Zeborah

In which she isn't a fan of the fridge-and-clone

2020-02-14T08:31:19Z

Spoilers for Doctor Who season 7, Discovery season 1, and Picard episode 1

What's the fridge-and-clone?

Well, fridging is when you kill off a female character (usually mother or girlfriend/wife) to motivate the (usually) male protagonist and it's pretty terrible. It's so terrible writers must be becoming uncomfortably aware that it's frowned on -- and yet, you've got to motivate your male protagonist somehow!

So, what if it turns out the fridged woman has a clone! Hahaha loophole yissss!!!

Thus we get Oswin Oswald, a flirty, incredibly emotionally resilient genius whose major weakness is souffles -- killed off. And Clara Oswin Oswald, a barmaid moonlighting as a governess who takes on the hobby of bad-ass investigating the Doctor -- killed off. But it's okay! Because they're replaced by Clara Oswald, curious teacher and inhabitant of the 21st century therefore suited to be the Doctor's companion.

And thus we get Philippa Georgiou, highly-decorated captain, resourceful, strong leader and staunch friend -- killed off. (The protagonist Michael isn't male, but all the same I'd argue this is essentially fridging.) But it's okay! because she has a mirror universe counterpart who's a machiavellian empress, and evil is sexy. Don't get me wrong, Mirror!Georgiou's pretty sexy. But mostly because they code sexy as evil, so, y'know: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

And thus we get Dahj, would-be android-researcher in a world terrified of androids, who suddenly awakens to discover she's being hunted and that this is because she's an android herself, and is accordingly terrified and in denial and full of potential for character development -- and killed off.

But it's okay because she has a twin sister!

No! It's not okay! None of this is okay!

I liked Dahj! I want more of her! Sure, let's meet her twin sister too, but why does Dahj need to die other than for Picard angst?

Georgiou could have lived and still have Michael court-martialled; she could even have transferred elsewhere (promotion or medical leave) leaving Discovery to its new captain and Michael to her guilt about starting a whole war, it'd be fine.

And, to be honest I could take or leave Oswin Oswald, but I really liked Clara the barmaid/governess. She'd have been a fantastic companion, and it would be such a point of difference to (once more after so long) have a companion not from the 20th/21st century.

In real life, murdering one of twins or triplets is still murder. Likewise in fiction, fridging a woman is still fridging her even if you promptly clone her. It's still lazy and misogynistic -- in fact, the implication that women can just be swapped out for each other and everything's fine because they've got the same DNA somehow manages to be even more misogynistic than the original version of fridging.

I do not like the fridge-and-clone and I would like for it to stop now.

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In which she has a polsci theory

2017-03-24T07:05:34Z

Of course I'm not a polsci expert so this may be old news or it may be bunk or it may be both. But my theory goes:

Every possible political/economic system has its strengths and its weaknesses, its virtues and vices. They're each good for some things, terrible for others. This includes capitalism, and communism, and totalitarianism. (I don't say that they each have equal proportions of bad and good.)

So a pure capitalist society can't be perfect. No more a pure communist society, no more any society that's purely one system because humans are too complicated for any one solution to cover all the problems.

If you try to solve all the problems with one system, things start to fall apart (kind of like now). At some point people look for a new system. When things fall apart enough, people actually try to implement it, and it does really well at solving the problems with the first system. So they idealise it: this is progress, this system is our future.

The problem is that part of the reason it works so well is that the old system is still solving a lot of problems too.

Capitalism is fantastic! Competition! Efficiency! Choice! Opportunity! But those things only work to any extent for as long as we retain the old-fashioned safety nets of social responsibility. When we pursue capitalism as if it can solve every problem, cracks appear and people fall through them.

Whatever the solution after capitalism, I bet it will be eventually be the same. But if it was possible to find that sweet spot in the transition period and -- not stop there. A two-solution system is hardly perfect either. But if we could, instead of racing forward past that transtion point into a new one-solution system, hover there and reach sideways to add a third, and fourth, and fifth solution into the system, getting a happy medium of systems without getting all competitive about the ideologies....

(Except maybe totalitarianism. Certainly a very little totalitarianism goes a very very long way.)

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In which she knows what happened to your hoverboard

2015-10-21T09:42:08Z

or,
Forget your goddamn hoverboard — where's my utopia?

Every now and then someone writes some screed that seems to presuppose that science-fiction began with Star Trek or Campbell and that the movement to include social themes is destroying the genre. This is a patent nonsense: firstly because the genre is flourishing; secondly because social themes were always part of those stories; and thirdly because Campbell and Star Trek were mere johnny-come-latelies to a centuries' long list of illustrious foremothers.

But the fake geek guys don't actually care about the history of the genre. All they care about is what they read and saw when they were growing up. That's why the catch cry among the current generation is "Where's my hoverboard?" They saw Back to the Future Part II, they imprinted on the hoverboard like a newborn chick on its mother and, ever since, that piece of cheap technology is all they want of the future.

What this doesn't take into account is that hoverboards don't come from nowhere. Someone, or more likely some team of people, has to create them. Back to the Future Part II has no interest in exploring this. It's not the kind of story that delves into social themes; it's the kind of story that knocks a woman unconscious and leaves her in the alley to keep her from interfering in the men's adventure. So it simply has our white male hero steal the hoverboard from a native of the time period and proceed to trash it.

Star Trek, though it was (self-)consciously interested in social themes and depicted the future as a utopia, wasn't much more forthcoming on how its technology or that utopia developed. Which came first, the replicator or the society with no need for money? Zefram's warp drive seems necessary to meet the Vulcans and enable humanity's next step of societal 'evolution'. It's never spelled out and there are a few counterpoints — the Prime Directive at least seems to recognise that technology isn't a panacea — but by and large the general impression, imbibed by the generation raised on the show(s), is that if we get the technology right, society will fall into place.

This isn't entirely unfounded: technology can greatly improve quality of life. Birth control, immunisations, water filtration, solar power and cellphones have, together and severally, incredible transformative power. But it's not the whole story. We still need to figure out how to get our hoverboard.

And this is something that the ovular works of science-fiction took an intense interest in. Whether their utopias were reached by the imagination, a polar vortex, a dream, or time travel, they didn't want to just revel in cool technology (although they did that) or the fantastic adventures it enabled (though they did that too). They wanted to know How do we in the present get some of this? And the answers were based in social justice.

Suffrage, says The Blazing World. Education, an end to early marriage, and keeping men secluded in mardana, says Sultana's Dream. Physical and mental training for women, suffrage, prostitution reform, and farming, says Men's Rights. Free and universal education, class equality, parthenogenesis, and eugenics, says Mizora: a Prophecy.

Yes, eugenics; no, these authors were not perfect. (None of us are: we can but keep striving for it.) But they were right about extending education. The more people we educate, the more people can contribute to advancement of society, knowledge, and technology. Like science-fiction, computing was literally founded by women, and we wouldn't be anywhere near where we are today without the integral contributions of LGBT people, of people of colour, of people with disabilities.

