iainjclark | Recent Entries

So it's time for the inevitable Doctor Who Season Report Card. Previous, equally arguable, season reviews are here for S2 and here for S3 and S1.

( Best to Worst... )

( Spoilers for Doctor Who - Episode 13: Journey's End )

Inspired by ajr and my need to impose order on our sprawling Heap o' Books, as previously detailed here, we went out this week and bought the tallest bookshelves IKEA had to offer, then bought the extra bits that made them taller, then bought extra shelves for them.

This weekend we de-stacked all the books, dismantled the old bookcases, assembled the new ones and (a first for me) attached them to the wall so they can't fall over and crush us.

( Before )

Behold the power of our fully operational bookcase:

( After )

And we still have books left over. I've deliberately left some gaps to accommodate my wife's book habit, but the other Heap o' Books in the bedroom already needs thinning out so I don't think this pristine tidiness will last long before the horizontal stacking returns to haunt us.

Oh, and don't worry, although we have indeed walled-in half the cupboard, we can still just about get to the light switch...

...

( Spoilers for Doctor Who - Episode 12: The Stolen Earth )

Tom McRae "guests" on the new single by Wills and the Willing, Lipstick. This seems to mean that he wrote and performed all his bits of the song --which are excellent-- based on hearing the rap parts --which are terrible. You can hear the whole song on their myspace page. Tom is also performing on Jonathan Ross's Radio 2 show tomorrow, which will presumably be available on the 'listen again' feature for the coming week. Finally, here is a very good summary and set of interviews with the Tom McRae / Hotel Cafe tour.

Meanwhile have some Star Wars Strictly Come Dancing. The best bit is Darth Vader and the Stormtroopers at the end.

And Harry Knowles has seen some scenes from J.J. Abrams's Star Trek film. It's not out for a year, but this is the first thing I've read to get me actually excited about it.

On Tuesday we went to see Ben Folds at the Carling Academy in Newcastle, which is pretty much identical to the Carling Academy in London if you moved it 300 miles nearer the North Pole.

The support act was a man called Corn Mo, playing solo without his band. This was one of the most complete WTF experiences I've had at a live gig. While I can see that in some hard-to-pin-down way his songs share a certain sense of deadpan irony with Ben Folds, he was just...bizarre. He spoke like the breathless Open University guy from The Fast Show, looked like Bill Bailey, sang like Freddie Mercury, and played an absurd set of observational songs accompanied by an accordion or an organ. To finish he sang along to a CD of one of his band's tracks, which had a far more overtly rock/metal flavour and so ended up sounding like a Darkness song. The audience appeared to love him. We felt like Derren Brown had secretly set the entire thing up to mess with our minds.

Mercifully Ben Folds then rescued us. Songs played included (not in this order): Underground, Kate, Battle of Who Could Care Less, Narcolepsy, Army, Lullaby, Annie Waits, Zak and Sara, Gone, Rockin' the Suburbs, All You Can Eat, You To Thank, Jesusland, Landed. He also played several others from the upcoming album due out in September, which some YouTube research reveals to be probably: Errant Dog, Free Coffee, Kylie from Connecticut, Hiroshima(?) and one with the line "If there's a god out there he's laughing at us and our football team". The new ones sounded good, insofar as you can tell from one listen at a concert. Free Coffee was particularly good.

Oh, and there was a song about Newcastle, its "weird-ass" white footbridge, eating a dodgy meal and not being understood when ordering beer. I assume this was written specially for the evening but it was so slick it was pretty hard to tell!

We were standing a little way back on the raised floor behind the sound desk, where the view was great but the actual vocals seemed a little boomy at first. Since he kicked off with a song I didn't know it took me a little while to get into the gig. Maybe I was still reeling from Corn Mo. However as things progressed and Ben's piano playing became ever more virtuoso (his hands were just a blur at several points) I started having a really good time. He had an organ by his side which he would often play with his right hand while his left stayed on the piano. For other "effects" he dropped bits of metal and shakers onto the piano strings.

Ben wasn't particularly talkative and what he did gabble into the mike wasn't always that easy to catch, but the sheer energy of the songs came through well. He was supported by a drummer and base player in a "Ben Folds Five" arrangement making for some extremely faithful renditions of his early material. Their backing harmonies were fantastic, and they delivered "hand me my nose ring / show me the mosh pit" from Underground with aplomb.

