Johannes T. Evans

me: yeah whatever. i dont feel shit

5 minutes later: only in death does duty end

Hey! For anyone out there who may have read and enjoyed my post-canon fic Scenes from a Disaster Zone, I am here to tell the audiophiles among y’all that the amazing @jellyfishfire made a podfic of it, and you can find it HERE.

Penn: Okay Leonard, then you'll smack Bill across the head with Spock's super Vulcan strength and Kirk collapses and-

Nimoy: No I won't

Penn: ??

Nimoy: Spock would never 😠

Penn: Um, well, the script -

Nimoy: What he'd do is - hey Bill, come over here so I can touch your neck. Then you're going to swoon.

Shatner: I'm going to what

Nimoy: Like this *pinches his neck*

Shatner:

Spock possessed the ability to project a unique form of energy through his fingertips. Nimoy explained the idea of putting his hand on his neck and shoulder to Shatner, and they rehearsed it. Nimoy credits Shatner's acting during the "pinch" that sold the idea and made it work on screen.

This was a much more collaborative era of TV in general when it comes to actors, and Roddenberry had personally headhunted both of them in the first place, he'd worked with Nimoy before TOS, he knew perfectly well what kind of prima donna artistes he was working with, and he still tried it after having stepped back from the show for ages. I knew all that, but!

The scientific versions of this make me feel very glad that I’m no longer a lab rat, as the life-defining version of this for me was when I was a young lab rat tasked with tracking down an extremely defrosted armadillo from Texas.

When the consignment of armadillo parts - decorously placed upon dry ice, in accordance with the finest scientific principles - was shipped to a young British scientist and summarily lost in transit, it was one of those academic problems. You know what I mean by that. That means: Problems that only happen to academics.

The late armadillo was too late. Despite earnest emails promising that it had arrived a few days before, this was meant in a sort of spiritual sense, and what you might refer to as the “material” aspect of the dead armadillo manifested many days later. This was the subject of some fraught discussions between the ivory tower and the US Navy, who said rather stiffly that they had shipped a dead armadillo in perfectly sensible dead condition to us, and had no idea why the American postal service had interpreted their instructions as “send the dead armadillo on a quirky little road trip and lie about it.”

Intense discussions about the dead armadillo revealed the US Navy had no sense of humour about Schrödinger’s Armadillo (“we sent you a dead armadillo, and have washed our hands of any downstream issues”) as well as their rather uptight announcement that they would not be sending us any more free dead armadillos unless we could prove that WE were not in the habit of carelessly losing them. The implication being that this important military armadillo corpse had been lost entirely because the postal service had received it in a spirit of unbecoming whimsy, and this was the fault of Elodie, lab rat and designated representative of the United States Postal Service. As the military arm of the imperial core are naturally the primary suppliers of high-quality scientifically reliable dead armadillos, this censorious and frankly ungenerous cooling-off was a topic of some consternation.

Elodie, a very young person at the time, who rather fancied the British postdoc who looked so enthralling in riding breeches, was thus tasked with tremulously arguing with the Navy about how grateful we were for everything, but how fresh armadillos were far more academically interesting, while we were on the topic, if they didn’t mind, and if they could spare another one, if we promised not to allow the mail to become whimsical.!

The academically interesting part of the metaphysical armadillo was eventually run to ground significantly after the point at which the dry ice had become academic. The state of the armadillo inside the box at that point was an extremely academic problem. The late armadillo had become so late that it had surpassed biological interest, yet had not quite entered the realm of palaeontological significance. It was, however, a stage of lateness that was officially Too Late. It smelled of an unusual kind of death, simultaneously pork and mouse.

As the most junior of junior lab rats, it fell on me at the time to sneak the box into the medical waste in someone else’s laboratory (as is only honourable.)

Universal single payer healthcare

Restore reproducive healthcare

Protecting trans rights

Passing the Equality Act

Ending mass deportation

Term limits for Congress

$25/hr minimum wage

Support for rural medical care and schools

$3000/month for stat at home parents