A New Universe

In a few weeks the title for this post might have another, hidden meaning... but for now, it's just referring to Marvel's third revival of their New Universe line.

New Universe was a line of comic books put out by Marvel in 1986, in honor of their 25th anniversary.  It was pretty much a sputtering, gasping failure from the beginning, but for me it was really cool... something that wasn't your regular spandex-clad super-hero fare.  I especially enjoyed Star Brand, a book that seemed to have a story arc, but I'm guessing like most things back then they were just winging it.  In 2006, probably to keep the trademark alive, Marvel let Warren Ellis revive the concept with his newuniversal mini-series.  It has been said that a catastrophic hard drive failure left WE with none of his notes on the series, which smells suspicious to me, but it was a great mini anyway, updating a nostalgic concept for more modern and engaging story-telling.

And now this.  Jonathan Hickman has taken control of Avengers and New Avengers, and has brought the NU into 616, or at least the concept of it (meaning the concept Ellis had fleshed out), and I am fucking hooked.  It's like the Godfather, just when I thought I was getting out of comics, they pull me back in.  I don't know yet if they're planning on incorporating NU stuff into 616, and after today's issue of Avengers I think they might not. But still, it's pretty awesome.  

(I will always lament that Kickers Inc. never got a second chance... super-hero FOOTBALL players fore hire?  Awesome.) 

When The Tripods Came... for him

a.k.a. his proper name, Samuel Youd

John Christopher, one of my favorite authors of the apocalypse fiction, has died.

I'm not going to recap his life... there are plenty of resources on the internet for that (although not nearly enough, in my opinion). I'm just here to express my grief on the loss of this author.

The Tripods

I guess I should just start out with what most people will be familiar with, his Tripods Trilogy (+1). Fanboys a little older than me probably read the first three books in grade school... they were common in libraries across the country. The White Mountains, The City of Gold and Lead, and The Pool of Fire tell of a world thrown back into the pre-machine ages, ruled by aliens who strode across the land in thrice-footed titans known as Tripods, who are also worshipped and loved by the populace thanks to a "cap" they place on humans upon reaching an agreeable age of maturity. Naturally, there are people who eventually rise up against this... the Freemen... and this is the tale of three young boys who join their camp and the fight against the tyranny of the Tripods.

Most of us either read these books in the school library, or the public library, or watched the BBC adaptations of the books on PBS and THEN read the books. That's how it happened for me. It didn't help that I had a crush on the actor who played Will (who looks disconcertingly like a young Paul McCartney).

This is the cover art from our library's copy.

I remember discovering the series on our local PBS channel, a branch of Kentucky Educational Television (KET), one Sunday morning. My brothers and even my sister were pretty captivated by it. Science Fiction? British? Sunday morning? Sign us up. Later I would see one of the books serialised in comic form in Boy's Life, but it was not as engrossing as the series. I sought out the books and of course raced through them, lamenting Henry's fate in the third book and eagerly awaiting the second series to see the alien Masters on screen.

In the 80s, for some reason, Youd penned a forth book, When The Tripods Came, a prequel telling of how the Tripods took over. They apparently used viral programming on television to do so, which was a bit prescient of how the internet would eventually help spiral popular things to the top of popular culture. When the internet finally started doing this, I noticed this similarity and thought it very peculiar. I wonder who really put that Hamster Dance online... Anyway, the book was a good chapter in the story, but it did feel kind of tacked on.... good, but unnecessary.

I liked how the books played as a comedy in the strictest terms, because, after the Masters were defeated and driven from the planet, humanity started its in-squabbling again. Oh humanity, will you ever learn? Yes, I view The Tripods ultimate as a comedy, in the strictest sense, because my actual favorite trilogy from Youd is very definitely a tragedy...

Art in the style of the Tripods, above...

It wasn't until I was an adult that I would come across many more John Christopher works. One that sticks with me is the Sword of the Spirits trilogy. It's a tragedy, in that our hero does not meet the best of fates at the end. Youd also manages to do something remarkable... he takes a likable protagonist, and through the course of three books, turns him into an absolute asshole without you really noticing it until the very end. Christianity also gets a very cold shoulder at first in the trilogy, being something to be ridiculed, but in the end it overturns the now-tyrant protagonist, who had become the aforementioned asshole. An awesome trilogy, with a very depressing end, that I can read over and over again.

The Lotus Caves

Youd wrote other stories as well, some quite well received, still. Probably the most famous is The Lotus Caves. It takes place on a Moon base. Humans are living there, squee, so it's already pretty fun from the start. Two boys hijack a go-cart and have an adventure in the moon mountains, only to discover a hidden cave where a Hive mind lurks, wanting to soak them in. Pretty gripping stuff for youngsters, lemme tell you.

But I don't think anything compares to his apocalyptic novel, No Blade of Grass.



I came across this very edition in a used paperback store in Lexington, KY, for only two bucks. I was elated when I realized what I had found... a JC novel I'd never read and knew nothing about... I knew I'd eat it up in mere days.

Kind of ironic, because the book is about the world starving to death. All grain based plants... meaning, most of them, fall ill to a virus, and the story follows a group of survivors trying to make it to one of their relatives' farms to live off of potatoes. The depravity they have to endure along the way is astonishing, when you consider when the book was published. It's my favorite John Christopher book of all, I have a first edition in storage even.

Anyway, it's not like I thought that he was going to write another book, but it is sad that he is gone. I wish they'd finished the Tripods on BBC for him.

Doctor Who Preview, The Wedding of River Song

It could just be Dress Like a Pirate Day...

(clicky the pic to embiggen)

So the Doctor Who fandom is having shouting matches all over the internet (I must say, polite ones) about theories on the Season 6 finale, and some of the theories make sense and others make my Flesh-boot Doctor seem genius.

Take the above photo. many questions are raised, such as:

1.) Why do River, Amy, and Rory all have Madame Kovarian eye-patches? What are the eye-patches for?

eye-patches are cool, that's why.

