Archive | 2010

Down Home on the TARDIS

The forthcoming dvd for the most recent series of Doctor Who includes two extra scenes, which as it happens are also available – at least for the moment – on YouTube, so watch ’em while you can.

In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy there’s a beverage dispenser on the spaceship that Douglas Adams describes this way:

When the ‘Drink’ button is pressed it makes an instant but highly detailed examination of the subject’s taste buds, a spectroscopic analysis of the subject’s metabolism, and then sends tiny experimental signals down the neural pathways to the taste centres of the subject’s brain to see what is likely to be well received. However, no one knows quite why it does this, because it then invariably delivers a cupful of liquid that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.

Steven Moffat pretty clearly had this passage in mind when he wrote the first scene below. It takes place between “The Eleventh Hour” and “The Beast Below”:

If you’re worried about Amy’s fate at the end there, recall the opening of “The Beast Below”:

The second extra scene takes place between “Flesh and Stone” and “Vampires of Venice,” immediately after Amy’s failed attempt to seduce the Doctor:


With Enemies Like These, Who Needs Friends?

Amusingly, Democrats in several states have apparently been running fake attack ads against Libertarian candidates that describe them in terms designed to appeal to Tea-Party-style Republicans so as to split the Republican vote. Here are a couple of samples (click on them to enlarge):

fake attack ad

another fake attack ad

I call this such ads “fake” attack ads because although the Democrats do disagree with the positions they ascribe to the Libertarian candidate, the goal of the ad is to increase rather than to decrease support for that candidate. (Notice that the ad never identifies its target as Libertarian, thus preventing anyone from wondering “why are the Democrats wasting money attacking a third-party candidate with low poll numbers?” They’re also counting on people not wondering “why would the Democrats use ‘outsider’ as a pejorative term when most voters identify positively with it?” or “why are they surrounding the person they’re attacking with flags and American Revolution imagery?”)

In other news, I see that I am, at the moment, the first name mentioned in the Wikipedia article on libertarianism!


I Can’t Decide Whether BBC America Should Live or Die

I caught “Last of the Time Lords” on BBC America last week – and they’d cut out the following scene!

Now admittedly that scene doesn’t really advance the plot; but still, I would bet it’s the one scene that fans best love and remember from that episode. (Plot isn’t everything.) And of course BBC America offers its viewers no announcement that they’re watching truncated versions of episodes.


Four Bits of Science Fiction News

There’s a new Galactica series in the works, to take place between Caprica and BSG, featuring Ensign Bill Adama in the early years of the Cylon War.

bright-eyed Gary Mitchell

The next Star Trek movie will feature one of the following five original-series characters: Harry Mudd, Trelane, Gary Mitchell, the Talosians, or the Horta. I guess I’m hoping for and/or expecting Gary Mitchell, because: Mudd is too silly, Trelane is too much like Q, the Talosians are too entangled with a specific Christopher Pike plot thread that the last film seems to have averted, and the Horta strikes me as not having, um, legs beyond its original story. (But if Abrams does use Mitchell, it’ll be one more case of his channeling Of Gods and Men – the $150,000 libertarian fan film that featured the destruction of Vulcan and the creation of an alternate timeline stemming from the moment of Kirk’s birth, three years before Abrams’ film did all those same things.)

There might be some Star Wars sequels (CHT AICN) on the (fairly distant) horizon, but will probably “not have anything to do with the Skywalker Clan” and may take place “as far as 100 years or 1,000 years in the Star Wars universe future,” presumably to avoid conflicts with the Expanded Universe stories.

The good news is that The Hobbit will film in New Zealand after all. The bad news is that this result was achieved by government micromanaging industrial relations to keep a big corporation happy. (And no, if it’d been micromanaging industrial relations to keep a big union happy I wouldn’t have liked it either.)


Blaze the Oregon Trail

Want to help send Charles Johnson under the banner of the Molinari Institute to preach Hayekian feminism to Marxian philosophers in the wilds of Oregon? Well, of course you do; it’s what you’ve been dreaming of all your life. Now you can.

Oregon Trail


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