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  • Losing a spouse and choosing to focus on raising your kids when you have the financial resources seems a value-based choice.

    Martin Short, another Canadian comedian of the same generation, also stopped working for many years when his wife died in 2010.

    His return to work in Only Murders in the Building has been enormously successful - and has reportedly led to a romantic attachment with Meryl Streep who also lost a spouse to cancer and had a hiatus in work.

    One has to wish Moranis similar professional and personal success.

  • Paramount+ Announces Fifth and Final Season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds
  • I was hoping that SNW would focus on Pike and his crew and less on the legacy characters.

    But it seems Goldsman has had his ideas about it since the early 1970s and he’s fulfilling his fan dreams, as an EP and writer, of filling in the backstories of the characters he and we love. I can’t naysay that and it certainly sold the suits on 5 seasons of an excellent show.

  • Paramount+ Announces Fifth and Final Season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds
  • We have to keep in mind that we’ve only seen 20 of 46 episodes, less than half the full run.

    I believe that the new benchmark for selling a licence for reruns on other streamers and linear has dropped from over 70 episodes to a bit over 40 based on various industry reports. So this definitely puts SNW above that threshold.

    This does raise the question though whether there is a plan to morph this into some kind of TOS continuation past year 5 and TAS.

  • Paramount+ Announces Fifth and Final Season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds
  • So a half season + a one-hour series finale?

    Having only 5 seasons seems the new normal since they haven’t been able to actually produce one season per calendar year and actors’ contracts run 7 years.

    But having a short season seems weird, like some kind of negotiated compromise.

    This is just going to feed the ‘Kurtzman is done when his contract expires …’ speculation.

  • Who wore it better?
  • News flash: the original TOS gold shirts were green but the film processing didn’t give us that. Somehow that specific alternate tunic fabric came out on film closer to the actual fabric colour.

  • Close the mathematics gender gap: huge study prompts urgent call to action
  • I would argue that a lot of the computational based problem solving , from middle school through early undergraduate years, focused on topics historically oriented to boys’ interests, aren’t a good measure of innate math talent either.

    But those have historically left a lot of female students behind.

    Male or female, most students are really looking to get through math requirements with plug-and-chug replication of algorithms to get to an answer - not genuine problem solving or abstraction. However, being able to reproduce an answer on a very slightly different problem, or just one with different numbers to plug in, does very little towards using mathematical as a means to model problems independently and find solutions.

  • EXO-6 Revisits "The Cage," Master Replicas' Next Action Figures (and a Talking Moopsy!), and Much More Star Trek Merch News!
  • Now I wish I had preordered Spock.

    The one I want most is Number One but it would have been great to have the set.

  • Methane leaks from dormant oil and gas wells in Canada are seven times worse than thought, McGill study suggests
  • Garbage dumps are close to the grid and the users.

    Many of the worst offenders are very old wells, as much as a century old. Their original owners are long gone which is how governments ended up being burdened with capping them.

    Like many old toxic mines, the creators of the problems have evaded legal liability by going out of business. Legal frameworks may be more rigorous now but the old wells and mines remain.

    Some of the oldest wells, like the ones near Petrolia in SW Ontario, might be economically viable for methane power generation. Others in Saskatchewan and Alberta are likely not.

  • [Insert Trek episode of choice]
  • That one was a budget shortfall actually.

  • Fewer Americans travelling to Canada
  • You’re welcome. The Bjorkquist decision implications aren’t that well known. I wouldn’t be aware if we weren’t trying to help some extended family figure it out z

  • Bruce Horak On Catching That Carrot On ‘Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ And Painting Over 600 Portraits
  • One of the things in the interview, that’s super interesting, is that the original script had a scene that would have made it absolutely unequivocal that Hemmer was killed.

    And it was shot, with some significant Sfx challenges.

    The interviewers asked Bruce if there were any scenes left in the cutting room floor and he responded that there was.

    :::The actor was in harness for a falling scene in which he would have been fighting off young Gorn. He had been pleased to have the opportunity to have a heroic on-screen:::

    But the scene was cut despite it being challenging production-wise, all the more so with a blind actor in prosthetics.

    So, one has to wonder if the showrunners decided to keep the door open for Hemmer to return…

  • Fewer Americans travelling to Canada
  • Yes, your Quebecois ancestors would be considered Canadian-born.

    But this opportunity to seek citizenship may be time limited as it’s an interim measure in place until the government can pass legislation to amend the citizenship act to address the issues found in the Bjorkquist decision.

