This one was fun when I did it in 2007!

Name three fics you think I will never, ever, ever write. In return(and if inspired), I will attempt to write a snippet of one of them.

Hello, world! I'm back! It feels like I haven't posted to LJ in a million years, although really it's less than a week. Work has entered the Christmas Rush period of the year, which means I'm there for eight hours, and then I crawl home and curl up on the couch, working on a quilt and watching stuff. Actually typing out words on the computer = far too much effort.

(Random interjection: all over the place, I've been seeing posts (and listening to real people) lamenting that stores start setting up for Christmas in October/November. Apparently that's really early, and the entire world will implode if you even say the word "Christmas" out loud before the US Thanksgiving holiday is passed. Sorry, people, reality is that the sheer quantity of Christmas stock coming in requires that stores put it out on display as soon as it arrives. Or else the store rooms would be overflowing, and staff would be ridiculously overworked trying to get a massive amount of stock out at once. Yes, it's shocking, a retail situation arranged for the convenience of staff, not customers. Please direct your letters of complaint to the Department Of Giving A Damn.)

Sorry. Christmas retail gets me a little on edge.

Anyway, all sorts of things have been read and watched lately!

The Men Who Killed Qantas by Matthew Benns looks at the history of the airline, and its current state of cost-cutting affairs. Along the way, lots of planes crash, and lots of people die. Turns out that whole "Qantas has never had a fatal accident" line was sort of the opposite of true.

This is a good book; the same schadenfreude that leads a person to fandom_wank also makes corporation!fail really entertaining. And it's full of interesting stories, like the development of commercial aviation in Australia, Qantas's role in WW2, rivalries between Qantas staff and staff in the budget airlines it owns. Did you know there was a real Oceanic Airlines back in the '50s? It was a wee start-up competing for the all-important Lord Howe Island route. Unfortunately its corporate stragety involved Blowing Up A Qantas Plane, which never goes down well.

There was a really interesting bit, that is totally unrelated to the book as a whole, but it intrigued me: during WW2, Qantas and other commercial airlines were involved in evacuating refugees from South East Asia. At one point -- or maybe it happened several times; it has been a couple of weeks since I read the book, and I'm totally ignorant of this part of history -- the Japanese followed the refugee planes back to Broome, and bombed hell out of them. Which is, to my mind, just not cricket.

Also, did you know that the bombing of Darwin was achieved by the very same squadron that bombed Pearl Harbour? Maybe it's common knowledge, but I had no idea!

Mary Shelley by Miranda Seymour is a straightforward biography of the author of Frankenstein. As such, it is totally depressing. The first third, dealing with her upbringing and her life with Shelley, is quite interesting, aside from the frequent desire to hunt down some Romantic poets and kick their teeth in. Oh, and it's depressing, with children dying all over the place. Then Shelley goes and dies, and Byron follows, and it's quite a relief until you realise that now Mary is at the mercy of equally annoying, but vastly lesser men. So she makes her way, and raises her son, and supports her family, and moderates her opinions because society doesn't look kindly on revolutionary women with questionable backgrounds, and she does need to eat. And meanwhile, all these friends of Shelley's are like, "HOW CAN YOU BETRAY HIS MEMORY LIKE THIS?" because obviously it's easy to be a revolutionary when you have a penis. Male privilege: it is tedious. This was a great book; I had expected to find it a bit dull, but I just ate it up -- right up until the final chapters, after Mary's death. These parts deal with Lady Jane Shelley's attempts to control Mary and Shelley's posthumous reputations; she was continuing Mary's work, but it was less sympathetic. But that's only, like, two chapters out of a millionty.

