Blog, Damn You! BLOG!!!

That's the trouble with getting a social life and meeting people on a regular basis, not to mention getting therapy. You run out of things to say and inclination to blog. So, after reaching the Official Lowest Ebb Ever last Thursday where the sheer ability for me to click "publish post" is an intellectual feat worthy of Ralph Wiggum successfully performing experimental keyhole surgery, here is my struggle to find something worth mentioning. It's kind of like Twitter except not so utterly pathetic. Yeah, you heard me right the first time, you monosyllabic gruntfuttocks - Twitter is doubleplusungood and is dumbing you idiots down so you will no longer pose any intellectual threat. Assuming of course you ever did.

THINGS TO THINK UPON

* That's my dad and two aunts clear of brain tumors. So, genetically, I'm a safe bet. I need to find some other excuse for my antisocioathy mysanthropic depression, don't you know?

* I am really, really sick of the election coverage.

* Also, Mark Latham is a diseased tool.

* Which is the better regeneration for the First Doctor? The one we can't see on TV or the version DWM tried to sell us? In a dialogue free sequence, our hero lurches around drunk, falls over, turns into someone else as his two companions we hardly know bitch about how unlikely this is until the Second Doctor wakes up and tells them to keep the noise down? Or the Doctor dying in some meadow somewhere, regenerating, and immediately stealing an ambulance for the sheer hell of it?

Here's the surviving test footage and everything.

* They are selling Ninja Turtle toys at Toys R Us. Specifically the SAME action figures in the SAME packaging they were doing in 1990. Thank god they were next to Star Wars prequel playsets, Shrek outfits and Doctor Who The Time Wars boardgame to reassure me I had not slipped a groove in time. BTW, no crowns there. Just fire helmets. Stupid anti-monarchist agenda.

* Sherlock is genius. Get it any way you can. Be warned, there's a cliffhanger and given the fact it's co-authored by Moffat and Gatiss I think we can be forgiven for thinking the final stand-off between Holmes and Moriarty was seemingly written for Matt Smith and David Tennant respectively. We also get some metatextual karma as, after decades of the Master being supposed to be James Moriarty, we get a Moriarty clearly based on the Saxon Master. Mind you, there seemed to be a bit of Graham Norton thrown in to. One downer was the epic confrontation between the geniuses was in some respects a wee bit too similar to my planned conclusion to The Rise of the Big N. That's not any kind of "they're ripping me off" rant, just a complaint they did it better than I ever could. Damn them.

* In Party Animals, one recurring gag was "Fuck A Torrie Week". Whenever the character's mentioned it, it took me a moment to realize they weren't talking in Maori.

* I really like Tamsin Drew, the Eighth Doctor's newest companion. Basically if Donna Noble had never had to put up with Sylvia the Bitch Queen of Death (and gone into acting rather than secretarial work) she'd be like Tamsin. They even go to the trouble of getting someone from The Catherine Tate Show to play her. It's quite a novelty to have the Eighth Doctor being accompanied by someone normal for once, rather than Edwardian Adventuresses, psychotic lizard monks, or Lucie bleeding Millar. The latest story began with the Doctor showing Tamsin around the TARDIS. Lame, you might think, until you realize the Eighth Doctor's never done this with any companion before. Ever. Plus, Tamsin loves cats. She's cool.

* Waterloo Road continues to make me boggle at the insane shit it can come up with. In the one episode I missed, an American conglomerate of hardline fundamentalist Christians (ones who insist dinosaur skeletons are actually dragons who were killed by the Great Flood) buys the school just as an international drug cartel arrives and starts selling cheap and lethal smack via cunningly disguised burger vans in the playground. After three pupils are dead of an overdose, the Christians and the drug dealers went to war in the playground and three teachers were taken hostage. The principal declared he would negotiate and the teachers were either killed or maimed, the dealers and the Christians wiped themselves out and the principal got a medal for bravery when he bragged to the police what he did. And that's the episode I missed.

