From an article in the September 29th issue of Rolling Stone talking about the early days of Late Night with David Letterman:
At a grocery store on New York's Upper West Side, [Chris] Elliott ran into Mark Hamill, then at the height of his Star Wars fame. Hamill not only recognized Elliott but admitted that he'd been videotaping Late Night off of his TV from the very start. Hamill was so worried the show would get canceled - "It was so far ahead of the curve," he says now - that he wanted to make sure he had his own copies. Later, when Late Night researchers needed a list of every "Viewer Mail" segment, they turned to Hamill, who had maintained meticulously annotated notebooks of the sketches on every show.
"The Picard Maneuver" is what we called it when we would sit down, and straighten our two-piece space suits (which came into use in the third season.) Patrick Stewart, being a classically trained actor with the RSC, couldn't simply tug down on his uniform, and always did it with dramatic flair, earning the move its name.
All of us had a problem with our jackets bunching up and looking lame, so we all had to do our own version of "The Picard Maneuver" whenever we sat down. When I finally got my two piece space suit, I did it after sitting down at the CONN, and a particularly officious associate producer pulled me aside between takes and said, "Wil, you can't pull your jacket down when you sit down. That's the Picard Maneuver."
"How am I supposed to stop it from bunching up?" I said.
"I don't know," he said. "Just don't tug on it, okay?"
...
I also recall Johnathan Frakes always making a huge deal about doing the Picard Maneuver with the jacket on his space suit, pulling it down, tugging it from side to side, standing back up, yanking it down, sitting back down and tugging on his sleeves . . . I don't think I'm conveying how incredibly hilarious it was, but maybe you had to have been working on the Bridge for twelve hours to be in the same comedy space we were whenever he'd do it.
Call Bruce Willis! We need him to drill a hole in a space rock!
The interloping space rock, called asteroid 2005 YU55, will pass between Earth and the orbit of the moon on Tuesday (Nov. 8), but does not pose a threat to our planet, NASA scientists have said. The asteroid is about the size of an aircraft carrier, spanning approximately 1,300 feet (400 meters), and is the largest space rock to have a close encounter with Earth with advance notice in 35 years.