But our society doesn't make it easy for any of these people. In the news recently have been the stories of women who left astrophysics because a prominent lecturer at their university harassed them and countless others for years with impunity. The same happens in science-fiction fandom. It happens in computing. And it happens in engineering. People who don't meet the cis-het white male standard get chased, sidelined, and ignored out of the field.

So where's our hoverboard? Let me tell you: it was supposed to be created by a team of engineers who met at a conference and discovered a shared passion and a mutually complementary set of skills. But in our timeline, none of these people are in the field any more. Maybe they got shot at the École Polytechnique. Maybe they got arrested for building a clock. Long story short, if we want a hoverboard we're going to have to take our DeLorean 30 years back in time and fix whatever went wrong.

No DeLorean time machine? Well, in that case maybe we'll just have to settle for fixing the things that are still going wrong in the present.

So first we need to build our social justice utopia and then we'll get our hoverboard. And a lot more besides.

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In which she finds out which cattery not to book next time she goes on holiday

2015-08-24T07:00:12Z

Ordinarily I get my sister to catsit when I'm out of town, but a full week after booking the holiday I realised that since my sister would be coming out of town with us, this wouldn't be practical. (In the event she didn't come with us because she was sick, but that didn't change the unavailable-for-catsitting status.) So I booked a cattery.

It was a very quick process, involving basically a telephone conversation. I was fluttery at the absence of formalities because I was expecting them to require a deposit if nothing else, or even to get a copy of Boots' vaccinations before the fact. But they were unconcerned so I figured I was just anxious at leaving Boots in a cattery for a week and a half knowing that last time I had to take her away from home during earthquake repairs she hid under the motel bed for three days, and so she was going to hate a cattery.

Now one reason I chose this place was she offered pickups and dropoffs, which is helpful since the bus website suggests they don't carry pets. So at the appointed time on the evening before leaving on holiday at oh-dark-thirty I awaited her arrival. And waited. And waited. Trying to keep Boots inside and yet not stressed all the time. So I phoned and apparently she'd forgotten. Illness or something; okay, there's a lot of nasty stuff going around here at the moment.

So it's fine, she rearranges her evening and turns up with her daughter in the backseat, and I hand over Boots and her food and medicines (both her regular food/medicines and her post-minor-dental-surgery food/medicines, along with an instructional schedule) and so forth and am all helicopter parent while the cattery woman is all "I've got this". We confirm the date and time she'll drop Boots off post-holiday. She gives me her card and asks me to drop her an email so she can send me some photos to prove Boots is enjoying her stay.

I sent her the email, mentioning my email access would be intermittent. Two-thirds of the way through the holiday (which was otherwise lovely, I may or may not blog about it separately) I realised she never so much as acknowledged the email.

So late last night I got home (and dreamed of cats and medicines), and this morning at the appointed time I expect my cat to be returned to me. Yet the appointed time passes with no Boots. Still no Boots. So I ring again, and get voice mail on both landline and cellphone. I continue ringing and leaving messages throughout the day. At 4pm I'm literally putting on my coat to get the bus and find out what the hell's going on when I finally get through to her.

"Oh yeah," quoth she vaguely. "I wasn't sure whether it was today or tomorrow. I think I was expecting a phone call."

Nope. A) I was always clear about the date. If she wasn't, she should have written it down when she specifically told me she was diarying it. Or emailed, at any point. Or phoned, ditto. B) We specifically agreed that Boots would be dropped off at this particular time. C) If you're expecting a phone call maybe you should actually answer one of your phones.

So anyway, we agreed a new time. Then followed two more calls to determine which cat carrier is Boots's. I-- I would have expected her to have been keeping track of other people's property herself?

Apparently not. Because when (with both daughters in the back seat) she drops Boots and supplies off (and a new excuse: she was being audited today so busy all morning) I discover upon unpacking (after she's driven away) that I am further missing not only Boots's food dish but also the collar from around her neck with the magnetic nametag that lets her get in and out of the house.

I've taped the magnetic cat flap open, and found a substitute food dish, and left a polite message on the answerphone saying no rush (because those kids do not need to keep getting dragged around) and just leave them in my mailbox if I'm not home (because I'd actually just as soon not talk to her again); and not saying that I'm not yet feeling any great rush to pay my bill either (those magnetic tags are not cheap).

Online reviews for this place are all positive. Probably most people wouldn't run into these problems as they'd pick up and drop off themselves, so no waiting around and they could point out the cat carrier, missing collar, and food dish at the same time, sans drama. But, wow. This is one business card I'm keeping in my stack just so I can scrawl never again all over it.

(But Boots is now home! And exploring everything. Yes, Boots, eat the business card with the dollar figure and bank account number on it so I can legitimately say "My cat ate the bill," that would be awesome. No? What if I accidentally spill deliciousness on it? Aw, fine.)

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In which she woke up and Moffat-era Doctor Who was all just a dream

2014-11-06T10:26:15Z

Not really. That doesn't happen in real life. (In real life it's a glorious Saturday morning, you've done all your chores and it's only 8:30am, the whole weekend ahead of you, and then you wake up and it's Tuesday and it's raining.) But wouldn't it be cool if it did?

Spoilers for season 8 ep 11, the '3W' episode

To recap, for posterity or for those reading this who haven't watched and don't care about spoilers: Clara's boyfriend dies. She decides to force the Doctor to rewrite history to save his life, and the way she does this is by stealing all the TARDIS keys, getting him to take her to a volcano, and throwing them in one by one until he stops saying "No." He doesn't stop. The last key gets thrown in. She realises what she's done, breaks down, and then he reveals a) she's been in a dream-state since attempting to drug him, and b) he still cares about her even though she's betrayed him so let's go to Hell and do the Orpheus thing.

So. My first reaction to this was that it was an unsatisfactory narrative cheat. I've always felt "it was all just a dream" was an unsatisfactory narrative cheat, even when I won a $10 book voucher for a story with the arguably worse trope: "it was all just a dream... or was it?"

It's a cheat because the author doesn't have to deal with the consequences of what just happened. It's unsatisfactory because I was getting really interested in what was happening and it turns out not to be real.

Second reaction (the dominant one at the time I was writing elsewhere about Missy's sexual assault on the Doctor being played for laughs): how incredibly patronising of him. When he realises something's up he doesn't say "Clara, why are you trying to drug me?" like a grown-up to a grown-up. Instead he lets it play out, like a teacher playing Socrates to a student. "Okay, so what would you do if you drugged me? Okay, so if I said no, what then? So if I kept saying no? What about when you'd destroyed all the keys? Ah, so eventually you'd break down in tears and wish you hadn't done that, I guess now you've learned your lesson."

And following on from this my third reaction: wait a minute, this is actually manipulative and emotionally abusive. Sure, she was stealing his keys and trying to drug him and this is not okay even when grief-stricken. So what you do is you say "Clara, not okay" and you either throw her out of the TARDIS or have an adult conversation about what's going on.

