Round Robin: Fancy Dress (both kinds)

For the Round Robin Challenge: Dress Up, I asked to see "Any kind of costume ..., any dress, tux and tails, doll clothes, anything worn by anything or anyone as long as it's out of the ordinary." Although I'm feeling pretty wiped out tonight with a bad allergy attack that's gone on for the last 15 hours or so, I can supply examples in several of those categories.

My immediate inspiration was the idea of cosplay - fans making and wearing costumes that represent characters and creatures from their favorite books, movies, tv shows and comics. Over the years I've taken more than a few photos of fans in costume at Gallifrey One, the annual Doctor Who convention in Los Angeles. It's been several years since I made it to Gally, but I recently managed to buy a ticket to the 2015 convention in the 75 minute window before it was sold out. So let's celebrate that victory with memories of costumes past. I'll try to avoid reruns from past postings:

 From 2010: A Clockwork Droid threatens Reinette, 

a.k.a. Madame de Pompadour.

From 2011: Amy Pond in her Kiss-o-gram police uniform, 

with Rory Williams, the Last Centurion.

The last time I saw people in cosplay as Doctor Who characters was last year, at Disneyland of all places.

 

The Tenth Doctor, Captain Jack Harkness, 

and the Eleventh Doctor, Disneyland, May 2013.

In the U.K., "fancy dress" means a masquerade costume. Here in the U.S., it tends to have a more literal meaning.

A young woman poses for photos at Gates Pass, September 2013.

This one is a rerun: a wedding party at Reid Park, 2009. 

That green dress looks like something Tinker Bell would wear. Love it!

But let's go back to Disneyland for a moment. Come to think of it, Disneyland is full of fancy dress, and fancy dresses!

Tiana from The Princess and the Frog, Disneyland, May 2012.

I have many more, but that's enough for tonight. Let's so see what all the Robins came up with for this Challenge!


Linking List
as of Saturday, April 5th, 2014
1:54 AM MST

Karen - Posted!
Outpost Mâvarin
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Mande
Simply Learning to Explore and Use My Camera
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Carly - Posted!
Ellipsis
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If it's still the weekend, it's not too late to play along yourself! Go for it, I say!

Karen

Benton Vs. a Cyberman - and a Snarky Dalek

If I can figure out how to do it, I will add a YouTube video (raw footage for now) of John Levene (aka John Anthony Blake, who played Sgt. Benton on Doctor Who) trying to stage a heroic encounter with a Cyberman and the world's snarkiest Dalek. Meanwhile here's a photo (I hope!):



And here's the cutest-ever encounter between the Doctor and K-9:






I had a reasonably great time this weekend, and took lots of photos, almost none of them of celebrities. This is because I almost never manage to sit less than a hundred feet from the stage. For the big deal events involving the actors, my photos tend to be really, really bad:



Just like being there, huh? But I kind of like it. It looks as though everyone is on the verge of teleporting out.

Okay, this app doesn't like my YouTube info or the hotel connection or something. I'll post it later.




I am in the Marriott's sports bar, Champions, where every year I treat myself to one decent meal, a steak salad. Love it! After this I start the long driver back to almost-Tucson. My new job is between here and home, so I won't actually get home to John and the dogs until Monday night.

Karen

Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:W Century Blvd,Los Angeles,United States

EMPS: Let's Look at the Numbers

For Ellipsis Monday Photo Shoot #79: Numbers, Carly wants to see "the numbers in our lives." This week I will have a few shots that take this literally, but some of the others might be a bit on the symbolic side. Still, numbers are symbols, so a symbolic representation of a symbolic representation is...well, conceptually interesting, anyway.



Let's start with her "Extra Credit," to find shapes of numerals in nature. I found a crude 8, at least one tilted 7 and a tilted 9 in these trees at Agua Caliente Park. Can you spot them?



