War Games 9

If An Unearthly Child was one episode of awesome followed by three episodes of dull caveman adventure, surely The War Games is nine episodes of crazy hijinks followed by one episode of exposition. Broadly speaking, the majority of Doctor Who tends to put its wacky hijinks in the middle episodes and wrap everything up nicely in the last one. But the story, really, is over here. The fatal SIDRAT flaw is only introduced at the beginning of this episode and frankly it diminishes the War Chief's character to make him dependent on the Doctor instead of sympathetic towards a fellow renegade Time Lord.

The Doctor confesses to Zoe and Jamie that he is a Time Lord (or rather, that the Time Lords are his people; the War Chief seemed rather convinced in the previous episode that the Doctor was a former Time Lord). Frankly, the Doctor doesn't start tossing his "Time Lord" title around until the Movie, and then the New Series. Surely, Pertwee, Baker et al don't justify their actions by saying "TARDIS, Time Lord, yes!" ("Fires of Pompeii.") If I wanted to be really pedantic, Season 23 is called Trial of a Time Lord. This could be the first time the series really starts hammering home the "Doctor is a Time Lord" meme. (Alternatively, Brayshaw could have fluffed his line.)

Big complaint: "What a stup..." no, that one's too obvious. How about that "throne" the War Lord and War Chief sit in? Or the rather obvious slo-mo shot of Troughton's tear-less trouser?

This is the end of Doctor Who as the 60s knew it. The following episode was the very last one ever in black and white, and it (and the two preceding it) ripped away a lot of the mystery surrounding the Doctor.

Surely no television show today could go 6 years without revealing that much about its lead character. I'll leave it to you to decide whether that's a good thing or not.

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Where the hell did Zoe get the locations of the resistance camps? Surely if the aliens knew that, they'd have wiped out the resistance by now!

Troughton's line: "Your reasons are only too obvious: power," is awfully Pertwee-esque. More foreshadowing?

A new order to the galaxy? A united galactic empire? I swear, that sounds awfully familiar.

The Russian says he saw the SIDRATs before, but is freaked by their appearance. Huh.

Other than that, this episode was entirely enjoyable. We finally got the Doctor/War Chief confrontation that we've been waiting quite a while for. The resistance movements have all come together, another thing that's been foreshadowed for quite some time. And the Doctor's pulling off one more epic gambit. I can't wait for part 9.

Oh, and this is the episode where it is revealed that the Doctor "used to be" a Time Lord. New Series, your attention please...

I suppose if I were going to continue my pacing quibbles, I'd whine about the fact that Arturo Villa or whatever his name is hasn't appeared or even been mentioned before this episode, considering he takes up a good chunk of its time. (The shadowplay when he first arrives is a particularly nice touch.) But the fact of the matter is that this was a shorter story that got blown up into both a 10-parter and Troughton's swan song, and under those circumstances it's really not bad.

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Viva La Resistance!

And also a French guy. The Doctor seems to think that "a flag of truce" entitles him to the right to ask what's going to happen to him, but then at the end of his very next line, he drops a smoke grenade.

The War Lord shows up, but that doesn't really stop the squabbling between the War Chief and the Security Chief. Despite the fact that we'll always be rooting for the renegade Time Lord, it seems like the Security Chief is just a tad more competent. Then again, the War Chief quite rightly points out that none of this would be possible without him... and his "SIDRAT." Are you serious?

Phil Madoc, the War Lord, is freaking awesome. The Security Chief is a fantastic ham ("What use. Is that. To US?"), and the War Chief, while slightly more subtle, still gets his share of scenery to chew ("It's a simple conclusion you might have even come to yourself"). As always, when there is a rouge Time Lord in the mix, the most interesting scenes are going to be the one between the Doctor and his "colleague." And the story's pacing really hasn't allowed that to happen yet. Having said that, I disagree with Madoc when he says "I tire of your eternal bickering," because the squabbling is really the greatest thing about these episodes.

Oh, and Smythe gets killed off in this episode despite the fact that he hasn't been in a few now. "We're going to bring you back to kill you off." Yeah, closure, but it still seems kinda awkward. Smythe's reappearance has reminded me, though, that this serial both begins and ends with the Doctor standing trial for his life. And neither the Time Lords nor Smythe seem to be free of prejudice.

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So, it was a filler episode, but a pretty cool filler episode nonetheless.

Best part: Doctor in a military coat. Never happens.

Worst part: Well, it's the Von Wiech scene where he hypnotizes Moor. You can decide which is worse; when he gets Moor to give him the monocle when Moor should know better, or immediately afterward, when the zoom-in on his face exposes the scar make-up.

I better get it out of the way: the scientist mentions the Time Lords. Okay, so there are these guys running around with space-time travel machines, and the War Chief is one of them, and the Doctor's remarkably good at operating their machinery. Well, it could be that all time-travel machines have similar enough controls that the Doctor can work the magnets out; the War Chief has a Mac and the TARDIS is a PC.

Since this was a filler episode, I really don't have a lot to say about it. The fights were poorly done, the one-upmanship between the War and Security Chiefs is starting to get a bit stale, and the Doctor spends most of this episode doing what he does best: running down corridors. That's about it. I'm going to take this opportunity to yak at length about regeneration, because we all know this serial ends with one.

First of all, let's look at what caused the Doctors to regenerate and the actual regenerations themselves.

The Tenth Planet: the Doctor's body pretty much wears out. He stumbles back to the TARDIS, fiddles with the controls, collapses, and turns into somebody else.

The War Games: the Time Lords change the Doctor's appearance and send him gurning into a black hole of sorts, but not quite in that order.

Planet of the Spiders: the Doctor collapses from radiation poisoning. Another Time Lord shows up to give his regeneration a start. This serial is pretty much "Buddhism 101 with Spiders." What we get after this regeneration is the most eccentric Doctor of the lot.

Logopolis and Castrovalva: the Doctor falls off a tower. His future self helps him regenerate, and most of the Castrovalva, episode 1, sees the Doctor alternating between "catatonic" and "insane."

The Caves of Androzani: the Doctor regenerates, unaided and inside the TARDIS, for only the second time. He states that he "might regenerate," implying that it might not happen. After a sequence inspired by "A Day in the Life," we end up with the most unstable Doctor of the lot.

Time and the Rani: the TARDIS gets shot down (wait what?) and the Doctor apparently dies in the crash and regenerates (wait WHAT?)

The Movie: The Doctor gets shot, killed, stays dead for several hours, and then emerges from a tomb of sorts wrapped in a shroud and looking like "...& I" in a wig. Only one of these things is not a hideous departure from established canon.

"The Parting of the Ways": Doctor absorbs the energy from the Time Vortex and regenerates, standing up, inside the TARDIS.

"The Stolen Earth": the Doctor gets shot by a Dalek gun and regenerates, standing up, inside the TARDIS.

The End of Time: the Doctor absorbs a fatal dose of radiation, does a huge farewell tour, and regenerates, standing up, inside the TARDIS.

Note that the 5th regeneration (Davison to C. Baker) is the first one where nobody helps the Doctor regenerate (Hartnell helped himself when he did whatever he did with the TARDIS). The 6th regeneration is the first time he does it unaided and unconscious. In the 7th regeneration, he's freaking dead.

Regeneration used to be treated as an important thing, not "whoops, fell down the stairs this morning, now I've got a new face because the old actor's got to leave." The Doctor's connection to the TARDIS and the other Time Lords used to be important, not "they're all dead, and I'm actually going to take steps to keep them that way whenever given the chance."

The point I'm trying to get to is that the Doctor used to have to earn his regenerations. I'm not saying Tennant wasn't all noble and good in his last episode, but the show's kind of written itself into a corner by not having a moral authority greater than the Doctor, and I kind of hope that Moffat and whoever gets to write 12 take him to darker places because of this.

The other point I'm trying to get to by way of the previous point is that in Troughton's final serial, he really, really has to be the good guy. He's got to be the hero all the time, but in this show he actually has to be the martyr. The situation's going to have to get so grim that he has no other choice but to call in the Time Lords, and they will exact a strict price for their services.

