1. The Seattle Cinerama is starting their Big Screen 70mm Festival. Lawrence of Arabia in glorious 70mm on Saturday!
2. It's Dad's birthday today.
3. I have a 2-day Video Bootcamp for Photographers workshop in a week.
4. Daytripping Vancouver this weekend while a friend's in town
5. Speaking of international travel, my NEXUS in-person interview is finally coming up in a week.
6. SIP for SIFF coming up soon!
7. Quick turnaround from Facebook on fixing a pretty nasty bug report we had to file with them this week when they broke one of the APIs we use.
8. I am (so far) keeping up with three simultaneous online Coursera courses, although one of them is History of Rock, Part One. We'll see how long that lasts, especially since I'm debating adding The Language of Hollywood: Storytelling, Sound, and Color starting Monday :)
9. I'm gradually getting vacation photos from the great Towns Called Newell tour up on my tumblr.
10. Prepping at work for going to the Strata/Hadoop World conference next month.
11. Kris and Lindy's First Sight Shorts Night! in a couple weeks.
12. The daughter of one of my best friends from college just had an absolutely lovely Bat Mitzvah.
13. My CSA farm share is still keeping in more veggies than I probably would get otherwise. Fresh corn this week!

I have a rather left-field theory about the identity of Benedict Cumberbatch's character in the upcoming Star Trek movie. I'd originally mentioned this - in jest - in a comment on a friend's Facebook post when the first trailer came out. But now that we have the extended trailer from some Hobbit screenings and a newly-started backstory comic, I haven't seen anything that convinces me that I'm wrong and I want to get it in print in the unlikely event that they turn out to be crazy enough to do this.

I'm the the first to admit that it would it would be impossible to reconcile this theory with the original canon without some spectacularly unlikely plot devices. But then I think back to pretty much all of the second act of the last Star Trek movie. You remember, all the scenes on Delta Vega where Kirk's pod, Spock Prime's cave shelter, a convenient spot to watch the planet Vulcan where it occupies more of the sky than our moon occupies ours, Scotty's outpost, and a suspiciously Cloverfield-like monster all wind up within easy hiking distance of each other, uphill, both ways, in the snow.

And I think, yeah. Spectacularly unlikely plot devices? Really not a problem. Yeah.

The perversely brilliant part of the whole thing is that, while it could correctly be seen as a giant middle finger extended to any remaining original-continuity partisans, Abrams could say with complete butter-wouldn't-melt-in-his-mouth honesty that "he was only answering a question fans have asked and debated, literally, for decades." [Spoilers, actual and speculative]

Who would win in a fight between Kirk... and Picard?

We've been told Cumberbatch's character will have occurred in the original canon; Picard (ignoring temporal issues for the moment) qualifies. The promos describe "a threat from within their own organization," and Picard is (ok, will be) "within their own organization." Movieline points out that the first backstory comic that was just released introduces Robert April, a former Enterprise captain as of Kirk's era, and theorizes that he might be Cumberbatch's character. But the comic character looks nothing like Cumberbatch, even considering artistic license. On the other hand, if we're setting up some sort of "nexus of Enterprise captains" - well, that's not inconsistent with my theory, now is it?

So, yes, according to canon, Picard hadn't even been born during the events of the original series, much less already been a young member of Starfleet. And I'm not sure how you'd motivate Picard-as-vengeful-villain.

But listen to the "announcement" trailer again with your eyes closed. Listen to that sonorously British intonation and tell me you honestly don't hear Picard now. Tell me that if you were actually trying to find an actor to recreate a younger version of Picard the way, say, Karl Urban does DeForest Kelly's McCoy, that you honestly wouldn't shortlist Cumberbatch.

1. Between SIB and Wine Rocks, it's been a good couple weeks for sampling good alcohol.
2. SIFF screened Robocop last night as a shoot-a-long, complete with free cap guns at the door. (They're following up with a Spaceballs quote-a-long and ever-popular Grease sing-a-long later this month.)
3. My folks just celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary, and I got to go east for the weekend for the party.
4. Speaking of going east for the weekend, the weather in Seattle has been mostly sunny, but with highs this week in the 70s. (I think this is the universe's way of saying that all of my friends living through heat waves really do need to come visit.)
5. Having said that, there's a rocking (if extremely localized) thunderstorm blowing through town today. We get those so rarely out here.
6. The judges agreed with me on the winner at the Belltown Chili Cookoff this past weekend.
7. Headed down to Portland for several days next week for OSCON
8. I successfully completed the Stanford Machine Learning course
9. The Stranger posted photos from the photo essay class I took, including several of mine (look for the Naomi Punk photos).
10. We're getting a new developer on the team starting Monday.
11. Sunday, I camp out in a couple of local theaters other than the SIFF Uptown and catch up on a bunch of the summer wide releases that I've been putting off the last few weeks.
12. Neil Gaiman's SDCC announcement
13. While prepping for demos next week, my boss just gleefully muttered, "hahaha! Evil plan, coming to fruition!" I believe this is a good sign :)