The show ended with Not the Same, for which Ben got the audience to do the aaaaahAAAAAH bits in a three-part harmony, then started conducting the audience with his hands. Hugely good fun. The audience were singing along throughout the evening and generally very appreciative (although there was a distracting amount of loud chatter from the back of the room in some of the quieter songs).

Good fun.

The second trailer (UK only) for next Saturday's Doctor Who is rather cool.

It's slightly spoilery, particularly if you've no idea who the main villain is (assuming you can read this from your isolation tank).

( Spoilers for Doctor Who - Episode 11: Turn Left )

Just saw this nice Tom McRae interview for those as is interested, on wide variety of topics ranging from his music to politics to record labels to touring to... what kind of fruit he is.

My review of the Babylon 5 straight-to-DVD movie is up today at Strange Horizons.

If you're thinking "Dude, didn't that DVD come out, like, aeons ago?" you'd be right. You'd also be a geek but we can't help that. I wrote this last year as a reflection on both the new movie and the original series, and (my feelings on Babylon 5 being somewhat conflicted) it wound up being longer, more personal and more retrospective than normal. It's been waiting in the wings until now, but I'm quite fond of it.

Now get the hell off my space station. And, y'know, go and read it.

I'm back from holiday, so what's the first thing I'm going to post about? Doctor Who. Damn straight.

( Spoilers for Doctor Who - Episode 10: Midnight )

What the-- Steve Martin has apparently made The Pink Panther 2. Sometimes the world is far a more surreal place than I generally allow myself to believe.

Anyway, the actual point of this post was not to watch Steve Martin's career circling the drain but to drool shamelessly over my shiny new PC.

I bought a gorgeous LCD monitor last week, replacing my 19" Samsung with a 22" widescreen Samsung. It's the same height, but wider. Soooo much wider. I have no actual need for a widescreen monitor, but it does help with spreadsheets and 16:9 video looks significantly bigger. But really: pure self-indulgence of the highest order. Mmmmm....

Then, while browsing the interwebs looking for upgrades to my creaky victorian motherboard, I belatedly realised that the best chip it could possibly take is now only available second-hand on Ebay. This started me thinking a) OMG I've been in a coma for ten years and no-one told me, b) I have lots of money saved up because I am crap at shopping, and c) these days you can buy a whole PC pretty cost-effectively compared to the good old days when computer fairs were the way to go and everyone still thought The X Files was a pretty neat idea. So I ordered a nice new PC off Dell, and it's a pleasure to use. No more 10 minute startup times. No more waiting five minutes after my desktop appears before I'm actually able to do anything. No more HD movie trailers that look like slideshows. Yes, I've been catapulted into what SF authors call "teh present".

For record, it cost a mere £384 (excluding the £220 monitor *cough*) which frankly is only about twice what my crappy upgrades would have cost. The specs are excellent, though not out of this world:

AMD® Athlon™ 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5000+ (2.6 GHz)
4GB 667MHz Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM
256MB ATI® Radeon™ HD 2600 XT graphics card
500GB (7200rpm) SATA Hard Drive
19-in-1 Media Card Reader
Windows Vista Home Premium
DVD+- RW / CD RW Drive
Integrated 7.1 Audio

I'm not entirely sold on the bloatware that is Windows Vista but having switched off most of the annoying visual effects I've more or less got to grips with it. Thanks to the miracle of home networking I've also transferred all my old documents, emails, pictures, settings, videos and mp3s. It's all feeling comfortingly familiar, and yet still cool and new.

This has been pointless gadget porn. We now return you to your scheduled programming.

( Spoilers for Doctor Who - Episode 9: Forest Of The Dead )

This is quite cool. New evidence for the structure of our galaxy from the Spitzer Space Telescope, and a lovely conjectural map of the Milky Way, with rollover annotations. Very SF.

Ed Burns and David Simon of The Wire have adapted the book Generation Kill into a seven part HBO mini-series. There's a review on AICN here which is full of the usual typos, spelling and grammatical errors you'd expect from an AICN review but is generally very positive about it. The mini-series is a matter-of-fact account of the lives of an elite group of U.S. marines in the early days of the Iraq War. May or may not be interesting, but with Burns and Simon behind it and being based on true events at least it won't be sensationalist.

As if by magic, a frog appeared!

Further to my last post about wildlife, I just snapped this extremely obliging frog by our pond this evening:

It hung around briefly posing for the camera while I snapped a few shots ("Give me more froggishness") then leapt under the surface in a single bound.

Lots of wildlife in our garden still. Here are a few pictures (which also link to bigger versions on my Facebook.)

