So, it was a big Dr. Who weekend for us. Netflix dropped off the bonus materials for S4 of NewWho and the last of S2 of Sarah Jane Adventures, plus we watched a Tomb of the Cybermen on Netflix as well.

The Traughton adventure was fun, but somewhat primitive. Pre-Time-Lord and all, so some oddities on that front. He's all for convincing others that the Cybermen must be destroyed because they're evil, but he does show dislike of guns.

Also: Cybermen should not have visible panty lines. I cannot stress this point highly enough.

Sarah Jane ended on a sour note for me. The Temptation of Sarah Jane seemed like a complete rehash of Father's Day from NewWho S1, right down to the resolution. Been there, done that.

Looking to see if there was much critical commentary on that, I ended up finding out about The K9 Missions, filming in Brisbane, OZ to air next year (in places other than the US). It's being developed by the guy who created K9 (Bob Baker, who wrote all of the Wallace and Grommit movies for Aardman), and there are rights issues with the BBC, so it's not Who Canon, but it's interesting, and "Who compatible".


I also came across a site that details a number of abandoned stories: all the things that didn't get as far as Shada: rejected stories, stories that got lost when the production team changed or a cast member decided to leave (or stay), stories where the author wouldn't change it, or didn't know how to write for Television, or ones that were just too expensive. Stories which, were they to have been made, would have changed some fundamental things.

A few favorites fromthe lost stories...

• Century House The Tenth Doctor appears on a modern reality TV show so he can hunt a ghost.


• The Face of God One faces a giant face in space, which claims to be God, but isn't. Unlike the Trek people, who made this same story into Trek V, the Who people declined...


• The Final Game I'll just quote this one, I can't explain it...:

  The [Third] Doctor and the Master are revealed to be two aspects of the same person -- the Master representing the “id” (instinctual needs and desires) and the Doctor the “ego” (conscious perception of and adaptation to reality). The Master ultimately perishes in an explosion which saves the lives of the Doctor and others



• The Krikketmen

  Two million years ago, the inhabitants of the planet Krikkit built a race of androids called the Krikkitmen to wipe out all life in the universe. They were stopped by the Time Lords, who trapped Krikkit within a temporal prison. Now, however, a group of Krikkitmen which escaped the Time Lords' sentence are trying to reassemble the components of a key which can free Krikkit -- components of which happen to resemble elements of the Earth game of cricket, itself actually a reflection of the ancient war. The Doctor and Sarah stumble upon this plot when they see the Krikkitmen steal the Ashes during a test match at Lords.

  Yeah. By Douglas Adams. In 1976, 6 years before LtUaE came out.


• The Lost Legion, in which Sarah Jane is shot by aliens and dies, and doesn't bitch and moan her way back to Croyden.


• The Son of Doctor Who The First Doctor encounters his evil time-travelling son, to whom he bears an uncanny physical resemblance. This was Hartnell's idea. He wanted more juicy roles on the show.


• The Prison in Space The 1968 story about a planet where women are in charge and men downtrodden. The description is 47 kinds of WTF, but I'll end with the line that made me write this all up: "Jamie frees Zoe from her brainwashing by smacking her behind."

Yeah. I'll be over here in the corner. Boggling. There have been some embarrassing things on Dr. Who in the past 46 odd years. Some in the long ago, some last season. Apparently, we've been spared the worst.

They're my favorite all-girl Norwegian pop/folk multi-instrumentalists of all time.

So, following all the fun Ginger had participating last spring in National Karaoke League, I decided to give it a go. Team Bringing the WTF is dedicated to finding and singing songs that make the audience, or some portion of the audience, say "WTF?"

Ginger has been rocking hard, a real backbone for the team, and I think she has three songs under her belt so far. Each performer has to sing twice.

I sang first out of the chute for team when the league started, with "The Bad Touch", a few weeks ago. It was OK, but it didn't really grab the audience. I've been working on a few options, at least one of which I think is really ready to go and several which, after rehearsal, I think may not be karaoke material.

Last night, week 4, was a tough week for the WTFers. Our team of eight had four absentees. I blame the Harmonic Convergence. Given that each team has to do two solos and a group song, we were all on the mic.

It was also theme night. Round one had to be about "New York, New York", round two was "Austin City Limits" and round three was "Going back to Cali". We didn't really have a solid line-up going into our group drinkalong/rehersal on Wednesday, but we had some ideas. It wasn't until noon on Thursday (show day!) that we had a song list.

( Gabba, Gabba, Hey, y'all )

Sometimes RPGs are educational. You run across a word, and maybe you think you know what it means, but you're unsure. So you look it up. Then you proceed to make the joke anyway, because mentally, you're 12.