When driving to California, as I did a week ago Thursday to Friday, I often stop at the Wheel Inn restaurant in Cabezon, CA, adjacent to the dinosaurs. Since I usually drive overnight and sleep in the car, the fact that it's "Open 24 Hours" is quite helpful. Too bad the "Robotic Dinosaur Exhibit" they recently opened behind the restaurant isn't so accommodating!



This Cabezon dinosaur seems quite happy about the "$75,000 CASH GIVEAWAY" advertised on a nearby billboard.

From Gallifrey One: Blackjack 21

Last weekend, of course, was my drive to California for the Gallifrey One: Blackjack 21 convention. The convention logo with its neon style 21 was in evidence in the main programming room. Here, former Doctor Who companion Deborah Watling (who played Victoria Waterfield in the 1960s) describes screaming for charity as her co-star Frazer Hines (Jamie McCrimmon) looks on.



Here's where we start to get less literal. From November 1963 to present, eleven actors have played the Doctor in Doctor Who on tv, each with his own unique costume. The semi-official name for each "regeneration" of the character is the ordinal number, e.g. "the Fourth Doctor," "the Tenth Doctor" and so on. Recently, however, there's been a tendency to call them "Ten" or "Eleven" (the new guy) etc. for short. Fans love to dress up as all of them at the conventions, but especially the most recent ones. Here we see a Seven, a Ten, an Eleven, a female interpretation of Ten, and another Ten. What does that add up to? Sorry about the blurring of Eleven's face. I was too low on batteries to use flash, and he moved!



Finally, back here in Tucson, I deal with numbers at St. Michael's all week long. A photo of a spreadsheet would be pretty boring, so let's have a look at this. This is the "Book of Pipes," a fundraising project of the church and a way to honor or remember someone by "buying" a pipe in that person's name. The church's  Æolian-Skinner Pipe Organ, built in 1959, has several thousand pipes. Each is defined by a section (Great, Swell, etc.), a type, a numerical length (are the 16' Contra Violone pipes, all 61 of them, really sixteen feet high, or does the apostrophe mean something else when discussing organs?) and so on. A person honored with a pipe gets a certificate stating exactly which pipe will forever be played in the person's name. This info is also recorded in the Book of Pipes, the large, handwritten book in the glass case seen here.

So a lot of numbers are written in that book, but that's just the beginning. The idea behind the Book of Pipes is to raise money to pay off the loans the church took out to buy the organ. The Book of Pipes donations are administered through the "Peace Fund" - as in peace of mind, not peace on Earth, although we're in favor of that, too. Accounting for the breakdown of money coming into the Peace Fund from the Graveyard Fund (to honor the deceased with a pipe), and from the Peace Fund and General Fund to pay for principal and interest on the Antiphonal organ loan is the trickiest, most time consuming thing I do as St. Michael's bookkeeeper-accountant. So you may not see any giant numerals in this photo (it actually says Opus 1352, or maybe Opus 135Z, on the second line below the SOLI DEO GLORIA bit; but that's hard to see here), but trust me, it's all about the numbers for me!

Karen

Weekend Assignment #309: Get in Line!

It took me a while, but I came up with a Weekend Assignment that relates to the Doctor Who convention I just attended without getting too obscure for everyone else:

Weekend Assignment #309: Nobody likes standing in line, generally speaking, but sometimes you have to wait around to get what you want. Are you one of those people who avoid lines as much as humanly possible, even if it means doing without? Or do you accept the need for queues, and simply try to make the wait as painless as you can?

Extra Credit: Do you see the problem of waiting in lines as getting better or worse in recent years?

As I may have mentioned before, my husband John is an absolute line-hater. He will avoid most restaurants because he can't stand the wait to be seated, and barely tolerates the lines at Disneyland, a place he loves in other respects. Lines stress him out and make him cranky.

