I get a bit of misty eyes whenever I hear Spock says "Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations; to boldly go where no man has gone before."
I am one of those tech nerds who grew up with Star Trek and it is a wonderful reunion to see the franchise getting a fantastic reboot in the new movie "Star Trek" by JJ Abrams. This is not a movie review but a movie recommendation. Just GO WATCH IT! Rotten Tomatoes, the top movie critic site rated it between 94-96% "FRESH", a rating normally awarded to those near-flawless, rare Hollywood movies. It is that good and it will probably be 2009's best summer movie. It is technically perfect, fun-filled, character-driven and heroic .. well, I can go on and on. I hate to say this and offend the millions of Star Wars fan (I'm one too), it makes Lucas' Episode 1,2 and 3 look a bit dated. Here is space opera at its best.
Over the weekend, out of nostalgia, I bought the "old" classic Star Trek movies (yup, including the one with the whales) that are now in Bluray format and had a blast watching it. My daughter, who is 4.7 years old, got terribly upset when Spock sacrificed himself in the radiation chamber to save the ship. I explained the concept of sacrifice to her and she was miserable for a few minutes. It is a terrible awakening in a young mind that good guys and heroes do not have happy endings. Luckily, this is Hollywood and Star Trek. I showed her the whale episode and told her Spock downloaded his data into his best friend and transferred it back to his new Genesis-powered body. (If you don't have a clue, go watch the classics.) Obviously she did not get it but when she saw Spock alive, she was overjoyed. Talk about nerdism passing to the next generations (bad pun but i cant help it).
Here is one interesting story. During the thawing or perhaps the end of the Cold War, Paramount Pictures showed one of the Star Trek movies to the Russian audience. And the good doctor "Bones" said,"The bureaucratic mentality is the one constant in the universe!" The Russian audience laughed for 5 minutes and the director, upon reflection, felt it was one of those precious moments when we humans let go and make a liberating, unified stance of what we really want in our society. Maybe they should show it to our civil servants and see how long they laugh.
And talking about Federation (in Star Trek universe, they call it "United Federation of Planets"), I can't help but see the parallelism (another Trek pun coming "Mirror, Mirror") between a certain sports association in Singapore and Captain Kirk. Kirk does NOT take instructions well; nor does he SUCK UP to his less-talented superiors, he just wins with his intrepid crew and will defend his position in public. In almost every movie adventure, he almost inevitably will break some rules and step on someone's toes (normally the top brass) and get away with it because he wins and saves the Universe despite some impossible odds. In the movie, he always get his rewards - be it a Starship or a medal. In the movie, he can't read Klingon (an alien language) and I don't think he will sign any document he does not understand. And they have this galactic "Babel-fish" technology called the Universal Language Translater so that alien races could easily communicate with each other. Pulling a fast one is gonna be tough against Captain Kirk. You may not like him but what else can you do - he delivers the goods!
Oh yes, and my private value fund investment's philosophy is not very different from "Live Long and Prosper". For value fund to work, you need to have a long term perspective and you need to have a long life to enjoys the fruits of your investments.
I think we can learn a bit from the Star Trek movies.
Harold Fock
This is the thumb-sized Starship Enterprise model that sits on my Epson printer.
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