What the Doctor does, though, is turn the drug on her to alter her perception of reality. He retains control and understanding that this is only a dream. Which means that his claim that he wanted to see how it would play out? This isn't a good experiment. If it'd played out in reality, he wouldn't have known it was a dream. He might have made different decisions, which would have changed Clara's.

In fact we know he would have made a different decision. Because almost as soon as we're in reality again, he says "Can't change the past but can go to Hell, let's try that." What if he'd said that in the dreamstate, huh? How would it have played out then?

She only saw the "betrayal" through (I feel that's a strong word for it considering the circumstances, but okay) because he effectively lied to her.

When does he finally tell her the truth? Only after he's satisfied that she's learned her lesson and is feeling sufficiently guilty. And when she calls what she did a betrayal he concurs; "but", he says, he still cares about her. He doesn't actually say "You don't deserve how good I am to you," but he certainly feeds and encourages the idea.

This is indistinguishable from Emotional Abuse 101. And yes, it is perfectly arguable that this wasn't his intent. (So maybe the bonus plausible deniability should make this Emotional Abuse 201.) But the effect on Clara, who's already in an emotionally fragile state, is abusive. And the effect on the viewer, by making her seem selfish and treacherous while lionising the Doctor, is to make us complicit in that emotional abuse. (Yes, I know it's just a story. But stories are how we learn how to make sense of the real world.)

It's just these little things that Moffat throws out there that make it really hard to pay proper attention to the actual story he's trying to tell.

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In which she watches the second episode (Doctor Who 08.02)

2014-09-02T08:50:09Z

I'm determined to go into this one trying/expecting to like it, in the hopes that my recent dislike of All the Doctor Who is at least partly due to justified bias against the Moffat.

This lasts literally four seconds. That's how long it takes to go from generic space battle scene to the sounds of a Woman In Distress, and quicker than conscious thought my subconscious hurls in disgust at Yet Another Woman In Distress.

Try to like it, Zeborah.

I spend the next minute alternately thinking:

In space, no-one can hear you shout. Just talk into your radio like a normal person.

No, Zeborah, you're trying to like it.

Come to think of it, that probably applies on Earth too.

Trying to like it, remember.

But if we must have a Woman In Distress, couldn't she be cool and collected?

Try to-- Oh never mind, maybe the next scene will be better.

ca. 2min 30, the Doctor makes the Woman in Distress beg to be taken home. I feel at this point it might be relevant to add that she's black. (Which might be why she figured out so much quicker than I what he wanted. I thought he was going to point out that if she distrusts him so much in these wartime conditions then she shouldn't really be telling him the position of her command ship.) Now, I don't mind the Doctor being a jerk. I mind the Doctor being a jerk in racially coded ways when I know that the writers want us to think that he's cool and always right. So I am Highly Uncomfortable with this scene.

But maybe the third scene's the charm?

Ooh, yes, someone's threatening to kill the Doctor. I could enjoy this episode after all.

The next few scenes are quite enjoyable because the Doctor isn't there. Unfortunately then the Doctor shows up and whisks Clara away from the interesting new character.

"A good Dalek?"

"There's no such thing."

His memory really is shot to hell. What about the one he and Rose rescued from the thingy mountains? Or the one who turned out to be a version of Clara? Some of the mutant ones from New York weren't irredeemably evil either.

Now, it makes no sense that you'd explode if you hold your breath. The whole environment is shrinking, that clearly includes the air around them so it ought to include the air inside them.

The Doctor talks as if he's often been miniaturised and injected into a Dalek's eyestalk.

Also I'm not clear on what scale we're working. They don't look like blood-cell tiny, but everything seems to be taking a long time to get places and they're seeing visual impulses on the way to the brain. Mind you I think Fantastic Voyage had this problem too.

Ruthless!Doctor is Ruthless. <pretends the script is rife with ethical nuance> I can enjoy that.

The fall through a tube into goop is disappointingly reminiscent of Amy's second episode. Though the twist gives us another round of Ruthless!Doctor Is Ruthless.

I feel a Geiger counter should go at least as high as "This is killing you as we-- Oh, never mind, rest in peace," so "off the scale" is more alarming than they give it credit for.

"No, Doctor, that is not what we just learned!" OMG this might be Clara's Crowning Moment Of Awesome. I could wish that she would be the one to actually tell us what we just learned. I wish even more that the Doctor would say it instead of wittering on in trite clichés; I have no idea how those could possibly convince anyone of anything especially in the time he has. But still, it's a really, really good and important point that Clara just made.

...Okay, what I thought we just learned was you can make Daleks be good with a suitable application of radiation. This is perhaps a little mechanistic, but on the other hand it would have been a lot easier that fiddling around with the brain and hoping that wiffly waffly touchy feely revelations would recur.

However Doctor Who has always been about the wiffly waffly touchy feely revelations. Tinged occasionally with the predictable but nevertheless satisfying twist that the Doctor's mind is as full of hatred as beauty. A risky thing always, trying to give someone religion.

But still! Clara gets to do a Clever Thing! Even better, she gets to do a technical Clever Thing without being told that she doesn't know anything about computers and therefore displaying a modicum of intelligence must be a sign that something's possessed her! Why yes I'm still bitter about those episodes, but if this is a sign of things to come I'm all for it.

I'm not entirely clear why Rusty tricked the other Daleks into retreat, instead of ploughing ahead and exterminating. Tactically this is of course the superior approach. It's just that Daleks have never really seemed to be about tactics so much as overwhelming numbers and complete dedication to their calling to exterminate.

Also not clear why Journey Blue wants to go with the Doctor and Clara. I like his rejection in that it's true to character; I could write fanfic about her feelings about it. Her face. :-(

Clara's "I don't know if you're good but at least you're trying" is sweet but actually, no. There's no "at least" about it. The Doctor is powerful; it behoves him to try harder. Handing him a copout doesn't help him. What he needs is specifics in where he fails and how he needs practically to improve, or at least a kick in the rear to inspire him to sit down and use his big brain to figure this out for himself.

But we get to see Danny Pink again. I hope we continue to, and that he becomes a companion~~, and that someone kills the Doctor so Clara and Danny can take over the show~~.

Verdict: With critical brain turned as far towards off as I can manage, the story was predictable but enjoyably so. (Focus on the able-to-be-enjoyed. It's not like it goes out of its way to make you enjoy it, but if you want to enjoy it you may well be able to.) I still wish Clara could be more respected by the writers (the big revelation was hers; she should have got the glory of spelling it out).

And I still consider the Doctor fundamentally weak-charactered: he recognises that he's not a good man, but he's not willing to actually face the fact and admit to it, let alone to commit to doing something about it. What I want in a character is either someone who's flawed but strives to do better, or someone who's flawed and revels in the fact. The Doctor is neither of these things. He's a moral coward. And as for the writers who expect us to admire him? I don't even know what to call that.

