The Hallmark Store has their Christmas ornaments at half-price so my wife and I went by just to see what there was left.  I picked up a Romulan Bird of Prey (looks really good) that lights up and also a Battlestar Galactica original Cylon Centurion.  It has sound and is very detailed.  The rest of the Trek items they had looked very poorly made, though the Star Wars (hack, hack, pitoo) items looked a lot better. 

I wonder if CBS/Paramount just didn’t care about the quality of the figurines or opted for lowest bidder.  Quality of items and prices convince me that they will allow “Star Trek” to be placed on anything with a jacked-up price, knowing that fans will scoop it up.  Well, not all fans.

Our change of command is now official, although it happened 3 weeks ago on September 10, 2011. Thank you Margi for being our CO “whilst we was borned”. We are forever in your debt. Congratuations to Commander Brian Franks for becoming our newest XO! Hip, hip, hooray!

The shuttle Atlantis landed this morning (in the dark – they couldn’t have waited a couple more rotations so people would be up and watching???????)(I think it was done on purpose as a slap to the program but that’s just me).  A big thank you goes out to all the faceless NASA workers that helped America shine for 30 years!  Unfortunately, due to the program shutting down, and our current lack of national leadership with long-range vision shutting down the Constellation and Orion programs, we will be losing our brain trust that NASA has had for so long.   Many engineers and scientists will not have jobs soon and it is to our national shame that we are losing these important people.

I don’t know if it’s their rush to get product out or their art director just needs to care more.  I went by Hallmark today to check out the new Star Trek ornaments and I wasn’t impressed by them.  The Spock looks almost like an anime copy and the Spock/McCoy was similar.  The Romulan TOS ship was okay but waaaaay overpriced.  I actually thought the Batmobile and Thor were better done than any of the Trek ornaments.  I might buy the Bird of Prey but I’m not getting the other offerings this year.   

Doug Hogan

The last space shuttle flight, the Atlantis, roared off the launchpad yesterday morning. It was a glorious beginning to the end of the program. Sorry to see the shuttle ending, but I’m excited about the lack of red tape to get other programs into space through private companies.

After the shuttle launches I’ll listen to the theme to Star Trek: Enterprise. The words are very appropriate for not only the last shuttle mission, but for American space exploration in general right now.

http://www.foxnews.com/slideshow/politics/2011/06/16/navys-sea-shadow/#slide=1