Notes to To Boldly Go Where No Blogger Has Gone Before!, or, Four years in

* On our phones. What Alexander Graham Bell meant to say, before he was cut off, was "Watson, come quickly, I need you so to help me out here so that some day people can read romance novels on the subway without anyone around them knowing." Or something like that.

** Another constant: in the twenty-first century, men will still attempt to use poetry as a means of seduction; what worked for Lord Byron comes very close to working for Helmsman Mitchell.

Which reminds me of another area in which, sadly, it seems our descendants will devolve: twenty-third-century gender roles are frustratingly reminiscent of mid-twentieth-century gender roles. Helmsman Mitchell thinks nothing of calling Dr. Dehner frigid, then trying to put the moves on her right there in sickbay after softening up her defenses with a little verse; for her part, she seems not to feel that either action is particularly inappropriate.

Fortunately, by the twenty-fourth century the situation has improved at least a bit, though the uniform worn by Counselor Troi on the NCC-1701D does make one wonder if there isn't still some distance to go.