This year of Doctor Who has just been brilliant. Upon rewatching the season, I’m pretty confident in stating that this has been the best year since the reboot, and that Matt Smith (should he decide to stick around for a bit) is going to become the new icon of what the Doctor is (this title is still currently held by Tom Baker). Because I think everyone should be taken along on this ride, I’m not going to talk about anything past the first 15 minutes of the first episode.
Over the years I’ve found myself drawn to writers / actors that can use tempo as emotion, because there is a kind of power in it that nothing else delivers. The canonical example of this is MASH. Alan Alda would be chattering about at break neck speed about all manner of frivolity. You would get into the rhythm and speed and be carried along for the ride. And then, reality would hit, and he’d stop in an unexpected way in mid stride. This created an emotional lurch, like when you’re on a boat and it comes to a stop on the docks. Not many can pull this off in a natural way. Aaron Sorkin is the current American king of this, as embodied in Sports Night. And now with Steven Moffat in charge, and Matt Smith in the drivers seat, we get this in Doctor Who.
The keystone moment of all of this is the fish custard scene that opens up the season. Having just crash landed in 9 year old Amelia Pond’s garden shed, he asks little Amelia to give him an Apple, as he’s having a craving (“I think I’m having a craving. That’s new, I’ve never had cravings before.”). The moment he takes a bite he spits it out, and we end up with a brilliant montage through much of what’s in Amelia’s refrigerator, each with a slapstick like ending. He finally settles on fish sticks and custard. And then we get this:
Young Amy: I’m not scared!
The Doctor: Course you’re not, you’re not scared of anything! Box falls out of the sky, man falls out of a box, man eats fish custard! And look at you… just sitting there. So you know what I think?
Young Amy: What?
The Doctor: … Must be a hell of a scary crack in your wall.
Timed and delivered perfectly. And that sets the stage for the whole season.
So if you haven’t started watching Doctor Who yet, now is the time to start. And do yourself a favor and make sure not to watch the “Next Time” bits at the end of the episodes. They are now giving away far too much of the plot and ruining many of the surprises over the first half of each episode. We stopped watching those half way through the season, and that was a great choice.
On November 15, 2009 · Comments Off
I just finished Wil Wheaton’s Memories of the Future Volume 1, and hope that Wil get’s writting fast to get Vol 2 out there. This book is just too damn fun.
The book is an episode by episode look at Star Trek The Next Generation, wherein Wil provides a 6 – 8 page synopsis of the episode in the way that the Mystery Science 3000 folks would do one. It’s incredibly funny, and has lines like “well as long as we’re not advancing the plot, why don’t we do a pod race?”. For anyone that watched ST:TNG growing up, this book is a really amusing look back, especially on all the uneveness of the first season. Each episode also then has Wil’s favorite quote from it, the obligatory technobabble, and his personal memories of shooting the episode.
Vol 1 covers up through Datalore (the first 1/2 of season 1), and is constantly making comments about the disaster which is Angel One. I can’t wait for Vol 2 which is going to start us there take us to the end of season 1.
Wil is really an incredible writer, and his great sense of humor comes through in this book in spades. After reading Just a Geek in the spring, I was happy to pick this book up. Honestly, I found it hard to put down. It’s just too damn funny. If you had any opinion at all on ST:TNG (loved or hated), do yourself a favor and get this book. You will not be disappointed.
On October 22, 2009 · Comments Off
I just finished listening to the audio book of the Omnivore’s Dilemma, which was great, but I’ll get to that after a brief digression.
I’ve been listening to a decent number of audio books over the past few years, but until now I’d never heard the same reader in 2 books of different genres. In addition to being an excellent reader for this book, Scott Brick also read the most recent Dune books. So I was mildly distracted through the first couple of discs waiting for the words “kwisatch haderack” to come out of his mouth. I guess given the epic nature of this book, it was appropriate, but a little jarring at first. 
The Omnivore’s Dilemma is Michael Pollan’s big food treatise, which starts with a simple premise: trace the path of 4 meals produced in different ways from grown raw ingredients to the final meal to be eaten. As he states in the intro, it was originally going to be 3 meals: industrial, organic, and self supplied (for lack of a better term), but as he started investigating the organic industry, he realized there were really 2 camps there, the industrial organic and local organic. While the local food movement was still young in 2002, it was there, and presumably his book helped further it dramatically over the years.
There is so much in this book that is fascinating. The entire first section of the book, the industrial meal, dives into the absolute reliance of our modern food supply on cheap corn. How we got to having all this cheap corn, and the effect it has on the rest of the food chain is pretty amazing. The average american gets > 50% of his/her callories from corn. Either directly processed, or through meet that was fed cheap corn. Because industrial grown corn requires artificial fertilizer (which is petroleum based) you can calculate the gallons of oil required for a pound of corn, and even a pound of beef.
The industrial organic and local organic sections show a rich history of where the organic movement started, and where it’s ended up after scaling up to global levels. The juxtiposition of the two is amazing, and the exploration of ways to produce meat outside of the industrial system is quite compelling. You’ll learn more about the biology of many farm animals and grasses than you ever thought you would, and will be better for it.
Lastly Pollan addresses his final meal, where he is determined to grow, hunt, or gather every element of it. He makes an incredibly elaborate meal, including bread with air captured yeast, so he’s really pushing the limits as to what you can do in full hunter gatherer mode, and the results are impressive.
I would highly recommend this book to everyone. The writing style is great, and what you’ll learn along the way is invaluable to understanding many things. Why high fructose corn syrup is in everything? Why America is continuously going through food fads while the rest of the world is not? And why we spend so much of our energy on figuring out what to eat? Which is, of course, the Omnivore’s Dilemma.
I’ve been listening to Bill Bryson’s “A Short History of Nearly Everything” for the last couple of weeks, and this book is amazing. Bill Bryson, most known for various humorous travel books, turned his eyes on the history and progression of science. It’s a journey about what we know about the universe across many disciplines (astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, geology), and how we came to know that information. The narrative is very compelling, and often similar in style to James Burke’s Connections (so if you loved that, you’ll love this.)
He uses big questions to drive the narrative. The first of which is something that seemed like a simple question, “what is the age of the earth?”. It’s somewhat surprising to realize that our current answer of 4.5 Billion years wasn’t figured out until the 1950s, and that that discovery was intertwined with the discovery of a massive cover up in the lead production industry on the health effects of lead, and would lead to the banning of the substance for fuel and paint.
You get to see how the chains of science build upon one another, where a new better answer is made based on what came before, and how over time our methods continue to refine themselves. The stories on the feuds in the dinosaur hunting communities are incredible. It also goes to show that individuals shape history much more than they are often given credit for. This is even more true in the fields of science, where a new discovery or insight often opens up massive new industries or fields of study. None of modern gene sequencing and DNA analysis would be possible had not a curious researcher decided to take samples from Yellowstone’s hot springs and on a lark see if anything was alive in the boiling sulfuric waters. This is even more amazing given that conventional wisdom at the time assured that no life was possible there. Decades later we discovered that one of those microbes has a curious ability to crank out DNA copies, thus opening up the modern science of genetics.
I can’t say enough good things about this book. It is a perfect, digestible, approach to science literacy. Your understanding of the universe will be greatly enhanced in the process, and you’ll never quite look at a lump of dirt, a wispy cloud, or the night sky again.