1. "Hack Day" skunkworks competition at work, Monday and Tuesday
2. I'm in the midst of a (literally) rockin' collaboration with local band Naomi Punk on a photo essay leading up to their forthcoming album launch.
3. SAM's Brit Noir film series is underway.
4. And coming soon, the Cinerama's First Annual Science Fiction Festival with a couple weeks of classic SF, headlined by the Alloy Orchestra doing a live pit for Metropolis
5. We've passed 10M unique visitors per month at work.
6. Despite being a tad overscheduled and starting a week late, I've managed to get caught up on lectures and problem sets for the Stanford Probabilistic Graphical Models class I signed up for when the Stanford Machine Learning class got delayed.
7. I got a Warcraft guildie a shiny new mount and fast-tracked my neglected paladin Saltire to level 80 by accepting a free trial re-subscription. (Not that the newly-boosted Dwarven knight is likely to get much use; I'm still feeling like I miss buddies from the guild more than Warcraft itself, and a lot of them are on FB or the like anyway.)
8. Bob (not the cat) is finally paying us back. Not necessarily quickly, but installments are at least happening.
9. Spiffy new wide lens to break in and play with.
10. My Alamo Drafthouse Bottle of Wits wine set was waiting for me at the apartment when I got home last night.
11. Only a week and a half until World Penguin Day (Wed. the 25th!)
12. I finally got to try absinthe (Martineau was selling theirs at the Moisture Festival shows)
13. Thanks to my good friend Sharon, I got into a preview screening for the Game of Thrones second season premiere down in Portland, a week early.

1. First and foremost, my Dad is doing very well after heart surgery over the holidays.
2. We are now only one week away from National Penguin Awareness Day. How are you planning to celebrate?
3. We have the New York team in the office this week, and tonight's the big company winter party.
4. We've got a key hire on the dev team at work that we've been trying to find for a while, and he's starting in a bit over a week.
5. A thorny issue with pulling our daily Facebook stats at work has been vanquished.
6. SIFF's David Lynch mini-festival kicks off this weekend
7. Not content to call that enough disturbing film for the month, SIFF, MIFFF, and Scarecrow Video are coming together on the Psychotronic Cinema series, kicking off next week by throwing Liam Neeson to the wolves with The Grey
8. Next weekend: road trip to Portland for the NW Film Center's 40th Anniversary Movie Marathon
9. Continuing the cinematic theme, I have shiny tickets in hand for Seattle's Science Fiction + Fantasy Short Film Festival, only a few weeks away.
10. Just brought a query in an often-used bit of code down from 6-8 seconds to 0.03 seconds.
11. We've been crushing our traffic targets at work.
12. Finally, we have a [potential] Republican primary candidate I can get behind - and he doesn't have to shutter his Super PAC, just hand it over to Jon Stewart...
13. I'm officially on IMDb! Thank you, Kickstarter :) (Also, the link may change; I'm going to try to consolidate these under "Christopher Newell" so I don't have to be "Soandso [V]")

1. A very fun and productive course on live concert photography (with field trips, of course) through the Photo Center.
2. May seems to be bringing bona fide spring weather. Finally.
3. I've acquired the right film for a test drive of a Century Graphic that came back with me from my last visit with my parents, now that we're getting sunny days to play with it.
4. I've caught myself working late or through lunch a lot at the new job, not because of a time crunch, but because I get into something and lose track of time. A very good thing to see at a new gig.
5. Speaking of the new job, the vending machines in the kitchen here are free.
6. ...and, in addition to the usual candy, chips and soft drinks, have things like dried fruit, edamame and talking rain.
7. Finally (for work this round) I just officially got on the scrum board with my first project and the early versions are already getting rave reviews from the internal users.
8. Brand spankin' new passport arrived in the mail last night. Now, where oh where to use it first… I'm thinking sometime this year I need to go someplace with an actual visa, so it's not just entry/exit stamps
9. Top Gun 25th Anniversary screening (with Tom Skerritt in attendance) at SIFF Cinema tonight
10. Seattle Cheese Festival at Pike Place Market this weekend
11. Less than a week out from the opening night for SIFF 2011
12. Managed to get into the now-extremely-sold-out Ewan McGregor Tribute at SIFF.
13. And just two weeks out to the 40th Annual Northwest Folklife Festival