What in the name of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is going on in this cartoon?
(From Punch, March 5, 1919. As for the artist–sorry, no clue. The signature is almost illegible and there’s no credit at Project Gutenberg.)
Doctor Who Reviews: Sometime Never
This is another old _Doctor Who_ tie-in review. If it seems oddly snarky, consider that I wrote it years ago, not long after the book came out, while I was still actively following a series that was determinedly running itself into the ground.
Sometime Never… is the culmination of over three years of eighth Doctor books. This is the ultimate fruition of the ongoing storylines introduced during Justin Richards’s tenure as editor. This is the climax that every EDA since The Burning has built towards.
And it stinks.
It’s too damn long, for one thing. Sometime Never… only exists to tie up a number of dangling plot threads. That’s it. There is nothing else to it: no theme, no plot, no character development. The little that Sometime Never… accomplishes could be done in the space of a novella. But Richards has 280 pages to fill, and he fills them with padding. Lots of padding. The most superfluous padding since Robert Jordan published volume three hundred of The Wheel of Time. Over seventy per cent of the American sales of Sometime Never… have been traced to a single bulk purchase by the Wisconsin Federation of Mall Santas. They’re going to scotch tape copies to their beer guts this December.
Some Interesting Links
I won’t try to write full posts about any of these; my brain is so listless this weekend they would likely turn out as empty bloviation.
**1.** Strange Horizons has posted [an article about how fiction becomes urban legend] [tfv]. In 1888 Ambrose Bierce published a hoax article about three abrupt vanishings. Like the [Angels of Mons] [aom], the storied passed into folklore (or maybe into [fakelore] [fake]), being reproduced in book after book of weird mysteries.
My favorite detail–indicating the level of “scholarship” that goes into these volumes–is the author who salted his reference books with misinformation to detect plagiarists.
**2.** [There’s a strain of symbiotic bacteria in your elbow] [elbow]:
>The crook of your elbow is not just a plain patch of skin. It is a piece of highly coveted real estate, a special ecosystem, a bountiful home to no fewer than six tribes of bacteria. […] They are helping to moisturize the skin by processing the raw fats it produces, says Julia A. Segre of the National Human Genome Research Institute.
These are not generic bacteria, and the article isn’t using elbows as a random example body part. These bacteria *specifically evolved to live in elbows*.
>Dr. Segre reckons that there are at least 20 different niches for bacteria, and maybe many more, on the human skin, each with a characteristic set of favored commensals. The types of bacteria she found in the inner elbow are quite different from those that another researcher identified a few inches away, on the inner forearm. But each of the five people Dr. Segre sampled harbored much the same set of bacteria, suggesting that this set is specialized for the precise conditions of nutrients and moisture that prevail in the human elbow.
**3.** Kit Whitfield examines one of the rarely-identified [stock characters] [stock] of modern fiction: the [Macho Sue] [whit]. (Via [Slacktivist] [slack].)
[tfv]:
[fake]:
[aom]:
[elbow]:
[slack]:
[whit]:
[stock]:
How Reassuring
I’m planning to have some work done on my roof. So this local news story was exactly the thing I least needed to see right now.
Tie-Ins I Never Expected to See
Apparently Martha Jones has “Rich ruby hues with a liquorice nose. Mouthfilling sweet chocolate malt flavours and a slightly tart fruity finish,” while Captain Jack is “Rose gold in colour, a hoppy nose with undertones of honeydew melon.”
(Link via Behind the Sofa.)
Revelations from the Bush Interview
Valuable information from the recent [Presidential interview] [pb]:
>I mean, part of the faith walk is to understand your weaknesses and is to constantly try to embetter yourself and get closer to the Lord.
Later, in a clarifying statement, the President explained he’d used “a perfectly [cromulent] [crom] word.”
>Look, I tell people — and this is an interesting thing — it’s harder to be the son of a President than to be the President.
After all, what does a President do all day? It’s mostly hanging out at the ranch and clearing brush!
>I feel I owe it to the families to be as — to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal.
Moved by their leader’s sacrifice, millions of Americans have vowed to stand with him by giving up bowling, letting their lawns grow a bit, skipping “Dancing With the Stars,” and maybe not supersizing that next order at McDonald’s.
>Baseball is a fabulous sport. I used to say it’s a sport played by normal-sized people. It turns out some of these normal-sized people are obviously very strong and very quick, but nevertheless, normal-size — you don’t have to be a huge guy to play baseball. And it’s a great family sport, and it needs to be cleaned up.
>Q: And there haven’t been enough normal-sized people.
>Bush: Well, there’s — yes, there are a lot of normal-sized people. I mean, there’s a lot of little dudes who can play the game and play it well.
In the course of the interview–a rare opportunity to question the most powerful man in America–the President was also asked who does a better impression of his father, whether it’s true he does a great impression of Dr. Evil, whether he’d recently watched “Father of the Bride,” and who he thinks will win on an “American Idol” charity show.
I’m too baffled to come up with a joke for this one.
[pb]:
[crom]:
Candy-Colored Animism
[This is a brilliant exegesis on Jim Woodring’s _Frank_ stories] [mo], viewed as a détournement of the conventional anthropomorphic, mutable world of classic cartoons.
It gets right to the heart of what makes these stories so beautiful and unsettling. In Jim Woodring’s world everything is potentially alive, and alien; anything might in an instant become a sudden threat or a transcendent miracle, or both.
