He Lived Long and Prospered

James Lileks has a nice little tribute to actor James Doohan, better known as Scotty the engineer aboard the Enterprise, who passed away yesterday:

You know, I think he could have changed the laws of physics, if he had to.

We don’t know who first offered Jimmy Doohan a smoke, but it saved his life. One can assume he kicked the habit, since he lived into his middle eighties, but he was still packing away the gaspers in ‘44. He had a cigarette case in his shirt pocket, and it stopped a German bullet. He may have laid on the sand for a moment and wondered if it would all end here on the shores of Normandy – but no, of course not. He got up, he made it through the day. He made it through the war, went home, took up acting. One day his agent called: Can you do a Scottish accent?

Sure. What’s the part?

It’s impossible to understate Doohan's appeal - if you sneak into a NASA control room during a mission and ask the controllers how many chose their profession because of Scotty, half the hands in the room would go up. No one wanted to go into space because of that whiny little red-head kid on Lost in Space. It takes something indefinable to be a Kirk, it takes med school to be a McCoy, it takes green blood to be Spock, but Scotty – aye. Any man could be Scotty, if he applied himself. And he'd be among manly things, too.

In a hundred years from now, no one will remember Brad Pitt. But they’ll have a picture of Scotty taped up in the break room off the moon shuttle.