I don’t think I can finish The Unexpected President tonight, and even if I finish it tomorrow I’d be unlikely to post a review until September….so here’s a rare Sunday post!

August was a dreadful month, weather-wise, with life-draining and nausea-inducing heat just sitting on us for week after week. Occasionally relief was teased in the form of thunderstorms, but never persistently. I didn’t want to get out and about too much, but I made the Selma stop of the “Howlelujah Tour”, in which two men tell stories about dogs and sing about love. (It helped that my church hosted the stop!) They do this to raise money for humane shelters. I had to tell them about Fred the Town Dog, of course. I also began attending meetings of the Prattville Silent Book Club; Prattville is a little drive, but my friends keep moving away, so I seek new friends where they might be found! I’ve enjoyed meeting new people; one woman was reading The Road to encourage her son’s reading, so they could discuss it together. Sweet! Our men’s group at church has continued meeting; at our most recent one we learned about the life and death of the Reverend Jonathan Daniels, who was killed while trying to help in the Civil Rights movement in Lowndes County, one of our Blackbelt neighbors. (Daniels also worshiped at St. Paul’s when he lived in Selma in 1965, and was partially responsible for leading to its integration.) Astonishingly, I watched no movies this month, and I can’t even say “Oh, I gave up movies for St. Michael’s Lent” or anything; the heat just sapped me so much that I’d fall asleep by eight most nights and then wake up early in the morning. Watching movies while waiting on dawn just seems odd.

Books

Books! The thing you’re here for. Let’s talk about those. August saw, for the first time since…July 2025, I think, a break from presidents. I was poking through Crusade in Europe, but all the chatter around The Odyssey put me in a Greek mood at the beginning of the month, and then mid-month I did a warp back to 1990s Treklit. While the Greek wind was unexpected, I was also in the mood to mix things up: this year has been somewhat monolithic, which is rewarding in its way (I know more about Nixon and Kennedy than anyone outside a presidential museum has a right to), but a little monotonous. I just realized I forgot to review Greek Ways, so that will be my project for this coming week.

Bible in a Year is roughly on track, give or take a week or so.

Science Survey is…well, if my reading year was a sports movie it’d be high time for the coach to give a rousing halftime speech.

America @ 250: I am currently reading two presidential biographies (60% done with Arthur, 25% done with Truman). That will bring me to 10 dead presidents remaining. A few of them, specifically LBJ, are going to be difficult to really grok, though.

(And yes, I’m going to continue reviving the 1960s use of grok until such time as it’s no longer associated with an AI. It’s only a futile effort if you don’t join me.)

Nonbook Commonplace Entries

“‘Fahrenheit 451’ presented a world where books are destroyed. ‘1984’, one where they are ‘memory holed’ and/or rewritten. ‘Brave New World’, a dystopia where pursuit of pleasure drowns serious thought, let alone memorializing such in print.Given the choice among bad options, late modernity has seized each on offer.” – Alcuin, Substack commenter reacting to the news that Amazon is buying rare books, scanning them, and then destroying them.

Lectures and Podcasts

Lectures 1-3 of “Athens and Sparta”, Hillsdale College. “Why Study the Classics”, “Life and Government in Sparta”, “Life and Government in Athens”.

“The Bible and Western Culture: Job and the Problem of Evil“, Dr. Michal Sugrue. I LOVE Dr. Sugrue. I found him years ago via his four-part lecture on Marcus Aurelius and Stoicism and frequently re-listen to it.

He’s sitting there in the dust amidst the ruins of his life, and a tornado comes up and starts talking to him. It’s…going to be a bad day.

“Greece vs Persia: the Rise of the First Superpower“, The Rest is History episode 668. Tom Holland & Dominic Sandbrook

“Thucydides and the Dawn of History“, Dr. Michael Sugrue

“Plato’s Republic, Book 1: Justice, Power, and Knowledge“. Dr. Michael Sugrue

Plato’s Republic is a funny book; you can’t read it for the first time unless you’ve already it two or three times.

Streaming

Star Trek Deep Space Nine 3×7: “Civil Defense”. Chief O’Brien and Jake accidentally trip an old Cardassian security program. Constant peril and monologuing by Gul Dukat ensue.

Star Trek TNG 2×13, “Time Squared”. The Enterprise-D stumbles across Captain Picard….from the future!

