TimC

OK, new series and all. Questions for the resident expert spring to my mind.

 

Any mention when/if the Drs next rejuvination is due?.

Smith seems to be sticking around for the 50th anniversary next year, but there's speculation he'll leave soon after.

 

Is he entitled to one, have they ret-coned away the limit on them?.

On the traditional 13-regeneration model, he's due another 2. This may of course be extendable for story purposes - why should there be such an arbitrary limit, especially with the Time Lords gone?

There was a throwaway line in 'The Sarah Jane Adventues' which extended the limit enormously.

 

Has there ever been even a joking reference to/explaination of why Timelords have British accents?. Aside from the "Lots of planets have a North" one.

Most individuals and races in this universe have what sounds like some sort of British accent, of course. Just like everyone sounds North American in Star Trek (yes, even Scottie).

 

Is our Dr congenitally male?. Is he capable of being otherwise?. ( This question might be better posed as, has there ever been Timelords where they changed sex with their re-juv?. )

Other Time Lords have changed gender between regenerations (eg the Corsair referenced in 'The Doctor's Wife').

 

I have a vague childhood memory of some of the Timelords being visually* of various races other than "European White", is that right?. Did they have races?. Could we get a Dr incarnation of some other race?.

Gallifreyans have been seen in a range of colours and apparent races. Romana tried being blue.

 

Would it be anything other than a rotten travesty, if they did do something like an Asian or African race Dr Who, but he/she ended up without a British accent?.

No. Why should it be? If it's, say, Idris Elba, would you want him to put on an African accent for the role?

 

Who would be the coolest non-white, non male Dr Who they could give us, both as an actor to take the part, and a "type", i.e. race and position in society**.

Anyone who's a good actor who can do something interesting with the role. I'm not sure I understand your question about "type".

So Carey is one of your least favorite writers on the title, then?

Well, it's the only time I was ready to drop the book (saved only by a short-lived improvement in art when Frusin left). Other writers have had their ups and downs, or some aspect of their writing that helped redeem the weaker aspects (Azzarello's atmosphere, Mina's characterisation, whatever it is that Milligan's doing), but no other writer has been so consistently uninteresting for such a sustained run.

It isn't as bad as all that: it's just the cult about big ears' ex that's so completely daft that it makes the rest of the story look ridiculous by association.

For a few years after '97, that didn't actually seem so far-fetched. Fairly mild satire, really.

I really liked Royal Blood at the time, largely for the good old anti-royal vitriol, but it was soon overtaken by Ennis' later run (essentially starting when Steve Dillon took over on art, not counting the very weak corpse-shooting story).

Definitely check out Delano - there's some big collections of his original run, plus the recent Pandemonium one-off. Jenkins is probably for completists only, though I'd take him over Carey.

Imho, if someone tells someone that GWDT is well written, they don't know shit about writing. It is poorly written.

I wouldn't want to criticise it for bad writing on a line-by-line basis, as I've only read it in translation. But it really is shit on many other levels, including structural (the actual detective plot all happens in about 80 pages somewhere in the middle), political (it's not enough that the wrong 'uns are fascists, they have to be dehumanised serial killing fascists), and sexual (the hip and caring hero who's terribly against male exploitation of women still fucks every bit of skirt in the book, including the ones traumatised by sexual abuse).

But apparently the sequels aren't so good.

Boys finishes at 72. It's heating up nicely.

How in the world does your wife know the Gor books, but not know Gore Vidal? I think the Gor books are more obscure.

She has hidden shallows. His fame was finally established through the fact that he (a) was in Gattaca, and (b) scripted Caligula.

As the wife said this morning: "Who was Gore Vidal? Did he write all those Gor books?"

Mirage Men - http://miragemen.wordpress.com/about-the-book/

Recommended. Very much yr psychosocial school of ufology rather than yr nuts'n'bolts saucerheads - but one of the things I like about Saucer Country is that it's quite specifically about these opposing schools.

