flashboy dot org

Fuck.

Humphrey Lyttelton’s dead. Awww, man.

So… who wants to play Mornington Crescent*?

I’ll start: Roding Valley.

* Zbigniew’s Variant (1974 Iteration)

Yes, yes, it was Horny Werewolf Day. Have this:

Let’s get one thing straight. Catherine Tate was, at least once upon a time, a very talented comic actress, with an impressive grasp of subtle character comedy and a flair for nuanced delivery. That was before she realised that she could become a lot more popular by turning into a shrieking, one-note catchphrase-spewing robot. Ever since then, she’s resembled nothing so much as a washing machine that’s got a bit of metal from someone’s pocket stuck in its workings, with the result that on every rotation it grinds out the same shudder-inducing, piercing metallic yowl at a frequency so horrifying that it leaves you with palsied fingers and a spine permanently bent into the shape of a normal distribution curve.

As such, it’s delightful news that we’re going to have to suffer her truly appalling, monotonous, charmless clot of a character, Donna, for an entire fucking series of Doctor Who. The dire Christmas special that she starred in wasn’t enough stunt casting, clearly. There’s no hope for respite, no faint glimmer of light on the character development front – it’s one of the two most striking flaws in Russell T Davies’s (otherwise wonderful) writing, that alongside his very poor world-building skills, he consistently seems to think that audiences will automatically find two-dimensional loudmouthed harridans utterly endearing. No, Russell. We don’t. Please stop.

Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuuuuuuck. I don’t want to look like I’m over-reacting to what is, after all, just a television show – but shouldn’t someone be asking questions in Parliament about this horrific shit? Like, whether we can re-introduce the death penalty for crimes of completely dicking up much-loved TV shows? Shouldn’t there be protests? Mass civil unrest? Riots on the streets? Effigies burning in central Cardiff? Rivers of fire and piss and blood? Wanton destruction? Phonecalls?

Or something. I don’t know.

FUUUUCK.

Just a quick note about a death. John M. Ford, science fiction writer. One of those small, briefly noted passings; one in which the suddeness catches you by the lee, as the unexpectedness of that new gap in your existence suddenly jolts you to care about it, even though you don’t know enough to know quite how to care about it. I’d never met the man, never corresponded with him – he entered my life simply as a erudite and witty commenter on another blog, and as the highlight of an otherwise pedestrian old S.F. anthology a friend gave me.

I perhaps wouldn’t even mention it, were it not for the fact that he wrote (over on Making Light, née Electrolite) one of my favourite pieces of verse. It’s excellent enough just standing alone; what gives it that extra boost into the realms of pure pleasure is knowing where it came from – a casual mention from another of seperate personal data points, leading to the observation that “If I were a better writer I’d conclude by yoking the trivial to the tragic, relating the twin inevitabilities of death and database error by means of a rhetorical figure involving worms.”

A few hours later, Ford produced the following sonnet. It seems fitting.

Against Entropy

The worm drives helically through the wood
And does not know the dust left in the bore
Once made the table integral and good;
And suddenly the crystal hits the floor.
Electrons find their paths in subtle ways,
A massless eddy in a trail of smoke;
The names of lovers, light of other days—
Perhaps you will not miss them. That’s the joke.
The universe winds down. That’s how it’s made.
But memory is everything to lose;
Although some of the colors have to fade,
Do not believe you’ll get the chance to choose.
Regret, by definition, comes too late;
Say what you mean. Bear witness. Iterate.

Drawn tonight at a MeFi meetup: