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@mudlark  Now, that’s something I need to read —

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@lisa  Thanks for the link — interesting reactions to GoT.  We watched most of it, though I never minded missing an episode —  women (and a certain eunuch) intrigue, men betray, everybody kills if they live long enough to do that, and they’re all moving around a large fictional geographical stage all the time, on foot, horseback, ship, etc.  There are things that bore me on screen (and often on the page too — I skim a lot more than I used to): sex scenes (sorry, it’s actors faking something that’s just mechanics unless you’re *not* faking it, and that’s nobody else’s business, says prudey old me); torture scenes (I *really* hate them, maybe because of the horrible revelations of political torture in our own supposedly more civilized times, of real people by real other people and with truly devastating and indelible results); and scant grounding in simple realities, such as, what are the Dothraki and their horses living on as they tromp around endlessly looking for an army and a fleet for the Targaryan blondie?  We do see her dragons foraging for themselves, but then she chains them up, and whose sheep is she buying to feed them with the money she needs for an invasion fleet?

It’s silly, but it distracts me; like so many of the males being rugged middle-aged guys when I’ve read that some of the, er, poor impulse control that led to the violent volatility of such times in history was in part because so many warrior and leader types were kids, more like Joffrey — more juvenile delinquents in armor than grown men.  It must have been hard to get to *be* a grown man in a world without antiseptics or antibiotics, if you were constantly fighting with edged weapons.  And then there was food poisoning, not to mention just plain poison, and accidents galore — ).

Somehow, this kind of thing hasn’t been an issue for me with DW, over many years of watching . . . ??  It’s just more my kind of fantasy, I guess, more variable and surprising, and with a domestic scale (the Tardis is a flying house/ship, after all) to work outward from to the deaths of worlds, if that’s where you’re going.  Smaller casts and tighter focus appeal to me (come to think of it, I don’t read vast, teeming fantasy adventure series either, not since Tolkien).  My loss, I suppose, just as those who turn their noses up at the Doctor’s adventures lose out, too.  Ah, well, strokes and folks, as always.  I’ll certainly look in on GoT when it resumes.

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@purofiion  http://www.doctorwhotv.co.uk/top-21-tracks-of-series-8-part-1-72400.htm, followed by part 2, good listening despite some poorly cleaned tracks; listening to this while winding up taxes gave me a lift!  Some of the selections were very surprising, since I hardly ever hear the music while actors are speaking words.

I hope pizza (or Chinese) has helped with depression, not to mention some classic Who; it was the plugged-in part that was making me happy — so much music and good stuff available now, it just reminded me of the thrill us kids got from TV when we had our own b&w set in the living room so we could fight over “Howdy Doody Time”, Twilight Zone, Gunsmoke, etc. while doing our homework . . . everything else was crappy, but that was *good*.

At least, in memory . . .

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Oh, aarrgghhh, oh PLEASE  — but Iannucci’s idea sounds like something really tentative and far off for now, so . . . might as well just start breathing again.  Bah.  Breathing.  Not as great as it’s cracked up to be . . . Anyway; as somebody said a while ago, what a wonderful time to be alive and plugged in!  Jeez.  It kind of reminds me of early TV in my mom’s house, when everything was just a blast, and you’d suddenly get an Alfred Bester story dramatized on Studio One or something of that calibre — just amazing.

And hey, look: it’s almost the end of March . . . !  Time flies when the conversation’s good, and there’s so much to look forward to!

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@bluesqueakpip  — You have an MA?  Great, who better to learn better from?  By all means go on; I’m not averse to learning something I didn’t know, or sharpening up outdated data (for example, about the inaccuracy of NT names).  As for Dan Brown, lord knows I tried but could NOT get over the horrible writing and structure and characters and — well.  I am a wuss.  I gave up trying to read him, and fell asleep watching the movies made from his books, so, no, I can’t use him as an excuse.  Don’t know who the other guy is that you mention, but I bet his books are better . . .

Where can I find articles on some of the newer “discoveries” being forgeries?  I hadn’t heard anything more about the “my wife” bits since the news items about them being discovered.

I did think of the Essenes, but didn’t anything much about them, so I just, er, passed over mentioning them in my post.  My recollection is that they were a small sect, not a major branch of Judaic culture, with — is this true? — only one known settlement of any size.  What I’m asking is, would their existence be an argument for Jesus’s celibacy if he didn’t actually go and live with them instead of traveling around preaching (or did the Essenes do that too)?  I agree, by the way, that whether or not he actually did have a wife and kids would has no bearing on believing or not believing in his story; and the subject  only came up in the course of comparing the figure of Jesus with the figure of the Doctor, not as an attempt to undermine Jesus’s stature as a religious leader.

@whohar  — Hi, then; I don’t think you were posting when I came on board here late last year, so glad to meet you.  Thanks for the “life lessons” article.  I’ve seen one or two others like it, and they usually spark some good discussion.  You label the link “US view of DW” — is there a different view of the Doc’s lessons in, say, the UK?

@purofilion  — Why has the Gospel of Mark come into question now?  Has something happened — something been found, or released to the public, etc. — that’s stirred up new uncertainties about the Gospels?

 

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@purofilion   Yep, been watching, on and off.  It Is Very Slow.  Everybody is sort of nuts (they do go out of their way to say that nobody goes to live in Ice Hell without pretty good reason to be running from something, so . . . ).  There’s a dead but very small mammoth that might have contaminated some kids; somebody’s arm — just the arm — handcuffed to an outdoor timber frame for — something, hanging game?  Some guy we never met called Pettigrew got shot/ando/or eaten by a polar bear.  Too damn much is going on, and we don’t find out enough about *any* of it.  I think it’s winding towards its end next week — ?  I’ll watch if I can find it . . . have seen enough to feel mild interest in the wrap-up, if there is one.

Stanley Tucci is in it, and is always worth watching.  The rest of them — well, it’s a professional job, some of the photography is beautiful in that way of things that are beautiful because you’re not actually standing there, breathing knife-blades of frozen humidity into your lungs, but you can watch other people doing that for you instead.  Only there are way too many of them (the people) and too many story-lines to keep untangled, and I can’t keep track of who’s supposed to be sleeping with whom most of the time, which is apparently important, somehow, to the story.

If you haven’t been watching, you haven’t a snowball’s chance in Hell of catching the drift of any of it, so I wouldn’t bother trying to latch onto it at this point.  But there’s been so much nothing-at-all to watch these past two months or more that it did have the attraction of rarity.

I (sort of) recommend instead “I Zombie”, which I gather is based on another god damn comic book (I used to collect the things as a kid, have grown to loathe the current ubiquity of super-simple comic book stories overtaking all forms of screen entertainment, or so it seems — Marvel this, Flash that, Secret floofy of Crud, Batman’s Gotham — plus all the supernaturally gifted teens and their soap operas.  This one has a nifty opening episode, crisp and funny and stylish; no doubt it will immediately descend into good zombies vs. bad zombies and off we go if you can manage to care enough.

