This blog entry consists of a brief new Zap Oracle card followed by a dissenting review of the new Star Trek movie.  My next blog will present a psychological theory of the financial meltdown and a suggested remedy, hope you get a chance to read it.  As always, your feedback is appreciated.  Send to jonathanzap@hotmail.com

Don't Let a Thorn in Your Side become a Splinter in Your Mind

text and photo © Jonathan Zap

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Incarnation in the Babylon Matrix almost always presents you with one or more thorns in your side. Some of the most common thorns include finances, health issues, dysfunctional relationships, loneliness, body image and career/job frustrations. You manage to remove one of these thorns and another pops up. It is very easy to let a thorn in your side become a glowing, red hot splinter in your mind and to dominate your existence. When you do you will tend to become either a passive victim or a desperate, obsessed Gollum on a forever quest to regain a lost Precious. One of the most crucial life skills is the ability to tolerate a thorn or two in your side without freaking out, without letting it become a splinter in your mind obsessing your attention.

Of course it's great if you can get thorns out of your side, but that is not always possible. Race car drivers are trained that if they are heading toward a wall that they shouldn't look at the wall, but at where they want to go. Stay focused on progressing along the open avenues of possibilities. Put your energy into your circle of influence, what you can actual affect right now, not on the circle of concern — the things you can only worry about right now.

Hemingway's definition of heroism is "Grace under pressure." Learn to handle the thorns in your side with grace, and don't let them become splinters in your mind.

Star Trek 2009 ----A Dissenting Review

        This movie  currently has a  96% favorable rating on Rotten Tomatoes and , by contrast, Wolverine Origins is at 37%.   Also I paid my nine bucks with every expectation that I was going to love this movie.  I’m not enough of a Trekkie to have ever worn pointy ears or owned a plastic com badge, but I am currently on season six of Next Generation which I have been watching in order, DVD by DVD.  Also I have really liked other things from J. J. Abrams. 

      I was prepared to boldly go into this Star Trek movie I had never seen before and for fifteen minutes or so there was just enough CGI eye candy for me to give it willing suspension of disbelief until I realized that I was being hurtled, at warp speed, into a sucktacular  ADD-friendly space cowboy, Star Ship Troopers type of plastic crap-fest with that annoying herky-jerky camera work and rapid fire MTV editing style, with sparks flying, and lights ever flashing, and constant in your face CGI mayhem, which probably would have worked for me if I was a twelve year old Ritalin addict with sweaty palms clutching handfuls of ultra sour candy. 

       I’m supposed to believe that the Federation goes out of its way to recruit a barroom-brawling hot head, square-jawed studly young made for TV renegade-maverick  Hollywood stock character to be captain of a Star Ship loaded with lethal technologies and a crew of hundreds.  Why do we set things in the future and then have a bunch of young Baywatch types whose personalities seem like they are from the Nineteen Fuckin’ Fifties?  

      I know a lot of you are saying to yourselves, “This guy just doesn’t get it.  These movies are made to appeal to twelve year olds, not fifty-one year old intellectuals, wake up and smell the Seven Eleven Slurpee, you don’t have the nervous system of pubescent boy whose fingers twitch with blurred speed over his X Box controller  for hours on end, but they’re the ones that a film like this has to lock its cash-hungry tractor beams onto to have a fan base that will keep the franchise going  and all that.”  Fine, but I loved the last Batman movie and so did the twelve year old boys. 

       Twelve year olds will not complain if you throw in some darkness, and visual novelty and don’t make the bridge of the Enterprise look like the chrome-trimmed, monitors everywhere look you see flashing behind the anchor man on the evening news. 

       When a director has confidence in his visual imagination he or she will slow the fuck down enough to show you a vision, but when what you’ve got is a failure of imagination then you do this herky-jerky unsteady steady cam shit with rapid fire MTV editing so we don’t notice that underneath the sparks and flashing lights are crappy sets and lame dialogue .  That’s what they did with the first Transformers  movie where the Transformers don’t even transform properly, they just throw a blur of sloppy CGI chaos at you for a couple of seconds.

       The reason I’m taking a few minutes to diss this movie is that Star Trek plays a key role in collective mythology.  Star Wars happened long ago and far away, and most sci fi fantasies are dystopian, visions of a world gone terribly wrong.  Star Trek is the most positive vision of a techno-future we’ve ever come up with---a pluralistic world where we’ve gotten past the dominance of money and where a philosopher kind like Jean Luc Piccard can use force or shrewd diplomacy as needed.  Instead we get dumbed-down space cow boy diplomacy of the “Go ahead, make my day, Romulian scum.” sort.  To be fair, many of the Trek movies have been terrible, even though they had casts that had polished their characters in long-running series. 

      My advice:  Save your money and watch the best Next Generation episodes, that’s as good  Trek will probably ever get.