(With critical brain turned on, omg the treatment of both Journey and Gretchen just ugh. And the heaven thing probably has the potential to be cool, but it's hard to see how even if it weren't a probably-villainous-woman in Steven Moffat's hands so we all know how terribly that's going to turn out.)

Actually the thing I really like? That it appears that the kids in Danny Pink's class didn't tell. Okay, all we know is that they didn't tell anyone who'd tell Clara. But still. There are stories at the edge of these stories that are a hundred times more interesting that these stories themselves.

Hopefully my theory that second episodes are more indicative of where a show's going than pilots will hold up, because in my various social circles it's important to stay up with current events in the Whoniverse, and this episode made doing so quite tolerable.

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In which another Doctor

2014-08-24T06:25:17Z

Standard warning for how I don't think Moffat is all that (at this point I just watch like one watches the depressing parts of the news - in order to keep up with current events rather than to enjoy oneself - and then I come here to rant about it because you just can't keep it bottled up) so if you do think he's all that or even half of that you probably just want to move along.

Spoilers, sweetie (S08.01)

So plot happened. Dinosaurs being murdered in the Victorian Thames by self-repairing cyborgs from space, yadda yadda. Also the opening credits have a new and 450% more steampunk visual thing going on.

But really the show today was about his regeneration and Clara's reaction to it. And the thing that really annoys me is that her perfectly legitimate worry about his memory problems and related dysfunctional behaviour (however temporary those turned out to be) and her perfectly reasonable concern at not recognising a Doctor who would trap her in a room with a homicidal cyborg in order to save himself (even if he came back later, even if he secretly and for some reason without telling her planned to come back all along. Most Doctors just wouldn't ever have done it in the first place) -- these were all dismissed in favour of chiding her for a supposed superficial concern over his new wrinkles and grey hair.

The whole point of the Doctor's regeneration is that it's his personality as well as his body that changes. And it's damn boring to turn that into a morality play about looking past a veil when it would be far more interesting to explore how a friendship can survive while necessarily adapting to that change in personality.

Other things that annoyed me today included:

As in Due South, buddy breathing isn't a kiss, it's exploitative fanservice.
Is Clara being made stupider and less useful in every episode? She had to be prompted twenty times to notice the obvious about those robits. She had some good moments, in extremis, but when the Doctor's in the room she's always forced into the role of gibbering simpleton.
Most shoehorned flashback ever or most shoehorned flashback ever?
Way to make the black girl be the voice of the unruly classroom.
Way to load on the Scots stereotypes.
A friendship between two people who think the other is an egomaniac control freak gameplayer is not really a healthy relationship. Also, one of them's right and we have seen no (zip, nil, zilch, nada) evidence that it's the Doctor. When has Clara ever tried to control anything other than her breathing? What games has she played? What the bleeding hell is the Doctor/scriptwriter/Moffat talking about?

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In which she liveblogs the Dr Who 2013 Xmas Special so you don't have to

2013-12-26T12:43:06Z

"Once... there was a planet—"

Oh God Moffat, enough with the pretentious voiceovers already.

The Doctor has a Cyberman's head in the TARDIS which he appears to be using as a kind of SIRI/portable companion. Given that Cybermen are converted from sentient beings, one would think that removing the homicidal part of them would return them to being the regular kind of sentient being who you shouldn't casually wield as a personal shield against laser fire, but then I'm not a Time Lord so may be missing some nuance.

I admit I did like:

"I'm cooking Christmas dinner!"
"I'm getting shot at by Cybermen!"
"Well, can't we do both?"

[opening credits have possibly been redesigned again, I'm losing track]

...The Doctor is naked. Because he's going to church? Now he's wearing hologram clothes. I don't even care if this is going to be a plot point, it's still creepy. Clara shudders but it's Christmas and she needs a pretend boyfriend so rolls with it.

(Sidenote: Why do people who suddenly realise they need a pretend boyfriend never just announce that they've had a pretend breakup? So much less comedic drama, plus then you can claim to be too heartbroken to deal with cooking turkey.)

Oh, it turns out that only Clara can see the hologram clothes because it didn't occur to the Doctor that her family might prefer things that way to. Hahaha so creepy.

The turkey isn't done so they take it to the TARDIS (whether to bake in the Time Vortex or to bake and then take a short hop back in time I'm not clear. Either way, whatever the Doctor says this seems a totally legit use of the TARDIS to me).

Turns out the Cyberman's got no organics at all, so okay. Anyway, it announces that Mystery Planet is Gallifrey. Doctor is dramatically melodramatic with extra manpain. "That's not my planet, its rings are too fluffy!"

They go to some big orbiting church-ship in hologram clothes and nothing else and the Doctor flirts with the Mother Superious. (Superius? Makes no sense grammatically but dunno.) Clara interrupts, bored already, and at least gets introduced before the Doctor and Mother adjourn to Private Conference Wink Wink and leave her to wander the cross-shaped corridors alone.

While the Doctor and Mother Superious discuss the colony on the planet over her altar-shaped bed, Clara has several runs-in with Silences which she each promptly forgets. Finally in terror she flees and breaks up the conclave. Forgetting again, she goes along with the plan to teleport down to the planet. The Mother Superious insists on the Doctor leaving behind his TARDIS key (by implication he hasn't even tried bringing his screwdriver) and gives them one hour.

We're just outside a rustic village on a snowy night. It's all very Christmas and then Clara's foot gets grabbed by a Weeping Angel's hand that protrudes from the snow. She suggests she could escape by taking her shoe off, the Doctor points out she's not wearing a shoe. They escape by summoning the TARDIS using the key that he's... hidden in his wig after shaving his head one night when he was bored. Okay...

Clara puts real clothes on and is approximately as grateful as I am for the opportunity. They go out to explore the village, with screwdriver. They meet inhabitants and, engaging them in conversation, discover they're all affected by a truthfield. Telling the truth compels Clara to introduce herself as someone to travels with the Doctor because she fancies him and to answer a question about her name with an assertion that she's a "bossy control freak".

Stephen Moffat, I am judging you so hard.

They find a crack in the wall. The Doctor realises it's left over, a structural weakness that Gallifrey is trying to break back into the universe through. It's transmitting a signal that's attracted a bazillion ships, and CyberSiri translates the signal as (the Doctor realises: the oldest question in the universe): "Doctor Who?" This translation also accidentally gets transmitted to all the bazillion ships in orbit, in a scene that's really startlingly similar to the Pandorica opening.

The truth field is to make sure that if he answers he tells the truth and the Time Lords know it's safe to return. The obvious solution seems to be to get Clara to say "Actually I'm not a doctor I'm Clara Oswin and I'm a schoolteacher!" but instead he sends her back to the TARDIS to find a left-handed screwdriver. For a bossy control freak she's really quick to follow makework orders and get herself dumped back safely on Earth.