Tommy Knight chats with fans as they move through a Friday autograph line.  From Gallifrey One: Blackjack 21

But I'm not too bothered about lines myself. I won't go so far as to say that they are actually fun, but many times the prize at the end (a steak dinner, an autograph, a driver's license renewal) is worth the tedium. At Gallifrey One last weekend, I waited in all six autograph lines, two each on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. At the end of each wait was a row of tables, filled with actors, writers, directors, an artist or two and a costume designer. Each Doctor Who celebrity was armed with Sharpies and a silver marker to sign your photo, book, magazine or what-have-you. There were a few people whose autographs I didn't ask for, mostly people who wrote or illustrated books or comics I haven't read. But I tried to say something friendly and intelligent to everyone, and to come up with as many appropriate items to sign as I could without going completely overboard on my purchases.



Above you can see the signed photos I ended up with, but they're just the souvenirs of the overall experience. For me the real hook is to have a brief conversation with people I would not get to meet otherwise. I asked Louise Page about the ripping of the Tenth Doctor's suit in "The End of Time," since it was one of only four brown suits made and irreplaceable. She confirmed that it was a wrench to half-destroy it for the shoot. I chatted with Nick Briggs about the on-screen character in Torchwood, and showed Deborah Watling what I wrote about her character Victoria on the back of her Cornerstone trading card back in the 1990s. And so on. I could not have done any of that without standing in some rather long lines.

The end of the line to be seated for the Masquerade. It wound though
the corridors and out onto this patio, where it had been raining.
I was lucky: I got to sit on a wall, under a giant leaf.

Still, there are ways to make lines go a bit faster. For quite a few years now, Disney has had a system called Fastpass, which gives you a ticket to return at a certain time rather than wait in line from the beginning. You still end up in line, but not as long. This year, Gallifrey One instituted "Flyaway Autographs" on a similar principal. Show up at a given time, and you got a ticket with a group number on it, based on when you show up and how many people were ahead of you. Then you could go do something else until the session started, or even a little while after the session started. But the convention had over 1500 attendees this year, nearly double what it had to accommodate for most of the con's history. There was no way to get that many people through the autograph lines without a protracted wait, even with the flyaway system.


And there are things the person in line can do to make the wait less tedious. I'm pleased to say I overcame my shyness enough to chat with a number of people in line this year. In the line to be seated for the Masquerade (costume contest) I was reunited with a woman who, like me, failed to connect with the group on fans making an run to to In-N-Out Burger on Friday night. She in turn with taking to someone about Chicago schools - not a thrilling subject for me, but it was something to pass the time. In the autograph lines I was one of a number of fans who were quite impressed with something one particular guy was getting signed, a Hard Rock Cafe shirt with over 100 Doctor Who-related autographs dating all the way back to 2000. It was fun to listen in as he talked about who was on the shirt and tried to identify some of the less legible signatures.

More on the convention in my next entry. Meanwhile....

For Weekend Assignment #308: Chick Flicks Or Guy Movies?, Carly wanted to know what kind of movies we gravitate toward. Here are excerpts from the responses. Click on the name to be taken to the person's blog and read more.


Carly said...

I think in our house the choice of movies is pretty evenly split. Way back before Alan and I started dating, back when we were best friends, we made a deal to alternate which movies we watched. It's a custom that we still do to this day. Although, there was one recent exception... I couldn't get him to go to the theater to see the Sex and the City movie a couple years ago. Nope. No way. Not gonna do it! LOL. I didn't push, but man I wanted to see that movie. When it finally came on HBO, Alan did graciously agree to watch it with me, and he actually enjoyed it! LOL. I knew he would.

Glenda said in comments...

Worst movie EVER - Disney's Fantasia ... First movie (and only one of two) that I have ever WALKED OUT on.

As for Chick Flicks and Guy Movies, I'm a big fan of both. Love action/adventure as much as romance.

I love Against All Odds, Overboard, Ever After, Shakespeare In Love, The Bourne series, The Net, War Games, Fast & Furious ... way too many to mention.

Florinda said...

It's interesting; my reading interests tend to women-centric, but when it comes to movies, I'm really not all that much for the Chick Flick. ... Basically, I prefer movies that aren't strongly marketed to one gender or the other, and my husband feels the same way. Most of the time, we agree on the movies we want to see, and that does make things a lot easier.