    Your ancestors wouldn’t have birth certificates as there wasn’t civil registration of births at that time but there is a database of baptismal records (which are valid for proof of birth from that time).

    That subreddit has several people who have applied based on great-great grandparents who were born in the 19th century.

    Best to look at the FAQs there. The forms are on the IRCC site but the information isn’t easily navigated around the interim measure.

  • Fewer Americans travelling to Canada
  • You may wish also to check out whether you may be able to claim citizenship by descent under an Interim measure related to the Bjornquist ‘Lost Canadians’ decision.

    It requires one Canadian-born ancestor (not a child of other countries foreign service).

    While I wouldn’t usually recommend Reddit, the r/CanadianCitizenship subreddit has a useful FAQ on the Interim Measure and people posting about their experiences with the process.

  • New Star Trek Series In-Development
  • My reaction precisely.

    But who knows, it may be wonderful.

    And I’m always ready to champion more animated Trek.

  • Canada has more manufacturing jobs per capita than the US.
  • You absolutely are missing the point.

    It doesn’t matter what we’d like it to be.

    Claiming a statistical account measures chickens when it measures albatrosses and then making inferences about chickens, would be silly.

    Likewise, using labour productivity figures from the national income accounts.

    Nothing to say that the points you and others are raising aren’t both much more relevant and interesting.

    But when the business press drags out labour productivity comparisons as if they have anything meaningful to say on the subject, it’s a non sequitur to the conversation you’d really like to have.

  • Canada has more manufacturing jobs per capita than the US.
  • Whatever the problems with the old definitions, and they are numerous, they remain the way the national accounts are published in OECD countries.

    But so are too the conventions of generally accepted accounting principles for financial accounting.

    These are the way our data sources are framed so to do meaningful data analysis and interpretation we have to know them.

    Business schools are not immune or exempt from understanding where the data comes from and how it’s constructed. Any good business school in whatever tradition will make sure its students understand that at least.

    It’s one thing be such a pedant as to make students switch from conventional and do basic microeconomics with the P and Q axes reversed (as they logically should be), just to correct a deeply embedded error in the history of economic practice - and there are profs out there who do that.

    It’s another thing to be insistent on what is actually in a measure that calls itself ‘labour productivity’ and is used by uninformed or deliberately misleading business press in Canada to beat on the labour force itself when the structural issues are completely different.

    It would be worth discussing if the business press didn’t constantly misinterpret the meaning of measure.

  • Canada has more manufacturing jobs per capita than the US.
  • Fair enough.

    There are genuine questions about whether or not the federal government should have given in to the provinces and territories in the 1990s regarding vocational and labour market training.

    Both of these, and post secondary, are federal jurisdiction or shared jurisdiction at best. (But accreditation of professional associations and credentials is provincial.)

    The federal government did its best to continue to directly fund these kinds of programs but the provinces, especially but not exclusively Quebec, felt strongly that this was preventing them to set their own socioeconomic development priorities.

    It sounds like both the CPC and LPC federal parties had platforms that look to have the federal government step back into this space.

    One has to wonder if they view the agreements they made to transfer labour market training to the provinces and territories as something they can pull back or wind up…

    On the agriculture point, let’s say I am more than qualified to speak to economic terminology.

    So, it may be pedantic, but it’s important to understand where economics definitions come from.

    Some like labour productivity and economic rents are irrevocably tied to their origins in agricultural economic concepts.

    Which means that when applied to a manufacturing or service economy, peoples’ intuition about their meaning can be very wrong.

    When we’re teaching economics, we talk about ‘developing economic intuition’ but it would be much easier for students if we didn’t have to counter so many counterintuitive terms.

  • Opinion: Mark Carney has shown a confidence in the existence of Canada
  • I was absolutely dumbfounded at the time.

    There was so much revealing racism and more in that statement, but also American Exceptionalism and willingness to do anything to get a gold medal.

  • Canada has more manufacturing jobs per capita than the US.
  • Agricultural productivity is relevant insomuch as the economic definition of ‘labour productivity’ was developed for that context.

    It’s a measure of return of labour to capital.

    It is NOT measure of how productive the human capital of a population is.

    You and others here are mistakenly confusing human capital which includes investments in

    • education
    • skills
    • health and longevity

    with labour productivity.

    Also, you are very far off the mark if you think that Canada’s education and skills training is in any way inferior to that of the United States. On every possible measure from literacy to cognitive skills and abilities, the Canadian adult population is better than the US in international comparisons such as by the OECD.

    Skilled trades programs are arguably better in Europe but not in the USA.