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@lisa  — Yes on Warren, but it’s been pointed out that we need her badly in the Senate . . .

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@purofilion  — missing an ear, mangled eye — for a minute there, I thought you were talking about the War Doctor, at least as I would have imagined him!  Doesn’t the Doctor grow back missing bits, if they’re not too large and complex?  I seem to recall — a hand?

@bluesqueakpip — The missing kids of Jesus — I’m just working off the norms of pastoralist and small farmer life I’ve come across for Ancient times, plus the Jewish cultural pattern of *everybody* gets married (gotta keep all that sexual energy of the young fenced in to avoid community chaos) and has kids, because that’s what you *do* or your whole family won’t talk to you. Jesus was a Jew, after all, and all that “celibate priesthood” stuff from other cults of the time (often with self-castration as sort of demonstration of one’s unusually devout life-path) was out (though I could have missed something here?).

Jesus was not far out of young manhood when he died, so the chances are pretty darn good that he had a wife and a young family by then (maybe not a *lot* of kids, if his family got him married for financial stability and familial alliance to an older woman, assuming his sibs already had kids of their own so it wasn’t that urgent in his case).  That wouldn’t suit the various ranks of writers and re-writers of the NT at all, not to mention Peter’s project of erecting a structure of authority on Jesus’s life story, so . . . the story gets trimmed, and claims of blood-descent get quietly squelched, and presto: family is gone from the record.  They certainly wouldn’t have wanted him behaving like, say, Zeus — running around making kids outside of marriage — either.  But the likelihood of a prominent and brilliant young “teacher” reaching thirty or so without a wife and kids had to be pretty low, as I’ve seen it explained (the idea has been around for a while).  It’s well to remember how compromised and comprisable a text the NT was (and is — I hear the Right Wing Nutjobs are working on a “Conservative” version of the Bible right now, so here comes another round of cherry-picking, craziness and schism, I guess).

Nor can we be sure, in the strictest sense, that the NT actually does have all the names of other people right, attendance at various events etc., right, either, isn’t that so?  I’m not saying accounts of Jesus’s life are made up out of whole cloth — I’m a non-Christian (religion) who does believe that this person did exist, probably pretty much as recorded, except that all the written part came later than the events and then got revised so much and with so much political program involved that what we have is pretty iffy when it comes to historical accuracy.

TenthDoctorFTW  — I’ve been wondering about what Twelve remembers now about Gallifrey, myself.  He’s gone looking for it per MixMaster’s directions, so he knows he didn’t destroy it, but does he know that originally he *did*, and had to go back for a do-over to get it right, and how extreme a situation that was and why it was that way (The Moment and all)?

@summersmith  — I like the comparison with Ulysses better than with JC too — monsters, cleverness vs. brute force, a long and rambling journey homeward full of detours and dangers — but I like the loose-cannon nature of the Doctor’s wanderings better for him.  When he’s too focused on Gallifrey, I feel plot-walls closing in and (potentially) shutting out interesting side-trips that would be fun to explore (that planet made of the shrubbery — there’s *got* to be more to it than that!).  The randomness, which has to be offset by the Tardis herself choosing some of his landfalls for him, is part of the Doctor’s eccentricity, and I’d hate to lose that to iron-jawed determination to get home *even though* there’s no Penelope waiting.

It feels arbitrary to me; but I’ve always thought of him more as a product of the Romantic imagination (in our day): a restless wanderer barely knowing what he’s looking for and stumbling upon wonders, loving companions, and soul-cracking ordeals does it just fine for me.  That kind of *is* his “sadness” — not knowing what he’s looking for, not searching — just running from being defined, in ways he can’t fulfill, by others (the TLs, for starters).  That’s also the wellspring of his eternal youthfulness and energy, no matter how “old” he is or appears to be.  It’s a youthful state of human life — still exploring, not “tied down”, lighting out for the Territories.  But that’s doubtless too restrictive a view, too.

Especially if, as purofilion suggests, he might think of his new regen-set as requiring him to do something specific in return — like getting Gallifrey unfrozen (without getting it obliterated at the same time)?

@phaseshift  — “I shall keep them from harm and *injustice*” — Really?  Wow!  I had no idea that the Hippocratic Oath was so wide ranging!  Is that a more accurate form of  “First, do no harm”?  How can modern doctors of medicine swear an oath like that, when they know their job now includes flooding their patients with drugs devised by the crooks and fools of Big Pharma (to the degree that this is so, which seems an uncomfortably large degree in the US these days)?  And thanks for the analysis of the Doctor and compassion — you can certainly see why he’d fall victim, from time to time, to “compassion fatigue” and burn-out, like anybody else (a hermit living on a cloud, SmithDoc rejects the idea that he helps the helpless and solves their problems, telling Clara “I don’t do that any more”); especially so if he had to be taught compassion in the first place (by us); it didn’t come naturally.

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@bluesqueakpip  — I’d never made that connection before — I knew that “Christos” meant “Annointed One”, but not that “Messiah” was the same word in a different language (that would be — Hebrew?).  “Healer” never seemed applicable in the case under discussion — healing the sick (and occasionally the dead0 was just something that figures like that did along the way, as proof of their god-power: expected behavior around the myth.

Thanks for the reminder about RTD’s idea of gods we “make” for ourselves; whatever plan you start with, over 50 yrs it *will* change, so exactly what he had in mind doesn’t carry all that much weight any more, seems to me.

@lisa  — I watched the Campbell interviews too; I’d read his book in college, I think, and of course ate it up without question.  Later on . . . well, even great minds can’t step clear out of the perceptual box their cultures have them locked into.  Out of, well enough to see as an outsider, yes; clear of, no.  Example Freud and his “penis envy” B.S., among other assumptions natural to a male European of his time.  He couldn’t see men as privileged, so he couldn’t imagine that women might long for a bit of that power, that went with having a penis rather than not, for themselves . . . not that we’re so much further along today, for the majority of humankind.

@arbutus  — I like SBNR as avoiding doctrine and making up your own; that does describe most of the people I know who use this term about themselves, and for many (myself included) it goes back to at least the sixties, when people began searching for beliefs that appealed to them or called to them and put together eclectic belief systems for themselves under the banner of “New Age”, very often.  The eclectic part was what angered doctrinal religionists, who would get very huffy about “cherry-picking” the basic religions to cobble up a belief-set that you liked better — on no “authority” but yourself, or some one who set himself or herself up as a “guru”.  They didn’t seem to be able to see that every time their own religions had calved another subdivision, the new outfit declared itself on some version of cherry-picking (no it does *not* turn into actual blood; yes it *does*).

@mudlark  — thanks for the ID on that almost-quote.