(Of course, that's what should happen. What we'll get, as you'll see, is Time Lords and regeneration tacked on as an ending to what could have been a great, well-paced 6-part story.)

IG2EUS: Modern Art

The Irreverent Guide to Everything Under the Sun has this to say on the subject of Modern Art:

Modern art, much like punk music, is what happens when people stop having standards. It is an excuse for the lazy and untalented to have their work displayed and make a lot of money.

Someone must stop this at once.

Artists are people with artistic talent. The ability to compose a great piece of music is talent. The ability to cry on cue is talent. The ability to fling paint randomly at a canvas is not talent. People who do fling paint randomly at a canvas for a living are lazy hacks, and people who call this "art" are their enablers.

IG2EUS: Concept Albums

The Irreverent Guide to Everything Under the Sun has this to say on the subject of concept albums:

Concept albums are albums that are centered around a single unifying concept, be it sex, drugs, or rock and roll. The term is a unification of two words: "Concept," meaning that the songs have a common theme, and "album," meaning a collection of songs recorded by one band in one place and at one time.

The concept of concept albums has been around since the 1950s but the crossover to rock music was first attempted in 1967 by Paul McCartney of the Beatles. The attempt was, frankly, less than sucessful, but that's not to say that Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is not a freaking good album. It is. It is in fact one of the biggest-selling albums of all time, and though rock fans can be morons at time, the collective idiocy required to buy more than 30 million copies of a less-than-stellar recording would be too great for any civilization to actually survive this long. The fact of the matter is, however, that there are more songs on Back in Black that have to do with the death of Bon Scott than there are on Sgt. Pepper that have to do with the Lonely Hearts Club Band.

The other common example of the quintessential concept album is Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon, an example that is equally flawed for opposite reasons. There are in fact two concepts on this album. Side one deals with life, while side two deals with isolation and madness. Where The Dark Side of the Moon falls apart is on the "album" side of the equation, and it is therefore unique among non-rock-opera concept albums for having extended instrumental passages that are not parts of actual songs.

Pink Floyd built on this, er, concept, though, and in 1975 they unleashed Wish You Were Here, which is not only a perfect example of a concept album, but arguably also a perfect example of Pink Floyd at their finest (if you can sit through the 8-and-a-half-minute instrumental passage before the first word is sung). The album might as well have been called The Rise and Fall of Roger Keith "Syd" Barrett, because that is precisely what it is about. Unlike The Dark Side of the Moon, there is only one unifying theme instead of two, and all of the different "tracks" on it are actual songs instead of a mix of songs and separate instrumental passages. They did it again in 1977 with Animals before creating one of the quintessential rock operas, The Wall.

A rock opera is a concept album that leans far too heavily on the "concept" side of the equation. These albums tell a story through their songs, at least in theory. In actual practice, the listener tends to get a small number of awesome songs, while the plot is actually described in 1-minute breaks between the songs. Every rock opera ever is guilty of this. Also every rock opera of any importance involves a rebirth of fascism.

IG2EUS: The Beatles

The Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a wonderful piece of fiction about a fish out of water, babelfish in peoples' ears, the significance of the number forty-two, the greatest drink in the universe, and a bowl of petunias.

This is not that story.

Rather, this is the Irreverent Guide to Everything Under the Sun, which is in no way a pathetic rip-off of a book written by an atheist that is probably read more than the Bible nowadays.

Statements like the previous one used to be rather inflammatory and taken far too seriously. There was once a man who suggested that an organization that he was part of was bigger than Jesus. He cannot be reached for comment, because quite like the author of the Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, he is spending eternity dead for reasons that have nothing to do with taxes whatsoever. But the organization that he was a part of lives on. You can hear their message on the radio every day. They were instrumental in creating a movement that can still affect young people today despite the fact that they haven't done anything, really, in 40 years.

They are, of course, the Beatles, a band whose name could not possibly have gone five seconds in this day and age without some clever critic adding a second "s" to the end of their name. Another thing that the Beatles did that no band could possibly get away with today is not tour for the second half of their career. In the days before the invention of the Internet, when disaffected teenagers (called "fans" by their idols and the media) could not copy and share audio and video recordings for free, when record sales actually meant something, touring was really a means of supporting an album. And because the Beatles' albums included Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, one of the biggest-selling albums of all time, there was really no need to go on tour.

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is claimed by some to be the very first rock concept album. This is untrue. Not even John Lennon thought Sgt. Pepper was a concept album. Sgt. Pepper may have brought the concept of concept albums to the rock scene, but it didn't do much more than that, other than sell, sell, sell, and also cause everyone to wonder how in the hell they'd managed to record an orchestra on only four tracks.

Not long after Sgt. Pepper, the band recorded The Beatles, also known as The White Album.

No. Stop.

The previous statement is incorrect. John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and George Harrison recorded The Beatles, but with the benefit of hindsight it is clear that they did not do so as a band. A general rule of thumb that all bands can follow to benefit from this lesson is not to skimp on the cover art. To wit:

AC/DC: Back in Black had a mostly black cover. Their sales started declining with the release of their next album.

Pink Floyd: The Wall had a simple cover. The recording process saw one member of the band get fired, and was the beginning of the end for another member.

Metallica: Metallica. They followed the Beatles' strategy of releasing a self-titled album under the nickname "The (Absence of Color) Album," and like the Beatles, went to Music Hell shortly thereafter.

Note that all of these albums sold very very well and were generally well-recieved.

At any rate, The White Album can be generously reviewed as a project made by four people who, because they weren't touring and also their manager was now dead, simply weren't relating to each other very well anymore. The Beatles broke up in 1970 and there was much sadness.

Then in 1971 an untitled album by four other Brits was released and eventually outsold Sgt. Pepper. But that's a different story.

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The War Chief's people are the only ones with the knowledge of space-time travel. Hrm. (This isn't true; we've seen the Daleks do it in The Chase.)

I love the bickering between the War Chief and the Security Chief.

And for the worst part of the episode: How did Zoe learn the names of the resistance members? She was only shown their face...

Also, the interrogator hat looks friggin redonkulous.

And why is there no 21st century time zone? Humanity clearly doesn't wipe itself out...

Von Weich looks awfully happy for a guy who has to be expecting to get shot for triggering that message. Also, the War Chief orders the Security Chief to leave Zoe, and then blames him when she escapes. Carstairs clonking the guard when he's got his gun pointed at the Doctor isn't such a great idea either.

So Troughton gets to manipulate people some more and Carstairs gets freed and Jamie gets shot by people in absurd rubber suits. The shift in style here is interesting; there's more running around and setup for organizing a resistance, but all the important information comes to us from the War and Security Chiefs, and not when any good guys are present (indeed, aside from that brief flash of recognition in the previous episode, Troughton and Bryshaw haven't shared a scene yet). We the audience now know more than the Doctor does - there is a War Lord, for example. Most of the time, we're finding out the plot right along side him.

There's one other point that I need to make, one that contradicts some of the things I said in earlier posts because I didn't do the research. Up until this serial, the implication was that the Doctor built his TARDIS himself, The Time Meddler notwithstanding. Furthermore, the Monk's TARDIS looks an awful lot like the Doctor's, whereas these "green" machines don't have any interior resemblance. So what I'm saying is that it's entirely feasible that no one got it yet.

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Running log of thoughts:

2:00: Zoe asks "Who else would have machines like the TARDIS?" and the Doctor responds "Well, there is an answer to that, but I hope... I just hope." Back then, it was cool foreshadowing. Now, it's proof that this serial's actual title is "X Episodes Until the Time Lords Arrive!"

2:30: wow. That's a lot of extras.

3:00: "They're going to fight, Zoe. That's what soldiers are for." Heh.

4:20: that American accent was believable until "South."

5:15: the wall wobbled. It was the barn door so I guess it's acceptable. They did it before in the spaceship, with the plastic walls.

5:45: remember what I said about Yanks not being heroes? Listen to Johnny Reb.

Oh, look, they've been captured, again.

6:40: "If they band together, they will calls trouble." Really? More foreshadowing. Is this script now taking itself seriously?

7:45: Why does the Doctor want to alter the controls now? They're going back to the base...

