"Contrast the way UFO belief operates with historical celestial apparitions, such as the aerial phenomena associated with the Virgin Mary in Fátima, Portugal..."

"... on October, 13, 1917. On that day, approximately 70,000 people reported witnessing a variety of celestial phenomena. The people ranged from devout Catholics to atheists and skeptics who were there to disprove the testimonies of witnesses. But the institutional church influenced the interpretation of that event, and the devout welcomed their interpretation. The UFO community is not as trusting. It is characterized by suspicion of conventional authority, be that the Catholic Church or the U.S. government. Rather than being defined by a hierarchy, UFO belief has been shaped by pop culture. For decades, films and television series such as 'Star Trek' and 'Star Wars' offered cosmologies populated with advanced intelligences. These stories did not create belief in UFOs, but they helped establish a cultural vocabulary through which anomalous experiences could be understood. Most significantly, 'The X Files' popularized the idea that governments conceal knowledge about nonhuman intelligence.... Each new file release, leaked testimony or declassified video generates further interpretation rather than closure. The two most famous catchphrases from 'The X Files' — 'I want to believe' and 'the truth is out there' — express this perfectly...."

From "The UFO files reveal a hidden truth about a growing religion/Belief in alien life is on the rise — fueled by declining trust in institutions" (WaPo).

"Learning cursive will provide New Jersey students with 'the skills they need to read our nation’s founding documents'...."

Said New Jersey governor Phil Murphy, quoted in "Cursive Makes a Comeback in New Jersey Schools/In one of his final acts in office, Gov. Philip D. Murphy signed a bill on Monday requiring third, fourth and fifth graders to learn cursive" (NYT).

Proponents of cursive cite studies that link handwriting to better information retention and writing speed, and say — as Mr. Murphy did in a statement released as he signed the bill — that knowing script can help people read the original U.S. Constitution....

On Tuesday, Gabrielle and Kurt McCann, of Lebanon, N.J., were waiting to break the news to their 9-year-old son, Atlas McCann, when he got home from school. “I think it is important that kids are able to use that refined motor skill,” Ms. McCann said in an interview shortly after a meeting where she said she had taken all her notes in longhand.

But Atlas, she said, was thinking, “What’s the point of having to sit here and torture myself?”

The poor boy has the weight of the world on his shoulders. And now, this additional burden — handwriting! What for? Who reads the Constitution in the original handwriting? It's not even cut-and-paste-able. It's not searchable in handwritten form. Atlas will grope forward, if the time ever comes, asking AI what constitutional clause goes with whatever is the issue of the day. What constitutional clause deals with transgender women in girls sports? What constitutional clause gives cis gender girls the right to undress at public school in a single-sex locker room? The ancient handwriting will not say. AI will.

Let's consult not a politician but an expert:

“Oh, God,” Morgan Polikoff, an education professor at the University of Southern California, said when he learned of the New Jersey law.... He attributed the renewed affection for the style’s curlicues and squiggles to “boomerish nostalgia,” and said he was struck by cursive’s bipartisan appeal, with states as different politically as Arkansas and California requiring its instruction. Conservatives, the professor said, promote its utility for reading old documents; liberals like it for its beauty as an art form....

Fight the decline lest the day come when we cannot read the documents. Then what?

"Nichols’s Uhura spent a lot of time in her seat, sometimes not doing more than just taking calls."

"But that didn’t mean she was relegated to servitude — she was responsible for communications, as the expert on languages both alien and human. She could be supportive and authoritative, a team player and a problem solver. She... was a part of one of television’s first interracial kisses, with William Shatner’s Capt. James T. Kirk."

From "Nichelle Nichols made Black sci-fi fans believe they could reach for the stars" by David Betancourt (WaPo).

They got away with putting a beautiful woman in a minidress in the background of as many shots as possible, but what did she do other than provide eye candy for the little boys and little men who watched? 

She was the secretary, seated at the switchboard, receiving calls. 

Come on. The sexual politics was ridiculous, and blackness was the device to make it seem progressive, or at least to shut up the critics.

And I mean no disrespect to Ms. Nichols or to any other black actor who accepted a role constrained by stereotypes. There should have been more offers. There should have been more roles.

"But I’m also getting more obsessive about human beings over huge swaths of time. Part of that came out of being on the Isle of Skye..."