Meanwhile the Mother Superious conferences with the Doctor and admits that this is Trensilor: if he lets the Time Lords through the Time War will start up again. Now maybe I don't know enough about the Time War but I thought it was between the Daleks and the Time Lords. The Daleks have already survived and the universe isn't in much danger, so they must be pretty weak, which I'd think would mean the Time Lords could defeat them quite easily. If the Time Lords couldn't defeat them that easily then either the Daleks are strong enough to threaten the universe by themselves, or the Time Lords are pretty weak and are no threat to the universe either. So I really fail to see the big deal at this point.

But the Mother Superious is adamant she won't let it happen. "Speak your name and this planet will burn."

"No. This planet is protected." I feel the Doctor is forgetting key parts of his history. While he rallies a couple of dozen townspeople, the Mother Superious dedicates the church to Silence and declares that the Doctor will not speak his name. "Silence will fall."

What happens next is confusing. For long enough for the Doctor to grow visibly old and require a cane to limp along, he stays on the planet protecting the town, while the church-ship stays in orbit also protecting the town from all the ships in orbit attempting to kill the Doctor by sending in hapless Sontarans and wooden Cybermen. I don't feel the Mother Superious has quite got the hang of silencing people yet.

Three hundred years later, the TARDIS turns up - with Clara still on the outside where she'd been trying to get her key in the lock while the TARDIS was trying to leave Earth. Luckily it seems to have extended the forcefield around her while they travelled through the Time Vortex because she seems shaken rather than dead.

Ah, apparently the reason the church-ship isn't attacking is in case he unleashes the Time Lords. He can't leave or they'll burn the planet to prevent him returning to answer the question.

We learn that CyberSiri's name is Handles, so he dies. The Doctor reveals that Moffat's counting both the War Doctor and the time Tennant regenerated with his own face, so this is his last regeneration too. If that's the case, how could he have been regenerating at Lake Silencio in the moment when River shot him the second time to make sure he was really dead?

The Doctor and Clara attend parlay with the Mother Superious. There are more Silences: the Doctor explains they're professional priests, genetically modified for the confessional so you forget you've seen them afterwards. I feel this misses some important points about confession.

A bunch of priest-soldiers turn out to be Daleks in disguise.

The Mother Superius mentions the Kovarian chapter broke away and travelled back along his timestream to prevent him ever reaching Trensilor. Of course by blowing up his TARDIS they created the very cracks in the universe that allowed Gallifrey access. The "Destiny Trap", the Doctor calls this: "You can't change history if you're part of it." I call this a paradox of the Ouroboros variety, and I have a friend who will literally not be able to cope with it. But the Mother Superious continues to tell how the Daleks are growing in strength, recently attacked, and slaughtered her people. "I died in this room screaming your name. —Oh." Yeah, that.

Dalek / Doctor standoff. The Dalek Superious takes Clara hostage, the Doctor shrugs, Clara is brave, the Doctor mocks the Dalek Superious as spineless in comparison, and she's goaded into grabbing back her humanity and killing the other Daleks. In delight the Doctor snogs her. She scolds him, "Kiss me when I ask," and he retorts "You'd better ask nicely." It's even more disgustingly PUA than it sounds oh my God Moffat.

He and Clara leave. The turkey finishes cooking. Clara asks him to promise not to ever send her away again. He does, and then does.

The war on Trensilor continues.

Clara is miserable on Christmas and no wonder with the callous (stepmother?) Moffat's invented for her. Her grandmother's sympathetic though, being too old to threaten Moffat. Then the TARDIS returns...

...piloted by the Mother Superious. "Flying the TARDIS was always easy. It's flying the Doctor that was difficult." She takes Clara back to Trensilor so the Doctor doesn't have to die alone.

Doctor is old wah wah. Daleks summon the Doctor. He tells Clara to stay put and be safe. She stays put and tells the Crack "You've got it wrong. It's not Doctor Who, it's just The Doctor, so help him." (This was the worst part of the trailer, but in context it's her moment of awesome. ...It's still pretty terrible that it's her moment of awesome.)

As the Daleks gloat over his impending death, the Time Lords send him an extra regeneration. With bonus regeneration energy apparently, which he uses to destroy the Daleks while Clara hustles the townspeople into shelter.

I will note for the record that even if one were rabidly "Time Lords can't change gender!" getting an extra regeneration sent from Gallifrey in another universe would provide the perfect excuse to make an exception.

All's safe. Clara returns to the TARDIS where he's still regenerating and hallucinating Amelia. "Who's Amelia?" she asks. What? Only your favourite author, Clara. Amy also gets a cameo, and then he takes off his bow tie. It falls to the floor in dramatic slow-motion metonymy. Clara is annoyingly distressed given how refreshingly matter-of-fact she'd been earlier in the episode at the prospect of him regenerating.

Capaldi appears, doesn't like the colour of his kidneys, and asks Clara if she knows how to fly the TARDIS.

This, Doctor, is one of many reasons why you shouldn't act like such an obnoxious know-it-all whose companions can't be trusted to learn simple life-saving tasks.

[end credits]

In summation:
Ehh. It had a relatively coherent plot that ties up loose ends from earlier, more interesting, plots, and many of the new plot-holes are forgiveable. I liked several of the hour-long episode's lines of dialogue, and if I hadn't stopped caring about Matt Smith's incarnation a year or two ago his farewell might have been somewhat moving. I guess it might be interesting to see how Capaldi does, but I'm still living in hope that Moffat will suddenly decide he can get more adulation in some other fandom and leave this one to someone who can write people.

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An anti-squee post for Day of the Doctor (and the Five(ish) Doctors)

2013-11-25T08:56:53Z

People who enjoyed the episode have the entire internet to squee in. To them I will cheerfully say, "It was classic Moffat. So how about this weather?"

To everyone else, I dedicate this post.

So yeah, I didn't expect this to be anything other than "classic Moffat"; I just watched because it's an important episode, everyone else would be watching, and I felt the need for my dislike of it to be well-informed. So key things for me were:

1. Day of the Doctor
So Clara's now graduated from being a nanny to being a teacher. Was she studying before, or have we skipped several years, or does Moffat just not realise that teachers have to be trained? (Like nurses. If Rory is the same age as Amy, and most of their first episode happens when Amy's 19, and getting your nursing degree takes 3 years in the UK, then are we supposed to assume Rory started university at 16 or younger, or are we just supposed to think becoming a nurse is what you do when you're not cool enough to be a Doctor? This is a serious question I need it for a fanfic whose timeline is screwed up because canon is a piece of classist junk.)

I missed the early screening because of technology so my friends who saw it at the movies took great pains to avoid spoilers for me until I could see the evening screening. But they did talk about the audience reaction, and she also said to me "What's the thing that Moffat always does?"

"Put women in boxes?" I said.

"Exactly," she said to my entire unsurprise.

"Huh?" said her husband.

The Woman in the Box this episode was the Moment, wearing Rose Tyler's form so Moffat could include a favourite actress without having to, you know, worry about characterisation or anything. I guess Time Lord technology is all about stuffing sentience into a box and harnessing the results? Anyway Billie Piper got to be all soulful and she's awfully good at being soulful so there was that.

