Shortcuts

Tonight was the night I was going to finally start writing in depth about the 2007 series of Doctor Who, based on the fact that it started airing in the U.S. today on SciFi. I don't quite feel up to it tonight, but I do want to share my reaction to one particular image seen by American viewers alone. This:

Why did I bother photographing this Channel Guide listing? For one thing, I wasn't quite sure you've believe me if I merely told you about it. For another, I'm wondering how many of you have already figured out that it's wrong, wrong, wrong. Well, two wrongs, anyway. So what's the problem? If you're a fan of the new series, it's just glaring. Otherwise, not so much. Let's break it down, shall we?

It is on Cox Digital Cable, it is on SciFi and the time given is correct for Tucson and the Pacific feed. Yes, the star of this episode, "Smith and Jones", is David Tennant. But Billie Piper? What is she doing on the two screen displays? She played Rose Tyler in Series One (2005) and Series Two (2006) of the revived series. She isn't in Series Three (2007), except for the occasional brief clip from older episodes. She certainly isn't in "Smith and Jones," although she's mentioned.

David Tennant's co-star in Series Three is Freema Agyeman, who plays Martha Jones‎. Martha is mentioned in this listing, but Freema goes uncredited. Shame on them, whoever it was that messed up this listing. My theory is that someone reused a template from last year, added that oh-so-uninformative plot description, and called it done, little realizing that the lineup of stars had changed, as indeed it did last year as well. Oh, and just to make it a little more pathetically clueless and wrong, they left about the definite article before the word Doctor. It wasn't "Doctor" who was transported to the Moon, along with an entire London hospital. It was "the Doctor!"

Oh, and by the way, they cut the proper trailers from both "The Runaway Bride" Christmas episode and "Smith and Jones", and substituted a different one at the end of "Smith and Jones," a few seconds later than the original one should have appeared. The main feature of the American trailer was a rather cliche style American voice over. Bleah. What I don't understand is why they couldn't have put it right after the logo crawl where it belonged.

Oh, and there were several ads for Series One and Two on DVD - except that the images, other than the regeneration, were all from Series Two. There was one little audio clip of the Ninth Doctor, buried in the mix. They couldn't be bothered to include a representative sample from the earlier series. Shortcuts.


Just for the heck of it, I'm throwing in another picture of the Simpsons figures here. In this case I deliberately included the ribbon that ropes it off, along with the sign that says, "Please Do Not Sit Or Touch." I don't know why it's in Title Case like that. I would contend that the couch was deliberately designed to allow someone to sit down, and be photographed alongside The Simpsons. Apparently a few too many people tried it, though. There were definite signs of wear at that end of the couch. Rather than try to maintain it, or just let it get worn, the theater proprietors are taking the shortcut of just roping it off.


It rained again today, and we got more pretty cloudage. The monsoon is definitely on its way!

Just in case you think I did absolutely nothing tonight but watch Doctor Who (and you're not far wrong), I'm up to page 281 of the Heirs of Mâvarin, edit, nearly halfway through Chapter Seven. But I'm tired now, in part because I was awakened early this morning (by my standards) by someone calling on behalf of a charity. We last gave them money twenty years ago, but apparently a charity contact list goes on forever. It's just another shortcut: collect the names, update the photo numbers as needed, and never, ever cull the list. The firefighters, the Children's Wish Foundation and John Kerry will be trying to squeeze money from me for the rest of my natural life, and probably a good while afterward.

Karen

The Bottom of a Barrel of Monkeys

Weekend Assignment #173: Share a joke. Make it funny. Also, since I'll want to link back to them, and I am, after all, but a cog in the great AOL machine, keep it reasonably clean and free of ethnic/sexual put-downs. You know.

