Author: James Aylett

Thank you to all the people who suggested I watch the opener for the new series of Torchwood. It was unmitigated crap, and quite possibly the worst writing I’ve seen in years. Feeble jokes, sex references without any sexual tension, and isn’t science fiction supposed to be at least tenuously based in, you know, science? It’s entirely possible to believe that Chris Chibnall was born in the 1550s, and has never heard of Francis Bacon. The US is producing precisely nothing, and this is all the BBC can come up with?

If the BBC really wants to make it better (and I doubt they do, or they’d have fired the entire writing team from last year, and quite possibly shot half the cast for good measure), they should send Jack Harkness into a black hole (with a copy of Spartacus on a portable DVD player so that, relativistically at least, he’ll be watching it for an eternity), and have the rest of the Torchwood team eaten by something large and slimey, before having a look at one of the other Torchwood centres, in the hope that they’re more interesting. And they could transfer PC Andy to work there because, you know, the world can never have enough of Tom Price (no, not that Tom Price).

That’s 45 minutes I’ll never get back. Plus nearly half an hour to get all the IMDb references right. And this blog entry would have made a better episode. Cast James Marsters as the narrator.

A friend pointed me at an article about how the The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary has dropped thousands of hyphens in its new edition. Hurrah, you might think, and be forgiven for doing so.

Then the article goes on to say:

The thing is – and it’s been niggling at my mind since I read this – there are implications to this kind of top-down language ruling. Imagine if the Oxford had decided to simplify English spelling, or any of the other irrational aspects of English.

… and a sketch from about 1998 springs to mind (which immediately ascribes it to Kevin Baker and John Finnemore, possibly without justification) where they did just that. They started out by removing ‘pointless’ words (words about cricket, adverbs, that sort of thing), and proceeded from there to mutilate the entire language, all in a single five minute scene. The strangest thing was that you could still tell what they were talking about after they’d removed all the nouns.

Not so much life imitating art, as my brain making strange connections where it really should have done some hefty forgetting instead. I seem to get that quite a lot these days.

Stop-motion elephants! Featuring the Eames Elephant, which they are now producing in a limited run. I want one! But I’m not sure I want one at the price they’re going for, limited run or not limited run.

We learn three things from the movie of Transformers.

1. Moving (as opposed to static) cinematography does not work with incredibly fast-moving action sequences, because you can’t tell what the hell’s going on
2. CGI isn’t nearly good enough to make Transformers look real yet
3. Otherwise capable Hollywood people get a hard-on when thinking about giant robots, and stop doing their jobs properly

I mean, come on, people. Did it totally escape everyone’s notice that the reason everyone loved the comics was that it was about the people interacting with the robots, not having two indistinguishable grey blurs beat the crap out of each other? And what was up with the military thing? When has adding the military to any film made it better¹? And did you just, like, look over the last draft of the script and go “oops, we missed out the love interest”, and bolt on Geek Love Story 101, then edit it out again in post?

But then, Steven Spielberg has had problems with extra-terrestrial films before…

¹ Aliens doesn’t count.

• to re-read every book I own
• to hack the arms off people who wear large and ungainly rucksacks on crowded tube trains
• to get a large number of stickers saying "terrorist" and start tagging people with them
• to subcontract my job to a history of art graduate

There are people trying to sell our book on Amazon, used, for more than the RRP. Given Amazon is offering it at about 65% RRP, this seems more than somewhat crazy. Or is it just more clever than I can figure out?

Is it just me, or does Pilsner Urquell sound like a particularly nasty creature from Tolkien?

Frodo slept on the ground that night, famished as he had never been before. Amongst Hobbits, missing one meal was considered eccentric, and he had never heard of anyone missing two. It had been three days now since he had seen Sam, with his blessed ability to make food out of whatever he could find. He could smell the meal that the orcs were cooking, and wished that he could not.

Morning light was kissing the mountains when they came for him. The leader of the orcs was joined by the Pilsner Urquell, fresh from the caverns beneath the Orthanc. Frodo could sense Saruman’s stench about him.

—-

Normal blogging will be resumed once I stop having strange ideas run through my head when I look at bottles of beer.

Outside my office is a small series of grass humps. Pigeons sit on it. No one’s sure why it’s there. Inside my office is my desk. Soft toy zebras sit on it. No one’s sure why I’m there either.

It’s just another ennui afternoon here, which is just a pretentious way of saying I’m bored and pissed off about it. Half the office have gone to Google for lunch, and not come back yet; close to the other half have taken the afternoon off under DoubleClick’s Summer Working Hours (which sounds like it should be its own timezone, but just means you get every other Friday off). Yesterday was one part good to one part vodka, so little about today has been enjoyable; basically nothing since I got into the office.

So I’ve been doing what anyone in my situation would do: finding books on the history of information. (Actually, my sister’s being doing most of the work, as she has the history contacts.) Witness Empire and Information, a history of how information and communication in colonial India led to the downfall of British governance. (Judging by the cover, there’s a severe danger of period woodcuts and cartoons that could now be considered racist.)

Next up: a refreshing history of cod.

I’m not sure I get this. We want to reduce energy consumption, right? So let’s have an enormous series of concerts, which millions of people will drive to, watch on their television or the internet, or listen to on radio; and which will use an enormous amount of electricity to power in the first place. I remember an estimate for the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert that the energy used for that one evening could power Luton for a week. Can we get figures on what the eight Live Earth concerts are using?

I’m all for musicians doing their bit, but do you see them turning it down? Something more appropriate, surely, would have been a massive, world-wide, series of local, acoustic concerts?

I’m going out to enjoy the sunshine. I’ll turn my computer off before I go.

We’ve been getting a lot of comment spam, and although there’s a really neat, subtle, clever way of dealing with them, we’re both far too busy to set it up right now. Accordingly, with regret, comments are disabled.

But wait! If you really want to comment, do please email web at talktorex, and we can set you up a special Talk To Rex account just for you to add comments! Won’t that be special?

James & James