  • Last day for Star Trek Day sale on Steam (Sept 8-15)

    Several Star Trek licensed games are on Steam, now at a significantly discounted price for the annual Star Trek Day celebration.

    These include the MMP Star Trek Online, but also single player games Star Trek Bridge Crew and Star Trek Resurgence (a choose your own path role play game).

    We’d waited until Resurgence came to Steam, because we did want to buy it from Epic, but decided to be even more patient and wait for a sale so we could get it for our teens as well. I’ve been playing in parallel with one of our teens and debating the impacts of our very different choices.

    I have had Bridge Crew since 2022, but we got copies for the teens yesterday. One is into it. It requires running an Ubisoft account synched to Steam which can be annoying, but otherwise G2G.

    4
    Confirmed! - CTV has the Prodigy season 2 licence

    Having reached my exasperation on the total lack of information from Bell Media on a Canadian release, I asked @GoodAaron@mastodon.social if he or the Hagemans could share any information. Here is his reply on Mastodon.

    It’s great to have EPs who will engage with us.

    I’m still gearing up my recipes for a Star Trek Prodigy Soirée for the premiere!

    In case you haven’t seen this, CBS entertainment sponsored a social media influencer to develop watch party ideas for the Prodigy Season 1 finale Supernova Soirée .

    I’ve been experimenting and building on some of these ideas for the premiere of season two. One of Canada’s favourite ice cream brands has this interesting suggestion for A triple-berry yogurt sorbet float punch that seems very Star Trek Prodigy themed.

    6
    Variety - Top Marketing & Communications Executive leaving Paramount Global
    variety.com Paramount Global Head of Marketing, Communications Julia Phelps Exits

    Julia Phelps, Paramount Global's executive VP and chief communications and corporate marketing officer, is leaving the company.

    More departures of former Viacom senior executives from Paramount Global in the wake of Baklish’s firing.

    4
    'Ivory Tower', likely aka 'Starfleet Academy' preproduction rumoured to start in March

    The Directors Guild of Canada (Ontario) ‘Hot List’ compilation of Ontario-based production information has been updated with a new CBS Studios show ‘Ivory Tower’ to begin Accounting & Art Department preproduction in March.

    3
    Friends don't let friends try. . .

    While all TAS episodes had some kind of moral lesson, S1 E10 was an outright criticism of substance use.

    M’Ress and Scotty, unwittingly exposed, end up enamoured then incensed with one another. One is never sure how different that is from a Caitian’s usual romantic style.

    Chapel comes off badly in this one. As Spock puts it “A few moments of love, paid for with several hours of hatred.” It’s all the more poignant given SNW’s deepening of their backstory.

    8
    James McKinnon confirms creative differences likely a factor in Kelvin 4 failure to start production in 2022
    trekmovie.com ‘Picard’ Makeup Designer Reveals ‘Star Trek 4’ Pre-Production Shut Down In 2022 Over Script Issues

    James MacKinnon has doing one more feature film as the last thing on his Star Trek bucket list.

    ‘Picard’ Makeup Designer Reveals ‘Star Trek 4’ Pre-Production Shut Down In 2022 Over Script Issues

    As much as most of us have long had any remaining interest in a fourth Kelvin movie long exhausted by the endless repetition of hype and failure, there does seem to be more confirmation of significant creative differences on the script that was in development in 2022.

    James MacKinnon, longtime makeup designer, shared some context during an interview on his work on Picard and future ambitions. He explained that he was hired by Matt Shankman in 2022 to work on preproduction but was fired after a week when the work shut down.

    > “We were supposed to shoot in the middle of [2022] and it was supposed to come out the following year [2023], but I think a script rewrite went in a different direction.”

    This aligns with previous comments from Zoe Saldaña that creative issues around the script were a factor in the movie not going ahead.

    5
    'The Trial never ends . . .' Global premiere! Migleemo - Hemmer : Fix that which is broken #1

    I have realized that I need a new editing tool that will let me use panels with more than 6 frames.

    A private message with a recommendation would be appreciated sincerely.

    2
    Tired of 'Car Talk' with Gowron? Here's the podcast c/risa really needs...

    Anyone interested?

    I can see so much potential for guidance from a telepathic Aenar engineer & an avianoid counsellor.

    12
    Paramount+ confirms series order for 'Starfleet Academy'
    www.startrek.com New Series Order for 'Star Trek: Starfleet Academy' Announced

    The all-new original series from CBS Studios will follow the adventures of a new class of Starfleet cadets!