* The other day's episode was even more retarded. Imagine a crossover between Double the Fist and Mr. Gormsby. In a desperate attempt to get more funding, the principal decides to allow disabled students into the school starting with a girl with aspergers' syndrome. He finds out at the last minute that she is prone to violent anxiety attacks and I mean VIOLENT. Thus, the principal decides on a cunning plan: he will "lose" all the paperwork saying she can give violent smackdowns so none of the teachers can complain he is putting them in danger (and since he's got three of them killed, they do have a point). He will also ensure the girl doesn't get her medication so when she inevitable explodes, he can legitimately chuck her out on the "we tried, we failed" argument to her mum. The girl fits in rather well but falls foul of the nasty English teacher (well, he's more of a Hiding In The Supply Cupboard Betting On Horses And Then Taking His Frustrations Out On Students teacher), she PICKS UP A MOTHERFUCKING CHAIR AND SMASHES HIS HEAD IN. Mind you, the guy's such an arsehole you (and the entire class) tend to urge her on. The teachers react and twig that she has something of a history. To hide his corruption, the principal then takes ALL the anti-psychotic medication himself to dispose of the evidence. So the epic stop-work-walkout staff meeting has the principal COMPLETELY OFF HIS FACE and taking the piss out of the teachers in a very passive aggressive manner. Finally he goes up to the husband of the teacher he let get stabbed and basically sneers, "Whatta ya gonna do about it?" The next scene has him thrown bodily through a second storey window into the playground with lots of broken glass. And that's not even ALL that happened in that episode.

* Season 7 of Red Dwarf. Did ANYONE think those CGI motion blurs improve the model shots? Nowadays you'd think there was an error on your DVD if things started to do that.

* I really like Oh Hark by Lisa Mitchell. Nothing else she has ever done works for me in any way at all. But then, maybe because it's the only song written about Weeping Angels and turning to stone...

* Spara's latest work is so bowel-shatteringly lame, I have been forced to take desperate measures that, as yet, no man alive has actually noticed. Go figure.

* In SFX, RTD reveals the truth... either that or he read my "Meanwhile, In Los Angeles..." post and is performing one hell of a mindscrew on me. Gleefully he notes all the points about him completely annihilating Torchwood and effectively creating a brand new show with cameos from Captain Jack and Gwen. Apparently two series of hijinks in Cardiff were more than Big Russell could stand, which is why he deliberately trashed every single thing in Children of Earth. The guy admits it, dude. I was right all along.

* Seriously, how much is Random Shoes a YOA episode? It boggles belief. And tell me the Nigel character wasn't more interesting than anyone in the Hub that week.

* Can you find better opening titles for Season 5 on youtube than on TV?

* Finding DWMs can be difficult. Typically, after I get a special airline edition of the damn thing at Comic Kingdom, it arrives not only at every newsagent I know supplies it but almost every newsagent that doesn't - including Sydenham Station and even my own local. For the first time ever they stock it. And I already have that issue (albeit with the cover ruined by a stupid special delivery sticker). Knowing my luck no where on the planet will have the next issue at all.

* I'm also totally broke. Which means if anyone wants to socialize with me, they'd have to pay for everything beyond transport costs. I apologize in advance. I feel a bigger tool than Mark Latham.

* Tony Abbot would be a lot more interesting if he superglued a mask to his head, so he looked like Cartoon Face in Ideal. Mind you, he looks like he already has. If he only took a page out of Cartoon Head's book AND SHUT THE FUCK UP FOR A WHILE...

* Speaking or rather typing of Ideal, maximum double-takage occurred when one episode began with Johnny Vegas lying in a familiar pose on the floor of his flat, crouched over by his large-boobed companion as he rasped: "Going soon... time to say goodbye... feels different this time..." "So what are you going to do then?" she asks, bored. "Regenerate?" Even my dad didn't get that one. Who knows what the audience made of it...

* On reflection, I'd rather they kept making Stargate: Universe than a shitty remake of Blake's 7

* If I had to name my favorite song, it would have to be Mexican Hitler by the Doug Anthony All-Stars. Is this an unfortunate implication of some kind that I bop along to the idea of the Third Riech restarting south of the border and destroying western civilization? Am I endorsing racist stereotypes? Am I somehow attracted to Paul McDermott dressed as Adolf? Is the Speedy Gonzalas jokes? Is it just the fact it's the most kickass, happiest, in-your-face, Gene-Hunt-ish of songs that transcends its content by sheer happiness? I just don't know. I wanna be a Mexican a-Hitler! Viva la franco, viva la Fuerher!

* It's been a while since I posted anything about the childhood of Mr. NJ Verkoff. Amazingly enough this is because I'm finding it progressively more difficult to write stuff the closer he reaches "known history". I've also done some continuity gaffs worthy of Robert Holmes - the first episode of YOA clashes terribly with Verkoff: A Terrible Ego. Not only have Andrew and Nigel clearly never met before (Andrew's only been with the school a short period of time), Nigel attended Year Six, Phoebe has a completely different life story, Jason has no personality, and there's also a character called Stoned Jock I don't recall at all. But Nigel's personality is the hardest to reconcile. Yes, he's arrogant, rude, acts like he owns the place... but he genuinely needs to lose serious IQ points and social skills to become the character he is at the start of the show, so high in his ivory tower he doesn't even know what ivory is and assumes everything's that colour.

