Author: Dave Keeshan

People ask me about crypto currency all the time. Here is an explainer for one of the more recent additions to the space:

Well after years of searching and having little joy a picture of Megan Gale dressed as Wonder Woman has finally emerged.  For those that don’t know Megan Gale is an Australian model that was the face of David Jones for the guts of 10 years, but as her modelling work came to an end she has drifted towards acting and was recently seen in the Mad Max movie that came out last year, Fury Road.

However back in 2007 the director of Fury Road, Australian George Miller, was reported to be prepping for a Justice League movie to be made at Fox Studios in Sydney.  Fox Studios is where the Matrix films were made, as well and Episodes II and II of Star Wars and the Bradon Routh Superman movie, Superman Returns. Casting for the movie was well under way and they even had a new Superman and Batman, even though Christain Bale was only part way through his tenure on the Christopher Nolan movies. Armie Hammer was to be the new Batman, most recently seen in The Man from U.N.C.L.E and D.J. Cotrona as Superman.

It was also reported at the time that Megan Gale was cast as Wonder Woman, not only cast but she had been in and photos of her dressed as Wonder Woman existed.  The story was out there, I put up a cool CG image of Wonder Woman back in 2010 and mentioned Megan Gales connection to the role, as a result it is one of the most visited pages on my site.

So with great pleasure I would like to give you the actual images of Megan Gale as Wonder Woman which have finally been released on these good intertubes by the photographer Mark Rogers.

I suppose it is a curse of identifying ones self so closely with being a trekkie I am getting a lot of people asking me what I think of the new movie Star Trek Into the Darkness. Since I live in Sydney, Australia, I got to see it nearly a full week before it was released in America, so I have been mulling over it since then.

SPOILER ALERT – Do not read beyond here as this contains spoilers

Going into the movie there was a lot of speculation as to who Benedict Cumberbatch was playing. He seemed very unlike Khan in choice and I actually never considered that as a viable role for him. I was pulling for him to be the new timeline’s Gary Mitchell, Kirks academy friend who becomes sorta God-like and goes crazy, as one does, and tries to take over the Enterprise before taking over the universe. Kirk ends up killing his friend to save the universe. Not a bad morality play, test Kirk out an all that.  Well I was wrong, Cumberbatch is Khan.

OK that is out of the way!

This movie is a fun, space movie. It has some great action scenes and makes other worlds and space battles awesome.  This does not, however, need to be a Star Trek movie. The movie begins with Kirk trying to save a prehistoric tribe on a planet that is near a volcano that is about to explode, the scene seemed more like a homage to a pre-credits Bond scene.  Now in the 60s, Gene Roddenberry couldn’t afford the TV budget to show a ship landing and taking off every  episode, so transporters were born.  They orbit the planet and crew get beamed up and down and a catchphrase is born.  In this movie for no reason what so ever, they have decided to hide the enterprise in the ocean.  No reason given why they would do that, other than it would look cool.  It is a move that is so at odds with Trek that has gone before.

It is this kinda laziness that pervades the movie, it is like JJ Abrams wants to make a big science fiction movie, but doesn’t want to be bogged down with a franchise that has nearly 50 years (yes count them) of history. Lets see what happens when he takes over Star Wars.

From there it continues, Kirk portrayed as a free wheeling captain that is way too young to have been given command, trucking around the universe with ~430 souls entrusted to him with there careers and lives at his cavalier whim (there is old school Trekkie knowledge).  William Shatner’s Kirk was many things, but he was always loyal and responsible for his crew. To be fair, Pine’s Kirk loses command in this movie, but then gets it back 10 minutes later when all of the chain of command between him and the captain chairs gets wiped out, an interesting trend.

There are explosions, there are chases, there is a weird Spock/Uhura romance going on.  There is a weird cameo from Leonard Nimoy, he is famous for wanting out of the franchise, now he seems to come back at the drop of a hat. There is even a scene where Admiral daughter stowaway, Carol Marcus, is standing in front of Kirk in her underwear, porn movies have more plausible ways of getting their actors to strip off (I have dutifully included it here though, let’s see what visitors google brings me with that image on my website). It is all fluffer material to get Kirk to take responsibility and we find him confronted with the warp core misalignment problem that Spock experienced at the end of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

The scene where Spock dies in that 1982 movie still stands the test of time.  Admittedly the sets weren’t as awesome.  Spock locked behind glass, too irradiated to even let out, his death, a matter of minutes away, says goodbye to his friend and captain (I know admiral, but you know), they have served together for 20+ years. When he dies, a broken Kirk turns around and stares off into middle space, he has finally found out that there is a no win scenario and he buries his friend.  An excellent scene and wholly consistent with the movie you are watching.  Arguably it suffers with time as 2 years later they decided to bring Spock back and I won’t justify that. At the end of this movie though the character is gone and people need to live their lives.