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@purfilion  Oh, don’t give it another thought — most of us threw snacks to the troll!  It’s a natural impulse among normal, decent people to try to move at least a step or two in the direction of the list-burglar (breaks in, steals time and energy), giving the creature a chance to respond to the climate here by becoming better and joining in.  It rarely succeeds, but you’re never entitled to beat yourself up for acting like a human even though the other guy isn’t.

Stories — well, yeah, given that the whole shebang is, once you get below the surface with sufficiently wild maths, just knots and swirls and sparkles of energy, I guess you have to admit that every description we come up with about what the universe “is” has to be seen on some level as “a story”, because none of it is “real” — it’s just energy.  Our perceptive grids give us the patterns to recognize, and we make stories out of that in various languages (like maths, or oil paint, or big long books about plots or gods or teddy bears, and so on ad infinitum) so we can regard the constructs we’ve made and think about them as if they were real.  Maybe that’s just Whusisname’s cave — the shadows on the wall of the cave are what we make of our perceptions.  The reality is energy, coils and flows and almost static shifts of energy . . . At least, that’s what science (and art) seem to be saying, AFAICS, when they stop talking about themselves and try to say something coherent about Everything as it really is.

I know this as an abstraction (of an abstraction of an abstraction of an abstraction of — ); in common sense terms, I stop knowing it and get on with dealing with the products of my perceptual grid, like everybody else.  You can’t live life at the energetic level, I think.  I think we merge back out of perception and into the energy flow when we’re done living the physical and mental life here.

Meantime, stories are how we fill our days and orient ourselves from one “action” to another.  See, I read that “Einstein for Idiots” or whatever it was that I. Asimov wrote decades ago, and that bit about the table you’re leaning on being actually a little bit of atoms and a lot of empty space between them did not go unnoticed.  It seems to be true; now you might as well forget it, and enjoy the stories, because I suspect this is the only place we get to have them, on any scale.

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@lisa   Basically, I don’t see him as Jesus either: no Son of God claims, no miracles, a few companions rather than a dozen devoted disciples, a dud and a runaway as a kid (not brilliant lad confounding the adult scholars), roaming all of the universe in his vehicle rather than going by sandal-power from one village or town in a tiny area of the globe for a few years before being executed by an occupying power, married lots of times and has kids and grandkids although they’ve been mislaid, and on and on; nothing much matches in the backstory or the fore-story either.  And he’s certainly not lurking in the future as a threatening (or comforting) judge of people’s whole lives, is not in any way the “creator” of the universe of that being’s child, and in fact only maps onto Jesus for me in a presumed disgust for the idea of becoming or rather being made into a God figure for people who never knew him.

Distinctions blur over time; but nonsense is nonsense, and wishful thinking is wishful thinking.  Sorry if I seemed to suggest otherwise.

 

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@arbutus   Oh yes, by all means, Anansi!  All the tricksters occasionally bring gifts, as I recall — great, powerful gifts, sometimes, in folklore.  I wonder if there’s some sort of dragon-character in Chinese mythology who might serve, too?  I wonder, though — are there any Trickster goddesses, or is it always guys?  I think there’s a distinction to be made between Tricksters (who are often aggressively sexual from time to time but serve as clowns and too-smart-for-your-own-good characters as well) and beings like the fox-women or the selkies who are shape-changers whose primary purpose is — what a surprise — about their sexuality rather than other qualities + sexuality.

The one difference I see that makes the Doctor stand out, though, is the foundation-level melancholy of the Doctor, as exile, eternal wanderer (even when he “settles down”, he outlives that stage by regenerating to end it), watcher of the deaths of others.  The Trickster/clowns are maybe more like MissMaster, actually — taking pleasure in deceptions and getting away with s**t.

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@mudlark — I like the “projections from the unconscious mind” theory, which the Doctor certainly expounds on in “Last Christmas”, doesn’t he?  The banging on the hull, not so much, maybe — after all, he did get “attacked” or at least physically affected by something out there, and had to be brought back, unconscious, into the capsule.  Could have been an accident, and nothing *should* have been left alive at that place and time — but the suggestion is, I suppose, that whatever is banging on the outside is something that we brought with us on the inside and then projected out.  So — ??  Mystery!  So delicious, if you’ve a taste for it . . .

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@lisa   I like it when she bops his head to stop him scaring young Rupert with a too-grown-up-for-him take on scary stuff, so he shuts up and lets her take over.  But he leans in himself, listening to what she has to say and how she says it.  One thing I like so much about this Doctor — his uncertainty, his wobbly sense of self, makes him more of a student, a learner, than usual, and that makes him especially appealing to viewers who value that kind of open-ness more than the (often false) comfort of a (self-proclaimed) knowledgeable expert taking the lead.

The stuffed animal companion might be a stage of the spectrum of “invisible friends” that kids can add to their lives for a firmer sense of security, and later we look back and see them, sentimentally, as symbolic of the days when we did feel more defended and protected, even if that was largely an illusion fostered by parents who wish they really *could* defend and protect their kids from all comers.  Doesn’t work — for reasons.  “Don’t worry, I won’t let anything happen to you” can also mean, “Don’t worry, I’ll see to it that you don’t have to grow up” — get cut on the sharp edges of the big world, and heal up with the scars that all grown-ups carry as signs of increased wisdom gained from experience (well, we hope so).  (e.g., KtM, for example . . . )

 

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@Jonathan I’m baffled by the idea that Jewish creatives (whether culturally, ethnically, observantly, agnostically, orthodoxically, ultra, or other) coming up with a time-and-space traveling outlaw-cum-busybody/meddler/fixer (or, for that matter, any other fictional protagonist) must somehow be operating on the level of Christian allegory. Why? Because to know Christian mythology is to necessarily subscribe to it?  AFAIK, most Jews (except the Orthodox and ultra) aren’t waiting around for a Messiah; they’re trying to preserve a world outlook and a set of rituals meaningful to them, just as non-observants like myself may be trying to uphold the basic ethical framework of Judaism, as opposed to the religious mythology, as an important part of our heritage.

If the Doctor is a Jesus figure, he’s got a whole bunch of (Wiley) Coyote mixed in there, and Raven, and an occasional splash of Buddhism, plus John Buchan’s adventure stories and several decades of modern SF space tales, etc., to the degree that finding the “Jesus” in there is a very iffy proposition. By all means try if you’re so inclined, but don’t expect others to rush to follow you just because you say, “It is so.”