2.) Why are the Greys (not sure what to call them now since the race isn't really called The Silence or Silents) submerged in a tank of (presumably) water while all the other ones are running around free?

I'm moisturizing AND I'm doing the dishes... at the same time!

3.) What's up with Rory's get up here? Is this like an alternate time-line version of Rory, like the Micky who worked for an alternate universe's Torchwood?

Super-Rory? UNIT Rory? G.I. Rory? Hot Role-Play Rory?

4.) Are you seriously trying to get us to believe that the Doctor doesn't know how to knit already? What's he need anyway, a cozy for his sonic?

OMG They have a Hello Kitty section!

5.) But I think the most exciting is this photo, which really seems to bring it home that the Doctor ain't messin' about this time...

Hmmm. Well I think after the last episode's finale, everybody's pretty much agreeing that the eye-patch thing must be a way to circumvent the effect the Grey Silents have on you. Other footage from the show seems to suggest a splintering of time, with lots of historical events happening at the same time... as if all of history is taking place in the present. Hence the pterodactyl, the future pyramid thingy, the Romans still being around, and it'd even explain (kinda) how Dorium the merchant returns after being decapitated, but I bet they're going to explain that away with something cuter, like his race doesn't keep anything important like a brain in their head.

All in all it looks to be a very curious episode and could be incredibly good or incredibly awful. Just so long as it's not incredibly average.

Doctor Who Review: Closing Time

Closing Time was a pretty good return to form.

Next week, the Doctor travels to Lake Silenci...

...mmm? Yes, I know it's not much of a review, but while the show was good, it wasn't really much of a show was it? It was... good. It's like when I gave up reading Ultimate Spider-Man. It's not that it was bad... it was just more Ultimate Spider-Man. This was more Doctor Who, more of the character of Craig Owens...

he has a profile on biggercity.

Oh okay. So in the previous Craig Owens episode, chubby chasers finger-banged their poop-holes for an hour over James Corden, who portrayed The Lodger mentioned in the title, with his slight fuzz and chubby cheeks and omghessocute... Well. I gotta admit he's a nice looking fellah, but I've never been one to understand getting your panties all bunched up about movie and TV stars. Well in Closing Time, all those fanfic slash people who wrote about Craig and the Doctor hooking up so that one of them could sonic the other right in his TARDIS probably lost control of their bowels during this scene:

their love is so pure.

...in which the Doctor and Craig have instantaneously been transported into the Cybermen's lair only Craig doesn't realize it yet so the Doctor tries to distract him by feigning a sexual and love interest in his friend and asking if he could kiss him and kind of being absolutely dirty about it. I imagine their bladders also emptied when Craig didn't really fight him all that much.

Personally, the thought of snogging Matt Smith kind of makes me gag, but whatever, I've had worse I guess.

their crotches are really close there.

So they beat the Cybermen and the Doctor gives Craig and his annoying girlfriend (who are NOT married and have a baby, living in SIN) a new living room suite as a goodbye gift.

And then we get to the really good part of the show: one word... spoilers.

River Song, i.e. Melody Pond, Amy's daughter. We did see her parents in this ep, as the Doctor hid from them as Amy signed an autograph for a small fan. Why is she famous? She's the model for a line of perfume, for the woman who's tired of waiting. Cute. Anyway, River's just received her doctorate in (presumably) archaeology, when Madame Kovarian (sp? who the fuck cares) pays a visit. And is it just me, or does Madame Kovarian look like Captain Kathryn Janeway from Star Trek: Voyager?

separated at birth?

Anyway, my thoughts that maybe it was really Future Amy from the Girl Who Waited ep who was really in the astronaut suit was shot out of the sky, as MK and the greys (I guess we can't really call them the Silents or the Silence anymore) put River in it to set up the next episode.

BUT. I still have a theory. It's not really the Doctor who gets killed.

WELL... it is, but it's not. It's a Flesh doppleganger.

I know, I know... this is not a new theory. But what is new about it is how the Doctor-ganger survived his fate. I know plenty of fans think it's this fake doctor from the Rebel Flesh two- parter earlier in the season:

bowties are cool.

So we all think that the Doctor Two (I think that's cuter than Doctor-ganger) sacrifices himself at Lake Silencio so the real Doctor can live. But why? And how did the Flesh Dr. get there when we saw him discombobulate? And where is the Doctor's TARDIS in the first ep? And why was he driving an Edsel? Here, dear Dr. Who fans, are the answers to all of those questions.

1.) The Edsel is the TARDIS. The Doctor fixed the chameleon circuit for just this adventure. After all, a police box was a very British thing... if he was going to "die" in America, he'd need an American icon, and the Edsel is as good as any other transport... distinctly American, a thing out of time. And pretty fucking good looking too.

2.) Why does Doctor Two sacrifice himself? Because of two reasons. A.) the Doctor would, for him, in his place, but B.) because the universe needs to believe the Doctor is dead. So his huge legend dies with him and he is no longer a being who can stop a fleet of attacking invaders with a little speakerphone like he did at Stonehenge with the Pandorica.

3.) How did the Flesh Doctor survive? His shoes.

Remember, they changed shoes so they could fuck with Amy Pond and figure out more about The Flesh and her signal to it. They never changed back, did they? And those shoes the real Doctor were wearing were part of Doctor Two, and each cell of the Flesh contained his whole structure and stuff... you know, like stem cells. That one captain of the humans in The Rebel Flesh said that the Flesh can grow, it's cells can divide. The Doctor kept the shoes, put them in a safe place in the TARDIS, and regrew Doctor Two.

BOOM. Did I freak you out? ARE YOU TRIPPING BALLS NOW?

Anyway, we'll all find out next week when The Wedding of River Song airs... I'll hopefully be watching it from Missouri with Dale.

Military precision camping

Don't Ask Don't Tell gets repealed and it's already started...

