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29 August 2015 at 18:12 #42140
@missy — no looks but admiring ones where I’m going today: local SF convention this weekend, “Bubonicon 47”, with the usual, enthusiastic DW contingent present and on the program. Gotta go, couple of program items listed on my badge —
ichi
25 August 2015 at 07:49 #42037Occasionally, just very occasionally a companion needs to be killed off in order to sustain a sense of genuine danger.
Also, I think, in Clara’s case I think there needs to be a strong finish just to do justice to the character — her complexity, her willfulness, her nerve, and of course her high standing in the Doctor’s regard. And because this Doctor is old and experienced enough with time and what it brings, he carries in his somberness an aura of doubt and anxiety that goes beyond “am I a good man” and into “People I love die on me, and how often is it my fault?” That needs to be grounded in real events sometimes, or he could come off as somebody inclined to indulging in neurotic self-pity.
23 August 2015 at 17:36 #4200823 August 2015 at 05:52 #42001@purofilion Nothing to apologize for, not to worry. I just thought, “Oops, messed up again — ” mainly because I’m still not reliably up to speed on internet etiquette, and probably never will be (too late, too LATE!). Happy to have cues to help steer through it.
23 August 2015 at 04:50 #41999@janetteb Phew, thanks! But watch out for that *impatience*, y”all. (this waiting is plain and fancy KILLING me!) I need my running, jumping, and standing still, damn it! Without it, there’s nothing but — but *chocolate*! And coffee. The nectarines have already gone off top grade.
23 August 2015 at 01:58 #41997@purofilion Oh crap, sorry — navigating the twists and turns of spoilerism is clearly not yet a skill I’ve acquired. I thought anything in an episode still to come was the main kind of thing to be shielded, assuming the BBC hadn’t yet alluded to it in the trailers? Cast news, or comments by the creatives in interviews, I thought were pretty open, since every time someone opens their mouth in public, it seems, speculation starts all over the Doctor-net about what they said and what it “means” — which seemed like fair bonkerizing as part of lots of very public discussion to me, but — isn’t?
Still kind of confused . . . I saw what PhaseShift said, and went over to News, didn’t realize that I was being (very gently, and thanks for that) warned off saying anything more here, since I thought the Sofa was — mm. Okay. No possibly spoiler-y details of anything here, then, only on “spoiler” thread — or “News” thread?
???
22 August 2015 at 22:39 #41994@lisa And the “crazy look” — yaaaahhhHHH! Like that, yep. One of my younger sisters has impatience too, and I have seen that crazy look in other places than just in the mirror. Funniest is how annoyed I get when I recognized impatience in other people — like,”yeah, in that big a hurry, are you, and how about paying attention to right NOW before you kill somebody in your hurry, and nobody else around here has things they need to get to and get done — ” Ridiculous.
22 August 2015 at 22:27 #41993@purofilion @lisa Tea, yes! Otherwise, I’ve found a couple of ameliorating strategies, over the years: one is, meditation of the “pay attention to your immediate surroundings and internal goings-on” variety. The other is catching myself in the middle of an impatience fit (happens a lot while driving, of course) and tell myself “Ahah, gotcha — that’s you, Impatience, caught you in the act.” Step out of it, that is. Feels better, brings the present back. Giving a bit of money helps too. I mean the dollar bills I keep in a slot in the car door, to hand out the window to someone holding up a cardboard sign by the road before the stop light changes; or that old guy toiling up a steep street in the afternoon heat –I drove him to his bus stop (he asked me what I thought about “what’s happening in this country” and I said, “Nothing good”, and we had a quiet chat). Those moments are so real, everything brightens and re-focuses after.
The impatience itself isn’t usually the sort of thing you can shed permanently; it’s part of you. I think we form these negative habits of thought as part of the armor we put on as kids to protect ourselves from whatever madness was going on around us. I can remember thinking, “Yeah, this stinks, but pretty soon I’ll be *grown up* and I won’t be putting up with this crap any more! So I can put up with it now, because soon it’ll be gone.” Only when you grow up, you find out how tightly that armor has begun to pinch and restrict you, and also how much it costs you.
Been following the “News” stuff on possible developments, yes; Moffat only recently said *he* certainly didn’t want Capaldi to go, and that there were no job vacancies he was looking to fill. Really the only concern I have is if Moffat himself decides to go, and Capaldi doesn’t want to do Who without him on as show runner and sometime writer. That hadn’t occurred to me, but it does now. I don’t like it. So. We’ll see . . .
22 August 2015 at 19:32 #41987@missy I’m horrified at the thought of an early departure, frankly. I hope that’s just a trick of impatience that I’m very familiar with (impatience as a trait if a “besetting sin” of mine): you achieve what you’ve been working toward and hoping for, and it’s every bit as wonderful as you thought it would be, and more. But instead of just basking in the joy of it, you become more and more ware that not only could it be snatched away at any moment (in this case, say, with so much strenuous activity involved, a serious back injury, or one of those terrible microbes that you can pick up while traveling, or — I’ll stop there; this kind of thing comes all too easily to me); but that even in the best of cases, the Great Good Thing has, as all things do, a natural term to it. It will not last forever. There will be a final rush to finish a season’s filming, there will be a last few days, there will be a handing over of the TARDIS key — there will be an end.
