Distinctive character actor Vincent Schivelli, who made his mark in movies such as Ghost, Batman Returns, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Lord Of Illusions, Tomorrow Never Dies and Buckaroo Banzai Across The 8th Dimension, died of lung cancer on December 26th at his home in Italy. Known for his droopy, sunken eyes an unmistakable voice, he was also a mainstay of TV and stage, with series guest appearances on Star Trek: The Next Generation (as the holographic pitchman in The Arsenal Of Freedom), Tales From The Crypt, Eerie, Indiana, Highlander: The Series, The X-Files and Buffy The Vampire Slayer. He could also be heard in numerous animated series and video games, including Family Guy, Batman, and games such Blade Runner, Emperor: Battle For Dune, Lands Of Lore: Guardians Of Destiny and Corpse Killer. Mr. Schiavelli was 57.
Sources: Associated Press, IMDb

But we kid our associates at Amazon.com, whose founder, Jeff Bezos, has bought a $13 million facility in a suburb in Seattle to begin testing and construction work for his new private space venture, Blue Origin. Bezos has been quoted as saying he’s working on a private spaceflight system that launches and lands vertically, and he has also bought a large parcel of land southeast of El Paso where he hopes to build a spaceport for the venture. Like SpaceShipOne, whose private flight made history in 2004, the Blue Origin flights will start with suborbital space shots. Test flights could begin next year, pending FAA approval, though Blue Origin is being very secretive about its technology, its timetables, or whether or not passengers can be delivered to space via Super Saver shipping.
Sources: Associated Press, ABC News

SETI Institute astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have found two new moons, several new rings, and one moon that astronomers haven’t been able to see since Voyager 2‘s 1986 visit to the planet. The sneaky moon Perdita, with a diameter of 16 miles, is the largest of the three moons sighted by Hubble’s most powerful camera; apparently, after careful study of the 1986 Voyager images, astronomers found that the two “new” moons, Cupid and Mab, were seen by Voyager’s cameras but missed by astronomers at the time. More thin rings were sighted around the planet, further away from Uranus than those already observed by Voyager and from ground-based telescopes but still well inside the orbits of the five major satellites. To date, Voyager 2 is the only unmanned probe to have visited the blue gas giant.
Source: CNN

This is what directing Clockstoppers and Thunderbirds will get you: a new academic career! Former Star Trek: The Next Generation star Jonathan Frakes has joined the faculty of Rockport College in Rockport, Maine, teaching acting and directing at the school’s film and television workshops. Students apparently don’t need to worry about commanding their new instructor’s attention, either: the class is limited to 15 students over an intensive 15-week period, each shooting and editing short films under Frakes’ tutelage. Frakes, whose family (presumably including actress Genie Francis) has also moved to Maine, begins teaching during the winter/spring term at Rockport College on January 30th, 2006.
Sources: Rockport College, TrekWeb

To celebrate the 10th anniversary of the original Sony Playstation‘s release, Digital Press has launched a new book devoted exclusively to the origins and history of that system, its vast library (including reviews of several titles, including rare and limited-run educational software), and the behind-the-scenes stories that made it the unexpected video game success story of the 1990s. Including interviews, photos aplenty and a complete collector’s checklist of software and hardware, PSX: The Guide To The Sony Playstation weighs in at a perfect-bound 140 pages (or as a free PDF file) and is now available via the link below.

PSX: The Guide To The Sony Playstation by Kevin Bryan

NBC Universal is confirming reports published in Daily Variety that Battlestar Galactica showrunner (and former Star Trek: The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine writer) Ronald D. Moore has signed on for a two-year development deal for both Sci-Fi and NBC, with his contract emphasizing SF projects. He’ll create new shows and help shepherd other series to the screen, with two projects already in their early stages. Moore will, however, continue in his executive producer role on Battlestar Galactica.
Source: Sci-Fi Wire

In Other Lives, the latest Doctor Who audio adventure, the eighth Doctor and friends pay a visit to the Great Exhibition in London, 1851, and discover that history is going off-track. They must become a part of history themselves in order to preserve the timeline they know – and if they can’t set things right, they may be trapped in this time and place forever. Also just released is the third of four chapters in the Cyberman audio spinoff series, Conversion. Both can be ordered in theLogBook.com’s Store (see link on our sidebar).
Source: Big Finish Productions

