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@janetteb   I was just thinking of you.   Hope you’re all right where you are.   We’ve been seeing the newsreel footage of catastrophic floods in Oz, though I think that’s mostly to the east of you?    We normally get the weather after you’ve finished with it, but it seems there’s this ‘blocking high’ in the Tasman that’s caused all the weather to pile up over Sydney.   Meanwhile we’ve had three weeks of fine weather and the water at Piha’s still warm, forcing me to swim every day  🙂   Makes me feel a bit guilty, actually.    But it seems (according to today’s forecast) that the weather has finally forced its way through so our turn is on the way.

Robot of Sherwood is okay, watchable, but there was one discordant note – when the Sheriff stabbed the old man in the village, in cold blood.   I thought that was a bit too grimly explicit for an otherwise ‘light’ episode.    And there was one implausibility, shooting the golden arrow at the ship.   I like the concept, that the arrow would save the day; but to reach a spaceship on launch with an arrow you’d need to shoot it out of a high-velocity anti-tank rifle at the very least; and by what mechanism could an arrow hitting the ship be converted into fuel for its engines?    (Why does that niggle me when robots and Robin Hood and a Tardis don’t?   I *think* because shooting an arrow is very much conventional Earth kinematics, not sci-fi.   We all have our own limits of credibility, different for each of us, I think.   And I think we’re more sensitive about things we know most about.   In my case it’s mechanical things, which is why McGyver always offended me with every ridiculous physically impossible trick that McGyver pulled.   Every single one.)

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@oochillyo   @blenkinsopthebrave

Empress of Mars doesn’t really do it for me.   It seems kind of predictable, Indiana Jones crossed with Edgar Rice Burroughs  (I think, I’ve never actually read Burroughs).   Sort of like Blenkinsopthebrave mentioned.   Ah well, tastes vary in an unpredictable way, a while ago I picked up a copy of Red Sonja for a dollar, it’s a sort of early Schwarzenegger  Xena-before-Xena-was-a-thing sword & sandals, and I wasn’t expecting to like it but I found it not bad.

Eaters of Light, now, that was definitely one I’ll watch again.   It had atmosphere.   I think there were plot holes a mile wide but (unlike Kill the Moon) I didn’t mind, I found I could gloss over them.

I don’t think S10 has a three-part final, unless you count the Christmas episode Twice Upon a Time, but that’s really quite unrelated to the actual final.   World Enough and Time/The Doctor Falls  is a very strong 2-part final, also a highly emotional one.   You may love it, you may hate it, maybe both,  but I don’t think you’ll be able to say it wasn’t a strong one.  I won’t say more, spoilers.

Quite OT, but here in NZ we’re having the end of summer.   Weather is fine for days on end, the sea is *warm*, lovely time to go to the beach.   And the best thing, the life guards have knocked off for the season so I can swim where I like (with due caution for my own safety) without being harassed to swim in a tiny crowd in their apparently randomly-selected ‘safe’ spot.   This settled weather usually lasts till about Easter, after which everything falls off towards winter.

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@winston    Oh yes, those happy-face robots in ‘Smile’ were scary.   Not least because of the idea that your own fears would cause them to kill you.    Be happy or you die.   By the way, wasn’t the architecture in that episode fantastic?   I’m NOT a fan of most modern architecture but I am of Calatrava, since I arrived at Lisbon Oriente station on a train and was struck by how amazing the place looked.   (Yes I had to look him up, never heard of him before that.   He did the City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia where Smile was filmed).

Also in the way of well-intentioned white bots who will kill you, the robots in ‘The Girl Who Waited’.   ‘This is a kindness’ indeed. With an absolutely tragic ending and a magnificent performance by Karen Gillan.   That episode, along with Midnight and Blink, is right up there on my list of low-budget one-off episodes that prove that sometimes, less is more.

@missy   I have to admit, if I’m alone in the house at night, I used to be nervous of the dark.  Not really terrified, it was more like being apprehensive *in case* I started to panic.   Which is weird.   For some reason, recently, I’ve got a bit more fatalistic about it, there’s probably nothing there and if there is, there’s nothing I can do about it anyway.   But I still feel much more relaxed if there’s someone else in the house, which is also quite irrational.   I’d still avoid watching ‘Listen’ late at night and alone, though.

 

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@winston Yes, statues are everywhere. To adapt the saying about Vashta Nerada, “it’s not every shadow, but any shadow could be”. Same goes for statues and Angels.
@baines @missy Yes, the monster in Midnight was one of the most classic. Even though the human mob mentality was at least as dangerous to a rational being like the Doctor. The stewardess redeemed herself at the end, and then nobody even knew her name. That was a masterly touch of – [I can’t think of the word. Pathos? ]
The clockwork repair droids of Girl in the Fireplace, though scary, weren’t intentionally malevolent. Just misprogrammed. They just wanted Madame de Pompadour as a spare part to fix their ship – nice twist in the tail. But the ending of that episode was tragic, in the way that loss always is – the Doctor just missed Reinette by a few hours.

The Silents also qualify as an ‘invisible’ monster, I think. They look hideously scary when you see them (remind me of Edvard Munch’s ‘The Scream’), but of course you forget the moment you look away. So – if you can’t see a Silent right now – that doesn’t mean there isn’t one, standing right behind your chair. That is spooky! That not only plays into the invisibility factor, but also our fears of amnesia. If you can’t trust your memory, what grip do you have on reality? And then you see all the count marks you made on your hands, and you realise you’ve had many, many encounters with them you can’t remember and they’re probably all around you right now.

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[reposted cos the website lost my first post?]

@baines

I’d rate the Weeping Angels as the best Doctor Who monster ever. The most frightening. The fact that they didn’t have to move (on camera) was a big asset – many frightening-looking monsters became a little bit silly when they actually had to move and do stuff. The Angels didn’t risk that.

I think they were so beautifully handled in Blink, that their subsequent appearances couldn’t quite live up to their first appearance – but that’s like giving them a 9 1/2 out of 10 rather than 10/10. Still way more impressive than most monsters.

Moffatt understands very well that what you can’t see is often much more frightening than what you can. The Vashta Nerada. Whatever was banging on the capsule door in ‘Listen’. The creature under the blanket in that same episode. The Silents, that you forget are there the moment you look away. So the Angels make use of that – you can’t see them when they’re moving, you just see the frightening result.

