I'm off on holiday...

Guess where?



See you on May 14th when I get home.

Doctor Who: The Sontaran Strategem

I was going to say 'nothing happened', but things did happen, they just happened SLOWLY. The reason why became abundantly clear at the end of the episode where it turned out that this was a two-parter, when at a guess there is only enough material to cover one and a half episodes, if that. Hence for example the interminable scene where the two guards (Dumb and Dumber) went into the Sontaran lair and stood around discussing the fluorescent green clone pool for an inordinately long time. (Although I did love the line "My legs! I can't move my legs!", last heard in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, another creature-in-vat-of-slime movie, and therefore surely a deliberate kitsch homage.) Also, a lot of the stuff that did happen was fatally bland. I mean scary satnav, really? And all that poison gas being spewed out of car exhaust pipes without actually poisoning anybody. Not for one second did I believe that the planet or any of our favourite characters were at risk. Even poor Grandad in the car - um, break a window?

Still, there were redeeming features. Donna is one hell of a smart cookie and I like her growing habit of taking the initiative and figuring stuff out by herself. She had the bulk of the decent lines, she didn't get captured, and she got to drive the Tardis! Get in! And the Sontarans are blissfully idiotic villains who look stupid, act stupid, and can be defeated with a shuttlecock. I liked them a lot, though I do hope they weren't supposed to be frightening.

Hard to say without seeing next week's, but my guess is that this could have been a somewhat rushed but entertaining one-parter or a wrist-slitting crawler of a two-parter. I know which one I would have preferred, and it's the one I didn't get.

When Computerised Recommendations Go Wrong

Witness.

Elfin Agent of Genius

Looky look! I have been longlisted for the Desmond Elliot prize! Very exciting, it is my first one. I am not at all sure how I ended up on a list with books like The Outcast and Random Acts of Heroic Love, it is making me feel a bit vertiginous. According to the site -

Reflecting the overall high quality of writing on the list, Nikita Lalwani’s novel, Gifted, has already been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award and the Glen Dimplex Fiction Award 2007; The Outcast by Sadie Jones has been shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction; Random Acts of Heroic Love by Danny Scheinmann has been selected for the Richard & Judy 2008 Book Club; and Adam Foulds, author of The Truth About These Strange Times has recently won the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year 2008.

Put it this way: only three books get on the shortlist and I am not picking out my dress for the ceremony just yet. But never mind! If I was going to get nominated for any prize, I'm glad that it was this one. The award is named after the Desmond Elliot who is described on the website as the "elfin agent of genius". From the site biog:

Desmond Elliott was ageless and, when he died, in August 2003, it seemed impossible that he could be 73. “A dapper little elf”, he was five-foot-nothing, always stylishly dressed in Brooks Brothers’ boyswear and with a mischievous twinkle in his faded denim-blue eyes. Waspish, witty, an uncanny mimic and a sometimes outrageous raconteur, he told endless stories against himself but wasn’t above bitching about some of his peers. And he always enjoyed a good feud: “I believe it is really important to have one or two really influential enemies. They tend to talk about one to all the right people.” [...]

As his authors grew rich, so, too, did Desmond, who quickly learned to enjoy his success. He drank only champagne and bought his groceries at Fortnum & Mason, “the local corner shop”, where he had a charge account and treated its St James’s Restaurant like the office canteen. [...] The Connaught and the Ritz were also favoured venues, but “travelling west of Marble Arch gives me a nose bleed”. When he flew to New York, it was always on Concorde and, once there, he exchanged his Mayfair bachelor pad (complete with kitchen trapeze) for a Park Avenue apartment."

It is a point of great pride to be associated with someone who owned a bachelor pad with a kitchen trapeze. I don't care that a kitchen trapeze is probably some kind of sling for hanging your saucepans off, I am imagining a team of performance dwarves doing acrobatics above my head as I burn the toast.

The only disappointment is that as a nominee I don't get to meet the marvelous-sounding but sadly deceased Desmond Elliot - the man who discovered Jilly Cooper, no less - but I am honoured to be listed for his prize. I will of course keep you posted on the shortlist and the eventual winner.

In case you're wondering why I'm not blogging much...

...I'm in the library. The books don't write themselves, unfortunately. Not without really expensive software.

Surely I can't actually be 32.

Doctor Who: Planet of the Ood

Another good one! And then I remember: this is how they all used to be, before that very dodgy Season Three.

Pitch dark this time, very very disturbing. I was quite upset after watching it. Not sure what young children would have thought of the whole slavery theme and the massive body count but I was quite moved. I'm enjoying Donna's continued character development as a deeply compassionate and intelligent woman (I feel like they are giving her a lot of what would normally be the Doctor's lines - eg about the Ood carrying their brains in their hands) and also David Tennant's hair's continued character development as modernist sculpture. Plus it's a welcome respite from all the 'aren't humans great' nonsense that has dogged Tennant's incarnation. I liked the revisiting of the Ood story, as they were pretty let down by the Doctor's last appearance. I experienced much retrospective guilt.

A somewhat frustrating episode though, as it would have been brilliant if some clangers hadn't let it down: man being killed by being absorbed into giant Ood brain? Company director gets turned into an Ood by drinking lots of Ood juice (shades of Human Dalek here, if we didn't all know that Human Dalek was a collective hallucination that *never happened*)? And such a wasted opportunity with the Doctor being chased by a giant claw which would have been a lot scarier if what we'd seen hadn't mostly been gurning man wiggling old skool joystick, as opposed to, say, CLAW. Also, I am already bored of the disappearing bees.

Still, it was properly nasty, and actually rather thought provoking. Three out of three!

The Joys of Compilation

I love making compilation CDs [would love making compilation CDs if it were legal]. It is one of my favourite things to do [or would be, if it were legal], particularly when I [would] make one [if it were legal] for a friend who I have made [in my head] many for before and whose taste I am starting to nail. Like my best friend whose birthday was yesterday and who I am spending the evening with tonight, watching the Kids from Fame. That's all the clues you're getting as to her taste, but even so, what do you think of the following CD [that I would have made her, if it were legal, but it isn't. What do you take me for?]

1. Yesterday Once More / Carpenters
2. Theme from Valley of the Dolls / kd lang
3. Fairest of the Seasons / Nico
4. Quelqu'un M'a Dit / Carla Bruni [yes, that Carla Bruni]
5. Does He Love You / Rilo Kiley
6. Fuck You / Haley Wojcik
7. 9 to 5 / Dolly Parton
8. My Name Is Tallulah / from Bugsy Malone
9. Guilty In Here / Miranda Lambert
10. My Boy Lollipop / Barbie Gaye
11. Girls On The Beach / The Beach Boys
12. And Your Bird Can Sing / The Beatles
13. I'm Gonna Sit Right Down And Write Myself A Letter / Madeleine Peyroux
14. The Circus Is Leaving Town / Isabel Cambell & Mark Lanagan
15. I'll Kill Her / Soko
16. Art Bitch / Cansei de Ser Sexy
17. The Dark of the Matinee / Franz Ferdinand
18. Raspberry Beret / Prince
19. Diana Ross / The Concretes
20. Tears Dry On Their own / Amy Winehouse
21. Yes / McAlmont and Butler

Is there anyone on earth aside from me who actually likes all of those songs? By the way, four of them are taken from compilations that friends who are also blog readers [would] have made me [were it legal], can you guess which? No cheating if you are the blog readers in question.

Further

A friend of mine called me today to tell me that he'd been shat on by a bird too. Epidemic?

I forgot to blog yesterday

and now it's tomorrow.

All I had to tell you was that a bird pooed on the back of my head at the train station, and I had to get a total stranger to wipe it off with a tissue. That could wait, right?