Joss Whedon, creator of Firefly, has declared the Firefly franchise (consisting of the cancelled Fox series and the feature film Serenity) dead. An Entertainment Weekly article reports that, following the movie’s rough ride in theaters, earning only $25 million, Serenity is unlikely to spawn a sequel; there’s no word on whether or not respectable DVD sales for the movie, which arrived in shiny round thing form today, might save the Serenity crew from oblivion one more time. In the meantime, Whedon is reportedly “moving on” and leaving Firefly behind, though he himself has said that Entertainment Weekly’s article takes that comment out of its original context. You can get Serenity and Firefly on DVD in theLogBook.com Store (see link in our sidebar).
Source: Entertainment Weekly

The lead scientist behind the U.K.’s failed Mars lander Beagle 2 believes he’s spotted evidence that the unmanned probe did, in fact, reach its target – though it may have reached it a little too fast. Pictures of the Martian surface returned by NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor show unusual features, including a possible point of impact and debris, in a crater near the Isidis Planitia region. The debris is thought to be Beagle 2′s airbags – meant to cushion the vehicle during landing, similar to the system used to land NASA’s Mars rovers – and possibly even the probe’s four solar panels. The current theory is that Beagle 2′s descent didn’t go as planned, damaging the probe with a severe impact. Beagle 2 landed on Christmas Day in 2003 but never contacted its ground controllers. High resolution photos may be taken of Isidis Planitia by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which could allow the scientists to confirm their theory on Beagle 2′s premature end.
Source: BBC News

Once known as a video game-oriented cable/satellite network, Comcast’s G4 TechTV network is deep into negotiations with Paramount for exclusive rerun rights to the original Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation. (The original Trek is currently locked down, though not shown on a consistent basis, by Sci-Fi Channel, while Next Generation is a mainstay of Spike TV.) A finalized deal hasn’t been announced, but both parties are said to be close to an agreement.
Source: Sci-Fi Wire

You might have just noticed that something’s changed, just ever so slightly, on our news page. Welcome to theLogBook.com’s brand spankin’ new news section! Beginning this week, news will now be added as it comes in (and as we have time to add it), rather than just once a week. You can thumb through updates with the handy calendar near the top of the pages, and you can also visit the month-by-month archive or even break it down by categories such as music, obituaries, video game news, and so on. Best of
all, it can be searched – something that will makes this portion of the site about 20 times more useful than it’s ever been before.

To accomplish this, we’re using a somewhat modified version of a blog software package called WordPress (already in use now in Scribblings From The Public Restroom Stalls Of The Gods. I’ve been using WordPress for my personal blog for some time now, and I’ve grown very fond of its abilities, its adaptability and its extreme versatility. So much so that, in the next year or two (and before you ask “why so long?”, remember we’re talking about re-entering the guts of nearly 3,000 pages of existing content built up over ten years of active web presence), I’m planning to convert the vast majority of this site into that new format. We’re already hard at work adding every episode guide entry ever produced on the site into massive database that will be accessed via an even more modified version of WordPress, allowing you to look at shows by year, by season, or even search for episodes in which a specific actor, writer, director or composer participated. It’s a massive undertaking, but one which will make the site easier to manage, easier to use, and much more versatile. Music reviews and Phosphor Dot Fossils will probably be the next sections due for an overhaul, again adding numerous sorting and searching capabilities to those already popular sections.

It’s going to take a long time, make no mistake. We have hundreds of episode guide entries, hundreds of game reviews, hundreds of music reviews, and so on. Redoing all of that from the ground up…the site could probably go into an update-less hibernation for the winter and we still wouldn’t be finished.

But there’s a good reason to go to the trouble. I firmly believe that this site has some of the best content on the web for the topics it covers. But my own web coding skills haven’t exactly kept pace. So Phosphor Dot Fossils doesn’t have the sorting abilities that KLOV.com does. And our episode guides, while informative (and, if I may say so, very well organized), can’t compete with the search options at IMDb.com. Nor can our music review section keep up with the search abilities offered by All Music Guide. None of these can happen in the site’s present form. But when you put these capabilities together with the content we already have here at theLogBook.com, I think that’s a winning combination.

Plus, an infrastructure already in place means that we’ll be able to just concentrate on creating new content without having to hand-code every last bit of information. I’ve always taken pride in the fact that theLogBook.com was more or less a home-made web site, but I think the content itself is more important than that point of pride.