The evil of impatience is that it keeps kicking you out of the delights of the present and into the inevitable future that you *know* is waiting up ahead. It steals from you the pleasures of the moment and substitutes a “drumbeat” in the background that surfaces more and more frequently as you go on. It is a horrible affliction, frankly, and comes with (or maybe causes?) a strong sense of the enormity and reality of that unreal thing, Time, and its major monster, entropy. Live into middle age, even, and your view will darken naturally with growing awareness of this. Impatience is a demon that uses that natural element of living in a one-way time-stream to leach as much of the warmth and happiness and sense of achievement out of the present as it can.
The “dourness” of the Scots has that feeling, for me; that sense that no matter how delightful things are right now, it will all End In Tears, because, as Capaldi said in a panel in San Diego, “Life is shit: Scottish philosophy.” I don’t think he’s thinking of leaving DW. I think he’s prey to self-torture through this function of impatience, so he’s thinking of how fast it’s all going by (well, that flow-state when you’re doing what you love and doing it well suspends time, but simultaneously encapsulates those moments and whisks them away, like the station your train just pulled out of — and you can never step on the same platform twice, you know).
There are several other afflictions of this kind that are just as damaging — greed, for instance, which means that whatever you’re greedy for, you can *never* get enough of it and you are always in terror of losing however much of it you’ve attained; or constantly running yourself down with a self-deprecating attitude because you never believe you’re good enough and people who praise you will see through you to the fraud you are any minute now. Every one of these things is a bastard and a thief, a vampire attacking your satisfaction, your contentment, your rejoicing in the fruits of the best in yourself.
Okay, time for breakfast: protein is a good remedy for the glooms.
21 August 2015 at 22:27 #41979@thecrynoidman Thanks; I’d about made up my mind not to bother with this, due to a killer review in The New Yorker Magazine. Your comments have completed the decision. Re-makes are always iffie; I usually avoid them like the plague anyway.
21 August 2015 at 22:25 #41978@craig Right, then — thanks to @phaseshift for a delightful read.
21 August 2015 at 19:02 #41976@craig Thanks for that lovely link! What a neat breakdown of the whole dodgy concept — ! I never could make much sense of the whole TL thing and have been quite happy without them and in NO hurry to “find Gallifrey” because — why? Bunch of decadent-looking fuck-ups if ever I’ve seen one. I’ve been quite comfortably convinced that the Doctor saved himself from brain rot and stultification by getting the hell away from them.
Of course, he seems not to agree . . .
21 August 2015 at 19:00 #41975@missy Oh no, the plaid pants have only shown up in various shots around the production of S9, including I think an early one of Capaldi and his old buddy Craig Fergusson each wearing a pair (?) in a shop someplace, in Trailer #1, and also in some shots of the filming of the Maisie Williams “highwayman” episode. From what Capaldi said recently somewhere, the plaid pants have some mysterious part to play in the plot — ?! Personally, I was relieved when they stopped showing up. At least there were no little white bunny patterns on them . . . but I kept imagining footies and a flap in the rear.
@gunslinger Sometimes it takes a little getting used to — the fact that posters here don’t casually flash their fangs and put each other down. It’s well worth sticking around, IMO, so I hope you do.
@mudlark oh, excellent! MissMaster might not even be aware of it consciously, but maybe that’s exactly right — s/he can only get the Doctor to pay a gratifying amount of attention by messing things up badly and then helping the Doctor to fix it! It sounds like a pattern fixed in childhood — a way of maintaining a friendship between a privileged, over-indulged, impulsive child and a poorer, more practical-minded, more outwardly engaged, but loyal one. And maybe the Doctor has secretly loved the thrills thus provided, and the occasions for showing off, and an excuse to hang out with a reprobate — until now, when things have become so serious and so injurious to innocent bystanders. He’s finally grown past that stage; s/he hasn’t, and is desperate to preserve it?
Ovens — this is one of the thingies that I had put in during *my* expensive refit of the kitchen in our (then — 1994 or so) new house, because it’s hard to sell a house with no oven (same-wise, dishwasher, which I hate the very thought of and never use either). It gets pretty hot hearer for a third or so of the year and the kitchen is hard to cool if it gets too heated. And I really dislike the whole idea of bending over to lift hot, heavy things out of a very hot metal box, not to mention that the thermostat never seemed to work properly. And my sister got me a microwave for Xmas. And ever since about 1980, keeping my weight reasonable has been a constant struggle, mainly because I have a raging sweet tooth and a fondness for deliciously flavored fat-loaded things like fruit pies . . .
21 August 2015 at 04:32 #41961@janetteb Damn it, Capaldi can’t go so soon! Four years; five years, better!
Unless, of course, there are other considerations that we wot not of, which of course there must be — that incline the situation against a long tenure rather than a short one. Didn’t we have news a while back that S10 was already signed up to go, with both Moffat and Capaldi on board?
