Star Trek, Stormtrooper, and Scientology
Saturday, Tony and I finally got ourselves down to Long Beach to see Star Trek: The Tour at the Queen Mary Dome, after driving up to Van Nuys to get his car window replaced after being smashed when somebody broke into it. And, though I didn’t know it at the time, in the course of our drive up to Van Nuys and back, we passed the Budweiser plant where they’re filming the new Star Trek movie. 
Once at Long Beach, after going through some pretty stereotypical LA traffic, we parked after doing a loop or two around the docks area and bought our tickets. The thing was pretty cool; ship models abounded, as well as wall displays and videos of different behind the scenes aspects. There were also display cases set up with various props and latex masks, including one in which a prop had fallen over and was resting on the hot light in the middle of case, which had started to burn the plastic of the prop. Tony and I found a crewmember and let them know, saving a random piece of Star Trek history and getting the really nice program book and a crew shirt for free because of it.
Of course, the real fun aspect of the whole thing were the recreations of the Original Series and Next Generation bridges, as well as a TNG hallway and transporter room and partial Main Engineering room. Sadly, I have no pictures from either of the bridge sets or the transporter room, since it was a staged photo op setup, any personal photography was prohibited, and buying one of their photos was like eighteen bucks in the gift shop. Eff that.
But you didn’t have to pay extra to just sit in the captains’ chairs, and by god, that alone was worth the price of admission. If you’re into that sort of thing, of course. The tour is in Long Beach until March 2nd, after which it will set sail for various stops around the country. You can check out the website and the official tour schedule here.
In other news, Anthony called me with an interesting bit of information last night. You might’ve heard of Michel Gondry’s new film, Be Kind Rewind, in which Jack Black and Mos Def work at a video store and accidentally erase the entire contents of their store. In order to avoid getting fired and ending the movie prematurely, they set out to recreate all of their favorite movies themselves and pass them off for the real things, hoping they won’t notice.
Well, it seems that the Monsieur Gondry or someone associated with the film is a fan of The Injured Stormtrooper, as it is posted in the favorites section of Be Kind Rewind’s Youtube page. So that’s neat.
Finally, if you haven’t been keeping up with Great Recent Internet Battles lately, you might not have heard that a group calling itself Anonymous has “declared war” on the Church of Scientology. Over the past couple of months they’ve been conducting Denial of Service attacks against Scientology websites and spreading not-meant-for-public-eyes information about the religion (or cult, depending on your point of view) as fast and as wide as they could, preventing the CoS from taking legal action to stop it, as they’ve done in the past. Yesterday was the next step in Anonymous’ actions: a series of protests orchestrated all across the globe from Boston to Australia to California, at every major Scientology center they could.
Living in Los Angeles, you could pretty much count on something interesting going on in our neck of the woods. So Fig, Chloe, and I decided to head downtown with cameras in hand and check it out. I’ve written a recap here, and you can see the photos in that in my Flickr stream here.
We also got some video, which Fig edited into this last night.
All in all, it was a fascinating experience. I’ve written before (elsewhere, I think) about the electrifying nature of rallies, protests, and marches. Of course, there’s a fine line between march and mob, but still, to see hundreds and hundreds of people coming together to make their presence known and their voices heard - to fight against or for something - is a really remarkable experience.
It’s almost like we’re living in the 60’s or something.