More snow today. Seems like we’ve already gotten more snow this winter than last, even ahead of the Solstice. Which is just the Solstice, not the “beginning of winter.” Winter got out of the gate early this year.

File the following under (1) movies I’ve seen pieces of lately and (2) movies I saw long ago that I never need to see again in their entirety, which is actually most of them. I chanced across Star Trek: The Motion Picture the other day, about which I have vague recollections from early 1980. That is, I vaguely remember it being a yawn.

So I watched about 10 minutes of it. The Enterprise had encountered one of those sprawling, amorphous energy beings that it seemed to run into with some regularity, and the ship was boldly going into it. Or at least going in with some trepidation.

Two things struck me. First, the purpose of the scene seemed to be to show off the movie’s special effects, which probably did look swell on the big screen in 1980. But the scene went on and on, with the characters and the audience seeing light patterns go by, something like the “through the star gate” scene in 2001, only a lot slower.

Also, everyone on the bridge just stood there, wide-eyed. This is the bridge crew of the Enterprise we’re talking about. They’ve seen a lot of outer-space marvels and weird things in their time. So why weren’t they at their instruments, trying to figure out what the thing was?