21 August 2015 at 04:28 #41960@lisa Wait, now — do you really want to look at the grocery clerk and see that he’s really a zygon?! I’ll take blissful ignorance, thanks.
Thanks all for the reminders about apple cider and honey — I did that for a while, should probably go back to it.
@ania My mom had an old upright and it never stood a chance, really. One of mom’s friends was a concert pianist named Ray Lev, a little round woman who came to mom’s parties and went at the piano like a bulldozer — we had hammers tied back into one piece with thread (that was one of my jobs). Ms. Lev liked Rachmaninoff’s work *a lot*. I hope some of our neighbors did too — but it was a walk-up tenement, a railroad apartment in a beat up old brownstone on the block right next to the most crime ridden block in Manhattan, so people probably just moved on if they couldn’t take it — that was in the forties and fifties. And now you’ve given me (via a leeetle miss-strike) a “Clara and Twelve upright”, which sets off complete (but, fortunately, uninterpretable) explosions in the thinky-thing in my skull; maybe a brain, maybe not — mustn’t jump to conclusions . . .
@arbutus Sonic *oven cleaner* — if I had one of those, I might actually use my oven!
20 August 2015 at 22:23 #41950@purofilion If anyone has legit reasons for “having work done”, it’s actors — for so many of them, their faces are, literally, their fortunes (unless they go to doing voice work only). On the other hand, for some at least the more sculptural qualities you get from age are a benefit. As in, I am waiting for Bradley Cooper, an excellent and talented actor, to get some lines etc. to give his very generic middle class youngish white guy face (IMO) some distinction. I’m an admirer of distinction; the unmarked, unlived-in-look just doesn’t grab my attention, I guess. My aesthetics incline toward the wabi-sabi style of beauty in the beat-up and well-used, the time-scored and distressed, than the shiny smoothness of the new. Been like that since a kid . . . weird.
I *hope* Capaldi has at least one more season in him after S9 wraps, though he’s alluded to the physically demanding nature of the role and the production schedule more than once, so . . . as usual with DW, anything can happen.
20 August 2015 at 22:10 #41949@ania On arthritis — the same person who directed me toward the rosemary oil + gin-soaked raisins included also not an application of lavender oil, but sniffing the stuff along with the others. I keep a bottle of lavender oil for that purpose, and so far, so good!
@bluesqueakpip My GP, like most GPs, has no time to learn herbology, so I don’t ask her about such things, which means that I do keep a careful eye out for adverse reactions to herbal treatments. I’m just glad that the last joint of my left forefinger was persuaded to stop trying to turn itself like a gunner’s turret, although a slight kink remains . . . I do a lot of internet searching about “folk” etc. remedies before using, as eel as researching side-effects and inter-actions for doctor-prescribed medications. These days in the US, you have to slowly acquire an M.D. in your own body’s characteristics and treatment, which leads me to wonder whether the Great Extinction period we’re going through right now might include extinction of humans of normal (rather than above average) intelligence, since it takes so much active brain power to figure out what the hell is going on about *anything*, using a constantly and exponentially exploding sea of mixed information, B.S., and flat out lies.
Yep, I remember Troughton’s plaid pants; had hope they’d been left behind permanently. Alas and woe, it seems not so. Tough; one must deal with it, that’s all.
20 August 2015 at 20:04 #41942@ania What “cow” were you watching? Did you mean to write “watching the show”? If not, you’re seeing a *very* different DW than I am . . .
Re the sunglasses — I think Capaldi explained in a recent interview that the sunglasses were needed for one episode — to see zygons, was it, in human disguises? He liked them, so he’s incorporated them a bit into the costume-range for his Doctor. On the other hand, I think there were some photos of him with sunglasses from way back when they’d just started filming S8 outdoors in bright sun. What with climate instability and all, maybe Cardiff has become sunnier than usual in whatever passes for spring, summer, and fall there, and he has blue eyes, I think, which means sunglasses would be very helpful when your job involves long periods frolicking about in the open chasing or being chased etc. And now, of course, with the guitar in the picture, the sunglasses indoors fit the Rock image.
What got me wasn’t the sunglasses, it was the plaid damn pants, which I took an instant dislike to; too much like the jammies my little sisters wore, going to bed, and (to the eye, anyway) weirdly flimsy for outdoor wear. Just jarring. Other people like the look, so . . . ?
As for the sonic screwdriver, wish I had one. Things get a bit tougher to open as the years pile on . . . though it’s possible to fight arthritis to (almost) a standstill with rosemary oil and gin-soaked raisins, if you’re lucky enough to have a body that responds well to this treatment.
20 August 2015 at 06:49 #41929@mudlark — I like that too — the open-endedness of themes and details. Of course that very thing drives the more — ah — more compulsively detail-oriented fans bats and makes them scream that (once again!) the show has been *ruined* by the dastardly dreadful awful horrible show runner-writer MOFFAT!!!!!