Star Trek Strange New Worlds 4×3: “The Griffin Incident”. Creeeeptastic horror episode, and definitely a mistake to watch before going to bed. Kirk, Spock, and La’an discover a Starfleet ship once thought to be destroyed, and all of them start seeing and hearing things. It’s definitely unsettling — one of the classic “everyone on the ship went crazy” plots but with haunted ship vibes — and with “Frame of Mind” vibes. It’s like they decided to take every element of Trek’s creepy episodes and combine them into a cocktail that needs to be chased with “The Trouble with Tribbles” .(Or, an episode in which the SNW crew are…muppets?) Although our early trio are sought out by the crew of the Big E, things only get worse.

T’Pring, who apparently materialized into a bodybag on an abandoned starship while Spock had his back turned: This is deeply unsettling.
Spock, who is pretty sure he’s lost his mind: On that we are in agreement.

Star Trek Deep Space Nine 5×6: “Trials and Tribble-lations”. The crew of the Defiant are thrown back into time — and thrown into the ST TOS episode, “The Trouble with Tribbles”. This was warm bath after a long day level comfort viewing.

Star Trek Strange New Worlds, 4×1. “Valles Marineris”. The Enterprise is thrown back in time, captured by a Princess of Mars, and La’an punches a dinosaur. One irritant: there’s no reference to VOY’s “Distant Origin” in which we learn about a sentient species of dinosaurs who originated on Earth and moved off-planet long before the planet-scorching KT impact.

Spock: I felt it was important to be here upon your return.
La’an, dressed in cowboy clothing: You just wanted to see me in my outfit.
Spock: Perhaps.
Scotty: ………

Una: According to Enterprise, we can’t harm any native life because of the risk of doing harm to the future.
Me: One, I thought Comms were down, how do you know you’re on Earth 65 million years ago? And two, YOU’RE ON EARTH 65 MILLION YEARS AGO! DO YOU KNOW WHAT’S ABOUT TO HAPPEN? WHAT HARM COULD YOU POSSIBLY DO?

M’Benga: Are you going to try to take over the galaxy now?
La’an: I don’t know.

Star Trek Voyager 3×23: “Distant Origin”. The logical followup. A reptilian scientist posits that his species evolved somewhere else in the cosmos, and after stumbling upon human remains and testing their DNA, he realized: whomever these humans are, they and his species the Voth are definitely related. They might come from the old country! Alas, the scientist is something of a Galileo and being hunted by his planet’s authorities who want to punish him for dissenting from doctrine.

Star Trek 2×15: “The Trouble with Tribbles”. Kirk is summoned to space station K7 under a distress signal, only to find that the emergency is….”Klingons are here for shore leave and we have WHEAT that needs guarding”. Also, there’s a slight tribble infestation.

ST Strange New Worlds 4×5: “Level Five Transporter Accident”. Scotty has a novel idea for improving the transporter, but turns everyone into puppets. I have to borrow from Captain Picard and say “Sometimes, number one, you just have to bow to the absurd.” That said, their dismissal of the Spock/La’an relationship and that portrayal of the Orions is unforgivable. Christina Chong and Ethan Peck are apparently a thing IRL (they did a song together), so that may have been part of the decision.

Ortegas: Scotty turned us into puppets. Absurdity’s kinda baked into the premise.

ST Strange New Worlds 4×3: “Human Best Friend”. The SNW crew goes in for shore leave, resulting in a The Hangover-esque plot in which Rebecca Romjin (Una) sings “Total Eclipse of the Heart”…in Klingon. Somehow someone shoots off fireworks in space. And moving tribbles!

ST Enterprise, 1×25: “Two Days and Two Nights”. The Enterprise crew beam down to the pleasure planet of Risa for two days of idleness and pleasure. Incredibly boring, except for when Trip and Malcolm get rolled after picking up two girls who turn out to be male muggers. Whoopsie.

ST Strange New Worlds 3×7. An unusually-framed episode, as we get not a standard show but rather events on the Enterprise as edited and filmed by a ‘journalist’ who is also Erica Ortega’s annoying little brother. The E is asked to escort a sea-creature that can also float about in space to another planet. The E is given the impression that this creature is ‘livestock’ that will help an alien race’s struggling colonies; it turns out to be armed and dangerous — but worse still, it’s a sentient being that has been chemically altered to be aggressive. Cap’n Pike is forced to stand with virtue against orders.

ST Strange New Worlds 4×4: “A Case of Chiarioscuro”. Commander Una, Dr. M’Benga, and Uhura are sent on a mission in a shuttle to give a stray Starfleet probe a love-tap so it doesn’t stray into Klingon territory (why did we need a doctor???), but then Klingons arrive and the trio have to make an emergency landing on a Klingon colony world so they’re not spotted by …the Klingons, Oh, and everything is in black and white..