Ten is snogging Good Queen Bess, who is being acted terribly. Okay, I get that not every actress can be Helen Mirren or Judi Dench or Cate Blanchett or Miranda Richardson. But seriously that was bad. When there were two of them, I could tell which was the alien because that one had a tiny bit of the self-pride that Elizabeth ought to have had.

Ten and Eleven compare sonics. Eleven's is bigger, just like his torch was bigger than Rory's in the Vampires of Venice. Yes, Moffat, we get it, you have a big dick. Now stop waving it in our faces.

I liked the woman with the inhaler. Apart from the "asthma as comedic relief" thing. And the thing where, while she's awesome in some moments of extreme stress, in others she's made to revert to "Help, Doctor, please save me!" as if she was fainting in Godzilla's hand.

The 3D paintings were cool and their use in the plot's resolution was tidy. But... it was kind of low key. Thinking about it, I think it's because Moffat (as so often) was distracted by all his other Cool Things that he forgot to keep our attention on the paintings, so there was no weight there to make it really resonate.

I was glad that after 400 years it eventually occurs to the Doctor that there might be an alternative to genocide. It's a bit unnerving that this appears to be the first time it seriously occurs to him: that he hasn't in fact spent the last 400 years in a state of terminal esprit d'escalier telling himself, "Next time I meet my past self I must tell him to do X instead!" But at least it didn't validate the old "I am responsible for the death of billions; clearly no-one knows pain like I do! <single perfect tear>" trope.

2. The Five(ish) Doctors
Summary: A bunch of washed-up actors are neglected by the world in general and Steven Moffat in particular, and nagged by their shrill wives. I stuck with it for a while hoping for something interesting to happen, but then they gave John Barrowman a wife. A shrill, nagging wife. So at that point I closed the tab.

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In which truly she is in hell

2013-08-28T17:50:58Z

I'm at the airport with an hour to kill (because SuperShuttle, while SuperAwesome, are also SuperCautious about departure times), and I can't whinge on Twitter because Twitter refuses to load.

DownForEveryone.com claims it's just me. :-(

I mean, I suppose I could do some writing...

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In which she shreds the latest Doctor Who episode (Bells of St John)

2013-03-31T11:06:04Z

Obvious spoilers are obvious

Melodramatic opening is melodramatic, derivative of a bunch of Moffat's previous stories (most obviously "Don't blink" and "Who turned out the lights?") and not at all creepy.

Opening credits are... new, again? Maybe not, I never bothered rewatching the last episode.

At this point I was already so bored I turned to Twitter.

In the next scene we're apparently meant to be surprised that a mysterious hermit 'monk' (like the last half-dozen mysterious strangers in town) turns out to be the Doctor. Apparently he's decided that the best way to track down Clara Oswald is — rather than looking her up in a gigantic database somewhere, or even travelling around at random hoping to stumble across her — to sit in a hole in the thirteenth century staring at a portrait of her he painted.

I nearly go back to Twitter but now we get a scene with Clara herself. She's now a nanny in modern-day times (one of her charges is reading a book by Amelia Williams. It takes me half a minute to realise it's a reference to Amy Pond because the writers decided, after seasons pointing out that Rory would totally take her name, that actually no, now she's going to take his) and she's trying to get someone on the phone...

...Which turns out to be the TARDIS phone (whose door of course mentions St John Ambulance). This is a mildly clever explanation for the episode's title except it's never touched on again so I'm not sure what the point is. The Doctor acts like no-one's ever called him on this phone before. Turns out Clara wants tech support to get onto the internet; a "woman in the shop" gave her this number saying it was a helpline. (I like to think it was Sally Sparrow.) The Doctor does the obvious techline troubleshooting because she knows nothing about computers.

(There's a high-larious interlude of the monks asking "Is it evil spirits?" and then crossing themselves when the Doctor says it's a woman. Because women are just like evil spirits, hahahaha oh misogyny you're not even original.)

The Doctor realises who he's talking to when she murmurs the thing she tells him whenever she dies as a mnemonic for the wifi password the family she's working for set up. So... even her catchphrase isn't really hers?

She accidentally attracts the attention of the horror of the week.

The Doctor turns up on her doorstep. Instead of explaining, he keeps banging on the door (which she has sensibly shut in his face) telling her he needs to explain. Seriously, Doctor, explain first; ask to come inside second. If you're less shouty and shovey, women will probably be less instantaneously scared of you.

The Doctor belatedly changes out of his monk's costume into a new suit, complete with bow tie. Now, I've always been in the "Bow ties are cool" camp, but there comes a time when every woman's loyalties reach breaking point, and that time for me is when I discover that the Doctor has made a little shrine of a box for his bow tie. Bow ties are now officially no longer cool.

(I think around here I returned to Twitter for another pick-me-up.)

Clara gets uploaded by the horror of the week. The Doctor bursts in, downloads her again, and carries her up to her bed to recuperate. While she's sleeping it off he puts water, flowers and jammy dodgers next to her bed, which is nice. Then he snoops around her bedroom, opens her journal, and licks a maple leaf from it, which promptly displaces Nicholas Cage perving on the showering woman in City of Angels for Most Unintentionally Creepy Moment In the History of Video Entertainment.

(Later I had an argument on Twitter about this with someone who thinks this behaviour is okay because a) the Doctor's obsessed with her, b) he's a Time Lord/alien, and c) it's only scifi. I used a word that I mostly otherwise reserve for 7.0 magnitude earthquakes, and then I blocked him. If anyone wants to continue the argument, I've got my Baninator right here.)

The Doctor then sets up camp outside her house to guard her, which I guess provides him a remnant of redemption? (The being outside part, I mean.) Then because Stephen Moffat is writing the episode, she spunkily insists on coming out to pseudo-flirt with him and he is awkward about her pseudo-advances. He deduces that while uploaded she learned a bunch about computers because before she couldn't operate one and now she's parroting the same kind of joke about Twitter made by technophobes the world over.

(Incidentally, in this version of herself she looks a lot like an older version of the girl who was stored in the Library. This ups my mental tally of Moffat's creepiness quotient to unprecedented levels.)

The horror of the week chooses this moment to attack. The Doctor yanks Clara into the TARDIS (it's bigger on the inside, yadda yadda), saves the day, jumps to breakfast-time in an unprecedent feat of temporal accuracy, and after an interlude involving a fez and a motorcycle, sets up at a cafe and attempts to track down the horror of the week. Clara tells him to hand her the laptop and get some coffee, she can do it. The Doctor's forgotten that she just learned a bunch about computers while uploaded and mansplains that no, she can't.

Eventually she prevails. While he's getting coffee and stealing food with impunity, the horror of the week (having used the ubiquity of wifi-connected cameras to track him down) controls the people around to gloat at him.

In a really clever bit of social hacking, Clara has tracked down the physical location of the horror of the week by a) getting its employees' photos from their webcams; b) doing facial recognition searches to find their social network accounts; and c) reading their profiles/status updates for their work address.

