Category: News

Who was the first captain of Star Trek’s U.S.S. Enterprise? And—was the Enterprise even the ship’s name? You can find out all this and more by reading creator Gene Roddenberry’s original pitch for his now-classic series.

A pop culture blog called Between the Pages has a link up to an online copy of Roddenberry’s initial outline for the series, dated March 11, 1964. The show itself premiered on Sept. 8, 1966, and in the intervening two years, a whole lot changed. For instance:

♦ Roddenberry’s original captain was not James Kirk or Christopher Pike, but Robert April;
♦ The ship was first called the U.S.S. Yorktown;
♦ The navigator was not a young Russian hotshot named Pavel Chekov, but a young South American hotshot named Jose Ortegas;
♦ Spock was the “first lieutenant” and described as having a reddish complexion and, of course, pointed ears, and was probably “half Martian.”

The researchers reported that cancers of the tonsil and base of the tongue have been increasing every year since 1973, and wrote that “widespread oral sex practices among adolescents may be a contributing factor in this increase.”

The researchers concluded that in their study, oral sex was “strongly associated” with oropharyngeal cancer, but noted that they could not “rule out transmission through direct mouth-to-mouth contact” such as French kissing.

According to this story, the former British Prime Minister blocked knighthood for Steve Jobs because he refused to speak at a political event. If true, that is pretty damn janky.

The then-Prime Minister refused to knight Mr Jobs in 2009 because he turned down an invitation to speak at the Labour Party conference, a former senior Labour MP said. Mr Jobs was put forward for the honour by the MP for services to technology.

In 1956, the US Office of Emergency Preparedness advertised a job opening for someone to plan and oversee the recovery of America after an all-out nuclear exchange, a kind of Chief Apocalypse Officer.

I was gonna make fun of this guy but turns out he’s awesome.