Oh, Scalzi, you have no idea how hard that is for me. I've already told every single joke I know in one blog or another, except for a couple of politically incorrect ones of yesteryear, some elephant jokes that are actually riddles, and a few that belong to John Manynames and I wouldn't want to steal them. I'm not a jokey person, which is perhaps why I love the Brick Joke so much. It's the ultimate anti-joke. Here are most of them:

(Links updated 3/14/09:)

2/4/05: Karen's Joke File: An Experiment (#1 of about 5)

2/5/05: Karen's Joke File #2: The Brick (The Rooster Was Better)

2/6/05: Karen's Joke File #3: The Prison Jokes

2/7/05: Karen's Joke File #4: The Con and the Corn Flakes

2/8/05: Karen's Joke File: The Monkey and the Cigar

10/8/05: The Jon Pertwee Memorial Joke

10/6/05: Bad Jokes, Told Badly

I don't know. I manage to make my boss laugh on a daily basis, and co-workers in email, but that's with little quips, not jokes. (Update: by way of example, here's a bit of banter from Saturday afternoon. John's computer setup was beeping - beep...beep...beep... - something to do with a power issue. I asked him whether it was the sound of the computer "backing up.")

Do you really want to hear about the elephants in the VW, or Tarzan and the elephants? 'Cause that's all I can come up with right now. No, scratch that. I'm not telling Tarzan and the elephants because it's out of a book I read at age seven or so. The VW one I got from Joel all those years ago.

How many elephants can you fit in a Volkswagon Beetle?
Six: three in the back, two in the front, and one in the glove compartment.

Listen, I know it's lame. I'll try to top that before the weekend's over.

(Nope, didn't come up with a thing. But when I asked John for a joke, he directed me to Aisle 11 at Safeway.)

Extra Credit: So, ever been to Kansas City? Because that's where I'm going.

Um, I don't remember. We may have driven through at some point. But I'm sure I wasn't standing on the corner, 12th Street and Vine.

(Update: no, wait, I forgot two specific incidents that happened there:

1. In the mid-1990s I went to a Quantum Leap convention that I'm pretty sure was in Kansas City. While there I had a positive result on a home pregnancy test, followed almost immediately by evidence that the pregnancy didn't take. Based on what my fertility doctor said later, I'm guessing that there was a fertilized egg, but it didn't implant. I really was "a little bit pregnant." It was as close as I got before we had to give up.

2. I got a free positive space ticket from Braniff at a travel agent function, sometime around 1990. I used it to visit my mom in Florida and use another freebie, a three day cruise on the Oceanic to the Bahamas. But the Braniff people at my connection in Kansas City either forgot to put me on the list or else improperly gave my ticket less priority than their other stand by passengers, mostly Braniff employees. I didn't get on the plane. I was stuck in Kansas City for 24 hours. My mom completely freaked, but really it was no problem. I took a free hotel shuttle to someplace nearby, returned the next morning, talked to the airline people and spent the rest of the time reading a Star Trek novel. Easy. And we still made the cruise.)



The wind's picked up the last day or two, and I felt a smattering of rain as I left work tonight. We're starting to gear up for the monsoon. Good thing, too, because 114 degrees isn't much fun, and I like the "dramatic weather" of the summer monsoon.

Meanwhile, I've got Heirs of Mâvarin edited through Chapter 6 now. That chapter was a problem, actually. I would have been in bed an hour ago, but Word crashed when I tried to save, and the autosave didn't retain anything for some reason. I had to redo nearly the whole chapter. But it's done now, and I'm in Chapter Seven, page 269. I just hope I found and reconstructed all my little edits. Chapter Six is also the first to get a little longer this time through, instead of a little shorter.


Must sleep now! Good night!

The Inevitable Fireworks Pics...and a Surprise

I've had a few posts in the past week with lots of text and no photos at all. Let's even things out with a handful of pictures and not much text. Ready?


I only saw one of the three main Tucson fireworks shows from the house this year. Unlike last year, though, most of the explosions were not behind a tree.


I took over a hundred photos, almost all of them with my camera resting on the roof of John's car.


The camera doesn't have a fireworks setting, as far as I know, and I probably went for the wrong setting. Still, I did okay, I think. For some of these I've boosted the saturation and sharpened lightly, and on all of them I've done some severe cropping and adjusting the tone values. They're still kind of fuzzy, but overall I think they came out better than last year.