Swift

Our Swift is nesting again in the eaves of our house, or at least has been making exploratory visits. The entrance to the nest is the tiny black square just to the right of the red lintel over the window. I snapped this picture quickly so it's a little blurry but I'm quite pleased with it. Its black belly marks it out as a Swift rather than a House Martin.

( Newt )

( Blackbird )

( Starlings )

Just saw this slightly later than planned and don't really have time to post in detail but...

( Spoilers for Doctor Who - Episode 8: Silence In The Library )

( EDIT )

My wife has been crafting again. This time it's one of her long-running projects that she's finally finished in a sudden turn of speed, plus some glass jewellery.

She's been making a few sets of wooden drawers for a while now, and this is the original practice piece made from pine which after many, many hours of sanding now opens and closes without sticking. At one stage I did wonder whether Janet's hand would fall off before the box was completed. With a little Danish Oil it looks lovely. She wasn't going to bother finishing this because it was just a test piece and she's not overly fond of pine as a material, but I think it's turned out really well.

( Glass Jewellery too )

Things that share little in commmon except that I saw them recently:

The Phoenix has landed. The Mars probe, that is. That's a bit of a relief. Watching the video of everything it had to do on its descent I was a little sceptical¹.

Sadly this good fortune does not extend to the pair of 200 year old pistols allegedly forged from meteoric iron, whose extraterrestial heritage has been disproven. They still look pretty in their own right, though.

There's some kind of slick link here to Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull which looks to be having a good box office weekend despite a fairly mixed critical reception. We saw it yesterday, and I enjoyed it a lot while not really rating it as a great film. Certainly it was about as entertaining as Last Crusade, and nowhere near the level of godlike perfection that is Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Meanwhile Iron Man continues to rake in the cash (almost certainly fuelled by my review).

Terminator 4, which still seems to be called Terminator Salvation despite recent suggestions to the contrary, has an official website with a good-looking bit of pre-production art. Frankly the only announcement so far that has made me feel positive about this trilogy is Christian Bale's involvement, but the concept of a post-apocalyptic trilogy is potentially a great one.

Peter Jackson and Guillermo Del Toro webchat about The Hobbit and The Hobbit 2. Following my poll to scientifically determine the title of the second film ("Back in the Hobbit" being the clear winner), Del Toro kindly tells us: "not 'H2 Electric Boogaloo', that has been discarded." So that's a relief. In a further display of good sense he comments: "Smaug should not be 'the Dragon in the Hobbit movie' as if it was just 'another' creature in a Bestiary. Smaug should be 'The DRAGON' for all movies past and present." He also rates the dragon in Dragonslayer. If he were any more rightheaded he'd explode.

--
¹ Obviously the evil Martians who shoot down our probes were too busy carving gigantic faces on the ground. Ahem.

No Doctor Who tonight, of course, because we need to be reminded that, right across Europe, there are people with no ability to sing. However there's a mid series trailer now online (UK only) for the remainder of the year's episodes. I can't say it blows me away or looks as excitingly incomprehensible as last year's equivalent trail, and a large part of that is simply that the images in it - old enemies, old companions - are so familiar.

In related yet random musings, is it me or is the new showrunner Steven Moffat the only person in the world who actually sports Norman Osborn's hairdo from the Spider-man comics?

Our garden has been invaded by Starlings. More precisely, several local Starlings seem to have done very well this year and had large broods, so the Dawn Chorus has been transformed into the Dawn Squawk, and our garden is full of fledgling Starlings eagerly fluttering their wings and being busily attended to by their parents. It's very sweet, but also makes it difficult to sleep once the sun comes up. We have three coconuts full of bird fat-feeder: every day Janet fills them to the brim, and every day we get home to find them pecked bare.

Sadly today we found the half-eaten remains of one fledgling in the middle of the lawn. Since we lock our cats in during the day, and our two felines have yet to work out that if you successfully kill a bird it turns out to be full of cat-food, this can only have been the work of one of the local Toms. Sad, but the Starlings are doing fantastically well and I'm sure their gains are far exceeding their losses.

We also have a Blackbird nesting on the side of our garage, underneath a big trailing clematis. It's managed to have at least two chicks despite being right next to our garden gate, and frequently spotted by the cats who sit nearby staring at it greedily. At one point Pixie even clambered up the wire mesh frame that the clematis has been trained up, and wound up sitting in the nest. Thankfully the chicks hadn't hatched at this point, but with Pixie incubating them it's a wonder they hatched at all.