    New Series Order for 'Star Trek: Starfleet Academy' Announced

    While there was an announcement shortly before the WGA strike, and Alex Kurtzman confirmed the writers room is back up and at work during an NYCC panel, Paramount+ is moving forward on promotional information about the forthcoming new ‘Starfleet Academy’ show.

    Will be keeping an eye out for information about preproduction design work starting up in Ontario.

    16
    What kind of weird really engages and trends with Trek fans?

    My contribution to the fediverse’ #MakeYourOwnMoopsyMonth challenge.

    Be gentle, I’m a novice meme-creator.

    5
    Kevin + Moopsy meme challenge - because why not?

    It’s October, and Trek’s new adorable horror is being unfairly usurped in trendiness by a character who appeared in all of two TOS episodes (even if the grimness of his personal backstory rivals La’an Noonian-Singh’s).

    So, Moopsy + Kevin memes. . . I dare you.

    4
    Yeoh's S31 movie preproduction complete?

    We know from Kurtzman’s messaging at NYCC recently that Michelle Yeoh put her Academy Award star power towards ensue that her Section 31 ‘movie event’ moves forward on Paramount+.

    Checking in on the Director’s Guild of Canada Ontario round up of information for its members (Hot List), there’s been an interesting update.

    While ‘Dovercourt’ (working title alias for the direct to streaming movie) still has a bold ‘POSTPONED’ due to the SAG-AFTRA strike, it’s moved from the ‘Preproduction stage’ section of the list to ‘Production.’

    What does this suggest?

    It would seem that the key preproduction production design work in Toronto has been able to be completed since the WGA strike ended.

    Like SNW, the crews in Toronto are basically ready to go into production once the actors’ strike is settled. Logistically, it’s not entirely clear that both could shoot at the same time as they share some of the same crews, but it is encouraging.

    3
    Question - Star Trek Explorer Presents short story collections from Titan Bookstores - are they simply compilations from the magazines or new content?

    I’ve been enjoying the very short stories by Treklit authors in the recent issues of Titanbooks Star Trek Explorer magazine.

    I see that they’re promoting anthologies of short stories, with a new third one due to be released soon. However, it’s not clear if these are just compilations of previously published stories from the magazine, new content or a mix of both.

    Anyone have the earlier releases?

    3
    NYCC Starfleet Academy confirmation

    StarfleetAcademy ‘will be funny’ according to Alex Kurtzman.

    He’s also confirmed at the NYCC panel today that the writer’s room is back at work after the WGA strike.

    Given the heavier #thriller background (Absentia) of one showrunner Gaia Violo, and youth supernatural CV (TheMagicians; NancyDrew) of Noga Landau the other, sounds as though Tawny Newsome is there to bring some lightness and fun.

    I’m really looking forward to seeing more in the 32nd century StarTrek.

    I’m also pleading 🙏 let David Cronenberg’s Kovich be involved.

    I would love so much to have some of The Magicians mysterious vibe with so true humour mixed in. Glad to know that they’re going for something less earnest than the tone of Discovery for this show, it didn’t seem to be working in the Discovery episode with Tilly and the cadets.

    18
    Star Trek, including timeloops, meets Hallmark

    StarTrek actors have a strong showing across the Hallmark movie offerings this year.

    — Jonathan Frakes & Robert Picardo have supporting roles in ‘A Biltmore Christmas’

    — Dan Jeannotte (Sam Kirk in StarTrekStrangeNewWorlds) is the lead in ‘Our Christmas Mural’

    — Ronnie Rowe Jr (Lt Bryce in #StarTrekDiscovery) leads in Christmas with a Kiss’ (working title), a Mahogany Presents romance (Hallmark’s Black-focused line)

    — Mira Kirschner (Amanda Grayson in #Discovery and #SNW) is the principal in a romance about a woman discovering her Jewish heritage in a 2022 movie ‘Love, Lights, Hanukkah! that will be rebroadcast this year.

    0
    Another spoken word album is coming from Bill Shatner
    www.udiscovermusic.com William Shatner Announces New Spoken Word Album, ‘BILL,’ Featuring Joe Jonas And Brad Paisley

    William Shatner has announced a new spoken word album, ‘BILL,’ with guest features from Joe Jonas, Brad Paisley, and more.

    William Shatner Announces New Spoken Word Album, ‘BILL,’ Featuring Joe Jonas And Brad Paisley

    Not sure we needed another album from Shatner but you have to admire his indefatigable creativity.

    This one will feature Brad Paisley and Joe Jonas.

    12
    StillPaisleyCat StillPaisleyCat @startrek.website
    Posts 172
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