The crew at the International Space Station was treated to a special viewing of the new Star Trek movie on Friday. Paramount provided a copy of the film which NASA reformatted in five hours and transmitted up to the station where they watched it on a laptop. More pop culture is arriving at the ISS next month, when Astronaut Timothy L. Kopra blasts off. For his ISS trip, he’s bringing a signed copy of Echo & The Bunnymen’s album “Ocean Rain”. A big fan of the group, Kopra emailed them to ask for an album to take up into space. Bunnyman Ian McCulloch was thrilled saying: “Now it’s official. We are the coolest band in the universe.”

Jim Henson’s Fantastic World, a traveling exhibit from the Smithsonian Institution, opens at Seattle’s EMP this coming weekend. The exhibition includes drawings, storyboards, television and movie props, photographs of Henson and his collaborators, and, yes, puppets (muppets even!). The EMP has supplemented their exhibit with an interactive puppet TV studio provided by local puppetmaker Annett Mateo. Titled the “Mudgarden Experience at the Rainbow Connection” it’s a puppet rock band inspired by Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem. Visitors can operate the band members and create their own TV performance.

Thousands showed up on Thursday in Lincoln City, Indiana for the official release of the new penny. Commemorating the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth and the centennial of the Lincoln penny, four designs will be released in 2009 illustrating different stages of his life. Collectible versions of the coins will also be minted with the same metal content as the 1909 version: 95% copper, 5% tin and zinc (regular pennies are still 2.5% copper, the rest zinc).

There’s some small irony in the news that the Sony Metreon, showcase of high tech games, is now the location of a farmer’s market. Island Earth Farmers Market, open every day, is renting space until a planned renovation. The mall has been sold and the new owners include the Westfield Group which has been snatching up and revamping malls everywhere. They plan to integrate the building more successfully with the surrounding neighborhood. The movie theater will remain.

Ctrl Alt Del pillows for your couch rebooting needs. And, perhaps more appropriately, Esc.

I missed news about this recent little drama in the Boston Public Garden: duckling Pack was stolen from the Make Way for Ducklings bronze sculpture in early April. He was soon found leaning up against a tree in Beacon Hill, four blocks from his home. Pack’s siblings have experienced similar incidents in the past. Quack was stolen in 1987 right after the sculpture was installed. Mack was stolen in 1988 and Quack was returned only to be taken again in 1992. Jack was taken in 1999 and returned. None of the duck thieves has ever been caught.

I’ve been expecting to learn new things from our son’s education, mostly new discoveries and events that have taken place since my time in school. I’ve found that I’m also filling in gaps in my knowledge, even though he’s only in preschool. Today he brought home a book about Balto, the sled dog who led the final two legs of the “serum run” that brought diphtheria antitoxin from Anchorage to Nome. Balto became the hero of the 1925 serum run, keeping to the trail in blizzard conditions and avoiding cracking ice on the river. There’s a statue of Balto in New York’s Central Park. I was a little creeped out to find out that his body was turned over to a taxidermist after he died and is now on display at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History (try explaining that to a four year old — who now wants to visit stuffed Balto). Although Balto and his musher Gunnar Kaasen received all the immediate media attention, Togo and musher Leonhard Seppala actually ran the most difficult and longest leg of the relay. The other relay teams received even fewer accolades. The Iditarod race, while not inspired entirely by the serum run, does commemorate its participants. Stuffed Togo is on display at the Iditarod headquarters in Wasilla, Alaska (nowadays more famous for a certain former mayor).

Enchanted April is a charming film in the Merchant-Ivory, E.M. Forster style, only it’s not a Merchant-Ivory production and the source novel is by Elizabeth von Armin. Mike Newell directed this little gem that was released in 1992. It was released on VHS in 1994 but a DVD version wasn’t released until just this month. (original 1992 N.Y. Times review by Janet Maslin)

The Broadway revival of “West Side Story” includes an authentically uniformed Officer Krupke thanks to the persistent research of assistant costume designer, Michael Zecker. He sought help from four different institutions before a fifth produced the only thing that satisfied his boss, costume designer David C. Woolard: the 1956 edition of “The Rules and Procedures of the NYPD.” The chief librarian at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice had a copy. Chapter 25 gave Zecker and Woolard the details they needed to put Office Krupke in a “regulation blue military shirt with 24 ligne removable brass buttons” with “black tie, tie clasp and black belt with dark buckle, preferably gun metal.” In the comments of the blog post describing the research someone signed “Crritic” says “Really? This is considered difficult research? Unbelievable.” To which someone signed “Michael Zecker” responds “To paraphrase Stephen Sondheim, ‘Hey, Crrranky Crrritic, Krup you!'”

Pluto was named by an 11-year-old girl from England whose grandfather knew the professor of astronomy at Oxford. Venetia Phair (her married name) wasn’t too bothered when Pluto lost its planet designation, but she definitely did not like it when people assumed she named the planet after the Disney dog. Her grandfather’s brother had named the Mars moons Phobos and Deimos. Phair died on April 30th at the age of 90.