I don’t know if this is a weird prank or what… it’s just weird enough to be legit. Patrick Stewart, Jonathan Frakes, Brent Spiner, and Michael Dorn are allegedly going to enter the Olympics. The luge. Representing the United Federation of Planets. (This has “publicity stunt for Star Trek: Nemesis” written all over it.)
Doesn’t look genuine
I can find no mention of this at the
official Star Trek new site. I can’t find a page
of Paramount press releases.
Re: Doesn’t look genuine
I just spent about fifteen minutes trolling through Yahoo!’s “Entertainment industry press releases” archive, and found nothing about that.
What I did find is, perhaps, stranger still.
Someone at Paramount decided to sign a cross-licensing agreement with Earthlink, yielding StarTrek.net, “the Universe’s only Star Trek-themed Internet service”. As far as I can tell, that basically means you can get an @startrek.net email address. Check out this wonderful gem:
There are lots of Internet service providers out there, but only one good enough to earn Starfleet approval. Because StarTrek.net isn’t just a way to get on the Internet. It’s the only way to combine your love of STAR TREK with your online activities. You get an authentic STAR TREK experience every time you log on to the real Internet.
Speaks for itself, I’d say.
unless something changed since last night…
…there’s nothing about this on paramount pictures’ sites (neither the press announcement page on viacom nore the news window on paramount.com), and every copy of the story google brings up points back to that zap2it site.
someone’s been pranked methinks.
Re: unless something changed since last night…
I think so. It wouldn’t surprise me
if Paramount tried a stunt like that, but I’d be
shocked if the Olympic committees allowed it.
Why was this even posted?
This is open-mic night at your local coffee shop. You cannot simply *enter* the Olympics! There are various pre-Olympic hoops you must jump through, not that least of which is you must actually *qualify*.
Re: Why was this even posted?
Not only that, you must be sponsored by a government that’s a member of the IOC. That’s a whole new can of worms which is why Taiwan isn’t participating under its own flag, the Koreas are participating under a common flag, and some athletes from South Africa participated under the Olympic flag when South Africa was blacklisted due to apartheid.
Re: Why was this even posted?
Why was it posted? Because it was funny. :-)
Yeah, I figured the odds of it being true were, roughly, the same as the odds of me walking out to my dead car, getting in it, finding that it magically runs now, and on the way up the driveway, accidentally hitting the twitching body of Charlton Heston, who had just been struck by lightning because his winning lottery ticket turned out to have a metallic thread that acted as a lightning rod.
But it’s funny.
Actually
The whole thing seems fitting since the franchise has been sliding downhill rapidly for years now.