"... during the serious U.K. lockdown. On Skye, if there’s a rock somewhere, it’s probably because somebody put it there. I realized that the rock that I was using to keep the lid on my dustbin was a stone that had been dragged around. People have been in this place for thousands and thousands of years, and in this bay I’m living in, they’ve left behind rocks!"

Said Neil Gaiman, quoted in "Neil Gaiman Knows What Happens When You Dream" (NYT).

Bernie Sanders has a clothes chair.

"You know what we're talking about. The chair. The one surface in the house designated not for sitting, but for dumping laundry on when you're just too lazy to fold it, wash it, or put it away. It's a habit that haunts Americans nationwide, and evidently, it even affects the Sanders household.... The living room features wall-to-wall carpeting, shelves cluttered with knick knacks and framed photos, and a single chair piled with folded clothing and topped off with a photo that appears to be of Sanders and his wife, Jane" (Mashable).

Detected through this tweet from his son Levi Sanders:

Watching and waiting for the results from various races throughout the country.#UsNotMe pic.twitter.com/DSuhD0WMh1

— Levi Sanders (@Celentra) March 5, 2020

QUESTIONS: Would Bernie Sanders just let America's problems pile up like that? Does Donald Trump have a clothes chair?

AND: Here's a NYT article from August 2018, "Levi Sanders Is Not His Father. He Keeps Telling That to Voters":

When told that he seemed less than relaxed, he replied: “I’m not stiff. I do yoga.”

Asked to define himself, he offered, “I am not a Romulan. I am not a Vulcan.” (“Star Trek!” he cried, when his reference was met with a blank stare.)

He tried again. “I am a sentient being,” he said.

Have you thought much about how American speech and writing will evolve in the next 100 years?

I'm reading the comments to my post "Trump's 6-page letter is — and he intended this — one of the prominent documents in the annals of American history." In the post, I talk about the way Trump addresses his letter to the people of the future, 100 years from now. The commenter, Freder Frederson, writes:

The letter is the ranting of an unstable old man. One hundred years from now the question will be "[What] kind of people elected this raving lunatic president?"

I don't think he's even tried to imagine how the American written language will evolve over the course of the next 100 years — with all the intense and manipulative usage raging in politics and in social and mainstream media.

I suspect that my use of the word "evolve" will set off Trump haters to characterize him as lagging  evolutionarily. He's an ape, an orange ape, an orangutan!

But I think Trump is more of an example of what lies ahead. His language is an early manifestation of evolutionary change. And he's an especially influential user of the language. Look around. More and more Americans are talking like him, including his critics!

The people 100 years from now will probably speak and write much more like him than the people of today. And if that is where we're going, they are likely to read Trump's letter as a quite ordinary expression of a President's position and to read the criticism of his letter (if it survives to be read at all) as trivial banter.

IN THE COMMENTS: Unknown said:

I am reminded of L. Sprague de Camp's "Language For Time Travellers", partially excerpted here.

For some reason that reminded me of my all-time favorite "Star Trek" thing:



That's from the episode "Omega Glory," where there are characters reciting the Preamble to the Constitution, but you can't make out the words make out the words, because they "said them so badly":

CLOUD: When you would not say the holy words, of the Ee'd Plebnista, I doubted you.
KIRK: I did not recognize those words, you said them so badly, Without meaning.
ELDER: No! No! Only the eyes of a chief may see the Ee'd Plebnista.

"I tried to divert myself... from pondering what it would be like if my father died while I was sitting next to his bed, in a sleeper chair, wearing drawstring pajama bottoms and an 'Illmatic' T-shirt..."

"... with my stocking feet up on the extendable footrest and my iPad, in its keyboard case, open in my lap, writing a short film about Mr. Spock’s first day on the job. I wondered if I would see or otherwise sense the instant when the hundred billion neurons in my father’s brain abandoned the eighty-year feat of electrochemical legerdemain known as Robert Chabon, and the father I had loved so imperfectly, and by whom I had been so imperfectly loved, pulled off one last vanishing act. I can give you the exact date of the first time I ever saw Mr. Spock on TV, I said. September 15, 1967. Hmm, I had just started my fellowship at Albert Einstein. We were living in Flushing. So you would have been . . . ? Four. I must have sneaked out of bed, or come to ask for a glass of water. I didn’t know that it was Mr. Spock, or that you were watching 'Star Trek.' There was just this scary-looking guy with the ears and the eyebrows. A pointy-eared woman, too, with enormous hair. Super-scary music, two guys fighting in a place made out of rocks. One of them got his shirt slashed open... 'Amok Time' might not be the best, but I think it’s the most important, I said. How so? My father endured my disquisition with unusual forbearance. Like all our conversations from then on, this one was doomed to take place on my terms...."

