Troggs lead singer Reg Presley, voice of the inescapable “Wild Thing,” has died at the age of 71.

You, Me And “Star Trek: The Next Generation”

by Anne Helen Petersen

An obsession in five acts.

I.
You’re about nine, and you always watch tv with your dad. It’s your thing — he’s usually nursing a Coors Light, you’re doing your best to hang upside down on the couch until your head starts pounding. Sometimes you watch golf and fall in love with Payne Stewart; sometimes you watch “MacGyver” and wish your dad had his hair. But then you start watching “Star Trek: The Next Generation” at 5 p.m. on a Saturday, because obviously that is when the best show on television should be scheduled, and your routine becomes: 1.) watch “TNG” together 2.) Mom and Dad go out to some dinner party and you eat Tony’s Pizza with your brother. Your dad mentions something about how you should maybe start watching the old show, or get the VHS tapes of the movies, but you’re like “is Data in them? THEN NO.” At some point, you watch Wrath of Khan and are horrified.

This essay is part of a series about our favorite TV shows past.

Previously: The Terror Of “Twin Peaks”: His Name Is BOB

There’s something so appealing about the uniforms — how you can tell who does what and how much power he has just by looking at the color and the pips on the collar. Riker, he of the impressive beard, looks so much like someone your parents would be friends with. It’s so great to see the guy from “Reading Rainbow” blind and thriving and an engineer. Lady Doctors! You’ve met a few of them, but none have a son as dorkily side-part handsome as Wesley Crusher. Picard is possibly the coolest person you know. If only you knew what “Tea, Earl Grey, hot” was so you could drink it leisurely before your sporting romp on the holodeck.

II.
You’re about eleven, and you’re in luck: “TNG” is now on every weekday at four. It’s summer, so that’s awesome. But your mom has put the kibosh on summer television watching, because she’s the type of math professor mom who would do something like that, and you’re only allowed television if you spend a Summer Marble on it.

Perhaps the reader does not understand the Marble Summer Economy:

Things that Earn (One) Marble: Chores, Being Nice to Sibling, Reading for Sixty Minutes, Mowing Lawn, Writing a Play, Journaling, Going on a Contemplative Walk, Helping in the Garden, Scooping Dog Poop, Respecting Parents

Things that Cost (Several) Marbles: A Ride to the Pool, An Hour of Television, A New Gameboy Game (approx. 1 billion marbles).

Every day, you do whatever it takes to get the marbles to watch “Star Trek.” You make your dog go poop so you can pick it up. You make your brother act up so you can be nice to him. You mow the lawn within an inch of its life. Your collected plays are proliferating. But “Star Trek” is five days a week, and always perfect. This is before the Borg, before the complicated good-evil split. Everything and everyone, save the dastardly Ferengi, are just so awesomely noble. This is right about the episode when Picard’s mind is captured by some foreign planet, he starts wearing burlap all the time, has a wife, and becomes super proficient at the pan flute. Don’t ask more about that episode — it was called “If Wishes Were Horses” — because you can’t return to it, lest you ruin it entirely. Like the best of your ludicrously hot, well-muscled, Christian ex-boyfriends, it is meant to be remembered, in all its glory, but never reexperienced.

III.
You’re about twelve, and summer vacation could not be more filled with strife. Do you buy a bikini or not? What Would Deanna Troi Do? The obvious answer is buy a skin-tight lilac jumpsuit with a v-neck, but that obviously wouldn’t work at the pool, which is basically all B-cup boobs and skinny dudes with bull cuts and/or highlights.

You want to spend every day waiting for someone to call you on your private number (743–2544) and talk about what happened at the pool yesterday but your parents take you CAMPING on the BOAT and it is so BORING especially with the incessant HIKING but have no fear: your mom bought you three new “TNG” novels, including the very racy Imzadi, which is all about how Deanna and Riker are not just soul mates, but universe mates, like bound and destined forever, and everyone else says it must be so, but then why, ISTL (In Star Trek Life) does Deanna start making out with Worf? It’s not that you don’t like him because he’s a Klingon, because duh, that’s racist, or planetist, but he is just so sincere and/or angry, especially when speaking Klingon, which you could learn to speak from the handbook your brother got you for your birthday, but bygones. A glorified security guard! His beard has nothing on Riker’s beard. Plus Riker is “Number One” — it’s his job.

You’ve read some trashy Lois Duncan in your time, but nothing compares to Imzadi and the other two novels that are so satisfying that you forget them entirely the instant you finish them. Plus your mom reads them too, which is either awesome or uncomfortable. Maybe you’ll just keep pouting and wearing your Umbro shorts.

IV.
You are somewhere in the middle of middle school and doing A+ work at being everything you are not. You’re on the math team but refuse to put on the team sweatshirt, covered in math puns, until the very last minute. You pretend you have a doctor’s appointment when really you’re getting out of class to do complicated word problems with the other nerds. You’re really into Simon & Garfunkel but fill your BMG 10-for-1 CD order with Warren G and Tupac. The way you can tell if you’re cool is whether or not someone links arms with you on the walk back from lunch, and you spent at least 75% of your energy on a given day anticipating that 100-foot walk.

You have cheerleading practice everyday after school but then you go home, make some Bagel Bites, and hang out with your real friends on television. They would never link arms; they stiff-arm walk with a purpose. Everyone’s cool because everyone’s on the motherfucking ENTERPRISE.

At some point the local affiliate decided to alternate “Next Generation” with the original series. You force yourself to watch but always feel nauseated by the color of Kirk’s uniform, the fine sheen of sweat on his face. You know enough to know that he’s supposed to be sexy, but the 60s coloring and the ramshackle bridge makes you queasy. In contrast, the “Next Generation” Enterprise is everything a Type-A girl desires — clean, stark lines, steely grays, pressed uniforms. Sex is present, but so much less volatile.

There’s a girl that sits next to you in your English class — very meek, almost to the point of invisibility. One day her Beverly Crusher bookmark slips out and onto the floor. You pick it up; stare longingly. If you were less self-conscious, less terrified of yourself, you would start a conversation and become this girl’s best friend. You could watch your favorite show and have the best conversations. But you’re a coward. It’s unclear whether your small town has made you a coward and you’ve done it to yourself, but the results are the same: the thing you love the most must remain your own unutterable secret.

Because there’s this other kid in your grade, the kid with four nipples (everyone talks about it all the time, because that’s the only thing there is to talk about) who, when angry, usually after someone makes fun of his four nipples, starts talking in Klingon. Cursing. Calling people “sons of mother’s hog sluts,” that sort of thing. That is the kind of kid who likes “Star Trek.” It morphs abject before your eyes.

V.

You’re in college and in slow recovery from years of play-acting at cool. You are the very cliche of the smart girl goes to college; stops wearing so many collared Oxford shirts; realizes boys like her. You want to date them all. Friends proliferate. You give up math because you want to. “Star Trek” becomes part of a long foreign voyage from which you have kept no souvenirs.

But then one of these new proliferating friends — one who seems the most confident, most at ease with herself, dating a senior as a freshman, that kind of girl with that kind of magnetism — somehow gets on the topic of “Star Trek,” and how much she loved it. SHE IS NOT EVEN DRUNK. IT IS AMAZING. She’s talking about the way that other people talk about their Nirvana phase, or how we all went through that weird period of wearing knee socks. She had a huge crush on Dr. Julian Bashir (totally subpar, but fine, okay) and conventions and her BEVERLY CRUSHER UNIFORM and their communicators and pips and your emotions expand and multiply like that wormhole you take to get to Deep Space Nine.

You can’t tell if you’re jealous, sad that you didn’t know her when you were 12, or so blissed out that you know her today. You’d seen “Star Trek” fans represented so uniformly, as such clear exemplars of antisocial behavior. But this, this is a new social calculus: “Star Trek” could breed all sorts.

***

When you love a show as a young person, it can manifest in all manner of ways. Some start swearing in Klingon, some read fanfic erotica. Some buy the technical manual and figure out how to craft a make-shift phasor. Some just learn codes of behavior, adopt understandings of tolerance and commitment and duty. Most, once grown, do not outwardly manifest the signs of their childhood devotion. Yet in certain situations, the evidence emerges, like so many bubbles striving for the surface.

Today, you could name dozens of people, from all paths of life, with whom you’ve breathlessly, earnestly, gigglingly exchanged “Next Gen” stories. Because there’s no such thing as a casual “Next Generation” fan: you either understand wholly or not at all. Upon encountering another, details begin to babble out — slowly at first, then a flood: COLM MEANEY! His WIFE KEIKO! Data acquires EMOTIONS!

It’s unclear whether these moments are meant as confession or catharsis, but the result remains the same. You are bonded to that person, and that person to you. How you dealt with your “Star Trek” consumption — how you hid it, or chose not to hide it — becomes as a crucial a personal narrative as the story of how you lost your virginity.

You may or may not find this all a bit overdetermined. But we are in no small part what we consume. Our media texts become signifiers of self, status, character. There was a reason why the obsession demanded, at one point, to be written in second-person and another reason why I can write about it, to an audience of thousands today. Why I can put my name beside it and own it in a Google Search. “Star Trek” meant something to me at age 13 that I could not speak. It means just as much, if not more, today, even if I cannot even bring myself to watch even one episode, lest it ruin my perfect memory of it.

