Another series of Doctor Who ends, and you gotta admire the boy Davies’s chutzpah.
It’s great but he seems to have nicked half of it from Star Wars, and the other half from the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. As Matt has pointed out, the timelords staring into the ‘vortex’ which drives some mad is more than a little like the Total Perspective Vortex in Hitch Hiker’s. And a couple of episodes ago they went… to the end of the universe. Arthur Dent even got name checked in the first David Tennant episode.
Tonight we had plenty of Star Wars imagery - the severed hand, the weapon sliding across the floor by telekenisis, the Master dying in the Doctor’s arms, then burning on a funeral pyre… hello! We have seen Return of the Jedi!
It was great TV, though.
Bad stuff happened in London today, and as I attempted to impose some order on our office by finally, finally tidying up (shades of Withnail - “Don’t go in there!”). While I was tidying up I had News 24 on. I watched - and mainly listened - to it for about 4 hours straight. I learned the following:
- London is a very busy city.
- It’s busy at night as well as in the day.
- According to one expert they had on “there are more things we don’t know than we do know”. (He really earned his fee there. I hope MI5 have him on their books.)
- One woman was really pretty cheesed off her journey to work had been disrupted.
- At one point a presenter interrupted her own question with the words “sorry to interrupt my question, but we have some news just in”.
- Another newsreader described events as ‘fast-moving’. I’d been listening for a couple of hours at this point and - aside from the discovery of the first car bomb which had not exploded - nothing at all had actually happened.
- The first car bomb could have killed “hundreds if not thousands of people”.
- The real MI5 is not like the TV show Spooks.
- We should feel sorry for the “plight” of people living in Haymarket. Yes, let’s have a whip-round.
- If nothing has happened for 4 hours, your lead story can still be captioned BREAKING NEWS.
All this put me in such a bad mood that even after removing 5 cart loads of gear from our office and sorting all the cat 5 cables into different lengths and putting every different kind of serial and VGA lead in separate boxes, the office still looked messier when I went home than before I began.
Like a lot of people on Flickr I made Dave Gorman a contact when I spotted him on there. I liked his pictures and I liked his stuff on the telly, so why not?
Then a few weeks ago a friend posted a comment on one Dave’s pictures. The gist was that the picture was okay but he didn’t think it would have garnered such a large number of favourable comments if Dave wasn’t famous.
Dave Gorman removed the comment, but wrote a polite note explaining why he’d removed it.
Last week I spotted this Dave Gorman photo on a Flickr group for objects that look like faces. It looked remarkably similar to this one I took - and posted to the same group - a few weeks before:
Now I know that my photo is technically inferior - a bit blurred and taken with a cheap compact camera. But I think it’s a better photo because of the group thing. I think it’s funnier. But of course Dave has many more positive comments and favourites than me - only to be expected as he has so many contacts.
I posted a link to my photo on his with the simple message ’snap!’. There, that’ll show ‘em I thought. But since then FOUR more people have commented on how great Dave’s picture is…
This series of Doctor Who was a bit humdrum. Then came ‘Family of Blood’, which I thought was one of the best episodes ever. Next came ‘Blink’ - which has to be the best ever episode of Doctor Who ever; sheer televisual brilliance, like a great Diana Rigg-era episode of The Avengers. Only twice as good. This week I was finding ‘Utopia’ a bit humdrum again - and they pull another rabbit out of the hat - Derek Jacobi turns out to be The Master and regenerates himself into Life on Mars’s John Simm. Genius.
This morning I was queuing for a train ticket for Charing Cross. There were two people in front of me, both with fairly complicated queries. The ticket machines were free but I had about 5 minutes before my train was due and I prefer buying tickets from human beings.
A man pitches up behind me. He looks like he wants to get the Cannon Street train which is just pulling in. Now, if he’d said “arghhh, there’s my train!” I might have let him queue jump. If he’d said “there’s my bloody train” I might have given way. But his opening gambit was this: he said “Fuck you! FUCK YOU ALL! There’s my FUCKING train!”.
So I didn’t move, he missed his train and the next one was ten minutes late.
I’m no ‘green champion’ - I do compost all appropriate kitchen waste and I recycle paper, but have been known to throw tin cans, bottles and plastic in the bin.
But this toothbrush makes me mad. It contains a non-replaceable normal AAA Duracell battery. You can’t replace it because if you try, the thing disintegrates inside and won’t work any more.
We salvaged the motor though and William made an aeroplane out of it. Or a sonic-screwdriver. We’re not sure. But it buzzes and spins and he loves it.
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