, of course, shouldn’t really be a plus, but rather a default. But “iTunes Default” or “iTunes As It Shoulda Been In The First Place” probably wouldn’t have gone over too well with the marketing folks, so “iTunes Plus” it is.

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Considering this site has a decidedly technophile bent, it may strike some (well, not Kassia) as odd that I am so preternaturally focused on the oh-so-very-old-school world of books. Perhaps it’s because I have spent my entire adult life working in libraries (full disclosure: I am not a librarian, thank goodness).

So this week I attended my first rare book club meeting, where sad to say, the median age of the other attendees was “dead.” I think a few permanently left our golden orb somewhere between the departure of the salad and the arrival of the soup at the French restaurant near downtown Los Angeles where the thirty-five odd (and I mean “odd”) people gathered.

Not to get all ageist on my gentle readers, but this is a preface to saying that being thirtysomething, I look around and see my fellow Gen-Xers just don’t seem to be all that interested in collecting fascinating, if musty, tomes anymore. It used to be great sport back in the day to have succesfully collected, for instance, every volume of the sacred Zamorano 80 books on Californiana (no, that’s not a misspelling). You were lifted to the ranks of bibliophilic Valhalla, feted by your brethren-in-arms every bit as much as Audie Murphy in a New York ticket tape parade.

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I admit to being a bit old-fashioned, but in my mind, good customer service rarely involves suing your customers. But, for the past several years, that’s just what the RIAA has done. Nothing creates a warm and fuzzy feeling about an industry faster than threats. Makes you feel wanted.

Illegal downloads are a problem. I maintain — because frankly, the RIAA has offered nothing in the way of hard evidence — that the amount of money being lost is quite a bit less than what the press releases suggest. I believe this simply because every download does not represent a lost sale. In many cases, the songs would have gone unsold, unheard, unnoticed.
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Let’s just get this out front: The Larry Sanders Show is on my shortlist of the greatest TV shows ever made. I’d already been a fan of Garry Shanding from his sly It’s Garry Shandling’s Show, but Larry Sanders was a quantum leap in every direction: the writing, the characters, the acting were all top-notch. People always point to The Sopranos or even Sex and the City as the shows that established HBO as an original programming powerhouse, but it was The Larry Sanders Show that really got the ball rolling.

That said, I have to ask this question: why are they fracking with us by not releasing every episode of every season on DVD? Why only the First Season, and now this (not just the) best-of DVD? Why not everything? I’ve been looking forward to buying every single episode of this show for years, and this is my choice? Bollocks!

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As is my sometimes habit, I ventured out into the real world this week to take the pulse of real people who use real new media. Nobody was paid nor bribed in the course of these discussions and all opinions reflected here represent the opinions of my (anonymous as they shun fame and fortune) focus group, expanded this time to include a few voices from the legal profession.

So here is what they’re saying out there in reality. Remember, real people with real money to spend on goods and services:

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