A New Trek

Friday, 15 July 2011

As discussed earlier, I hosted an episode of Atheists Talk in June that featured local librarian Mindy Rhiger talking about her favorite books for young free thinkers. Very young free thinkers, that is. Most of the books she cited are probably best suited for those in the under 10 years old category. If you have a child or grandchild between 1 and 10 years of age, I suggest you get some of these books. A short description accompanies each one, and the webmaster (not me) provided a link to Amazon.com to purchase the books. Many of the books are available at the public library, too.

Here is the complete list of books we talked about during that show. Here is the iTunes podcast list for the show, though at this moment it has not been updated to include June’s episode yet.

And here is Mindy’s blog, including her “Secular Thursday” posts that feature new books for children every week.

And as long as I’m directing you to go to other places on the web, check out my buddy Tim’s latest blog post, in which he shows off his new baby girl and his photo-taking prowess.

Saturday, 16 July 2011

After Owen’s unprecedented acceptance of Star Wars, I felt the need to bring some Star Trek into his life. As everyone knows, Star Trek > Star Wars, and my wife came up with the idea that showing Owen the animated series may be the best way to introduce him to that universe.

This is a great idea, really. The original series, I felt, would be too boring and dated for him. Next Generation and Voyager are way more fun to watch, but there’s also a lot more violence and other things that are, perhaps, inappropriate for a six-year old. But the animated series seemed perfect: half hour episodes of Captain cartoon Kirk flying around saving the galaxy.

We watched the first two episodes a few days ago, and this evening we watched episodes 3 and 4; “One of Our Planets is Missing” and “The Lorelei Signal,” respectively.

So far, Owen loves them! Both times he has requested watching a second episode (I would rather limit the TV viewing to one episode a night but, come on, this is Star Trek). He was very excited to learn that episode three indicated a missing planet, because he thought it meant that there must be a weapon strong enough to destroy entire planets. I told him that might be the case, but he was sure to be disappointed if he went looking for a Death Star in every sci fi world he entered.

Anyway, there are only 22 episodes total. (How come all the shows I like have so few episodes? Oh, wait – not all the shows I enjoy are like that.) Seeing Owen’s enjoyment of disk 1 has led me to put the other disks on the Netflix queueueue. I may have to bump them up to higher positions.

Also, I’ve been meaning to say: Happy Independence, South Sudan! Yes, that’s right, this month marks the beginning of a new nation in the world, bringing the total up to 196. I believe this is an all-time high. In other news, it now means THIS QUIZ has 54 answers now, instead of 53. Just to be sure, I played the quiz to ensure I could still get 100%. I can.