18 August 2015 at 18:05 #41896@janetteb Ah, I think the coat sleeve looks tricked out somehow because the coils connecting the old fashioned land line (?) phone the Doctor is using are picking up a shine for the lighting. But that coat does have a *lot* of buttons on the cuff, too.
18 August 2015 at 17:47 #41895@craig Good article from the den — thanks. So It’s a good thing that Steven Moffat mostly ignores the “demands” of the fans, eh? I think it is. That lovely extra tension, between fan uproar and Moffat’s teasing and forked tongue talk is a strong element in the pulsing lifeblood of the show, IMO. Buzz, buzz, shriek, swoon, terror, hysterics, doom, rapture, and (supposedly) cold analysis — you couldn’t design such a vivid response, and with such longevity, if you tried! Fan-TASTIC!
Well, something for everyone, really, but not everything for everyone. I stumbled across a corner of tumblr that’s connected to Philip Sandifer’s DW articles, and it appears to be a hotbed of excited academics writing “metas”, which are largely vast, over-arching theoretical dissections of the whole series, its symbology, psychology, intensely elaborate structures and motifs, etc., and I (yea, even I, who generally love intellectual/observational pursuits around this show) found myself — skimming long, intricate posts! Yep; a bit bored . . . or maybe just out of my depth? I’ll drop back in now and then, but that’ll do it.
The “what you wish for and nothing else” sounds to me like “lowest common denominator, i.e. only the elements that will please the most fans”; LCD useful in marketing, but it’s the death of art, and most fans are looking for some level of artistic resonance, even if they have to invent it for themselves (see: fanfic?).
17 August 2015 at 06:54 #41878@purofilion Oh yes, loved The Empty Child. So much Good Stuff over the years . . . can’t *wait* for S9.
15 August 2015 at 19:13 #41846@mudlark Ah, the Viennese bakers . . . New York used to be full of lovely bakeries like this, where you could get a real apple strudel with tart apple filling + cinnamon and a few raisins and of course miles of butter, slathered on between the enclosing layers of puff pastry — instead of those flat, heavy, over sweetened gummy apple cakes that are now sold all over America as strudel. Unfortunately, those great places slowly vanished as the European Jewish refugee population aged and trundled off to Florida to roast themselves on the beaches until they died. I noted was happening when I’d go to a bakery on a visit to the city and see latinos at the counter and Koreans in the kitchen — and the strudels were gone, never to return (except at Greenberg’s, that held out for years but finally closed up over a decade ago — they were a splendid last star in the firmament of great baked goods in Manhattan, IMO). There are probably a few places tucked away in Brooklyn and the outer boroughs with the Orthodox Jewish communities, but Manhattan, now bloated with the super-rich, has exactly what those people deserve in terms of baked goods: turgid rubbish with lots of sugar. (Somebody please tell me I’m wrong, and where to look for some hidden gem of baking survival!).
And the seeded sour rye from Cakemasters — ! Fabulous. They also made rye breakfast rolls to die for. Gone with the wind. I wonder whether the old baking still flourishes in places like Budapest and Vienna? Probably, but who knows? I’ve read that neighborhood pubs in England are shutting because of incoming muslim populations that don’t drink but that do settle in the lower-end areas where traditional pubs (not gentrified ones) still existed until recently. When I follow news stories about the massive population shifts that are really just getting into full swing now, I don’t normally think about what’s being drowned in those irresistible tides.
We had a great French bakery here in town for a long time, owned and run by French people. Eventually they went home to France, sold the place to some enthusiastic locals — and of course it all went downhill, from excellent to a mere cut above the more or less tolerable local norm. They make some good cookies, but their pastry is a little more than soggy bricks, loaded with butter but minus any shadow of finesse — the American way.
15 August 2015 at 07:50 #41844@bluesqueakpip Except that Marxist-commnist zealots are worshiping gods in disguise — the Great Leader, be he Mao or Stalin or Pol Pot or that weird little creep in North Korea becomes the one true God of the nation he rules over, and his zealots do exactly what “religious” zealots do: try to stamp out other religious power centers in their country so that no challenge based in the religious ethical systems can be mounted by organized believers such as the Buddhist monks following the Dalai Lama in Tibet. The Precious Leader simply takes over and obliterates the concept of God except as himself. It doesn’t always last; see the rapid resurgence of the Russian Orthodox Church in recent decades.
There are, though, extremist atheist zealots whose “God” is materialism: I mean men like Hitchens and Dawkins, who insist that nothing that can’t be reliably and repeatedly measured (that is, measured by scientific means) can exist. If they had the power to shut down religious institutions, I don’t doubt that they would, without hesitation, for the general good of course.
Racists are something else. As I understand it, the worst of them here in America often are Christian fundamentalists with even narrower than usual parameters of acceptance. They worship a White God expressed on Earth by a White race that’s supposed to have God-given “dominion” over everybody and everything else — as far as I can tell, anyway. I haven’t made a study of them; my low tolerance for hateful and pernicious B.S. makes that prospect more trouble than it would be worth.