Doctor Who Review: The God Complex

The God Complex. Considering what happens at the end of the episode, this one was really, really disappointing.

The problem really isn't the episode in and of itself. It's a perfectly fine but mediocre episode. There's nothing wrong with mediocre episodes. They have to happen eventually, even in a show that's been hitting it out of the park as much as Doctor Who has. The problem is that a very, very seemingly important thing happens at the end of the episode, and given the story arc we're in, it really changes everything about the show... and you wind up not caring nearly as much as you should.

Let's just recap what's going on. There's this guy:

On the DVD edition, George Lucas is going to dub in the minotaur screaming "NOOOOOOO..."

He's a minotaur, kinda. Later we find out he's very old, way older than the Doctor. He's been in his Labyrinth a long time, his "labyrinth" being a kind of holodeck version of an 80's American hotel with a seemingly infinite amount of rooms, each one containing somebody's personal scariest fear, such as:

Yes, some people shit themselves over clowns. I can understand that. I personally never was bothered by clowns, until working for a cluster of radio stations in Dallas. We'd changed formats of one of the stations to a Regional Mexican music channel, which meant to celebrate, we had an authentic (right) Mariachi band wandering the halls of the station playing La Cucaracha or some such stuff as loud as they could, and also wandering... or rather, stumbling... along behind them was a drunken Mexican clown.

Seriously, I could smell the tequila on him when I got off the elevator. They joined the mid-day guy in the on-air studio (which was adjacent to mine... they shared a window between them), and he did absolutely nothing but stand there, swaying and half-asleep, seemingly only kept on his feet by his handful of helium balloons.

Anyway, so each room is filled with a personalized horror for a future or current guest. Long story short, the Doctor finds other guests, hey what, I'll rescue you, bally ho the TARDIS has gone missing, oh did we mention the corridors change and you can't find an exit, and soon everybody starts dying.

This is me watching the episode.

After one particularly frustrating death for the Doctor, a Muslim nurse/medical student/something (I've not watched the episode twice so I can't remember) who was potential Companion material, the Doctor realizes that the creature isn't feeding on fear, it's feeding on faith, oh dear, Amy has too much faith in the doctor so she falls under the creature's spell, which is eventually broken when the Doctor admits he's not all that and a plate of chips after all, boom the monster is dying, everybody goes home.

Including Rory and Amy. Seems the good Doctor is scared that Amy might die during one of his adventures and he's eager to shove her and her husband out the door so they can get on with their life together. As a going away present he seemingly has acquired a blue flat for them (with TARDIS-blue door even) and a red Jaguar for Rory, which he eagerly accepts. He explains himself to Amy and then takes off, alone.

First off... really? NOW? This is the adventure that makes him say, "Whoa, I better stop while they're still alive!" NOT losing Amy in an alternate time stream and then having to kill her future self? Not fucking up their chance at parenthood by losing their baby so that they grow up together instead of raise her? Not Amy being held prisoner for HOW long while PREGNANT and replaced by a replicate? He kicks them out after this one and they don't get all up in his grill about it?

And the whole Amy's stolen baby storyline isn't even resolved yet. Really? That's how they want to end it?

We know they'll at least be back in the final episode, to answer the question about who shoots the Doctor at Lake Silencio (I still think Amy does... maybe even Future Amy... we never really saw her die, after all). But even if they are back in the TARDIS after next week's comedy relief return of Craig Owen (the lodger from the episode The Lodger), I still think it was a weak point to kick them out.

Mediocore episode. Big ending whose emotional impact was kind of quelled by it. Too bad.

Next week:


Closing Time!

Right, stop that, this is all too silly...

I know what you're thinking. I'm such a big fan of John Cleese, he must be my favorite Monty Python member. I love A Fish Called Wanda as well as Fierce Creatures and even Clockwise is in my collection, never mind the Fawlty Towers box set I bought the day it was released, I must love John Cleese above all others.

I'd be lying if I said John Cleese wasn't one of the funniest minds on the planet. He is. Trained to be a lawyer, I believe, which helped him with delivering lines properly when he joined Footlights and met Graham Chapman, his brief writing partner for the duration of the Monty Python TV show. But no. While John Cleese is one of my favorites, the one who always made me laugh the most was the late Graham Chapman.

From his autobiography, which I was lucky enough to find on bittorrent recently in audio form (oh yes, I know I can get it on Audible and pay for it, but if they insist on giving me a lower bitrate just because it's spoken word, they can fuck right off):

Graham - The Homosexual by tabkendouglas

I don't care if it's Eric Idle's joke there, the way Graham recounts it is hysterical. And every time I hear it I still laugh out loud. Even recounting one of his first meetings with then-drummer for The Who, the now-late Keith Moon, is pretty funny:

Graham and keith by tabkendouglas

The thing is, the autobiography isn't that funny... it deals with Graham's battle with alcoholism, and it's actually kind of one of the things that convinced me there is a big difference between an alcoholic and a drunk. Chapman's descriptions of what he went through during withdrawal, at times funny (like in the beginning, when common furniture seems to be attempting to punch him as he tries to do simple things like making it down the staircase), wind up being more sad than funny very early on. And of course there's the whole story of his coming to terms with his sexuality, which is surprisingly unfunny and stark. He pretty much said to himself, "Fuck all them if they can't deal with it, I'm not going to live a lie anymore." You have to applaud that, if you can't laugh at it.

In the end, though, he inspired as much comedy as he created. In fact, one of the funniest pieces from John Cleese was a eulogy he gave for Chapman himself... I can't tell you how many times I've watched this, and how many times I've known Chapman himself would have nodded with approval at it, puffing on his pipe to make people think he was brighter than he was. (He was extremely bright too... a licensed doctor, you know.)



From time to time I wonder what would have become of him if he'd lived as old as the other Pythons.

Doctor Who Review: The Girl Who Waited

Well, Doctor Who tried really hard this week to make me cry again, but it fell just short of the mark.


