Free Republic

After a brief period of uncertainty, Riverside’s TrekFest will go on as scheduled June 24 and 25. The weekend-long festival celebrates the city’s self-proclaimed position as the “future birthplace” of “Star Trek”’s Capt. James T. Kirk. Problems arose recently when the Riverside City Council voted not to fund the $10,000 needed to put on the event this year. Sponsor Riverside Area Community Club put out a call for donations, and this week, the Mindbridge Foundation’s board of directors voted unanimously to give the final $5,000 necessary to ensure the festival would go on. Based in Cedar Rapids and Iowa City,...

""Guinness World Record Attempt The challenge is out there, and Riverside, IA deserves the honor. The current record for "Largest gathering of people dressed as Star Trek characters" is 99. There has also been word that an event in Germany had a little over 500 people attend their attempt at breaking the record but that statistic has yet to be confirmed by the GBWR organization. So here is the challenge: At the Trekfest event we are going to make our own attempt to break that record. We are shooting for at least 1,000 people dressed in Star Trek costumes to...

If you're a big fan of the Star Trek science fiction genre, then there's a good chance that you're a humanist at heart. That's the way that Susan Sackett, the longtime personal executive assistant to Trek franchise creator Gene Roddenberry, sees it. Ms. Sackett, who met recently with the Greater Worcester Humanists group at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Worcester, said Mr. Roddenberry was an admitted humanist who liberally sprinkled his out of this world stories about Capt. James Tiberius Kirk, Mr. Spock and the other Star Trek characters with the fundamentals of humanism — a non-theistic, or secular, approach,...