@bluesqueakpip Yup, exactly. At a scholarly conference I attend, there’s one academic who instantly relates almost anything to Campbell, and is fondly heckled for it by others because it seems as if he just can’t help it. Kind of like people deep into this or that religious ideology (or other academic one, for that matter). There’s also been a good bit of discussion in Feminist circles about how Campbell’s theories pretty much exclude female heroes (but then, Pratchett (Tiffany Aching, Susan Sto Helit, Granny Weatherwax?). I don’t recall Campbell even addressing this omission of half the human species, but, well, 1949 . . . by the time of the Moyers interviews, Campbell was a Grand Old Man. I don’t think he was expected to move on to in-depth consideration of a the new wave of cultural thought that feminist thinking forcefully introduced into our cultural discourse in a forceful way later in the same century, although Moyers, being Moyers, might have raised the question (sorry, I just don’t remember). See the recent uproar over MissMaster and the possibility of regeneration into female form for the Doctor at some point for an good example; insisting on the full humanity of women does tend to up-end masculinist cosmologies all over the place these days, with resulting hyperbole, emotion, and (predictably) backlash.

How do we perceive our own stories, other than as stories? We are pattern-recognition specialists, after all, and past stories ingrain patterns to recognize.  Thanks for the book titles; I kinda favor Corey Doctorow’s summary of story (although he may have found it elsewhere), which is more or less, “Someone leaves town; someone comes to town”.  After one (or both) of those events, yer on yer own, baby.  @Mudlark, as you said; story is a basic method of classifying and making sense of our experience, whether the story is just a construction we put onto events or intrinsic in them.

Is the Doctor a healer? I think he aspires to be and sometimes succeeds, but I suspect he’s also much more complex than *just* that (which is why he persists in his hold on the public imagination). I suppose the Ood would go for calling him a “prince of peace”, although his general history is loaded with warfare and strife, isn’t it? And it doesn’t always end in peace . . . as for Gallifrey, for example, frozen in a pocket universe (“You make a desert and call it peace” . . . said of the Romans Empire I think, but by whom?).

Does “Messiah” mean “healer”?  I’ve been under the impression that its meaning is “messenger”.  “Doctor”, now, that’s a term that has meant both “learned person” and “healer”.

@whisht  Glad to find you here again!  Trolling has become more sophisticated than it used to be, IMO, with more insidious entry strategies followed by the usual deliberately draconian and provocative statements and judgments.  But a person who really is sophisticated has of necessity developed a mind susceptible to interesting conversation, so such a troll is more likely to become the catch, to the benefit of all concerned.

@purofilion  Thanks for the kind words; I do appreciate them.

 

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Ha, found it — wasn’t looking but here it is, and I hope the link works.  This is what was under the blanket in “Listen” (I did ask about that someplace here, didn’t I?):

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@janetteb  Oh, got it — not sure about Arthur, myself, long time since I read anything in that realm of story.  Maybe — for me, maybe it’s more like Merlin, as he appears in “The Sword in the Stone” — magical (sonic screwdriver! Tardis!), ancient, alien and a bit of an innocent, with a whole different grip on time (in the book, Merlin lives time backwards, and gets imprisoned in a tree due to succumbing to the wiles of a nymph or some such)?  I think of Arthur more as an authority figure and a warrior, I guess, so I have to work it a bit to fit the Doctor with that, but the Eternal Return, that part works fine: regeneration on the one hand, arriving in the nick of time (“hour of need”) because the Tardis takes him where he needs to be — yep!

 

 

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@janetteb   Robin Hood, maybe, but he can’t be King Arthur: he either does horribly with heavy-duty authority (“The Doctor Victorious”) or he does nothing with it (President of the World) and renounces or refuses it as quickly as he can (DiH).  His authority, when he has it and is using it properly (as in, temporarily), is strictly provisional, not an attribute of rank (what’s a Time Lord on Jupiter, after all?  A tourist) or badge of office (although psychic paper often plays the role of such a badge, at need).  It depends on — ah, the eyebrows, as he himself has claimed?  That eagle beak of CapDoc’s?

Come to think of it, you could say that his arrogance and authoritarian tone are absolutely necessary character traits, because without them, how could he just muscle his way into being the boss when he needs to, as per MotOE, for example?  The Lone Ranger did it with a six-gun; your chances with just a sonic screwdriver, not so much (though a Tardis is pretty convincing).  And, to do the character justice, all that ordering people about is tempered by the generous use of the phrase seldom heard from Earth authorities (unless they are in a courtroom), “I don’t know”, or “no idea”.  It’s an intriguing combination: authority and honesty!  When he’s not lying, that is . . .

 

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@janetteb  I like the ida of a “chaotic good” — yes, that’s the Doctor, to me; an agent of chaotic good, out of whose actions results both good and terrible can emerge, depending.  More like one of the “old” gods, really, the ones who never made much sense but if was a bad idea to get on the wrong side of them even if you didn’t know how you got there.  Bascially, of course, he makes no sense at all, because he’s also a time traveler.  He could pick action B instead of all the others, then travel forward in the time line of that action to see how it worked out, and then travel back before his initial choice and try C, and follow that up the same way, etc., until he hit on whatever action proved out as desired, at least at whatever point in future time he chose to stop checking.

NOT workable as a TV series for many reasons, so instead you just make him energetic and impatient and rushing about trying to put out fires on the immediate horizon or outside his door, and then let the chips fall where they may.  That’s human behavior, though, so far anyway.  From very long-lived aliens, I’d expect a more patient, or maybe even more casual approach.  In fact it could be argued that the Time Lords have a non-interference rule *because* they’ve already tried the check-up solution, and even a sort of gambling game solution (what do you bet *this* happens if I do *that*?), and none of it has been less trouble (in the longer run, which they can’t avoid since they live so long) than anything you might get out of it at the moment of action.

On the other hand, we know he’s a “rogue” Time Lord, which also can be read as “imperfect” or “poorly qualified” Time Lord, who just *can’t* maintain a distant, hands-off perspective but has to try to make things better by interfering in what he hopes is a positive way.  IOW, if he hadn’t stolen a Tardis to travel in, he would have been grounded anyway, for being too much of a compulsive meddler.

But then why would the TL’s keep handing him regen cycles, since he ignores their rules and aggravates the hell out of them when he *does* come home for a visit?  Is a puzzlement.

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@mudlark — Yikes, I wouldn’t want that blanket-thing anywhere near me!  Understand, my sister — younger than me by SIX YEARS  — coaxed me into going to see “House of Wax” with her, and once I dove under the seat, more or less, she kept poking me and laughing and insisting that it was *only make-up* that was making Vincent Price’s face look as if it were melting.  Sheesh, I *knew* that, I wasn’t an idiot — but I still can’t look at faces distorted for a horror effect even now, for fear that the damned images will show up in my (often very vivid) dreams, where shutting my eyes is not, as it were, a workable defense.

So, somebody ‘splain me please — what *was* the thingie under the blanket, in your opinion, and *why did the Doctor insist that they turn their backs* on it?  I mean, if it was just about not *seeing* it, shutting your eyes would do.  I just stepped right out of the story at that point, yelling, WHAT?  WHY?  And that’s why I don’t rate “Listen” higher than, say MotOE or Flatline.