"The Girl Who Waited" is another rehash... much like "Night Terrors" was a sort-of rehash of "Fear Her" from the Tennant era, "Waited" could be seen as a reworking of "The Girl In The Fireplace."

Look, I like Jim Steinman. So even when it's an obvious rehash, I can't get upset, so long as it's not just a blatant rip-off. And this one didn't feel like it. It deals with two time streams running at two different speeds, much like the ones in "Fireplace." Amy is trapped in a hospital in a room that compresses time, causing her to live out her life in a day, a facility which was built for people who contract a heinous virus that kills them in a day. The Doctor and Amy's husband, Rory, are in another time stream, this one running at normal universal time, but they can communicate with Amy through a type of magnifying glass... one side shows one time stream to the other.

Basically the upshot is the Doctor locks onto Amy's timestream but things go all wobbly and pear-shaped, and they wind up thirty-six years into their Amy's future when they finally arrive to rescue her.


Amy lives in the Two Streams facility all this time, learning how to hack the computers, the robots that want to give her a "kindness" (euthanize her), and she basically becomes a badass warrior by the time Rory and the good Doctor show up. And she is NOT happy.

Even if this ep didn't get weepy towards the end, it would have been one of the most emotionally charged episodes of recent memory. Amy's anger at the Doctor is tangible, and when she interacts with her past self, her love for Rory seems real as well. Karen Gillian gives an incredible performance as young Amy and old Amy, both with radically different worldviews of their best friend and their true love.

At the end, the Doctor has said that he can save both Amy's (Amies?) but in truth he can't. The TARDIS starts to lose its shit as they both get closer... the paradox can't be sustained. Rory is able to carry young Amy, his Amy, into the TARDIS, but as he tends to his unconscious wife... the Doctor shuts the door in the face of old Amy.

That, dude, was cold.


And THEN he tells Rory, who is adamant that they can save both versions of his wife, that he needs to decide himself which one to save. And here come the hankies. The tender moment they share is heartbreaking, as future Amy says her goodbye, so that Rory's Amy can have all the days of Stupid-Face that she never had. It's a tragic moment. And punctuated as the Doctor callously walks off in silence to let Rory tell his wife that he killed her future self.

Frankly I'm starting to wonder why Rory and Amy are still with the Doctor. He's always being a bit of a cunt donkey.

But it was a wonderful episode. Next week?

Oh I WISH it was another Weeping Angels ep. We'll see how much of a role they play this Saturday night in "The God Complex."

The Texas Chainsaw Masscara

Yes, that's Leatherface. In drag. Leatherface, the transvestite. Leatherface, the big screaming girly femme transvestite. The tagline for this hot mess was "If looks could kill, he wouldn't need the chainsaw." Sometime in the early to mid-nineties, some movie execs looked over their pile of franchises and decided that The Texas Chainsaw Massacre needed a third sequel.

"How are we gonna make Leatherface scarier? Kids today are used to hack and slash."

"How about we make him a nelly, fruity crossdresser who screams all the time like a monkey being raped?"

"Awesome. Green-light."

"Shouldn't we write a script first?"

"You're fired."

My brother saw this one night on Chiller, watched about three minutes of it and was bored. I can't blame him. Most of the beginning of this horror show (and I say "horror" in the saddest sense) is about bored teens out on prom night walking through spooky woods. So he turned it off. Then he was curious about it and looked it up online, and holy shit what a clusterfuck of a movie. We got it from Netflix and watched it together.

It's so awful. But it has some good points. For example, if you hate Renee Zellwegger as much as most people do, you get to see her smacked around, electric cattle-prodded, punched, and tied up and thrown in the trunk of a car while stuffed in a garbage bag. It's almost worth it at that point. And if you ever wondered what all that jazz about Matthew McConaughey yelling at the sky in Texas and acting crazy naked banging bongos on his porch with a stoned out friend of his, you can easily imagine it after seeing his performance in this, as the patriarch of the homicidal family of maniacs. He hoots, he hollers, he punches women. Oh, and he has a bionic leg.

No, they don't explain that.

Anyway, you don't even need to watch most of this movie. Just put it in and fast forward to til you see this:

Yes, that's Leatherface (or as my brother calls him now, Purdyface) wearing a woman's skin and putting on lipstick. Oh, and you should see the pretty blouse he puts on. To be honest, he kinda looks like he's dressing up to go to a Halloween party as Julia Sugarbaker. Oooh! Maybe he'll do the "night the lights went out in Georgia" speech!

I should mention that there's actually precedent for having the killer play Pretty Pretty Princess like this... after all, the original movie was inspired by the story of Ed Gein, the Wisconsin murderer and body thief. Besides making a woman-suit out of corpses, presumably for a fancy-dress ball, he had a shoebox with nine pussies in it. I think the guy might have potentially been a tranny.

From this point on, the film is still a mess, but at least you can make fun of it... we literally had nothing to work with up til that point.

The coup de grace came at the end, though, when McConaughey's character dies after being buzzed by a random passing prop plane (and no explanation is given for that, either) and Purdyface absolutely loses his/her shit, swinging the chainsaw around in circles and screeching like Fran Drescher on a bad acid trip. My brother made the above LOLcap from the movie, as well as the one below, for my birthday:


Wasn't that sweet?

Oh by the way, despite the title... well, let's hope Purdyface's looks CAN kill... because nobody dies via chainsaw in the movie. The end.

Flying the Coop

Okay. Look at that album cover. Is it any wonder I was nervous about this album? It looks like somebody tried to update the classic, wonderful cover to Welcome to my Nightmare with a bad Photoshop job and Heinz Ketchup. So seeing this a month ago didn't exactly stoke my fires. Neither did having Bob Ezrin (who produced the original WTMN) do much... after all, didn't he produce Brutal Planet? Not a bad album, but just not Alice. Or, not the Alice I like.

