Technically released in 2011, this is the first film I’ve seen in 2012.

Who’s In It: Meryl Streep and Alexandra Roach as Margaret Thatcher; Jim Broadbent and Harry Lloyd as Denis Thatcher; Olivia Colman as Carol Thatcher.

Who Made It: Phyllida Lloyd directs from a script by Abi Morgan. Produced by Damian Jones and distributed by The Weinstein Company.

What It’s About: As her mental state deteriorates with age, Margaret Thatcher reminisces about her rise to power and tenure as Prime Minister. 

My Take: This is not the story about Margaret Thatcher that I would have wanted to have seen made. The frame story, set in present day as Thatcher attempts to come to grips with the death of her husband while beginning to suffer the effects of dementia, takes up far too much screen time. What I would have wanted to be the meat of the story, Thatcher’s rise to power in a male-dominated Tory Party and leadership in the waning years of the Cold War, is reduced to a series of flashbacks. However, Meryl Streep rises above the films flaws in a mesmerizing performance. We all expected Streep to carry the film; I simply would have liked her to have had more help.

For More Information: The Iron Lady on Wikipedia.

A Storm of Swords is the third book in G.R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones series. Weighing in at nearly 1,200 pages, it is almost as long as the first two books combined. Following the continued fighting in the War of the Five Kings, ASOS dramatically expands the scope of the story and introduces new point of view characters. I’d highly recommend all of the first three books of the series to anyone who enjoys the fantasy genre. 

Click to purchase: for Amazon Kindle; for Apple iBooks; for Barnes & Noble Nook.

Apple Predictions 

• In October, Apple will release an iPhone 4G, perhaps with new styling, using LTE for highspeed networking. The new iPhone will not have a significantly larger display than the current model.
• Coincident with the iPhone 4G, Apple will release iOS 6.0, which will use a new mapping service owned and operated by Apple to provide turn-by-turn GPS directions.
• In the Spring, Apple will unveil a new line of MacBooks Air with 11”, 13” and 15” screens, updated Intel processors, and solid state storage drives ranging from 128 GB to 512 GB.
• Also in the Spring, Apple will unveil a new line of MacBooks Pro featuring 15” and 17” screens.
• Apple will update the Apple TV settop box to support 1080p video. Users will be able to purchase and play Apple TV games using an iPod or iPhone as a controller.
• In the Spring, Apple will unveil the iPad 3, featuring a Retina Display and a quad-core Apple A6 SOC processor.
• Apple will release an updated software suite, iWork ’12, which will include updated, sandboxed versions of Keynote, Pages and Numbers with direct integration with iCloud document storage.

Google Predictions

• Google will continue to integrate Google+ into everything they release, including much deeper links between the service and the Android operating system.
• Motorola will become the flagship Android phone provider as Google stops outsourcing production of its Nexus models to Samsung.
• Google will begin to diverge the Android UI from the iOS UI in an attempt to escape Apple’s growing wave of lawsuits against the copycat operating system.
• Despite user annoyance at the Google+ integration, and legal saber-rattling by governments, Google will not lose significant market share in search.
• Google Chrome will pass Mozilla Firefox to become the second most commonly used browser worldwide.

Microsoft Predictions

• Windows 8 will not ship this year.
• Windows Phone 7 will continue to recieve great reviews but find few buyers. The Nokia Lumia 900 will be one of the best phones released this year, but will struggle.
• Internet Explorer will dip into the low to mid 40s in market share.
• Steve Ballmer will begin the process of annointing an heir apparent, in anticipation of a departure in 2013 or 2014.
• Microsoft Office 365 will grow into a large financial success.
• Microsoft will release Office for iPad, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. 

Other Tech Predictions

• Facebook will surpass the one billion member mark.
• RIM will begin a public effort to sell itself off as the BlackBerry line continues to fade. Few credible suitors will emerge.
• Amazon will release a revised Kindle Fire in early Fall, addressing the major issues present in the current device.
• E-Book sales will continue to grow dramatically, and traditional publishers will find themselves increasingly disintermediated as authors begin publishing directly to the Kindle, Nook and iBooks stores. 
• Barnes & Noble will spin its Nook family off into a separate company, and will also begin reducing the size of its physical stores.
• Nintendo’s Wii U will be the first eighth-generation console to be released. It will not share the same sort of success as its predecessor.

As a nod to my previous efforts, I've transferred some of my MobileMe-hosted content, specifically the Rewatching Voyager posts, to this new site. I will try to find time to bring other elements from previous editions of KirkMcPike.com to this new foundation, as well.

Thanks for stopping by. Hopefully there will be more here to see than there was at the last incarnation of my website!

At the very least, expect some interesting new material to be posted in early 2012....

Synopsis

After poking their noses into a nebula where they don’t belong, the crew proceeds to show how little sense of urgency they possess about returning home. Paris and Kim play pool. Chakotay demeans Native Americans everywhere by leading Janeway through the most insulting rendition of Indian culture this side of Tonto. When it turns out that the nebula was a living creature, Janeway goes all Jane Goodall and insists the crew risk their lives again to repair the damage they caused. Surprising no one, everything works out fine.

Nitpicks

• Neelix is fairly sensible at the beginning of this episode when he bemoans Captain Janeway’s insistence on playing explorer instead of focusing on the mission of returning her crew home. He still needs to die, however.

