Tag: doctor who

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One more musing about Great Big Sea and Sean McCann

Overall my household found “The Time of the Doctor” to be a bit of a mess–but Dara, Paul, and I were all in agreement that Matt Smith’s regeneration speech was the shining gem of the episode.

This part:

The Doctor: It all just disappears, doesn’t it? Everything you are, gone in a moment, like breath on a mirror. Any moment now… He’s a-comin’.
Clara: Who’s coming?
The Doctor: The Doctor.
Clara: You. You are the Doctor.
The Doctor: Yep, and I always will be. But times change, and so must I.

And this part:

The Doctor: We all change. When you think about it, we’re all different people all through our lives, and that’s okay, that’s good, you gotta keep moving, so long as you remember all people that you used to be. I will not forget one line of this. Not one day. I swear. I will always remember when the Doctor was me.

All of which I mention because the recent regeneration has been on my mind, what with the ongoing emotional reactions of Great Big Sea fandom to the departure of Séan McCann from the band. Many fans have been heartbroken by this news. Some have sadly expressed how this will impact their ability to enjoy Great Big Sea concerts moving forward, and that they’re not sure they’ll want to try. A few have been actively, alarmingly resentful on the matter.

In Doctor Who fandom, many fans speak of “their” Doctor–often the actor who was playing the role when they first imprinted on the show, either as a child or as an adult, but sometimes not. For me, although Christopher Eccleston was the Doctor who made me start paying attention, David Tennant is “my” Doctor since he’s the one with whom I’ve developed the emotional connection.

Great Big Sea feels the same for me. The band’s already been through a few changes–the departure of Darrell Power back in 2003, the addition of Kris MacFarlane on the drums, the replacement of Darrell by Murray Foster. All of these have been changes that caused their share of brouhaha among the fandom, and all of them bring to mind Matt Smith’s speech up above.

Because like Time Lords, bands change. But when you’re a devotee of a band, it can be almost like being one of the Doctor’s Companions. Your Doctor is the one you travelled with in the TARDIS–even if you meet the Doctor again many years later and he’s gone through half a dozen regenerations since you saw him last, as we saw happen to Sarah Jane in “School Reunion”. Likewise, your version of a beloved band is going to be the one whose combination of vocal and performance chemistry is the one you fell in love with–the one that got you to eagerly seize every new album the day it’s released, and to snap up concert tickets the instant they go on presale.

My Great Big Sea was the original four–Alan, Séan, Bob, and Darrell. I’ve very much enjoyed the Great Big Sea made up of Alan, Séan, Bob, Kris, and Murray, mind you, much as I’ve happily enjoyed other Doctors besides David Tennant. This second version of Great Big Sea, for example, gave me The Hard and the Easy, which remains one of my all time favorite albums of the group’s.

But that said, I made the transition between these versions of the band much as I made the transition from Eccleston to Tennant. Losing Séan, though, is harder. It’s like losing Tennant as the Doctor–I’ve found things to like about Matt Smith, make no mistake, but he just never grabbed me on the same level that Tennant did for the most part.

Still, though, I haven’t stopped watching Doctor Who. Neither will I stop listening to Great Big Sea. It may be that when the group regenerates again (aheh), I’ll find new things to love about what they’ll provide to us fans. And as I periodically keep an eye on what Tennant’s doing now that he’s no longer the Doctor, I’ll be keeping an eye and an ear on what Séan does with his music.

But I’ll always remember when Great Big Sea had Séan McCann.

Shantyman, good night.

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Exactly how it happened

Not too long ago on Facebook I was giggling over the Easter egg on Google Maps that actually takes you into a TARDIS interior if you click on certain police boxes that show up in the UK. Related to that story, I went and dug up this old pic of myself from 1995, from when Dara and I went to the Worldcon in Glasgow in Scotland that year. We called this “Anna Buys a Used TARDIS”.

Anna Buys a Used TARDIS
Anna Buys a Used TARDIS

I posted it to Facebook and was promptly asked whether I lost the vehicle in a card game. This was my reply!

Certainly not. There was a PERFECTLY LOGICAL EXPLANATION for the entire affair. See, this little Scottish dude with an umbrella showed up and said to me, “YOU! I NEED YOUR HELP! I seem to have parked my police box here without proof of ownership and aheh, well, I’ve got something I’ve DESPERATELY got to take care of. I don’t suppose I could convince you to buy it from me for oh, say, half an hour?”