15 August 2015 at 07:32 #41843@mudlark Some things I guess you just have to make at home, or give up on. A good local bakery offers a “lemon meringue cake” that’s yellow cake with lemon curd layers between, but topped with a “meringue” that I guess holds up better in the showcase than the real stuff: a cement-tough block of white pastry cream (just very sweet, solid fat so far as I can tell, might as well be lard) with a layer or what looks and tastes like melted marshmallow on top. $6.50 per meager slice.
It’s almost enough to make me try baking for myself . . .
15 August 2015 at 05:44 #41842@purofilion I agree on Barrowman; I never could shake the feeling that he was performing in a stage show in his head, a musical full of dashing about instead of action, that would lead him suddenly fling up his arms and start belting out show tunes. Just — wrong; the wrong size, the wrong — wattage? — for the TV screen. Something. Of course, it works — I don’t remember anyone else from Torchwood, except the tragically betrayed John Frobisher (strangely enough — quiet desperation just works better for me, maybe). I think Frobisher’s story was fully presented and brilliantly wrapped up, so I’m not keen to see him again. The gun behind the back, the wife and kids looking up at him, and the closing door — perfect. Messing with perfection is generally a mug’s game.
15 August 2015 at 04:26 #41841@mudlark @Purofilion I feel the same way about cooking for guests, and I barely cooked anything complicated for us two at home. Now that I’m on my own, I’d still rather go out with friends to eat, although it’s tough sometimes because of the incredible noise levels in most new and/or “trendy” places that we’d like to go try out. No one puts sound-absorbing tile on the ceilings any more, or fabric as part of the decorating, and the piped music is generally at a level appropriate to a pick-up bar — loud, or louder, to simulate/stimulate an energetic, even frantic social scene that will *surely* get you laid pretty quick unless there’s something *wrong* with you (or even if . . . ).
Okay, into the kitchen for some nice spinach, rice, and pine nuts, with a sprinkle of shaved ham for — sprinkles.
14 August 2015 at 08:45 #41812@purofilion Thanks — I only wish that writing were less true, even if it would also be less beautiful.
Down here in the southwest, as in the South itself I think, you have to ask in restaurants that your tea *not* be sweetened if you don’t want to consume all that sugar. The US population at large is constantly regressing toward kindergarten.
On the other hand, I like my lemonade, and lemon curd in pastries, both very sweet and very sour. We have one wonderful baker here in town, on her own and using borrowed ovens, whose spectacularly good fruit tarts I used to get at a good local coffee shop; but like so many true artisans, the woman is hopeless at business, so they’ve stopped buying from her because she’s not “reliable”. She also sells at the farmers’ market on certain mornings downtown, but her baked goods are so good she’s always sold out almost immediately, and there’s no way in Hell or Heaven that I am going to show up *anywhere* at 7 a.m., not even for those fruit tarts. If I get up before 8, I feel sick and woozy the whole day, and end up sleeping away the afternoon anyhow. So my dumb, tyrannical body clock keeps me from getting too fat. What a deal!
14 August 2015 at 07:17 #41807@purofilion Well, Islamic zealots are crazy, Christian zealots are crazy, ultra-Orthodox Jewish zealots are crazy, and I have no doubt whatever that there are Hindu zealots and even Buddhist zealots who just as damn crazy as the rest of them.
Maybe they all just need a good dose of home-made marzipan? Not me, though. My Viennese grandmother loved marzipan and I had to eat it when I was sent over to buy her groceries, so I came to loath the stuff. Crystalized ginger, now . . . that’s another matter. The whole cooking craze looks to me like just another indication of the lethal political decadence of our times and our (western) system: not only bread and circuses to distract the masses from their powerlessness, but the circuses (phony politics, anti-social “social” media, electronic games and foolishness of all kinds including most TV) now actually include the bread — ads for fast food that is sometimes indistinguishable from slick photos of road-kill for the commons, and cooking shows on TV for the illusion of a middle class.
Food, my version: my mom didn’t cook (day job + freelance design at night + cocktail and political yak parties whenever), and I could burn a chop and make a stew when I got married. Learned to cook whatever I could make in ten minutes because my husband came home from his law office at any and all hours during the evenings and I never had much lead time; cooked happily and plainly from “Diet for a Small Planet” and “Good Cheap Food” (both excellent cookbooks for low budgets, which applied while he was paying his ex and then for college too); then unlearned any sort of normal cooking when it turned out that he was gluten intolerant and somewhat allergic to dairy products. Now he’s eating gluten free etc. in a dementia facility, no complaints (one symptom of A’s D is loss of the sense of smell, without which food is pretty tasteless anyway). And I’m cooking “singles” food, adult version, which means, fast, easy, tasty, and minimal washing up.
Cooking shows? It is to laugh. But then, I seem to have outgrown my native culture almost entirely, which is what age does to us; and I think it feels fine, as a matter of fact. I’d have to give myself an ice-pick lobotomy to get stupid enough for all the shrieking, celebrity-riveted, gadget-gobbling, terminally narrow and selfish idiocy around me. Luckily I’ve still got friends and colleagues enough of a similar mind, so far. Could do so much worse . . .