(Of course there's no conceivable way the plot could have worked if this had been her own talent rather than a skill accidentally technomagically gifted to her by the horror of the week because women don't have talents of their own, especially not involving technology, sheesh, don't be silly!)

She tells the Doctor that she knows the location, except it's actually a robot thing which uploads her. Her face remains when the real Doctor returns to tell him "I don't know where I am" even though three seconds ago she knew exactly what the location was.

Jump cut to the Doctor knowing exactly what the location is even though three minutes ago he didn't have a clue. (I like to think he read it off the screen of her open laptop, but the show doesn't take even a second to admit that he didn't work it out for himself.) He confronts the puppet queen of the horror of the week and when she doesn't back down he reveals that he's actually still at the cafe and she's talking to the robot thing, which uploads her.

Her only way to escape is to order her employees to download everyone, including Clara. While UNIT storms the offices, the puppet queen reports her failure to the season's Big Bad the "Great Intelligence" and on his instructions does a "factory reset" of all the employees, including herself. Thus (as all powerful women must) she gets her comeuppance by being found huddled on the floor asking in a silly little girl voice and even clunkier dialogue where her mummy and daddy are. (The male employees only lose a few mental years and are merely bewildered, which apologists will say is because she was under the GI's influence for longer, but this isn't an excuse. Children can have dignity too, and for her to end as she did is either a) lazy writing or b) misogyny or my personal favourite c) both.)

Meanwhile the Doctor tries to convince Clara to go with him on the grounds that he can return her with precision to this exact time to pick up her responsibilities. Maybe River fixed some TARDIS circuits so that nowadays he can pick a time and place and actually end up there? Clara plays hard to get with an "Ask me tomorrow" and the Doctor is all happily intrigued.

Summary:

The Doctor, having steadily got creepier and creepier over the last year and a half in particular, is now actually creepier than the horror of the week.

Clara Oswald is steadily getting less and less interesting. When we first saw her she was a technowhizz. The next time she was maintaining jobs both as barmaid and as governess. Now she accidentally became a nanny to repay a favour, can't even log onto a wifi network without assistance, and her flirtiness and wanderlust are exactly the same flirtiness and wanderlust as all Moffatt's other female characters. She doesn't even seem to bake souffles anymore.

The horror of the week and large chunks of the plot (not to mention the extra-plot trimmings like the monk gambit and the wardrobe fishing) could have been generated by Mad Libs. It was all so utterly predictable that I stopped watching several times to chat on Twitter and once to watch the last third of an Attenborough documentary about baboons. Baboons are fascinating, but even so when a documentary about baboons is more compelling than a brand new Doctor Who episode, something somewhere has gone terribly terribly wrong.

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14 reasons why people begging for food money mightn't want your hamburger

2012-03-22T08:35:29Z

I haven't been in the position of begging for food money (I've busked, but that was for pocket money, so and also it's not the same) so these reasons are from my imagination, not experience. As such, they likely lack nuance and I'm probably missing piles more.

They don't know where that hamburger's been.
They're vegetarian.
They're gluten-free.
Or lactose-intolerant.
Or have other allergies.
Or other medical conditions.
Or just want to eat healthily to prevent future medical conditions which they won't be able to afford to treat.
They've actually just eaten. It's just that they'd like to eat tomorrow too, but it's forecast for rain: miserable and unprofitable weather for begging, and a dollar keeps better than your hamburger.
They've actually just eaten. It's just that they'd like to feed their kid too, and a hamburger is a poor substitute for formula.
They lied. They don't need money for food. It's just that they don't have a card that says "Need money for toothpaste and toilet paper".
They lied. They don't need money for food. It's just that begging for food money gets more money than begging for shoes-that-don't-leak money.
Let alone for condom money.
They'd love a hamburger right now. But begging for charity is soul-destroying enough at the best of times, let alone when someone implies they're a drunken gambling-addicted drug addict not to be trusted with bit of spare change. Honestly they'd rather starve for another day than accept your right to judge their sincerity.
Bugger the burger. They've had a shitty week and they deserve a beer, dammit.

Not that I'm saying one should always give money to beggars. There's plenty of reasons one might choose not to, or not be able to. (Sometimes I choose not to because it's a nuisance wrestling my purse out of my bag. No claims of sainthood from this corner.)

I'm not even saying one should never offer a hamburger to beggars. Just, if they refuse it, that isn't evidence that they don't need the money.

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In which she offers a PSA

2010-10-30T22:59:36Z

I am, at the moment, full of fierce and heartbroken despair and rage at the patriarchy.

Nothing terrible happened. Just one little thing, no worse than every other one-little-thing-after-another, except that it came in a place that ought to be safe, from a person who ought to desire my safety and happiness.

There are excuses. There are always excuses. Plus I could have prevented it all by just keeping silent, or being politer. Well, no, politer wouldn't have worked. Silent might have. I could have responded to the things being said with silence. Your heart doesn't get broken that way; just abraded.

I also had some good support from others there. That was nice. But emotions aren't integer variables, negative and positive, that add up and cancel each other out. The strings of the heart concatenate; the hurt is still there.

So that was the trigger, but there's a whole lot more gunpowder behind it. So last night and today I rage and weep and hate with a burning hatred the whole damnable kyriarchy. I don't exactly like telling the whole world that I am at present a hysterical bitch, but there it is.

Which means that if I see someone being a jerk on the internet, I'm liable to call them out on it, and if I'm not sufficiently careful of their poor oppressed privilege I'm not really going to give a flying damn.

If this bothers you, you may want to preemptively ban me from commenting on your journal for a while or something.

Comments are off. I don't want sympathy (qv concatenation). I want someone to make the world better. Faster.

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In which she opines on freedom of speech

2010-10-22T09:47:43Z

For the purposes of this post I shall focus on freedom of speech in the USA, whose First Amendment states:

Congress shall make no law [...] abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press [...]

People abiding in the United States are constitutionally protected from the specter of a law forcing them to say one thing or forbidding them to say another thing. They are likewise constitutionally protected from the specter of a law forcing the press to espouse some point of view or to suppress some other point of view.

This means that people abiding in the United States need never fear being arrested or prosecuted by the government for what they say or don't say, and this is a very good thing indeed. It also means that people can trust that US newspapers and TV stations aren't all just mouthpieces for the government (unless of course those newspapers and TV stations all individually choose to be, which seems unlikely) and this is also a very good thing.

Note however what this amendment doesn't say. It doesn't say that a press may not espouse a point of view or suppress a point of view. (If it did say such a thing, that would be a law abridging freedom of the press, and it's just said that there shall be no such law.)

It doesn't say that a non-governmental organisation may not espouse a point of view or suppress a point of view. It doesn't say that a person may not espouse a point of view or suppress a point of view. (If it did say such a thing, that would be a law abridging freedom of speech.)