“What?” I said? “Why only half an hour?”

“Well,” the little Scottish dude with the umbrella explained, “that’s the RULE. But if you’ve bought it from me that makes you the legitimate owner. It’ll be safe then!”

“Ummmm okay?” I said dubiously, but what the hell, we were only just wandering around being tourists anyway, and it was going to be nice to hang out for a bit. “I’ll give you five pence for it.”

“SOLD!” he said, and dashed off like his shoes were on fire. That’s when things got REALLY weird, because THEN a guy with curly blond hair and the most hideous coat I’d EVER SEEN IN MY LIFE showed up.

The blond guy started to argue with me about the police box being HIS, but I said quite firmly that I HAD just paid five pence for it. So then he stormed off, gesticulating and pontificating wildly, and I was about to say bugger to the whole thing when a THIRD guy showed up. This one had pointy hair and a pinstriped suit on and he was running as fast as his red trainers could carry him. “For the love of all that’s holy, GET OUT OF THE WAY!” he bellowed as he charged past. “Also, you might want to duck!”

I ducked because somebody was firing FRIGGING LASERS over my head, and when I turned around, wait, what? Stompy robots? In Scotland? Da hell? They weren’t even wearing kilts or playing bagpipes. Just kept blithering on about YOU WILL BE DELETED, and they stomped off after the guy with the pointy hair.

By then, I can tell you, I was DEEPLY confused. But that was when the door to the police box opened from the inside, and the little Scottish dude with the umbrella poked his head out and smiled at me. “Here you are then, here’s your five pence back! Also, you might want to have a dash of this nitro nine. On your way now. Be on the lookout for those robots.”

Which was when the police box promptly vanished, with a WHRR-WHRR-WHRR noise that I was pretty sure that police boxes weren’t actually supposed to make. So I went on my way, wondering what the HELL had just happened, and chucked the nitro nine over the fence just so that last robot would explode nicely.

And then I had tea.

Cross my hearts, this was exactly how it happened.

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Several awesome things make a post

I’ve been total Scattershot Girl when it comes to blogging for some time–like many, I’ve found most of my day to day online communication shunted over to Twitter and Facebook. But that said, I’ve had several recent lovely things happen that are worth sharing with you all in longer, blog-based form. So! In no particular order:

  • Finally saw The King’s Speech, since userinfospazzkat got it via Netflix. That was a very satisfying film, and I’m not at all surprised that it’s spawned so much fanfic across my various Friends lists and such. Everyone in that film did an amazing job, and I have much increased respect for Mr. Colin Firth now. Also, mad love for the scene where the speech therapist’s wife comes home and discovers the King and Queen in her dining room. :D

  • Also, as of today, finally saw Source Code with userinfosolarbird. Mad, mad props to userinfomamishka for recommending that! It’s a nice, tight little SF flick, and if you like alternate-reality type plots, try to catch this before it vanishes entirely. If you’re local to Seattle, it’s still playing at the Meridian 16 downtown, and it’s running at the Crest as well.

  • I have finally found a way I might actually read more comic books: the Dark Horse comics app for the iPad. I installed this on the grounds that a couple weekends back, Dark Horse had a sale of all its digital versions of Serenity and Firefly comics. Since I didn’t have Shepherd’s Tale yet, I thought what the hey, I’d buy ’em all. The iPad is definitely more suited to digital comics reading than the iPhone, that’s for sure, although the iPhone does actually talk to this app as well.

    Also on the iPad, I have a shiny new app called TunePal, recommended to me by Marilyn, one of the fiddle players who attends the weekly session userinfosolarbird and I have been going to. Those of you who know the Shazam app will find the way this works familiar; it basically identifies songs. But in this case, it identifies traditional Irish tunes! You can play them at the app on an actual instrument, or, it’ll identify ’em if you’re playing them in iTunes as well. Then it goes out and hits up a big ol’ database and yoinks back several guesses as to what it thinks you just played it. It’ll show you sheet music for its guesses, and it’ll play the sheet music for you as well. And, you can add tunes out of the database manually by searching for them as well. You can’t import your own tunes, which is my only complaint about the app, but it’s otherwise very, very cool. Any of my fellow music geeks out there who are interested in trad tunes, you should be checking this out.

