DS9 Stories/News: Legends of the Ferengi Review

Legends of the Ferengi

Rating: Series: Deep Space 9
Author: Quark, as told to Ira Steven Behr & Robert Hewitt Wolfe
Published: August, 1997
Review by: CL6 Kali D’or

Found this one in a used book store and couldn’t help myself. The premise of the book is that Quark tells stories based on the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition. It is done totally tongue-in-cheek and is a great laugh of a book. I have yet to read the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition which Quark wrote some time ago, but it has to be as good as this one.

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All 285 Rules are not included, the book would be too long and cumbersome, but Quark has taken some of his favorites and explained the who and how and why they came into being through tale tales, old stories, family fables, lies and other devious means to get his/their point across.

Some examples:

Rule #31: “Never insult a Ferengi’s mother….insult something he cares about instead.” A good insult is a thing of beauty, a work of art that endures long after it’s crafting. Not bad, and the attached list of the 10 Most Famous Insults in Ferengi history are a hoot.

Rule #104: “Faith moves mountains…of inventory.” This has a clever little folk tale attached, about one of the really old guys, Grand Nagus Gint, who died of a tooth sharpening accident. But a clever Ferengi, Yost, came up with a plan to liven up the mourning citizenry with figurines of the Nagus and marketing was born.

Rule #177: “Know your enemies….but do business with them always.” Another short little ditty about the Tholians, silk, bog moss and how things really work. According to Quark.

Rule #94: “Females and finances don’t mix.” Funny picture, reputed to be an old cave drawing, showing a female Ferengi with bags of “profit” while all around her, the men are dead. This stuff is just too funny.

This is not a big book – just a small paperbound one, only 157 pages long. It’s the kind of book you might keep in the bathroom, for a quick page or two every day? Or next to your computer – read a rule while something downloads. It’s up to you. I found the writing to be very clever, totally in keeping with the character. There are pictures of all our favorite Ferengi cast members, and their “victims” to entertain as well. And references into the history and culture of the Ferengi that we didn’t know before, and may well not really have wanted to find out. Thank you for sharing, Quark!

 

DS9 Stories/News: Memorial Day-Players: A Tribute to TV’s Fallen Heroes

Source: http://www.ugo.com/tv/tv-fallen-heroes?page=4

Remember the honored dead this Memorial Day and celebrate the good old US of A with UGO’s list of some of TV’s Best Fallen Heroes!

By Kevin FitzpatrickMay 30, 2011 Follow

7	Jadzia Dax

Brave Soldier:  Jadzia Dax of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

Killed in Action:  By Gul Dukat’s…Pah…Wraith…beam

Lots of great Star Trek deaths to choose from, between Tasha Yar and Christopher Pike (hey, that ain’t livin’) but none so heartbreaking as watching Jadzia Dax struck down by Gul Dukat while the rest of the crew fought off the Cardassians.

Wait, we can just replace her?  And the new Dax is even cuter?  Huzzah!

DS9 Stories/News: Some ‘Deep’ Talk with Alexander Siddig (3)

Cont.

Cairo Time

Jordan Hoffman: So let’s talk about the new movie Cairo Time, which I think is the first time you’ve played a romantic lead, is that correct?

Alexander Siddig: It is indeed, it is. Since I was at school, that’s the first time I’ve played a romantic.

Jordan Hoffman: How much fun is it to woo the hearts of audiences like that? To lay on the charm thick for the sake of the audience?

Alexander Siddig: It’s pretty great. It wasn’t so much, I have to confess I wasn’t really thinking of the audience when I was in Cairo but I – to gaze into that lady’s eyes [Patricia Clarkson] is quite thrilling.

Jordan Hoffman: Your character sort of welcomes this woman into the Egyptian culture and the city of Cairo; how much familiarity did you have with Cairo prior to making the film?

Alexander Siddig: Well, you know it’s one of the places that’s sort of been in my reference library all my life in the sense that I was born in the Sudan which is the neighboring country and up until – I mean forever we’ve had a treaty with Egypt and immigrants come and go; my whole family lived in Cairo for years. And so it was a familiar place and I’d been there in the 80’s as a kid really, so I knew my way around and I felt very comfortable and relaxed there. So it was easy to make the little leap from a Sudanese man to and Egyptian man which I had no problem doing.

