'Temporal ship' proposal met with surprisingly civil discussion

Well, we haven't resorted to ad hominem attacks. Yet.

Project Omega editor and all-around rabblerouser Mike "Teevee" Rouse-Deane proposed an alteration to the "TOS-era" ship, only exactly the opposite: a 26th-century ship. Others added to this most imaginative of proposals by suggesting the incorporation of the "temporal ship" seen in the future on Voyager. Rouse-Deane, as his final exam for the Captain Kirk School of Command, produced a rousing speech asking STFians to a risk on this notion of the 26th-century ship. Others, like STF's own Colin "Shylock" Wyers and Steve "Magic" Johnson, weren't so quick to give Rouse-Deane the "A" he needs to graduate. Johnson felt that the Engineering Department, whose inbox stack is eight meters high, would take far too long to approve the temporal ship and its temporal core. Predicting the kind of ED haranguing that would doubtless go on, Wyers pondered (rhetorically), "Am I afraid that attempting to create an RP universe with no more than 5 shreds of sketchy canon data total anywhere in a quasi-democracy like STF will lead to enough strained arguing to appreciably increase the incentive for young men considering gastroenterology to enter the field? Well, yeah."

STF Mike Larry I chimed in on the issue, agreeing with Wyers (astronomers suggested, "Take a picture. It'll last longer") that it would be difficult to pursue something in the 26th century with so little information to go on. Instead, he suggested returning to the TOS-era ship, since there is much more "canon" information and less risk that we may damage the canon framework. Garfield also unofficially dismissed the idea of a ship set in the Enterprise era, since there would be not only very little canon framework, but the fact that most of the Federation ships were slow freighters doesn't lend itself to interesting sims. Freighter Pilots' Local 440 has since filed a complaint, alleging that "Garfield doesn't care for us freighter-types. We'll fit him with some cement shoes! And by cement shoes, we mean we'll threaten him. And by threaten him, we mean we'll throw rotten vegetables at his office window."

Garfield captures leprechaun, enters land of fairy people

When a little man clad in green entered STF President Larry O'Garfield's office last week, he assumed it was just another day at the office. When the little man offered him a pot of gold, he thought it might have been one of those Irish mobsters making him an offer he "could nay refuse." When the little man took him to see the splendid underground world of the fairy people, Garfield knew that something was amiss. "How could they breathe under there?" he later told SNN colored liquor editor Alec Guiness. "There weren't any ventilation fans to speak of; they must have had magical powers." The leprechaun, whose name was never released, introduced Garfield to the king of the fairies: Liberace. "I thought Oberon was the king of the fairies," Garfield reportedly said. "A lot has changed since the seventeenth century," said Liberace. "For example, this is the twenty-first century, you moron!" Garfield later recalled that he seemed a little surly for a leprechaun, which are generally not that surly, according to anthropological texts.

"What's the catch?" Garfield asked the fairy king, knowing that there was always a catch in these kinds of movies. "You have to stay here forever," replied Liberace. "Once you have seen the land of the fairy people, you can never return to that crazy world above. Insurance reasons, you see." Fortunately, Garfield had been watching reruns of MacGuyver when he should have been running STF, a shirking of responsibility that would ultimately mark the difference between life and death. Fashioning a smoke bomb out of a spare pair of underwear and some needle-nosed pliers, he fled from the land of the fairies and returned to tell his harrowing story. "The moral of the story," said Garfield, "is that you should always have a spare pair of underwear. Wait a minute. Maybe this never happened at all. Maybe it was brought on by excessive drinking, a minor case of green dye poisoning, watching MacGuyver and Darby O'Gill and the Little People, then falling asleep. Maybe I'm not even here right now. Am I dreaming this interview? Good thing I only get tanked once a year. Can you imagine me like this all the time?!"

My, but that looks familiar

In what has been called by English teachers everywhere as "a textbook example of plagiarism," 60 Minutes II has been sued for plagiarizing its name from fellow CBS production Everybody Loves Raymond. Also in the world of illegal borrowing, an online RPG called "UFP" has apparently plagiarized STF Academy's engineering class, authored by Larry "Flynt" Garfield (fortunately, they used the PG version). The story was broken by SNN cub reporter Colin "Frayed" Wyers, who noted, "And you will find, with a few modifications here and there (including the phrase that tipped me off, 'UFP Fleet's own Colin Wyers,' which was odd, because I never was in UFP Fleet) Larry Garfield's Engineering class." SNN Smoking Gun experts Woodward and Bernstein visited the site and confirmed that UFP's engineering class is, almost verbatim, STF's engineering class. STF President Larry "Nermal" Garfield will no doubt press charges. "We will send them a torpedo full of lawyers," he told Woodward (but not Bernstein). "The lawyers will assimilate them and turn them evil." UFP Fleet Admiral Hans "Max" Plancke said in his defense, "All we did was r