I know what Bad Wolf is

I love Dr Who.

It'd be ungallant to reveal anything before the episode has been shown, but hooray for another whole year of Billie, and hooray for Season 3.

Spoilers, if you want them, provided by the Times.

An apprentice in knackerness

During recording of The Coup last summer, the Brigadier* asked about the derivation of my surname. It's French for 'warrior', but AIUI it's more specifically the hired-help a king might call in when facing some kind of barney. So it's the same sort of thing as a mercenary, or a ronin... or a freelancer.

My elder brother has just told me it means something else entirely in Irish slang.

gurrier
[...] a Dublin knacker/scumbag/scanger!!
Usually a young person or even a kid i.e. an apprentice in knackerness!!! ;)
that little gurrier tried to rob my mobile!

Hooray!

Off to the press screening of Parting of the Ways tonight at BAFTA, and already jittering with excitement. The Doctor, aptly, is coming too. And admits she's might even be looking forward to it. Full report tomorrow.

[* Actually, of course, the Brig is now General Sir Alastair Lethbridge-Stewart. He asked about the knighthood, too, and what he'd done to deserve it. More than enough, I reckon.]

A name for my pain

Went to see Batman Begins at the IMAX last night, to review it for Film Focus. No Catwoman. Hardly any women. But cool, though.

Two hours before we met

Something Changed is in. Done. Delivered. 84,883 words. Details of authors and the blurb will be forthcoming.

Oh, and apparently the authors for History of Christmas get announced in Dr Who Magazine, in just over a week. Woo!

Believe in a thing called love

'A hippie is a Countercultural with political rationale. A crusty is an aggressively or else helplessly unhygienic ditto: with extra righteousness or extra nuisance value, depending on your point of view.'

Gwyneth Jones, Bold As Love, p. 372.

Reading this at the moment, based on it having won the Arthur C Clarke Award (always a good recommendation). It's an odd but engaging read: a near-future England where rock-and-roll is getting into bed with the government. Not so unlikely, considering Live8, I guess. Wonder what my old tutor, George McKay, makes of all this... Is it sleeping with the enemy, or a reasonable demand for the impossible?

Anyway, the book. Ax Preston is the dictator-elect, and also guitarist with 'The Few'. His mate Stephen/Sage/Aoxomoxoa spends his whole time hidden behind a 3D mask that makes him look like the living dead. And both are in love with Fiorinda - a teenage girl with a *really* messed up past, who might just be a witch. There's a war with the islamic community, there's the festival site in Reading getting washed away in a storm, there's a girl being kidnapped by ne'er-do-well immigrants, there's all sorts of fights and drugs and explosions... All good, exciting stuff, with good characters and surprises and that sort of thing.

But there's very little in the way of the mechanics of politics. We never really get to see how decisions are made, or how grievances sorted. It all kind of ambles along under Ax's forever vague catchphrases:

'Be good to each other, It's the ecology, stupid. Positive interference, start from where we are, the natural environment of people is people, if we can just get through this part...'

Ibid, p. 387.

The rock stars - as in their music, so in their politics - try to do their own thing, and just kinda hope people'll follow them. Which, for the most part (i.e. bar some explosions), handily they do...

A moment of clarity

You were my brother...

Revenge of the Sith is better the second time round. Went with two of the brothers and the Doctor - who was shocked by the all-out violence, but didn't cry at the end.

Since I knew what was going to happen this time (well, I kind of knew last time, just didn't know how), it was easier to pull back from the eyeball-popping spectacle and spot stuff I'd missed. And enjoy it all the more because I wasn't constantly trying to keep up.

Oh, and Obi-wan claimed he couldn't possibly go fight Darth Vader, because Annakin "was like a brother". He obviously doesn't have real siblings. Mine never paid for their tickets. They will die, they will die.

We wuz... too late!

A quite scary glut of years ago, back when I believed in that sort of thing, I used to be an altar-boy for this bloke. Which, er, means I can claim one degree of separation from the new pope. Oh yes.

Dr Who is afraid?

A week to go, and I still have entirely no idea what Bad Wolf might be, though surely it's not what Popbitch thinks (highlight to read):

Dr Who fans are in a froth on the internet about a big twist in the series. Each episode has contained references to Bad Wolf - graffiti,posters etc which, they say, will turn out to be the name of a reality TV show that the Doctor, in Truman Show style, doesn't know he's been starring in all series.

Weirdest thing is that Popbitch is even bothered, as if Dr Who plots matter. You know, matter to normal, everyday folk and not just us social inadequates who drink too much. Just last week I manfully resisted leaping in to the following discussion, overheard somewhere I work:

1. "Why was an American (Captain Jack) in London prior to Pearl Harbour?"
   (It was patiently explained that Jack is really from the 51st century, that he's a time agent, and that "his story keeps changing". Oh, and it's since been pointed out to me that "there were American volunteers prior to that".)
   
2. "Was William Hartnell the one in black and white?"
   (General consensus: yes, but so was Jon Pertwee, who had a double-act with Brigadier Somebody).
   
3. "Was William Hartnell the one my mate fancied?"
   (General consenus: probably. Peter Davison was too weak).
   

Tree

The Doctor's experiments with her camera continue, and here is a splendid shot of Pierre Vivant's traffic light tree sculpture at Canary Wharf.

Clash of the Titans

Blackadder on last night, with Stephen Fry as the Duke of Wellington, blathering about Nelson being up in the Arctic. Bah.

Wellington and Nelson did actually meet, just the once. This from Philip Guedella's The Duke (pp122-3):

'One day he had a strange encounter in "the little waiting-room on the right hand" of the old colonial Office in Downing Street. Another visitor was waiting there already - a sad-eyed little man, "whom from his likeness to his pictures and the loss of an arm" Sir Arthur promptly recognised as Nelson, home from the sea and happy in a few weeks of Emma Hamilton and "dear, dear Merton." The Admiral began to talk and, as Wellesley recollected drily, "entered at once into conversation with me, if I can call it conversation, for it was almost all on his side and all about himself, and in, really, a style so vain and so silly as to surprise and almost disgust me." (Sir Arthur was unlikely to be captivated by the manner which, when expressed in an excess of stars and ribbons, had elicited from John Moore the pained comment that their wearer seemed "more like the Prince of an Opera than the Conqueror of the Nile.) Then, suspecting something, the sailor left the room, learnt the identity of the spare military man, and came back transformed. All that the General "had thought a charlatan style had vanished, and he talked of the state of this country and of the aspect and probabilities of affairs on the Continent with a good sense, and a knowledge of subjects both at home and abroad, that surprised me equally and more agreeably than the first part of our interview had done; in fact he talked like an officer anda statesman." So the French marched to Austerlitz, and the first broadsides of Trafalgar came faintly up the wind, as Nelson and Wellesley sat talking one September day in a room off Whitehall. Lord Castlereagh was busy; and they talked above half an hour. The talk stayed in Sir Arthur's memory; and after thirty years he judged that "I don't know that I ever had a conversation that interested me more," adding the shrewd reflection that "if the Secretary of State had been punctual, and admitted Lord Nelson in the first quarter of an hour, I should have had the same impression of a light and trivial character that other people have had, but luckily I saw enough to be satisfied that he was really a very superior man; but certainly a more sudden and complete metamorphosis I never saw." They never met again.'

(It's the 200th anniversary of Trafalgar this year, with stuff going on and that.)

The Wake

Hello. This is my blog. Not sure exactly what I'm going to use it for, though. Possibly nothing.

Tra la la.