Perhaps the obsessions that matter the most are the ones to which we can never fully admit, to which we can never truly return.

Previously in series: The Terror Of “Twin Peaks”: His Name Is BOB

Anne Helen Petersen writes Scandals of Classic Hollywood.

If you enjoyed the usual American male weekend of constant television viewing while sunk deep in the pizza-crush folds of your sofa, evolution has already decided it doesn’t want your kind in the generations to come. That’s why low-activity men who watch lots of television have dramatically lower sperm counts than those who get some exercise.

The subjects of the study were college-aged men in New York state, aged 18–22. The first group did 15 hours of “moderate to vigorous physical activity per week,” about 2 hours daily. The second group just slobbed out in front of the flat screen for 20 or more hours weekly. Besides being incredibly dull people, the latter group also had remarkably lower sperm counts than those who exercised. The active men had 73% more sperm than the couch sloths.

Clocking up 20 hours a week of TV time appears to be detrimental, the US authors from Harvard say in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. Yet 15 hours or more of exercise a week boosts semen quality, according to the results in nearly 200 college students.

Sperm counts have been declining in developed nations for years now, although not enough to affect the ability of these lethargic males from reproducing. Eventually, however, when climate change has made the Earth a water-covered globe with a few heavily populated islands, those men with the higher sperm counts will have an advantage in the annual “try to have a baby” lottery.

“[P]rofessors used the size of a CEO’s signature on annual SEC filings to measure CEO narcissism. They found that a large signature was correlated with company over-investment and subsequently lower forecast revenue and sales growth.”

“The moral complexity of the Rampaging Dad saga — or at least the semblance of moral complexity — comes in the unfolding depiction of how even a righteous mission can warp, debase, and harden a decent man over time until he goes functionally berserk. In order to right a wrong and rescue a captive soul, the movie’s (anti-)hero may carve a trail of destruction whose human toll surpasses that of his adversaries, becoming the very monster he seeks to slay. This is amped up to insane, absurd excess in Taken, where, according to one online tally, Neeson’s Bryan knocks off about three dozen guys with neck snaps, gunshots, knife stabs, and, in one showy sequence of sadism, a makeshift electric chair, which seems a tad disproportionate, even for an angry, post-9/11 American. I tried keeping my own body count while watching the 2012 sequel Taken 2 (which, despite a critical chorus of boos, banked it huge at the box office) but after a while lost track of how many dead Albanians Bryan had left in his wake like a marauding litterbug. That the movies manage not to be totally preposterous is a testament to Neeson’s innate plausibility as an actor, his calm, anchoring core.”
 — Vanity Fair’s James Wolcott appreciates Liam Neeson’s transformation from thespian to action-hero. You may have seen it already, but for my money, Neeson’s 2011 cameo on Ricky Gervais’s “Life’s Too Short” is the funniest five minutes of comedy filmed in the past five years. It’s always worth rewatching.

Skating in Central Park with Pippa Middleton, Iranian Space Monkey & Bibi Netanyahu. Pippa makes a play-hat of Monkey as Bibi pirouettes.

— Dana Vachon (@danavachon) February 5, 2013

Dana Vachon is one of our favorite writers, but also publishes rarely. So when he drops a short story on Twitter late at night, it’s our duty to carefully collect his leavings.

“At the scene, police found the monks and novice monks restraining the trouble maker, identified as Mr. Phonsiri Janthamas, age 45. He had been cut by the damaged mirror on his left hand, which was bleeding heavily. Mr. Phonsiri was trembling uncontrollably and appeared to be deathly afraid of something. He told police that he could see the ghost standing beside the wall of temple. The officers tried to calm him down, but were unable to calm his intense fear that made him insane. So the police restrained him and brought him to the police station to calm his emotion.”
 — Your problems aren’t so bad when compared to those of this department store security guard who is constantly harassed by an evil ghost lady who makes him so scared and crazy.

If you haven’t seen this yet I’m just going to recommend that you dive in without any explanation. There’s some background information here, but it seems almost superfluous, all things considered.

Errol Mark Morris, the visionary genius behind this commercial hawking computers and some other stuff, turns 65 today.

You can do the things: why else do you live in this town? Simon Morris talks on the conceptual books; Sonia Sotomayor dishes on the Court; last year’s Pulitzer winner Kevin Puts gets some songs performed with pals; and a harrowing lineup celebrates the New York Review of Books 50th anniversary… And Much Much More. #conceptuallyinsaneheadlines #sorry #coffee