From "The Final Frontier/I love Mr. Spock because he reminds me of you, I told my father. For the first time that night, I considered the possibility that he was going to survive it" by Michael Chabon (in The New Yorker).

"Associating hate with [Sam] Harris is bizarre. I’ve grown fond of his preternaturally composed, hyper-rational style..."

"... on the Waking Up podcast. But when he talks about [Ezra] Klein, he is not quite himself. He can’t disguise his bewilderment. He sounds like Spock discovering his shorts are on fire. 'Captain, I have detected . . . flames and singed flesh . . . in the vicinity of . . . my perineum.'"

I'm trying to read "Ezra Klein’s Intellectual Demagoguery" by Kyle Smith at The National Review, but I've run into an atrocious men-in-shorts/Star Trek smash up and my heart cries out I don't belong here.

And I've got to say, if you wanted to be a racist — or any kind of evil devil in this world — the best approach would be to adopt a demeanor that is preternaturally composed and hyper-rational.

But I've started this post, so let me soldier on. I've avoided the Sam Harris/Ezra Klein discord for quite a while, but something made me feel that I could catch up by reading Kyle Smith:

[Harris's] tone remains steady...

Ugh... tone...

... but the words are uncharacteristically pointed. During the debate, as Klein keeps delivering lectures to Harris on the history of racist injustice and repeatedly accuses him of having a “blind spot,” you can hear Harris sighing. Does Harris — does any intelligent person — really need to be told that blacks have been victimized by racism? Of course they have been. It’s a different conversation from the one about what we do and don’t know about IQ scores.

Harris, who has to his credit a philosophy degree from Stanford, a Ph.D. from UCLA in cognitive neuroscience, and several well-reviewed books, has described himself as on the left on virtually every issue. How disorienting it must have been to find himself reclassified as a neo-Mengele and besieged by the social-media mob because he spoke with ["Bell Curve" author Charles] Murray....

If Harris is as educated and sophisticated as all that, he shouldn't have been "disorient[ed]." He should have been prepared for Klein's utterly predictable attack. Was Harris so lost in self-love — thinking he's one of the good people — that he didn't see how mean his seeming friends would be if he questioned one of the Good People's Articles of Faith?

Contemplating the shrine to the mid-60s.

Detail of the display, from the LBJ library,  under the 1964-1966 sign:



The model on the cover of Playboy looks kind of like Ann Margret, but it's Venita Wolf, She was a minor actress who lived from 1945 to 2014 — not too minor to have a Wikipedia article:

Venita Wolf... appeared in the Star Trek episode "The Squire of Gothos" (1967) as Yeoman Teresa Ross.



Other than that, she had only a short stint on popular television from 1966 to 1969, including guest roles in The Flying Nun, The Monkees, Gunsmoke and The Beverly Hillbillies, among others. She appeared unbilled in The Oscar (1966) but her only feature film credit was a supporting role in the beach movie Catalina Caper (1967)...

"Arabesque" was a 1966 movie. It was, like "Charade," one of those Hitchcock movies not by Hitchcock but by Stanley Donen.

"The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby" is a Tom Wolfe book from 1965. Here's its Wikipedia article:

Many versions of the book are headed by an incomplete quotation from Kurt Vonnegut: "Verdict: Excellent book by a genius." Vonnegut's full quotation was "Verdict: Excellent book by a genius who will do anything to get attention." 

Speaking of orangeness, there's Tang. And that grand triad of mid-60s fun: the Spirograph, the Frisbee, and Operation.

"The media elites are in a panic. They witnessed the meltdown of their candidate in broad daylight and can feel that shiver up their spine..."

"... except that this time, it is not the delight of victory they are feeling, but the dread of defeat," writes Kenneth R. Timmerman at The Hill.

They watched her spar unsuccessfully over this issue with Clinton Global Initiative member and NBC morning news anchor Matt Lauer during Wednesday night's national security forum, and blamed her poor performance on — Matt Lauer.

The Washington Post is now essentially an arm of the Democratic National Committee. It has done this with deep investigative dive into the penetralia of the Trump empire and no equivalent reporting about the Clinton emails, the Clinton Foundation's corrupt pay-to-play scheme or the nonstop lies from Clinton herself.

