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DC tends to be intolerable in summer -- sometime in April the temperature shoots way up and stays there, with far too brief a spring. But the weather this weekend was perfect for the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, warm and breezy, and the National Mall was not too mobbed to get fresh limeade whenever we felt like it.

In addition to exhibits on Haiti and on Latino music (which could be heard all across the Mall), one of the themes of this year's festival is Water Ways: Mid-Atlantic Maritime Communities. There was a Chesapeake Bay skipjack - an oyster boat - on display along with boat-building tents where people were actually building rowboats and sailboats, exhibits on commercial fishing and crab traps, artists carving decoys, water safety and rescue information, and many models of ships. A local seafood restaurant was there frying crab cakes and making the entire Mall smell like seafood, which is all to the good as far as I'm concerned. We wandered through the tents, then briefly through the Haitian cooking exhibits.

Then we wandered through the National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden into the museum to see a collection of landscape paintings by Sanford Gifford, one of the Hudson River School artists. We used to go to the Wadsworth Atheneum and the New Britain Museum of American Art when my in-laws lived in Hartford, where the influence of the better-known painters Church, Cole and Bierstadt is much in evidence as well as Gifford. Autumn was apparently his favorite season, and sunset his favorite time of day, and he loved mountains and shores, so the paintings are suffused with red and violet light and there's a great deal of greenery and waterside scenery - as with most of the Hudson River School artists, with the people and animals greatly diminished by the landscapes. He lost a brother in the Civil War, which is a big theme in his work, and you can see where Thomas Kinkade swiped some of his mountain lake imagery and use of light.

This week my children are in camp, coming home sunburned because they can't be bothered to reapply their sunblock. This weekend we are spending the Fourth of July in the hills in Pennsylvania. Happy Independence Day!

Trek BBS Today

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

-Can Enterprise borrow ideas about the Andorians from the DS9 relaunch books?

-Who should Janeway have dated?

-Which Trek cast had the worst chemistry?

More topics can be found at the Trek BBS!

Trek Two Years Ago

These were some of the major news items from June 2002:

• 'Enterprise' Resumes Shooting With 'Carbon Creek'
  Paramount announced that production had resumed on Enterprise for the second season, beginning with the episode "Carbon Creek" since the sets for "Shockwave, Part Two" had not been completed.

• Grace Lee Whitney Talks Trek At Book Signing
  Grace Lee Whitney (Janice Rand) shared her good and bad memories of Trek, including the on-set rivalries and her personal anguish at being let go after half a season.

• Stewart Almost Said No To 'Nemesis'
  Patrick Stewart (Jean-Luc Picard) nearly walked away from Star Trek Nemesis because of the long, drawn-out process of studio negotiations.

More news can be found in the archives.

Poll Results

Below are the results of the most recent TrekToday poll:

The rumour is that Star Trek XI may be a prequel film! Bad bad bad! What are they thinking! 37.3% - (622 Votes) Good, maybe Bakula, Blalock et al will be in it! 24% - (401 Votes) Good, maybe it will straighten out timeline inconsistencies with the original series! 20% - (334 Votes) Good, maybe William Shatner will be in it! 9.4% - (158 Votes) Good, let's hope it's set before 'Enterprise' and takes it out of the timeline! 9.1% - (152 Votes) Total Votes: 1667

Please vote in our new poll on upcoming complete series DVD sets!

Today's Television Listings

Tonight at 8:00 p.m. Eastern Time, UPN will show the Enterprise rerun "The Shipment". Here's a synopsis of the episode:

Archer, Reed and Major Hayes infiltrate a Xindi-Sloth industrial colony to learn more about the weapon of mass destruction that will be used against Earth.

Then at 9:00 p.m. Eastern Time, UPN will show another Enterprise rerun, "Twilight". Here's the synopsis:

A spatial distortion leaves Archer unable to form any new long-term memories. Years in the future, he wakes up one morning and is stunned to learn the outcome of the human-Xindi conflict.

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