Mike said...

Yes, I'm a fan of action flicks and Sci-Fi flicks. Mixing the two together is ideal, but it doesn't always work. I can list all the movies that I've seen that mix these two and end up being terrible. I will still watch them, but they are bad, bad movies. Look, Armageddon is a load of garbage, but I'll still watch it when it comes on. Maybe I think that one time when I watch the movie it will magically be better. Also, I like to laugh at it.

Karen said...

Of the two general categories in the assignment title, I suppose I must choose chick flicks, but really, that's not how I classify films or what I look for. ... If you think about it, the Peter Jackson-directed Tolkien films are both chick flicks and guy movies, having the romance between Aragorn and Arwen (and the love triangle with Eowyn), and lots of battles and fight scenes. It's even a buddy movie, with the two pairs of hobbits and the friendship and rivalry between Gimli and Legolas.

Paul said in comments...

The worst movie I ever saw was Master of Disguise, starring Dana Carvey. My son thought it was great, but I got tired of the recurring fart jokes.

OK, sorry, I didn't actually answer the question. We're solidly on the guy movie bench here at Casa AWV. Fav movie is probably the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and we also have the Star Wars films and the Indiana Jones movies in our DVD collection. We're also huge Disney animation fans. Unfortunately, almost all of those we used to own on VHS and we sold them at a garage sale because we never watched them any more.

Come along with us now, and tell us what you think about standing in line. Here are the guidelines:

1. The deadline is 6 PM PST on Wednesday, March 10th (my birthday!).
2. You may answer in the comments below, or, even better, write an entry about it on your blog. If you do write a blog entry, please mention the Weekend Assignment and link back here.
3. Use of the Weekend Assignment graphic on your blog is encouraged but not mandatory.
4. Please make the rounds of other participants if you can. That's half the fun, and your fellow bloggers will appreciate it!

Got it? Good! See you over on Carly's blog Ellipsis next Thursday for a roundup of this Assignment and to read what the next one is.

And don't forget our other memes:


The Round Robin Photo Challenges. 
Next Challenge (to be posted Saturday, March 13th):
Round Robin Challenge: Look Up/Look Down

Ellipsis Monday Photo Shoot (hosted by Carly). 
This week: EMPS #79: Numbers

Come play with us, won't you?

Karen

EMPS: Still Life with Steak

D'oh! As busy as I've been at this Doctor Who convention, I almost forgot to post my entry for Ellipsis Monday Photo Shoot #78: Still Life featuring Food.  This is my shot from Friday's dinner at the Champions sports bar inside the Marriott LAX. It's a steak salad. This seems to me a very odd concept for a menu item, and is also quite expensive ($17 or $18 I think), but I love it so much I've had it twice this weekend.  Those are the only two proper meals I've had since Thursday lunch, unless you count two fish tacos (with fries? really?) from Del Taco.



In haste,

Karen

Friday at Gallifrey, Revisited

Right, where was I in my painfully slow recap of Gallifrey One's Nineteeth Symphony, Opus 2008 (the con's full name)? As I look back on my entries labeled Gallifrey One, I see that I didn't even write up the stuff from before the Masque of Mandragora except for the briefest of summaries written that Friday night. The problem with not posting full details as they happen is that memories get garbled after a while. Was the VotD screening on Friday or Saturday? (Friday.) Was the Buffy singalong on Saturday? (Yes.) And so on.

Okay, then: once I got to the right hotel and checked in, I managed to cram in a number of events that day. From here on out I'm going to crib from my program book, Lee's con report and my own posts made at the time.