8:40: they really can't see out of those glasses at all, can they?

9:30: the Reb sounds believable when he's talking slowly...

9:50: Hey, wow! A black hero in 1969! Contrast with Toberman in Tomb of the Cybermen.

10:50: And not only that! But he can resist the hypnosis! Something else Toberman needed the Doctor to do.

11-12: Jamie lost Jennifer and found a horse. How did he lose her??

12:21: Troughton looks hilarious in those glasses.

12:50: They aren't in any sort of recognizable uniform. Does the guard think they're generals from the Great Vaudeville War of 19whatever?

14:00: Rubber suits? What fetish store did they get them from?

15:15: Zoe's panicking. How come no-one else notices?

15:30: So, we have a chair that re-writes memories. All together now: "Did I fall asleep?"

16:22: Whoops. Wait, when was Carstairs ever programmed to think the Doctor was a German spy?

17:18: Huh. Experimentor can't figure it out. Love the Doctor taking control without ever showing any credentials.

19:50: Von Weich stands there and shoots people without seeking cover. And he's supposed to lead people into war?

20:45: Why did the Doctor just take his glasses off??

21:10: Troughton's and Edward Bryshaw's reactions to each other. Dun dun dunnnnn.

21:40: Well, if you want him alive, you probably shouldn't call him a resistance member...?

22:00: Why does Zoe think Carstairs is sane? She saw him get reprogrammed!

Okay, plot moves forward here. The War Chief and the Doctor know each other, there's a resistance, and we're clued in to the fact that the Doctor thinks he knows what's going on. After Episode Three's epic stall, this one seems to move at a lightning pace. Could be all the action surrounding events on Jamie's end, even though, really, his story's just marking time. We can infer that there's a resistance from what the scientist and the War Chief say.

So, to reiterate... why does the Doctor take his glasses off? And also... how does the War Chief recognize the Doctor? We've never met him before, and the general implication of the series up to this point is that all the Doctor's knowledge was gained from adventuring before the first serial (i.e, back when he was William Hartnell).

(Blah blah later on, blah blah, nametag of Rassilon or whatever that allows Time Lords to recognize each other on sight after a moment's hesitation. None of that exists yet. What has been suggested - in Season One - is some sort of very basic psychic link between Susan and her grandfather. Perhaps all Time Lords have it.)

Someone recognized the Doctor. Aside from humans he personally has met in previous adventures (Prof. Travers in The Web of Fear knows him from The Abominable Snowmen, and The Brig knows him in The Invasion from Web of Fear), that's never happened- wait, scratch that. It happened in The War Machines. Isn't that the one where the computer confidently asserted that the character's name was "Dok... Tor... Who?" Anyway, let me rephrase that. Villains - specific villains, not a generic Dalek or Cyberman - haven't known the Doctor before. There is exactly one exception: the Meddling Monk.

If you saw this serial right after The Time Meddler and had no other knowledge of Doctor Who, what conclusion would you draw?

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So... Zoe calls it a "space-time machine" or some such and the Doctor surmises that it's bigger on the inside. On the other end, a character referred to in the credits simply as "War Chief" notes that the fugitives are time-travellers. It appears to be The Meddling Monk all over again. It's not, of course, bit still.

First thing that doesn't make sense in this episode: Lady Jennifer couldn't drive from 1917 to Ancient Rome, but she has no problem driving from Rome to 1917.

First awesome thing in this episode: Lt. Carstairs' shadow looming as the Doctor examines the safe. We think someone's snuck up on the Doctor- nope, just good old Lt. Carstairs. A few minutes later someone bursts through a door holding a gun and we think the game is up again- nope, Carstairs again. Clearly a bunch of filler was going on, but that doesn't mean it wasn't awesome.

About Time goes on about how you can't blow up a safe without damaging the stuff inside. The think I'll pick apart in that scene is the length of the fuse. "Four seconds" indeed. Lt. Carstairs is a master confidence trickster if he can bluff that other soldier in four seconds.

As long as I'm on the subject of About Time, I should point out that they complain about how WWI isn't a very good way of training troops because survival had more to do with luck than skill. Von Weich and Smythe, however, do not discuss tactics. They discuss morale. The WWI zone is designed to see how good the aliens are at keeping morale up in a hopeless situation. (Fridge brilliance at its finest.)

The capture-escape game that they played in the first episode with the Brits is now done again with the Germans, and we're treated to the Doctor using his Sonic Screwdriver as... a screwdriver... twice. Hrm. The scene's important; we establish that Von Weich is a hypno-alien as well, and the Germans are being manipulated every bit as much as the Brits are.

The Doctor's hypothesis about where/when they are is an interesting one. The way he describes it, it would appear that he thinks they're on Earth, and that random time-holes have been erected that allow people to travel from WWI to Rome and back. Erm, are we still supposed to think that Smythe is a human, maybe from the future? Why would he be so incredulous about the concept of time-travellers who look like humans, then?

...Surely, the aliens wouldn't mind introducing a random element into their games? They won't be fighting real wars completely on their terms...

Also: Carstairs kills a bunch of people. They're all innocent dupes in this, just like him. This, to me, makes his "last stand" somewhat less heroic.

In which I post a video in which two males are shirtless

Bon Scott
July 9, 1946 - February 19, 1980

(It is also Tony Iommi's birthday. There is only one appropriate thing to do: play lots of AC/DC and Black Sabbath today.)

The War Games, pt 2

General Smythe is evil. Captain Ransom is a sycophant enabler. Lt. Carstairs is actually a decent human being. One wonders if on some level, The War Games isn't a subversive morality play on the evils of authority. Smythe can't just give evil orders; he has to hypnotize Ransom into following them. Which he does, and he's averaging twice an episode now. A uniformed officer giving evil orders probably couldn't actually make it to the air in 1969, certainly not a British officer, so Smythe's constant use of hypnosis must be the writers' attempts to get around that.

Okay, now the obvious one. Who fired that shot??? Was it the redcoat? The implication is that he wandered into the WWI zone from the Highland zone, so how did he end up at the execution station, if that was actually him? (Wild mass guessing: was it the Master, eager to let events play out so he could mess with the Doctor a lot on Earth in the coming four years?) It's actually a guy in a Civil War outfit - I can't remember if this is Private Moor or not, and he doesn't appear again for the rest of this episode, so we'll just have to see. For a show that lingers on details - constant hypnosis, everyone talking about mist and memory loss - the two seconds we get of the sniper are confusing, to say the least.

Next up: Jamie not immediately slitting the redcoat's throat is probably due to a combination of the manners he's picked up over the past two and a half years and the squeamishness of the BBC censors. So why doesn't the redcoat immediately attack Jamie, especially if he's from 1745 and the Highlanders haven't been routed yet? Given that the character dies in the next scene, he could have been wearing, say, a Civil War uniform. Or better yet, have him be an American from the Revolutionary War. That'd give him an excuse to shoot at the Brits. (No, wait, can't have an American hero on the very British Doctor Who unless they have boobs and are completely useless. Even Jack Harkness has to be from the future and pronounce "estrogen" wrong.) Admittedly, no-one from 1777 would actually be a good enough shot...

What, they didn't bother to search the Doctor's pockets before trying to execute him? If they had, they would have found a recorder that doubles magically as a telescope!

4:02: Look! Bessie shows up before the Third Doctor does. Clever foreshadowing indeed...

6:12: Troughton shouting at people looks an awful lot like Troughton maybe possibly forgetting and remembering his lines. Though if the anecdotes of Jon Pertwee from The Three Doctors are anything to go by, the man had a habit of making it up on the fly. Works here.

Smythe disappears in a black box that's roughly TARDIS shaped. That could have been a cliffhanger in and of itself, but now I'm quibbling. After ranting about the pace at which the illusion starts to crack in the last episode, I'll say that this time around things are much different. The entire episode is escape/capture/escape, with the "defection" of Carstairs and Jennifer being the only real plot point. Still: ROMANS!!! But even "Holy #$%&, ROMANS!!" becomes less impressive when we meet a redcoat and a Civil War sniper first.