  • Speaking of the iPhone, my coworker Joe pointed me at my new favorite iPhone game: Tiny Wings. You play a birdie with, of course, tiny tiny wings, and the object of the game is to get the birdie to fly as far as possible by tapping. It’s super-cute and only 99 cents, so check it out.

  • FOLKLIFE! Well, that deserves a whole separate post, but I’m noting it here anyway.

  • And while I am still technically on book buying hiatus, I’ve picked up a few freebies. And I will unrepentantly, UNREPENTANTLY I TELL YOU, break hiatus wide open to buy userinfoseanan_mcguire/Mira Grant’s Deadline this week. Because GIMME. Seriously.

  • My friend userinforavyngyngvar is sending me a Blu-Ray of a-ha’s last concert in Oslo! Thank you, Yngvar!

  • I am sorely behind on Doctor Who posts, and will shortly be doing a catchup post. It’s an indicator of how much I’ve not been paying attention to the net lately that I totally missed that BBC America did NOT air the second half of the two-parter on Saturday, to wit, bah. I did not however give enough of a damn about this to actually try to find and download the episode; it’ll air next week as far as I know, and I can wait that long. Especially given that we’re about to have the mid-season hiatus anyway. Just nobody spoil me, mmkay, those of you who’ve already caved and downloaded the ep anyway?

  • And because it’s always worth saying, mmmmm blackberries of my marketboys mmmmmm.
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Vacation in review

I’ve got to say, two weeks of just hanging out at home has been one of the nicest vacations I’ve had for a while. It hasn’t been fancy or exciting or expensive, but it sure has been relaxing. The last few times I’ve had this much time at home have been surgery recovery–and by comparison, this has been more like the Longest Weekend Ever. All things considered, an excellent way to round out 2010.

In brief, here’s what I’ve been doing the last couple of weeks:

  • Saw and enjoyed both Tron: Legacy and Tangled. Both were quite pretty, and while T: L had less plot than one might have liked, it actually had more plot and emotional weight to it than the first one did. And I say this as a fan of the first one, which I rewatched during this downtime, too! As for Tangled, I liked it more than I expected it would, given my prior fear that it’d screw up my favorite fairy tale. It was Disney by the numbers, but then, Disney does do awfully catchy numbers.
  • Did Longest Night with , in which we did what seems to be becoming my yearly tradition of rewatching The Lord of the Rings. We are sure you’ve noticed by now that the sun did, in fact, come back up.
  • Speaking of Solstice, and Christmas by extension, I didn’t really want much loot this year thanks to having gotten the Awesome Guitar of Awesomeness. But a few lovely bits of loot were had nonetheless! Most notably, Dara gave me a really clever little capo that lets you capo individual strings and therefore simulate different tunings. I also got Peter Jackson’s King Kong on Blu-Ray from , Matt Smith’s just-concluded series of Doctor Who from , a B&N ebook card from , a lovely hardbound copy of a Norwegian graphic novel from , and the obligatory pile of stocking stuffer candy.
  • The Thursday before Christmas, Dara and I went downtown and spent a lovely afternoon at Ummelina, the spa on 4th. We did their two-person Pacific Rim package, and mmmm relaxing. This was redeeming the gift card I got Dara back in April for her birthday, since we’d decided that “while I am on vacation” was an excellent time to do so. After the spa, I did a lightning-quick raid on the marketboys, catching them JUST as they were closing up shop and surprising them by my arrival. They looked pleased to see me! Or at least pleased to sell me literally last-minute raspberries. ;)
  • Christmas Day itself was fairly quiet. Dara and I went back downtown for the aforementioned viewing of Tangled, and afterwards had Chinese at a place downtown we hadn’t tried before. We didn’t care for the place much, but they were awfully overworked that night so we couldn’t quite hold it against them. And the food, while mediocre, was revived by Dara later for two more meals’ worth of nomming. So it was a win in the end.
  • Have been doing a lot of trying to fill out all the achievements on Plants Vs. Zombies, as well as trying to play through the new levels in Angry Birds. Raise your hand if you’re surprised.
  • The high point of Christmas Day was definitely the Doctor Who Christmas Special, and big kudos to BBC America for having actually broadcast it in a timely fashion and uncut, as I previously posted!
  • Also as previously posted, Dara and I had an almost impromptu totally blottoed viewing of “Spock’s Brain”!
  • Also watched a lot of MST3K as I was seriously in the mood. Bought one of the DVD box sets we hadn’t owned before and watched all of those, as well as The Brain That Wouldn’t Die (PERFECT followup to “Spock’s Brain”) and Hercules Against the Moon Men via YouTube, streamed over the Blu-Ray player. (Which worked amazingly well, I might add, and way better than playing those same videos over any of the computers in the house would have done. Even given that it’s on the exact same network!)
  • Some light reading was done, and way less writing or editing than should have been (read: none to speak of).
  • Caught a cold, which was NOT so fun. But really, it didn’t change much of what I was doing anyway, except while I was shaking it off, I was doing the same things with added blankets, Nyquil, and sneezing. George was very, very happy to occupy my lap the whole time regardless.
  • And last night, we finished off the year with a lovely visit from Jenny as well as , , and their children, for consumption of homemade pizza, some more boozahol and snacks, and playing of Rock Band 3. Jenny stayed overnight with us so she wouldn’t have to drive all the way back to Issaquah with a bunch of drunk New Year’s Eve partiers out on icy roads, and we got up to have tasty breakfast cooked by Paul. A great way to finish off the old year, and start a new one, indeed.

