Slimejam
A personal weblog written by Christopher Miles, an author and website developer living in Melbourne, Australia.
Regular topics include books and publishing, technology and the internet, parenting, and Doctor Who.
It’s a long-established rule of fantasy that the more powerful and ethereal a being is, the more freely he can indulge his latent transvestism.
That’s Gary Gillat describing the evil (no, really?) Black Guardian from Doctor Who, in his 2009 review of the ‘Black Guardian Trilogy’ DVD box set.
Mike Lynch at Nannygoat Hill offers an examination of Doctor Who, its central character and its enthusiasts in the form of a Ballardian short fiction-cum-psychiatric essay, as though the program itself were a series of ‘disaster reports’ detailing ever-increasing threats to humanity, the universe, and temporal reality itself; metaphors, as the essay suggests, “for some crisis of the mind’s ability to retain an integral image of itself over historical time”.
The Journal of Victorian Culture Online compares the recent Doctor Who Christmas special, ‘A Christmas Carol’, to Dickens’ original. Much is made of the Doctor’s active participation in the Scrooge figure’s past, present and future, in contrast to the ‘passive observation of the past leading to internal reflection’ in Dickens’ story. “What ensued,” notes the author, “was a deliberate manipulation of Dickens’ plot to suit both the hero and the show”.
Yesterday I spoke to ABC 666 Canberra about the death of Elisabeth Sladen, who played legendary companion Sarah Jane Smith on Doctor Who. You can hear the interview below. (Note: you may think you hear the presenter calling me ‘Chris Smith’ at the end, but you’d be wrong.)
Incredible LEGO® MOC of the Russell T. Davies era TARDIS console from Doctor Who. Be sure to check out some of Mr. Xenomurphy’s other LEGO® MOCs, including this LEGO® vignette featuring Lady Cassandra from the 2005 Doctor Who episode ‘The End of the World’.
As the Ninth Doctor himself might have said, “Give the man a medal”.
David Tennant: not shy about his obsession with the Fifth Doctor. I’m starting to get a bit worried.
Who knew that Australia possesses the last surviving crop seeds of certain varieties of Lebanese chickpea? Sparing us the nightmare scenario of a future devoid of farting hippies, Australian farmer and scientist Dr Tony Gregson has preserved these and other seed samples in the Arctic environs of that mother-of-all spice racks, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway.
But seeds? Snow? Doom? (Okay, doom in the sense of ‘doomsday, preparation for’, but still.)
It emerged this week that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange “disguised himself as an old woman in order to evade US intelligence officers”. It’s important to note, however, that Assange is not the first renegade and computer boffin to dabble in drag.
A taste of what the new series of Doctor Who might have been like had it been produced by BBC Istanbul rather than BBC Wales.
You can probably guess what I thought when I saw this.
It’s the end… Neil Perryman announces the closure of Doctor Who review blog Behind The Sofa. Hopefully this means there’ll be more activity over at the newly-regenerated Tachyon TV (I love the idea of the Adventures With The Wife In Space column).
Meanwhile, there’s always the regular (and regularly entertaining) Who Fix.
“What are you going to do, sucker me to death?”
It doesn’t come as a huge surprise, but I didn’t realise Michael Moorcock was a Doctor Who fan until it was recently announced he was contributing an original novel to the tie-in range currently being published by BBC Books. Here Moorcock shares his memories of the original series and his excitement (and sense of nervousness) about his forthcoming involvement with the new incarnation. Too bad Moorcock didn’t write for the New Adventures series Virgin published in the nineties: he could’ve really let rip. Looking forward to this one nonetheless.
When Tom Baker abstained from participating in Doctor Who’s twentieth anniversary episode, ‘The Five Doctors’, he was, for the purposes of a promotional photoshoot, replaced with a wax dummy. Now I’m wondering if he shouldn’t have been replaced with one of these adorable nesting dolls.
I love that the Hartnell and Troughton dolls are in monochrome.
(sweet is the wind, via lizbt)
I’d love it if these uncomfortable plot summaries were actual pitches. Particularly like the summaries for Doctor Who (“Elderly man serially abducts young women”) and Torchwood (“Bisexual is inefficient manager”).
This combines my Dalek obsession with my iPod evangelism, which is all I really ask for in life.
(iLounge)