Jordan Hoffman: So you didn’t have to think it too much.

Alexander Siddig: No, I really didn’t. It’s a really honest city for all its evils. It can be quite filthy – that’s not exactly an evil is it by world standards. But it lays itself out to you as a tourist. London for example, is an impossible city. You need to know people in London to find out where things are and what’s going on and you can’t make friends here unless you were kind of born here. So, Cairo is much more friendly and available to people.

Jordan Hoffman: So when you were shooting this film, it was a Canadian production, but it’s still a large western production and there isn’t too much of that on the streets of Cairo. How were you treated by the general population?

Alexander Siddig: They were completely puzzled by us. They were like, ‘what the Hell is that?’ they just couldn’t quite make out what weirdness we were doing. This was bigger than an ordinary video camera, we weren’t just saying hi in front of a landmark we were doing scenes, so when they could they would sort of jostle into the frame to get involved. Which was fine on some levels, but as soon as they started looking into the camera and stuff it was a total nightmare.

Jordan Hoffman: So that shot of nearly getting hit by a motorcycle, was that actual?

Alexander Siddig: We really did – well it was a stunt, but the interesting thing was that the stunt guy had never done a stunt in his life – was not a stunt man. He literally tried to run her over. And I must have buried my nails deep into her arm to get her out of the way she was absolutely – she was shaking afterwards. She wasn’t used to that.

Jordan Hoffman: Was it all Egyptian crew? Or was it Canadian crew?

Alexander Siddig: It was a beautiful mix actually. It was a whole jumble of different people. The Egyptians were brilliant, I mean really brilliant; and kind of cool and cosmopolitan and wanted to take us all out to cool places to hang out in the evenings. Egyptians – thank God you know Cairo is not a dry city and is not massively fundamentalist.  It’s got fundamentalist aspects, but you can still have a really swingin’ time.

Bashir and O’Brien

Jordan Hoffman: Who from the old days that you don’t get to see do you like to hang out with the most at conventions?

Alexander Siddig: You know I love hanging out with Nicky deBoer.

Jordan Hoffman: I see.

Alexander Siddig:  She is just hilarious; great, great girl. And um if I see Colm Meaney we’ll have a drink and bitch at each other. That’s all we do. I realize looking back at my history with him, I went out with him twice a week every week for seven years – drinking. Boy, he can pack em away.

Jordan Hoffman: I would imagine.

Alexander Siddig:  And all we did was fight. And I guess that’s what they did on the show too. But we fought in real life all the time. He would set me up, he’d take me to Irish bars where they hated English people. I would think they were being racist about the fact that I’m black and they weren’t. The just hated the English people, they would just hear my accent and they’d – and he just laughed his head off.

Jordan Hoffman: Did you ever actually play darts, though, is the real question.

Alexander Siddig:  No. No. That would be very weird.

Jordan Hoffman: There needs to be a separation between art and life.

Alexander Siddig:  Yes, because that was the only separation, the dart game.

DS9 Stories/News: Some ‘Deep’ Talk with Alexander Siddig (2)

Cont.

Reaction On The Station

Regarding his reaction to the character’s change.

Jordan Hoffman: What did the other cast members think? Were they on your side or did they think you were being crazy?

Alexander Siddig: I had a reputation for being a bit of a crank, yeah. They thought I was being cranky. I had this – there was one time I got furious because none of us were being paid royalties on our – this is rubbish, not important for the real world – but, nevertheless, we weren’t being paid royalties on our photographs. So I changed my name for a number of reasons, but that was one of them. So that they would have to re-do all the photographs, all the press with all the right name on it.

And I didn’t turn up to the big photo call for the season’s photo. So there’s one season’s photo of Deep Space Nine – the cast, without me in it which is the one I didn’t turn up to. And being a naïve twenty-something year-old, I didn’t realize that they immediately turned around and fired the head of marketing. So there was a real significant impact for me being such a childish brat.

Jordan Hoffman: Wow. So did that wake you up a little bit? That move?

Alexander Siddig: It woke me up, yeah it woke me up to being naïve and stupid and that real people get involved in these things.

So, Yeah, What’s The Deal With The Name Change?