I have to say, after listening to the album, I'm satisfied. It's half-awesome. Even when it falters, like the ballad (all AC albums have to have a ballad, you know), it's not horrible. And when it shines it's more earworm than those slugs they stuck in Chekov's ear in The Wrath of Khan.

Welcome 2 My Nightmare starts off in a very worrying manner, with the piano riff from Steven, one of Alice's seminal classics. Will this simply be a rehash, Jim Steinman style? No, soon it deviates from the original. In a way it reminded me of that one ST:TNG ep where Captain Picard fell for some piano-playing astrophysicist, and she came buy to jam with him and her roll-up keyboard, and they played with the melody of whatever that classic song was, too lazy to look up all the details right now. It's interesting, and forgiveable, as it's a link to the original album... and then Alice Cooper starts singing.

And he's auto-tuned.

Yes, the song I Am Made of You has Alice auto-tuned. Like Cher's Believe. Alice. Cooper. Auto-tuned.

And it works.

It's a very powerful song, and I just realized that it's pretty much Alice talking blatantly and forthright about being a Christian and what it's meant to him all these years. I guess all the years of the spam email chains of "Praise Jeebus, Alice Cooper is saved!" finally got to him. You know, I'm an atheist, but if Alice's Christianity can make a song this powerful and good, I don't mind one bit.

Besides, if anybody needed help singing, it's Alice. I mean, come on!

The next song, Caffeine, at first listen, was irritating as fuck. But on subsequent listens, it becomes... well, this album's frenetic Under My Wheels track. Pretty good, really.

Next is a revisit to Steven with The Nightmare Returns... you could say that Alice ran out of speed to stay awake, and finally he fell asleep in his Steven personna... and it revisits that motif and builds on it. While I didn't like this when I heard it by itself, on the premiere special for radio stations, I liked it on the album as a whole.

Next is probably this album's Some Folks... a Tom Waits sounding song, The Last Man on Earth. To be honest, it reminds me of the Heat Miser/Snow Miser songs from the Rankin/Bass animated special, The Year Without a Santa Claus. It's pretty awesome.

The rest of the album? I still need to listen to. The song Disco Bloodbath Boogie Fever, which includes Alice's attempt at (cough) rap music, was at first a real horror show. But now, it's kind of effing catchy. I've listened to it a few times. But I'm not sure I'd wanna see it live.

The album ends with an instrumental mashup of riffs from both the original WTMN and W2MN. An interesting piece, but only after you're familiar with the new album.

All in all... not as good as The Eyes of Alice Cooper. But still pretty damn good.

The Big Bang review

A review by kirkslashspock+++

Well finally, my Saturday nights are my own again. After finally getting employed at the radio station I started my career at (kind of), after a year of unemployment, I am once again laboring to "working for the weekend." Yes, that precious forty-eight hours of time-off is finally mine again... no weird scheduling, like some friends have, where there jobs of management require them to work odd hours (although, honestly, I would love to work second shift like I did in Portland, when they simply didn't have studio space for me until the morning show vacated around 2 p.m... there's plenty of studio space in the skeleton-crewed place I work now). No, I'm a Monday to Friday, eightish to fiveish regular Joe, one who for the first few Saturdays of being married to his new and underpaid ball-and-chain has been spending those Saturday nights glued to the bittorrent feeds waiting for the new Doctor Who ep to finish downloading.

The series started with a bang...



...whereupon the new Doctor, the very young Matt Smith, almost universally charmed the audience of old fogeys and newcomers like myself. I've only been really into The Doctor since David Tennant took the role. I watched Tom Baker when I could in the eighties, but far too often the bus driver taking us home from school would take the long way 'round to my place, and we would be stuck with just Addams Family reruns.

The season had been mostly hit and sometimes miss for me, with the return of River Song and the Weeping Angels two-parter being the highlight of the middle of it. I'm not sure why some Whovians felt such disdain towards the character... simply a fellow time traveller that knew the Doctor well, who just happened to be going the other way through time. What's the big deal? I thought the character was well thought out, and obviously writer (and now showrunner) Stephen Moffat knew exactly what he wanted from the character when he created her. I think perhaps it was even known back then that Russell Davies would be leaving and Moffat would be taking over... which is why they introduced such an important (to be, anyway) character in the fourth season, even if they did kill her off in a way.

The return of the Weeping Angels, however, was a thrill. They were how I got my little brother hooked on the show... I made him watch "Blink" with me and suddenly he was there when repeats were on, there to enjoy The End of Time and The Waters of Mars along with me. It's been a long time since we've shared a show together, so it kind of felt special to me. Then again we also watch Warren The Ape together, perhaps I shouldn't put so much empathy into that then.

And then there was the historical figure episode. Normally I do not look forward to these, and I did not look forward to Vincent Van Gogh warning of a deadly creature in a church a'la John Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness, but the creature itself was barely a blip on the radar compared to the examination of the tortured Van Gogh (who I shall now always pronounce as "Van Goff" rather than the American "Van Go"). For one thing, it would appear that Van Gogh, in this imagining, has a bit of synesthesia... that is, one sensory perception, say how you look at color, can be represented by another, such as taste or smell. In the case of Van Gogh, he didn't just see a black night sky... in one amazing scene with The Doctor and Amy lying in a field with him, he helps them to see the sky as he sees it, awash with deep blues, pitch blacks, lighter shades of lavender, and the stars aren't merely bright pinpoints but swirling explosions of color and light... slowly the sky morphs into the Starry Night painting. Awesome scene.

But that wasn't even the best. So far Doctor Who's revitalization has made me almost cry twice. Once was in Blink, when Sally Sparrow, who keeps receiving messages from the past from people who used to be in her present, meets detective Billy Shipton. I can't recognize Billy's accent, it doesn't seem Jamaican but it definitely isn't English. But he is sweet on Sally, and when he tells her that she's not seeing the big question about her little mystery, she asks him what it is.

