Gwnewch y pethau bychain

Month: November 2013 Page 1 of 4

The best of Ohio, on sale in Washington Mmmm, Jeni’s.

The best of Ohio, on sale in Washington Mmmm, Jeni's.
The best of Ohio, on sale in Washington Mmmm, Jeni’s.

(Metropolitan Market)

I am the ghost of Christmas shopping! Boo!

I am the ghost of Christmas shopping! Boo!
I am the ghost of Christmas shopping! Boo!

(La Vie at Queen Anne)

Friday Five: Good Reads

No theme this week, just a collection of really interesting, though-provoking, and sometimes funny esays.

Neville Longbottom is the Most Important Person in Harry Potter-And Here’s Why | Tor.comNeville Longbottom is what Peter Pettigrew might have been – why that’s important to the Harry Potter arc.

Embedly Powered

via Tor

What Really Makes Katniss Stand Out? Peeta, Her Movie GirlfriendGeneral Hunger Games/Catching Fire information below; no huge surprises revealed. ] This weekend, Catching Fire, the second chapter of the Hunger Games film adaptations, raked in enormous piles of dough – with over $160 million in one weekend, it’s the biggest November opening ever. Ever. (Take that, Twilight sequels.)

Embedly Powered

via Npr

In Defense Of Sarah SilvermanVariety TV critic Brian Lowry, in a piece entitled “Sarah Silverman’s Bad Career Move: Being as Dirty as the Guys,” warns that she is “veering into bad taste territory.”

Embedly Powered


The 35 Greatest Easter Eggs From The “Doctor Who” 50th Anniversary445,582 Total Views Tagged: doctor who, day of the doctor, doctor who 50th anniversary, easter eggs, viral, win, doctor-who 4.6X Social Lift Stats 3. And here’s Coal Hill School itself, where companions Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright taught. Look closely… Chairman of the Governors: Ian Chesterton! And right under that it reads “W.

Embedly Powered


25 Gifts For Writers1. Books This is about as obvious an answer as it gets (“What should I buy that starving child for Christmas?” “Um, food?” “Eh.”), but just the same I’m surprised at how rarely I receive books as g…

Embedly Powered

Happy Thanksgiving!

Today is Thanksgiving in the US, and we’ve been enjoying the first day of our long weekend with lots of good food and a mini-marathon of Doctor Who.

I’ve always been a huge Doctor Who fan, dating back to when I was a kid.  My room looked like a Doctor Who museum gift shop exploded in it.  I watched every episode, read every book, and bought every poster and collectable I could get my hands on.  Doctor Who fandom in the 1980s was a pretty small group in the US, but we were die-hard.

When the show relaunched in 2005, I was elated, and it once again became appointment television.  Up until the middle of season six or so, at least.  But something about the tenor of the developing storyline with Amy, Rory, and River was bothering me.  It just didn’t feel right;1  I still can’t really articulate it, the whole story that was developing over the beginning of season 6 just didn’t sit well with me.

There wasn’t a breaking point; there wasn’t a moment where I threw down the remote and said “That’s it, I’m done!”2  But something was corrupted in my download of the subsequent episode, and I needed to go and re-download it3 and then we got distracted with this thing and that thing and….the next thing I knew, time had passed and we still hadn’t gone back to pick it up.  The things I was hearing about the developing storylines didn’t actually make me feel like I wanted to come back to it, either.  I did watch “Asylum of the Daleks” with runnerwolf, and the Christmas special “The Snowmen”, because those were setting up the new companion.  The first just refreshed my annoyance with the Rory/Amy storyline, and the second I liked well enough to say I wanted to watch the series again, but not so much that I immediately made room in my schedule for it.

Then, this last week, they aired the 50th Anniversary episode.

I had been keeping an eye on the lead up to the festivities, but I figured I’d wait and see what they actually did with it before committing to watching it.  Multi-Doctor stories are tricky at the best of times, and I was a bit wary of what they might do with it.  But after it aired I heard nothing but good things4, so I pulled it down and we settled in to watch it on Monday night.

To say I loved it would be an understatement.  I’d been intending all week to write a more detailed reaction to it, but this was an episode that felt so perfectly right to me, with the right balance in tone between funny and serious, paid the right nods of respect to the classic series, and managed to hit a big reset button on some of the recent continuity in such a way that preserved the effect while lifting the staggering burden from the Doctor’s shoulders so that he can move on without being blithe and simply deciding to ignore the monumental consequences of his actions.5

The net result of this has been a revitalisation of my interest in the adventures of the good Doctor, so today we settled down over our Thanksgiving dinner to start watching again.  We’re not going back to where we left off — I’m still not entirely ready to watch the rest of the Ponds’s saga — but we did pick up with “The Bells of Saint John”, which was the first proper episode featuring Clara as a companion.  We got through four of them today, which is rather a lot in one stretch for us any more, and I’m finding myself quite engaged.  Some of this is due to Clara herself.  She really reminds me more of an old-school companion in her relationship to the Doctor, and she’s smart and very capable.  The details of her unfolding mystery are interesting enough, but mostly I just like her personality.

