Creeva’s World 2.0

LeVar Burton, The Internet’s Latest Superstar

Image from here

Out­side of Star Trek LeVar Bur­ton has not done much act­ing in the last 10 years.   One thing that he did keep going until the last cou­ple years was Read­ing Rain­bow, a show myself and my sib­lings all grew up with.   I’m kind of dis­ap­pointed hear­ing that it is gone, on the cusp of my child being born any day now, he won’t be able ot the expe­ri­ence I had grow­ing up with the show.  Between Star Trek: The Next Gen­er­a­tion and read­ing rain­bow is where I (like most geeks) have had my expo­sure to LeVar Bur­ton.  He is the guy you rec­og­nize and want to see things from, but has kind of dis­ap­peared from the spot­light.   Well he is back, he has embraced the inter­net rev­o­lu­tion (is it really a rev­o­lu­tion still??) and in the last few months has shown up everywhere.

Since I’m not sure where it started, I’ll give my details as I noticed his lat­est new fame.  It all started when he popped up on an episode of Dig­gna­tion:

When I saw this clip show up on Digg I just had to track it down later when I was at home and watch it.   I would say it gave me chills, but that is the wrong word for it.   It was excit­ing, refresh­ing and took me back to being an eight year old kid watch­ing Read­ing Rain­bow in the first few sea­sons.  Then he popped up on Twit­ter and I imme­di­ately fol­lowed him.   He is cur­rently (among other things) cov­er­ing his strug­gle to stay a non-smoker, some­thing that I’m going to have to fight myself very soon when my child is born.

Most recently as I was catch­ing up on my back episodes of This Week in Tech, behold LeVar shows up there.  Wil Wheaton has man­aged to talk his friends over ot the medium he has done so well at in the recent years.  LeVar has shown that this level of inter­net star­dom is not unique to a sin­gle Star Trek star.   Here is wish­ing you luck LeVar and I’ll keep read­ing your blog.   I’m hop­ing Brent Spiner man­ages to lever­age this as well as you.