TV-wise, I finished re-watching season 4 of Babylon 5. ( Spoilers! )

Then, of course, there was the preview for "The End of Time", the Doctor Who Christmas special. ( Not a spoiler: the Doctor got lei'd. )

Just because the universe likes playing tricks on me, I also watched The Virgin Queen, starring Anne-Marie Duff as Elizabeth. I have to confess that I'm sort of cheating here; I haven't seen the last half-hour, which deals with Essex's betrayal and Elizabeth's final days. After Mary Shelley, I just couldn't take any more old age and death. But it's an amazing portrayal of Elizabeth's life, from her time in the Tower to her death. Actually, "amazing" probably goes too far; it concentrates far too much on her love life for my taste, and resorts to historical inaccuracies to make Dudley look better. But those aside, there are several things that make it a bit wonderful:
- Anne-Marie Duff is remarkable. She has the right look (and even bleached her eyelashes for the role), being beautiful but not remotely pretty. And she's powerful, magnetic and brittle.
- The soundtrack, by the Mediaeval Baebes, is amazing. Truth be told, the soundtrack is the entire reason I bought the DVD; having already bought the soundtrack, I desperately wanted to see it in context.
- When Elizabeth is dying of smallpox, she hallucinates her sister and father. Okay, that's a tiny thing, but it was brilliant.

To demonstrate my point about the soundtrack, this is the main theme, based on a poem attributed to Elizabeth herself.

Martin Phipps. feat. The Mediaeval Baebes - The Virgin Queen

In addition to all these Tudor shenanigans, I have watched lots of Pertwee.

"The Ambassadors of Death" seemed infinitely better now than when I tried to watch it three years ago. Then I got three episodes in and gave up out of boredom; this time I inhaled the whole thing in a couple of days. Liz Shaw, man, could she be any more brilliant? Of all the companions the Doctor has ever had, I think she's the one who is least prone to falling into feminine cliches. On the other hand, she was only around for a year.

"Mind of Evil" may have turned me into a Doctor/Master shipper. "You wondered how long I could endure the machine. Well the answer is, I can't." I don't know why that, of all lines, should make me want to smush them, but there you have it. Maybe it's because I love it when they work together, even if they are working to sort out the Master's mess? And there are not one, but two taunting phone calls. "The Sound of Drums" eat your heart out. Delgado is still the best Master.

I also watched the final two stories from SJA's season three. They were all good, but not brilliant; I think the season took a decided slide after "The Wedding of Sarah Jane". If only that had been the finale. Still, I did get an icon out of "Mona Lisa's Revenge", which is really all that matters.

Based on general LJ buzz, and my own bad mood, I wasn't going to watch this. But then suburbannoir was going to watch it, and I was like, "PEEPS CAN'T BE WATCHING STUFF WITHOUT ME!" So, for the first time ever, the House o' Squid watched some New Who as a family.

( SHIT JUST GOT REAL, Y'ALL. )

Speaking of massive hubris that offends the gods: JMS has a commentary on "The Deconstruction of Falling Stars". I dread to imagine what it contains, but unless I am reassured that it consists of a forty-odd minute apology, I doubt I'll be watching it.

Books

Well, I finished A Feast for Crows by George R. R. Martin, so now I get to join everyone else in waiting anxiously for A Dance With Dragons. This is especially nasty, given that it ended with cliffhangers for a lot of characters. Cersei: hoisted on her own petard. Brienne: hoisted on someone's petard. Just what is a petard anyway? And where the hell is Tyrion?

Let's play the casting game: I would like to see Billie Piper playing Brienne. She's too short and not really muscular enough, and probably isn't interested in a supporting role whose ugliness is commented on by nearly every character who encounters her, but still. Brienne needs pluck and charisma, which Billie has, and she's described as having a square jaw, full lips and prominent teeth, which ... well. You know. Anyway, I ♥ Brienne, and I think Billie would be nifty.

Incidentally, the pilot for the HBO series is being filmed, among other places, at Castle Ward in Ireland, which once belonged to the family of Lalla Ward, before the money ran out and the National Trust took over. Good times. Good, obscure-connectiony times.

First Generation by Mary Tamm: was pretty awesome. Very light, and written in a style that makes you feel you're sitting in a pub with Mary Tamm, drinking vodka and limes as she rambles on about her life story. Large sections are devoted to her journey to Estonia in 1990, where she met many of her relatives for the first time. Those were good, but I have to admit that I got more of a kick out of the showbiz anecdotes. Like the time Richard Burton ended up back at her flat eating fish and chips, or Peter O'Toole describing her future mother-in-law thus: "Who is that magnificent woman?"

Doctor Who comes almost as an afterthought after all of this; there are a few chapters about the filming of season 16, including a rather extraordinary bit where Graham Williams hints that he'd fire Tom if it meant Mary would stay. Equal space is given to a hilariously awful cruise-ship convention in 2003, in which Mary, Peter Davison, Deborah Watling and their plus-ones hid out in each other's quarters, smoking and drinking champagne.

Then I read Breakout: How I escaped from the Exclusive Brethren by David Tchappat. It was ... the early chapters, about his life in the Brethren, and his attempts to escape before finally getting out were interesting. But once out, the book basically goes like this: "Went out drinking with the boys. Meditated on how much I hated women. Picked up a girl. Had a relationship. Broke up with her/She broke up with me. Single again. Went out drinking with the boys. Meditated on how much I hated women. Went on Big Brother." None of which is either interesting, or likely to hold my sympathy for long. The book was borrowed from work; I'm very much hoping it will be deemed to be in salable condition when I return it, because otherwise I'll have to buy it, and I don't really want or need to own it.

TV stuff

Am into season four of my Babylon 5 rewatch. By this stage the first time around, I was pretty obsessed and watching quite closely, so I'm not picking up new things the way I did with the first couple of seasons. So I've been watching some other things this week, starting with SJA's "The Eternity Trap"

( Spoilers ain't afraid of no ghosts! )

Somehow, SJA always leaves me in the mood for some Pertwee. So I dug out my DVDs and watched "Doctor Who and the Silurians" for the first time.

( Spoilers never report themselves anywhere, particularly not 'forthwith'. )

Naturally, I had to have MOAR THREE, so I scouted through my files until I found something I'd not seen before: "The Time Monster". Now, I've always had this idea that it was a bit rubbish, but obviously my mind was poisoned by silly fanboys who don't appreciate feminist scientists with a sense of humour, or the inherent comedy of the Master wooing the queen of Atlantis. Also: RANDOM ATLANTIS.

( Spoilers will be consulting the entrails of a sheep next. )

After that, my last unwatched Three serial was "The Time Warrior", aka Sarah Jane's introduction. Now, I'm no great fan of Sarah Jane in her companion years, but everyone assured me she was better with Three than Four, and I do love a bit of SJA. So I finally bit the bullet and watched it.

( Spoilers wrote this review at the age of five. )

Now I'm sort of Pertwee-d out, so I'm going back to B5. Ah yes, the exciting life of a nerd.

You know what this needed? LIZARD BABIES. Maybe also a new script. ( Not actually a live blog. )

Title: The Boy Who Touched Time
Summary: Clyde's mum always said that if you died in a dream, you'd die in real life. He died and regenerated nine times in his dreams, but he kept waking up the next morning.
Rating: G
Spoilers: Through to "The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith"

( 'A tear, Sarah Jane? Where there's life, there's...' )

HOW AWESOME WAS "THE WEDDING OF SARAH JANE SMITH"? I laughed, I cried, I lusted over David Tennant a bit. ( Spoilers were grounded by the Judoon. )

After that, I was in the mood for some more Who, and I have a whole bunch of unwatched DVDs from work's sale earlier this year. "Tomb of the Cybermen" was still shrinkwrapped! ( Nobody in the universe can do what spoilers do. )

So there I was, pottering around work, and a book caught my eye. This book:

"That's funny," I thought, looking at the cover. "I've seen that photo in some other context. It makes me think of Doctor Who."

Of course, lots of things make me think of Doctor Who, but I thought a bit longer. What kind of connection could DW have with leggy redheads in the fashion world?

...Leggy redheads?

Oh. Right.

Normally I'd be freaked out at being stalked in my workplace, but I think I'll let KGill keep on keeping on.

SPEAKING OF WORK, I overheard the following hilarious conversation today:

Hip young woman: "'Grow organic'. That's my new insult from now on. 'Grow organic'."

Hip young man: "I'm still trying to see how that's an insult."

Hip young woman: "Oh, grow organic."

So johnnypurple was saying that instead of NaNo this year, she's going to write 20,000 words of fic. Specifically 20,000 words of hilarious Merlin roller-derby AU.