At 4 PM was Gary Russell's interview of Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred, after which I left the main room (which had composer-archivist-restoration specialist Mark Ayre's presentation on Doctor Who) to rush upstairs for things to be autographed. That particular autograph session was largely writer-oriented, and so I got to say hello to Steven Moffat (who jokingly characterized himself as "a disappointment" in person), story editor Andrew Cartmell (who presided over some of my favorite 1980s stories), Andy Lane (whose New Adventures novels I had foolishly left behind at home), Paul Cornell (who remembered my comment on his blog about John Lennon and Paul McCartney), and James Moran (whose interview in Doctor Who Magazine was in one of the issues I left home). Still, it was pleasant to get a quick chat in with each of these guys, especially once I tracked down my well-thumbed copy of the Discontinuity Guide, co-written by Cornell, which I had been reading over lunch at Carl's Jr.

After that was Opening Ceremonies in the main room. I was a million miles from the stage, but that didn't dim my appreciation as emcee Shaun Lyon introduced the weekend's guests.

Steak salad in the sports bar.

A break in the schedule of must-see events followed, which gave me a chance to have dinner with some of the fans in from Phoenix, including the marvelous Lee Whiteside. I had what sounded like a relatively healthy and intriguing menu option, steak salad. This turned out to be a salad with french fries dumped on top of it, and a steak on top of that. It was good, though.

The "Drunken Doctor" poses with "Martha" in the hallway

The Fifth Doctor (left) meets the Tenth Doctor

The Doctor faces "Evil Toby," which didn't happen in the story.

This brings us up to the Masque of Mandragora, which I've already covered in some depth, except that I've found some more pictures I failed to post before. Here they are.

Rob Shearman launches into a funny rant about a
Steven Moffat (left) catchphrase in Just a Minute

My post the other night ended with the Just a Minute game, except that I totally failed to communicate how fun and funny it was. Great stuff, and that's all I'm going to say about it tonight. Some of it was supposedly available online as of last week, but appears to have been taken down now.

After Just a Minute on Friday night, prize certificates (and some actual loot such as gift certificates) were handed out to about half of the costume contestants, some of them very specific to the individual's costume. Cassandra and her "boys" took Best in Show, and I remember Martha and the Cyberboy being honored as well.

This was followed by screenings of "Time Crash" (Moffat's charity piece featuring the Fifth and Tenth Doctors) "Voyage of the Damned" (the highly-rated 2007 Christmas special) and "The Infinite Quest" (an animated adventure that was originally serialized on the BBC kids' show Totally Doctor Who, with Tony Head voicing the main villain). None of these have officially been aired in the U.S., nor released on video. Nevertheless, most of the fans at the convention had already seen them, including me. But seeing them on a big screen with a bunch of other fans was a rather different experience than watching them alone on my laptop!

I was up late Friday night blogging, which made it a little hard to get up the next morning. But Saturday was a full day of stuff to write about, so I'll leave that for another time.

Karen

More of the Masque

I've dawdled my way to (almost) 1 AM, watching Doctor Who and two episodes of the British series Primeval (one of them by Paul Cornell), refreshing my memory about the end of a L'Engle novel, reading a Thurber pastiche about a candidate for the SFWA presidency and learning why John Scalzi and others say our current President of the United States is only the second worst one ever. (Sure. Go ahead and follow all those links, especially if you're a science fiction fan. The rest of this entry will still be here when you get back.) What I've accomplished by all this, of course, is to give myself an excuse to fob you off with a photo essay tonight instead of writing a lot of those word thingies.

Okay, so in my lackadaisical coverage of the Gallifrey One convention we were partway through the costume contest, called the Masque of Mandragora in honor of a Fourth Doctor serial that I haven't watched in a decade or so. Let's pick up where I left off:


There are only two people in this shot, which I've cobbled together from three different photos. It was a quick change act, with the guy acting as a human wardrobe for the woman. I'm not sure all the costumes were very successful, but it was a very ambitious and interesting attempt.

Somewhere in there was also a guy dressed as Benton, and possibly one or two other entrants, but I failed to get usable photos.



Here's another composite shot, this time of a truly awesome recreation of the Tenth Doctor's recent companion, Martha Jones.


And finally, here's another Tenth Doctor, trying to break into his own TARDIS. Looking at the shots from Friday night, I'm 80% convinced that the fragile TARDIS prop was a little lopsided that night from being handled too much by the day's guests and costume contestants.