So yeah. Feeling ready and rested if not tanned, and rather looking forward to getting back into the swing of normal things on Monday. Bring it on, 2011!

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Merry Christmas and Happy Doctor Who Day!

No matter what holiday you celebrate this time of year, I hope it’s going splendidly for you! If you’re with loved ones, may you have excellent food and presents; if you’re spending it alone, may you have something handy to pamper yourself, maybe good music or food or books.

If you are a writer, may your muse give you a present of the best possible words for the stories you want to tell.

And if like me you are a fan of Time Lords, may you enjoy the Doctor Who Christmas special airing tonight! Thank you, BBC America, for airing the new special here in the States in a timely fashion–and uncut as well! :D

and I are going out tonight to see Tangled at Pacific Place and then we’ll be looking for somewhere nice to have Chinese food for dinner! After that, we are totally all over the Doctor Who.

Enjoy your holiday, all!

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Book and TV catchup

Let’s clear out the backlog of new ebook and print book purchases, shall we?

Picked up in print from the Norwescon dealers’ room:

  • The Zombie Survival Guide: Recorded Attacks, and The Zombie Survival Guide, by Max Brooks. The former is a graphic novel adaptation of a section of the latter. I’d already listened to an audio copy of the latter but didn’t have a print copy, so picking one up was required!
  • Dawn of the Dreadfuls, by Steve Hockensmith. This is a prequel to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, basically setting up how the Bennett sisters became such infamous zombie slayers! Okay, yeah, I couldn’t resist.
  • Chicks Dig Time Lords, by assorted folks. This is the essay collection I wanted, billing itself as being all about Doctor Who, by the women who love it. Pretty much required reading for me!
  • The Mystery of Grace, by Charles de Lint. Urban fantasy. Because apparently I still need more Charles de Lint in my life!

And, yoinked in ebook form down from Barnes and Noble:

  • Dead Matter, by userinfoantonstrout. Book 3 of the Simon Canderous series. Urban fantasy.
  • Embers, by Laura Bickle. Urban fantasy. Bonus points for the heroine on the cover actually having a head!
  • Compromised and Revealed, by Kate Noble. Historical romance. Bought on the strength of the userinfosmartbitches review of the forthcoming The Summer of You, and which I will also be buying as soon as B&N has it on their ebook store.
  • Master of None, by Sonya Bateman. Urban fantasy. Heard some nice buzz about this one and have to frankly admit that I was drawn to it because the guy on the cover kind of looks like Sawyer on Lost. (Mmm, Sawyer!)
  • World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, by Max Brooks. SF/Horror/Humor. Bought in ebook form, and this time NOT as a replacement for the print copy, just because this book is that awesome.

This brings the total for 2010 up to 104. And it’ll be going up to 107 as soon as Barnes and Noble lets me buy userinfojimbutcher‘s Changes, Ann Aguirre’s Hell Fire, and the aforementioned Kate Noble!