• Hopefully someone on board noticed that Janeway almost got them all killed in this episode in order to slake her thirst for replicated coffee. One wonders if the Kazon could have convinced her to give them the Caretaker Array’s secrets had they just thrown in a case of Taster’s Choice as part of the deal. 

• Technobabble reigns supreme in this episode. It’s used to describe the effects of the nebula on the Voyager, the structure of the nebula creature, and the crew’s solution to the “how do we heal it?” problem. This technobabble tumor will metastasize in later seasons.

• There are some excellent effects in this episode when the ship is traveling through the nebula being.

• I enjoyed the mutual snark between Tuvok and Kim after the Vulcan provides the ensign with some unwelcome criticism of his job performance.

• Because of this excursion, the ship will have to travel 14 light years out of their way to replenish the energy supplies lost in the nebula. At the roughly 935 times the speed of light the ship is traveling, that’s a 5-day sidetrack from their journey home.

Journey Statistics

Stardate: 48546.2 (~July 18, 2371).

Distance From Home: 69,795 light years.

Surviving Crew: ~141 and the Maquis.

Synopsis

While scoping out a planetoid for dilithium, Neelix is critically injured by a Vidiian who uses a device to remove Neelix’s lungs. The Doctor, still seeming way too human for a hologram, creates “holographic” lungs, but they require Neelix to live in the 24th Century equivalent of an iron lung. Rendered incapable of movement, and forced to stare up at the Sickbay ceiling all day, perhaps for the rest of his life, Neelix eventually demands that the Doctor allow him to die. Unfortunately, before they can do so, Janeway and the crew track down and capture the Vidiians, whose advanced medical abilities are able to transplant a lung from Kes to Neelix.

Nitpicks

• The Vidiians, a race of biological scavengers who steal organs from others in order to combat a deadly disease, are pretty interesting, and their makeup is quite cool.

• Also nifty was the low-energy phaser trick used to locate the Vidiian ship in the “hall of mirrors” asteroid. 

• In other words, this is a pretty good episode of Star Trek, marred only by the fact that they let Neelix live.

Journey Statistics

Stardate: 48532.4 (~July 13, 2371).

Distance From Home: 69,803 light years.

Surviving Crew: ~141 and the Maquis.

After detecting an explosion on a nearby world, the Voyager moves to investigate. They discover that the planet was destroyed because of its unusual power system. When Janeway and Paris are sucked back in time, they soon learn that their investigation into the cause of the explosion will actually have the effect of instigating the crisis. Yes, it’s another time travel episode. In the end, Janeway breaks the loop, and none of this ever actually ends up happening, which in terms of character narrative makes this entire episode pointless.

Nitpicks

• “Time Warp!” Ugh. Please note that we’re only three episodes into Voyager, and already 67% of them have been stupid time travel plots.
• This episode and the one before it do a good job of highlighting a unique trait about Janeway, as far as Trek captains go: she was originally a science officer. She likes to roll up her sleeves and dig into the technobabble. Which is fortunate for her, given that technobabble is more common than hydrogen on Voyager.
• By the late 1990s, time travel had become a crutch for weak writing in Star Trek. That Voyager begins its run by dipping deeply into this well bodes ill for the series’ future.
• Tom Paris and Harry Kim have one of the few very realistic male human friendships in Trek. But theirs is just a faint echo of the awesomeness that is Bashir and O’Brien.

Journey Statistics

Stardate: Unknown (By placing it halfway between the episode before and after it, we get ~June 26, 2371).

Distance From Home: 69,846 light years.

Surviving Crew: ~141 and the Maquis.

Synopsis

Nitpicks

Journey Statistics

This series of blog posts will involve the re-watching, summarizing and critiquing of the adventures of the Voyager crew. Along the way, I’ll try to keep an on-screen body count, I’ll estimate how far from Earth each episode takes place at, and I’ll point out why I still prefer Deep Space Nine for my normal Trek fix. I will try to keep these reviews to a few hundred words.

Synopsis

“Caretaker” is the premiere of Star Trek: Voyager, and thus it goes to somewhat awkward lengths to introduce us to each of our new characters. Building from the foundation of TNG and DS9, the Voyager premiere was probably confusing to non-initiated Trek fans. The text crawl at the start tries to explain who the Maquis are, but it’s too brief to really clue the newbies in.

After being flung to the distant Delta Quadrant while searching for a missing Maquis vessel, the Voyager finds itself stranded decades from home. After destroying their only way back to save the Ocampa from the Kazon-Ogla, the surviving Alpha Quadrant residents take on two locals as guides, and set a course back to home. Let the “adventure” begin?

Nitpicks

• This is the first “Gilligan's Quadrant” episode of Voyager, defined as an episode where the crew has a chance to get home, but doesn’t do so because the chance is ephemeral, an accident occurs or, in this case, their morals prevent them from using the opportunity.
• The scene where Tom Paris and the Betazoid navigator fly to Voyager drives me nuts. She runs down the “awesome” specs of the ship in a way no real person would, and they’re on an impulse shuttlecraft flying towards Deep Space Nine at which only the Voyager is docked... so where did their shuttle come from?
• The Kazon sure are interesting. I hope Voyager doesn’t waste their potential.... Just kidding. I know that it does.
• The crew makes a horrible, horrible mistake in picking up Neelix in this episode.

Journey Statistics

Stardate:  48315.6 (~April 25, 2371).

Distance From Home: 70,000 light years.

Surviving Crew: ~141 (five on screen deaths, another seven off screen) plus an unknown number of Maquis.