JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Ever generous, even in his final public message.

Leonard Nimoy has died. To generations of nerds he was the uncle who would remind us to be logical when faced with ignorance, stupidity, meanness.

Apart from playing the original Mr. Spock to perfection he was the host of In Search Of…a TV show that investigated the 1970s obsession with UFOs, the Bermuda Triangle, Sasquatch, the Loch Ness monster, killer bees and other phenomena that we kids assumed would lead to planetary extermination any minute.

Here’s a Spock-centric episode of classic Star Trek: Amok Time, written by Theodore Sturgeon. It’s mating season on Vulcan.

Here’s Kevin Spacey saying “Chos.”

Watching House of Cards, the Netflix-produced drama starring Kevin Spacey as American politician Francis Underwood, is destroying my faith in humanity, not that there was a surplus of it to begin with. Adapted from the book by British Conservative Party deputy chair Lord Michael Dobbs and the BBC miniseries based upon it, House of Cards assembles a team of Hollywood heavyweights, including the David Fincher, to pander to our cynical, most basic assumptions about politicians: that they’re vicious and power-hungry.

What does it add to the discussion of political power in the 21st century? That politicians are stupid weaklings, as demonstrated in episode after episode of Underwood chewing up and spitting out every Washington player in his march to the White House. In this world, describing Underwood as “Machiavellian” is unnecessary, not just because his victims have apparently never heard of The Prince, but because it never even occurs to them to compare notes about him. Seriously, people, it wouldn’t hurt to share information and check his stories, maybe even consult your constituents. Oh, right, they have no constituents.

Read The Binge, our TV column at BusinessWorld.

Where we first saw Spacey: TV’s Wiseguy.