And as soon as I buy the brand new Amelia Peabody, A River in the Sky, it’ll be 108. There is, indeed, a new Amelia Peabody. Y’all may remember I have expressed some disappointment in Ms. Peters’ last few efforts, but this one? This involves the Ark of the Covenant. As an Indiana Jones fangirl, I think I’m morally obligated to check this one out. Plus, I did engage in the handy “Get a free sample” B&N ebook feature, and it started out strong enough that okay, yeah, I’ll be buying this too!

Meanwhile, userinfospazzkat, userinfosolarbird, userinfomamishka and I did a lovely doubleheader of this week’s Castle and the brand new Eleventh Doctor tonight. Picoreviews: speaking of Indy, as an Indy fangirl, I am now solidly in favor of Nathan Fillion playing Indy if they ever pry the part away from Harrison. He just looked too adorable in the fedora. ;) And, Eleven? Yeah. He’s a keeper. Brand new icons will be required. And I’ll be posting more in depth about the new Doctor tomorrow, I think!

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41 and feeling good

I’ve been getting lovely comments dropped on my Facebook wall from folks who saw there what today is, and I’ve gotten the usual lovely email from userinfostickmaker wishing me natal felicitations. What I did not expect however was to get a little email from the folks who run JournalFen, wishing me a happy birthday and inviting me to send in and/or post interesting birthday stories. That was awfully nice of them and makes me glad I’m continuing to maintain an account on their servers. So this is me sending out a shoutout to JF’s staff: thanks, folks! Thanks also to all of you who have already sent me comments. :)

Birthday Weekend 2010 for Anna will be involving a second viewing of Avatar tonight and probable sushi. There will be cake, but it’ll be tomorrow in conjunction with this week’s Jam, since I didn’t want to have cake and pie in the house at the same time and I felt it would be lame to offer partly eaten birthday cake to folks who show up for Jam. I will however have a fancy cupcake tonight as Birthday Cake standin, the thanks for which go of course to my lovely userinfosolarbird!

Also as part of this weekend’s laid-back fun, Dara and I listened to the first CD of one of the Big Finish Doctor Who audios I bought her for Christmas, and that was great! First of all it was fun to hear Paul McGann reprising the role of the Eighth Doctor, but even more fun was hearing a Dalek Supreme actually be–at least by Dalek standards–subtle. It’s not too spoilery to say that the general thrust of this plot is that Eight and his new companion Lucie wind up on the planet Red Rocket Rising, which has just been devastated by an asteroid strike. And oh hey, a passing alien fleet has just offered to rescue the human survivors from the planet–and OHNOEZ they’re Daleks.

What the Daleks are up to, pretending to be compassionate, is part of the great fun of this episode. In particular there’s an awesome bit where the Dalek Supreme first learns from the Acting President of the planet that the Doctor is around–and you can just hear the Dalek forcibly keeping itself from going ballistic. Later it pretty much orders the President to turn over the Doctor in exchange for Dalek assistance, and Dara and I lost it hearing it say “THE DOCTOR IS AN ENEMY OF THE DALEKS! HE MUST BE EX… TRADITED!”

Unrelatedly, more fun was had last night as I did indeed spend the rest of my Amazon gift certificate. Many thanks to you all for your extensive book and music recommendations! The things I wound up purchasing were:

  • The Green Glass Sea, recommended by userinfosutures1. YA.
  • Mark of the Demon, recommended by userinfoalfvaen. Urban fantasy.
  • Graceling, recommended earlier to me on Goodreads by userinforosepurr. YA/fantasy.

This brings the total of books acquired in 2010 up to 25!

Just about all of the rest of the recommended titles have gone onto my Goodreads Recommended shelf, and I’ll get to them as best I can! Some of them aren’t available in digital form so I may wind up checking them out from the library. Yay, books!

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Doctor Who: “The End of Time”, Parts 1 and 2

So now that I’m done writing up all the rest of my 2009 Book Log reviews, it’s time to jump over to another topic near and dear to my heart. Let’s talk Doctor. And specifically, the Doctor Who “End of Time” story, which I’m pretty sure most of you reading this will have seen by now. But just in case you haven’t, oh my yes ginormous spoilers behind the cut!

