Star Trek fans made history on Saturday by breaking the record for the largest gathering of people dressed as characters from the TV series at the “Destination Star Trek London” convention.
An estimated 1,083 costume-clad “trekkies” assembled at the event at London’s ExCel center, narrowly beating the previous record of 1,040 characters, which was set at the bigger, annual Star Trek convention in Las Vegas in August.
The achievement will be officially verified by Guinness World Records within a few days, but organizers were confident they had topped the Las Vegas record.
Photo: Reuters
The majority of record-breakers dressed in the color-blocked uniforms of the Starfleet, with Vulcans, Klingons and Romulans peppering the crowd.
“Destination Star Trek London” is the first live Star Trek event in Britain in more than a decade. About 17,000 fans came to London to celebrate the 46-year-old TV and film franchise, which has spawned six TV series and 11 feature films.
Outlandish costumes were ubiquitous at the event, which saw Britain’s first Klingon wedding on Friday. Swedish couple Jossie Sockertopp and Sonnie Gustavsson tied the knot in full Klingon attire and exchanged vows in the fictional and guttural-sounding language of the Star Trek characters.
The three-day convention also saw all five captains from the TV series appear on stage together for the first time.
The captains played by actors William Shatner (Captain Kirk), Patrick Stewart (Captain Picard), Avery Brooks (Captain Sisko), Kate Mulgrew (Captain Janeway) and Scott Bakula (Captain Archer) joined forces to officially open the convention on Friday night.
Speaking ahead of the opening ceremony, 81-year-old Shatner appeared moved when discussing the show’s loyal and sometimes obsessive fans in an interview.
“It’s an accumulation of a lot of work and a lot of people traveling from all over the world here. It’s sort of monumental in its worth,” Shatner said.
The veteran actor turned filmmaker has released the documentary Get a Life!, which examines why fans attend conventions.
“The conclusion that I come to is that it’s mythological,” Shatner said. “It’s a desire for mythology that we don’t have in this age.”
Two medieval fortresses face each other across the Narva River separating Estonia from Russia on Europe’s eastern edge. Once a symbol of cooperation, the “Friendship Bridge” connecting the two snow-covered banks has been reinforced with rows of razor wire and “dragon’s teeth” anti-tank obstacles on the Estonian side. “The name is kind of ironic,” regional border chief Eerik Purgel said. Some fear the border town of more than 50,0000 people — a mixture of Estonians, Russians and people left stateless after the fall of the Soviet Union — could be Russian President Vladimir Putin’s next target. On the Estonian side of the bridge,
Jeremiah Kithinji had never touched a computer before he finished high school. A decade later, he is teaching robotics, and even took a team of rural Kenyans to the World Robotics Olympiad in Singapore. In a classroom in Laikipia County — a sparsely populated grasslands region of northern Kenya known for its rhinos and cheetahs — pupils are busy snapping together wheels, motors and sensors to assemble a robot. Guiding them is Kithinji, 27, who runs a string of robotics clubs in the area that have taken some of his pupils far beyond the rural landscapes outside. In November, he took a team
Civil society leaders and members of a left-wing coalition yesterday filed impeachment complaints against Philippine Vice President Sara Duterte, restarting a process sidelined by the Supreme Court last year. Both cases accuse Duterte of misusing public funds during her term as education secretary, while one revives allegations that she threatened to assassinate former ally Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. The filings come on the same day that a committee in the House of Representatives was to begin hearings into impeachment complaints against Marcos, accused of corruption tied to a spiraling scandal over bogus flood control projects. Under the constitution, an impeachment by the
Exiled Tibetans began a unique global election yesterday for a government representing a homeland many have never seen, as part of a democratic exercise voters say carries great weight. From red-robed Buddhist monks in the snowy Himalayas, to political exiles in megacities across South Asia, to refugees in Australia, Europe and North America, voting takes place in 27 countries — but not China. “Elections ... show that the struggle for Tibet’s freedom and independence continues from generation to generation,” said candidate Gyaltsen Chokye, 33, who is based in the Indian hill-town of Dharamsala, headquarters of the government-in-exile, the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA). It
RSS