Jordan Hoffman: It’s funny, for a while you were Siddig El Fadil, then you became Alexander Siddig.  But your full name, is. . .

Alexander Siddig: It’s a mouthful; it’s not something you’d say on the street.

Jordan Hoffman: What is it, could you actually say it for me?

Alexander Siddig: Siddig El Tahir El Fadil El Siddig Abderrahman Mohammed Ah – I stumble a bit myself – Ahmed Abdel Karim El Mahdi.

Jordan Hoffman: Wow, okay. And you sort of just picked Alexander?  Said Alexander works.

Alexander Siddig: Yeah, Alexander worked because it was, it’s Mesopotamian, it’s Arab, you know it’s pre-Muslim. The “Al” bit is a bit like, well, I suppose like Al-Qaeda.  Al-Isskandar is the actual name in Arabic. And it’s a pre – it’s not a Western name at all, it’s an Arabic name. Hence, obviously the great Mesopotamian Alexander who didn’t look much like Colin Farrell and all that jazz.

Jordan Hoffman: So it wasn’t just as random as everyone says.

Alexander Siddig: No, it wasn’t random, and, also my first best friend had a dog that was called Alex. And so I was already happy with that name.

Jordan Hoffman: Can we talk a little bit about your background more? You’re a descendant of Sudanese royalty? Is that correct?

Alexander Siddig: No. I mean, there are no royals in Sudan.  There are certainly religious leaders and I was – my family is a family called the Mahdi family, and these are direct descendants of 1880’s great religious leader. Mahdi loosely translated means messiah so you’ll kind of get the idea.

Jordan Hoffman: That’s a heavy burden!

Alexander Siddig: Heavy burden for him, not for me. I can be the naughty grandchild, great-great grandchild going off the rail. So yeah, the family ruled in the Sudan for many, many years. Even now Sadiq al-Mahdi is trying his hardest to get into power as an opposition party in Sudan.

Jordan Hoffman: You steer clear of the political side of what’s going on over there?

Alexander Siddig: I do, because I’m pretty disgusted by it to be honest. It horrifies me. I happen to have had the privilege of growing up in the West, dictating my righteous indignation across to Africa where they have a much more difficult time and more nuanced existence than I could possibly lead. But I find it very abhorrent and very dangerous. I have problems with the far right. . .I went back in the ’80s and it was a gap between presidencies when my family I weren’t going to be arrested when we arrived and they were extremely condescending . . . Fundamentalist Islam terrifies me anyway, speaking as an Arab. And that’s not just because I’ve been brought up in a coveted western society, it’s because it is scary. That’s the end of that.

DS9 Stories/News: Goodbyes

Source: http://deflipside.com/?page_id=1693

by Christopher DeFilippis

DeFlip Side, Vol. 1, No. 6
(First Appeared: June/July, 1999; First Light E-zine, Issue #82)

This is going to be short and sweet, folks. My original plan for this month’s column was to bid a fond farewell to Deep Space Nine, until recently the best show on television. I was going to do an in-depth review of the final episode, exploring whether or not it brought the Dominion war arc to a satisfying conclusion, as well as if it proved a fitting send-off to the best Trek series ever; my swan song to the swan song, so to speak. But those ne’er do-wells at Paramount took the wind out of my sails. After watching the finale, I came to only one inescapable conclusion: It’s not over.

After all, Sisko left his baseball behind.

Of course, there’s also the question of his unborn child, his career in Starfleet, a new Defiant that needs to be broken in, an unfinished real estate transaction on Bajor and his promise that he would return “in a year from now or yesterday.” But the baseball is the cincher. He doesn’t leave home without it, much less take up permanent residence in Prophet limbo. We haven’t heard the last from him or the rest of these characters. I don’t know when or in what format, but we’ll see them again. Bet on it.

This fact colors my opinion of the two-hour series finale. As a final good-bye, it would have left too many loose ends. But as a “so long for now” it was perfect. It brought enough closure to satisfy, but egged us on just enough to keep our expectations for a return simmering on a low frame somewhere in the back of our brains. Like Kira and Jake, we’re all gazing out of a portal on the Promenade, waiting patiently to see what happens next.