Revival and Punk Rock Jesus started off well enough to earn further review. I picked up Saucer Country #1 just because it's been slim pickings lately and I need another pull. Does it get better? #1 suffered from trying to introduce too much in one go.

I'm really enjoying Saucer Country. Probably partly because it gets quite explicitly Fortean as it goes on (no.5 is just out), and Cornell has said that he was largely inspired by a book by a pal of mine.

Punk Rock Jesus looked absolutely fucking horrendous from all the promo I've seen, from the pissawful title to Murphy blethering about 'The Cause' - is it, against the odds, actually OK?

Number 6, then. Yowsers. The clown's one of the less disturbing things about it, and that's saying something.

'God particle' is just a journalistic invention, coined when a physicist's description was bowdlerised for publication. He'd actually called it 'that goddamn particle'.

True story.

Anyone reading any religious significance into it is a twat.

Surprised? Really? I thought it was made obvious from pretty early on that that was where it was likely to be going.

The Higgs field is the stuff which other particles move through, that gives them mass - the popular metaphors usually deploy swimmers in a pool of treacle, or something similar.

The Higgs particle is the quantum of that field, in more or less the same way as a photon is the quantum of light or other electromagnetic field.

If you're expecting fundamental physics to make much intuitive sense, you're likely to be disappointed.

Also, despite the jokes, 'boson' doesn't really sound all that much like 'boatswain'.

Shaky and Hine were at my local comics shop at the weekend, so I asked about the Adamski comic - it's on indefinite hold.

No real plans for more Bulletproof Coffin after the current run either - Shaky would like to do a few one-offs, particularly a Ramona special, but there's nowt in the pipeline.

Bleeding Cool has resurrected a chat between Bisley and Grant Morrison from 1994 -

http://www.bleedingcool.com/2012/06/24/tripwire-the-bisley-morrison-tapes-from-1994-part-two/

Bisley: "I like to draw is a juvenile way, almost badly on purpose, because I like that."

Which might explain a lot about his Hellblazer work.

An obsequious man named Gove,

Who no-one could possibly love,

Put in charge of our schools,

He made up daft rules ...

Oh how we all wish he would move.

I like the way that the only line-ends that rhyme there are the ones with entirely dissimilar spellings, which rather nicely illustrates Rosen's point about the contradiction between poetry and Gove's phonics ideology. Bravo.

These plastic toys are kind of cute. At work, we're doing additive manufacturing with aerospace and nuclear industry alloys, and just ordered a 200 cubic metre chamber to try some new ideas.

Sheffield: fucking metal since the dark ages.

I've met the Bubble. He is a twat.

Preview of Lemire's first issue -

http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=preview&id=12489

Oh dear.

It's not as clean cut as that. While there have been runs when I've just bought the book out of habit over the past 20-odd years (Carey, Diggle), now isn't one of them.

Bainbridge's 'Young Adolf' was published in 1978. It'd be kindest to describe Morrison's strip as a postmodern homage to the novel (you could just about get away with that in the late 80s). As well as the basic plot, they share some key dialogue - which may have been taken from Mrs Hitler's 'historical' account, but I'd suspect not.

The Bainbridge book wasn't referenced at the time of the strip's publication in 'Crisis', nor in the pieces I read around the original 'Cut' publication.

Ballard did train as a doctor, and worked as a science journalist when his first books were published. The precise origin of the catastrophe in 'The Drought', for example, was taken from research reported while he was working at 'Chemistry & Industry'.

( These figures are facts you know, with the same validity as a Ballard "fact" like "everything is hopeless and humanity is finished before it can even enter the race", and "there is no sense trying to build anything because . . . entopy". )

Which, funnily enough, is almost exactly not what Ballard was saying. His were always the most optimistic of catastrophes.

He was also right to conclude, quite early in his career, that scifi as a genre was dead and rotting.

Jings!

I've been enjoying the arse out of The Boys. There's been a few longueurs, maybe, but it's been a good ride.

I'll have to dig out the old Marshall Law once it's finished though.