When I was in college, I co-created, co-hosted and co-wrote a television show called The 27th Hour.
It was a cable access show that found an audience down in The O.C. way before those cheap-ass looking cable access shows became popular. Hell, we were the high watermark back then. We even had No Doubt on our show. (Yes, I know — I’m obviously biased.)
Most of the shows had themes from a backwards show (the opening actually started with the end credits and went totally backwards, with us constantly talking about what was coming up, when it had in actuality already just happened), an all blooper show (which contained bloopers that had been pre-filmed to fill up a half hour blooper show) and a Star Trek episode in which the entire cast dressed up in Trekkie uniforms.
On that particular episode, our guest was a guy who spoke fluent Klingon.
He was a nice kid and all, but I couldn’t help but marvel at the skill in which he spoke the actual language of Klingon, which was created by someone, somewhere. Klingon ko da jatala, he would rattle off in a gutteral sounding-voice. It was all at once, humorous and strange. But again, that was YEARS ago.
Then recently, just when I thought the Klingon obsession had ended, I started to see signs of it coming back. Someone I knew actually named their newborn after a Klingon character. I’d heard of people writing songs and stories in the Klingon language. A local shop had created a sandwich named after the Klingon home planet.
Have I missed something? Did George W. Bush include something about Klingon’s in his most recent State of the Union address?
Personally, I have nothing against Klingons. I have never met one, but only seen them on TV. I have never heard of people having bad experiences with them, except for the fact that Klingons always seem to want to kick your ass for the smallest things. And finally, I have never had to compete with a Klingon for a job or raffle prize…as I have never met them in the first place (which you can see by referring to the first option in this paragraph.)
The real question is this: Why does the name Klingon make me think of a character from the classic TV comedy M.A.S.H.?
That’s a question I’ve been battling for years.