I thought the monsters in Doctor Who today were particularly creepy today. I won't say anything more about that. “Spoilers”, as Doctor Song would say. I didn't realize that Elisabeth Sladen, the actress who played Sarah Jane Smith, passed away until I saw the episode had been dedicated to her. I remember her from when I watched Doctor Who when we first moved to the America, as well as her appearances during the tenth Doctor's tenure. Seems as though I was not the only one who found her memorable.

The producers of the show are obviously trying to appeal to American audiences now. Beyond the fact that this episode was filmed in part on location in the US for the first time in the shows rather lengthy history, it was released in the UK, US and Canada^[1] at the same time. Australian audiences who don't download it from the Internet have to wait a whole week to see it. WTF BBC? Americans start to get a little interested in the Doctor and you rearrange everything. Doctor Who has always been big in Australia! Of course part of the reason they are airing it at the same time on both sides of the Atlantic is to reduce the number of people who download it from BitTorrent, so that they can sell ads on the BBCA version and at the same time air it ad free in the UK where people pay the BBC tax.

1. eh?

I realised that explaining to Don what steampunk is^[1] was going to be difficult when he indicated he didn't even know what cyberpunk is.

1. after watching the steampunk-esq Doctor Who chrissy speical

Apparently she and the Doctor had a thing for her entire life. Typically, he was into it for about an hour.

In unrelated events, spring is in the air. I need to do some of the requisite cleaning.

Today Tristan was asking me about Transformers again. This pleases me because this is the list of the things that I am somewhat expert in (no particular order):

• Transformers
• C/C++
• Star Trek
• Perl
• Doctor Who
• Photography
• Thursday Next
• Never Being Confused

Anyway, he was asking me about where the Transformers came from and I told him about Primus and Unicron, the gods of the Transformers. This is sort of how it went:

me: Primus and Unicron are the gods of the Transformers. Primus created the transformers to battle the evil Unicron.
Tristnan: Did Unicron create the Decepticons to fight the Autobots?
me: No, Primus created both the Autobots and the Decepticons
Tristan: Why did he create them just to fight each other?

I really love the questions that Tristan asks. Now, granted we are talking about a mythology that nobody believes in, but you could easily recreate this exact same conversation using a number of “real” religions that I can think of, and this is exactly the sort of abstract thinking that should be applied to the subject.

I am so ready for APEC to be over. Those world leaders can go jump in a lake as far as I am concerned and frankly the lake can take our rotten “leaders” too.

Dateline Canberra. Nothing happens here. Ever.

Sibs are good. I am educating Tristan on important things like Doctor Who and asking annoying questions like “what did you do in school today.” I know this is annoying because I did a whole speech for the speech contest on the subject in primary school. That must have been before I was mortally terrified of getting in front of people to talk. Or it might even be the reason for it, who knows.

My dad is a neo-luddite. I told him he was a technophobe and he admitted to being “conservative” about such things. What is so hard about programming a number into a phone or sending an SMS?

Most of the time lately I wish that I didn’t quite have both feet so firmly planted in two totally different countries. How did I wind up yearning for a life at the same time in each?

I watched 4 episodes of Doctor Who today, and one yesterday. Four were recorded from when I was in the states and one was aired on TV tonight. Two of them were really good: 42 and Blink. The other three were kind of blah. 42 was obviously a reference to Douglas Adams, who was a writer for the original series, but I think it was also a sly reference to 24, even though there was no torture involved. Blink was cool because it was one of those episodes which didn’t focus on the primary characters at all, and instead you get to see the weird havoc wrecked by the Doctor. They’ve done this once before and I think it has worked well in both cases.

Went to Aunty Joyce’s for afternoon tea today. My mum is still intimidated by her, which is kind of amusing. It’s nice to see her; I feel like seeing once somewhat estranged family fills in holes that are worth filling in. It also gives me hope. Tonight Don picked up this manual thingy and read the title: “A Practical Guide to SAX” only it sounded like “sex” to me so I asked “how practical is it?” SAX is the name of some hardware thingy that mum has at work.

Doctor Who, new series, second season, two part-er: “Rise of the Cybermen” / “The Age of Steel”: the tenth doctor and Rose visit a parallel universe where Great Britain is a republic and there are lots of airships, which gave the initial impression of being a Thursday Next rip off (it wasn’t but the coincidence is curious). Only I know it isn’t a real parallel universe because Mr. Spock didn’t have a goatee. You can’t fool me!