14 August 2015 at 01:25 #4179813 August 2015 at 23:10 #41793@mudlark Too true; in most of the US, sugar is added to EVERYTHING, to the detriment of most things. I prefer flapjacks or (better yet!) crepes, but we can even muck up crepes — too much sugar, or nothing at all so it’s like eating lightly browned skin, because the cook doesn’t have the sense to add a touch of salt to the batter, to pick up the taste a bit. A nice little place near me began serving fresh-made crepes recently, and I don’t bother stopping there any more — no taste, damp dough lightly browned on one side, not worth the bother. My grandmother’s blintzes were wonderful, compared to the flat, dull rubbish (full of sugar though, of course) sold as frozen blintzes/blini/whatever the hell else they think they’re cooking. I’m not a gourmet by any means, but I know giant-sized food ignorance when I see it, and it’s still rare to find anything else in most of the country beyond the northeast big cities and the two coasts. A little place here, a little place there, known by word of mouth — and the rest is (usually) drek.
13 August 2015 at 19:02 #41791Here in the SW US, “flapjacks” are pancakes, usually made with something other than plain white flour. A local restaurant serves a modern version using mostly seed and nut flours, and whole pumpkin seeds for crunch (no oats, and the result is more delicate and airy than pancakes, which are usually leaden around here), and some ghastly syrup that looks exactly like that old standby, Duco Cement (and tastes like nothing — well, like Karo Syrup, a loathsome goo made from corn and tasteless too unless you add sugar: “high fructose corn syrup”. Gag.). I complained on their fb page about the dreadful syrup, and they replied the same day that they’re “experimenting” with other syrups to find something better. I should damn well hope so. They went through a bankruptcy procedure recently, shut some branches, claimed that a financial officer made off with their $, so they are struggling a bit; but that’s no excuse for Karo.
Well. *Nothing* is an excuse for Karo, IMO.
13 August 2015 at 18:51 #41790@jimthefish A “senile” TARDIS? So Doctor #1 should have stolen a newer model? And Clara misdirected him to one that would descend into dementia before the Doctor himself ever would? We need Perkins! Fix those stacks, or whatever the heck they are!
12 August 2015 at 20:49 #41771@craig Oh, the spoiler thread will ignite tonight! (Um. Of course it *is* tonight, here and there) Thanks for the link!
ichi
8 August 2015 at 21:50 #41657@bluesqueakpip Oh, that’s lovely! Featuring a perceptive American — how delightful!
7 August 2015 at 07:13 #41613@fowl Barnable, I’ve seen bits of Eight Mile — more than I care for of a musical form that I don’t normally respond to much. It’s the ASL beauty that caught my attention and dragged the music with me . . .
5 August 2015 at 05:24 #41546@George Bailey Good! So glad I’m hoping this clip goes viral in a big way. It’s drama, dance, and visualized music all rolled into one spectacular treat — recognition of a new art form? It just makes me smile and smile . . . !
4 August 2015 at 22:16 #41532Just — because? Though not into rap, this got to me; enjoy (I hope)!
https://www.facebook.com/lostateminor/videos/10153309510468972/?fref=nf
I hope the link works!
28 July 2015 at 20:54 #41474@jimthefish Heh heh. But I think even in school, you’d have to be pretty damn fast and awfully well focused to put one over on UKL. She has a very sharp and critical mind, and speaks it straight out and frequently. I recall a discussion in which somebody complained about “political correctness” (this was back in the eighties), and she snapped back something along the lines of, “Strangely enough, I see no reason to apologize for being against slavery, against racism, or against jingoism, or to stop holding those values.” He shrank into the floor (on which we were all, Ursula included, sitting together). She does not suffer fools. At all. PKD — well, not a fool, but not well-balanced, either.
27 July 2015 at 22:13 #41471@lisa Thanks! Straight onto my fb page. Acid for PKD, but most probably not for Ursula — though you never know, do you?
27 July 2015 at 19:12 #41468@missy JS&MN has just wound up here, and I stayed with it (despite too many thin white men with long dark hair and beards, a bit confusing at times) and enjoyed it quite a bit. I’m with you on the book — its knotty, gnarly, twiddly style and massive “cast” threw me off. The series removes that layer of fiddliness and gives you the story so you can follow it, and does so with verve, wit, and a loving attention to visual detail. It’s still a bit crowded, and there’s some rushing through significant bits that doesn’t give time to digest them, but the end result is impressive, IMO. Well worth a look.
26 July 2015 at 18:39 #41463@jimthefish Wow, that’s gorgeous! I’ve always thought of the Cybermen as robotic soldiers because that’s how they look and how they act. Maybe we need a story about them restoring themselves to a less armored look? I don’t remember their origins at all, but I don’t like the super-muscular macho look they have now.