Me: Oh ho ho, a D7!
Una: The D7 is blocking our path —
Me: 😀

La’an: Let’s make sure this isn’t a Trojan horse.
Spock: ?
La’an: It’s from The Odyssey.
Spock: I am familiar with the Greeks.

That Greek wind is blowing all over the place this month!

ST Strange New Worlds 4×8: “Four and a Half Vulcans”. A deteriorating nuclear power plant on an alien world that is familiar with the Vulcans, but no other species in the Federation, begins to go into full-on breakdown. The Vulcans set up this system, but can’t reach it in time, so members of the Federation crew are medically altered to become Vulcans. For Vulcan-handwave-reasons, the crew also becomes hyperlogical. La’an, however, becomes..hmm:

Vulcan!La’an: I find it fascinating that there is so much unclaimed space out there. Space…for the taking.
Me: More like Romulan La’an….
Vulcan!La’an: Soon the ship will be stronger. Faster. Unstoppable.

The neo-Vulcans suddenly don’t want to become humans again.

Ortegas: Pike is still the Captain. He won’t like us conspiring against him.
Una: We are not conspiring. We are…..lightly plotting..

Although part of the episode’s premise was farcical, a recurring issue with SNW is that it can soar into farce and somehow produce moments of beauty. There is a scene in which Vulcan!La’an and Spock are engaged in a ‘katra space’, as he is trying to lure the real La’an out of the dark side that has overtaken her, and they somehow manage to combine fighting with the tango, all in a black slit dress. Dancing was how the Spock/La’an relationship came to be, a way for these two deeply repressed people to express themselves in a way that was still formal enough to feel safe, so the scene really works.

Star Trek Discovery 2×1: “Brother”. I am determined to finish season 2 of DSC for Captain Pike and Spock if it’s the last thing I do. This will be my….third or fourth attempt. After the events of DSC’s last season — in which Cool Captain Jason Isaacs was revealed to be from the mirror universe up to mischief — Discovery needs a new captain. Conveniently, the Enterprise has just been crippled, and her captain Christopher Pike is free to take over the Disco for a while. While en route to investigate some strange space whatsit, they learn about a crashed medical ship on a dangerous asteroid and attempt to effect a rescue.

Star Trek Discovery 2×2, “New Eden”. I fell asleep. Again. I always fall asleep during this episode. it’s a cure for insomnia. It’s something to do with the Discovery finding some planet in the Beta Quadrant populated by people who live like it’s the 19th century. Pike changes from his glorious TOS gold into blaaa Discovery kit.

Star Trek Deep Space Nine, 3×18: “Distant Voices”. Bashir is turning 30. He loses his mind. This is an unsettling episode the first time you watch it, because you only see Bashir roaming alone on an empty station, occasionally encountering panicked members of the crew; after you realize his mind is being destroyed by an alien virus and these members of the crew represent parts of his brain that are withering, it’s unsettling in a completely different way.

Bashir: This year is a little different. It will be my…thirtieth birthday.
Garak: ?
Bashir: In many human cultures, the 30th birthday is considered a landmark. It begins the slow march into middle age.
Garak: And that’s considered…bad?
Bashir: Well, no, but…it becomes harder and harder to ignore the passage of time.
Garak: On Cardassia, growing older is a sign of …dignity, and power.
Bashir: IN TWO DAYS I TURN THIRTY IF I CHOOSE TO BE GRUMPY ABOUT IT THAT’S MY PREROGATIVE

Jadzia: So, if you’re in a coma, and we’re not real, then what are we doing here?
Odo: Perhaps we’re just here to give him someone to talk to.
Kira: A coward, a paranoid, a hothead, and me?! You’d think he’d pick some better company.
Bashir: I haven’t PICKED anyone, I’m in a COMA!

Garak: I’m part of you, remember? I know what you know. Or, perhaps a little more…
Bashir: …always the man of mystery.
Garak: You wouldn’t have me any other way. ^_^

Garak: You know, doctor, what I find most interesting about this entire incident is how your mind chose people you know to represent various parties of your personality — and how your mind cast me in the role of the villain!
Bashir: I wouldn’t read too much into that, Garak —
Garak: To think, after all this time, all these lunches, that you still don’t trust me — there’s hope for you yet. ^_^

Star Trek Deep Space Nine, 1×18, “Dramitas Personae”. DS9’s answer to TOS’s “The Naked Time” and TNG’s “The Naked Now”. No nudity.

