I spend a lot of time at the Cafe Depot and the Second Cup, two chain coffee shops with outlets here in Montreal. My message today: the kids working behind the counter are great. They’re hard working, cheerful, unflappable. They make shit, something like $8.50 an hour. The tips are worse. I’m one of the biggest tippers they’ve got, and I give them peanuts.

The schmucks get up at 5 in the morning, trudge thru Montreal snow and ice, clean toilets, deal with clowns counting out pennies to pay for a cup of coffee. Then the kids go off to study or play in their rock bands or whatever. I don’t know how they do it all; I wouldn’t have the energy. 

In the ’90s I worked at a newspaper in New York where kids the same age made $25 an hour and spent most of their time sitting around. And boy, did they bitch when there was something to do. (Yeah, Krajick, I mean you.) Maybe Montreal is better than New York, maybe constant work is better than idleness. Maybe, my favorite theory, the world is on an upward trajectory and the latest generation is the product of better child rearing than previous ones. Maybe not. But it’s nice to have something nice that you can take for granted. And now that I have written this post, that’s what I”m going to go back to doing.

One caveat: the pretty girls treat me like I’ve got a disease. But what else is new? 

 It’s amazing how many of our cross-cultural and cross-class encounters are limited not by hate or pride or shame, but by another equally insidious, less-discussed, emotion: embarrassment.

“Did Your Mother Come From Ireland, Ben Casey?”

Author: Dorothy Fontana, the same lady who wrote the classic Trek episode “Journey to Babel.”

This is the story of the United Space Ship Enterprise. Assigned a five-year patrol of our galaxy, the giant starship visits Earth colonies, regulates commerce, and explores strange new worlds and civilizations. These are its voyages … and its adventures.

I think that’s terrible and, trust me, his next draft was worse. The intro emerged thru collaboration. For 10 days Roddenberry traded drafts with producer Robert D. F. Black and associate producer Robert Justman. Then he wrote out the final and Justman ran it over for Bill Shatner to record. All this was very last minute.

From the memos reproduced by Inside Star Trek: The Real Story, we can see that Black brought in “the final frontier” and the use of “starship,” whereas Justman introduced the idea of a “to do this, to do that” itemized list of what the Enterprise was up to in space. The phrase “where no man has gone before” is claimed by Sam Peeples, who wrote the series’ second pilot and used the phrase for its title.

The full story may be available in the Gene Roddenberry special collection at, I believe, UCLA. Going by the few pages devoted to the subject by Inside, I would guess that Roddenberry got off to a lousy start, collected phrases and ideas like a magpie, then pulled them together into the magnificent final product we now know. At least, if more credit could go to Black or Justman, Inside would definitely send it their way. Justman is the book’s co-author, and in regard to Roddenberry it has a pronounced “bad stuff ’bout” tendency.

A final point is that Roddenberry wrote some of Star Trek’s feebler episodes but is said to have done very good rewrites of other people’s scripts. The same bent can be seen here.