26 July 2015 at 18:31 #41462@janetteb Yes on copy-editing, all right; that’s why I read a piece of my own work out loud when I think it’s ready for a final edit — the ear catches errors the eye never would, and of course it’s a great check for the how the flow and pacing of the language in general is working. You don’t even need to record your reading and then listen to it afterwards — the ear immediately pings the brain, “That can’t be right!” and you put a mark in the margins of your text and come back later to correct. It’s not a substitute for having Beta readers before submitting it to editors, but it’s a huge help in catching repetitiousness, wrong words, and infelicities of all kinds.
26 July 2015 at 18:21 #41461@arbutus I’m pretty sure LeGuin took that model from the Israeli kibbutz practice of sending the kids to all day (and sometimes all night) day-care inside the kibbutz so their parents were available to take their required turns at the various kinds of work needed around the place. I remember reading a mystery novel set in a kibbutz in the eighties, maybe (I don’t think many functional ones are left now), in which this version of an early childhood “boarding school” and its drawbacks was germane to the central crime, whatever it was — old grudges from childhood. The story was also about the dismantling of the kibbutz movement that went along with the gradual shift away from the country’s socialist foundations (much bitterness about that too, in that novel).
@puro I’ll go find the Omnireligious bit; thanks!
26 July 2015 at 02:45 #41444@purofilion Wait, “Omnireligious”? I haven’t come across that before. Sounds a bit like the Roman Empire, in which you could worship whatever the hell you wished to in any way you liked, so long as you paid your taxes and included the Emperor in your worship, once the emperors began claiming to be gods (late Empire, as I recall).
So, in these times of ours, does Omnireligous mean that you claim to practice any and all religions as the whim takes you, or as a rule (Monday, Thor; Tuesday, Kali; Wednesday is Ogun’s turn, etc.)? Or just that you claim to accept all religions as equally valid? Isn’t that sort of Universalist Unitarianism?
25 July 2015 at 22:51 #41435@arbutus You expressed it just fine. That think about “the Abyss gazes back into you”, so unpleasantly true . . .
25 July 2015 at 19:11 #41431@proxy I admire you adventurousness with tenses! When I talked about training for Clara, I didn’t mean an informal apprenticeship (traveling with the Doctor), but going through the formal training that the Doctor and the Master did at the Academy on Gallifrey — which is no longer accessible (?) since the Doctor wouldn’t know where to send her, Gallifrey being currently tucked up in its pocket universe. I doubt anyone can *officially* become a Time Lord without graduating from that schooling — like, not a “wizard” without wizard school, only a “hedge” witch?
@purofilion I haven’t moved on either, since I too get my head snarled up around time travel and its paradoxes. And I’ve always been uncomfortable with the whole idea of TL marriage being more or less human marriage, with minor modifications. It works fine for the original young kid/family audience for DW, of course, but really, once your series has gained a huge and diverse viewership including grown ups and even old people, a species with an aristocracy of regenerating m/l immortals with nothing but a plain old human marriage set up is kind of a waste of possibilities, isn’t it? Literary SF itself has come up with better alternatives than that for (future) humans with extended lie-spans — serial marriages by 10-year contracts, stable marriages with multiple partners who wander in and out of the child-rearing core, female living centers with seasonal visits from males that are otherwise out-dwelling hermits, etc.
Could DW afford, at this point, more (mild) exploration of alternatives to one man, one woman, til death?
“Omnisexual” or “pan-sexual” might work (or not; see recent weird news story about a guy in Florida arrested for “capturing” an alligator and, yes, um . . . ). I don’t think these words actually fit a person who is attracted to the whole LGBTC (?) spectrum as we know it, but not to, say, large, sentient pumpkins (or large non-sentient pumpkins, for that matter, which would be included in the “pan” or “omni” part along with aliens as well as alligators in the DW universe). The Doctor himself felt he had to draw the line with that dinosaur lest she get the wrong idea, but of course he wasn’t in his right mind at the time . . .
Yeah, some feminists charge Moffat with being “paternalistic” and all round “sexist” because DW (an at least partially publicly funded “family” and “youth audience” show) isn’t progressive enough for them on gender issues. As Philip Sandifer points out in an essay on Moffat’s feminism, compared to most of what’s on TV whether commercial or not, Moffat is (cautiously) a whole lot better than the common run of writers who are *not* in a position to write, say, “Queer as Folk”. This feminism-based criticism is passionate but, IMO, ridiculous. The sexuality in the show is framed as conventional because of the basic target audience; yet there we have Jenny and Vastra, Captain Jack, MissMaster, in spite of all the flap and flutter from some fans around these variations (let alone the howls of protest at the idea — clearly *not* rejected by Moffat, only not tried yet — of a female Doctor).
@lisa, love your idea as quoted by puro, of “Missy” as a coldly reasoned attempt by the Master to re-set the relationship with the Doctor for a different power dynamic and maybe outcome (have I got that right?).
25 July 2015 at 05:53 #41399@bluesqueakpip Thanks for the diagram — it works, until I look away from it . . . told you, I have trouble with time travel stories. So I’ll stick with the simplest explanation I can find, until The Big Reveal — whenever that comes (and it better be in S9, or there’s gonna be trouble).