"Good evening, Ladies and Germs, I'm Lewie Jerris and welcome to the 43rd annual Aquascutum telethon. As you all know, 'aqua' is a bluish color and 'scutum' is the latin term for ...well, you know. I'm asking you to give generously to the great cause of the prevention and relief of Aquascutum, commonly known as blue balls. Every gift helps in this great cause and I think we can conquer it in our lifetime, with your generous help. Won't you please lend a hand?"

The word 'Slytherized' came to me in a gaming session, and I had to do something with it.

Luckily, I didn't have to do anything useful with it...

its about style and maybe even a little rebellion. There are a lot of people out there who believe in style and rebellion, but dont think twice about using to a plain white toilet.

The author doesn't think twice about using apostrophes, which is OK, since I would definitely have second thoughts if faced with this throne. It's covered with low-grade pink-and purple gemstones. It's mirrored. It's coated in resin (as, I suspect, are the lungs of the chap who created it).

Of special note is the mudflap girl flush handle. That adds an extra dab of class. Normally the seller charges $500 for those, but with this baby, you don't have to think twice about grabbing an impossibly proportioned sex object by the crotch and flushing your troubles away...

This beauty can grace your home for $2100 plus about $500 shipping and handling.




via Craftastrophe

Kay Bailey Hutchison is running for Governor of Texas and has announced that she's resigning her senate seat to do so. Eh, she'd be better than the incumbent, but not a lot.

What she's got right now is a reasonably incompetent web team. They put up a web page with a hidden div that has 2272 key words that you might be searching for that they'd like to bring you to their site. That's the kind of shit that gets you banned from search engines and doesn't really work.

It would be interesting to do an analysis of the word frequency to see what KBH hopes to associate her campaign with. Here's a stab at it, grossly. The first item is "rick perry yell leader" and Governor Goodhair is represented 148 times, "life" (as in pro) is there 7 times, abortion is 5, Ron Paul 168, democrat 4, commissioner of agriculture indiana 1 (really?), gambling 28 times, cooper tire texarkana 1 (sucks if you have a blowout in Texarkana and don't want to find out about KBH), tax 7 times, immigration 5 times (it's 25% worse than democrats!), 9 mentions of gold, israel 2 (more than Cooper Tire of Texarkana, at least, but really...), "ron paul is a mason" 1, tex-mex 8, mexico 0...

Anyway, lots of fun.

The list is reproduced in full below the cut... Almost.

When the Austin American-Statesman first discovered it, it has 2273 line items. The item that was removed said "rick perry gay".

Yeah, stay classy, Kay...

( don't click unless you want to see the keyword mania! )

Even if I had a RC plane, I don't think I'd tape my iPhone to it.

But if I did, I'd be using TerraSight™ for motion stabilization...

One of our favorite local restaurants to take visitors to is the Hula Hut. Created by the Chuy's people, Hula Hut is a Tex-Mex/Micronesian fusion restaurant, serving such delicacies as the Polynesian Pescado Pu Pu Platter and other tasty, tasty crimes against nature.

It's on Lake Austin next to Tom Miller Dam, and when the weather permits, you can eat on a pier. There's a separate pier for boats to tie up at and it's necessarily casual, which fits the themes nicely.

This being Austin, Grackles are everywhere. At the Hula Hut, they like to wait near the pierside tables and bars and hope that someone will feed them chips.

Watching the grackles led to seeing the turtles swimming in the water. Looking for the turtles led to seeing the catfish, then three catfish, all very big (24"?). Looking for more catfish led to seeing a gar.

The moral of this story is "look at stuff, you never know what you'll see."

Champions Online. Champions. Online. Doctor Destroyer. Foxbat. Millennium City.

Developed by the CoH/CoV studio, published by Atari, and PC only!

I'm saved! rickjthree is doomed. Jones, maybe you can sell them your San Angelo IP...
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Apparently it's not Renee-smee like some demented cross between ms zewiliger and Peter Pan's mr. Smee. It's renn-esme. And I can't make too much fun of Franklin Richards Sparklypoo-Cullen, because my niece is a Fan...

Man, Thats one Impressive storm!

Servers should reboot once the lights are on...

ETA: aaaaand we're back.

Sephora is a place that Ginger shops, mostly despite the catalogs. I used to think of them as "the place for people who can't tell eye makeup from clown paint."

I think they've finally seen that this isn't enough in this economy. Now, I think they're trying to be "the place for people who would use a BeDazzler™ on their eyebrows".

Hopefully, they'll find their target audience, and stop sending me disturbing catalogs.

