and worked for Lamont next door in Connecticut.

Now I live in New Jersey and will be happy to do the same for Joe the Admiral (sounds better than Joe the Plumber I think). My pleasure at the "redemption" Arlen the Specter lasted about

22 hours. How dumb does he think the voters of PA are?

and I think I know what it is.

who was a teenager when Sturgeon --- for me still the best of them --- was writing for Galaxy ($.35 an issue in 1955). I read "Caves of Steel" and "The Stars My Destination" when they were serialized in Galaxy and also bought F and SF every month for some years. SF kindled my interest in physics (which remains although I'm not up to much of the modern diff-geom. approach technically) and I went on to become a professional musician, now retired (that is, I don't play for pay any more but I do play, a lot).

I also remember truly cheesy science fiction from the early dyas of TV --- horrors like "Tom Corbett, Space Cadet" and

"Captain Video" and the worst of all "Lost in Space" which epitomized the anti-intelligence of American popular culture -- the hero is a shoot-first, ask questions never military guy and the anti-hero

"professor" who is a coward and inveterate liar.

I remember seeing the 2nd part of the flag-ship episode "The Menagerie" without realizing that the series had just begun. (I was 26 at the time.) And I was hooked...the sets and costumes were no more "cheesy" than what I had been used to, but I recognized immediately that this was much closer to SF as I knew it in written form than anything else that had ever been on TV. The ideas behind the plots were intelligent; there were real scientific, political, and moral (and even philosophical) ideas explored (as much as one can so that in a commercial TV hour) and there was a basic respect for the audience even if not every episode was of the same quality.

Because of my work as a symphony musician on nights when it first played, I was unable to see TNG until it went into reruns, but since I've seen practically every episode at least once, and while it was not the same, it had many virtues as well, and I always got a kick out of knowing that the actor playing "Q" was the son of one of my former conservatory teachers (John DeLancie, the father, was the principal oboe of the Philadelphia Orchestra and later director of the Curtis Institute, my school). My favorite episode was the one in which Data is saved from being disassembled in a hearing; the question is whether he is sentient, and when Picard --- who helped to make bald men sexy! -- as his defender asks the prosecutor to prove that he himself is sentient, I went ROLFLMAO, recognizing the "Turing Test" from the classical research on computation theory. Also, I thought the final double episode was one of the best things to that point that the franchise had done. I got tired of the Klingons after a while...too much like the jocks I went to HS with.

But over the long haul, I still think DS9 was the best...because of the long-running plot themes (agreed, the Dominion business went on far too long), especially the Bajoran religious fraud (perfect casting in Louise Fletcher!), and especially some of the complicated characters...Quark and his brother Rom, Jadzia with all her/his former lives, Garack the tailor/spy ( a little John le Carre play there?) and the hilarious "Tribble" replay episode, not to mention the full quote from Karl Marx in "Bar Association".

I don't want to run over the word limit...but one thing always amused and bothered me in TNG. In the episode in which Sarek is losing his control due to age (I don't remember the name), the clue to his condition comes during a musical performance where tears are seen running down his cheeks. (BTW, as good an actor as Brent Spiner is, like all who have never really played a stringed instrument, he never learned to hold or draw a bow convincingly.) The actual music was well chosen for the plot purpose: the second movement of Brahms String Sextet op. 18, which is very intense. There was only one problem: obviously a sextet requires six players, but the scene showed only four (of which 3 were really musicians actually playing). It can't have cost that much more to hire two more players, can it? And considering the type of audience the show was more likely to attract, it seems likely to me that there could have been hundreds of people, if not more, who would be able to notice the mismatch.

I know it is basically trivial to make a fuss over this, but when they hire real scientists to check out their techno-babble for plausibility and go to such lengths to create a consistent "future" history, why fudge such a detail? Certainly whoever chose the music (again, an excellent choice for the needs of the story) knew what the piece required. If anyone out there was connected to the production of that show, I'd really like to hear the inside baseball on this.