Star Trek Madness

I got an amazingly excellent crop of nerdy (or would that be geeky?) birthday presents this year.
The photo in the post above is me with a dalek, handmade for me by Sascha (Rudy in Paris's husband). Its body is a track-lighting shell, its head is partly a sink strainer, its bosses are marbles, its arm is a wrench and a spark plug, and you can see it has a pressure gauge on the front. What you can't see is it even has a rear mirror!

Bink sent me her photos from my birthday, and I used one of them for my new profile photo. In it, I am wearing the honking great Mr. Spock pin that David B. gave me. He did not go out and buy this pin for me, he already owned it, which makes it even better.
David was one of three scientists at my party. (I can't claim any of them; they all came with other people.) It made me ridiculously happy that at one point the three stood in the center of the room, talking about power grids.

The shiny blue object I am holding is a space-age water bottle Denise W. gave me, because, she said, it looks like a robot. Now I can Cycle to the Movies at the YW on Saturdays in style.

Here's another of my favorite birthday presents. Hannah in England sent me this Star Trek Annual, 1976, which she found for 3 pounds at an Oxfam shop. (Kind of steep or a total steal, depending on how you look at it.) Its cover reads "As Seen on BBC TV," and inside "by arrangement with the publisher" in Racine, Wisconsin (! not far from where I grew up).

The inscription on the fly-leaf reads:
Mark
Have a smashing Christmas
Love from Uncle Chris Aunty Terry & Samantha

What caught me, besides the general excellence of the gift and the coincidence that 1976 would have been the height of my teen-age love affair with Mr. Spock, was something in this opening panel of the first "strip story":

See it? Another Venn diagram.
"This isn't war, it's madness." That's almost exactly what the French army marshal said about the Charge of the Light Brigade, which I quoted in a post a couple months ago:
"C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre. C'est de la folie."
("It is magnificent, but it isn't war. It's madness.")