'Scotty,' we hardly knew yee ...
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05203/541806.stm
Friday, July 22, 2005
By Peter Leo, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Boldly going where all men go
As a youth, this Morning Filer spent many happy hours plopped in front of
the console television, watching "Star Trek" reruns when we should have been
outside exercising or at least not eating so many potato chips. Warp speed!
Phasers on stun! Live long and prosper! That's just the type of dork the MF
was, and it helps explain why MF never lettered in any high school sports.
And it also explains why MF was so saddened to learn that James Doohan, the
actor who played chief engineer Montgomery Scott aboard the Starship
Enterprise, died Wednesday at age 85.
As is often the case, you learn the most about a guy's real-life heroics
only after he dies. According to the Associated Press obituary, at 19, the
Canadian-born Doohan escaped turmoil at home by joining the army. He became
a lieutenant in artillery and was among the Canadian forces that landed on
Juno Beach on D-Day. That night, he was machine-gunned, taking six hits:
four in his leg, one in the chest and one that took off his middle right
finger. He hid the missing finger on screen.
So today's Morning File is dedicated to the man immortalized by the phrase,
"Beam me up, Scotty."
Misquote of the day
William Shatner's James T. Kirk, captain of the Enterprise, never actually
said, "Beam me up, Scotty," during the show's three-season run. So claim the
people behind www.filmsite.org. He came close -- "Scotty, beam me up," and
"Kirk to Enterprise, beam us up, Scotty" -- but the captain never uttered
the S.O.S. call most often attributed to him. Small detail, but trekkies are
nothing if not sticklers for accuracy. The "Scotty" misquote is Star Trek's
version of the famous "Luke, I am your father" quotation, which any true
Star Wars geek can tell you was never precisely said by Darth Vader.
Other common misquotes, courtesy of filmsite:
In "Cool Hand Luke," Strother Martin never told Paul Newman, "What we have
here is a failure to communicate." Instead, he said, "What we've got here
is, failure to communicate."
Joe Friday, played by Jack Webb in the TV series "Dragnet," never said,
"Just the facts, ma'am." He said, "All we want are the facts, ma'am."
Neither Humphrey Bogart nor Ingrid Bergman said, "Play it again, Sam," in
"Casablanca." Bogart said to the nightclub pianist, "Play it, Sam. You
played it for her, now play it for me."
In "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," the wicked queen never asked, "Mirror,
mirror on the wall, who's the fairest of them all?" She said, "Magic mirror
on the wall, who is the fairest one of all?"
And contrary to popular belief, MF did not lean over the bow of a boat and
shout to the sea, "I'm the king of the world!" The quote was, "I think I'm
gonna hurl."
Stunning news
Whenever they beamed down to new planets, Scotty, Kirk and the crew always
carried their trusty phaser guns, whose energy pulses could be turned up if
you wanted to blow away a nasty alien, or turned down if you just wanted to
give the nasty alien a good tickle. Now the Morning File, through its
top-level government source (we'll call him "Deep Rove"), learns that the
U.S. military is getting closer to creating such a phaser device, which
would use beams of electromagnetic energy to incapacitate or kill a foe.
"Directed-energy pulses can be throttled up or down depending on the
situation, much like the phasers on 'Star Trek' could be set to kill or
merely stun," the AP's Brian Bergstein reports. "Among the simplest forms
are inexpensive, handheld lasers that fill people's field of vision,
inducing a temporary blindness to ensure they stop at a checkpoint, for
example. [A] separate branch of directed-energy research involves bigger,
badder beams: lasers that could obliterate targets tens of miles away from
ships or planes. Such a strike would be so surgical that, as some designers
put it at a recent conference, the military could plausibly deny
responsibility."
The Morning File vows to keep Deep Rove's identity a triple mega-atomic
secret, unless we're threatened with jail time, in which case we'll sing
like a canary.
Good dog
Among registered purebred dogs, the Scottish Terrier -- Scotty, to its
friends -- is the 42nd most popular dog in the U.S., says the American
Kennel Club
The Final Frontier
Doohan stuck with his space explorer gig to the very end. Before he died,
the actor asked to have his ashes launched into outer space, as was done for
"Star Trek's" creator, Gene Roddenberry. Houston-based Space Services, which
specializes in space memorials, plans to send a few grams of Doohan's ashes
aboard a rocket later this year. Remains are sealed in an aluminum capsule
that stays in orbit up to several hundred years before falling and
vaporizing in the Earth's atmosphere, the AP says.
Last word
>From Hank Stuever in the Washington Post: "The real tribute to James
'Scotty' Doohan, 39 light-years after he first saved the USS Enterprise's
heinie (and did it many times over), is that it's now almost impossible to
have a boyfriend or husband who can't do a somewhat reasonable impression of
Doohan's famously stressed-out burr: 'We've got nuh powrrrr, Cap'n!' Or 'She
cannuh take much moor.' Men say these things when copy machines are jammed.
They say it about an overstuffed Diaper Genie, or a '91 Honda with an
expired inspection sticker. The world is full of chief engineers, and oh,
the things they could do, if they only had a wee more dilithium and a little
more time."
The Morning File wishes James Doohan had been given a little more time.
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