One wonders what the world is coming to …
Recently I stumbled over this article about the Klingon language. Now being of a suspicious nature (and having someone who sent me an update on the story as well) I found that the comment on the snopes.com website to be somewhat enlightening

Now one of the things that have been a continuing passion up for me until comparatively recent years has been Star Trek. My Dearly Beloved and I have been heavily involved in Trek fandom here in Perth from the earliest days of our association until Viacom/Paramount and their associates got all heavy about fan groups and because of the legislation here in Australia, closed us all down in the early 1990s ... except for those who were willing to pay mega-bucks for a license. As we were incredibly non-profit to the extent of having held meetings in our lounge room for several years when the club was small enough to do so. To a great extent it meant the death of the social Star Trek in this city – not to mention the loss of income to various video-rental and movie-memorabilia businesses.

Trek fans would put up with almost amazing discomfort to see an episode that had not aired before, and the creativity that went into writing stories and discussing Trekian neo-physics – a truly peculiar branch of physics that does not exist but delights real physicists with a childlike glee in concocting rational sounding explanations ... great fun when one has two or three physics students in the group who can help keep it within the bounds of (im)possibility *G*
Us Perth fans never reached the apparent stylistic heights of some of the American fans. Although we had one or two who preferred a Trekish persona at times, we had no one who actually had to be medicated or confined because they took to a politician with a phaser!

What amused me more than the story was the comment on the snopes.com website that pointed out that Klingon had been added to the list of languages on the basis of a) covering all possible contingencies and b) injecting a bit of humour into a dry list. The media ran with it and turned it into something that it was not. Subsequently resulting in the Multnomah County health board looking like complete prats because they had to change the listing and post a reminder that they had not actually spent money on employing a Klingon speaker, for those who have no funny-bone.

Thinking about it, there was a certain self-conscious presumptuousness in the way we behaved back then that encouraged us to laugh at ourselves in a way that we, in both our culture and societies, seem to have lost in the last few years. Even the new ST:Enterprise series reflects that in it's "..to go boldly..." statement which is so politically and grammatically correct as to preclude the possibility that the bright humanist vision of "classic" Star Trek has been lost in franchise and the adultery of putting away one's playthings for boringly becoming a groan-up.