My review of Iron Man is up at Strange Horizons today. Should you care to take a look.

Guests around today so this'll be very short and sweet.

( Spoilers for Doctor Who - Episode 7: The Unicorn and the Wasp )

Yesterday we had no internet access.

We arrived home to find that some random contractor had dug metre-deep holes into the grass verge at intervals all the way down our street. For no obvious reason.

We went inside and discovered that we had no internet connection. Also the phones didn't work, but mainly we had no internet connection. Suspiciously, we went back outside and peered into the hole in front of our house. In the hole were several huge tree roots, a manky looking sewer pipe, and two frayed ends of telephone cable separated by a couple of centimetres.

Hmm.

Our neighbour had already reported the 'fault' to BT, so there was nothing more to do except ~~curl up in a ball and wait for morning~~ get on with our busy lives. Janet played Oblivion. I decided to use this opportunity to finally get around to watching my Transformers movie DVD.

During the following two hours and twenty minutes of hokey comedy, moronic plotting, tedious characterisation and gigantic robots repeatedly failing to kill Shia LaBeouf, I silently plotted the death of whoever dug that hole.

A day of excitement, thrills, gardening and wildlife.

Today was the annual ceremony of the removal of bubble-wrap from Janet's greenhouse. We use the bubble-wrap as added insulation when there's a threat of frost, but the greenhouse is a much lighter, airier place once it's gone. It takes quite a long time because everything in the greenhouse including all of Janet's carnivorous plants and the aluminium staging have to be moved onto the lawn, then moved back in again. Naturally we had cat help.

At lunchtime I was startled by a noise - let's call it a squeal of terror - from upstairs. Janet had been sitting on the toilet when a large black spider had crawled over the top of her bare leg. When I got there she was in some post-traumatic stress, not least because she could no longer see the spider. I eventually located it by turning her trousers inside out in the bath. It was fairly juicy-looking. You can only imagine what would have happened if she'd put them back on without checking. :-)

Later on this afternoon we were standing on our patio when a bird crashed very inelegantly into the top of the huge Leilandii tree next door. The tree is home to vast numbers of birds so we assumed that an enforcer for the local Pigeon Mafia had fumbled its approach, but then a bird of prey launched back out of the tree and flew right over our heads. It was speckled on its belly like a thrush, and about pigeon-sized. We reckon it must have been a Kestrel or a Sparrowhawk. It's really good to know that there's one patrolling somewhere near our house. Janet was so pleased about this it nearly made up for the Spider of Doom earlier. However she wishes me to be clear that nothing could ever make up for the HORROR.

We also found a couple of frogs in our pond a few nights ago. The newts are still there -- we've counted at least three of them anyway -- but we had a fine pair of yellow-brown frogs lurking under the surface. We've seen them a couple of times since then, always at night. I love the fact that we live in a suburban semi-detached house and yet we can see newts, frogs, toads, hedgehogs, bats, birds of prey, ~~spiders~~ and a wide variety of garden birds.

I'm certain I'm ambivalent.

( Spoilers for Doctor Who - Episode 6: The Doctor's Daughter )

Yesterday we had a very nice barbeque with good food, good company and even some reasonably warm and sunny weather. As a result, no posting from me. Belatedly therefore, here comes the rambling...

( Spoilers for Doctor Who - Episode 5: The Poison Sky )

Guillermo Del Toro will be filming not one but two Hobbit movies. The first to be based on a book by J.R.R.Tolkien called "The Hobbit". The second... less so. He states:

‘The Hobbit’, the book, is really one self-contained film, so for the second movie we sat down and worked it out. When we did this we got really excited because this second film is not a ‘tag on’, it’s not ‘filler’, it’s an integral part of telling the story of those 50 years of history lost in the narrative. There will be certain things that we will see from the first movie but from a different point of view, but it will feel like a volume, in the 5 volumes of the entire story. It will not feel like a bridge, I’ve been hearing it called ‘a bridge film’, it’s not, it’s an integral chapter of the story, and I think we’re all on the same page.

Which brings up the burning question: what will the second film be called? And burning questions call for polls.

snowking has already suggested a few additional names which I've shamelessly tacked on the end.

[Poll #1180320]

This has the added advantage that if they use any of our titles we'll clearly be paid off with a fat settlement.

The X-Files 2 is now titled "The X-Files: I Want to Believe". Because that's not crap at all.