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@pinchofvortex   Gosh, I couldn’t wait for Clara to grow up, which she did in Series 8, at last!  Now I want to see how she develops as a person and a companion of Twelve in the next series; she wants things for herself (last season, to keep her teaching job *and* her boyfriend *and* her volatile and often baffling (and baffled) space person, and she did everything she could to keep them all in some kind of balance in her life, while figuring out whether she herself still *wanted* to travel with this new and rather scary incarnation of the Doctor.

As for that dream in “Listen” — I gotta tell you, even as an old person myself (I haven’t been able to seriously claim to be “middle-aged” for about 15 yrs now), I can still remember myself as a kid making sure my that no part of my body, especially my feet, stuck out over the edge of my bed while I slept because I *knew* anything projecting off the (somehow) safe island of the bed itself could attract the attention and the aggression of — whatever the hell might be under the bed.  Actually, I think if was probably okay, sort of, if it was just a toe, or an elbow, and *the sheet still covered it*.  That was about the same time that I would wake up and lie paralyzed in bed, sure that Frankenstein’s monster was in the hallway and would pop his horrible head around to look at me any minute now —

Of course I don’t have those worries now.  But I do seem to always sleep without hands or feet hanging off the bed . . . hmmm…

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Here’s a bit of fun — below the announcement of a DW convention upcoming in Baltimore is a 20 minute radio segment about the show by an announcer who’s never watched it (refused to indulge in something that seemed so silly, when he caught his dad watching it back in the day).  Now he sets about asking fans what DW is about.  Some of the answers are a bit surprising.

http://wypr.org/post/doctor-who-kill-other-and-bmore-en-espa-ol

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My family was of the cocktail generation; cocktails and whisky.  My stepdad was a functioning alcoholic, which maybe helps account for my aversion to hard liquor and my unrefined appreciation of wine, once I got past the specific and disgustingly sweet “wine”, if that’s what it is, that some of my mother’s family had at religious meals, like at Passover.

My drug of choice is chocolate.

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I’m thinking, the Doctor as a character out of (and participating in the ongoing formation of) the Folklore of — TV?  Fiction media?  — of “our time”, however defined.  He is a “work” of imagination — the imagination that produces folklore, an imagination that currently operates on a multi-media worldwide, macro, as well as on a national, regional, neighborhood, family scale, I guess.  Newer examples might prove to be, for example, female “superheroes” like the ones being produced in comic book format in India and — damn; a muslim country, forgot which — who fight against misogynist mania in Hindu and  muslim cultures (they’ll have to persist long enough to take root to join the folklore).  The Roadrunner? Wiley Coyote?  Maybe the basic qualification is, the figure has to persist in the imagination of a significant portion of “the population” (defined depending on where you are on the macro/micro scale) beyond a couple of generations and a maybe the turn of a century (as a landmark, not meaning they must “live” for a hundred years”), and new stories have to continue to be created about it.

To return to the Doctor, everyone who wants to can take a hand in making up “Doctor Who” stories, via amateur arts of all kinds — fanfic, primarily.  Stories are retold (re-read, re-watched), and there are even folkloric festivals put on (irregularly) all over the world, and academic studies (“anthropology”?) being shared and published (see, Studies in Popular Culture conventions, SF and Dr. Who conventions) . . . Trickster, yes; hero; a visiting Angel who drives away demons . . .

It’s early here, I’m just doodling, no breakfast yet, brain on sleep rations . . . I’ll just add, as a convinced atheist (who is also SBNR around ideas of reincarnation), that for some sectors of the world population, that’s pretty much what the Jesus myth, with all its accouterments, is — a particularly indelible-seeming figure of folklore, although made from what was once a real living human (probably?  Perhaps? Depends on who you talk to), as the Doctor never was.  But with enough time, that distinction tends to blur (and there’s always enough time, although things may not follow the expected course).

Noodle, doodle . . . Goin’ out for breakfast before you guys start laughing . . .

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@janetteb  Red wine — well, I’ve had two spectacular reds, one a merlot out of a winery in California, cheap little bottle, in the mid-eighties, which was so unbelievable that I went rushing back for more — but it was all gone.  Some 8 yrs later, with family that lives out there I stopped at that very winery (Carneros Creek, it was) and mentioned this wine, and they said, “Oh yes, that one, we’ve never been able to do that again, but we’re opening the last bottle today in the back room; would you like a swallow?”  The point being that this stuff was so wonderful that even I, a total wine ignoramus, was bowled over by it, and then had my reaction confirmed by the makers themselves.  The other great wine was perfectly obviously that from the get-go, having been selected by a visiting Frenchman at a very fine local restaurant, at $125 a bottle.  Yep, liquid velvet.  Been, done.

But my tastes are irredeemably low, and becoming an oenophile (?) will have to wait for next life; til then, I drink Menage a Trois table red with dinner at $5.00 a bottle, and a very nice, calmly confident little wine it is, too, quite fine enough for simple pleasure.  Not their other stuff: that one.

I will drink some, with friends I hope, when the Doctor is once again IN.

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@purofilion  Well, that glass of Scotch for Half-face sure looked at home in CapDoc’s hand; but he said he’d poured it for Half Face, and he didn’t so much as have a sniff at it for himself, did he?  Coffee, yes!  Well, he’s a smart guy; of course, coffee!

The only beer I have ever enjoyed I had at a beer garden alongside the Danube somewhere in Germany (a “river cruise” five years ago or so), right outside the monastery that’s been brewing the stuff for centuries. My GOD that was good!  Fortunately, I live far, far away and have forgotten the name of the monastery, so I’m safe.  My psychic friend tells me that I spent some medieval lifetime or other brewing beer in a monastery in N. France, I think, along with some of my current friends, among others.  Well, okay; must have been more fun that surging around Europe with this army or that one, sleeping rough and stealing food from farmers.  I hope our beer was as good as that wonderful stuff I had in Germany . . . a true gift to humankind, if not to humankind’s waistline!  So that makes it a useful life, at least.

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@DroneX1  — Glad to help clarify, but “pre-emptive strike”, “slap in the face”, “accusatory”?  Not according to what I saw, but I’m glad to have your input, particularly on the issue of signals of friendliness being mistaken for flirty come-ons; we do live in a hyper-sexualized society (US, anyway), which makes it difficult to actually reach understanding of other kinds of warmth towards others — affection, support, loyalty, passionate caring but without a sexual vibe or goal, etc.  As for Series 7 Clara, she was so “empty” as a character for me that I just assumed that she *did* fall for the distinguished older gent with the fancy wheels, though he never followed through.  But I only saw part of Series 7, being put off by SmithDoc’s whirling dervish style.