So anyway – yes, Time of Angels / Flesh and Stone, and Angels Take Manhattan, were all excellent episodes. The surprise disappearance of Arthur at the end of Manhattan, and Amy’s deliberate choice to follow him, were shocking and tragic and very moving. We don’t know what the Doctor did to the angel that took them, but I hope it was something suitably drastic and final, possibly finishing with a small pile of sand, or better, dust.

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@deathbycocktails   Well, I suppose if the Doctor can regenerate into a female, he can just as likely regenerate into a Scotsman?

(It’s the Scottish Mafia in operation…   Seven, Ten, Twelve, Amy, and the showrunner for series 5-10…)

 

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Companions – yes, I agree with @janetteb, I like Martha a lot. Very intelligent, able to stand up for herself, and – when she realised she was falling for the Doctor (which is not something we can control) but he was never going to get over Rose – she had the sense and strength of character to leave him. That is not easy to do. Without recriminations, an amicable separation. In fact I think she was the only NuWho principal Companion (up to Capaldi’s era, not counting since then) who had a non-traumatic ending to the relationship.

I did like Rose though, can one blame her for being swept off her feet by the Doctor? And I think Billie Piper was an excellent casting choice to reboot the series, she’s one of those fortunate people who the camera is drawn to, did anyone notice how she could photobomb the scene (as The Interface) in The Day of the Doctor just by leaning against a wall in the background? And it made her little cameos in episodes late in Season 4 stand out. Though Rose did treat poor Mickey very badly, far worse than Clara treated Danny. But her journey really grabbed me. (I recall grumbles from OldWho fans about the Doctor getting emotionally involved with the Companion – but wasn’t oldWho heading that way with Seven and Ace? Of which more later).

My favourite companion has to be Clara. When she was ‘up’ she shone, dazzlingly. I’ve always found the companion as important, story-wise, as the Doctor so the gripes of fans who think she (or any other companion) was eclipsing the Doctor fall on deaf ears for me. Yes she eventually got too confident, for which she paid a dreadful price. Pride comes before a fall, and all that – the plot of many tragedies since Shakespear’s time. I found her clashes with the Doctor around the time of Kill The Moon (the only good thing in that regrettable ep) were riveting.

Bill was okay, I quite liked her, but she suffered from following Clara (in my own ranking, I quite accept others may rank them differently). Her fate in World Enough and Time was tragic.

I never really warmed up to Donna, because of first impressions – at the end of Doomsday, Ten (and we) were in shock and grieving for the sudden shocking loss of Rose, when Donna comes bursting in aggressively and accusatively to destroy the mood. That takes a lot of getting over, and I never quite did.

Amy was great. Okay, she too treated her boyfriend badly at first (there seems to be some sort of theme there), but overall I’d rate her up with Rose and Clara as my favourite Companions. And possibly she had the most striking and tragic episode – The Girl Who Waited – with a stunning performance by Karen Gillan.

Old Who companions? – I don’t really know. The only oldWho eps I’ve watched this century are Ghost Light, Curse of Fenric, and Survival. And I have to say I’m now a fan of Seven and Ace. The limited special effects of last century’s BBC productions do detract a bit from the story, but you can see the chemistry between McCoy and Sophie Aldred (it comes through in the video clips of cons on Youtube too). I would have liked to see them continue with 2005-quality production values, though I guess Sophie might have been a bit too old to play a teenager by then (Seven of course is ageless). And as I mentioned, maybe that chemistry was a pointer to the developments with Ten and Rose two decades later.

 

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@janetteb    Thanks, yes, I made it to Chch.    I flew down to Wellington on Monday and caught the ferry and train to Christchurch on Tuesday.   (This is NOT the most sensible way to go, I could have flown all the way for about the same air fare, but I enjoy the journey).

We’re heading back to Auckland in about two weeks so hopefully this lockdown will be just over by then.   Auckland is Level 3, rest of NZ is Level 2.    In any case, at Level 2 travel between regions is OK, the Cook Strait ferry will operate, and since we live in Auckland we’d be allowed back into the Auckland Level 3 area to go home**.   And at Level 2 here, I can still go to the beach.    So at the moment, I’ve just managed to dodge the lockdowns (by luck, not design, all suspicions that I am the evil mastermind conspiring with the Illuminati and the New World Order to manipulate Covid for my convenience are hereby denied and anyone propagating such calumnies can expect a knock on their door at midnight).

**Provided I can supply proof of address.  Answering this message prompted me to check the regulations.   I binned some old papers in the car yesterday, how unwise, and now they’re at the bottom of the recycling bin…  rather than go dumpster diving, I just downloaded a bank statement and I can get it printed out for 20 cents at the local library.   So thank you for that, you may have saved me an impasse with ‘border control’ in a couple of weeks’ time!

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@janetteb    The second-last ep with Bill was ‘World Enough and Time’ – marvellous title.   The original quote was the first line from a love poem by Andrew Marvell,  ‘Had we but world enough, and time’.    The title fits well with the episode, after all, time (or the time distortion caused by the black hole) is the root of all their problems.

But the original poem was a love poem, along the lines of ‘sieze the day, for tomorrow we may be dead’.   Doesn’t really suit the episode, since the Doctor and Bill didn’t have any romantic relationship (would have suited Ten and Rose better);  however, it would certainly have fitted the following episode, with Heather coming to rescue Bill.

My Christmas special has to be ‘Last Christmas’, with runner-up A Christmas Carol, which I particularly like when it becomes apparent that Sardick wasn’t being a complete bastard when he froze Abigail, just trying to stretch out the short run-time she had left.   (I’ve just realised that’s the same theme that Moffatt used for Clara’s end, and Bill’s.   It’s always a tragic theme.   That’s no criticism of Moffatt, he managed to vary the story such that that’s only just now occurred to me.   If it works, use it!    Might as well criticise ‘bigger on the inside’)

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@janetteb
I found the freedom of travelling in Europe in the last decade, marvellous. I was used to arriving back in NZ from the Cook Islands and going through our tedious antiquated bureaucratic border controls – laboriously filling in Arrival Cards and Customs Declaration (penalty for incorrect statements), queueing for Immigration, queueing for Customs…
So when I first arrived in Paris in 2013 (from NZ via Abu Dhabi), I suddenly realised with a gulp that I hadn’t filled in my arrival card and customs declaration – but that was because they hadn’t been handed out. The French didn’t bother with them. I collected my bag, wandered through a door marked ‘Sortie’ past a bored-looking agent wearing ‘Douane’, expecting to find myself in the Customs hall, and found myself – outside. I just could not believe one could enter a country so easily. It was quite disconcerting, I half expected a gendarme to pop out of nowhere and detain me for having evaded some procedure. 🙂
And later on, on the Col de Montgenevre, the Mont Cenis, the Little St Bernard, and Ribellasca/Camedo on the Centovalli road, there were these big imposing Customs buildings – all closed and shuttered. Nothing is so delightful as the sight of a disused customs post 🙂 I *love* Schengen! I’d just never heard of it till that trip.
Will Covid put a damper on that, long term? I do hope not. I very much hope the vaccines all work. But it’ll take a couple of years at least for things to recover.

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@devilishrobby

Considering that Gordon Ramsay is the only other TV personality whose vocabulary approached Malcolm Tucker, I found that entirely credible.    🙂

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@janetteb    Snow.   I love snow too, in the right context.   Fresh snow is lovely.   Old snow turns to slush, which is no fun at all.

When I was a kid in southern England, I used to be disappointed that we hardly ever had a ‘white Christmas’.   Just didn’t get snow there.   Here in Auckland we never get snow either, (it was reported once on the Waitakere Ranges a century ago), we get a few mild frosts but I’ve only once ever seen ice on the puddles.   200 miles south on the Central Plateau it’s another matter, they get plenty, but spasmodically.

I was in France and the Alps in 2014 with a group of friends and we loved snow.   We drove up every Alpine pass we could find, and if there was snow at the top it was obligatory to go for a barefoot walk in it.

I do agree that planning is half the fun, now we have the Internet and everywhere has websites.   In 1990 I took my wife to England and Switzerland, and it took months to make a couple of bookings.   In those days every Swiss town had its own tourist office which published an excellent booklet which listed all the hotels and pensions, with a map and rates, but it still took a long time to set up by snail mail and telephone.   Now we have the Internet and email.   In 2017 I did my ‘big trip’ from Vladivostok to Lisbon by train, then round the Alps by rental, I made bookings with two airlines, two car rentals, RzD (Russian Railways), Deutsche Bundesbahn, SNCF (French),  RENFE (Spanish), and Eurostar, and about 30 hotels/backpackers mostly on Booking.com.    Took me days and days to do (and research my route) but it was interesting.    Also, cheap   🙂   Couldn’t have been done in 1990, not for my budget, travel agents existed but they wouldn’t have known about many of the places I stayed (how could a $25 a night pension afford a percentage cut for a travel agent?) and nor could any travel agent have afforded the time it would have taken.

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@oochillyo  Well, the beach is our current reward for being in the upside-down half of the world.   Six months time, it’ll be the other way round.   So I do rather like to make the people ‘on top’ feel a little jealous when I have the chance   🙂

I think we were lucky with covid, two ways.   First, obviously, we’re an island, so easier to isolate – what is normally a bit of a drag (can’t go anywhere without a 3-hour flight and then the place is full of Aussies,  no offence intended Janetteb  🙂  becomes an asset.

And second, the country was not split politically, and Jacinda Ardern was popular (helped by the opposition party having just had a meltdown, that happens from time to time, but their new leader, Judith ‘Crusher’ Collins, was eager to establish a profile of being appealing and taking the moral high ground).   So there was no big groundswell of discontent or mistrust, and nobody in the opposition could see any mileage in sabotaging Covid measures.   At a different time in history it might have been different.

‘Wild New Zealand’ does of course show the better and more spectacular parts of our country, not the boring flat bits full of houses or cows.   That said, we do have a pretty good supply of scenery.   That’s one reason I like Piha beach, it’s on the west coast, with plenty of cliffs, wild surf, and ‘bush’ (native forest).   I love England but I can’t think of any areas of England that are quite so ‘wild’, other than some fairly bleak uplands.

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@oochillyo

Whew! That’s quite a review. (Also, a wall of print. With respect, it would appear much less intimidating to the reader if you hit Return occasionally to break it up into paragraphs :).

It’s a while since I viewed the Monks trilogy but much of it is coming back to me. It was an absolutely brilliant concept in ‘Extremis’ that the whole ‘world’ was a simulation and the people who apparently ‘suicided’ had just realised they were characters in the simulation and ‘quit’. Turned the whole ‘world’ on its head.

I did like the original pyramid in Tajikistan (?) that just sat there, enigmatically, doing nothing. And I really liked the Doctor’s cunning idea of turning off all the CCTV and then seeing which one the Monks turned back on – that was genius. The concept of Bill’s mum being solely an idea in Bill’s head, so not something the Monks could mess with (?) sort of eluded me the first time around. Too subtle for me, I guess. But she was excellently cast, she looked not only beautiful but warm and welcoming – perfect for an ‘ideal mum’.

As to the Monks being benevolent, (a ‘benevolent dictatorship’?), I can’t really agree with you. I think living a lie and being subservient to the Monks was too much freedom to give up. I’m always suspicious of using the word ‘freedom’ but I think it’s valid in this case.

(I do think ‘freedom’ is a bit of a myth – there is no such thing as absolute ‘freedom’. We are all subject to some laws or other if we live in any society, the only alternative is to live alone on a desert island and that’s no fun while you starve to death. And different countries have widely different ideas of what ‘freedom’ is, it’s easy to find examples but just as easy to start a fight over it 🙂 But, though it’s very hard to define, certainly some places are much freer than others).

I did have one nitpick based on geography – when the Monks’ pyramid set down in London, where exactly was it (I mean its precise location on the street?) and which building(s) did it flatten/dematerialise/bulldoze out of the way to make room for itself? Or was it a small Tardis-sized ship with a massive hologram screen? (I’m an engineer and I tend to get these spasms of logistical nit-pickery. Time travel, fine. Bigger-on-the-inside, fine with me. Finding an unoccupied building site in central London, oops. 🙂

I suspect there were some plot holes in this trilogy – but I don’t care. Some of the questions I’ve seen raised were just carping criticism, like Where did the Monks come from? Don’t know, doesn’t matter, after all nobody knew where the Cybermen came from until RTD and Moffatt invented backstories for them. I like the ‘shiny bits’ like the Pyramid in Tajikistan and the submarine planted in the desert (How did the Monks do that? Unkown alien powers, that’s how, doesn’t matter!) and I’m quite willing to dismiss or invent hypothetical background circumstances for why things happen on-screen. Unless it’s a massive plot-hole for the main thread of the story, I’ll happily ignore it.

I expect I’ll think of more things about the trilogy but I’ll post this now and go to the beach…

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@janetteb     Hoping you have good luck with your booking and don’t get disrupted (again) by a lockdown.

I would be in Christchurch now (as I think I blathered about in the On The Sofa page), but the Sunday evening before I was due to catch the train we had a 3-day Level 3 lockdown…

As it happened, we had about 2 weeks perfect weather before that, to the point where I was getting almost weary of trekking to the beach every day (but what else can ya do?), then the Monday and Tuesday and half the Wednesday (yesterday) were rainy and cold.   And now the Level 3 is over, the weather’s nice again.   So for once Auckland weather co-operated perfectly.

Anyway, all one can do is take it as it comes and make the best of the situation.

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@oochillyo

Yes, I really like Extremis.   I’d have to re-watch it again to remind me of the full plot  (like many of Moffat’s episodes, because things are not what they seem, you miss a lot on the first time through.   When you re-watch it you notice all sorts of details that now have a different meaning that wasn’t apparent to you before.   I love this sort of plotting, aside from the surprise factor, it’s really like getting two episodes for the price of one.   For some reason some people hate it, as though they’re insulted by being ‘fooled’; personally, I love it.  ‘You bastard Moffatt!’ (said with a grin).     And yes, the Pope ruining Bill’s date was classic.

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@janetteb

Well, I’m hoping our lockdown is short.   I’ve re-booked on next Monday’s train, so here’s hoping…

(I have to say Kiwirail’s booking staff were very good.   The lockdown was announced at 6pm Sunday, starting at midnight.   I got text messages from Kiwirail saying ‘train cancelled, please see your email’ and emails giving more details and ‘if you wish to re-book/refund, please just reply to this email indicating your preferences’.   Which I did, but just to make sure I rang the booking office next day to confirm the changes, which the booking clerk cheerfully did, I said ‘you very very prompt with your emails’ to which he said ‘yes, we were up all night sending them’.   That’s customer service!

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Hi @oochillyo    Well, actually I am home, home being Auckland.   My wife is at our daughter’s place in Christchurch.   If I lived in Christchurch I could have claimed an exemption to ‘go home’, (and yes I did contemplate lying about where I lived, but decided it might not work), and anyway it would have been academic since the train was cancelled.   Hopefully there will be be no more Covid cases and the lockdown will come off after a few days.

Besides, after a couple of weeks of perfect beach weather, it’s now cold and rainy so quite good weather to *not* be travelling.   🙂

 

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Aargh! The website ate my message! Try again…

@oochillyo

Hi Declan. Portuguese man’o’war (which are not actually jellyfish) are huge and terrifying stingers, found in the Atlantic. The ‘Portuguese’ name was probably given because they like warmer water so British sailors probably first saw them in the Atlantic ocean ‘off Portugal’ (maybe the Azores, I don’t know). Or in the Caribbean and were at war with Portugal at the time. Or something like that. I would not necessarily expect them to concentrate on Portugal itself.

We don’t get them this side of the world, thankfully. What we get are Pacific man’o’war or ‘bluebottles’, very much a mini version. Can sting (though I’ve never been stung) but never fatal. I see lots of small ones, 1-2″ long floats, washed up on the beach. At Piha a couple of days before I got ‘itched’, I saw the biggest I’ve ever seen, a whole 3-4″ long, maybe they were the source of the tiny larvae that got me.

Names are misleading. Even the NZ Herald got it wrong, “Bluebottle jellyfish, also known as Portuguese man o’ war…” which is doubly wrong because bluebottles are neither jellyfish or Pmow’s. “Sea lice” rash is not usually caused by sea lice (which are a parasite on fish), but actually by jellyfish/bluebottle larvae. And in England, bluebottles are big noisy buzzing house flies. And so on…

Valentines Day has been postponed for a week around my household, I should have been on the train to Wellington today (and on to Christchurch tomorrow to join my wife there), instead we have a snap 3-day Level 3 lockdown which means no-one leaves Auckland without an exemption. And anyway they’ve cancelled the train. I have to say Kiwirail were very efficient and prompt at emailing and text-messaging me, and they’ve re-booked me next Monday (on the assumption the lockdown will only last the three days).    So I get to chill out here and watch yet another Youtube season of Robot Wars  🙂

This has nothing to do with Doctor Who, I’m dreadful at straying Off Topic, maybe I should move it to the Kebab and Calculator…

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…and would you believe it, I was booked to catch the train to Wellington tomorrow morning to carry on to Christchurch to meet Mrs D, but 3 people in Auckland just tested positive so we’re in Level 3 lockdown for 3 days which means I wouldn’t be allowed on the train.   Just have to re-book next week and carry on working my way through old Robot Wars on Youtube.   (I’m surprised nobody ever made a Dalek robot though I think it would have got pretty quickly massacred by some of the more destructive ones).

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HI @oochillyou    Nope, the jellyfish stings weren’t painful at the time.   They weren’t adult jellyfish, though I noticed a large number of ‘blue bottles’ (very small Portuguese man’o’war, the biggest we ever get them is 3″ long) swept up on the beach.   I’ve never seen one in the water.   What got me is swarms of very little jellyfish larvae (or something), their stings are too small to be felt, but what they do, their stings are just enough to cause an itch.   So if you get covered in the things and don’t realise to wash them off with a good shower straight after you get out of the water, you get covered in a rash of itchy bumps.  Not painful, just itchy, it’s probably as much an allergic reaction to their tiny stings.   And the itching lasts for days.   It’s just about gone now, however I got stung by a wasp a couple of days ago and now the spot where the wasp got me is itching!

Back to Voyage of the Damned, yes I like that ep.   I know it isn’t very highly rated but I did like Kylie Minogue’s character, and also I was happy for Mr Copper.

Blink of course is an all-time classic, I can see why your friend was upset at the death of Billy Shipton, though really he shouldn’t be, since Billy had a good life.   It’s just that time travel highlights mortality, I guess.   But I must admit that scene (“it’s the same rain”) always makes me go a bit damp.    And yes those weeping angels are uniquely scary.

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Hi Declan @oochillyo

I’m just sittin here chilling, watching old Robot Wars on Youtube.    It’s raining outside, like yesterday, and a bit cooler.   This is almost a relief after the two weeks of warm weather and sunshine that forced me, lemming-like, to trek out to Piha beach every day.   I got a nice case of all-over itchy hives that the quack reckoned was either an allergy to maybe watermelon  (watermelon?   I didn’t know they could cause allergies) or more likely ‘sea lice’.   Yes sea lice do exist,  they’re parasites on fish, but the ‘sea lice’ that give swimmers itches are actually jellyfish larvae.   Didn’t stop me swimming though…

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@winston     It was actually JanetteB who first brought up drop bears.

But anyway, you have Sasquatch, and the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus.   (I know the octopus is technically USAnian, originating in Olympic National Park, but it must have reached Vancouver Island by now)

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@janetteb

I do know that the Discworld featured a vast panoply of mythical creatures.   Just when I thought Sir Pterry had exhausted the entire catalogue of spooks and monsters he would come up with some more.   So it’s very tempting to think that every mythical creature that could be conceived of is lurking in potential Discworld space, just waiting to be discovered or, possibly, brought into existence by the power of belief.   Running haggises included.

(In fact, now I think of it, that’s exactly what happened in ‘The Last Continent’ on the God of Evolution’s island.   If you thought of a creature, bing!, it appeared.   Just when I thought I’d had an original thought, Sir Pterry was there first…)

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Drop bears (along with many other Ozzie traditions) featured in The Last Continent.

I’m not aware of any Pratchett books that had ambulatory haggises though.

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@winston    Yes a drop bear is exactly and precisely what you have surmised.   It is said to have a reinforced butt so as to cause the maximum amount of damage to the victim.

It is also a myth, invented to test the credulity of ignorant Poms and other visitors.   It is, sadly, not real (except in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld).

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@janetteb

True, we don’t have drop bears. But then, we (NZ) have a notable lack of murderous wildlife that hates you and wants to kill you painfully. To the extent that I walk everywhere in the bush barefoot (admittedly sometimes garnering curious remarks from the yuppie generation who can’t imagine setting out without their designer Nikes, but I’ve never suffered worse than a wasp sting yet. Curiously, they seem to think that unmade tracks with mud or rocks are hard on the feet. No. Rocks are fine. Mud is fine. What I hate and loathe is ‘upgraded’ tracks with sharp gravel.)

Among the wildlife we don’t have is alligators, cassowaries, duckbill platypuses (yes they have poisonous spines on their legs. A poisonous mammal? Only in Australia…), snakes, funnelweb spiders, cane toads, sea wasps, cone shells, blue-ringed octopus, stonefish, lionfish… I may have missed a few.

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@blenkinsopthebrave

I call foul!    Aussies stealing NZ’s assets again!    (Actually, I’m a Pom, I don’t give a toss either way but  xkcd 386 …)

The story is, Toyota NZ ran a series of humorous TV ads for the Hilux featuring Barry Crump, a well-known Kiwi backwoodsy character.   And (IIRC) in one of those the word ‘bugger’ was used.   This attracted a number of prissy complaints to the Advertising Standards Association.   And Toyota’s memorable response was, famously, the first ad you linked above, in which the entire dialogue was ‘Bugger!’.   Here’s another link to it on the official NZ government Encyclopedia of New Zealand site:

https://teara.govt.nz/en/video/43898/controversial-bugger-ad-1999

Never mind, just to even things up, here’s my favourite Australian Pommie joke:

A pommie walks into a bar with a cane toad sitting on his head.   The barman said ‘Hey mate, where’d you get that?”   And the cane toad said, “It started as a wart on my arse”.

(Pommie = English, in both Aussie and Enzed, probably one of the few things they agree on   🙂

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Well, when Trump was elected, I hoped he’d have the sense to be content with sticking his name on the building in big letters, appoint some competent advisers to run the country, and leave them to it and swan off to his golf course.    I should have known better.   Trump really should have known better.

Trump just had to undo anything positive that Obama had achieved, purely out of malice.   It’s refreshing to see Biden reversing Trump’s idiocies even quicker.    The trouble is, will other countries be so willing to enter into agreements with the US when tRump has shown they can be torn up on a whim?   Traditionally, governments have tended to regard agreements made by previous administrations as having some weight, they would try to ‘renegotiate’ but they didn’t just break their word.   tRump had no idea how to behave in a civilised or dignified manner so US foreign policy became equally irresponsible and unpredictable.    It may take a while for Biden to rebuild this.

Trump boasted that he hadn’t started any wars, but that wasn’t for lack of trying.   Full marks to the government of Iran (yes, really!) for keeping their cool under provocation and, effectively, showing some faith that the US would return to sanity.    Yep, for the last four years I’ve had more faith in the maturity and sagacity of the government of Iran than the USA.   🙂     (Note – that’s not an endorsement of Iran so much as a reflection of what Donald Trump did to the USA).

@janetteb, I respectfully disagree, I don’t think tRump has been a ‘wake up call’, any more than Hitler was in between-wars Germany; we all know people can behave nastily when motivated.   The toxic tRump legacy is that he has legitimised ignorant, irrational, xenophobic, deliberately perverse, bloody-minded  and antisocial behaviour at all levels.    40% of USAnians have said they won’t take a Covid vaccine, ffs.    How is Biden ever going to restore a rational USA with all of those loonies around?

Never mind, tRump’s gone now.    I wish Biden and Harris all the luck in the world, they’ll need it.

 

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@nerys I’m in the general age range when the death of me is expected. 🙂 Or at least, wouldn’t be unusual. It’s a bit disconcerting when acquaintances I’ve known for years, die. I just find it convenient to ignore the statistics.

I wouldn’t even try to plan my own funeral. The one thing I might demand is that they play Dire Straits’ ‘Wild Theme’**. As it happens, I’m an atheist, but Mrs D gives Jesus his detailed orders for the day every morning, so I know I’ll get the full Christian works. That doesn’t bother me, I won’t know so I won’t care and I’ll be the only one present who doesn’t have to sit through the whole service 🙂 And, it will make Mrs D feel much better. (Of course, if I am observing it in a ghostly fashion, it will prove I’ve been wrong anyway, won’t it?)

[** Footnote: Specifically, the version of “Wild Theme/LocalHero” off the Sultans of Swing album, which was a live recording at Les Arenes, Nimes in 1993. I have to be so specific because there are dozens of variations on Youtube and Mark Knopfler changed his playing every time he performed it. Mark Knopfler was, I think, the one musician mentioned by name in Doug Adams’ Hitchhiker trilogy – So Long, and Thanks for All The Fish, IIRC – and Adams was right about his playing.]

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@janetteb I’ll wish you a timely restoration of your train service. I know the feeling, Auckland public transport planning has been a shambles for the last century and they see no reason to change now.
In the beginning, the main station was right in town at the foot of Queen Street (call it ‘Britomart’). Then in the 30’s it got too busy so they abandoned it and built a grand new station at Strand, half a mile out. This became a major impediment to the use of suburban services, so finally in 2000 they built a new underground station (at Britomart) and abandoned most of Strand. A few years later, as suburban usage increased again, Britomart became too busy so the Wellington train (‘Northern Explorer’ aka ‘Dora’) was banished to the one remaining lonely platform left at Strand where it no longer connected with the Auckland suburban trains.
January is when they typically shut down parts of the Auckland system for track works and ‘upgrading’, so I get used to Dora terminating in some unusual fashion. This year they’ve shut down Britomart so the subbies have taken over the Strand platform and evicted Dora, which terminated at Otahuhu, change to a subbie for – Strand!

Like you say in SA, the atmosphere here re covid precautions feels strange. Masks – sometimes in use. ‘Checking in’ to commercial premises – they’re all displaying the ‘Covid’ signs (which people are supposed to scan with their phones) and many are, many aren’t. It reminds me of what I’ve read of the ‘phony war’ in 1939 when war had been declared but nobody was shooting. Or waiting for a storm to break. Hopefully the vaccines will work before it does.

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@nerys Can I offer my condolences? Still, it should be some consolation that your father ‘had a good run’, as they say. From your account, I think he was maybe more fortunate than most in the manner of his going.

My father died at 96. He was fine, living in his own flat, very active, till the last six months when he went downhill and could no longer manage for himself and had to go into a ‘home’ and went a bit – odd. Slightly paranoid. Which was very trying for all concerned. But his funeral was attended by a vast number of his friends. It was an excellent service, we were lucky in that the funeral director made a lot of very good suggestions that we were happy to adopt. Until that time I had thought that funeral directors were as superfluous as interior decorators – who needs ’em? – but I realised that just having someone who knew how to take care of all the 1001 details within a few days was worth every dollar.

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Hi from DownUnderLand (or is that Australia? How about ‘Down under and a bit off to the right so it’s almost falling off the map’ land?) NZ in case I’m being too obscure.

Well here we’re OK so far but nervous. The new more infectious strain has shown up in a few quarantined arrivals but hasn’t escaped (yet). Vaccination won’t really start till April, opr something like that. Our Opposition (National Party) is saying it should be starting now (rather unkindly I suspect they’re looking for a ‘point of difference’ and that if it was starting right now, they’d be saying we should wait until it’s been thoroughly proven overseas). But the point is, they’ve chosen to criticise the sufficiency of anti-Covid measures, they obviously see no mileage to be made in pandering to the ‘Covid deniers’. Which is, I think, a good call for them and for the country.

So anyway, we’re only at Level 1, unless it escapes quarantine. The government has just ordered wearing of masks on public transport (previously only required at higher ‘alert levels’). Curious thing – yesterday I caught the train from Christchurch to Picton and the ferry to Wellington, and though all passengers had been warned by email to bring a mask, nobody wore them. Today, on the train from Wellington to Auckland, they reminded everyone that wearing a mask was compulsory and handed out masks to anyone who hadn’t brought one. A few people were a bit lax about wearing their masks, but nobody (that I saw) objected to wearing them. Was there a change overnight? I don’t know, because I haven’t seen the news for 2 days.

Anyway, wearing masks has absolutely zero economic impact, unlike lockdowns.     And partial lockdowns are extremely problematic, like trying to fix the leaks in just one end of a boat…

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I tend to agree with those preceding recent (‘recent’? 20-month-old, so what, it’s all relative isn’t it) comments on Chibnall – his stories are all fairly straightforward heros-&-villains tales, with aliens slotted in for the humans. They’re lacking the flashes of brilliance that the Moff used to inject.

The Power of Three did have one amazingly original idea – the cubes. I loved them. They were enigmatic, neat, and funny, and the various things they did were a great display of imagination on the part of the writer (or producers. I imagine they probably had an informal discussion group coming up with ideas for nutty things the cubes might do). I imagined the cubes were, in fact, carrying out sophisticated psychological experiments on humans, in the way the mice did on scientists in Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I thought this was going to be a precursor to taking over all of humanity. It seemed a bit of an anti-climax when it turned out that all they cubes (or their creators) wanted was to exterminate humanity – you don’t need extensive in-depth knowledge of a species to do that.

I think it would have been more coherent if the cubes had been investigating humanity in depth with a view to reaching a verdict on whether humankind merited extermination or not. But if that was the case, I missed it.

Again, this episode probably suffers by comparison with its neighbours – the preceding western (A Town Called Mercy) – westerns always have high production values, at least if they can afford to go to Spain; and the climactic Angels Take Manhattan.

 

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Well, I found this episode to be pretty average, very much what-it-says-on-the-tin. Though it probably also suffers from its placement between the awesome Asylum of the Daleks with its Moffat-esque twist in the tail, and the equally striking A Town Called Mercy (Amy, pointing a gun at the Doctor and she looks as if she really means it).

The comedy robots were genuinely funny until, shockingly, they killed a dinosaur just to make a point. That was disconcerting. After that, I didn’t even blink when the Doctor let Solomon get blown up, in fact I thought he deserved it – both emotionally (he was a repulsive character) and rationally (he did murder all the Silurians).

Nefertiti, I loved. I would have dearly liked to see her return as an ongoing companion in later episodes, she would have made a worthy opponent for the Doctor (though, with Amy’s presence, I guess that role might have started to become crowded). I am severely un-woke, but still I disliked the implication that all it needed was a bit of macho egotism from John Riddell to win her interest/companionship. He should have had to work a lot harder than that. I think the episode would have benefitted from rather fewer companions – Amy, Rory, Brian, John Riddell, Nefertiti – too many people! It didn’t leave room to do justice to all of them. (This is reminiscent of Chibnall’s Season 11).

That’s my 2 cents worth, anyway.

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@jamjarr     Just to pick up on one point – yes, I really liked Ace too.   I was initially prejudiced against the character because, who calls themselves ‘Ace’?     But Sophie Aldred was great in the role and she really had some ‘chemistry’ with Sylvester McCoy, it shows through in the episodes, and you can see it in their appearances together at Cons.   (There’s quite a lot of footage on Youtube of the various doctors and companions at Cons, which might be worth your while viewing while you’re working through Who).

Similarly, I thought Sylvester McCoy looked silly, having just seen still pictures of him with his question-mark clothing – again, quite the opposite when I saw him in episodes.    It’s a pity he and Ace didn’t have more time to establish the more substantial storylines they were starting to get.

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I’ll echo the Happy New Year from here in upside-down-land.    In fact we got to see it first and probably in rather better condition than when it reached you further-from-the-date-line people.   🙂    Since we’re currently not in any sort of lockdown – a circumstance which in normal times would be utterly unremarkable but is a rare good fortune right now – the crowd that watched the fireworks in Auckland may have been the biggest in the world, for the first and probably the only time ever.   When you’re approximately #100 on the list of countries-by-size, you grab these tiny distinctions whenever they come past.

Here in South Island, the stiff cold onshore breeze finally let up, for the first time in several days – it *is* supposed to be summer here ffs! – so I ventured in for a ‘swim’, which consists mostly of jumping at the four-foot waves in an effort not to be knocked over – it’s actually quite fun.  So there I was in four feet of water and a little sealion floated past, waving his flippers in the air (which I hope is a sign that he was playing in the waves).   First time I’ve seen one that close on New Brighton beach.   I just hope he was a good omen.

Revolution of the Daleks – I’ll make a wild prediction that it involves a massive retcon.   I expect I’ll find out in a year or two when I view it on DVD  (the thing about the Doctor’s adventures is, they’re timeless, so it doesn’t matter when you watch them).

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First, best wishes to everyone, I hope you’re all safe (so far as you can be) and not too badly affected by the various lockdowns.

Here, I’m in Christchurch, NZ South Island, and we just had two noticeably cold days in the middle of summer.   12 degrees C, I think (53 F), which is not all that cold admittedly but still, it should be double that (in Celsius) right now.   More like a nice day in midwinter.   The climate is truly screwed up.   The day we arrived (a week ago) it was beautiful and more people on New Brighton beach than I’ve ever seen before.   (We’re currently Covid-free, by the way).

@nerys    Best wishes for your Dad, at least he is now recovered? and will be out of isolation in a couple of weeks?   I think Last Christmas  is the best of the specials.   Sarcastic Santa and the elves are a hoot, and the best thing is, they draw attention to how logically impossible they are, and then at the end we find there’s a perfectly rational explanation for them.   I love that.    I can’t watch it myself (all my DVD’s are back home in Auckland) so I’ll just have to think it  🙂

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I’d echo blenkinsopthebrave’s wishes, and particularly to my relatives, most of whom are in the UK.

Here in NZ, I’m now in Christchurch, we came down via the Cook Strait ferry, and nobody was wearing masks or thinking much of covid.   The beach yesterday was crowded.   Now this is probably okay since we’ve had no covid cases ‘in the wild’ for a few weeks, but the Government is understandably nervous, looking ‘across the ditch’ at Sydney that currently has 30+ new cases.   Having to lockdown right in the middle of summer, that would be tough.

janetteb, best wishes to you and hoping the Sydney outbreak doesn’t spread to SA.

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@winston

Thanks for the good wishes.    Our celebration was low-key but satisfying.    (As it happens, Mrs D forgot our very first anniversary (and I remembered it), which set up a very stable scenario – it never mattered which of us forgot an anniversary subsequently.   Mrs D can’t say (accusingly) “You forgot it!” because she did it first.   And I know better than to try to make anything of it because, well, no male ever won that sort of argument.   🙂

Back to mask designs, yes those feathery leaves are rather elegant.   I can see masks becoming quite the fashion accessory.

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Hi @janetteb

We’ve had a ‘check in’ app (in NZ) for about 6 months, but my $18 cellphone is not a smartphone. All it does is calls and texts, which is all I want a phone for. Oh, and it’s even got a camera, which takes pictures which are, surprisingly, not bad, if the light is good enough. I do also have a Samsung S2, but the Covid app won’t run on anything that old. So I take the trouble to manually ‘check in’ at most places, though it’s rarely enforced. But I think you should certainly complain about any place that enforces checking in and doesn’t have a manual option. We’re back down to Level 1 currently, though masks have just been introduced as a requirement on our local buses and trains (previously they were only required at Level 2 or 3). I’m not fond of wearing a mask – it makes my glasses fog up – but I carry one just in case I’m in company.

We’ve made the necessary Cook Strait ferry bookings for us to go down and stay with our daughter in Christchurch over summer. There’s a risk, if there’s a significant outbreak, that sailings could get cancelled, but better to take that risk than not go at all. In preparation for which I just did the clutch on Mrs D’s Mazda Tribute (aka Ford Escape), what a saga – it’s a 4-wheel-drive, which complicates everything. So I was putting it off but it finally reached the stage where it wouldn’t have got us up the first hill…

@winston I’m not surprised kids accept wearing masks (often more readily than adults). To them it’s just another form of ‘dressing up’, like the way they happily wear Batman or Lone Ranger masks (well, maybe not Lone Ranger these days, how about Darth Vader?) The good thing about masks is, you can improvise one yourself – have you ever thought of going for the Tom Baker / Osgood look with the scarf?

As it happens we’re just having a very small impromptu party – a cousin just phoned Mrs D to congratulate us on our xxxth wedding anniversary, which both of us had completely forgotten as usual. Takeaways and a cake grabbed from the supermarket, no expense spared 🙂

 

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@johnnybear

I got one too, a couple of days ago.   I think it’s ‘phishing’ i.e. a scam.   I’d ignore it.

(I found the message function on this site has a ‘Delete’ button.   So that’s what i did.  Made like a Cyberman – ‘Delete.   Delete.’    🙂

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@blenkinsopthebrave

Thanks.  You know, it’s occurred to me that Donald Trump is certainly making sure he’ll be remembered – as the biggest and most spectacular loser ever.   Nobody loses like Trump!   Probably not what he’d like to be remembered for, but it’s entirely self-inflicted.   I have to admit I’d have been secretly disappointed if he’d picked up the phone and conceded the day after polls closed like normal Prez’s.

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@nerys    I’m so pleased to hear the news about your Dad.   And I’m pleased that he had stuff to keep him occupied if he needed it.   The reason I asked whether he had stuff to keep him occupied mentally is, if I had to go into isolation, I’d be climbing the walls after a couple of hours without something to keep me busy.   For example if we go visiting my wife’s rellies (they all go off chattering for hours) I just take a dreadful French sub-James-Bond novel (I’m learning French by reading it) to keep me busy.

However, I was forgetting that being sick not only reduces your ability to do things, it also mercifully reduces the urge to be ‘doing something’ (as your dad found).    When I had heart valve repairs a decade ago, I took a few books and a portable CD player with me (because I knew they had TV in the room but the average TV program drives me nuts), but all I actually needed was the CD’s.   It was quite pleasant just lying there comfortably doing nothing and – most significantly – without the guilty feeling that there were things I ought to be doing.

Re the ‘covid tourists’ I can sympathise with your concerns.    Here in NZ, when we had the ‘first wave’ of Covid, one of the first things they did was put strong travel restrictions in place for the whole country, even in areas that didn’t have cases – simply because all it takes is one person to travel to another region and start spreading it and bingo, you’ve got an outbreak before you even knew it.   (Though I suspect they may not have been enforced very strongly in remote covid-free areas).

When Auckland had its mini-‘second wave’ (with an epicentre a couple of miles from me) Auckland went to Level 3 (out of 4) while the rest of the country went to level 2.   And travel out of the Auckland area was actually restricted.   There were police roadblocks on all main roads out of Auckland (Auckland is geographically fairly easy to isolate) and people without a legitimate reason to travel (such as, genuinely essential business or they lived elsewhere and were returning home) were turned back.

This is, literally, what you have to do to control covid outbreaks.   In normal times there would be public outrage over restrictions like that but everyone’s seen the overseas news and we all know how lucky we are to be (almost) covid-free.    Waiting for the vaccine…

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@janetteb

I was just prompted to order Seasons 2 and 3 of Sherlock.   Bit odd to note that on the cover (Watson) is Dentarthurdent from the movie.   Which I watched the other night and really, it is a bit weak even compared with the TV series.

My DVD of Survival just arrived, they certainly have put all the extras they could lay their hands on on these old Who reissues.   So I know what I’m watching tonight.

(Re B5:)    ‘The best is brilliant but there are some cringey moments.’     Exactly like Xena, then.   😉

 

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@blenkinsopthebrave

I’ll see you and raise you this:

 

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@missy

Well of course Blakes 7 is dated, it dates from about the same vintage as early Doctor Who.   And it was notorious for its cardboard sets that would wobble if someone bumped them.    It still had some cool dialogue though (I’m a sucker for clever dialogue and black humour).   In particular the hero (who I take to be Avon) is decidedly NOT a ‘good man’.   And I’m attracted to the irony that, most of the time, there weren’t exactly Seven of them and it didn’t include Blake.   So I think I’ll try a re-watch of some episodes at some point and see how well it’s held up.

I’ll certainly look into Sherlock a bit more – I’ve just seen the first three episodes and they were quite intriguing.

Babylon 5 I know very little of.   For some reason the concept of the show doesn’t really appeal to me, I can’t really say why.

I’m quite baffled by the importance of loo paper.   I keep a stack of it because it’s useful for all sorts of general-purpose uses like cleaning car parts and as a substitute for Kleenex tissues, but if I ran out I’ve got a stack of old newspapers.   In fact weren’t old newspapers hung on a nail the traditional furnishing of an outback ‘dunny’?

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@bluesqueakpip Odd about the toilet paper. We had the same thing here in New Zealand. I must admit to being moderately guilty, I didn’t go crazy buying it but we were in Christchurch when it all kicked off and we came back up to Auckland with three packs of TP in the back of the wife’s Mazda. Cleaning products all flew off the shelves too, luckily I had seen a litre of isopropyl alcohol in the hardware a few months earlier – first time I’d seen it in ‘bulk’, it usually comes in tiny expensive bottles as ‘keyboard cleaner’ or the like – so I’d bought it.

@nerys – good to hear about your father. I hope this progresses to a recovery. Does he have anything to keep him occupied – books or Internet? At least Covid is one virus you can’t catch down a phone line (though I’m sure the conspiracy theorists are working on it).

@janetteb One good thing about masks is, you can make your own. Or even a scarf wrapped around – you could go full Tom Baker 🙂
I’d be happy to suggest an episode of Xena when the time comes. In case I’m not in contact at that moment, I’ll mention one now – the one most people seem to suggest is ‘The Debt’ 1 and 2, a two-parter in the middle of Season 3. Or anything with the villainess Callisto in it, they’re usually fun.
It sounds like you have a good long-term project. Mine is – finish re-watching through Xena (I interrupted it to watch right through New Who – and that was a while ago!), then I’ve got The Prisoner, Red Dwarf, Blakes 7, Battlestar Galactica (the new series, not the old one), Farscape, not necessarily in that order. One day I might take a look at Game of Thrones, since everybody else in the universe apparently has.

Cheers

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@janetteb

Sorry to hear your weekend is off. Hopefully the lockdown will be brief and you can reschedule your trip.

I’m not sure what Black Books is?

Xena is notorious for the uneven ‘quality’ of its episodes, even more than Who. One week it’s Hell Bent, next week it’s Love and Monsters (in Who terms). And from my observation any Xena fan would agree with that statement, even though they’d battle to the death over which was which. 😉

(Was there ever a fandom that wasn’t a hotbed of dissent and bickering over the storyline and the characters? I haven’t seen one yet).

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@bluesqueakpip

Sadly, there’s no great glowing eye any more, though there was 25,000 years ago – known as the Taupo supervolcano, it was a humongous eruption in the middle of North Island where Lake Taupo is now. I think the lake is in the crater.

There are (of course) books and probably websites that tell where all the locations for LOTR are. I never really investigated that. On the other hand, if you ever caught Hercules or Xena on TV, I could tell you exactly where the Land of the Amazon Dead and the Gateway to Eternity are   🙂

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