Hello World!

I'm back from England, tired but happy, with endless news, conversation and laundry to catch up on. There were enough highlights on this trip to cover ten articles, so I'll mention the more fannish-related activities here. We took the kids to see The Phantom of the Opera onstage at Her Majesty's Theatre, since they had loved the movie; my husband and I saw it on Broadway in 1988 and on our honeymoon in Toronto in 1990, so it had been a long time. We also spent some of our London time in Greenwich at the Maritime Museum, which I count as a fannish activity because we skipped both last time we were in Greenwich as Patrick O'Brian and Master and Commander had not yet happened to me.

The bulk of the trip was spent in Yorkshire, which we reached by way of Birmingham and a couple of Pre-Raphaelite museums as well as several stone circles and megaliths, not only Stonehenge and Avebury but the Rollright Stones and Castlerigg. For me, visiting Wordsworth's Dove Cottage was a fannish activity - there's a lot of information on the wider Romantic circle, including Mary Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein, and her mother Mary Wollstonecraft, one of the most important feminists of the era. We also went to Whitby, famous for both Captain Cook's adventures and for the churchyard which is the setting for parts of Dracula at the top of the 199 steps. I count York as a place of fannish interest - there's a great deal of Richard III history, the real sort as opposed to Shakespeare's version - and there's also a train museum with many of the cars that were the basis for those in Thomas the Tank Engine, long a favorite of my children.

We took a trip to Castle Howard, the gorgeous baroque great house that was the setting for Brideshead Revisited and which has a chapel that is worth the price of admission with stained glass windows by Edward Burne-Jones. It would be hard to pick a single castle from this visit as my favorite, let alone a cathedral or an abbey - we visited Scarborough, Carlisle, Brough and Portchester Castles, to name just a few, York Minster, Westminster Abbey and Durham Cathedral, and Rievaulx, Fountains, Whitby and St. Mary's Abbeys - but I can name a favorite tall ship. Though we visited several, including Cutty Sark in Greenwich, Trincomalee in Hartlepool, Grand Turk in Whitby (a star of the Horatio Hornblower TV films) and many ships in Portsmouth, Nelson's restored HMS Victory has no equal, particularly in this Trafalgar anniversary year.

I met several people I know from fandom while visiting England - a Star Trek fan I first encountered on America Online when she was thirteen and I was running Kate Mulgrew's fan club, a Lord of the Rings fan who took us around Rievaulx Abbey and a Harry Potter fan whose husband is the vicar of the city nearest the cottage where we were staying, plus a good friend in London whom I also encountered online because of Kathryn Janeway and whom I have since seen several times on both sides of the Atlantic. I missed my last two connections, a Highlander friend in Portsmouth and an Alan Rickman fan whom I had hoped to meet at Heathrow as she was coming back from seeing him at a Hans Christian Andersen celebration in Denmark, but it was great fun to encounter in person these people whom I had known only by screen names and online personalities.

Trek BBS Today

Below are some of the topics currently being discussed at the Trek BBS:

-What was your favorite bit of insulting dialogue on The Next Generation?

-Would you want to meet Brannon Braga?

-The West Wing season finale: would you rather have these candidates than the real ones?

More topics can be found at the Trek BBS!

Trek Two Years Ago

These were some of the major news items from April 2003:

• Finale Features Familiar Faces
  A Paramount press release announced the guest cast line-up for the Enterprise second season finale, "The Expanse", which marked the return of recurring characters Admiral Forrest, Ambassador Soval, Silik and "Future Guy", as well as Klingons and several new Starfleet officers.

• 'Enterprise' Season Two In The Can
  Principal photography on the second season ended after an eight-day shoot for "The Expanse", which required numerous extra locales in addition to the NX-01 standing sets. The cast went on a 10 week hiatus before resuming production on Enterprise's third season in June.

• Fox 'Falls' For Fuller
  Fox added former Voyager scribe Bryan Fuller's new series, Wonderfalls, to its 2003-2004 prime time line-up, ordering 13 episodes of the "dramedy" series about a girl who receives messages from objects in her Niagara Falls store.

More news can be found in the archives.

Poll Results

Below are the results of the most recent TrekToday poll:

Which pop culture event are you looking forward to the most? 'Star Wars Episode III: The Revenge of the Sith' in May 34.2% - (2211 Votes) 'Serenity' in September 27.9% - (1801 Votes) The 'Enterprise' finale in May 20% - (1295 Votes) 'Batman Begins' in June 6.1% - (398 Votes) 'Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire' in November 6% - (391 Votes) 'War of the Worlds' in July 3.5% - (230 Votes) 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory' in July 1.9% - (128 Votes) Total Votes: 6454

Please vote in our new poll on the next big TV SF thing!

Today's Television Listings

Tonight at 8:00 p.m. Eastern Time, UPN will rerun the Star Trek: Enterprise episode voted by fans as their #1 favourite episode of the entire series. Next week, April 15th, new episodes resume with "Bound", after which UPN will run new episodes each week until the series finale on May 13th.

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