* Worse, I fear the stuff I have written just isn't funny. Perhaps not even interesting. The last installment I completed was mainly about Dave's not-at-all-funny attempts to kill himself after he finds out Nigel's shagged the girl he loves. (That's "finds out" as "awkwardly realizes what the noises coming from the high school sick bay really are", farce fans). Another sequence is Nigel whoring himself to every legal girl in high school he finds attractive, which seemed funny at the time but now worries me might be a bit too Duece Bigalo... Mind you, Nigel's seduction scenes might raise a smile. But they might also raise a "Eww, gross" and be completely avoided. I dunno. Have I, as Alexei Sayle once described, "lost it"? Has my empathy with the audience (the dozy layabouts) vanished? Has a pink light emerged from my ear? Have I lost my timi-- and have I lost the ability to hold interest for more then a few seconds wjhr5n a tgojwem.................................

* In conclusion, an exclusive reproduction of a plot in The Rise of the Big N that was never taken up. Maybe because it had no basis in my real life, the storyline really had nowhere to go. True, Nigel immediately uncovers a dark supernatural secret about his new high school... but nothing else happens.

[In one of their first glasses, Jason and Nigel are looking through atlasses for Geography.]

Jason: Nigel?

Nigel: What?

Jason: I can’t find the school in this map.

Nigel: You couldn’t find a fart in a space suit, Jason. Now... hang on. You’re right. This isn’t on the map. [flips back through pages] There isn’t even the lake! Who published this crap?

[The teacher directs them to the library.]

Nigel: Why isn’t this school on the map? And I mean literally. There are countless reasons why not metaphorically.

Librarian: Back in the seventies, the school was nestled in a valley. Then the valley flooded, forming a lake, the school was completely under water so a new one was built on the hill.

Nigel: Wouldn’t it have been easier to just empty the lake?

Librarian: ...shut up.

[The duo reflect on what they discover by the lakeside.]

Jason: You really think there’s a whole school under there?

Nigel: Guess so. As explanations for misprints go, it’s a bit extreme to make it up.

[The bell rings.]

Nigel: Hang on. [checks watch] It’s not the end of lunchtime yet... It’s not even half-time. We’ve got an hour left!

Jason: You heard it too right?

Nigel: Of course I did.

Jason: No one else seems to, though. Weird.

Nigel: For once in your life, Jason, your summary of events is halfway accurate.

Jason: You don’t think it was...

Nigel: [unimpressed] ...was what?

Jason: The underwater school, do you?

Nigel: And for those of us who don’t speak moron?

Jason: There’s a whole school down there. Maybe it was THEIR lunch bell that was ringing.

Nigel: Bullshit. Even IF there was some kind of bell system still working after three decades under freshwater, and even IF we were able to somehow hear it by the shore, why would it be an hour early?

Jason: Um... Daylight saving?

[Nigel stares at him.]

Jason: Cause the bell is set to go off at certain times, right? Well, they change that when they put the clocks forward. So... they didn’t do that in the underwater school.

Nigel: Jason.

Jason: Yes?

Nigel: You are a stunted human being. Stop talking before you offend my senses any further.

[Later, creepy voices are heard near the lake.]

Dave: It was like voices... whispering, over and over again.

Phoebe: What were they saying?

Dave: Something about “come away into the lake”.

Jadi: Someone was just pranking you.

Dave: There was no one else around. It was just me there.

Jadi: I bet you anything there’s some microphone or something in the bushes.

Phoebe: Yeah, we’ll check it out lunchtime. Probably some Candid Camera stunt or something.

[And the voices are heard again. Strange, distorted but not sinister children chanting.]

Voice: Come and play with us... come to the lake...

Voices: We need you... we need you!! Play... come away... in the lake...

Jadi: I dunno about you, but I am officially freaked.

Nigel: Listen! There’s the school bell! Can you hear it?!

Voices: Stay with us. We need you. We need you.

[The teachers aren't helpful.]

Teacher: “Students of the Drowned School”? You think you’re the first ones to try and pull that stunt? No adult’s ever heard that bell ringing. All you kids loitering around here, going swimming... It’s evil!

Jason: Swimming is evil?

Nigel: I'm going to tell the Thorpedo you said that. And I think he'll be very upset.

[Jason is finally lured into the waters...]

Jason: I can’t swim.

Nigel: Is there anything you can do?

Jason: Um...

Nigel: Oh, don’t strain yourself. You’ll burst something.

[to be continued... NEVAHHH!!!]