First Robison Command squabble

It's a special time for a newly-elected president; a time that should be cherished and celebrated with an ice-cream cake, like taking one's first steps or saying one's first words. It's the first Command squabble of the Robison administration, and it's an ugly one. Though we can't say for sure, we're pretty confident that this one pits USS Resolution XO Brandon "That wasn't a loaf of bread that I" Stoll against (or possibly juxtaposed with) Project Omega publisher Mike "Grouse" Rouse-Deane. It definitely places Stoll at odds with USS Sydney GM Emily "Braunstein" Stephenson. SNN's Command Squabble experts called this one a "doozy," probably because they can't be sure whom is fighting with whom. This is for sure, however: Stoll and Stephenson do not like each other. Due to lots of emailings (that came home to the Fleet One Mailing List, among other places) and general insults that have been going on for more than twelve (but less than eighteen) months.

Our Command Squabble team believed that Project Omega factored into all this because it wrote articles that slandered Stephenson's GMing abilities and caused some members of the staff to leave. Stephenson was upset because PO allegedly reported opinion as fact, a claim that has been supported by others. This, then, brought in President Robison, who talked about PO and, through the process of misinterpretation, everyone became angry with Robison for allowing PO to exist, as though he were a king who exclusively grants charters to electronic periodicals so that they may operate in the New World.

Which created a heated debate over freedom of the press in STF. Former everything Mike "This makes-a me so" Bourdaa commented brilliantly (as is his tendency) that the president has little or no regulatory control over so-called WeBBpapers and that he is not at fault, for he did not give permission, nor did he have to, for PO to start its operations. So, we have that cleared up. Sort of.

In viewing these Command Squabbles, STFians get a good idea of how their leader really responds in the heat of the moment, when the kid gloves are off. In our own humble journalistic opinion, this leader is less a Lackie/Hughes/Bourdaa and more a Spurlin. SNN Command correspondent Preserved Head of Peter Jennings said that "Robison, knowing the involved players as well as he does, gets involved on a personal level. He may or may not like one of them, and he directs presidential comments toward them in a personally hostile way. This is not how a president must act; Robison cannot be in the thick of the battle trying to separate the two fighting parties. He must sit atop his throne and listen as each person presents his case, and then he must give his opinion with presidential impartiality, not attempting to vilify one person because he does not like that person, and not giving someone the benefit of the doubt over another simply because he likes the former more than the latter." Well, what can we say? Two hundred years in a glass jar has made Peter Jennings a little smarter and a lot more verbose.

ID changes colors again; everyone up in arms

STFians who logged onto the WeBB in the wee hours of June 20 were given quite a shock, one even more disturbing than the neat LCARS display on the login screen. The Internet Department had changed the default settings for text in STF, causing a good deal of confusion and some slightly altered MOTDs. Chris "Kill the messenger" Healey was in the #star-fleet chat room at that time and was the victim of quite a bit of ill-spirited language, most of it coming from FComm-4 Larry "Odie" Garfield. The newly revamped CSS file that controls the default settings for all pages in STF changed the default font from 12-point Times New Roman to 12-point Arial. It also altered the italic tag so that anything that was in italics was not only italicized, but colored yellow. Link colors were changed from neon green to neon blue, and default table background colors became gray.

Garfield and others were reportedly very upset (Barret Vogtman uttered a hearty "ACK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! WHAT THE %$&! HAPPENNED TO MY MOTD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"), as their MOTDs had strange colors and settings on them. Healey claimed that fixing MOTDs was a small matter that could be done by the Internet Department, but he neglected to realize the irritation caused when a tag as simple as

<i>SNN Headline News</i>

<font color="#000000" face="Times New Roman,Times"><i>SNN Headline News</i></font>

Starbases to change position-naming

The BCOs, BMOs, COOs, and BLTs of the world are no longer, thanks to a new proposal in Command. Proposed by Barret "There aren't two 't's in my name" Vogtman, the proposal would eliminate the special ranks given to starbase officers. Currently, instead of COs, starbases have BCOs (base commanding officers), BMOs (base medical officers), and COOs (chief operating officers, the equivalent of CE on starships). Vogtman felt it was time to stop discriminating based on rank. "We must unite, not divide," he told a crowd that had gathered outside the president's office in San Francisco. "I say, COOs are just as good as CEs, and it's about time we excised the Miles O'Brien Laws that separate COOs from CEs!" Vogtman received a thunderous applause, which later turned out to be the result of a blimp overhead that said, "Applaud thunderously if you like cupcakes." Nevertheless, Vogtman's measure seems to have met with general favor in Command, except for a few uncertain folks who were suspicious of the simplicity of the proposal. "There's got to be something behind it," said one opponent, who wished to remain anonymous. "I mean, it sounds so easy and common-sensical! But I'll argue until my brains turn to pudding against this unanimously-supported proposal!" The opponent was later identified as Bill Cosby, who asked, "Wouldn't you like a nice skull full of delicious Jell-O brand pudding?"

Angry comments from our readers

By most definitions of the word, Chris "When I break-ey my legs, they will" Healey is a calm person, not prone to violent outbursts. Last week, though, he burst into our offices and was quite disturbed when he read our last issue, particularly the article about the IDir's change of the main login page. Healey felt that we were grossly misinformed about the change, which did not happen to all of STF's pages as we reported. It was also not done by the IDir because he disliked the old style, but rather, was done to the login page by Healey himself because it was more Trek-like. We would like to remind readers that this is about only the fourth time we've ever apologized to someone for bad facts. We remind readers, however, that the policy of SNN is to not issue retractions; they deduct money from our pay. We have, however, corrected some mistakes, as Healey is outside our office door holding a shopping cart full of Molotov cocktails.