I’ve seen some references to Jesus/Doctor; I can see how resonances between the two could be sparked by some of the things you mention — but I don’t think any of it is intentional.  Nobody central to the show seems to be Christian-oriented (or any other way, for that matter), so that would be a hard sell.  Certainly there was that weird bit with the Jesus/Doc around the death of the Simm-Master, but I’ve only seen a clip of and shied off.  Jewish myself, on my mother’s side, very unobservant; probably Catholic on my Dad’s, but he was an emphatic atheist.  Which is maybe why I’ve done so much rummaging around in informal religious “studies” since.  I can’t map the Biblical Jesus onto the Doctor, though; no miracles, no dozen disciples, no claims of authority from on high, etc.  Still, if it floats your boat . . . the question around here would be, how wedded are you to arguing a position that others here find unconvincing?  Can you move on to other aspects of the show when others are ready to do that, and shift without rancor?  If not, I don’t think you’ll be happy here.

@bluesqueakpip   Up the women!  Yes!  I have colleagues who dismiss DW for its “rampant sexism”, which I consider much less horribly sexist sexism that I see on most tv series, so I just go on liking what I like because I’ve been where they are — which now seems to me to be supersensitive.  But I am very aware of the perils of seeing a self-comforting imaginary construct that validates one’s own desires and opinions, instead of the living person in front of me (isn’t all racism based on this?  All stereotyping?).

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@purofilion   Oh crap, sorry to hear about Crohns — miserable stuff, worse than CFS from what I hear.  What if you put the memory work in your drink — does that make it a Tequila Moon-egg Olive with a side of Northern Lights (the green part)?  Or is it Mescal that has the worm, memory or otherwise?  Maybe you can tell — my drink is red table wine.  Skoal!

warmly,

ichi

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@bluesqueakpip   Yep, he was fooling himself, playing at romance as 11, trying to get away from himself that way.  Yes, he’s way old and knows it — look at that slightly bent-kneed stance and gait, it says “older guy with slightly sprung knees” and also brings Capaldi down closer to Jenna’s height, of course.

I don’t know that it would occur to him, but the concentration he needs to bend on himself, his own actions and reactions, in the course of getting to know himself again as 12, is *exactly* what nobody should want in a boyfriend (or a girlfriend, for that matter).  A person who is that self-absorbed (however good and necessary the reasons) is pretty much bound to be a poor romantic partner, even if they really love you: there’s only so much prime mental and emotional energy to go round, and the one who loves you doesn’t want to starve you while he/she is dealing with pervasive and sudden change in himself/herself.   If he’s capable of thinking this far out of the box he’s finding himself in, he certainly wouldn’t want her involving herself with his new, chaotic self on the level of romance.

I like giving Clara the recognition she deserves for “playing along” rather than diving in and dragging him too deep with her in Series 7 (have I got your meaning?).

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@DroneX1  @purofilion  @Barbara lefty   My view:  “I’m not your boyfriend” needs not to be taken out of context. What does CapDoc’s presentation of himself say, up on the stairs?  “Look at me up here, master of all I survey (the inside of the Tardis, that is).  I’m no one’s fresh-faced ‘raggedy man’ in a beat-up tall hat, and I mean you to know it.  I wear black: you can’t miss me, or the change in me.  I am darkness walking, an enigma to be learned all over again.”  (By you; by me.)

Then he says, essentially, “I’m OLD (unlike you, young person who is young even in terms of your own species’ tiny lifespans), and I’ve been active all those 2000+ plus years so there’s a ton of deeds and misdeeds piled up behind me, some of them stupid, or careless, or hideous in their outcomes — mistakes of my judgment that I mean to fix.” Pause, setting up  the identification of one of those mistakes, a very recent mistake to be fixed right now: “Clara, I’m not your boyfriend.”

When she protests that she never assumed that, he reassures her: *not your fault*, not criticizing you for it: “I never said it was your mistake.”

There, that’s cleared up!  “That sets new terms (terms that *I* can manage) for our being in the same room together; so how do you like my new outfit?”

What he did there: *he wasn’t talking about her*.  Not who she is or isn’t or what she is or isn’t, or anything, really, about her except that he wants to make sure that she *sees* that he’s not flirty Eleven any more.  He’s defining himself as *not* romantically interested in her because romance between him and *anybody* right now makes no sense in logical terms, and he’s absolutely not up to it anyway in his current confused and parlous inner state.  He’s just managed to choose a new wardrobe meant to express his basic self now: the alien being as old and as packed with experience as Madame Vastra’s “mountain range”.  What that is, exactly, he’s not sure yet, but “boyfriend” material it is not, and though she’s zipped around in it as the “Impossible Girl”, it’s not been *her* experience but his.  He needs to settle himself into who that experience has made of him, and meantime he’s certain that he’s definitely nobody’s boyfriend.

But — she’s been peering at him, looking for Eleven.  And she’s been touching him, during his regeneration fugue, in very familiar way (his hands in “Take five!” and “I’m alone”, for example).  He’s not saying “Don’t do that,” although the “not a hugging person now” is partly about just that.  But he does need those physical cues she gives him (look how she *physically* turns him away from Hood’s gang in “I hate banter!”).  He accepts her guiding touch; but he means her to understand that for him, that contact is not erotically charged in any way.

That, of course, remains to be seen; but for now, he’s defining himself as a-sexual with regard to her, and taking care to be explicit about it because it matters to him (already, and always) that he not unwittingly injure her.

No way can I read that as condescending or demeaning.

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@Barbara Lefty  — not just arrogance, either: simple self-confidence will do.  You can hear the rejection of all this in the fan whining about how they hate Clara because she’s “such a bitch” in Series 8.  Such a determined and forceful human being, they mean — how dare she?

You want bitchy?  MixMaster’s your woman for that, and note that her bitchiness lies in her being imperious, callous, ambitious, careless of the feelings of others (to put it mildly), and perfectly calm about ordering or even causing the deaths of millions.

Officer material; and most officers in the military are still men, for a reason (the highest ranking one I know is an Admiral who runs the Navy hospital that my kid works in).

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@purofilion — f’Chris’ sake, don’t be embarrassed — I just *answered* that post (and had a good time doing it, too).  Good post (mine too, I hope).

Ichi

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Bluesqueakpip saves the day!  Champagne, anyone?

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@purofilion  — I’ve always *loved* that in DW — that the Doctor never asks his female companions to whip up some supper, why don’t you, or lay out some time, or how about giving the floor a little sweep and by the way pay the bills — the checkbook’s over there — and scrub out the fridge?  Not to mention the laundry . . . While the companions have been increasing their stature by leaps and bounds, as you point out.

Well, if you’re going to have really snappy, witty dialog and the companion has to be smart enough to hold up her end of such a conversation (see all of NuWho pretty much), then she’s only going to be credible if she can also think a bit with that same brain, and learn from the Doctor, not just lollop along with him asking to be enlightened.  I guess I’m saying it’s, ahem, built into what I regard as a great improvement in the writing.  But I would say that, wouldn’t I.