>The frowning, peering, waterspout. The gawping foliage… I’m not sure I’d describe any of this stuff as friendly, and I’m certainly not sure its apparent intelligence is in any way human. We might find something of who we are scattered across the million masks of God that form Frank’s home – this place is anthropoland, after all – but that doesn’t mean we’ll happen upon ourselves offered back up to us in an easily recognizable form. In Frank the singing trees may possess the operating system of a shark, and the houses all the winning charm of the octopus. We’re out of the comfort zone of simple anthropomorphism and entering the realm of primal animism.
[Read the whole thing] [mo] at [Mindless Ones] [mo2].
(Link via [Journalista] [j]. And everyone knows [Jim Woodring has a blog] [wm], right?)
[mo]:
[mo2]:
[j]:
[wm]:
Doctor Who Reviews: Palace of the Red Sun
This is another old Doctor Who tie-in review, written years ago and revised only slightly.
Why do we always come here?
I guess we’ll never know.
It’s like some kind of torture
To have to watch the show.–The Muppet Show
Reading Palace of the Red Sun, I had occasion to think of Statler and Waldorf. They were the two old guys who sat in the balcony in “The Muppet Show.” Whenever anyone did anything, their response was a derisive comment and a forced laugh. This took a serious toll on everyone’s self esteem. Eventually Kermit had to keep a therapist on call backstage to prevent some of the less stable Muppets from slitting their wrists.
Obviously Messrs. S. and W. thought the show was crap. Yet for some reason, week after week, they kept coming back. You see, Statler and Waldorf led empty, hollow lives. The dreams of their youth had withered, leaving them unfulfilled. Their families had long since died or moved away. If not for the Muppets, they would have spent the evenings in their tiny, dingy rooms at the nursing home, drinking themselves into a stupor and reminiscing about their glory days before the war. I think on some level Kermit understood this, because he never had Animal drag them out behind the theater and beat them to a bloody pulp.
Palace of the Red Sun brought this to mind because it parallels my own relation to the literary works of Christopher Bulis. Not the drinking and the empty life–just the fact that, no matter how bad his books get, something keeps me coming back.
Maybe it’s the ideas. Bulis does almost nothing right, but there’s one thing he’s good at: coming up with interesting ideas to build his novels around. Palace of the Red Sun has a planet of fairy tale holograms and gardening robots, surrounded by a temporal anomaly and placed under siege by a megalomaniac who’s granted an extended interview to a mediocre journalist. In an alternate universe, a place of sunshine and lollipops, somebody like R. A. Lafferty or Philip K. Dick might have taken this stuff and turned out a quirky, interesting, exciting novel.
Unfortunately, this is the real world. It is frequently cloudy. The lollipops fell on the floor and are now covered with lint and crud from the avocado shag carpet, which hasn’t been shampooed since the late seventies. In the real world, this novel was written by Christopher Bulis, and Christopher Bulis could not write his way out of a wet paper sack with a sharp pencil. His characters are cardboard. His prose is flat. His dialogue is inane. He can’t even make a decent plot from the great ideas he managed to pull together. The Doctor and Peri spend 280 pages wandering through a morass of stupid cliches. They run around, get captured, escape, and meet rebels. The Doctor patronizes the secondary characters with shallow “wisdom,” and Peri is sexually harassed. There’s even a subplot about an intelligent robot learning what it means to be human. I looked in vain for some sign that Bulis was trying for irony–apparently he just doesn’t realize how stale this plot is. (You know an idea is past its sell-by date when it turns up on Star Trek. Multiple times, even.)
Palace of the Red Sun sucked. Yet I could not turn away. Perhaps someday Christopher Bulis will write another Doctor Who book. If so, I will buy that one as well, and read it. Because it feels so good when I stop.
Optimism
This ad appeared in the Help Wanted section of the local college newspaper.
I’m not sure I understand the logic here.
Where’s George?
Anybody remember that President Bush guy? What’s he been up to?
Apparently not a lot.
You want to know the pathetic thing? The press hasn’t been up to much, either:
>To react to the main news of the day — thousands of deaths from the cyclone in Burma — Bush sends his wife out to make a statement. She criticizes the Burmese government for its failure “to issue a timely warning to citizens in the storm’s path” and “to meet its people’s basic needs.” Reporters, too tactful to draw parallels to New Orleans, quiz her instead about daughter Jenna’s wedding, and the names of future grandchildren.
>[…]
>Four minutes after the scheduled start time for yesterday’s White House briefing, only 14 of the 49 seats were occupied… many of the nation’s leading news outlets left their chairs empty, among them National Public Radio, the Washington Times, the New York Daily News, the Dallas Morning News, the Houston Chronicle, the Boston Globe, the Baltimore Sun, the Chicago Tribune and the Politico.
>[…]
>Reporters busied themselves with personal tasks: rubbing eyes, cleaning eyeglasses, reading the newspaper, fiddling with BlackBerrys or studying the blank pages of their notebooks. One of the deputy press secretaries, Gordon Johndroe, rested his chin in his hand. There was nothing left to be said — which was the cue for [radio host Lester] Kinsolving, who demanded to know Bush’s view on the disparity in pro-football eligibility for players from the military academies.
You’re doing a heck of a job, Washington Press Corps!
(Link via Hullabaloo.)