...because, Jim, it's not "Holy #$%&, ROMANS!!!" It's "guys are going to try to kill us. They just happen to be Romans. Also, the mist sent us back in time...?"

WAR GAMES, part 1

I have no idea how well this is going to work, given that I know Episode 6 was just marking time. Anywho. (Two sentences in and I'm punning. This will not end well.)

Okay, you have ten episodes to get from "this looks like to WWI" to "Holy #$%&, TIME LORDS!!!!!!" (even though, and this won't be the last time I say it, the Time Lords are not the point of the story). Along the way you have "this is not really WWI," "Holy #%$&, ROMANS," "this is the BBC Costume Drama Extravaganza," and "ALIENS!" So that's four plot points. There's no way "Holy #$%&, ROMANS" was going to wait for four whole episodes, and I don't really remember when the action shifts to the alien base (episode 4) - I'm only watching one episode a day - so I really shouldn't comment on the pacing that much.

Still. We've hit both "this looks like WWI" and "this is not really WWI" in the first episode. It would have been forgivable if Smythe hadn't said "1917 zone" which tells us immediately that there are other zones - and thus "Holy #$%&, ROMANS!" can't really be much of a surprise when it shows up in (let me check my handy-dandy guide) Episode Two. Ah.

My vague recollection of the plot after they get to the alien base probably has something to do with the fact that I thought this episode was kind of rushing it. Given that this is a 10-episode story, you could spend two episodes honestly thinking this was WWI. If Smythe hadn't said "1917 zone" but had still done all that hypnotizing (and kept that fancy TV in his office), we could think that this was a bigger, longer remake of The Time Meddler, which it already is in all the unimportant ways (bad guy has time machine, another Time Lord shows up, etc). Without giving the game away, you could have had us think "okay, guy's manipulating the war (the worst war in history, as the Doctor is quick to point out), and he has shadowy superiors." By giving the game away and all but saying that there are different time zones, it diminishes the impact of the next cliffhanger. (I will not stoop to comment on cliffhangers that end with the Doctor not getting shot; one of the reasons Caves of Androzani is so freakin' awesome is because we actually see a body we think is the Doctor's get shot at the end of Part 1.)

If they wanted to drop a little hint, they could have called it "zone 19," or better yet, "Zone 20," for the 20th century. (Okay, okay, there's the Russo-Japanese War going on in another zone as we learn in a later episode, and there are four wars in the 19th century; American Civil, Crimean, Peninsular and Boer. And we'll later meet a Private from 1871, which fits none of those dates.) I'm riffing here, but my point stands; saying "1917 zone" completely gives the game away.

(Also, the wars are all Earth wars from 1969's past. What, no Dalek invasion? Or can you not even say "Dalek" if Terry Nation hasn't been paid a redonkulous amount of money?)

Am I too clever for the 1969 audience, or am I just blessed with foreknowledge of what's to come? The point that I'm missing is that all the ads, including the Radio Times, said that this serial was going to take place in WWI. This means that the fake setting has already been established, and we can start dismantling it in Episode One. This effect is completely lost on contemporary viewers.

Another writing quibble: Smythe hypnotizes two people twice. The first one is his personal assistant, basically, and is done to establish that he can hypnotize people. So it's no surprise that he pulls that stunt and hypnotizes the assistant again at the court-martial. Why show him hypnotizing the other officer before the court-martial? Give the viewer a glimmer of hope that maybe the other officer, who is not part of Smythe's command staff, isn't vulnerable to hypnosis and then take the rug away. Instead we know we've got a show trial before we even get to it. Yay.

I suppose if I were really going to quibble I'd mention the Germans who come quite literally out of nowhere at the beginning to ambush the Doctor and company. Hey, it's only been three years since Lee Van Cleef did it so well in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly...

Also: we. get. it. Nobody except Smythe (who, let's remember, we don't know is an alien just yet. We know he's a time-traveler who can hypnotize people, which would make him a perfect shoo-in for the Master except that we're going to get an even better one later on) seems to remember how long they've been there. Pretty much every. single. character says they don't remember.

Were 1969 audiences really that thick?

We interrupt this broadcast

Cracked has an article up today implying that somewhere down the line iPods will have unskippable commercials in them.

#$%&.

I understand ads on television. They need to pay for those shows somehow. Writers and directors need money too. Reality TV came along and got rid of the need for writers, and I still hate all reality TV because I turn on a television to watch monsters get the crap kicked out of them, not to learn that what molehill some spoiled brat is making a mountain out of today.

Hrm, ignoring the uncomfortable meta-irony in the last sentence and moving right along: ads on the internet I also understand. Websites are in the business of making money, and they should get paid somehow for putting up interesting content (read: pr0n). Now, I sure as hell don't want to have to pay to access Cracked, which is where I get all my non-political news from. I mean, I pay indirectly for my internets; I'm sure that's included in the room and board fees my college charges. I don't want to have to pay to access each and every website, but I understand that the people who run them need to make a living. So, ads in the sidebars I understand.

Now let's talk about video ads with sound that you cannot turn off. These are popping up more and more on the lyric and tab sites I get my guitar knowledge from, and it's only a matter of time until other sites have them. People hate that stuff. People got so fed up with TV ads that they got TIVOs and DVR thingys so they could skip the commercials. The Internet is a land of very angry people, which you can easily prove by going to any video of Megadeth's "Mechanix" on YouTube and typing "Four Horsemen is better" in the comments. Some of these angry people are nerds. Some of these nerds have the know-how to make a virus that kills websites that run unskippable videos with unmutable sound. What I'm saying is that it will all burn, sooner or later.

(Spelling "mistakes" in this post: 11.)

This is not today's only post

Neil Gaiman is writing an episode for the 2011(?) season of Doctor Who.

Epic Yay.

teh rock/metul

more Download news! Aerosmith is going. I'm tempted to continue my rant about the singers for the bands I like who are going to be at Download, but hey, this "let's replace Tyler" nonsense seems to be over for now so yay.

Also Iron Maiden finished recording their 15th album. The good news is I get more Maiden later this year. The bad news is Steve Harris apparently set out to make 15 albums, and now that he's met his goal, one wonders how long the band will go on. I say wait until you've made at least 15 with Bruce.

Something lighter

After a post about how futile life is and another one about how the zompocalypse(tm) will kill us all, I consulted my magic 8-ball and asked "will I write a lighter post today?"

"No. You won't."

Since that's not a standard magic 8-ball response, I shook it again and got the answer "give Bob all your money."

This raised some questions. Who was Bob? Why was he so desperate to get his hands on $93.02 that he'd go through all the trouble of hacking my magic 8-ball? How did he hack my magic 8-ball? And, most importantly, why was I taking advice from a magic 8-ball?

To answer those questions in their respective order, "some guy," "because," "magic," and "because my usual advisor was out."

Of course, I've just gone and spoiled the ending for you. So now I don't need to tell you the story of how I arrived at these conclusions, which is a shame because it involves drunk police officers, a high-speed chase to the border, twelve quarter-pounders with cheese, a mysical ring of power, the theft of a blank CD, and enough explosions to satisfy the demands of the next dozen Michael Bay movies.

Sadly, by the time I'd actually figured out who Bob was, the $93.02 he was after had been spent, mostly on bribes. We had a duel to the death, and that's where the explosions came in. Then we stopped playing video games for a while because we were both flat broke.

I know nothing about hearts. Here's a post about brains instead!

Experts all over the world plus one undergraduate who once got a B+ on a Calculus paper all agree that the world is doomed. The zombie apocalypse, or as I call it, the zompocalypse, is coming. For proof, I direct you in the general direction of the entire internet.

There are a couple of bits of good news. The first is that I hold the copyright for the word "zompocalypse." This really is about as useful as as a finger growing out of my elbow, and no, perverts, an elbow-finger has no practical use whatsoever.

The other bit of good news is that it's really easy to tell whether you'll survive or not.



But I kid. Your chances of survival are actually rather easy to determine.

1: are you physically fit?

2: are you genre savvy?

3: do you have a heart?

If you answered "yes" to all of those questions, you fail and will be excellent food. That's only because #3 was a trick question. If you have a heart you'll try to save the idiot kid who really, really needs to just go away and let everyone else get on with it.