And I thought, "THAT IS A BRILLIANT IDEA!" Not just the roller-derby AU (although, who doesn't love an awesome roller-derby AU?), but the 20,000 words of fic in a month. Why, I thought, there should be a comm! And then I did some maths and realised that 20,000 words in a thirty-day month equals a minimum of 666.666 words a day.

And then I realised that, really, I had no choice but to see this through to the bitter end. So. 666words. Tell your friends!

Title: Balance
Summary: They took the long way back to Gallifrey.
Rating: G
Notes: This is set immediately after the third and final Key2Time audio. If you've not heard it, here is some context in the form of spoilers: So the Doctor and his companion, a human-shaped Tracer named Amy, are searching for the segments of the Key to Time. The Sixth Segment turns out to be Romana, who absorbed Astra's, um, segmenty-ness, at the end of "The Armageddon Factor". All of the segments are decaying; Romana is dying. By the end, the segments have all been restored, Romana is well again, and she's agreed to take Amy back to Gallifrey with her.

( They took the long way back to Gallifrey )

Who doesn't love some crazy Cylon shenanigans? SHUT UP IF YOU'RE ANSWERING THAT, I DON'T WANT TO KNOW. ( Let's assume there are going to be spoilers. )

I've been meaning to pimp Australian drama East West 101 for a couple of weeks, but now bantha_fodder has done it for me! Go find out about the show that has eaten my brain. And then watch it, so I'll have more people to pay attention when I finally get around to writing my meta on Patricia Wright.

I sort of took a break after I finished re-watching season 3. Something about the status quo at the end is worth savouring. I think it's the bit where everyone is either deeply screwed or dead. Except, obviously, the person who manages to be both.

( Spoilers. )

"Sometimes, Mother, I wish you'd behave like a normal woman."
"In order to be a normal woman, I'd have to be surrounded by NORMAL MEN!"

Siân Phillips, man. She divorced Peter O'Toole to marry Robin Sachs, and grew up with Welsh as her first language. I am inordinately impressed by both of these facts.

I don't think I ever noticed before, but the first forty-five minutes of I, Claudius is basically about the epic bromance between Augustus and Agrippa. Culminating in the Best Scene Ever (That Doesn't Involve Livia Or Agrippina The Elder):

"I LOVE YOU, MAN! YOU'RE MY BFF! DON'T EVER LEAVE ME AGAIN!"*
"You know, dude, such is the depth of our great love, the only thing that can bring us closer is the sacred bond of marriage."
"OH AGRIPPA, YOU'VE MADE ME THE HAPPIEST EMPEROR ALIVE!"
"...I meant your daughter."
"EH?"
"You can be my father-in-law!"
"..."

There is, allegedly, a new adaptation being filmed. But I don't believe a word of it.

* Augustus is played by Brian Blessed. Therefore, capslock.

1. There really needs to be a B5 vid to "Rehab". (Amy Winehouse, not Rihanna.) I mean, the place attracts addicts like David Tennant attracts fangirls. I'm just sayin'.

2. As I re-watch B5, I've been alternating with other series, just for variety. I did The Middleman -- that was great. Now I've just finished the first season of East West 101, which was far, far better than any Australian cop show I've previously encountered.

But now -- well. Season two of East West 101 is about to start, and season three of SJA, but those are all weekly affairs. What to do in the meantime? I am minded to revisit an old favourite. But I wonder ... if I watch I, Claudius and Babylon 5 at the same time, will I go completely mad? Or simply begin delivering long speeches in a posh accent? Stay tuned.

CHEAP TWILIGHT KNOCK OFFS!

Work is full of crap teen novels with badly photoshopped red-on-black covers. They're all DOOMED ROMANCES involving SOME KIND OF SUPERNATURAL ELEMENT. Zombies are the big thing at the moment, but in a couple of weeks they'll have been out of fashion and we'll have teen incubus romances.

I've also been seeing classic novels with Twilight-style covers. It actually suits Wuthering Heights pretty well, but I fear customers will be disappointed by Pride and Prejudice. I'm hoping a red-on-black version of Anne of Green Gables comes out next. Or Little Women. Nothing says supernatural angst like a Civil War-era pre-feminist moral fable!