And, picoreview: fairly sloppy story overall with some moments of beauty. Russell T. Davies does tearjerking sentiment much better than he does logical cohesion of plot these days, I fear. And man, I’m going to miss David. Sniff. (Okay, yeah, the tearjerking sentiment got to me! ;) )

Continue reading “Doctor Who: “The End of Time”, Parts 1 and 2″

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And now, a holiday review!

I’m coming off a nice long vacation, thanks to my workplace having given the entire lot of us the week of Christmas off. This was as the cool kids say AWESOME, given that it meant that userinfosolarbird and I were able to have Longest Night without me having to take an extra day off for that. And that was a nice way indeed to fire off a relaxing break.

The weekend of the Solstice was pretty much given over to, aside from a special Solstice Murkjam (more on this in another post), a mighty rewatching of the entire extended edition Lord of the Rings trilogy. There are few movies I can happily watch over and over again, but these? Absolutely. Especially when Dara starts asking me questions about Middle-Earth lore and we get to Tolkiengeek. <3 Plus, this time around I started finally watching a lot of the copious extras in all three sets of discs, which I had never done despite owning these things for years now. I'm sure you all know by now, but yeah, lots of lovely stuff there and I've only barely scratched the surface of it all. Did a lot of catchup of medical appointments during the week, and the highlight of that was getting to touch bases with both my endocs and say "by the way, I'm working on seriously trying to lose weight, just so you all know". In particular, wanted to check with the thyroid endoc to make sure I coordinate with him about how to reduce my T4 and T3 dosage as I drop pounds. I've already had to start tweaking my intake since I've dropped six pounds or so. I dropped in on userinfokathrynt to say hi in between some of those aforementioned medical appointments, and was treated to tea and a cookie and her delightful offspring informing us, when asked where her dump truck was, “it could be ANYWHERE!” Lillian continues to impress me with her smarts. This kid is going to be scary when she gets older. Hell, she’s kind of scary now!

Christmas itself was pleasantly low-key and featured first going out with userinfomamishka to see the new Sherlock Holmes movie. Picoreview: big silly fun if you can buy that this was totally a fluffy, alternate-universe version of Holmes and Watson that didn’t bear too much resemblance to the canon versions. I did like many get a kick out of the chemistry between Holmes and Watson, and felt that poor Mary was sadly underused as a character, and that the actress playing Irene wasn’t quite up to the task of her own character’s awesomeness. But really, the thing I liked the most about the movie? The music. Especially the jigs during the action scenes and the take of “Rocky Road to Dublin”. I may have to buy the soundtrack on the strength of that alone.

Christmas evening, userinfomamishka, userinfodarthhellokitty, and userinfoking_chiron all had dinner with us at the Murk and then we all watched the new Doctor Who, “The End of Time, Part 1”. Most definitely more on this in another post. There are rumblings of another group watch of Part 2 to come.

I closed out this past weekend with going, finally, with Dara to see 2012 before it finally vanishes out of the local theaters. We wound up having to catch it at the Alderwood Mall cinema, which was really kinda crazytalk since the place was swarming with after-Christmas shoppers and getting from our parking spot to the theater was a nerve-wracking exercise in dodging oncoming traffic. But we did manage to get there on time, and once we were actually settled in, despite being too close to the screen for comfort, we had a delightful time. I’m sure many of you already know this by now too, but yeah, this movie was awesomely bad. We’re talking epic levels of MSTable disaster pr0n, which is pretty much exactly what we were there for. Mutating neutrinos, baby!

Didn’t get a damn bit of writing or reading done, but on the whole, I didn’t really mind. I’ve been catching up on fixing broken stuff on this web site instead, and that sits well with me, since the long-undone tasks there were annoying me, and I found fixing those relaxing. I assure you all though that more writing and reading will be coming with the New Year.

And oh yes: with userinfospazzkat coming home from Virginia on Sunday, we had our little house gift exchange. My nifty l00t: one box of Ninth Doctor DVDs (man, I do love Nine and Rose, I must say), one lovely tin of bath bombs from LUSH, one $50 Barnes and Noble gift card which I promptly spent on five new ebooks, and last but not least, this, which is pretty much the Best Possible Christmas Ornament to Give to Anna, Ever:

Indy Ornament
Carefully, Indy

There’s a button on it that plays the Raiders March when you press it. userinfospazzkat knows me very, very well. <3