OK that is a lot a exposition for a scene that is not in this movie, well the inbred fanboy equivalent is.  I can just imagine the writers room session that created the scene in the new movie.

 

 

Hey you know that awesome scene in Star Trek II, the one where Spock dies and Kirk watches?

Yeah

How about we do that again, but Kirk dies and Spock watches!

Brilliant

You know what lets have it happen twenty years earlier in their timeline, but with characters saying the same lines.

Oh, lets also have Spock scream “KHANNNNN!” into space so that an entire generation can be segregated by those that thing the famous cry came from Kirk versus Spock.

Hey, if we kill Kirk I am guessing we’ll probably have to bring him back in the next movie right!

No, lets bring him back in this one 10 minutes after he dies, using magic blood we find in Khan, that we fore shadowed with a reanimated Tribble earlier in the movie.

Excellent! Money fight!

(full disclosure I am rather fond of the KHANNN scream)

To wrap it, this movie stands in the shadow of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, this is solely because the writers thought it would be cool to do so.  If I had to compare the two, Star Trek Into the Darkness is an alcopop and STII is a fine wine.  One is obviously better than the other, but at the end of the day they both get you drunk in the end.

You will notice I haven’t talked about Cumberbatch as Khan. He is a great actor and he performs well in this movie, I just wished they had created a new character.  At the end of the movie, I don’t know if it is there to piss off the fans, they have Kirk read out the Captain’s Oath to a assembly of people as the Enterprise is rededicated:

To seek out new life and new civilisations, to boldly go where no-one has gone before.

Not bad, I wish the film makers would do the same in service of the next story.

Oh BTW, please checkout my religion, The First Church of James Tiberius Kirk. At least the new movie is carrying on the tradition of killing and bringing back Kirk.

 

With the new Star Trek movie out I decided to share with every body my take on trying to learn another language, for those that haven’t seen the new movie potential spoiler, even though this clip is nearly a year old.

KHAN!

After a very successful sold out run at the Sydney Fringe Festival, Andrew Barnett and I are delighted to bring our performance, One Man Show, to the Sydney Comedy Festival.

In the 21st Century there are many expectations about what a Man should be. Between them Dave Keeshan and Andrew Barnett meet almost all of these expectations.

Our show is on the 7th of May 2013 at the Factory Theatre in Marrickville starting at 8:45PM.  Tickets can already be purchased online and you can find them here. It is going to be a great night, so make sure you book tickets before it sells out.

Keep an eye for a few posts in advance of our date where I try and rattle out a few squirrely things in my head.

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First time I saw Dolores O’Riordan I said to myself, what would she look like as a Ewok?

(This is part of a series of posts that I am doing in the run up to my first Sydney Fringe Festival show in September. It is called One Man Show and it is a split show performed with Andrew Barnett, in the run up we have another website to promo the show, check it out if you get a chance. Original Post)

People who know me know that I have one huge pet peeve right now, Hipsters! Now that word has quite a few meanings, there were 50s hipsters that were different from the 90s version, but the current version, the post millennial crop, just seem custom designed to annoy the crap out of me.

My theory is that Mother Earth did a stock take at the end of the last millennium and figured out there are far too many of us bald monkeys walking around and screwing up the planet. She didn’t get to 4 billion on the clock without being able to take corrective action every now and again and hipsters are her way of depopulating us from the inside. Just to start off, they seem to enjoy having bad hairstyles, a good way to stop being attractive to the opposite sex and future mate. Should they overcome that obstacle they have a fondness for uber tight jeans, an excellent way to keep the sperm count down and stop the next generation right there.

Have you ever been out walking around and you see a person wearing glasses that look like they were government issued in the 70s, but then on closer inspection found out that the glasses in question have no lenses? Hipsters wanna be! I personally don’t get that one. When I was 11 I found out I had to wear glasses, as I got older and earned some money, I tried to make the glasses I had to wear as invisible as possible. When I found out I couldn’t wear contacts (imagine trying to give medicine to a cat that doesn’t want it, that was me trying to get a contact into my eye) I went for the best science could deliver and got lasik eye surgery, “What’s that burning smell? Oh right it’s me!”. These kids don’t even need glasses, but they wear the frames, GAH!