@barnable Well, the Doctor is supposed to use brains, not violence, to crack a problem, so when he loses it and wipes out a whole species, say, that’s a shocker; but face to face intentional murder, even under abundant provocation — ? That’s a really tough one, for him. Missy “won” by pushing him to that point and slightly beyond the place that he refuses to go — the ultimate resort to lethal violence against an individual standing right in front of him.
Apparently, under those conditions with this particular evil and destructive person, the Doctor is only human. He *did* mean to kill her. That’s why the Brig did it instead — as a favor to an old friend, a favor that costs the Brig nothing, morally speaking. Determining who the enemy is and killing it has been his whole career.
24 July 2015 at 23:43 #41394THIS MIGHT BE SPOILER-ISH — ? SO, WARNING FOR THOSE WHO WANT NO POSSIBLE SPOILING. I’d go over to the spoiler thread, but my comments below won’t make any sense without previous comments, above — by @suzannems @missy et al on this thread.
. . . Missy is trying to manipulate things so that the Doctor will realize that he may have a million adventures with a servant, but eventually he must grow up and realize he is aristocracy.
It’s more like an aristocrat with his pets, though — MissMaster even uses that term for humans, pejoratively, in DB. But the TLs aren’t, strictly speaking, a “race” that has to be bred, is it? My understanding is that It’s a class of the dominant species (which looks like humans, at least when we’re looking at them) on Gallifrey. The Doctor and MissMaster could produce new Gallifreyans, by one means or another, but it would take the Time Lord Academy to turn those offspring into Time Lords, if the kids made it through the training (which doesn’t exist any more in our universe). MissMaster might still want to do the Adam/Eve thing with the Doctor, of course, since she’s been driven crazy the looking into the Time Vortex, so your theory could hold up in *her* mind and could have led her to maneuver the real last hurrah of the Doctor’s adventures, with Clara, before expecting him to settle down and make Gallifreyans with her crazy self.
@bluesqueakpip . . . Clara has two perfectly human parents; but she would never have existed if the Doctor and Missy hadn’t interfered in her life.
Do you mean that Clara as a part-mystical companion (who jumped into the Doctor’s time stream to protect his life) would never have existed, right? Because she already exists, as normal human girl, when that leaf-thing happened, didn’t she? And the leaf-event, whatever it was, is what you mean by the Doctor and Missy “interfering in her life”?
Or are you saying that they interfered in her life *before* the leaf-event, as in “Clara was *born to save the Doctor*” (which sounds as if she was not human even before being born), and the leaf-event was a trigger for that mystical saviour-Clara to take over her previously human life?
Or was she never human but a time-savvy alien all along, adopted as a young child by her human parents? She’s the (future) daughter of Missy and the Doctor, grown to adulthood and traveling back in time to get adopted and then leafing out, so to speak, into Clara the Vortex-diving Doctor-Saviour. And *then* becoming very human Clara in S8, puppet-mastered by Missy to bring the Doctor back to Missy so the two of them can engender Clara, their future child and present backwards-time-traveling adult offspring?
Ye gods.
24 July 2015 at 22:52 #41393@phamlore I can never stay clear about what’s been established and what hasn’t, since the writers do sometimes play fast and loose with previously ‘established’ stuff (like, say, Clara being a Time Vortex acrobat satellite to the Doctor’s entire series of lives in S7, and a convincingly human and normal, intelligent, willful woman with a grandma and a boyfriend and everything in S8); though maybe some reconciliation of those two identities may be part of the story of S9 — so, well, I get confused.
Thing is, if he knows some (all?) of the “fixed points”, and fixed really does mean fixed, then you could know your necessary place in snapshots of those fixed points, and feel confident in doing whatever you like in between nothing that you do (short of suicide, and maybe not even that) can change the fact that you *will* wind up at your next fixed point. If the universe were so delicate that fixed points can be abolished or knocked askew by the Doctor choosing a course that doesn’t correct itself to lead him right to the fixed point he’s trying to avoid, then the fixed points aren’t fixed; they’re conditional.
Which, at least for TLs, would make sense. What is “lordship” over Time if it doesn’t include being able to boot a fixed point out of your way when you need to and replace it with something more to your liking? Or does it only mean that as a TL you can *see* all the fixed points, but not do anything about any of them? More like a Time Accountant, or a Time Cop, keeping the order of things in line?).
On the other hand, I really do take to the idea that the Doctor’s calculations, the ones we saw him working on in S8, were about dodging a future fixed point that includes, let’s say, Clara’s departure or death — although when caught up in the present moment, he can shut all that out and react spontaneously to foreground events. And I also like the idea of the TLs having pre-planned for the foreseen “destruction” of Gallifrey (which now isn’t destruction but sequestration) by “seeding” the universe with not one but two rebel TLs, who between them can, presumably, re-establish the TL race in the future.
I did see “Interstellar” and sort of understood it (?) at the time, but can you use that film to narrow down the “5-dimensional bulk” thing? I’m not following, but want to.
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