The plan was to have writer Paul Cornell host a game show called Just a Minute while the judges did their judging. However, when all the people in costume had paraded across the stage, Cornell and his contestants weren't ready yet. Nobody really minded, though, because Tadao Tomomatsu and Patrick Beckstead of the con committee did a fabulous job of entertaining everyone while we waited, even performing to the classic Muppets tune Mahna Mahna (a.k.a. Manamana). Tomomatsu also did a flawless impression of Satchmo singing What a Wonderful World, the classic song that closes the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy tv series.

Paul Cornell (in stripes above) then presented his version of the longrunning BBC Radio 4 game show Just a Minute, featuring (left to right) writer Steven "Two Hugos" Moffat, "Dalek" writer Rob Shearman, Torchwood/Doctor Who writer James Moran and actress Sophie Aldred. (The woman next to Cornell above is keeping score.) Somehow I didn't manage a good shot of Sophie in the game, which is a shame because she won. The premise is to speak for a full minute on an assigned topic "without repetition, hesitation or deviation," with other contestants winning points for challenging the speaker when he or she commits one of these errors. The catch is that the successful challenger then has to take over speaking on that topic. The topics, such as "My Volcano," "My Dalek" and "Are You My Mummy?" were all tailored to the individual contestant, and the funniest bits tended to come when someone else took over a topic. Lee over on sftv blog has a good rundown of the highlights of the game, and it's nearly 3 AM so I'll stop here for now, and bid you good night.

Karen

Round Robin: Whose Shoes?

It's Round Robin time again, and for the last ten minutes I've been trying to cobble up a good pun to go with this week's topic, "Shoes," as suggested by Vicki of the blog Maraca. The previous sentence is the best one I could find to shoehorn in here. Since this paragraph is almost solely about stepping into some gags, which have already gotten rather arch, let's toe the line, shall we, before I feel like a heel!


There was a cartoon many years ago by a guy named Jack Ziegler, in which a time and temperature sign on a bank announces, "TODAY'S WEATHER: SHOES." I've never actually seen the cartoon, although I could almost certainly rectify that by pulling out the CD ROM that came with my New Yorker cartoon collection book, and probably will do so shortly. But I read those three extraordinary words in a book review in Time, way back in 1979, and they've stayed with me over since. Today's weather: shoes! Glorious nonsense! That's what's raining down on us this weekend, courtesy of Vicki and the Robins.


But what shoes can I show you? Do you really want to see the scuffed monstrosities I clop around in everyday? A few years back I posted pictures of the cheap athletic shoes I wore almost exclusively for five or ten years, accompanied by a long explanation about my large feet and the fact that I can only wear men's shoes in certain styles, usually in a size 10 1/2 W, because anything else leaves me with foot pain. Some anonymous idiot showed up a few days later and left a comment about my lack of style. Uh, yeah, thanks for that. Next time, read the text, buddy.


Hey, it could be worse. When my previous pair --laced shoes from Payless for $45, 3 times what I usually pay) died the death after two months in December 2007, the soles actually split down the middle, exposing the metal rods inside. Those were fun to walk in that day - especially when I went to lunch. It was raining.


But enough about my shoes. I originally planned to crop a bunch of pictures from the Masque of Mandragora costume contest at Gallifrey One, and show you just the shoes worn by the contestants (and one of the judges, above). But even from the second row, I didn't really get the resolution to end up with nice sharp pictures of everyone's shoes. Still, here are a few anyway:


This shot is from a sketch involving the Seventh Doctor (left), his friend Ace (right), and the Second Doctor (not shown). I love the attention to detail the Seventh Doctor guy showed, wearing those two-tone shoes! (By the way, for those who may not know, I'm talking about a convention for my favorite tv show, the long-running British series Doctor Who.)