Back in my day I was a fairly serious cyclist, I enjoyed as we went through the 80s and 90s, bike technology got better, first it was single speed free wheel, then 3 speed, then a 9 speed, then 18 speed, then full hyper glide 27 speed XTR, yay! Hipsters in their obsession with form over function have stripped it all back to either a single speed or a fixie! That is a bike with the gear fixed to the wheel, so that they can’t stop pedaling. This is how crazy it is getting, this is their logic. Because the wheel is fixed, they can just back pedal to brake, hence they don’t need a brake on the bike and they remove all brakes, WTF! I presented one hipster once with the real life situation, “OK so you are going down the road at 60 kph and a car unexpectantly pulls out in front of you, what are you going to do?”, “Eh, I’ll just pedal backwards”, was his response. “You’ll snap your legs off!”, was mine. I have to admit this was before I was in on Mother Earth’s plan, viewed through that prism it all makes sense again, right they don’t wear helmets because it’ll mess up their crappy hair do, so that when the worst happens and they crash, it will be immediate death rather than surviving on some life support system clogging up the world. Nice!

I like to think of myself as an optimist, I can’t fight the system, people are allowed to be idiots and wrong, how can I take advantage of it? Well single speeds and fixies are murder on the knee joints, most of them think that they’ll be 23 for ever, I’m waiting until they turn 30, provided they last that long, and find out they have the knees of a 90 year old due to Osteoarthritis, since it turned out that, yeah, gears were a good idea after all. I am going to set up the first joint replacement facility targeting hipsters. Also since they have the frames already, you know reading distance starts to go as you approach 40, here lets me get some lenses for you. Man I am going to clean up.

(This is part of a series of posts that I am doing in the run up to my first Sydney Fringe Festival show in September. It is called One Man Show and it is a split show performed with Andrew Barnett, in the run up we have another website to promo the show, check it out if you get a chance. Original Post)
I suffer from an unusual complaint. I’m not proud of it, but I know nothing about cars. This is hard to admit as a guy and even harder for some one who works as an engineer. I don’t know how a carburetor works, in fact if spell check hadn’t just kicked in I wouldn’t have even been able to spell it. It sorta comes down to a thing I call “The Lingo”. We live in a highly specialised world, every thing has it own code, series of buzz words. This is mostly noticeable to me when I go out and try and purchase medium to high priced electrical and household goods. Bought a new phone recently, how many mega pixels in the camera, do you have a front facing as well as a rear facing one. Is it NFC enabled, what you still using bluetooth, no one uses that any more etc etc. Now most of that statement is current, it makes sense now, 3 years ago it would have been gibberish and in 3 years it will more than likely be gibberish again. I do live in dread fear of having to upgrade my phone, like a body builder preparing for competition, I have to hit the equivalent of a gym and learn up on all the new technology and find out what is no longer there. Does any body remember express on covers? I do! This is all so that when I enter into the shop and start talking to sales dude he doesn’t start bamboozling me with terms I don’t know and before you know it I have added rust protection to the glass of the lens.If I am honest about it cameras and phones technology usually comes to me, but it is all the other things, BBQs, bicycles, lounges and beds, yes beds! I spent the past three weekends checking out “sleeping giant” and “snooze” to replace our 10 year old bed, you could say we rode it into the ground! (shit joke). But there is a lingo for beds. Frames or bases. Medium or Firm. Memory foam or latex. Matching bed sides, dressers, tall boys, low boys, built in storage, Gah!. After losing the will to live and not being conversant enough on the lingo, at first I thought we were getting it, but was devastated to find out you can not get a racing car bed in a queen size. Eventually we capitulated and picked the first frame we saw, with the first mattress we saw. At times like that I just walk into the electrical section of a Harvey Normans and pick on the sales dudes. I use my powers of lingo to make my self feel superior and ask for stuff on camera or phones that just don’t exist but sound like they should. “I want a 100 Mega Pixel camera, which front, back and side facing lenses. It needs to have 100 GHz of memory and it had to be able to upload all images to the cloud and the intranet!” When they apologise and say they are “Sorry sir, we don’t have that camera in stock”, I then like to blare in his face “Well I believe I’ll take my business else where! GOOD DAY! I SAID GOOD DAY” and then storm out. I can be rest assured I have claimed my human sacrifice to the god of Lingo.I suppose I wasn’t entirely truthful at the start when I said I didn’t get cars, that was true until these things called electric cars started to arrive on the scene, and being an electrical engineer, it was like that scene in the Karate Kid where Daniel-San found out all the shitty work around the house was in preparation to learn to fight. All of a sudden I knew what regenerative braking was and why its cool. Lead acid batteries versus NiMH and why one is better than the other under load. Ranges of 100 Km for Mega Coulomb Hour. Yeah Biatch! That’s what I am talking about!Some times I feel like Indiana Jones trying to stay ahead of that rolling stone ball, but one day I will become the Zen master of Lingo!

I performed at LaughYTO last week and it turned out a reviewer from Time Out Sydney was there.  I didn’t get much of a write up, but at least what was there wasn’t bad:

[Cameron James] was a hard act to follow, but Irishman Dave Keeshan made a decent fist of it with solid material delivered in his lilting brogue (especially his beautifully simple mynah bird gag that should be on t-shirts at refugee rights rallies).

I’ll take it!