"Would you have a drink with me?" "What?" "You, me, drink?" It's a very sweet scene, where he tells her that he's knocked off of work and wants to ask her out because "Life is short and you are hot." Normal rambunctious hormones, yes? He gets a phone number for his troubles... not a promise, just a phone number, before she leaves and the Angels steal his potential time energy to feed upon, whipping him into the past, where he's found by the Doctor.

Although only minutes have passed for Sally, the next time she hears from Billy he is an old man. He had to take the long way through time to contact her again, living live from 1969 to present day 2007 the old fashioned-non-Tardis way. Like Sparrow's friend who was also zapped by the Angels, Shipton lived his life, married, and now at his old age is facing his final day of life, and he's using it to help Sally solve her mystery and help the Doctor. He takes her hand and says, "Life is long, and you are hot..." and dude, I almost lose it every time. Every single time. Sally just met this man that she was obviously a little taken with, and now he's going to die, old and broken. Billy has waited his entire life to have one final moment with a girl he never really knew. THAT IS THE SADDEST THING EVER. But it is also part of one of the best time-travel stories ever, and that's why I love it and love this show.

The other time it's nearly made me cry was when the Doctor, knowing that even with the grande adventure they've had with Van Gogh, he was still going to commit suicide, decides to give him one final hurrah... he takes him to a Paris museum, this drunk of a man who couldn't sell a painting in his lifetime, and lets him stand among his works as dozens of admirers coo and gasp at his artwork. Then he has the curator say some of the most awesome things about Van Gogh, just within earshot of the artist, and to watch this man who was never appreciated in his lifetime come to realize the lives he'd eventually touch with his art, the one thing he could cling to and know was real to him when nobody else cared... it was one of the sweetest moments in TV for me for a long time.

Certainly better than that damn glowing fairy pond in LOST anyway.

The season finale was a doozy. In any other show, indeed even Doctor Who past, I would cry foul at the use of time travel in the manner that it's presented here, but it's obvious they've been setting us up for this the entire time. The useage of the Vortex Manipulator to hop through time and enter previous episodes to set up sequences would be a cheat if they had not actually set those sequences up. The talk with Amy in the forest, especially, was something fans had figured out way before the finale popped up. And I didn't quite get it, at first, but after my second viewing, I don't see how Amy remembering the TARDIS for her wedding (old, new, borrowed, blue) was at all a cheat. The entire episode hinged on her memories. It was perfect. Best season finale so far for the show. And such a happy one... Rory and Amy married, going off with the Doctor for more adventures. These are new times we live in, and I am glad Doctor Who is turning out to be such a crowd pleaser.

Now if we can just figure out what role River Song is to play... is she a good witch, or does her bank account go up by thirty pieces of silver next season? We get to find out for sure, according to Moffat...

The Big Bang... Doctor Who finale

For once in my life, I don't want to read any spoilers at all. I will be glued next to the computer refreshing the screen until the bittorrent is posted. This promo from BBC doesn't have anything we didn't see in part one.

The Dalek's entry in the Hitchhiker's Guide

Talk about a well done slab of fried gold... this mashup between two sci-fi universes continues to make me giggle.

Iron Man 2: Demon in a Bottle

I gotta say, I loved Iron Man 2.

I'm glad Marvel kept Favreau as the director. Unlike Michael Bay, who tries to emulate the "actors talking over each others' lines because that is how people talk in real life" style of acting, Favreau does it right and it doesn't seem too fake. It only seems fake in that nobody is that witty that much of the time. It's not as bad as a Kevin Smith movie, I mean.

The sequel avoids the pitfalls of some super-hero genre, wherein there are simply too many villains. In fact, I think there's a perfect proportion of villains... the Whiplash Drones and Whiplash himself. I guess Justin Hammer can also be considered a villain, buthe's not suited up, so he doesn't really count.

They did, however, go kind of overboard with the heroes. Iron Man, War Machine, Black Widow, Sgt. Fury... the thing they did well to balance this is avoid having to really explain the characters. Even if you didn't see the first Iron Man, Nick Fury's character explains himself through his actions. Black Widow does as well... in fact, I don't think they ever really use her code name, do they? You don't need to know her comic book history to know she's a fucking badass chick who will eff your ess up if you're in her way.

But what I loved most about IM2 was, in fact, it's portrayal of Tony Stark's alcoholism. It was so hysterical.

I should perhaps at this point say that Stark didn't seem like an alcoholic so much as a drunk, to me. And there is a big difference. I should know, because I wanted to get treated for alcoholism at one time, convinced I was one, until they started questioning me. it was pretty funny. I was in the hospital to have my gall bladder taken out, when I was asked if I had any other problems they should know about. I said immediately, alcoholism and depression.

Well, first they started asking me about my depression. How often do I hear voices talking to me? Telling me to do things I know are wrong? Uh, none. What? And then things like, do you ever harm yourself on purpose, like cutting yourself with a razor? --Really? No. I don't do that. I pick at scabs but that's as bad as I try to hurt myself, and I'm really not trying to hurt myself there, they just fucking itch. Anyway, all the depression questions went along this line, making me realize that people with depression are fucking crazy, God bless them and all and I hope they get the help they need. I wasn't one of them.

Then came the alcoholic portion of my treatment. They told the nurses to be prepared for when I get "the shakes." The what? Shakes. You start to shake uncontrollably from withdrawing from alcohol. I do? Yes, when did you last drink? Uh, a week ago, before this gall bladder shit started up. You've not drank in a week and you're not having withdrawal? I guess not. Do you want a drink now? Not especially.

So I came to realize that I wasn't an alcoholic, and that I was just stupid and didn't know when I'd had enough to drink. That's a drunk. And I feel now that you really should pity alcoholics. True alcoholics really can't go without a drink... believe me, if the way they described the symptoms, I'd keep a bottle on hand for emergencies too. They're not getting a real choice to drink. Drunks, however, always choose to drink. They know they might have a hangover, or puke, or something the next day. They choose to do that.