Now, I'm a heartless jerk and I know enough about zombies to know that splitting up is only intelligent until all the deadweight is gone, and then it's a great way to lose the one or two other people you can actually use. However, I'm also a blogger, which should pretty conclusively answer #1 with a resounding "no." In fact, anyone smart enough to know how to handle a zombie outbreak probably isn't physically fit enough to survive. Some people might call it a catch-22. I call it braaaaaaaaaaaaaaains.

So once the zompocalypse comes to pass, we're all dead. Some of us will be unlucky enough to be reanimated with various bits missing. Others will be only merely dead (as opposed to only mostly dead, and no, true love cannot stop the zombies. They have no brains, and no hearts either). Therefore, we must prevent the entire zompocalypse from happening in the first place. I propose we send a Terminator back in time to kill John Connor, but since that probably won't work, let's keep sending Terminators back. They'll never kill him (not in the past, anyway), but they will ruin the franchise.

On a completely unrelated note, the Blues Brothers' "Everybody Needs Somebody to Love" just came up on iTunes. I do believe my 8-year-old and clinically brain-dead computer is trying to tell me something.

It has occured to me that tuning to a top 40 station would be an excellent way to ward off the zombies. When you become a zombie, you won't want to eat brains that are infested with that, will you?


What, I put 30 seconds' worth of work into that picture! How could you not expect me to post it twice?

Of course, zombies don't discriminate. As far as I know. They lack the intelligence to do so (does this mean that it's intelligent to discriminate?!) and that means that a zombie society would be entirely, er, fair. Colorblindness really doesn't mean anything to the undead, right?

Does this mean zombies are better than us?

I'd just like to reassure you that I was not bitten while writing this post. Nor are the zombies paying me money to write propaganda for them. They're too dumb to think of that.

Life, Don't Talk to Me About Life

Here's the scoop: you're going to die. No, that's not a death threat. One of these days your body will betray you and you'll turn into a rotting sack of flesh. Nobody wants to think about it. They'll do anything to bury themselves in a fairy-tale world where they don't have to think about it that they'll pay $20 for bad movies and steal bad music off the Internet. And this is why the entertainment industry exists.

People simply aren't equipped to deal with the fact that they'll die. Athiests may claim to be; "Oh, you religious types, you do this and that to shelter yourselves from the fact that you will one day cease to be. Heaven is just an illusion you came up with to try to believe that everything will still be all right."

All very well and good, but an athiest can still live responsibly. As opposed to saying "there's no judgement; we all just die and that's it" and then going on a binge, athiests tend to follow a moral code and live by society's rules just like everyone else. Now it is certainly true that living intelligently can lead to living longer. It is also true that a car can swerve around the corner and kill you next time you're at a busy intersection.

I'm not trying to say that life is fickle or that there isn't a God or you should live your life in such-and-such way. All I'm saying is that you really don't understand the concept of never.

Never listen to the same song twice. Never watch the same actor in more than one movie. Never watch re-runs.

...yeah.

ps, suicide is never the answer. Ever.

I-vi-vii

Iron Maiden have literally made a career out of this chord progression. Hallowed be Thy Name, Revelations (the beginning and end), Fear of the Dark, No More Lies (which, really, is just Fear of the Dark in E with Adrian Smith added to the line-up), Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Wicker Man (at the end) Wasted Years comes close, Phantom of the Opera does it in reverse during the "don't you stray" part... (and these are just the ones I know how to play)

And speaking of it in reverse, I-vii-vi is the chord progression used in "All Along the Watchtower" and the penultimate part of "Stairway to Heaven."

And speaking of Zeppelin, play "Immigrant Song" and "Flight of Icarus" back-to-back when you get a chance.

I love Maiden, I really do, because they are, despite this rant, master-class songwriters and anyone who doesn't believe me should learn some music theory and then listen to "Hallowed be Thy Name" again. But seriously, I don't think they've done an album since Number of the Beast where this progression didn't pop up.

ScrUSA Today

I mentioned in passing that USA Today published a misleading chart a while back, trying to imply that Bush's numbers right before his first State of the Union were worse than Obama's at the time (right before his first SoU). Well, today they ran a political cartoon lampooning Palin for writing down three words on her hand. Full disclosure: I think Palin made too many mistakes in 08 to have a chance in 12. But writing three words on your hand in the age of the Teleprompter Presidency isn't one such mistake.

If USA Today were even remotely in touch with the massive joke that ObamaPrompter is, that cartoon would have involved the Secretary of Defense asking Obama for the nuke codes, and Obama having to turn to his Teleprompter programmer to get them. Seriously. Who needs a Teleprompter to talk to a bunch of sixth-graders?!

Radio Ga Ga

I missed the post yesterday because of a) a busy schedule and b) chronic laziness. But no one reads this anyway so it doesn't matter.

Second radio show was yesterday. I didn't get to play the new song I wanted to play because it wasn't on the computer. Someone should look into that. I also played Iron Maiden's "Twilight Zone" simply because I finished the regular set with about 2 minutes left on the clock and needed something else. Not sure I'm going to play anything heavier than Maiden. We'll see. I have some 'tallica and 'deth, as you should know by now, but I'm not sure I'll be playing them.

I am pleased to report that the Who Review will return sometime next week. I've ordered Patrick Troughton's swan song (sort of), The War Games from Amazon along with some guitar strings because I'm too lazy to make the 30-minute trip to the nearest guitar store for the strings, and because Doctor Who is cheaper on Amazon than it is at Best Buy. I saw it on YouTube a very long time ago and remember the important plot points (including the big one, the one that's actually window-dressing and shouldn't need to effect the story) but I've forgotten a lot of the details. So I'll go through one episode a day and post about it.

Cigarette tax

60% of voters would approve a $1 increase in the tax on cigs.

Now, I don't want the government to raise the tax on something just cuz they think it's unhealthy. God knows I live on ice cream. My hyper metabolism never stopped. I'm still waiting for the day I'll suddenly wake up fat.

And now for the "but" that you've been waiting for: this, in this one case alone, is an excellent idea. The government needs the money, and better yet, some people will actually quit. And as someone who has to breathe secondhand smoke all over campus, charging them an extra buck is perfectly fine by me.

Of course, the government being the government, they'll always take a good idea too far.

Blooger Indeed

Whoops, looks like the Megareunion is slightly more complicated than I thought, but the short answer is that what I said in my original post on the subject is correct: LoMenzo got shafted so Ellefson could come back. Ah well. James' myspace post doesn't seem resentful; I guess you know going into Megadeth that your number could come up at any time.

Also, I'd like to amend something I said in another earlier post about the Big Four playing Orion. Ellefson's no slouch; I'd like to see him take a whack at that solo at the end. I'm not saying I think LoMenzo couldn't do it; it just seems that James was a hired hand, whereas David Ellefson's the closest thing Megadeth has had to a second permanent member. And really, Metallica's been using hired hands on the bass ever since Cliff died; if that sounds like an insult to Jason, check out the number of songwriting credits he had in a 14-year period with the band versus Cliff's credits in four. So what I'm trying to say is that since Cliff isn't, well, available, the bassist-who-is-not-Cliff-Burton that I'd most like to see take a whack at it is Junior. And no, I don't really care about Anthrax or Slayer. I get that Scott Ian is the go-to guy anytime VH1 or MTV want to do a documentary on thrash metal, and I get that Reign in Blood is teh br00tul. I just don't care about those bands as much.

Cavemen Vs Astronauts - Weapons TBD

If you've been reading this blog for a while, you should know where the above comes from.

I'm kind of on the side of the cavemen for a couple of reasons: one, the astronauts may be better trained and have the ability to coordinate (can the cavemen even speak?), but the cavemen kill things and eat them for a living. Assuming an otherwise-even playing field, cavemen win easy. Two, take away our technology for just 24 hours and we're completely lost. "Do the astronauts have weapons?" indeed. If they do, cavemen need to run and hide until the batteries on the weapons run out. Third, as the superiority of music from before I was born over current music clearly demonstrates, we've clearly lost something in just the last 20-odd years.

Speaking of!