Apparently the Torchwood Season 2 finale was most appreciated by Welsh females aged 16-34. You just can't make it up.

There are some lovely new posters for The Dark Knight here. The Harvey Dent one is sublime.

Those are as nothing compared to this one which is both bold and breathtakingly risky given the 9/11 overtones.

Guillermo 'Pan's Labyrinth' 'Hellboy' Del Toro is officially signed on to direct The Hobbit (yay!) and The Hobbit 2: I Want To Believe. Del Toro says that Andy Serkis is on board, as is Sir Ian McKellen "all bureaucracy pending".

We have frogspawn in our garden pond! Not much, but it's there. More importantly, we were examining the pond today and saw not one but two newts swimming around in it... which may expain why the frogspawn is dwindling. Ahem.

Janet is over the moon. Getting either newts or frogs into the pond was one of the main reasons we built it. We knew we'd had newts in the garden at various points before installing the pond, but the pond has only been there since the middle of last year which is not long for it to naturalise in. Now not only are there the small snails we introduced but an entirely different species of snail, various insects, at least one itinerant frog who left the frogpsawn, and the newts we saw today.

CRAZY WIFE UPDATE: At Janet's insistence we just went out in a thunder storm with a torch to check on our newfound newts, and there were at least six in the pond, which has to be a thriving colony by anyone's standards. This is a rubbish photo of one. Then again it was dark, raining, thundering and lightning at the time.

We're very pleased.

I was far too busy last week to write anything about Doctor Who but I'm nothing if not a completist so here, out of sequence and entirely too late to be of any interest, are some brief thoughts. Assuming I can actually remember anything about the episode...

( Spoilers for Doctor Who - Episode 3: Planet of the Ood )

On Thursday we drove up to Edinburgh to see the Hotel Cafe tour headlined by Tom McRae. We went to the Hotel Cafe tour in Newcastle in 2006 and we saw him solo in Edinburgh last year so this fused the two experiences. The Hotel Cafe concept is a fantastic idea which manages to highlight artists you may (or may not) like while never staying still for long enough that you get bored with any one singer.

( Cut for length )

The gig lasted about three hours all told, ending about 11.30. Overall it was a fantastic experience.

The night sky was so clear and brilliant I actually made a brief pit-stop on the way home just to stare at it. I can't remember the last time I saw so many stars away from light-pollution. The constellations were almost lost amidst the background stars. It was a truly gob-smacking sight, and a fine end to a fine evening.

Sontarans! Not much more I need to say, really. Oh, go on then.

( Spoilers for Doctor Who - Episode 4: The Sontaran Stratagem )

To our great relief Pixie is feeling much better. I can tell this because she's resumed her customary practice of waking us an hour before we're due to get up and snuggling in next to us in the bed, and then miaowing when she feels enough time has passed that she probably ought to be fed. In Pixie's world there is a strict daily rota and we fall sadly short of her high standards. Janet was so delighted she's recovering that she didn't even complain about being woken up.

We really did think she might be on her way out if she didn't start eating and drinking soon.

The vet yesterday evening gave her a dose of antibiotics and that's what seems to have turned her around - within a few hours her appetite started coming back and when Janet let the tap run over her palm Pixie lapped thirstily at the running water for several minutes. Hardly surprising since she gets most of her water from her food and she hasn't been eating. She's still a bit picky and her appetite isn't fully back, but I think she's out of the woods.

Our part of the bargain is having to squirt antibiotics down her throat twice daily for a week, something that we more often have to do for Charcoal than Pixie. It was surprisingly easy this morning, but I suspect that's because she didn't know what we were up to. I'm expecting more of a struggle tonight.

(The vet told us that if we parted her gums and squirted the pipette through her clenched teeth this would work without needing to prise her jaws open; certainly it seemed to work and it's less traumatic).

Bit worried about our little three-legged cat Pixie who is uncharacteristically quiet at the moment. She's sleeping most of the time (nothing new there) but hasn't eaten much of anything since Sunday. She'll hardly nibble at tuna flakes from my hand, won't touch her favourite cat treats, and licks her lips a lot as if thirsty but won't drink water. She also seems a bit shaky, and won't go outside unless I carry her out, when she has a desultory scout around the flower bed and then returns to her bed indoors.

I've checked inside her mouth and can't see anything obviously wrong there. We're taking her to the vets tomorrow night to see what's up, but I hope it's nothing serious. (Plus our other cat, Charcy, has Cystitis again and is weeing small drops of blood all around the house, but these days that's a semi-regular occurrence which generally clears up on its own.)