Anyway, this is all backstory to talk about how I love how they displayed Tony Stark's drinking problem. I say this because I think drunks are a more widespread problem than alcoholism. I only know like one real alcoholic. He literally can't function without drinking, or at least, he used to not be able to. Now drunks? I know drunks. I grew up in Kentucky, after all.



Tony Stark had a battle with the bottle, and they laid the groundwork for that in this film with the scene with DJ/AM. In the above shot, you can see a clearly disheveled Tony Stark with the DT's, sweating like he's in Hotlanta during sweat season, unshaven, and worried about something. Is this an alcoholic, as they're trying to portray with the whiskey bottle next to his left hand? No, it is not. If he was alcoholic, that bottle wouldn't be nearly as full. And he wouldn't be worried about whether his multinational is going to collapse from his drunken neglect (after all, he does still have Pepper Potts to run the thing). No, he's a drunk, realizing that he's really fucking his life up getting so drunk all the time. Big difference.

Anyway, I've always wanted to see the scene that regular people see with the drunks in their lives, regarding Iron Man, which they showed as Stark doing all sorts of repulsor stuff while intoxicated. That was awesome... that's exactly how it would be. An alcoholic? God, Stark would kill himself after one week in the armor. But a drunk? Yeah he'll be repulsoring expensive champagne thrown into the air by chesty babes, trying to dance to DJ/AM's phat beats, etc. This is what he was... Stark was a drunk, NOT an alcoholic. An alcoholic would only look that way if the whiskey bottle was nearly empty and the stores were all closed.

But it could get a lot more realistic than that... like, he shows up to a fight with Kang The Conqueror, the time travel terrorist, he's LATE and besides that flying erratic with only one boot jet working because he's still too drunk from the night before to lace the other one up properly. And everybody on the Avengers team just GROANS knowing that he's three sheets.

"Oh, Gods," Thor would say, praying to the one-father Odin for an intervention. Captain America would simply shake his head in disapproval, being the epitome of a Boy Scout. The Wasp would make some quip, "Really, Tony, again?" And Kang would be all tough and shit. "Drunken sow! You complete my ultimate plan! Now I will use you for my foil to undo the" blah blah blah, whatever Kang, you always lose.

Or... Stark showing up in the Iron Man armor on top of the Golden Gate Bridge's arches, repulsoring pigeons and peeing on the cars below.

Or Stark standing down The Mandarin and his ten rings, only to puke in his own helmet uncontrollably as Mandy gets away. "Just... glug... just give me a minute... oh gawd..."

Anyway, the movie was awesome, you should go see it.

What Lost Did Tonight

So just imagine you're hanging out in Hollywood or something, celebrity-spotting, when up walks your favorite, LOST. "Oh, hi LOST, I love your show, I can't wait to see how it ends!"

LOST smiles at you and nods and is very nice in general. "What are you looking forward to the most?" he asks.

"Oh, I just can't wait until you explain the mysteries. I know you're not going to explain everything, but I just can't wait to find out the backstory on Jacob or Smokey or the island..."

And LOST says, "Hey that's great." He shuffles a little closer and whispers, "Would you like a preview of it?"

"WOULD I? OMG I have to tweet this," you say, and in your hurry to Tweet "Met MiB in Pinkberry's, getting dish on next ep now," you fail to notice that he's leading you into the bathroom. "Lay down on the floor please," he says, holding a medical chair that looks suspiciously like something an infant would toilet-train with, only adult sized.

"Why?"

"Come on, don't be a spoil sport. Just lie in the floor." Not being a fool, you are able to put some puzzle pieces together and you say:

"I don't think you're going to explain anything. I think you're just trying to shit on my face."

LOST looks at you, aghast. "Shit on your face? Pishtosh, nothing of the sort. Now come on, lie on the floor." And so, you lie on the floor, because you REALLY want to know about the number sequence and what about the sideways universe anyway. And when you're lying on the floor, he puts the toilet trainer right over your face.

"Wait a minute! You're trying to shit on my face!"

LOST's face comes into view of the toilet seat, saying "Nothing of the sort! Don't be silly. Now close your eyes." You close your eyes and you hear the curious sound of a belt buckle being undone and pants being unzipped.

"HEY! You're about to shit on my face!" "Nothing of the sort! I'm just getting comfy. Why are you so jumpy?" "Because you want to shit on my face, you do!" "Nonsense, I've put on weight and just need to adjust my pants is all." And then LOST sits on the toilet-trainer seat, his naked, hairy and smelly ass mere inches from your face.

"You ARE trying to shit on my face! I can smell your ass!"

"My goodness, you simply have no patience do you! Does little baby want his bottle?" LOST continues to tease you until you're embarrassed into silence, reminding you that all your LOST friends are going to ridicule you when they find out you met LOST in Pinkberry's and you could have learned all the important secrets but you couldn't keep quiet. You acquiesce, and lay in wait for the knowledge to flow.

AND THEN LOST SHITS ON YOUR FACE.

As LOST leaves the bathroom you yell at him, "Hey, no fair! You said you weren't going to shit on my face! Well what do you call that?"

And LOST replies, "The Aristocrats!" *snaps fingers*

That's what LOST did tonight.

Doctor Who Two

Woo hoo! "Common / People" is a finalist for the CJA's! I feel a little down that the Body/Buffy mashup didn't make it, but okay. It's an honor to be nominated, I guess...

...except that, if this musical Dr. Who video is any indication of the rest of the entrants, I don't think I have a chance...



I especially love the Weeping Angels/Madonna bit at the end. I mean, I like my little animated slashfilm, but damn, THAT was a lot of work. Somebody's got a TB drive to rip stuff to.

But I digress, this post was really just an excuse to not strut about with my chest puffed out like a rooster showing off his feathers, but to talk about how deliriously much I love the new take on Doctor Who by Stephen Moffat.



See that promo? It's kind of crap. It didn't really inspire me to think we'd be seeing anything worth paying attention to, not after David Tennant's incredible run as the tenth Doctor. But after just one episode, I was won over.