I have never noticed the plane buzz by at the 2:30 mark in Iron Maiden's "Where Eagles Dare" before. It's pretty awesome.

Now, let's keep the ADHD train shifting tracks by talking about new covers of old songs. Stop it. Stop it right now. That's like asking George Lucas to re-write Hamlet. Yes, the original Star Wars trilogy was awesome and contained roughly 300% more explosions than all of Shakespeare put together. And yes, Willie Shax had some clunkers. So what? Hamlet is Hamlet. Leave it the hell alone. I don't need 400 threads on the fan-sites saying how Yorick will feature in the prequels or how Polonius shot first. So: new artists: if you want to demonstrate proper respect for older artists' songs: leave them the hell alone.

The comma button on my computer is dying. I am amused to find that the colon works nearly as well.

Heck, my computer's been really slow recently. I can't tell you the number of times that I've been on YouTube and the "now" marker has caught and killed the "loaded" marker, and that's not because I have trouble remembering what comes after eleventeen. It's because my internet is really bad. In the time it took me to look up "anti-cavemen techniques" on Wikipedia, they'd kill me and eat me.

So yeah. Cavemen always win.

Ads, Not of the Super Bowl Variety

I have to wonder about online games whose advertisement consists solely of virtual scantily-clad women. If you're on the Internet already, you can just find regular porn.

No, I'm not telling you where! Sheeple are one of the many, many things I hate, right up there with rap "music" and most politicians. Think for yourselves occasionally.

On a related note, ads should be the last content that loads on any webpage, and you should be able to click links off the main page long before the ads finish loading.

Random Nonsense

Segways are for the lazy.

Bicycles are for the environmentally conscious.

Hybrids are for the economically insane.

Gas-guzzlers are for those who think everyone else must be environmentally conscious.

Unicycles are for clowns and show-offs.

Helicopters are for the obscenely rich.

Teleportation is for sci-fi nerds.

Tanks are how real men get around.

The big Megadeth announcement

...means that I can no longer refer to it as "the solo project that Dave Mustaine insists on calling Megadeth."

Here is my full, honest opinion of David Ellefson: He is a talented bassist who sued Mustaine for eighteen and a half million dollars when the band broke up in 2002 (he lost). Mustaine forgave him a while ago, but I never in a million years thought he'd actually let Junior back in the band.

Here is my full, honest opinion of James LoMenzo: Dude got shafted.

I think this is the first time Dave chucked someone out to get someone else back. AC/DC did this to Chris Slade back in the early 90s, because Phil Rudd clicks with them more I guess, even though Phil was originally fired in 83 because he got in a fistfight with Malcolm Young (and possibly did something else, which I've only heard about from one source and thus won't print here). In an interview back from before 2002, Dave said Junior was the only one other than him who ever really had his finger on the pulse of the band, so it's probably a similar situation to the AC/DC example.

It's ironic that Dave, the guy Metallica said (way back in the day) was "just filling in" until Kirk showed up, seems to treat everyone other than Ellefson and (possibly) Broderick as "just filling in." (And a certain more professional blog refers to Broderick as "the latest guitarist who is not Marty Friedman.")

Still, this is pretty cool. Let's hope it lasts longer than the reunion with Chris Poland.

Edit: this would seem to indicate that LoMenzo's leaving opened the door for Ellefson's return instead of what I'd assumed, which was that Dave decided that Ellefson was coming back, which meant that LoMenzo had to go. Of course, the article doesn't quote Mustaine or LoMenzo, so it's still unclear to me what really happened.

Google Wars

Yesterday a friend and I invented Google Wars. It is something to do if you are completely bored, so come back and read this when you have literally nothing to do.

Wow, that only took, what, 30 seconds? Tops?

Anyway go to Google, click image search, and then type in 2 items (eg Tree Frog and Elephant). No "and" between them. Just "Item 1 Item 2." Then view the first page of results. If Item 2 has more hits than Item 1, Item 2 is the winner. If Item 1 has more hits, go back and type "Item 2 Item 1." If Item 2 now has more hits, it's a tie. If Item 1 still has more hits, Item 1 wins.

With this in mind I have created a tournament:

Elephant
Tree Frog

Tennis Balls
French Fries

Chicago Skyline
New York Skyline

Blue
Red

Round 1:
Elephant: 8
Tree Frog: 11

French Fries: 6
Tennis Balls: 8 plus this, which I link you to only because of its crazy name.

New York Skyline: 5 + 1 that's actually London
Chicago Skyline: 8

Blue vs Red: a result I should have predicted. (I originally had "iPod vs Cell Phone" as one of the entries, which should show how little thought I put into this.)

Subsequent attempts to find a replacement for Blue and Red:
Sprite vs Coke (tie)
Apple vs Orange (results showed apple-oranges)
Apple vs Banana (finally!)

Apple: 1 + 5 pictures with a banana
Banana: 9 + 5 pictures with an apple + 1 banana with "apple" written on it

Round 2:
Tennis Balls: 7
Tree Frog: 9 + 1 tree frog being eaten. By a person.

Banana: 0
Chicago Skyline: 19

Final Round
Tree Frog: 4
Chicago Skyline: 8

Congratulations, Chicago! You're more popular that pictures of tree frogs, New York, and bananas!

Also, congratulations Blogger spellcheck on not recognizing "iPod!"

100th Post! In Which Yours Truly Saw some Bands

The names of the bands have been withheld to protect the guilty but also because I just can't remember them. Their names, that is.

Now, this was a triple bill. This sort of thing makes it kind of hard to be objective, because if the first two bands are awful and the third is only mediocre, you're going to remember the third one as being a lot better than the first two, aren't you?

Yeah, pretty much. That's actually pretty much how it went.

The first band had five people up on stage; two guitarists, a bassist, a keyboardist and a drummer. There was no singer; one of the guitarists and the bassist shouted into the microphones a bit but because the mix was so godawful no one could make out what they were saying. It was punk with bits of musical talent showing through; three bars of power chords, one bar of synchronized single-note licks. I was less than impressed.

The second band featured a guy with a stupid haircut playing some sort of unholy cross between a Gibson Melody Maker and a Fender Stratocaster while growling into a microphone. Backing him up were the nerdiest-looking drummer I have ever seen and a bassist who was probably too talented for that noise. Their slowest song was their best one, but the guitarist's insistence on employing the "stumble around the stage and stare like a madman" approach was less than endearing.

Before I get into the third band, I'd like briefly to comment on a phenomenon I've noticed among guitarists. I'll call it the "insecurity-pretention index theory" and it basically goes like this: the further above their waist the guitar is, the more insecure the guitarist is. The further below their waist the guitar is, the more pretentious the guitarist is. Jimmy Page is the only person who pulled off being able to play guitar at his knees, and that's because he's an actual guitar hero (license him already, people). (Okay, blah blah Slash. Not really in the same league, but he deserves mentioning just cuz.) Angus Young is the only person who pulled off being able to play guitar across his chest, and it works because he's really, really short (blah blah Beatles, shut up). Angus' and Jimmy's guitars probably both hang at the same height relative to the ground (no, just kidding. Angus would have to be three feet tall for that to actually be the case).

Anyway this last band had three girls in it, which was three more girls than the other two bands had put together. Two of them played the drums, one of the drummers also played keyboards, and the third one played what at first glance appeared to be a knockoff of a Gibson Les Paul with single-coil pickups. It looked absolutely ginormous on the girl, who wore it rather high, and my first thought was, "okay, Angus Young effect. The guitar looks huge because the player is a dwarf."

Thing was actually a six-string bass. Might have been a baritone guitar but if you read this post you know what I think of baritone guitars. And since I did not find this band to be totally awful, I'd rather imagine that it was a six-string bass than acknowledge that it was probably a baritone guitar.

Two drummers, one of whom doubles as a keyboardist, and a bassist/singer. Halfway through the second song the bassist/singer stops and yells at the sound guy to turn up the microphone and the monitors. "Wow, the girl singer has more balls than either of the two guys," I thought, because the mix was simply godawful up until this point, but neither of the previous bands had particularly decent singers- no, scratch that, both the previous singers were terrible. Still, the singer with the highest-slung guitar yelled at the sound guy. My "insecurity-pretention index theory" went out the window.