All very interesting. Read the whole thing. Timmerman is an out Trump supporter. I'm just going to get distracted by the word "penetralia."

It is a word. Not a coinage. My dictionary — the Oxford English Dictionary — says it's "The innermost parts or recesses of a building; spec. the sanctuary or inner sanctum of a temple. Also fig.: secret parts, mysteries, etc." From the diverse the historical examples:

1876   J. G. Holland Story of Sevenoaks (new ed.) xxiii. 323   They followed the boy into the penetralia of the great office.
1947   B. N. Cardozo Paradoxes Legal Sci. 99   We reach the penetralia of liberty when we throttle the mental life of a group so fundamental.
1994   H. Weinstein Better Man vii. 73   Even since Spock's mind-blowing journey through the vast penetralia of the machine-being V'ger a couple of years earlier.

I just want to say: 1. I hope the boy is okay. 2. I can't find a searchable copy of Cardozo's book, and despite the seeming love of lawyers for Cardozo, I can't find that quote in any case, so I can't tell you what group's penetralia he didn't want to throttle. 3. Nice to see "Star Trek" pop up in this context. And: What a great word! Penetralia. It's like genitalia, but, despite sounding sexier, you can use it in all sorts of contexts, from lofty legal bullshit to pop culture chatter.

50 years ago today: The TV show "Star Trek" premiered.

Lots of tributes and memories around the web today — links collected here.

I was extremely interested in new TV shows in 1966, but this one didn't reach me. I was more of a "Twilight Zone" person. I was up for science fiction, but I wanted more interesting ideas, more mysterious phenomena, not campy adventure. To see the same cast of characters in their tight-fitting outfits might have worked on me if I'd perceived Kirk or Spock as virtual boyfriends. But they were not. Too old. And their hair was too short. For cute boys, I was watching "The Monkees."

Here are the TV listings from half a century ago. "Twilight Zone" wasn't on anymore, but "The Monkees" were. I know I gave "Star Trek" a chance, but can see that it had to compete with "Bewitched." I'm sure I watched "Bewitched" (and "That Girl"). I'd still choose "Bewitched" over "Star Trek" if I had to watch one of them right now.

Nobody says "handsome woman" anymore.

Yesterday on this blog, we were talking about Milo Yiannopoulos. If you listen to the video over there, you'll see that he's pressured inordinately about all the fun that was made of the "Ghostbusters" star Leslie Jones, but the main thing he said about her was just that she looks like a man. I got to wondering: What's wrong with a woman looking like a man?

It occurred to me that no one uses the expression "handsome woman" anymore, and if my long observation of American culture can be trusted, the sequence was:

1. "Handsome woman" was once a standard expression, used as a genuine compliment for a particular kind of woman. Ah, here's something from 1783, "The Distinction Between Words Esteemed Synonymous in the English Language":

"By a handsome woman, we understand one that is tall, graceful, and well-shaped, with a regular disposition of features; by a pretty, we mean one that is delicately made, and whole features are so formed as to please; by a beautiful, a union of both."

2. Because "handsome" was the standard word to refer to a man's appearance — you wouldn't call him "pretty" or "beautiful" — calling a woman "handsome," it was too easy to sound as though you were saying that the woman looked like a man, and nice people started to feel inhibited about saying it.

3. Only not-so-nice people were left saying it. We laughed watching "Seinfeld," when Elaine said — about George's girlfriend who looked like Jerry — "she's quite a handsome woman." And here's Captain Kirk in 1966:


4. The joke/insult use died off because the original, serious usage no longer existed. You have to have the reference point to make it funny, and the envious deployment of an incomplete compliment doesn't leave you unscathed if you use a word that nobody nice ever uses.

5. Here we are in the present, where the word "handsome" could be revived. And why not? There should be no stigma in a woman looking good in a way that tends toward the masculine. And it shouldn't be bad for a woman to look good in a way that doesn't highlight sexual accessibility. That's the look many woman like and might seek to enhance rather than to overcome.

"Are you a magician?"

Anton Yelchin on "Curb Your Enthusiasm," annoying Larry David with a card trick.

A delightful child actor, who grew up to appear as Chekhov in the recent "Star Trek" movies.

