The Tease of Things I Don't Need

All Beamed Out

James Doohan, Star Trek's most famous engineer, "Scotty", died at 5:30 (his) local time this morning. I'm sure numerous tributes are already popping up across the net. Any of the interviews I'd heard or read of the actor presented him as a likeable guy who realized early on that he had become part of something large and lasting enough that it made sense to stop fighting it and go with the flow. That's an admirable grace to come from an actor, as I'm sure it must have meant some lean years between going from a poorly-paid actor in a not-immediately-commercial tv series that was cancelled and the time when Star Trek came back into its own as a series of films nearly a decade later. Sure, he had various movie roles, etc., including some in-character voice work as Scotty for the 1973 cartoon series, but I doubt that interim work was particularly high-paying.

Until I read the obit I hadn't known he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's, and so had retired from public life last year.

(Sorry to find myself running to the morbid the past two days, but I didn't kill them. One of the things I've found in doing this site is that pegging milestones like this can be helpful in the long term when one inevitably looks back on the year.)