It was our second play at the Rep in as many months, so we know: a gay character in a Seattle Rep performance this season has about the same odds at survival as a redshirt on an away team mission did in the original Star Trek. That is to say, he dies. Apparently that's how you illustrate "families being torn apart" or something these days. The Breach tells the stories of a disparate group of......

As we were saying the other day, the Seattle Rep is producing a play next season by playwright (actor, screenwriter) Robert Schenkkan, who lives in Seattle and whom we first met at Victrola. (You know him for authoring the magisterial The Kentucky Cycle, or from his appearance on Star Trek: TNG or in Pump Up the Volume.) Seattlest: By the Waters of Babylon: it's a newer piece, right? What got you started on a......

The title is a little pun about the Dyson sphere, Freeman Dyson's main claim to fame and the source of his name-check in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Outside of the ranks of science fiction fans, Freeman Dyson is known for being an award-winning physicist and the author of several popular science books. Dyson spoke at Town Hall on Monday to promote his latest collection of book reviews and essays, The Scientist As Rebel. Dyson......

Wednesday, September 27 >>>Town Hall, 7:30pm. Science and medical writer Thomas Hager tells you all about the drug that you won't hear about on House, M.D.: "The Nazis discovered it. The Allies won the war with it. It conquered disease, changed laws, and single-handedly launched the era of antibiotics." But does it make you feel like hugging strangers? $5 at the door. >>>Bella Cosa Foods, 4:00-6:00pm: Federico Bibi lets you taste two organic olive......

Town Hall kicked off its Science Lecture Series last night with a talk by particle physicist Lawrence Krauss on Einstein's "biggest blunder." Krauss is famous (in some circles) for three things, which we'll list in descending order of fame: 1) for being the Star Trek physics guy (he's in town for the Trek-inanigans at the Sci-Fi Museum this weekend), 2) for allegedly calling string theory a "colossal failure," and 3) for his work on......

Houstonist reports on cross-dressing thieves and undressing educators this week. A Peeping Tom defends himself with a papaya and an outraged onlooker asks Ken Lay, "TATER TOTS OR FRIES?" Also, FEMA wants it's money back. LAist are a bug bunch of geeks. They're Star Trek geeks, David Duchovny geeks and Frank Gehry geeks. During their Cochella preview their readers reveal themselves to be Depeche Mode geeks. Seattlest saw their basketball team preparing to leave for......

This video shows us how great the world will be in 2055 after we turn around this whole global warming thing and finally get down with some clean energy. As you can see in the capture above, monorails will be whisking by, cars will be hovering and our cities will be massive and dense. Substitute yesterday's vision of clean fuel (nuclear) for today's (hydrogen, biodiesel, wind, solar) and this could have been produced in......

As Seattlest was just saying, theoretical physicist Michio Kaku was at Town Hall last night, giving a talk on parallel universes and string theory. We prefer to get our science fix from people who don't sound like they're physicists "in theory" (or who advise the Star Trek franchise), but we keep an open mind. (We'd heard Michio Kaku was a popular speaker, and were gladdened by the number of attractive young women who seemed to......

Do you remember the episode of Star Trek where Spock and Kirk had to fight to the death? Sure, it had a bit of a cop-out ending, but the theme to which they fought has ingrained itself into pop culture, as has the vision of these two friends fighting in an unwinnable fight (although Spock won). So what does bringing up this extraordinarily geeky moment have to do with Seattle? Not much to be honest,......

Halloween isn't until Monday, but everyone's going out to celebrate this weekend. So after you put the final touches on the ultimate scary costume (be it a Katrina victim, avian flu, or even *shudder* Harriet Miers), hit the town for one of the many Halloween-themed movies showing on the big screen. Tonight at the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame is the second film in their Alien Encounters series, It Came from Outer Space.......

You never know who your neighbors are until something tragic happens. Yesterday we discovered the sad news that actor James Doohan, Scotty from TOS, has died of pneumonia and Alzheimer's complications, but also that he was a Washington State resident, making his home across the puddle in Redmond. He originally hailed from Vancouver, B.C. Doohan had been active in the science fiction and Star Trek communities even recently, appearing in recent Trek films as well......