Assignment: Earth

And hey, speaking of Star Trek (which we were yesterday), here's a trivia question for you: Which episode of Star Trek: TOS (The Original Series) took place in Florida?

Give up? That's okay, it is a trick question, sorta.

Episode 55, "Assignment: Earth", doesn't actually mention Florida by name, but in the Star Trek universe NASA's fictional McKinley Rocket Base must be part of Cape Canaveral (then called Cape Kennedy), as that is the location for the stock footage used for the episode. The glimpse of the map showing the base, however, doesn't quite correspond with the actual shape of the coastline, but whaddaya want - it's science fiction, pal, where's your suspension of disbelief?

For me, one of the greatest tragedies of the original Star Trek is not so much that the show was cancelled, but that the spin-off show, for which this episode was intended as a pilot, never came to pass. It's about a mysterious interstellar secret agent named Gary Seven (played by Robert Lansing), who has been sent to Earth to help shape its history, guide its survival, and protect mankind from its own self-destructive impulses. His cat, Isis, is actually a shape-shifting woman who, for reasons unclear, prefers to spend most of her time in feline form. Teri Garr plays a secretary who accidentally discovers Seven's secret, and would have been a co-star in the show had it been greenlit.

George Takei at Supercon 2013

George Takei, best known as Hikaru Sulu from Star Trek, will be a guest at this year's Florida Supercon in Miami, which runs from July 4th through the 7th.

Takei, currently a regular on Sirius XM satellite radio's Howard Stern Show, has been in recent years a crusader to raise awareness of America's internment camps that Japanese-Americans - including him - were imprisoned in during World War II. As Takei told the Miami New Times:

"The best way to reach people intellectually but also in their hearts is a musical," Takei says. And if you know the exact number of minutes in a year (525,600 — thanks, Rent!) or that Oklahoma is a real place, he might be right. To that end, Takei has both inspired and stars in Allegiance, a musical about life in the internment camps that he expects to premiere on Broadway next spring. An earlier version broke attendance records during its run in California, eventually winning the 2012 Outstanding New Musical award from the San Diego Theatre Critics Circle.

In 2009, Takei appeared in an episode of Star Wars: The Clone Wars, making him the only leading actor from Star Trek to also take part in a Star Wars production.