Happy Birthday William Shatner!

http://www.shatnerDVDclub.com/

http://harry.latrique.free.fr/Leonard%20Nimoy%20&%20William%20Shatner/Spaced%20Out-%20The%20Best%20of%20Leonard%20Nimoy%20and%20William%20Shatner/13%20Lucy%20in%20the%20Sky%20With%20Diamonds.mp3

Its scaring me.

-- Dr Morbius (wjwe...), March 22nd, 2006.

The Day the Clown Cried

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Also remember Lewis having a syndicated talk show pilot (circa '84) and interviewing The Shat, mostly about horsemanship.

Jerry Lewis receives French Legion of Honor on 80th birthday

Hip Hip Hooray for the Bill Shatner! On his magical birthing day!

Nimoy: Melllvar, you have to respect your actors. When I directed Star Trek IV I got a magnificent performance out of Bill because I respected him so much.

Shatner: And when I directed Star Trek V I got a magnificent performance out of me, because I respected me so much!

I just prefer Shatner because I like how he throws himself 100% into whatever stupid project he's on - no matter what it is, you get the full SHATNER EXPERIENCE (ie, lots of weird inflections, overacting, etc.) I appreciate that work ethic. (I'm not familiar enough with JL to say whether he shares this or not - its entirely possible).

I fckng love this album. The version of Common People is awesome.
Never will be a has-been in my book.

Happy Birthday Bill!

And I'm sure if I met him he'd say - "Hey call me Bill..."

He had a great schmuck moment on the Oscars (it must've been 1980, right after the first elephantine Trek film) when the Best Documentary winner for Best Boy -- it was about the guy's retarded cousin -- thanked several relatives, including the subject;s dead dad, I think. Shatner steps back on the mic and quips "I'm glad that man didn't have a bigger family!"

Trek cast unanimously found him unbearable.

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2447/3605337552_28233e4d19.jpg

Has anyone else been watching his interview show on Biography? It is strangely compelling!

meant to post this from Michael Musto's blind items column last week:

And now, let's stop in the vintage gossip shop for some oldies-but-not-moldies: What bizarre icon once called a famous mail-order company to finish his last-minute Christmas shopping, and when the clerk quipped, "We'll beam those right out," he complained to a manager and had the clerk beamed right out of there? (I.e., he got the guy fired.)

Happy bday you weirdo

apparently his book on Nimoy chronicles much feuding; LN mostly froze him out last ten years

Nimoy def seems like the all-around more pleasant and (dare I say it) smarter of the two, I can only imagine how tiresome dealing with Shatner in real life must be

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/william-shatner-opens-up-deathbed-864547

the project 'rift' was over that Shatner ST Captains interview show.

http://nypost.com/2016/02/14/leonard-nimoy-wasnt-speaking-to-william-shatner-when-he-died/

Just found about this and listening to "Mr Tambourine" in celebration.

The last paragraph of the nypost piece made me emotional

William Shatner on his Blue Origin flight to space: "It was among the strongest feelings of grief I have ever encountered." https://t.co/CI1WDV17oe pic.twitter.com/z0jyFRzJ7w

— graham starr (@GrahamStarr) October 9, 2022

Pathetic. "I'm changing the climate, ask me how! To feel the catharsis of connection with all living things, of course. But wait...why does this ridiculous boondoggle of a vanity project make me feel so empty inside?"

Cue Sagan's pale blue dot speech and wheel Shatner back to the aging narcissists' home. (His LPs do rate, I'll give him that.)

This comment was fine.

Was it? I had second thoughts but I'm pretty expert at second guessing so

looks like old bill is in agreement with heidegger and arendt then

I'm out of the loop. Wasn't it Arendt who came up with the banality of evil? No idea about Heidegger to be frank.

they just both predicted what shatner said: it would be supremely alienating, you go out there in a cramped little capsule and it’s dark and cold and empty and nothing really to look at that you can relate to, so you turn back to stare at the earth behind you for comfort and instead you see it all as a pale isolated ball against endless black and that’s supremely alienating too (see the cover of the body’s “i shall die here” album). they said we should just try to have a connection with what’s here around us instead of constantly trying to push into new frontiers to master nature (path to more alienation right there)

i’m not a big fan of either author, obviously both were smart but i don’t have a lot of use for critical theory in general and start to look into their relationship to the third reich and it gets a bit dicey. but their ideas about space (and more generally not constantly trying to master nature) were one of two things that really stood out to me in a college seminar class i took on heidegger and arendt. i think heidegger just talked about it in interviews, arendt wrote something called “the conquest of space and the stature of man” but what we read was from a well known work called “on technology”

you know what, i have the title wrong. it was sections of “the human condition”, with that title. maybe from a reader? apologies, it was 20+ years ago

Thanks for the context.

In 1963, soon after the first human expeditions to space and amid NASA’s plans to launch the Apollo 11 lunar mission, Hannah Arendt participated in the contest “Symposium on Space”, organized by The Great Ideas Today. She was asked whether “Man’s conquest of space increased or diminished his stature?” “The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man” was the essay that she published as a consequence of that contest. It was later included in the second edition of her book Between Past and Future (1961). The essay stemmed from and resonated with the prologue and the latter part of her book The Human Condition (1958). In both of these works, she writes of how science had transformed what it meant to be a human in the modern world. Arendt believed that technology was moving us away from communal participation in society; that it was uprooting the masses as it advanced individualism and execrated interdependence, pushing more and more people into the dungeon of loneliness. Ultimately, in her eyes, science was creating a type of human being who finds satisfaction merely in labour and consumption...

Archimedes once said that if he had a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, he would shift the Earth from its position. In The Human Condition, Arendt quotes Kafka: “(Man) found the Archimedean point, but he used it against himself; it seems that he was permitted to find it only under this condition.” Science may well have found such a point for us – a point from which we could think ourselves off the Earth to such an extent that we could look at the Earth not as our home but as some mechanical object; such that we could look at it from above by separating ourselves from it and making ourselves not those who are fated to live on Earth, but those who can create a new Earth....

The human brain is indeed earthly, yet science has allowed us to think from the Archimedean point. A point at which we could, in a sense, think from so far outside the Earth that we could remake it and see the Earth simply as something to be understood, not as a home but an “objective reality”. If we apply this Archimedean point to ourselves, then our activities appear as no more than overt behaviour and we begin to study ourselves “with the same methods we use to study the behavior of rats.”

https://bigthink.com/hard-science/hannah-arendt-outer-space/

He turned 95 last month, and last night I took my long-time-Trek-fan octogenarian parents to see him speak after a screening of Wrath of Khan. I didn't really know what to expect from him at this point, but he talked and answered questions for more than 90 minutes, up on his feet pacing the stage for much of it. He rambled and wandered as you might expect, but generally kept track of where he was in stories you could tell he'd told thousands of times. Shenanigans on the Star Trek set, his years working in live TV in New York in the '50s (talk about a time capsule), the Twilight Zone episode he did, his own trip into space. As you might expect, he came across a bit full of himself and he definitely likes the sound of his own voice — once a ham, always a ham. But with some endearing self-deprecating humor and a lot of gratitude for the life he's had. It was fun. We didn't get out of there til 11 p.m., and he was still going to hang around after to take pictures with people who bought VIP tickets.

I did a phoner with him around 20 years ago after Has Been came out - he was pretty charming, lucid, sharp, funny.