Por cats.

There's lovely.

( Spoilers for Doctor Who - Episode 2: The Fires of Pompeii )

I do believe there be a new, post writer's strike episode of CSI: Original Menthol Flavour on Channel 5 in a couple of minutes.

EDIT: Oh how I have come to hate those Kia Cee'd promotional ads with the car zooming in front of sentences to make banal and obvious changes to the meaning.

Today is the day on which the fact-free conspiracy theory that Prince Phillip had Diana assassinated (for a plethora of reasons that only exist in Mohamed Al Fayed's head) finally went up in smoke once and for all. Not that it will stop the conspiracyheads of course, but then conspiracy theories don't thrive on rigorous public examination anyway. They thrive on half-truths and insinuations that often make a seductive amount of sense until you take a single step backward and remember all the other facts that make them impossible. So, although it will make no difference and I stopped caring about Princess Diana's death approximately ten years ago, I do think it right to pause briefly and genuflect at the altar of rightheadedness.

In that vein, Charlie Brooker writes hilariously about the so called 'Brain Gym' for school-children [via badscience.net].

Yes it's snowing here too in big chaotic swirls of snowflakes. Sadly the flakes vanish into the tarmac as if continuing to fall unimpeded towards the centre of the globe. Even on the garden the snow is only able to cling on grimly for about half an hour before melting away into airy nothing. We're still seeing the odd flurry, in between bouts of brilliant sunshine when the damp grass looks startlingly green.

Since I went out to, ahem, party hearty immediately after last night's Doctor Who season premiere I haven't really had a chance to comment very much, but it's been thoroughly dissected here, here, here and here amongst other places.

( Belated spoilers for Doctor Who - Episode 1: Partners in Crime )

Next week's episode does look much better, but then I'm pre-disposed to like anything set in Pompeii.

City Link suck.

Yet again we wait for a package that never turns up. Yet again the sender tells us that the courier has faithfully tried to deliver the parcel on several occasions. Yet again no-one rang to tell us when the delivery would be, and no cards were left telling us they'd tried to deliver.

I don't understand how this company stays in business. They're employed to do one thing and one thing only - deliver parcels. It's abundantly clear that they don't bother to do this unless you're standing on the doorstep with your arms outstretched as they pull up to the kerb. Since their staff can't be bothered to leave a card, this essentially generates an endless loop of failed deliveries until the parcel gets returned to sender. (Either that or they can't find our house; I'm not sure which is more damning).

Without a card we didn't even have the consignment number to track the parcel on their website. Having now got the consignment number from the sender by telephone, the website states that we were left a card twice in the last two days. Uh huh. Now we either have to pay another £6 for them to redeliver (fat chance) or collect it ourselves on Monday.

Grr. I know I should be used to this by now but it's that particular combination of incompetence, laziness and deceit that drives me crazy.

My review of the Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles series is up today at Strange Horizons. You don't have to read it, but I may kill you with my brain.

This is rather cool. The earliest known recording of a human voice has been found, from 1860, pre-dating Edison's "Mary Had a Little Lamb" by 17 years. The full details of the recording and the work done to play it back are here and here, and the actual (rather warbly) sound files are here. The recording unfortunately reduced one Radio 4 presenter to a fit of giggles.

There's another BBC story that my wife was ranting about the other day. Apparently -- and I know this will come as a shock to you -- unrealistic images of male bodies in lad's mags can cause teenage boys to aim for an impossible ideal (to the point of taking steroids: a 'condition' named "athletica nervosa". Really.) Apparently after years and years of everyone saying this about unrealistic images of women in the media, it's considered surprising that men are affected the same way. I suppose it's worth reporting but a) surely we all knew this and b) surely the pressure on men to achieve unattainable physical perfection is orders of magnitude less than the equivalent pressure on women? My impression is that images of male perfection in the media and in Hollywood are far more about attitude, looks and style, e.g George Clooney, than they are about toned abs. And surely lad's mags in particular remain far more influential in their depiction of women's bodies than men's? Then again I don't read lad's mags.

A quite nice X Files 2 poster. Apparently they're still haggling with the studio over what the film will be called. I don't mind "The X Files 2" personally. It's been so long since the first one they don't really need a subtitle, and anything is better than "Fight the Future".