If I didn’t think this was one of the coolest places on the web, I wouldn’t spend more time working on it than I spend on reading other people’s sites. And now it’s time to make it even cooler.

Bear with us – construction will begin shortly. The “classic” HTML pages will remain open until a section is completely ready to go “live” in database form, so there shouldn’t be too much disruption.

We’ve stocked the News larder with a few classic tidbits from the past so you can check out the searching and sorting abilities offered by WordPress. In time, our entire 11-year (soon to be 12-year) news legacy will be available, and searchable, here.

As Mr. Garibaldi once said, I think you’re gonna like this. I think you’re gonna like this a lot.

- Earl Green

theLogBook.com webmaster / editor-in-chief

Several DVD sites have reported that the previously promised extended version of Pegasus will not appear on the upcoming Battlestar Galactica Season 2.0 DVD box set, but instead the broadcast version will appear; in the inevitable box set of the second half of the current season, the extended version will appear.

The DVD release schedule for “classic” Doctor Who is shaping up for 2006; among the serials due for the digital treatment are Tom Baker’s all-time classic Genesis Of The Daleks (which introduced the Daleks’ creator, Davros) and the atmospheric seven-parter Inferno, from Jon Pertwee’s first season, which saw out companion Liz Shaw (Caroline John) without even so much as a goodbye scene. She and Nicholas Courtney (The Brigadier) have already mentioned recording an audio commentary.

Howling with applause: Hiyao Miyazaki’s anime film Howl’s Moving Castle continues to rack up the accolades. The movie picked up a Best Animated Film award from the New York Film Critics’ Circle, and has been nominated for three Annie Awards: Best Animated Feature, a Best Director nod for Miyazaki, and Best Writing in an Animated Feature.

DVD site The Digital Bits says that Paramount Home Video has confirmed to them that Star Trek: The Animated Series is being prepared for a DVD release, and the likely street date will be in the second week of September – the 40th anniversary of the broadcast of the first live-action Star Trek episode. Though there have been reports from the past of such people as writer David Gerrold participating in bonus features for the animated series, Paramount hasn’t officially confirmed any bonus features at this time.
Source: The Digital Bits

The Japanese space probe Hayabusa, fresh from its successful asteroid sample-gathering mission, is being instructed by engineers at JAXA to take its sweet time in returning those samples to Earth. Hayabusa is still holding its position near asteroid Itokawa while engineers try to figure out why the activation of its engines for the return to Earth is sending the probe into a spin and causing it to lose contact. Originally scheduled to start home in time to return those samples to an Australian landing site in June 2007, Hayabusa will now not even leave Itokawa’s vicinity until early 2007 (at a similar point in the asteroid’s orbit relative to the sun and Earth), with the return now scheduled for June 2010.

Source: Associated Press

Interest in Witchblade beyond the medium of comics seems to be at an all-time high this week; earlier in the week an anime series was announced, and now Platinum Studios, Top Cow and Arclight Films have sealed a deal to make two Witchblade feature films back-to-back next year. Financing has been secured, and the movies are now in pre-production; Witchblade creator (and Top Cow founder) Marc Silvestri is serving as executive producer, as he did with the short-lived but popular series that aired on TNT. The two movies will be filmed in China; no casting news has been announced yet, and the movies are expected to start the story from scratch rather than trying to follow up on the tightly-connected continuity of the TV version.

Source: Comic Book Resources

Rainmaker, the visual effects house which creates the alien worlds for both Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis, snagged a coveted Gemini Award this year – honoring production excellence in Canadian-made movies and TV – for Best Visual Effects. The episode that landed the trophy was the two-hour pilot The Rising, whose scenes of the city of Atlantis plunging out of the ocean featured enough computer-generated water effects (very hard to pull off) to make anyone break out in a sweat. (But it was also nearly a shoo-in – four other episodes were nominated, including The Eye and the SG-1 episodes Lost City Part II and New Order Part I.) This was the only award for Stargate this year; Martin Gero was nominated for Best Writing In A Dramatic Series for the Atlantis episode The Brotherhood, while Before I Sleep - with an aged Dr. Weir thawed out from cryogenic suspension – earned a Best Make-Up nomination.

Source: Gateworld.net