Death by Lightning, “The Man from Ohio”. Michael Shannon plays James Garfield, and NICK OFFERMAN plays Chester Arthur. It’s going to be hard to properly hate the machine-creature Arthur when he’s played by Offerman. (Arthur’s first scene involves shoving Garfield’s future assassin vewy woughly to the floah.) Spencer Macpherson also brings an unexpectedly sympathetic portrayal of Guiteau. I’ve been wanting to watch this for a while (Shannon is a superb dramatic actor, and I’ve loved Offerman since first meeting Ron Swanson), but reading Garfield/Arthur biographies opened the door. Anyhoo, this episode covers Garfield nominating some sherman spawn for presidency, only to so impress the RNC that he winds up getting nominated — and voted in as candidate — himself. GORGEOUS cinematography. One big demerit: I think the language is overstrong for the period.

Death by Lightning, “Party Faithful”. Knowing they need the New York machine to be somewhat on their side, the RNC hit up Chester Arthur to be the vice presidential candidate. Conkling (the master of the Machine) isn’t happy, but it’s better than letting that fat old has-been Hancock win. Although at their first meeting Arthur threw Guiteau (vewy woughly, to the floah), they bond after detectives chasing Guiteau confront him in a …uh, ladies boxing match that Arthur is present at. Arthur is ready for a fight, and he gives the detectives one, and they become friends after Arthur starts drunk-barfing. Arthur becomes increasingly interesting as he’s having to face down his former patron Conkling and sweet-talk him into supporting the Garfield ticket.

Death by Lightning, “Casus Belli”. Tension soars between Conkling’s stalwarts and the president after he appoints a man of his own to be the Port Collector of New York — a post that takes in two-thirds of the Federal Government’s customs revenue — rather than one of Conkling’s minions. Guiteau’s attempts to land a federal post lead him to attempting a forgery, resulting in him being told he will never have a place in this administration. Conkling resolves to go to war against Garfield, and Guiteau….looks with starry eyes at the man he once ‘despised’. Nick Offerman continues to play Arthur in amazing fashion as a conflicted character; he’s Conkling’s man, but at the same time he and Garfield ocasionally stumble into chemistry and mutual connection. There’s also an amusing bit of whiplash between modern and historic dialogue: “I feel it is my duty to communicate that you really ought to fire me”. Notice my first historical whoopsie this episode: when Guiteau yells “DO YOU KNOW CHRIST?” in Garfield’s church, he’s sitting right behind Garfield, not in the back as happened in reality. In the show, Garfield recognizes Guiteau as that nut who kept showing up the White House; in reality, Garfield wrote in his journal that some young man screamed nonsense in church. This episode had one SUPERB shot where Guiteau is in a museum, and he stands in front of an empty exhibit marked “THIS DISPLAY BEING PREPARED”: he is mirrored in the glass, a man increasingly convinced he has a Destiny — to shoot Garfield and save the Republic.

Garfield: I can’t figure why a man like you would pivot to machine politics.
Arthur: A man can only punch up and lose so many times. Better to be within than without.
Garfield: And now that you ARE within? Once he’s seen the mountaintop, what does Chester A. Arthur stand for?

Death by Lightning, “Destiny of the Republic”.

Guiteau disappears, only to announce himself with an inexplicable gunshot at a train station. The viewer is as astonished as Garfield, as it happens out of nowhere. The back half of the episode is all about poor Garfield’s months of misery. The show potentially expands the role of Dr. Purvis, who appears to be completely aware of germ theory and approaches to antisepsis; he’s completely ignored by everyone else. I just read a surgeon’s treatment of Garfield which heavily emphasized the death-by-medicine angle of Garfield’s life, and it seems as if that would have come up. I’ll have to check out Destiny of the Republic to be sure, though, since that’s what Death by Lightning is inspired by. Arthur is deeply disturbed by the shooting, especially by the fact that Guiteau shouted his name in the aftermath. (“I am the Stalwart of Stalwarts! Arthur is president now!”) The last shot is very sweet.

Dr. Purvis: Are you aware of the new research coming out of Europe?
Dr. Bliss, turning Garfield into a shish-ka-bob: THIS IS NOT EUROPE, SIR!

Mrs. Garfield, slapping Arthur: You read this, Arthur, and you read it ——- WELL! (straightens hair) Great emergencies can rouse, shall we say, generous and long-dormant traits in men. If there is a shred of real nobility in you, I suggest now is the time to let shine.

