Honduras Coup, Act VI, Day 13

According to the BBC, Zelaya will meet with Pretendisent Lobo on Monday.

(Who thinks that democracy in their country is better than in the rest of Latin America. Notice where Venezuela and Honduras land. From Latino Barometro, via BoRev)

Gabriela Núñez, pretend Minister of Finance, says that the country’s finances are reeling from a fall of over 10% in remittances, a decline in exports, and a drop off in tourism. I guess the Grand Theft Auto Vacation package the government was pushing didn’t work out.

La Prensa says that Micheletti was given a medal for having served as a member of the Presidential Honor Guard for Ramon Villeda Morales. He returned the favor by raining in rank Luis Alonso Reyes Baide, Lizandro Valle Pérez, Salomón Montes Maldonado, Fredy Yanic Guillén, Jaime Orlando Espinoza, and Osman Ramiro Ramírez. A total of 248 officials were recently promoted, according to Tiempo. Any bets on their involvement in the coup and its aftermath?

The following is completely unconfirmed. La Tribuna claims that the “Popular Party” of Europe (EPP), Christian Democrats, have agreed to support Honduras in the European Parliament. The claim is that they have enough votes to do this.

Belated Movie Review: Star Trek

In keeping with my being a day late and a dollar short on most everything, this is my review of a film that came out seven months ago.

Here was the problem that director JJ Abrams was confronting:

The franchise was dying — almost dead. No further movies could have been made that would have been any good had they kept sending the Roddenberry-originated Trek films out to do imperfect battle with the other parts of the Trek multiverse.

The solution Abrams and company found allows them to keep the parts of the old that they can use, and to do so with verve and flair. Every single person on screen was filled with energy — even (spoiler white-fonted) the seventy-eight-year-old Nimoy — energy that they used to make excellent performances.

Oh, and while Roddenberry was a competent director, Abrams is a visionary on the order of John Ford. That’s shown right in the opening minutes, where gentle, almost elegiac music plays during a scene where most directors would have tried to blow us away with bombast. Roddenberry approached both the TV and movie productions like he was building a bridge: Brick by brick construction. Abrams in contrast seems to be a whirling dervish who also happens to be a Cordon Bleu chef, collecting the ingredients for something that you can’t quite divine — until he’s finally done, and you see he’s created a marvelous mushroom soufflé. (This is probably why he identifies with the buccaneer swagger of James T. Kirk — the strongest constant between the old Treks and the new — because he brings out the buccaneer in Chris Pine, the actor playing Kirk.)