Every now and then, we have a crisis on our hands, and during those times, we in the news media comment on the President's actions during those crises. No one can be judged, we believe, until he can be seen at his extremes. It's very easy to live inside a happy medium, but the true test of a president is how he acts during crises. If we may say so, President Robison acted duly under pressure, despite some misgivings.

The crisis in question was the MOTD crisis; the ID had changed CSS settings for the entire WeBB, altering MOTDs without giving what many (including us at SNN Headline News) thought was an adequate and timely warning, but the meat of that complaint is in one of the above headlines.

Problems occurred predominantly in IRC, where such argumentative folks as Barret "Not Beret" Vogtman and Larry "Nermal" Garfield expressed their opinions which, largely, were that the whole thing was a bad idea. Attempting to subdue the situation, Robison quickly acted to silence Garfield's and Vogtman's complaints, citing the fact that a warning was given in the "Internet Department" subject of Starfleet Command. If he had stopped there, we would have accused him of taking sides on the issue. We would have probably said that he took the side of the ID representative that was present, Chris "Berman" Healey because it was not the side of Larry "Odie" Garfield, whom we know is disliked in some circles.

It's a good thing we didn't say that. Though Robison initially took the side of Healey, arguing that change was necessary, and labeling Garfield as someone who was against change, he did begin to change his attitude. In a summation of what his opinions on the issue, he believed that Healey should have made sure that the CSS code worked correctly before implementing it. He also felt that more of a warning should have been given (after saying that an adequate warning was on the main MOTD for weeks, even though we at SNN Headline News believe that it was neither adequate, nor timely).

We admit that we had misgivings about Mr. Robison's ability to be non-partisan as STF becomes more and more strained with the weight of its two opposing factions (there may be more; the exterminators aren't done looking). With allegations that he had conducted official club business in IRC, which is a definite no-no, we thought that we had a problem on our hands. We are nonetheless pleased to say that we were wrong in our assumptions; Scott Dale "Evans" Robison has proven himself to be just as capable a president as STF could hope for. Though he has supported certain groups of people while president, we hope that he takes this ID issue as an example for how any president should act: personal biases should not be expressed professionally. Everyone is just as guilty as everyone else.

'Project Omega' proves that duopoly just doesn't work

Many years ago ("many" being one or two), there were a half-dozen electronic periodicals pervading STF like cockroaches at a rotting meat convention. Though they tried valiantly to keep track of STF news and events, they never survived past one or two issues. SNN Executive Editor Mike "Near Woods Hole" Ballway, then-editor of the WeBB-only SNN periodical WeBBsights, invented a column that reviewed WeBBpapers. In the namesake of one of the great WeBBpapers, Aye on the WeBB, he called his column "Aye on the Competition." In the tradition of SNN-quality journalism, we're borrowing that column, mostly because Mike isn't here to protest.

Project Omega is the name of STF's newest electronic periodical. One wonders why it would name itself "Omega" when there were plenty of other Greek letters with more positive connotations. It makes me think that Project Omega is one of the four horsemen and that its name heralds the end of human civilization. Or maybe that used Omega because its Greek letter is a horseshoe. Or maybe it's because the Greek letter "omega" is the symbol for electrical resistance; in this case, Project Omega is telling us that it will fight the power at a level equal to the voltage (in volts [V]) divided by the current (in amps [A]. Although, the symbol for "current" is not "A," but "I." "A" is just the abbreviation for the unit of measurement).

Well, whatever the reason, Project Omega appears to have dug in for the long haul. They have already begun the laborous process of interviewing noted STFians, and they have a collection of archives. But, as mentioned in previous articles about this periodical, they update their news very frequently. We spoke with Editor-in-Chief (which, may we say, is not as impressive a title as "Grand Poobah") Mike Rouse-Deane about his brand new periodical. He informed us that "after many studies and focus groups, Conglomo Inc., the parent company of Project Omega and related holdings, has determined that readers like news that is updated frequently. They also like lots of funny little icons, which we are determined to give them." Yes; we know what you're thinking: how sinister, indeed.

He's going to cry himself to sleep

So ends another much-belated issue of SNN Headline News which, may we remind our audience, is STF's longest-running periodical that's still in production. We wish we had published our issue a little bit earlier, but couldn't find much to write about. Then came that ID scandal. Of course, we couldn't come up with a good way to write about that, so it sort of simmered for a while on the back burner while we cooked our dinner on the front burner (they feed us a lot of Ramen noodles here at SNN Center). And yes, we're aware of the blatant contradiction between our first article about Robison and H. Simon Gregory's evaluation of his performance. We wrote the first article before Gregory wrote his little commentary, so the attitudes are different (not to mention that H. Simon Gregory's opinion is different from our opinion, anyway).

Now is the time when we like to take time out from our busy day and mention our very hectic motto which, coincidentally, is "Quick, Informative, Totally Biased Reporting" of STF Events. In retrospect, though, there's nothing coincidental about it. We didn't even mention how it was coincidental.

Coming up next issue is the Issue 65 Extravaganza, which celebrates 65 issues of heart-grabbing fun. It's not heart-grabbing because it's so funny; it's heart-grabbing because Headline News is medically proven to cause spontaneous hardening of the arteries. In fact, as we type this, our cholesterol levels are reaching levels that could choke an elephant! Perhaps it's best that we stop the whole issue right here so that the both of us can live to produce and view a 65th issue. See you in intensive care!