And now for the surprise:


Early this afternoon we went to see the Brad Bird Pixar film Ratatouille over at Park Place Mall. (I liked it, but not as much as The Incredibles.) When we were at the theater a month ago for Pirates 3, we saw a Simpsons couch gag display, but I didn't have my camera with me. This time I did. Enjoy!

Funny how Homer holds the candy as if it were a remote. Mmmm...tasty remote.

The women of the family seem happy today.

And of course Bart has to be different.

The one thing that bothers me about life-sized, 3-D Simpsons is that the yellow skin tone looks much weirder and more disturbing than in a cartoon.

(I'm adding the blogplugs tag because people might want to see the Simpsons shots, Joe. Hope you don't mind!)

Karen

P.S. Carly mades it down to the temporary "Kwik-E-Mart" in Mountain View, CA, and came back with some fun pics. See them here.

Choose Your Own Adventure

This is one of those nights when I've had no idea what I was going to blog about, and therefore hung around late into the night, indulging in the usual distractions (Wikipedia and Doctor Who) and waiting for inspiration to hit. It didn't work.

The only subject I thought of until about two minutes ago was recent casting announcements regarding Doctor Who: Kylie Minogue will be in the Christmas special; Freema Agyeman will star as Martha in three episodes of the spinoff series Torchwood before returning to Doctor Who later in the season; and Catherine Tate's character from the 2006 Christmas special, The Runaway Bride, loud-mouthed Donna Noble, will be the Doctor's full-time companion. Beyond the fact that I did a lot of work on Donna's Wikipedia article tonight, I don't actually have much to say about all that. I still feel funny about writing about the 2007 (and now 2008) series in any depth before it airs here in the U.S., so I get in the position of writing too much about the show for those of you who don't care about it, and not in enough depth for those of you who do. Still, it all starts up on SciFi this Friday, so let's just say I'll be writing about the episodes on Friday nights, when other Americans (the ones with the right cable channels, anyway) have had an opportunity to watch.

And now for that other subject I dragged out of my head. I was going to ask only two people, but since I have nothing better to say, I may as well put it before the house. Hmm, that's an odd expression, isn't it? But what I mean is, I'm going to share with you all a bit of decision-making I need to make regarding the new Jace and Sandy story, "Later This Somewhere." If you'd like to help advise me, you're welcome to do so.

The hit counter and the comments both tell me that some of you have read Part One. Thanks for that. If you have, you probably recall that at the end of her first letter, Sandy asks Jace what the teenage physicist thinks about Sandy's having seen two actors in the same play in 2013 - one of them over 50 years younger than she ought to be, the other over ten years older than he should be. To write the rest of the story I need to know the source of the anomaly, and how it's going to manifest further as the story proceeds, and why it's even a problem. I figure there are three basic options:

1. There's something strange about that particular theater, and it regularly draws actors from its own past and future history.
2. There's something strange with Sandy herself, due to her previous experiences with temporal and spatial anomalies.
3. The time anomaly moves around, and people start to notice as the story continues.

If I go with 1, I need to decide who is responsible and why, whether the actors are aware of what is happening, and whether it's something they agree to do. If the answer is 2, then Sandy is seeing parts of two or more different times from her own, at the very same moment. If we do 3, then the scale of the thing necessarily gets much bigger, which could be a problem.

So, whaddaya think?

Karen

Barren, Boring Pre-Monsoon Yard

Your Monday Photo Shoot: Take a picture of something interesting in your yard (or take a picture of some fun happening). Front yard, back yard, side yards, it's all good. If you live in an apartment or otherwise don't have access to a yard, something at a local park or garden works well (or just take a picture of your windowsill garden).

Fortunately for this shoot, John just did a bunch of yard work. But that only makes the yard neat, not interesting. Still, let's take a look anyway:

Front Yard:

The bougainvillea that was snowed on in January, looked completely dead in March and April and started to revive in May and June, has one flower as July begins.

Not so this not so green evergreen. It's been failing for years.

Back Yard:

I seldom miss a chance to photograph Tuffy in the back yard, easily its most photogenic feature when she's there.

John recently lined up all our back yard furniture and other stuff on its way out of our lives, the better to get the rest of the yard under control.