So imagine lots of drums, the occasional keyboards, basslines that all sounded like Megadeth's "Peace Sells" of all things, and wailing (but I mean it in a good way) that sounds like some mournful ghost of an Egyptian Queen. Why that particular imagery, I have no idea. Suffice it to say that this was the best band of the night by a looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong shot.

And then I went back to my room and tried to get to sleep, only to have to listen to some idiot drunk girl stumble around talking to her boyfriend on her cell phone and trying to find his room.

Orion

Metal Hammer have this brilliant idea to get the Big Four to jam on Orion, and when I say "brilliant idea" I mean "post about how it's a great idea." If you're going to celebrate thrash metal, you can't not play that song at some point.

Though frankly you'd have an easier time getting them to do the song that Metallica calls "The Four Horsemen" and Megadave calls "Mechanix," because (at least) four of the eight guitarists who will be there already know it. Though they'd argue about which set of lyrics to use...

Besides, it's not like I'll be there, but even if I was I'm not sure I'd want four bassists in a genre that is all about insanely tight playing mucking up the greatest bassline Cliff Burton ever wrote.



That thing that starts at 6:36? That's a genuine bass solo, son. That's how it's done.

New Market Enterprises #2

What follows is a work of fiction. Any resemblance blah blah blah unintentional. You can find the original NME story here.

We here at New Market Enterprises have been making tremendous breakthroughs in brain manipulation. And by "have been making tremendous breakthroughs" we actually mean "we had a visitor from the future show up, stole his time machine, and stole lots of cool stuff from the future." One of these things we're calling the "Brain Blaster," but that's because our marketing department gets all their advice from their 8-year-old sons.

The gun can alter people's state of mind (as opposed to altering their perceptions of reality, this one alters their reaction to these perceptions). Our first use of it was to get Doctor Sanderson out of his closet at long last. Once we did that, we found a secret passageway at the back, but that's a story for next week.

On a particular setting, the gun increases the subject's concentration and decreases the subject's potential to be distracted. I regret to report that three members of our team starved to death after testing the gun on themselves and then reporting the effects in such minute detail that they weren't going to let a little thing like hunger distract them. We still have a lot of bugs to work out.

Again, this is not the sort of weapon that we'd like to fall into the wrong hands. Doctor Beth Fisher has been hit with it twelve times by twelve different co-workers who all tried to make her fall in love with them. We discovered further unfortunate implications when we programmed the gun to make us not want to use it for personal gain; no-one has the slightest interest in pursuing the project anymore except me, because I was in the bathroom when this decision was made and no-one had the willpower to zap me when I came back.

I have hidden the weapon. I tried to use it on Doctor Cribbins, to make him want to use the gun for humanity's greatest benefit; his head exploded. I have not endeavored to repeat the experiment, I and I would offer condolences to his family but our NME contracts clearly state that this sort of thing is expected to happen all the time. At any rate, we have more than enough tissue to put a clone together and I confidently expect Doctor Cribbins to return to us within a year. And, as I said, I hid the gun. Its capacity for good is undeniable; we can force people to vote Democrat, for example (hey, we need more federal funding. What else would you do with that money, start a war?), but we suspect that someone else may have beaten us to that one. However its capacity for evil is far greater, and every time it is used, someone's right to make up their own mind is violated.

No, just kidding, we're scientists. We're geniuses, of course we know what's better for you than you do. Now... forget you read this, and give me a raise.

(c) 2010

My very first ever radio gig was last night and I've already lied once in this post!

Because my very first radio gig was 2 years ago when we did "A Christmas Carol" live in the studio. I was Young Scrooge, a role I was born to play. And that was just my first live radio gig. Before that, in Halloween 07, we recorded "The War of the Worlds" beforehand. I was Crazy DaResistance guy near the end.

But last night was the very first time that I hosted my own radio program and had to push buttons to switch the microphones off and the music on and so forth. It went rather smoothly as first gigs go, I didn't swear on the air and I didn't insult current music too much (because I can be very generous when I want to, even going so far as to not call out artistic rot the instant I'm given a pulpit from which to do so). I had to play a current song, so I played Muse's "Uprising," it being the only thing on the new music shelf I was at all familiar with. It sounds pretty much like everything else they've done only with slighly lower vocals and a blatant ripoff of the Doctor Who theme going on in the background. But AC/DC have made a career out of making the same album over and over again, and Pink Floyd put the Doctor Who theme in "One of These Days," (2:17-2:31 in the video) so I can't complain much. Muse are one of the better bands playing today, and I wish that were saying more than it is because they do actually have serious chops. They probably would even have gotten airplay back when standards were higher, if they'd been around then. What I'm trying to say is Muse is better than most other current music acts and that's good enough for me.

The setlist was your standard classic-rock fare; there was Zeppelin and Queen, AC/DC and Pink Floyd, unabashed use of "Sympathy for the Devil" and "Hotel California" as 6-minute fillers, and an offhand comment on Aerosmith's current state after I played "Toys in the Attic." The radio we had set up in the studio to let us know how it sounded had absolutely no bass, but there was bass coming out of the monitors so I have to assume that this is because the radio in the studio was as cheap as the actual value of your average current music album.

It was kinda fun.

Rant #67043

You may have noticed that the average age of the things that I talk about on this blog is approximately twenty-one, and no that's not a number I picked out entirely at random, that number happens to represent the number of years I've been forced to endure existence on a planet that seems to lack any sort of quality control, and without giving the game away, I blame the internet primarily for this. But as for the number representing the true average age of things I talk about (not counting curent politics), I'm probably off by the same amount as the President whenever he talks about the number of jobs he "created or saved."

You see, there's more crap out there now than there ever was before, and by crap I mean both "stuff" and "stuff of bad quality." This blog, which will turn one year old at the end of the month, is one such piece of crap. Nobody reads it, nobody replies to any of the posts, and nobody points out that every one of my opinions are horribly biased against either the Democrat Party or just about anything younger than I am that's not Nu Who or part of the collective output of Joss Whedon or Quentin Tarantino. And frankly they don't get a free pass either because they've all had clunkers too. Oh, and if the Democrats ever want a kind word on this blog they can all go take Econ 101 and then run a small business for a few years. And frankly most Republicans should do that too. They're not in power at the moment so slagging them seems kind of pointless.

I love AC/DC, a fact that every day gets harder and harder to reconcile with my insistance on originality and quality; the Thunder from Down Under have made the same album sixteen times now (note: number does not include box sets like Bonfire or Backtracks, compilations like '74 Jailbreak, or live albums), and only about half of them are worth owning. Nevertheless, there's something to be said for a band that's never written a heartfelt ballad or a song about how the world sucks and how the singer wants to die. And there's comfort to be had in this consistency; you know you're about to listen to 40 minutes of 3-chord rock songs about the fun of sex and the greatness of rock and roll whenever you stick something with "AC/DC" printed on it in your CD player.

By comparison, music today is god-awful. This PC insistence on tolerating everyone else's artistic expression means that no matter how ear-splittingly terrible you are, you'll find at least a hundred idiots who "like" your "music" and thus give you a sense of self-importance, and speaking as one egoist to the most self-centered generation in modern history, it's not all about you. These hundred idiots will be idiotic because their music libraries are full of "free" stuff they stole. The average quality of the songs in those libraries will be comparable to the average Nirvana song, and because they don't know any better they won't realize that that's an insult. So, let me be clear in a way our President never will be: if you down-tune past either E-flat or Drop-D, if you complain about how mommy doesn't love you, if your solo doesn't last longer than one bar (I really don't care if you only know one scale, you can make something decent out of that), if you can't actually sing, if you can't write lyrics without using the words "oh" or "yeah" or "hey" to fill out the rhythm, or if you have to rely on sampling other songs to get any recognition at all, then please get out of the road if you want to grow old.

"But," says Dylan, the completely fictional reader of this blog who I in no way named after the first rockstar with no discernable performing talent (guy could write songs, I'll give him that with pleasure no matter how wrong the phrase "I'll give him that with pleasure" sounds), "if you're for originality, why won't you let us experiment at all? For example, isn't a song in baritone tuning an example of at least some deviation from the norm?"