I’ll spare you all a long-winded essay on what I liked and why. Different parts of the finale will have appealed to different people for different reasons. But there is no call for excess exposition. After all, we’re not talking about “Mirror Image” here (the legendarily confusing finale to the TV series Quantum Leap). Instead, I’ll be as succinct as possible:

The Good Stuff:

• The death of Kai Winn.
• The kick-ass battle scenes.
• Kai Winn’s unfortunate demise.
• Garak’s revenge on Weyoun.
• Barbecued Kai.
• Nog’s promotion.
• Pah Wraiths 1, Kai Winn 0
• Kira’s ironic role in the liberation of Cardassia.
• Kai Winn all gone.
• Ezri’s nearly exposed breasts.
• Bye bye Kai.
• Sisko plowing Dukat over the cliff’s edge in a flying tackle.
• The old bag bites it.
• Martok’s self-satisfied belt of blood wine while standing on bloated enemy corpses.
• She’ll finally shut up.
• The faint hope that once O’Brien accepts a teaching position at the academy, he’ll attain some kind of rank (Where does “Chief” fall, anyway? As far as I can tell, it’s somewhere between ensign and lieutenant. So Nog outranks him now? Not a proud legacy for more than a decade in uniform…).
• Winn-kabob.
• Damar’s last stand.
• Burn Winnie burn.
• Worf’s new-found honor and influence with the Klingon council.
• Are those Kai burgers I smell?
• Bashir finally gets some.
• Armagedd-Winn.

The Bad Stuff:

• Vic Fontaine’s schmaltzy send-off.
• A too-short stand-off between Dukat and Sisko that smacked of the
• Kirk/Mitchell showdown in “Where No Man has Gone Before” (“Get on your knees and pray to me, James”).
• A tuxedo-clad Odo melting into the Great Link.
• The use of stock footage of a Klingon getting blown down a corridor on a wave of fire (from The Undiscovered Country, I think).
• Worf’s flashback sequence that held not a smidgen of Jadzia memories. (I guess Paramount didn’t want to have to pay residuals to Terry Farrell.)

 

As you can see, the good clearly outweighed the bad. I think the very best thing about the episode, and the series over all, was that I could never tell exactly how things would turn out. And even when I did have a pretty good idea of where things were going, the characters would reach their destinations via completely unexpected routes.

This rule holds true for the future of Deep Space Nine. It’s a foregone conclusion that Sisko will come back. Just watch; he’ll soon get tired of playing pinochle with Wesley on the astral plain and shuffle back into his mortal coil for a return to his old life. But to what effect? Will he be considered a lord on Bajor? Will his new found Prophet wisdom cause a rift between him and his all-too-human friends and family? Will he have hair? I can’t even guess at the possibilities.

Of course, we’re most likely to be hearing from Worf the soonest. I just hope the powers that be use the opportunity they’ve created to full effect in the next movie. Worf’s position as Federation ambassador to Qo’noS lends itself to a sweeping story that could encompass the Federation and Klingon Empire and propel the franchise forward, something it sorely needs after the disaster that was Insurrection.

The one thing I do not want to see is a feature length film that combines the Next Gen and DS9 casts. The writers have a tough enough time as it is finding useful roles for the entire Enterprise-E ensemble with each outing. If they tried to add the DS9 crew as well, the screen would be packed tighter than Seven of Nine’s Wonder Bra, but with a far less marvelous result. I’ll pin my hopes on a small-screen reunion that will give the DS9 characters and plot lines free reign.

In the meantime, I guess I still have Voyager to give me my Star Trek fix, though it’ll be like going from heroin to methadone. Now that the DS9 writers are freed up, maybe they can help put Voyager on the right track and raise it to the standards we’ve come expect from Star Trek. But I’m not gonna hold my breath. I don’t have to anyway.

When DS9 premiered, I still had a maniacal hatred of new Trek. I wasn’t sucked over the Next Gen event horizon until Generations hit the theaters. And by the time I got into DS9, it was well into its run. So I ask you to pray with me now that channel 11 in NY soon starts rerunning the series from the beginning. There are three years worth of episodes I’ve never seen. It’s a little something extra to look forward to.

See Pop? Sometimes it works to your benefit to be a day late and a dollar short…