For future reference: a brief overview of minstrel shows in Australia. There are more resources; this was just the first reputable-looking source that popped up when I googled.

Context: traditionally crap, thankfully-long-cancelled local "comedy" show Hey Hey It's Saturday! was dug out of mothballs for a series of reunion specials. On Wednesdays, but whatevs. This week's special included a new version of a skit first run in 1989: five doctors blacked up to parody the Jackson Five.

(Technically, only four blacked up. The last one painted his face white. Because he was Michael. GEDDIT? Oh it is to laugh. Wait, laugh? I meant cringe.)

One of the judges -- think of a very low rent version of [Insert Country Here]'s Got Talent -- was American Harry Connick Jr. To his credit, he stopped the skit immediately, gave the group zero points, and said, basically, WHAT THE HELL, I CAN'T BELIEVE THIS WAS APPROVED, IF I'D KNOWN ABOUT THIS I WOULDN'T HAVE DONE THIS SHOW.

Cue controversy, as Australians set out to fill up bingo cards. Highlights have included "THERE IS NO RACISM IN AUSTRALIA / YANK GO HOME" (I know that US citizenship is a nationality not a race, but I still facepalmed), "WHY ARE YOU SO OVERSENSITIVE?", "THE AMERICAN PC POLICE ARE COMING FOR US!", "IT'S NOT LIKE WE WERE MAKING FUN OF ABORIGINES!", "FINDING BLACKFACE RACIST IS RACIST".

My favourite, so far, was "HOW IS THIS OFFENSIVE? LAST TIME I CHECKED, THE JACKSON FIVE WERE COLOURED." All this facepalming is beginning to leave a bruise. Also, apparently Connick Jr. once played a (white) southern preacher in an American skit, which is EXACTLY THE SAME if not MOAR OFFENSIVE.

Crikey has a good overview of the controversy, with a whole lot of bingo to be played in the comments. Here is the most current update from the mainstream media.

The network was, last time I checked, pointing out that it got really good ratings. The men who did the skit issued a classic fauxpology, highlights including "We are sorry you think this is offensive" and "as Indian-Australians, we cannot be racist against black people".

So now there are people claiming that Australia has no tradition of minstrel shows. This shits me off, as way back in first year uni, I wrote a paper on the history of popular culture in Australia, including minstrel shows. They were originally imported from the US, but believe me, we came up with our own. Sadly, I've moved house so many times since then that the paper and all my research has long been misplaced, otherwise I'd be going on a scanning frenzy. As it is, I am merely capslocking with rage a lot, and contemplating the foundation of my own micronation. I did consider moving to America, but then I remembered the health care issues.

SO MUCH FAIL, GUYS, I CAN'T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT.

ETA: Hoyden About Town has a much more coherent discussion, with links to more coherent discussion. And less capslock.

I was poking around the intertron a couple of weeks ago, and discovered that Neil Gaiman's script for "Day of the Dead" had been published for sale. I'm on a pretty limited budget at the moment, but I figured I could spare $20 ($4.75 for the book, $15.25 for postage -- I KNOW, I KNOW). Of course, by the end of the pay cycle, I really felt like I was just $20 short of being comfortable, but by then the book had arrived, and to quote the philosopher Minogue, I wouldn't change a thing.

It's a really interesting read, especially if (like me) you groove on miniscule changes in dialogue. What, you mean normal people don't? Well, that's totally their loss. Anyway, it has footnotes marking changes between the completed script and the filmed version, mostly due to filming issues or JMS trimming dialogue (words I never, ever thought I'd have cause to use consecutively). The most interesting bit, to me, was the original version of the scene between Lennier and [character I won't name because infiniteviking only just found out this ep exists and I don't want to spoil her].

( Crap scan beneath the cut. )

One of my favourite episodes, not so much because it's good, but because it hits several of my crack buttons and has some good scenes. I don't know if I'd call it a good episode on its own merits; it mostly wraps up the immediate threads from "Severed Dreams" and brings some character arcs to the fore. Wait, those are all aspects I enjoy. Maybe it is a good episode.

( Spoilers intend to have other plans. )