You may have noticed that the grass and trees are dry, dry, dry, despite John's watering. But July is here, and the monsoon will start soon. When that happens, the desert will be greener.

Karen

Actual Writing Is Actually Taking Place

As promised, I've typed up Jace's first letter to Sandy in "Later This Somewhere," the sequel to "The Jace Letters," and posted it on my fiction blog. By the time I got the continuity under control it came to under 400 words, so I wrote and added Sandy's reply. Sara G. had thrown out a few interesting venues in an IM earlier tonight, and I think Sarah K. will be pleased with the one I went with. If you're one of my fiction readers, I hope you'll like it, too!

I've had a few surprising bits of feedback from folks this weekend:

Barbara from Colorado left a comment on a three-year-old entry in Musings, asking about the artist who made a pair of kachina figures I photographed. I Googled, and on the first screen I only got what appeared to be info on an archaeologist, David A. Phillips, Jr, plus my own journal entry. Sorry! Maybe Santa Fe Trading Company in Tucson can help you; they're the ones who were selling the figures.

"Anonymous" had a few things to say. He, she or they found my entry about "The Fan-Tailed Warbler Disaster" a "very interesting story," and identified the bird on the prickly pear as an Ash-throated Flycatcher. Could well be!

Melissa enthused about the Beatles and the Stones in her comment to an old Weekend Assignment entry from back in May. John L. Trapp responded to the current Weekend Assignment entry, calling the warbler story "A very interesting tale of misadventure." Thank you very much! I love the word "misadventure." It always reminds me of the "Catch a Falling Star" episode of Quantum Leap. Paul wanted me to know that he was holding himself back from commenting negatively about an entry that mentioned some missionaries. Thanks for that, and to Bea for her more positive response to the entry via email.

Whew! I guess my drought in comments is over for now! I'm very grateful, really.

I won't go on tonight about Doctor Who again. Instead let me assure you that I did get some work done on Heirs of Mâvarin. I finally finished editing Chapter Four, updated my word count spreadsheet and went on to Chapter Five. I'm on page 180. That's only a third of the way through the book, exactly one third as it happens. Still, it's progress!

Karen

Ah, That's Better!

I didn't mention it here, but I had a stressful few days toward the end of this past week. There were some things I needed to get done at work that dragged on and on, and things I didn't have time to do, and things I didn't want to do. I managed to put several of these sources of stress behind me on Friday. Tomorrow I will take care of one more. And today, which is to say, this past day, Saturday, Russell T. Davies took care of the remaining source of my stress.

Ridiculous. Maybe even pathetic. But true.

The opening shot of the season finale,
reprising the previous episode

There were lots of pieces of the puzzle that was the end of Series Three of the revival of Doctor Who, lots of hints, lots of rumors. I was worried that the resolution would not be a satisfactory one, that the Doctor would regenerate, that the Earth would remain a mess, that something nonsensical would happen to the long-dead Time Lords, that something bad would happen to Martha. After three years I should have learned to trust that the show's main writer and executive producer would make it all work. And he did, mostly. There is one element that remains a bit of a cheat, but the rest of it works, it makes sense, it pulls it all together. And I'm still smiling about one out-of-the-blue revelation toward the end. I bet nobody saw that one coming! Judging from the Talk page of one Wikipedia article, some people hate the idea and are trying to weasel out of its being true, but me, I'm laughing. Perfect!

So except although the season I've just watched on download (shh!) is about to be aired on cable here, there is no new Doctor Who-related tv for me until The Sarah Jane Adventures of the next Christmas special, whichever comes first. And that's okay, because it means this frenzied watching of the show should start to abate, leaving me time for more important things, like finishing that edit of Heirs of Mâvarin and sending it out to DAW, like revising Mages of Mâvarin, like writing that Jace sequel in earnest, and finally finishing Chapter One of The Mâvarin Revolutions. I haven't been idle on these things - well, not on most of them, anyway - but less distraction should help.

And just to show that I actually have been writing, tomorrow I will post Jace's first letter from "Later This Somewhere," over or the fiction blog. Probably.

Karen