As played by Mr. Yelchin, Chekov was endearingly antic, humorously navigating his way through high-pressure scenarios and — even in the 23rd century — having difficulty with the “V” sounds in words like “Victor” and “Vulcan.”

And now he has died at the age of 27, killed by his own car, which he'd gotten out of and left running and which rolled down the driveway and pinned him against a brick mailbox.

He was born in Leningrad in 1989, to parents who were figure skating stars and who, that same year, left what was then the Soviet Union and came to the United States, to L.A., to escape religious persecution.

"Warren to meet with Clinton this morning, fueling VP speculation."

Headline at WaPo.

I thought it couldn't be Warren because she's one of the Democratic Senators whose vacated seat would give a Republican governor the power to name the replacement. But I guess the need to win the presidency could supersede the desire to control the Senate.

I would guess that today's meeting is more about getting Warren lined up to lend her support to Hillary's campaign where it will be most helpful and to perform a little theater for us out here in the public. We can talk about the VP possibilities and what it would mean to have a ticket with 2 women.

Okay, let me do that for a second: Hillary just reveled in the history-makingness of her being the first woman to get a major-party nomination for the presidency. Why would she like that historical distinction to be immediately intruded upon by a second woman, sharing a second distinction, the first 2-woman major party ticket? I'll just gesture subtly at the "other woman" theme in Hillary's life and say that her preference is probably to stand alone as the woman, not to be there with another woman. I know some people are putting it in terms of whether America is ready for 2 women, as if it's America's fault for being so sexist, but I think Hillary herself doesn't and shouldn't want to share the stage with another woman.

Especially Elizabeth Warren. Elizabeth Warren is such a passionate speaker that it's actually pretty weird. If you align with her on the issues, you may think it's absolutely wonderful, but if you don't, you might feel very uneasy, as I did watching her on the Rachel Maddow show last night. Warren gets so excited, it's like she's in the middle of a heated argument. It's very theatrical. That alone could be off-putting to many people, if we were just deciding if we wanted to hand power to her. But think about the set of her and Hillary. Hillary's style is so emotionally flat, it's almost robotic. Why would you pair that with Warren? If it were a TV show, it might be great fun — a kind of Kirk and Spock effect, but with Spock in the captain's chair.

I don't care enough about "Star Trek" to know if there was ever an episode or movie plot where Spock got to be captain and Kirk was subordinated. If so, how'd that work out? Badly, right? The emotionless one in command would replicate traditional patriarchy, and the emotional, subordinated one would seem like a traditional wife. In traditional wife-and-husband stories where there is an emotionally vibrant wife and an stony, logical husband, the story would almost certainly have the wife ultimately undermining the husband's attempted domination.

How could Hillary set up a show like that?

"I may take a swipe at you myself," says the teacher, Mr. Pomfritt, walking into the classroom....

... just as Milton Armitage (Warren Beatty) is telling Dobie "I'll kill ya":



From my all-time favorite TV show "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis." What kind of teacher could insult the kids like that. Oh, I loved Mr. Pomfritt — along with Maynard and Thalia and Dobie and the rest. And I'm sad to see that the actor who played him, William Schallert, has died (at the age of 93). He was also Patty Duke's father, and "Star Trek" fans know him as Nilz Baris, the under secretary in charge of agricultural affairs for the United Federation of Planets in “The Trouble With Tribbles.”

The man who wrote the first episode of "Star Trek" and the "Nothing In The Dark" episode of "Twilight Zone"...

... George Clayton Johnson, has died at the age of 86.

Johnson also wrote the original "Ocean's 11" and the book (made into a movie) "Logan's Run." "Logan's Run" is the story about a wonderful, entertaining society that executes its citizens when they turn 30.

"Nothing In The Dark" is the "Twilight Zone" in which the unknown young actor named Robert Redford played Death and got inside the house of an old woman who'd been determined to keep Death from entering. Here, somebody compressed the episode into a 2-minute version:

I asked for an explanation of Hillary's giant-gaping-collar costume, and you answered!

Here's where I ask, and here's the puzzling outfit:



I'm going to say right off the bat, my favorite — because it made me laugh a lot and because it's pretty damned arty — comes from Unknown, who remembered this get-up worn by the actor Emil Jannings in the 1930 movie "The Blue Angel":



And extra points to Eric the Fruit Bat for subtlety, saying "I'll let the link do the talking" and taking us here:



And to m stone for having the same idea but spelling out the functionality of a big, gaping collar: "The collar is designed to accept the bubble helmet that is worn with it." He chooses "the Alan Shepherd model":



Then we've got 2 from "Star Trek," from Quaestor and madAsHell, respectively:





The first guy is doing especially well in the gaping collar department, while the second one connects with the medallion around the neck.