Of course, I immediately had to download it as soon as it was available, like many here in the States. The thought of waiting two weeks to see how absolutely horribly they'd screwed up the Doctor was like a death sentence. No, we needed to know NOW how bad it was. And then the reviews came out.

"Pretty good" and "Fantastic" and "Totally won me over" were common phrases, with a few die-hards moaning about the theme music ("They've ruined a classic," please, it's not like they got Lady Gaga to remix it or something... hmmm now there's a thought) or just spoil-sports all around about how things just haven't been the same since Pertwee or Baker or whoever your favorite Doctor was.

I expect every time they change actors, you have to deal with this, but when the original Doctor Who's run stopped you had to actually listen to these people in person at the comic book shop or at the science fiction convention you were attending and what not. Now it's all-pervasive... you can't log on to one of your sci-fi interest sites without a deafening din of outraged or delighted fanboys/girls demanding justice and/or squeeing messily about how great/awful the new thing you used to like is.

So I admit, Matt Smith, in promo pics, wasn't doing it for me. He looked too strange. Out of a lineup of possible Doctors, I doubt I would have picked him. But the first episode, "The Eleventh Hour," hooked me from the very beginning of the show, and never let go.

I won't recap it, because if you care you've seen it and already dismissed or lauded it as a failure/success. I loved it. Sure, the next couple of episodes were kind of light... Starship UK was kind of a so-so mediocore DW ep, and the new Daleks were obviously just a setup for something further down the road. But then "Time of the Angels" aired, and anything I might have been holding back, dreading, were all let go.

I make no apologies that my favorite episodes of the new run of Doctor Who are the more silly ones, totally deus ex machina at the end and such. But my favorite episode so far? "Blink," with the Weeping Angels, a new and terrifying enemy who, by their nature, will probably always lend themselves to thrilling episodes, as long as they're not overused (I'm looking at you, Daleks).

"Blink" was not only one of the best Doctor Who episodes, but it was one of the best time travel stories I've ever watched. While Time Travel is at the core of the Doctor Who mythology, it's not really used all that much except to set up each story, but in this one it was woven into the story perfectly. The Doctor and Martha, trapped in the past without their Tardis, must set up a series of events to give a message to a person in the future that will ensure that the person not only escapes a nasty fate, but provides them with information about the very event they're warning her about somewhere in their past timeline. Genius.

Anyway, the two parter reintroducing the Weeping Angels to DW was simply phenomenal, although I think Brits liked part two a little more than I did. In a very weird turn, I think part two needed more obvious explanation about how things happened, but it was great. And I take back what I said about Matt Smith before; he may be weird looking, but he is an awesome Doctor Who.

Although I still think he has awful hair.

Creative Junkyard Awards

Hoping that one of my two mashups will win something in an online competition...

Of course there's the Common People one...



And then there's the Buffy/Sheryl Crow mashup...

Big Man Japan

I am so totally first in line for this movie.

STAR TREK, a review by Kirkslashspock

In high school, if you knew me then, you'll probably remember that I was a bit of a science geek. Not just a science fiction geek, but a science geek. In fact, bathroom reading material right now includes physicist Michio Kaku's last book about impossible (and possible) science fiction concepts, and astronomer Phil Plait's book about how our planet is a fragile little thing in this cosmos that could succumb to everything from gamma ray bursts following a local supernova to comets smashing into the earth to unlikely events like alien invasions and the like.

So naturally the only thing that really bothers me is the science. Oh ho, you're bothered by the science in Star Trek NOW? Well, I was then, but I didn't think JJ Abrahms was going to play so loose with concepts and terminology. For example, to try not to spoil anything, there was a part where a character was describing a supernova (exploding star) that was 'a threat to the galaxy...'

Here, we tread into the dangerous mistake of confusing what a galaxy is and what it isn't. For example, our sun and the planets around it aren't a galaxy. They are a solar system. A system with two suns is a binary system, and one with three is a trinary. But they aren't galaxies.

Let's quote Monty Python here to describe the Milky Way Galaxy that our planet resides in:

"The galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars; it's a hundred thousand light years side to side.
It bulges in the middle, fifteen thousand light years thick, but out by us it's just three thousand light years wide.
We're thirty thousand light years from Galactic Central Point, we go 'round every two hundred million years,
And our galaxy is only one of millions and billions in this amazing and expanding universe..."

So, basically, one sun exploding isn't going to take out the galaxy. The galaxy is big. Really big. Now, a supernova can theoretically kill a lot of life in a wide area thanks to the Gamma Ray Burst it generates, but the whole galaxy? Not even remotely impossible.

There were all sorts of little science facts like this, avoidable ones that could have easily used the conceit of science fiction to get away with a lot of this, but they didn't seem to even try it as much as they are trying to do it on Lost. Frankly, I thought Scotty would pull out a fairy wand at one point when teleporting people onto ships going at warp drive or the main villain using Magic Ragu Sauce to destroy a planet.

But, I liked it.



It did seem a little too much like STAR TREK: THE WRATH OF SHAKEY-CAM at some points, or STAR TREK: THE SEARCH FOR LENS FLARES, but even once you get past the prettiness of the new ship and the awfulness of Chekov's voice, and the plot holes you could drive a Klingon Bird-of-Prey through, it was a really fun film. I've always felt that the film version of these characters from the Original Series were New Takes on those characters. Sure, they had the same flavor as The Original Series, but they felt different. More adult for their time, perhaps.



In much the same way, Zachary Quinto's take on Spock is much the same, as are most of the rest of the cast's performances. I wish we'd seen more of Simon Pegg's take on Scotty, but in the movies Scotty really only had one or two good scenes per movie.



Still, it's an interesting thing, this reboot. What will the sequel be? The Wrath of Khan? How can we have TWOK without having Space Seed first? It'll be interesting to see if they screw this up further or if they keep it alive.

But I'm not buying any toys.