The Fifth Doctor (left) wore what were probably called sneakers, back in the day. The Tenth Doctor (right), who wears this style of footwear exclusively (the better to run around and run away) calls them "trainers." He actually mentioned in a recent mini-episode for charity that his footwear was inspired by his previous self. This is not the first time the Doctor has talked about shoes, though. In the Third Doctor's very first appearance in 1970, his very first line of dialogue consisted of the word "Shoes!" Half-delirious, half scheming, he was trying to recover his shoes from the staff of the hospital where he was a patient. The reason: he'd hidden the key to his TARDIS inside one of his shoes. A quarter century later, the Eighth Doctor was suddenly delighted to discover that a pair of shoes Grace had given him had stretched out, and now "fit perfectly!"


Let's move on to the most stylish shoes here at the Museum of the Weird. As you see above, John's shoes don't qualify, and no, Tuffy doesn't wear shoes. Then whose shoes are they?


Well, Barbie's of course! And Skipper's, and Tutti's, and Casey's and so on.


The shorter, rounder shoes in this shot are for the Remco line of "pocketbook dolls" from the 1960s, Heidi and Jan and Spunky. Somewhere along the line the shoes made for these dolls either got much better or much worse, and I have examples of each. Some are fairly heavy plastic, have well-defined molded bows on them, come in several colors, and fit the dolls well, if a little tightly. The others are of thin, white plastic, indistinctly molded and a little too big. Odd, that. Forty-five years, later, however, I don't suppose it matters much!

And now you know the source of the shoes in the two "Today's Weather" shots: not rain clouds, but Remco and Mattel.

Now go see everyone else's photogenic shoes!

Karen

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Before the Masque (and During): Gallifrey One Part One

I was going to write about Gallifrey One tonight, with a more general and factual perspective than my Friday night misadventure entry or my Saturday night introspection. I can't, though, because two or three hours of editing photos has left me no time to write actual words. I'll get to it, though.

All of these photos are from Friday, February 15th:

Sylvester McCoy (who played the Seventh Doctor) emerges from the TARDIS as Sophie Aldred (who played his friend Ace) rushes to follow up on Sylvester's shtick. Shaun Lyon, the emcee and public face of Gallifrey One, looks on in amusement, having just introduced Sophie.

Sylvester and Sophie put their feet up as writer-editor Gary Russell asks them a series of numbered questions. Sophie wants to know whether it's a game show.


Skipping over Opening Ceremonies, here are some shots from the Masque of Mandragora, the con's costume contest. Here is the littlest Cyberman, or Cyberboy. The premise is that like Ianto's former girlfriend in the Torchwood episode "Cyberwoman," the Cyberboy wasn't completely transformed when the Cybermen got him. The following evening, this little boy and his equally tiny sister were rolling around in the hallway as orange-suited Luke and white-hooded Leia from Star Wars.

A comedy Dalek. For some reason all my shots of the TARDIS came out skewed, and refused to be fixed by perspective and skew and arbitrary proportion-editing tools. That TARDIS also has an unfortunate tendency to come out purple in photographs. It isn't that way in the real world. Oh, and Steven Moffat says that the windows are the wrong size. (That's a running joke. Fans debated the size of the windows on the recent TARDIS props earnestly and at length, and Moffat commemorated this with a line of dialogue in his award-winning episode "Blink." But he did say it about this TARDIS as well.)

The supposedly drunk Doctor from Moffat's "The Girl in the Fireplace" sings "I Could Have Danced All Night," praises bananas and insults the audience.


Harold Saxon, the mad, murderous Prime Minister, turns his laser screwdriver on us.

Harry Saxon's deranged wife Lucy pouts prettily in her handmade satin "moll" dress.

The Seventh Doctor introduces Ace to the Second Doctor in a brief sketch, which references a Dead Ringers comedy bit about the Second Doctor's foes being "made of tin foil."


Over a decade later, fans are still upset that the Eighth Doctor claimed to be half human. How much bigger would the firestorm have been had the Eighth Doctor been female?

Another female portrayal of a male character: Captain Jack's old flame Captain John, played on tv by Buffy's James Marsters.

More tomorrow. With words, even!

Karen