And, also with a bold medallion, it's the Emperor Ming, from yoobee:



ObeliskToucher said "She's Sontaran, obviously...":



And finally — also getting a LOL from me — Joe Schmoe said "I thought she was going for the turtle look":

"I admire the way [Leonard Nimoy] presented the women as standing there looking the viewer full in the face."

"Saying look at me — I’m entitled to stand here and present myself to the world. I don’t have to be ashamed and cower in the corner," wrote Natalie Angier in the foreword to the photography book "The Full Body Project." (Clicking the link won't display nudity on screen, but scrolling down will.)

"It really disturbed him that women who considered themselves overweight had this terrible feeling about themselves... He wanted to show the world that there’s beauty to be found in different body types."

I noted Nimoy's photography project back in 2007, in a post that read "So, Leonard Nimoy is into fat women. I have a similar preference." The link on "similar preference" went to a 2005 post titled "Drawing from the nude model":

My undergraduate degree is in Fine Arts, and I've spent many hours drawing from a live model, both in art school and in evening sessions here at UW....

It can also be tiresome to draw from the model. You may think it's always going to be interesting to look at a naked person, but many people who try to be artist's models are not very good. You need an interesting body and an ability to find a good pose and hold it. The artist can move around looking for a good angle on a pose, but with some models there are no interesting angles. Try drawing a thin man! The best models are overweight women -- like the woman in the photo at the link. One reason I stopped doing the evening drawing sessions here at UW was that nearly all the models were thin. I mean, if I want to draw landscapes, I'd go to the mountains, not the plains.

ADDED: The 2007 post linked to a NYT article titled "Girth and Nudity, a Pictorial Mission":

Mr. Nimoy... admits that before he began ["The Full Body Project"], it had never occurred to him that beauty might be culture driven.... His enlightenment came about eight years ago, when he had been showing pictures from his Shekhina series — sensual, provocative images of naked women in religious Jewish wear — at a lecture in Nevada. 

(Nimoy — according to Wikipedia — was "the son of Yiddish-speaking Orthodox Jewish immigrants from Iziaslav, Soviet Union (now Ukraine). His parents left Iziaslav separately—his father first walking over the border into Poland—and reunited in the United States.")

Afterward, a 250-pound woman approached him and asked if he wanted to take pictures of her, a different body type....

“The nudity wasn’t the problem,” he said, “but I’d never worked with that kind of a figure before. I didn’t quite know how to treat her. I didn’t want to do her some kind of injustice. I was concerned that I would present this person within the envelope of an art form.”

But soon he relaxed into it, lulled by the clicking of the camera and the woman’s comfort with her body. He placed some of the shots in various exhibitions, and they invariably garnered the most attention. “People always wanted to know: ‘Who is she? How did you come to shoot her? Why? Where? What was it all about?’ ”

"Is Leonard Nimoy the first example of a 'famous last tweet?' If not, what are some others?"

A question on Reddit. Nimoy's last tweet was: "A life is like a garden, Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory." I don't see how you can call that "famous" when he just died. Would you remember that 10 years from now?

Among the answers: "The last tweet of that poor Notre Dame student who died on the scissor lift filming football practice was... 'Gust of wind up to 60mph ... I guess I've lived long enough.'" That's the other meaning of the phrase "famous last words." There, stress belongs on last, not famous. It's something a person who isn't planning to die says that, in retrospect, speaks to the circumstances of the death.

Another answer is Roger Ebert's "So on this day of reflection I say again, thank you for going on this journey with me. I'll see you at the movies." That's like Nimoy's. Someone who is planning to die frames an apt statement on the way out.

Let's not mix up the 2 kinds of famous last words. Or are there more than 2?

ADDED: The expression "famous last words" is most useful as something to say to a living person who has just said something that you're picturing could be something that is said right before doing something deadly.

AND: The fire extinguisher's empty. Get the hairspray!

"Long before being nerdy was cool, there was Leonard Nimoy."

"Cool, logical, big-eared and level-headed, the center of Star Trek's optimistic, inclusive vision of humanity's future."

Said the cool and nerdy, big-eared Barack Obama.