Ah, I say, Dylan, old boy, in your haste to call me a stupid hypocrite (I am suddenly reminded of the hilarity of rock "stars" who are so obviously in it for the money and sex railing against "the rich"), you forgot to read my words more carefully. I require both originality and quality from my entertainment. Hence, I will not accept a song written in a tuning that makes it easier to bend notes or sing along.

"Then defend your admiration of AC/DC, since by your own admission they repeat themselves on every album and only half of them are worth owning," says Dylan, ignorant of the fact that I can barely hear him because I'm listening to Jimi Hendrix sing about a joker and a thief.

I believe I already have, I say, but in case you'd like me to elaborate: AC/DC were a refreshing gasp of fresh air when they pillaged England in 75 and 76 and America in 77. Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd were both getting overblown and punk was defiling all that was sacred about rock music. AC/DC did exactly what punk was supposed to do, strip rock back down to its essentials. I've got nothing against Zeppelin or Floyd, they're also two of my favorite bands and they both did a lot more experimentation than AC/DC did, but neither really did a lot for straight-up hard rock. (Blah blah "Black Dog" blah blah "Rock and Roll." Blah blah "Achilles Last Stand," which was probably the first song with thrash metal elements in it but don't quote me on that. Other than those three songs, the Zep were more blues-rock than hard rock.)

"But isn't straight-up hard rock itself fairly unoriginal?" Dylan asked, and by this point I realized that my imagination had conjured up a troll, and if there's one thing I hate more than every Cobain wannabe and rapper, it's a troll who thinks my opinion actually means anything. And for that, I especially blame the internet.

In Which the President is Agreed with by this Blogger

I wholeheartedly approve of one thing and, to the best of my knowledge, only one thing in President Obama's budget: it would appear that he's going to give our troops in Afghanistan and Iraq enough money to do their jobs effectively.

I could go on the offensive about everything that's wrong with the budget (i.e. most of the rest of it), but a) that would be too easy, and b) that would diminish the fact that the man finally got something right. So I'll leave it at that.

...And Another Thing

Eoin Colfer is not Douglas Adams, and he knows it. Aside from an overdose of continuity references in a book that will forever stand apart from the first five books in the Hitchhiker's trilogy, he does an admirable job of carrying on the legacy of lunacy.

First and foremost, Zaphod finally returned. So Long and Thanks for All the Fish is my least favorite book in the series because Ford doesn't do anything important until the end and Zaphod's not in it at all. Colfer pulls a wacky stunt at the beginning, letting characters live out their lives in a virtual reality thing for a while before plopping them back into the real world. This handwaves away any inconsistencies between the way Colfer portrays characters and the way Adams did, but aside from Random's er, random interest in politics, he does a fairly decent job of getting them right, and Zaphod's no exception (Zaph wasn't in the VR world, but he wasn't in the last two books either). He's lost one of his heads - please tell me that's not a reference to That Bloody Movie - but other than that he's still crazy.

The plot is wonky and Adamsesque, very reminiscent of Mostly Harmless in that everything fits together very neatly at the end, only this time we get a happier ending. Wowbagger the not-entirely-Infinitely-Prolonged-anymore-once-the-story-ends plays a rather prominent part, and what goes on with Trillian seems kinda odd, but weirder stuff has happened in this series and God knows she and Arthur were never actually going to be an item. Arthur is clueless as ever, and I really must give Colfer credit for creating the best and loopiest Ford Prefect since the original (I wasn't particularly impressed with his portrayal in either the TV series or That Bloody Movie).

Now the big question: Would Douglas Adams approve? I think he would have enjoyed its madcap insanity, but it does lack his signature style. It is not, thankfully, Artemis Fowl in space (nothing against that series, but that having been all Colfer wrote before this, I worried a bit that silly acronyms and super-geniuses were going to suddenly pop up everywhere).

So as I said, Colfer doesn't try to imitate Adams precisely, which is probably for the best, and just gets on telling an Adamsesque story in his own words. Frankly this is the best possible outcome.

Personal Code of Storytelling

Ford Prefect had a moral code in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy's fifth and until very recently final book, Mostly Harmless. (Rant tomorrow on ...And Another Thing.) The code goes something like this.

1. Never pay for your own drinks.
2. Never be cruel to any animal except geese.
3. Never bite the hand that feeds you (gentle nibbling okay).

I have a code about fiction.

1. Perfect heroes are boring.

2. Flawed heroes cannot obtain perfectly happy endings.

3. Perfectly happy endings are boring.

4. I would rather have a Bolivian Army Ending than a Deus Ex Machina.

5. Villains must die at the end of their first appearance (Big Bads of TV and book series are exempt from this rule. Leaving a film villain or minor villain alive at the end is obvious sequel-milking and must stop at once. Besides, Luke could have gotten some serious pathos if he found out Vader was his father after he already killed him).

6. Villains may defect and fight for good, but they may not become capital-H Heroes.

7. "Destroy the enemy superweapon" is not an acceptable plot line. They'll just build a new one.

8. "Destroy the enemy's mysical power source" is only acceptable as a plot line if you are JRR Tolkein.

9. You are not JRR Tolkein. (Hello, Mrs. Rowling)

10. You are not Joss Whedon. Nor are you Quentin Tarantino. Therefore you cannot write brilliant dialogue. And you will not have a rabid and devout geek/slacker following who swear that you can do no wrong.

11. You are not George Lucas. This is a good thing. (See #2, 3, 5 and 7.)

12. Making the same movie again and marketing it as a sequel is wrong. (Looking at Lucas again.)

13. Making the same movie again and marketing it as something completely different is very wrong. (Hello, Mr. Cameron.)

14. A sequel, in the very rare event that one is allowed to be made, must actually advance the plot. (Hello, Mr. Bond.)

15. Homages are okay. A story full of homages to different things is okay. A story that is nothing but homages to one other story is fanfiction.

16. Anyone who charges for fanfiction must be put to death.

17. No-one who gets their start writing fanfiction may write for the official continuation of the story about which they wrote their fanfiction. (Naming no names, I'm sure at least one of the Nu Who writers is guilty of this.)

18. No-one who gets their start directing music videos may direct anything but Art movies. "Style over substance" is not a good thing in drama (Hello Zack Snyder, I'm sure we'll meet again).

19. No, you may not reboot a franchise. That's called "cashing in on someone else's idea." It's also called "making the fanboys suffer continuity attacks." Come up with an original idea. (The Dark Knight was awesome. I just wish it didn't have to rely so much on already-established characters.)

20. Picking up an abandoned franchise where it left off is more acceptable, if only because Doctor Who did it so well.

21. No film series may last longer than three films. This means we wouldn't have Star Trek VI, but it also means no Star Wars prequels. We would have Star Trek: First Contact because of rule #23.

22. No television show/novel series may last longer than five seasons/books.

23. Exception to rules 21 and 22: if it changes scope dramatically (i.e. new writers, directors, cast, or focus) every three films/five years/books, it may continue indefinitely.

24. Any character who kills scores of innocents (innocents here meaning a faceless crowd of characters who are not actively evil), even for the greater good, is not a Hero. (Alan Moore you are guilty as hell of this.)

25. Blowing up New York before 9/11 was funny (Independence Day). Blowing up New York after 9/11 (and displaying the World Trade Center prominently in the skyline) is wrong. (Hello Zack Snyder. And no, I don't care that Watchmen is set in 1985. You made the movie after 9/11.)

26. And if you do nuke an American city, the guy who does it sure as hell doesn't walk (Hello Snyder/Moore again).

27. And if you do include the line "I did it thirty-five minutes ago" in your story, set it up right! (Moore did it right, Snyder not by a long shot.)

28. Slow-motion fighting was clever in The Matrix. But there was a purpose to it (for the lunkheads: to show that we're not in normal reality. This is why we never saw bullet-time outside of the Matrix). Way to devalue it, every single action flick since.

29. Vampires are not (healthy) romantic interests.

30. Unresolved sexual tension is not an acceptable main plot. Especially for a sequel.