My father is the Chancellor of the North Texas Conference of the United Methodist Church, which is not something I will ever be for many, many reasons. As he describes that, this means he is "the bishop's lawyer". Southern Methodist University in Dallas is both affiliated with the church and the home of a major Methodist Seminary, the Perkins School of Theology.

A member of the SMU Perkins staff sued the Bishop in Church Court over his decision to allow SMU to go forward with hosting the George W. Bush Presidential Library and the policy institute "inspired by the principles of George W. Bush's administration."

"The university and the church’s South Central Jurisdictional Conference, which owns the school and elects its trustees, contended the presidential library is an honor that will serve as a resource for historical research, dialogue and public programs."¹

Whatever you think of Bush and his administration's principles or Methodists or the economic advantages to Dallas or any moral stain that adheres to SMU or if you think it's going to be a resource or a tool, or any misgivings you might have regarding the details of the deal, the case she brought was that the Bishop should block the lease because it subsidized a particular political point of view.

It was a pretty weak case, and it was demolished by the Chancellor. “We do not see this case as a vote for or against former President Bush or his policies, but a simple matter of church law,” said my father, the Chancellor.

I think SMU is making a mistake. I don't think, for instance, the various Bush Library organizations will deal substantively with Bush regime torture. But I can't help but think it's their own choice to lie down with dogs and get up dirty.

Aunt Jane was was a chrono-novitiate with the Sisters of Temporal Correction, based in what used to be China around the first half of the 28th century. Dad never told us any of that, much less where he was from. Eventually I forgave him, although I don't think Mike ever did. I remember Aunt Jane as a sweet little old nun when I was a kid. We never knew about the ruler, not in the 1970s. We thought she was Catholic, and it turns out she might not have been human.

Her letters to Dad were preserved, and there's a book about her order's campaign, Havoc in Hunan that he wrote. She had it published in her time. I was toying with using her adventures as the subject of my second novel, but late one night she showed up at my front door, splattered with someone else's blood and carrying a twelve-pack of St. Christopher's Pale Ale and looking all of eighteen years old. "Let me show you something, kid, before you talk to your agent." That's why I teach high school history today. The future isn't safe for me.

You should go to Brittingham's Irish Pub to see a dual bill of Seven Nations and Brother.

We won't be there, but you should.

As immlass mentioned in her report, the important thing to mention here is "and everyone is OK." Now that that's clear, we'll continue in order.

For those who don't know, Ginger has been competing in the National Karaoke League's South Austin Division this spring. NKL is just getting started, but they certainly have a fun idea and I hope it takes off. It's nice to get some structure and lots of positive feedback around karaoke. It's also been something Ginger has enjoyed a great deal.

( The Battle Royale in detail... )

Oh, and my pictures are on Flikr...

"Why is a watermelon trapped between those monstrous pressure plates deep within the Institute's Critical Stress Laboratory?" Team Banzai botanical agronomists have been for years hard at work on the problem of hunger in Third World countries under constant revolutionary turmoil. A nonpolitical, humanitarian effort, their goal has been to find ways to feed starving peoples in remote areas where traditional food delivery systems prove woefully inadequate. Often, the only way to get the nourishment into the bellies of the needy is to hit and run, avoiding all petty ideological side-taking. What you see in the Critical Stress Lab is a revolutionary watermelon capable of withstanding impact pressures of 300,000 pounds per square inch! Sweet, juicy and vitamin-packed, this remarkable fruit can be dropped from the bomb bays of low-flying aircraft into the backyards of disenfranchised villagers in the remotest backwaters of this angry planet. Just another Team Banzai effort to cut through all the unnecessary crap around us and help people help themselves. Look for high-impact, low cholesterol eggs next... and sooner than you think, shatter-proof whole-wheat taco shells.

--faq

Rumor has is they're working on Phase 2 of the watermelon project, which involves putting a whole chicken into the watermelon so that they can provide a protein source...

This page belongs to an amusingly deranged pet groomer. An award winning amusingly deranged pet groomer. An amusingly deranged pet groomer who has won awards for her deranged acts against poodlekind.

http://www.pinkcoyote.net/creativegrooming.html

It's just bizarre. She has a dozen other creations on the same page--poddle-snail, poodle-shark, poodle-camel, poodle-peacock, poodle-ninja-turtle, etc.

While it is true that I find the images disturbing, it may be more disturbing that my first thought was "I can use this for a role-playing encounter!"

I'm still waiting for bad poodle-horsemonkey, though.

For those who don't follow the LJ community rpg_statements, Ginger has just posted what may be the most succinct summary of role playing in Roger Zelazny's Amber evar.

Also, follow rpg_statements. It's often funny.