It doesn't say that a media channel may not fire someone who has said nasty things. It only says that Congress shall make no law that a media channel must, or contrariwise that it must not, fire such a person.

It doesn't say that a convention may not refuse to honour someone else who has said other nasty things. It only says that Congress shall make no law that a convention must, or contrariwise must not, refuse to honour them.

Even if you count "honouring someone" as a speech act or as enabling a speech act, which I think is stretching things rather a lot.

Because the fact that one person has freedom of speech does not mean that someone else is obliged to pay for or otherwise actively support that speech. It doesn't give anyone the right to demand a column in the newspaper, or a segment on Fox News, or a minute on the radio airwaves, or comment space on someone's blog, or a podium at Wiscon.

Wiscon/SF3's decision to disinvite Elizabeth Moon as Guest of Honour does not abridge her freedom of speech, even if you think that organisations as well as government bear some moral responsibility for upholding that freedom. She can still write books. She can write blog posts. She can call up talkback radio. She can chat with her friends in the coffeeshop. She can speak at any other convention that's willing to have her. She can even, I believe, attend Wiscon and speak with people there; she just won't be officially honoured for it.

So she can still say anything she wants to say, and she will never, in the USA, be arrested for it, because Congress shall make no law abridging her freedom of speech. She just has to find somewhere else to say it than Wiscon's Guest of Honour podium (nor will she find this hard).

And if anyone really thinks that everyone everywhere in the US has the moral obligation to uphold everyone else's freedom of speech by providing them a platform to speak on, then six weeks before Wiscon/SF3 made their decision you should have been protesting Elizabeth Moon's mass deletion of comments from her post. Wiscon/SF3 aren't the ones engaging in censorship here.

(Personally I think she not only has the legal right but also the moral right to censor and otherwise control what's said in her own space. That she chose to exercise this right in this way and this context, however... was not the most constructive way to show respect for the people involved, shall we say.

(--Incidentally, my own personal policy on censorship is that if someone posts a comment to my DW or LJ which I feel I cannot in good conscience allow to remain here - which will generally be because it's hurtful to some third party - then I'll delete it and, where possible, email the text back to them so they can repost it to their own blog if they so choose. People are free to speak, and I'm free to refuse to host that speech.)

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In which feminine hygiene products are perhaps not the best source of a good education

2010-07-13T04:56:37Z

Do they still make those bubblegum wrappers with the jokes on them? You know those jokes that had been carefully selected from a jokebook entitled The World's Unfunniest Jokes, by people who've heard of jokes but maintain their impartiality through a strict and willful ignorance of what this joke thing is all about, and who then painstakingly rewrite them so as to leech from them any remaining hint of comedy?

Well, for those of my readers who don't themselves experience that time of the month when you pour blue fluid(*) onto a Feminine Hygiene Product and then go out and ride a horse in white pants, let me just say that FHPs often come wrapped in a similar manner. Except instead of unfunny jokes, we get unfactual factoids.

The ur-FHP Factoid for me will always be "If you put a grape in the microwave it will explode." To be fair, this would probably be true if you inserted the important clause and then turn it on. And "A full moon always rises at sunset" is true for values of "always" that include "at certain latitudes, or at least at certain times of the year", so I'll pass these ones by.

I'll also pass by those familiar factoids like "The human body is made up of ninety-random percent water" and "When you sneeze, the air comes out your nose at randomty miles an hour."

But every so often my eye gets caught by something like "23% of all photocopier faults are caused by people sitting on them and photocopying their buttocks." Which. I. What? I mean. I'm pretty sure that ninety-random percent of all photocopier faults occur at my workplace alone and I'm also pretty certain that I would have noticed if any of our students had decided to drop their pants, sit on the copier, and attempt to scan their buttocks and do you know how I'd know? Because then they'd have to jump off and waddle across the library casual reading area and main entrance to me at the help desk in order to tell me the photocopier wasn't working, and I'd come back across the room and discover that the photocopier was flashing a "Cannot recognise paper size" error message on its clever little screen.
Maybe this statistic was collated in the first week after the first photocopier was bought by the first company ever to use one, which coincidentally happened to be the week of said company's annual Christmas party?

Because otherwise I can only presume that the writer of this factoid has never actually used a photocopier. Other than, perhaps, to photocopy their buttocks.

And when they print stuff like that, it causes me serious doubts about the scholarship behind their claims that "Human thighbones are as strong as concrete" or that "The first known contraceptive was crocodile dung, used by the Egyptians in 2000BC". Don't get me wrong, I don't doubt that these things could be true! But so easily is scientific integrity shattered that I'll never again be able to take it on faith from my [brandname] Feminine Hygiene Products.

(*) Actually I just remembered an ad in New Zealand a few years back in which someone murders someone, disposes of the body, but just as the police sirens approach she notices a small but incriminating pool of blood remains. Oh noes! But wait, she has a brilliant idea! She grabs a [brandname] pad, quickly soaks up the blood, and we cut to the police leaving again, thwarted. Ladies and gentleman, Feminine Hygiene Products, your ultimate murder alibi! (Possibly works with Handee towels too.)

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In which she vents and recites Latin

2010-02-18T01:02:08Z

Dear colleague,

You've never managed to get a foot in the door at this event [tomorrow]. When I suggested trying again this year you said they just wouldn't want us. Last Thursday morning you finally said you'd email the head honcho. Then on Friday and Monday you were on leave so I thought I'd better follow up with him in case he'd emailed you back, so I phoned him. It turned out you hadn't emailed him yet, but I managed to get us our 3-minute timeslot in the event anyway.

I admit I screwed up in not showing you yesterday a copy of the powerpoint I threw together. And when, having created a 15-slide show (I go through photos quickly), I suddenly got told by the organiser that we were limited to 4 slides, or could I get it down to 10? I admit I was kind of flippant in just scrunching a bunch of those photos with timelapse onto a single slide so we'd keep the same 3-minute content.

But I was under a time constraint to get it to her, so I did it as quickly as I could. So when you then saw the slides and said it was off-message, and then refused to tell me in what ways it was off-message, only saying that we should talk about it with our manager 'later', that's really not helpful. If you'd told me the problems I could have fixed them and sent it immediately to the organiser, but 'later' is too late. As I told you but it apparently didn't change your mind.

So now, later, I finally know what you meant when you said that. And, duh, it's too late, though I've fiddled with the script as best I can.

And anyway if we don't cover all the things you want to cover, what's the difference? If I hadn't forced things along we'd never have got permission to even come to this event anyway.

<deep breath> It's the crazy time of year, and we're merging two teams together, so culture clash. And delays in construction making everything crazier. So stress. If it weren't Lent I'd go for chocolate about now...

Oh, hah. The thing I worked out about giving up chocolate for Lent last year is that when I want chocolate I remember to think about Lent and stuff. So thinking about chocolate now reminds me that I want to read through the Psalms, and then Psalm 8 comes into my head, and Psalm 8 is just awesome, so now I feel quite an awful lot better.

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