This would have been a GREAT series if they didn’t drop F-bombs like they were on The Sopranos. Also, Mrs. Garfield’s lines were not hers; they were from Julia Sand, a woman who wrote letters to Arthur imploring him to rise to the challenge of history — and yet she is not mentioned.

“You are free—free to be as able & as honorable as any man who ever filled the presidential chair. Your past—you know best what it has been. You have lived for worldly things. Fairly or unfairly, you have won them. You are rich, powerful—tomorrow, perhaps, you will be President. And what is it all worth? Are you peaceful—are you happy? What if a few days hence the hand of the next unsatisfied ruffian should lay you low & you should drag through months of weary suffering in the White House, knowing that all over the land not a prayer was uttered in your behalf, not a tear shed, that the great American people was glad to be rid of you—would not worldly honors seem rather empty then? Rise to the emergency. Disappoint our fears. Force the nation to have faith in you. Show from the first that you have none but the purest aims. It may be difficult at once to inspire confidence, but persevere. In time—when you have given reason for it—the country will love & trust you. Your name is now on the annals of history, You cannot slink back into obscurity, if you would. A hundred years hence, school boys will recite your name in the list of Presidents and tell of your administration. And what shall posterity say? It is for you to choose whether your record shall be written in black or in gold. (As quoted in THE UNEXPECTED PRESIDENT)

Also, in a Chester Arthur biography I’m reading, the Garfield shooting aftermath is absurd. Guiteau puts his pistol in his pocket and strolls off; a policeman approaches him and says “Sir, I must arrest you” and Guiteau replies “I must go to jail”. So gosh-darned polite.

Star Trek Voyager 3×25: “Worst Case Scenario”. This is one of my favorite episodes of Voyager: it drops the viewer in media res, into a scenario that seems perfectly normal at first until we get a few minutes in and go “HOLUPAMINUTE”. In a nutshell, B’Elanna Torres discovers an immersive ‘holonovel’ in which the holodeck player portrays a crewman who is invited to join a coup conducted by Chakotay; it quickly becomes a favorite on Voyager, but then …we discover that a villain from a previous series had PREVIOUSLY found the holonovel and tampered with it to make it a lot more deadly. I liked getting to see the crew’s playful sides: they get REALLY invested on where the ‘holonovel’ goes. (And yes, there’s a reason I keep using ‘holonovel’ in ‘quotes’.) The episode really plays with a thread that Voyager really dropped on the whole: the tension between Maquis and Starfleet officers.

Cap’n Kate: With all due respect, Tuvok…..loosen up.

Star Trek Voyager: 4×23, “Living History”. Another favorite, this takes history as its subject. In the future, a planet who had a run in with Voyager have an entire museum devoted to their version of events; they find a version of the Doctor and activate him. He is dumbfounded at the skewed version of history being presented. I’ve grown to appreciate this more over the years, as I’ve witnessed reality be thrown down the memory hole in favor of ideological narratives numerous times.

DarkKate: When diplomacy fails, there’s only one recourse. Violence. It’s the Starfleet way.

Star Trek Strange New Worlds 4×6: “Off-Hour”. The Enterprise gets trapped by a wormhole during a shift-change (so much for happy hour) and all of the bridge’s explodey-things explode. Even Pike gets explodey-thing’d. This is a bit like TNG’s “Disaster” in that different parts of the crew are trapped in different parts of the ship and trying to muddle through their particular problems. However, they’re also racing against the clock: the longer they stay in the wormhole, the more they’ll accelerate — and at some point, the ship will disintegrate. There’s some body horror, but not nearly as much as “The Griffin Incident”.

Coming up in September…

This September marks the SIXTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF STAR TREK. Kinda a big deal? I mean, there’s no current Trek series in production, and the novels have returned to aliens-of-the-week with no character continuity whatsoever, and Strange New Worlds has devolved into novelty episodes instead of serious character drama it’s CAPABLE OF, but…hope breeds eternal, right?

(sigh)

I might try to read some more Star Trek. Maybe I’ll replay Star Trek: Elite Force. (Except for the last mission, which is so dull. Kill the aliens, go down an elevator. Kill the aliens, go down an elevator. Cutscene. Go down an elevator, kill the aliens. Literally everything after the introductory ‘jump puzzle in zero gravity’ bit is boring and repetitive.) I should also really read some science, since I have TEN BOOKS LEFT IN THE SURVEY.

Also — am I crazy, or do these kids sound like they just popped out of 2002? My fellow Millennials, chime in!