We expect to watch the remaining four episodes we’re behind on over the weekend.  I hope everyone had a wonderful day, and that, regardless of whether you are in the US or not, that you spent it enjoying life with people  you love.


  1. I expressed this to my friend Jeff, who has been my best friend since we were twelve and is also a devoted fan of the show.  He said, “I’m sorry you don’t like them.” and I explained that it wasn’t that I disliked them.  I loved Amy and Rory to death, and what I didn’t like was what was being DONE to them. 

  2. In fact, the last episode we watched was “The Doctor’s Wife” by Neil Gaiman, which I loved to bits. 

  3. I still download the episodes off the underwebs.  I don’t trust BBCA not to make a dog’s breakfast out of the episodes cutting them down for time, after the travesty of their edits on “The Eleventh Hour”. 

  4. Even Zander Nyrond, who has been a bitter critic of the new series, wrote “that actually wasn’t bad. I shall probably watch it again, and who knows, it might even make “rather good.”” 

  5. Doctor Who has never been the world’s most continuity-conscious shows in the best of times, but there are some elements you really do have to resolve on screen. 

It’s not easy being a street busker with an upright piano.

It's not easy being a street busker with an upright piano.
It’s not easy being a street busker with an upright piano.

(Pike Place Market)

Falling off, climbing back on

Well, after a good start, I finally  hit a strech of not posting.  First was the weekend, which had little to note in it other than visiting Larissa’s aunt in Tacoma, which was lovely but uneventful.  We did caught up in some of the traffic generated by the President’s visit to our fair city, but all told it only added about 30 minutes to our trip home, at a rough estimate.

I’m pondering various content ideas to try and make sure I keep regular posting up, in addition to what I’m already doing with the Friday Five Digest.  But for now, just know that things are moving along at a lovely pace, and my silence is largely a result of not much to say.

How’s life going in your world?

Friday Five: Art

This week our theme is art in various forms.

A Single Thread Wrapped Around Thousands of NailsKumi Yamashita, whose mind-blowing shadow artworks have been featured before, uses a single, unbroken thread wrapped around thousands of nails to create stunning portraits of women and men. In the ongoing series entitled Constellation (a nod to the Greek tradition of tracing mythical figures in the sky), the Japanese artist (living and working in New York) uses three simple materials to produce these otherworldly works of art.

Embedly Powered


Modern Renaissance Superhero Designs: Altered ArtWorth1000 hosts a variety of photo-editing and illustrative contests. One of their contest series, Superhero ModRen, challenges users to incorporate superheroes into fine art pieces. It’s fun to see the contrast of modern characters we know and love placed in classic painting styles and poses.

Embedly Powered

via Design



Back to Basics

As I wrote about over the weekend, I’ve finally done something I’ve needed to do for some time, which is find someone to sit down with who can help me expand my guitar toolkit.  Tonight was my first meeting.

They have a nice little setup in the basement of a marina on Lake Union, with two small studio rooms.  I met with my instructor, Mike, and spent a lot of time discussing my background, how I learned, what I was already good at, and so forth.1   Mike is a curious mixture of laid-back and hyper-focused, but I think I’ll get along with him.  He had me play a song for him2 just to watch my current style, and then we got down to the brass tacks of what I wanted to learn and how to get there.

We’re starting out by refreshing on theory.  Now, I know a bit of theory, because you can’t hang out with folks like Gwen Knighton and Mary Crowell without absorbing some stuff just through osmosis, but I’ve never made a formal study of it.  The last time I had any formal music instruction, I was too impatient to get to the “I wanna play a SONG” stage to really focus on it.  I think I’ll be a slightly more disciplined student today.

We did have an entertaining digression talking about how my personal guitar idols are.3

My homework for next week, aside from making a list of five “desert island” songs to send to him as background, is to play the note C.  More specifically, to play all of the C notes on my fret board.4   I’m looking forward to Wednesdays for the next few weeks!


  1. Actually, the very first thing that happened was I opened my guitar case, and Mike immediately gushed about what a lovely instrument it was, and took it to his partner’s studio to show it to him. Because it’s that nice. 

  2. I randomly pulled “But The Days And Nights Are Long” by Cheryl Wheeler out of the air 

  3. The Two Richards: Thompson and Shindell, Paul Simon, Robbie Robertson, Mark Knopfler, David Gilmour… 

  4. I do actually understand the point of this exercise, but I’ve still been humming Beethoven’s “Minuet in G” over and over since I left. 

Please do not fish or swim in the sewer.

Please do not fish or swim in the sewer.
Please do not fish or swim in the sewer.

(Myrtle Edwards Running Trail)

Mixed Messages

Because we watch TV on the TiVo, we rarely actually see commercials, but a recent ad by cognac giant Hennessey caught my ear,1 mostly due to their slogan juxtaposed with traditional disclaimers that accompany alcohol advertising on television in the US.

NEVER STOP.
NEVER SETTLE.
Please drink responsibly.

I’m not entirely certain those three directions are entirely compatible with one another.  Just sayin’…


  1. The text on the screen was just the first two lines.  The voice-over contained all three. 

Page 1 of 4

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén