@missy  — Yep; the meaning, I guess, of this one or that one is my type — or *not* my type.

If they go pretty boy again, I will probably jump ship.  It’s not that I’m “against” youth, but from where I sit these days, overactive snarky kiddish heroes aren’t offensive — they’re just overfamiliar, dull, and I haven’t got time to wait for them to grow up.  Been; done.  “Merchandise” is  just cheap clutter; when it becomes the core con…[Read more]

@missrori  Thanks for the fanfic; it does illustrate your opinion, and in an imaginative and moving way.  As commentary, let me pull back a bit to a different perspective, a writer’s perspective, a story-teller’s (and eager reader’s and viewer’s) perspective.  The impulse to make it up to the Doctor for all he’s gone through and all he’s lost by…[Read more]

@thane15  Yes, it’s going to get worse, IMO.  And it will be a long time before it gets better.  The fact HRC has won the *popular* vote by a margin of nearly 2 million votes makes it impossible for progressives to just meekly bow and accept the evil farce of a Trump presidency.  To add fuel to the fire, it’s the idiots who spent the past 8 yrs…[Read more]

@mudlark  Yes on your observations and speculations, but there’s another possibility, and it’s far more frightening than Trump himself.  Many knowledgeable commentators have been pointing out that Trump has never done any real work in his life, since he never needed to, and is accustomed to demanding what he wants and getting it; he thinks he’s b…[Read more]

@missrori  the Twelfth Doctor is in need of an overarching story for his tenure.

Good question; I’ve wanted for a long time to see him seriously set about using time travel to return to the scenes of some of his uncorrected “mistakes”, and try to “make amends” for what he can’t fix (which is probably an awful lot, come to think of it).

What…[Read more]

@thane15  Thing is, when you talk to some of the younger people I know they forget SO fast who has died and what they meant. They were sad over Alan Rickman but then they forgot!

Life runs very fast and wide these days; you have to *want* to hang back a bit and examine the depths.  Maybe youngsters, in particular, forget so fast because there’s s…[Read more]

There was just an interview with Cohen in the New Yorker Magazine — in it he said that he saw not conflict between his many years of Zen study and his recent return to Judaism, because Zen isn’t a religion: it’s a practice.  So neatly put, and so true IMO (apart from people who insist on worshiping the Buddha as if he were a god, which I think…[Read more]

@mudlark et al —   Well explained, and yep, I *was* asleep, and soon shall be again.  A couple of notes —

The Electoral College was set up by the Founders of the Constitution because they were distrustful of popular democracy and wanted to avoid a popular vote, possibly driven by factional, ill informed and irrational impulses, resulting in t…[Read more]

@mudlark   grateful universe stepping in to guide a new companion to his door. Missy did that with Clara, largely to the benefit of the Doctor, although her motives were not entirely altruistic, but I think he would rather take his time and find companions for himself

As I think about it, I’m seeing it differently.  A grateful universe (or F…[Read more]

@thane15  We say “going off the grid” here; it means pioneering your own little homestead somewhere, raising your own food, building your own stuff and so on, a bit like the Amish — all old fashioned, but disconnected as much as possible from modern “civilization”.  The “grid” is the electric power grid of wires and stations; solar cells and/or s…[Read more]

@missy  “Parades End” was pretty good; I just watched the BBC version of “A Dance to the Music of Time”, and right now another series (on Acorntv) from a novel I’d never heard of, “The Camomile Lawn”, all about a sweet and pleasant England blown to smithereens by war.

I put a critical comment about “Strange” on the movies discussion — I enjoyed…[Read more]

@thane15  The people calling up “help lines” for consoling conversation are my people, the 57% that worked and voted for Clinton, only to see all that effort and eager anticipation blown sky-high by the reactionary dumb-heads of the Republican party and its toxic fringes.  We’re in shock; they’re celebrating what they think is a win in a…[Read more]

I went to see “Dr. Strange” on Monday, wondering what Cumberbatch would bring to this Marvel Comic story.  My verdict: the movie is very pretty to look at, especially through 3D “glasses” — very detailed and impressive CGI.  The acting is — appropriate. But it’s really no more than just what it purports to be — a filmed comic book.  Where “s…[Read more]

I’m out of shock sufficiently to post now — a friend and I called off a lunch date today because we both felt so gut-punched by the victory of the Deplorables.  And it is pretty much a total victory — White House, both houses of Congress, and pretty soon, the Supreme Court, when that miserable excuse for a man makes his appointments from among…[Read more]

@mudlark  Oh, that’s a good summary of the Doctor/Clara dilemma and its resolution!  Concise, too, which I have to admire.

for a split second the man’s face becomes that of Clara as he would have seen her just before he lost consciousness in the stolen tardis.

I saw that, and assumed it was a momentary flash of what had just happened to him bef…[Read more]

@missy  Got it — Terrence Stamp!  In “The Limey”, and that thing with Matt Damon, I think, running about chased by a bunch of future bureaucrats through lots of doorway from one street to halfway across the park or something . . . He’s got this weird, sort of dried up beautiful old gangster look to him now.  Stamp, not Damon.

Timothy Dalton –…[Read more]

@mudlark  @janetteb  Good, good stuff — history is a marvel, but in the US it isn’t honored at all, but regularly replaced by myths and propaganda, which we know because every now and then a trove of documents of some kind throws the spotlight of reality on some famous incident, there’s a flare-up, and it’s all forgotten as the s…[Read more]

@pedant  OH.  Thanks, that’s useful to know.  Atkins’ series definitely stressed the way even servants with very old-fashioned loyalties that they couldn’t leave behind still began to find ways outward and upward during and after the Great War.  Fellowes’ series was just *weird* about the servants and how unrealistically kindly their bosses wer…[Read more]

@janetteb  Thanks for moving the thread.  That icky servant stuff bothered me too, although I think it was actually a pretty accurate reflection of attitudes inherited from old feudal patterns plus scarcity of employment apart from heavy duty farm and factory work at the time.  The initial “Upstairs, Downstairs” series was created by a woman (A…[Read more]