Aye, Captain!

It’s easy to find, on and through the Internet, a great many people with, as I like to put it, more time than sense. The New York Times has recently introduced us to a bunch of men — yes, all men — for whom we can add “or style.” They fancy themselves as Captain Kirk, from Star Trek.

Now, we’re not talking, here, about guys who like to go to Star Trek conventions dressed as the captain. We’re not talking about people who open their flip-phones as if they were communicators and say, “Beam me up, Scotty,” because they think it’s funny. These people don’t carry around tricorders. Well, or maybe they do, but that’s not the point.

The point is that each of them has a Captain Kirk command chair. An ugly, boxy chair like the one on the bridge of the Enterprise. With buttons and such.

In their living rooms.

There is nothing particularly unusual about the living room of the two-story town house that Scott Veazie shares with his wife in Washougal, Wash., except for one piece of furniture in a corner: a full-size replica of the captain’s chair from the bridge of the U.S.S. Enterprise, as seen in the original “Star Trek” television series.

They take this stuff seriously, too, researching the style, and arguing about who got it right. And, here, well, let them speak for themselves:

“Every once in a while I’ll play a ‘Star Trek’ video game in front of the chair and pretend I’m in command of the fleet,” Mr. Sturgeon said. “But by this time I’m so used to it that it’s just like any other chair. Maybe I feel like I’m in command of the house.”

“You sit in the chair,” Mike Paugh said, “and you’re watching an episode and pushing buttons and you find yourself saying, Fire photon torpedoes or whatever, and you’re making the sounds yourself because I don’t have the sound effects yet.”

Uh-huh. Yet.

To be fair, I used to pretend I was Captain Kirk, too.

When I was twelve.

Their wives seem to shake their heads about it, but find it harmless enough. Here’s a fairly kind response, I think:

“Personally,” said his wife, Barbara, “I think my husband is a nerd.”