As for excusing the Doctor his excesses and condemning Clara just for being realistic, human, and female — well, I hate to say it, but I can sure see a certain style of fan doing exactly that.  Besides, lookit, I gotta say — I actually wrote an essay on this once and put it on my website, though it’s now archived — Western culture (I can’t speak for all of it of course, let alone other cultures, but anyway) western culture *privileges* masculine pain and valorizes it (ah, see how he suffers, poor fellow), whereas feminine pain is — exaggerated for effect by drama queens; a dodge and a tactic; weakness; and it’s what women are made for anyway, what with all the messy, bloody stuff that leads up to (aaghh!) childbirth (this also has to do with being “invested in the planet” as in “standing for physicality in all its grubby reality, ugh, pew”.

That, I am sorry to say, is Built In, and it’s everywhere.  It’s all that god damn torture s**t where the hero gets to withstand dreadful agonies in stoic silence (or not) in order to rescue the whimpering heroine who probably hasn’t a scratch on her.  I have no a doubt in the world that this cultural standard (please, a more elegant term, anyone?) plays into how the Doctor and Clara are differently perceived and judged for similar actions and decisions.

Oh, beautifully spotted, about the sonic!  She’s been keeping it, and the Doctor’s own agency (necessarily adopted by her while he is literally out of action for most of Flatline), until he’s ready to step into his major role as rescuer, judge, and hero  at last.  Note the difference between the jokey fumble of this transfer in “Deep Breath”, and the swift pitch and clean catch, swivel, and “shazam!” in “Flatline”.

Naw, she ain’t pregnant; Old Clara doesn’t mention any kids or grandkids, only her own satisfying solo adventures.

Now here comes the MixMaster to mix it all up — can Clara and her Doctor withstand the chaotic blast?  Or whatever else is coming down the pike?  Poor Moffat & Co — a lot rests on their shoulders, and no matter what they do, of course, some of the fans will be dumping loads of crap in their direction for not doing something else!  Brave?  The *writers* are brave.  It’s funny how I do *not* sit around wishing I were one of them.  I like my night’s sleep, thank you very much, with passions banked.

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@purofilion  — Misdirected comment, my fault — somebody posted that the Flatliners were very slow moving zombies, or some such.  I was responding to that, meaning that their legs are in zig-zags (thank you, automatic correction function, for utter nonsense of “rick-tacky”, above), so it must be hard to move faster.

He went and got a haircut on his own?  How *dare* he?  They must be very pissed with him!  I wonder a bit, though, about that hair.  We’ve seen at interviews and out of shot bits of film when he fluffles his fingers through it in a very emphatic and thorough way, more like a — pardon me, but I don’t know how else to put this — more like a dog scratching an itch behind his ear than a guy just smoothing his hair down.  It could be that it’s both wild and itchy when it gets long, so when he needs to not be distracted by it he doesn’t ask anybody, just goes and gets it cut, and that’s that.  It’s great-looking hair, but specially good stuff sometimes comes with special maintenance requirements, too.

Just a thought.

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@purofilion  — course they can’t run fast!  They’ve only just got legs, and crap legs at that, all rick-tacky.  The Doctor despatched the bunch of them in the nick of time.  A little more practice, and —

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Well, just look at the off-topic havoc the fool thing is wreaking around here!  We need to stop looking at this blasted, bad-tempered bleble!  Can’t you hear the drums?!

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@thepapalmainframe   Okaaayyyy . . . so . . . not really something to inquire about.  It’s a MaGuffin until the writers need it to be something else, at which point they’ll come up with, um, some more words . . .

I’m a fan of mysterious thingies, so, not a problem.  Actually, kind of a criterion for sticking with the Doctor, come to think of it.  Maybe the whirly tunnel of the credits is the Vortex?  Looks like a vortex, fluid-y like the vortex of water going down the drain in the sink . . . but with a Tardis bopping around in there . . . can you tell it’s near bed-time around here?

@lisa   I’m not sure “physics” is what they threw together, but yeah, it sounds perfectly suited to its context.

 

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What would a “tempered schism” be tempered with?

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@purofilion   Yes, of course, what was I thinking?  Not a lot, it would seem.

best,

ichi

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@tenthdoctorftw  HUGS AND KISSES, YOU HAVE MADE MY DAY!  What a wonderful, goofy, clever clip that is!  Where the HELL did you find it?  Loved it loved it loved it!  I’m watching again instead of having dinner, and *that’s* a first around here!

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@lisa  Yeah, somehow the idea does make me laugh — I probably wouldn’t, if I knew the details, but for all I know the story is just a gossipy anecdote with some other story behind it.

“Pathological fixation” is right!  And “devotion”, yes, in a weird way.  After all, MissMaster has no friends, does she? Not even colleagues.  She has “minions”, like SEB and Dr. Change, poor fellows.

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@tenthdoctorftw   I congratulate your on your courage and persistence; my stepdaughter has been a CFS sufferer all her life as well as being badly dyslexic, and she was working toward a career in theater but decided that the energy demands of that kind of work, and the stress-load, were more than she wanted to take on, so she took another road instead.  It was a struggle, though, and so was the other road in its own way, as it turned out.  She’s a social worker in a major hospital now, 15 yrs or so from retirement, and very happy in her work but nevertheless ill more often than most.  People are just beginning to press forward here in the states with demands that “invisible illnesses” like Crohn’s, CFS, and others be recognized as serious handicaps entitling their sufferers to legal protection under the Disabilities legislation that covers more conventional (and readily observable) conditions.  Is that happening in Greece also?

People apologize for rambling in here all the time, but nobody takes offense; we all do it, I think, and often the results are interesting and enjoyable, so not to worry about that.

What kind of music?

 

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@tenthdoctorftw  My favorite was Tom Baker, since it was during his time as the Doctor that my husband and I got really hooked on the series.  TomDoc was so capricious, so fizzily energetic, and so smart that he was riveting to watch.

I thought Eccleston was very promising, but he was gone too soon to make a strong enough impression on me.

There’s a good bit of TomDoc in CapDoc, as people with better memories than mine have observed, so maybe that’s part of it, but in any event there’s no doubt in my mind that Capaldi’s Doctor is my Doctor now.  His range — of expression, of layered meaning, and of acting skills (like comic timing) is phenomenal.  To be fair his very strong showing is undoubtedly helped by, and partly due to, the fact that Season 8’s Doctor was written to capitalize Capaldi’s strengths (the way George Ballanchine used to choreograph a prima ballerina’s role in a new ballet “on” that dancer, meaning tailoring it to all her abilities), and the actor was himself included in at least part of that process when he came on board.  He’s spoken of this unusual synergy in interviews (and it’s one reason that I try to ignore the all-too-common dismissals of Moffat’s writing as inadequate or ruinous to the show; acting is a *performance* art.  It’s — usually — a mess of sound and fury signifying nothing without a good script, just as even the best script is just a half-realized blueprint without actors to embody and speak it).

