While driving to and from…wherever, I tend to lean heavily on Mr. Autopilot while my mind wanders. I probably shouldn’t state that so casually — nobody in their right mind will ever want to drive anywhere near me, let alone with me, but hey, as long as I’m divulging scary habits of mine, I may as well admit that I don’t ever wear my glasses while driving, even though I should. (WOW! All your first prize for longest run on sentence EVaR belongs to Barmy!) I highly doubt I’m the only person on the planet that does this, though that’s not exactly a good thing either.

Anyhoo, during my habitual ponderdrive I’ll think of things that range from the everyday-mundane to the borderline ridiculous.

For the past few days the subject has been a member of the latter category: universal translators. Yes, the ones used in the fictional Star Trek Universe. Now I’m about as geeky as the next fan, but I’m not so hardcore that I’ve looked this subject up to research the piss out of it. It’s highly possible that a debate about universal translators was brought up and thoroughly picked apart years ago and it’s only now that I’ve begun to think about it.

As I drove down Cornhusker the other day, dodging traffic, slowing down, stopping, and turning where appropriate, I mulled this one over. I’m assuming that all the alien races in the various shows are speaking their own language while the translators do their little thing so that everyone can understand eachother. I’m assuming this because of an episode of DS9 where Quark, Rom, and Nog go back in time and end up in Roswell, NM. Their translators aren’t working and they are unable to understand English. Transversely, none of the Humans could understand… whatever language Ferengi speak (I haven’t looked that one up either) until the trio get their translators fixed.

Here’s the problem: Why is it that occasionally words slip past the translators when a character wishes to convey something in his/her own language? Do the translators read minds (“Okay, I don’t want this translated,”)? And more puzzling, if everyone is speaking their own language, then how come in every episode we don’t see every Klingon’s/Cardassian’s/Betazoid’s/Andorian’s/etc. lips flapping like some low-budget, dubbed kung fu movie?

Now that I’ve typed that all out, I will leave you with a little scene between Husband and Myself. We were watching television when the Dairy Queen commercial advertising their Blizzards came on. This is the one situated at an elementary school on Career Day. The commercial opens with some guy at the front of the class wrapping up his presentation on how cool it is to be a spy.

Myself: *frown* Why would a spy go to his kid’s class and say, “HEY! I’m a SPY!”? Wouldn’t that blow his cover? This is a stupid commercial.

Husband: And then there are some people who take television way too seriously.