The director of the fourth Terminator film, which is having title troubles of its own, seems to imply that they'll be trying to keep its timeline straight with that of the very decent TV show The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Nice idea, although frankly since that series may or may not run for several years who knows where it might end up and how it may end up contradicting things? Despite the continuing absence of James Cameron (which arguably hamstrung T3), Christian Bale is on board for the film and there's talk of making a Batman-style fresh start, which bodes well.

Incidentally the Sarah Connor series has some kind of tangential viral marketing site, EniTech labs, that seems to have little to do with the actual show but ties in strongly with the Teminator franchise as a whole. Frankly I couldn't be bothered to plough through all the dodgily acted videos/webisodes but the last one does feature some cool Killer Robot Action.

Ronald D. Moore reckons they've taken the opportunity afforded by the writer's strike hiatus to retool the second half of Galactica season 4 (spoilers in the link for those who haven't seen the S3 finale). This either means that we'll feel the benefit of forward planning that blessed the first half of Season 2 or, more likely on the evidence of recent storylines, that important threads will fizzle into nothing while major events and character arcs will suddenly erupt out of nowhere.

Battlestar Galactica's Helo is one of the stars of famed misogynist (just kidding) Joss Whedon's Dollhouse.

Meanwhile Moore and fellow Galactica producer David "Not the one who thinks the Queen is a lizard" Eick have been given the greenlight on their strangely dull-sounding Galactica prequel Caprica. I wish I could summon up any interest in this but I can't.

Eick is also writing the pilot of a TV show based on Children of Men. Sounds like a terrible idea given how good the film was, but from the brief comments he makes it seems it will be based more on the book and the social aspects of having no future for mankind. So it may not suck.

And finally... J Michael Straczynski In Good Script Shock. Specifically his movie script for World War Z, apparently.

Yay! Snow!

Fairly shabby snow it has to be said, but living right near the coast as we do that's actually as much snow as we've seen all winter. I do pine for a nice bit of snow. I've been looking at everyone else's snow pictures and feeling a bit short-changed. At least this stuff is lying.

We had a lovely visit from my parents on Easter Sunday in which I daringly cooked Sunday lunch. Not only did it all get mostly cooked, mostly at the same time, but it was ready exactly as they arrived. I couldn't do that again if I tried. We then tried to convert my parents to the wonders of Wii bowling and Wii boxing, the latter of which is amazingly knackering.

Other than that we've had a strange weekend of occasional fine and sunny weather, occasional snow flurries that have melted as they touch the ground, and some amazing gales on Friday that actually blew one of our recycle bins off the patio and right down to the foot of the garden under the bench. I don't know what's been going on with the weather since December but we've had some really fierce gales on a regular basis.

We also managed to get a swift nest box and a sparrow nest box attached to the house (courtesy of yours truly, a very tall ladder and a hammer-action drill, a combination not recommended to settle your nerves), which feels very satisfying. Now if I only knew how to get birds to nest in them. Maybe a "Rooms To Let" sign near the bird table. We already have swifts nesting in the eaves above our bedroom window so I'm cautiously optimistic.

And lastly we've been watching the unexpectedly not-crap adaptation of The Colour of Magic. Okay, it wasn't fine art, but it did at least make me laugh and the actors were better cast than I'd originally feared, particularly David Jason. From what I saw of Hogfather this one felt a lot less stilted.

EDIT: Oh and I, er, may have eaten some chocolate. A bit.

Nice cinema trailer for new Doctor Who, Season 4 here. It still has Catherine Tate in it, sadly. There's only so long I can remain in denial about her. It also has some significant returning faces, and various nice shots of Rome, Ood and Sontarans. Oh, and Bernard Cribbins. Quite well done, all told.

We've been continuing to watch various old Doctor Who stories recently, with mixed success. I mentioned last time how much I enjoyed Tom Baker's debut story 'Robot'. Sadly 'Planet of Evil' from the following year is less impressive.¹ The setting is atmospheric, especially the weird alien jungle, but it just lacks the necessary character banter from the Doctor to lift the so-so plot. Likewise Pertwee's debut story 'Spearhead from Space' manages to be simultaneously snappily edited and draggingly slow, which is disappointing. Even the Autons can't really lift it from tedium.

We then progressed to the 'Beneath the Surface' box set. 'The Silurians', despite being very long, is consistently entertaining with good characterisation, decent location filming, Fulton Mackay, Geoffrey Palmer and a vague attempt at moral complexity. Okay the Silurians themselves look crap and the young, headstrong one has a hilarious voice but otherwise it works very well. The sequel tale 'The Sea Devils' is less good but still quite enjoyable. You can't go too far wrong with Roger Delgado and Sea Devils, and in true Pertwee fashion the story is stuffed to the gills (geddit?) with location filming and speedboat chases. The end of the -ahem- "trilogy", Davison's 'Warriors of the Deep' is both better and worse than I remembered. Better in that it was a tiny bit less polystyrene than I recalled, but worse in that the Silurian and Sea Devil dialogue is nothing but undiluted exposition and cliche of the worst kind, delivered at about four words per minute. "Soon.. we.. will.. have... our... revenge..." kind of stuff. (Also, why are the Silurians calling themselves Silurians when we know from 'The Sea Devils' that it was a misnomer? And why do they talk about "Our Sea Devil brothers"? Don't they have a name other than a pejorative nickname some sailors slapped on them in the 1970s?)

I'm enjoying old Who overall but it's a very hit and miss experience. My boss's 6 year old boy was apparently sat down in front of an old Tom Baker episode recently and immediately started complaining that the monster looked fake. Sign of the times.

--
¹ Although a few moments gave me powerful deja vu from watching the show in the 1970s, and from reading the novelisation -- it's surprising how often that happens. Those novelisations were a big part of my childhood.

My wife is one of those people who always has some hobby or other on the go. I may have mentioned this before. I may also have mentioned that she tends to jump in with both feet, and that the results are often highly impressive.

Recently she signed up for a silver art course at the National Glass Centre. The course was a mixture of traditional silver working, and silver art clay. The clay is a suspension of pure silver in clay that can be moulded and then fired, burning away the clay to leave just fine silver (99.9% pure in fact; purer than sterling silver.) Obviously the materials are quite expensive but Janet being Janet she now has a fair bit of silver clay, several tools, a number of books on the subject, and a butane-powered mini-blow torch. Oh yes.

She's not much on wearing earrings but she does wear necklaces and bracelets so made a number of items of jewellery along those lines.

I think the pendants are fantastic. All the pendants were done with silver art clay; the leaf design was her own and the piece has been oxidised and then polished to give the antique, slightly coppery look with the polished silver showing through on the highlights. The other pendants are unoxidised silver with a lot of polishing. The gems are synthetic.

( More pendant pictures )

She also did a bit of conventional silver working on a ring and a bracelet. The ring probably doesn't look like much but when you've seen it as a wonky and rather dejected-looking bit of metal and then suddenly it looks like a machine-worked ring you have to be slightly impressed. The bracelet was apparently much simpler to create than it looks, and turned out so well she's been wearing it to work!

( Bracelet and Ring pictures )

Janet's very critical of all of these, naturally, and sees only the flaws in them, but I'm genuinely impressed with the results. I know I always say this, but it's true!

Following on from the Battlefield Extraction Assist Robot (BEAR) (aka Johnny Five) the US military are developing yet another robot to do helpful things on the battlefield like ~~run amok and kill everyone~~ carry the soldiers' kit. It's called 'BigDog', presumably because 'K-9' was already taken.

This video is amazing. The way that it keeps its footing when it's pushed or when it slips is quite uncanny. It's also strangely creepy in the alive-but-not-alive signals it sends. The sinister buzzing noise is not helping.

Time for a poll, then.

[Poll #1158192]

Having purchased an iPod recently I'm feeling a renewed interest in all things musical and have invested in a few albums of varying quality. Inevitably therefore comes the rambling post about a shedload of music. ~~I've put up a few tracks to download here and there.~~ Tracks removed as they were killing my bandwidth allowance. :-)

( Josh Ritter - The Animal Years )

( Roddy Woomble - My Secret is My Silence )

( Crowded House - Time on Earth )

( Suzanne Vega - Beauty and Crime )

( Matt Nathanson - Some Mad Hope )

( Newton Faulkner - Hand Built By Robots )

( Hue and Cry - Seduced and Abandoned )

( Deacon Blue - Raintown / When the World Knows Your Name )

EDIT: My wife demands your sympathy for having been subjected to my 80s nostalgia.

Coming up in the next few weeks are the new Counting Crows and R.E.M. albums, which (on early evidence) could tentatively represent a return to form for both bands.

I'll admit to feeling strangely unexcited about the prospect of another Indiana Jones movie, but this poster is just about as perfect as it could be. By which I mean it looks just like every other Indiana Jones poster you've ever seen. Having said that, the artwork does seem to be downplaying Harrison Ford's current level of grizzled-ness, which is slightly odd as the movie looks to be doing the reverse.