By all accounts from the people in involved, this is the kind of ideal pairing of actor and part that you rarely see onscreen, and all the more striking because of that.  So I think CapDoc has already begun proving himself to be a great Doctor, insuring a future of being looked back on as a classic set of performances in its own right.

IMO, mind.

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@lisa  Oh, Clara will still have her fragilities and weaknesses, I hope — otherwise, she’ll be flattened out again to a plot-mule instead of a real-seeming, engaging character.  Our weaknesses, and our ways of dealing with them, are a huge part of our effective reality in the world; this is why we instinctively distrust apparently perfect people who seem to “have it all” (or, if we’re semi-formed personalities ourselves, we worship them instead until we see their fraudulence, and sometimes even after, hence the pathetic farce of celebrity culture).

And I like your pinpointing of *competence* as what she’s really after: demonstrable competence that will validate her small, pretty self in the eyes of others (and, on some levels of course, herself).  That works very well for me.

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@purofilion   Charlotte Rampling is something else — now there’s somebody who can project “alien” just by standing there.  Something about the eyes . . . ?  Always doing something interesting.

@scaryb  With Danny, here’s what I would have liked to see, to give him a bit more dimension but without making a huge distraction out of it (he was not, after all, a super-significant focus point until DiH): I’d like a scene with Danny talking about his new girl-friend with a couple of mates from his Army time, being cautious about it, but when they talk about their shared experience a bit, absent friends etc., warming up to a real sense of the solidarity that can happen among comrades in arms who’ve gone through some s**t together.  This would give him a bit of inner conflict between his guilt over having killed a child and his sense of belonging with others who’ve been there with him, who support him and approve of him and don’t make the same judgments about him that civilians are likely to do.

I think this actor could have carried it off brilliantly, and his conversations with the Doctor and with Clara would have gained considerable depth, because both of them have *also* been through war-is-hell stuff too.

Probably too complex, but what the heck, it would have been a lot more interesting than another conversation about digging wells, and it would have made Danny more real at the same time.

What else could have been done to help?  Maybe they’ll bring him back somehow, but if they do it without getting past the Danny we got in Series 8, there wouldn’t be much point to it, IMO.

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@lisa   I think MissMaster not only respects the Doctor — she’s utterly obsessed with him, and with some kind of fixation on their childhood days together, which she probably doesn’t remember accurately anyway, being more or less certifiable from way back.   As somebody else noted here earlier, she’s basically a crazy stalker, wants to own the Doctor, probably at some level wants to *be* the Doctor — very dangerous, and sad, too, which is certainly how the Doctor sees her and why his response is so compromised (she is a murderer, after all, so in some sense *any* effort to kill her is basically a defensive move — as with the CyberArmy that she wants the Doctor to use to murder sentient beings all over the place, and add their nervous systems or whatever to the Army that killed the).

I did live in a flat-roofed house for about 15 yrs, when we first came to the southwest; it’s SW or “pueblo” style, like many homes here (even the wood frame ones can be made to imitate the softer, more organic lines of a mud-brick home, which is what adobe is).  It had been built by a latino guy right after WWII, behind the much older little farmhouse up front on the same property, so he could holler back and forth from the porch to family members living in the front house; then, the story goes, he slugged his brother in law with a rock, killing him in the backyard, and this being the still rather wild west, his punishment was that he had to leave the neighborhood, so the place was sold.  The house, an adobe cottage of one story, really, had a traditional roof on it — cedar rafters, planking, and a layer or two of cut turf bricks on top of that that were supposed to keep off (absorb?  Grass grew up there!) the rain, if any came.  Then, when that got leaky, a tarpaper and pitch layer, and another on top of that, and we had to add one more because with that kind of construction, when you get leaks the water can get into the walls and, well, melt them.

It was tiny, with walls about 2′ thick, and we loved it.  But I got too allergic to the valley weeds (this was a sort of rural suburb — ? — about 7 miles north of the center of the city), so we moved down into town between the university and the town center, where I live now, in another older neighborhood.  This is a Queen Anne cottage on a street constructed around 1900 or so to house mid-level railroad staff.  The roof is in fact steeply pitched, and there’s a second floor that’s one big room.  The roof problem is on a small outbuilding with a flat roof — the garage, into which I can just barely fit a compact car (the garage was added probably in the forties).

@tenthdoctorftw  There’s a theory around that English is now more or less the Latin of the modern world — being taught and spoken everywhere because it’s the language of commerce (as Latin was the language of European education), and that it’s already beginning to break down into sub-languages the way Latin did, with national dialects starting to diverge from each other in not-quite-yet significant ways.  With everything else in more or less wild flux everywhere, I guess that’s to be expected — but strange times, aren’t they!

 

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More on the future of the BBC, with specific and warm reference at the end to Doctor Who:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/15/privatising-bbc3-pernicious-as-isis-destroying-iraq-historic-sites

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@purofilion  and love the stories of your dad!  Those were the *real* do it yourself days; most people had a lot more time than money, since you mostly didn’t have to work three crappy-pay jobs to raise your family so you could at least *try* to mend your own fridge/roof/toilet/gutters etc. for yourself in your spare time, which you had a bit of.

I’m sitting here thinking dark thoughts about finding a reliable roofing outfit to re-do the leaky roof of my tiny garage, where tons of papers are stored, so water damage is a concern — and no way can I (let alone my guy) get up there and do it!  Though come to think of it, when we got out here in 1969 or so, we did rig a pulley and a bucket thing and haul up loads of small white quartz rocks to put on the (flat) roof in hopes of reflecting a bit of the hot summer sun back off the house.

What were we, crazy?!

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@purofilion   Thanks for the explanation of your screen name — wow, what you describe sounds like a scene set for a Doctor Who story!  Red moon, smoke, bodies burning — !  Maybe not mythical, but just a wee bit exaggerated, you know, the way things go from kind of utilitarian and workaday (everybody has to dispose of their dead somehow) to epicly lurid over centuries of retelling.

Yes, production values are hugely better, and that whole half-hour + cliffhanger format of the early days was so much a part of the old film series format — the Perils of Pauline etc., little chapters and a million climactic moments to lure you on to next time!  We’ve come a long, long way from all that — thank gods.  It suited me fine as a kiddie, but I haven’t been that for ages now.  The combo of the creepy transformations of people into furniture etc. + the silliness (and then the scary part, being trapped) of the teeny tiny Tardis was what really made that ep for me — those galloping wrenches in tone from comedy to terror to total creep-out are one of the stand-out strengths of the show, IMO — handled with enormous aplomb, no fancy transitions or explanations necessary, just in your face, and thank you very much!

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