Last week was a hell of a cliffhanger and the start of a massive call to arms. This week we discover that the answer to the question “Where is the worst place in the universe to be standing?” is easily found out when you kidnap Amy Pond. A baby is born, a baby is kidnapped, a trap is sprung, some old friends return for the first time, we finally discover who River Song is, and this week on Doctor Who we discover that a battle can be lost and won simultaneously and that demons run when “A Good Man Goes To War.”
Category Archives: Doctor Who Mania
“Shenangians” is a beautiful word.
Last time it was a spooky castle and Frankenstein motifs and doppelgangers going to war with their human originals, but this week on Doctor Who, the war comes to end, in which “The Rebel Flesh” become “The Almost People” and we’re left hanging from quite the narrative cliff…
Dusty in space.
Last week it was time machines made human and the king of all dreams and stories and Michael Sheen and bubble universes and other good and fun stuff on Doctor Who. This week we take a step back and go a little more gothic with dark castles in the future and lightning strikes and doppelgangers and “The Rebel Flesh” brought to life!
“The only water in the forest is the river.”
Last week it was the third three episodes of the current season of Doctor Who, with a planet called America and the moon landing and Richard Nixon and aliens you completely forget about once you turn your back and then pirates and alien medical Sirens and this week it’s dead spaceship graveyards and the creepy disembodied voice of Michael Sheen and a mad woman who’s bigger on the inside and who might just be “The Doctor’s Wife” and also the guy who brought you The Sandman is writing the words…
The legs, the nose, and Mrs. Robinson.
This is a Doctor Who post.
A planet called America, part two.
This morning I walked into work and said something to one of my co-workers along the lines of, “So, is your life any better now that Osama is dead?” She looked at me said, “OMG, the President is dead?” And I said, “Huh? What? No. NO. Osama. Bin Laden!” And then she squinted, looked at me curiously, and said, “What the fuck are you talking about?” Just then another co-worker held up the front page of the newspaper which had a huge picture of the deceased terrorist mastermind on it and a massive headline that said “BIN LADEN DEAD.” Or maybe it said “BIN LADEN KILLED.” Honestly, I can’t remember anymore. But the headline was huge.
from here.
A week ago I said to a friend: “Dealing with your enemies is simple and easy. The best way to combat them is to simply make friends with them. Make friends with them so hard that it hurts.”
It’s so weird to me still that one of the time I felt most unified with this crazy, amazing, fucked up country was on 9/11. The wost metaphor I could use here would be: It’s like that girlfriend, the one who’s really fucking amazing, if a little weird, and way too good for you, and you just treat her like shit. She should really quit you and your bullshit. You just don’t appreciate her and for some reason she just won’t leave you. And you don’t realize how important she really is to you until someone else threatens here. Some clarity only comes to us on the precipice of great and terrible disaster. Life is funny like that.
Part of me is glad that Bin Laden wasn’t captured and forced to answer for his crimes to us and to the world in person, though I would have wanted that, of course. Part of me was glad to hear that this was finally over, that everyone who had been wounded by the tragedies that seemed to be dialed up at this man’s fingertips can now crawl just one more inch ever so slowly and painfully into the past. I wouldn’t really call this “justice “though because, well, there is no such thing as justice. Scales aren’t balanced because Bin Laden is dead. His life will never ever begin to be equal in worth to those lost on 9/11 or those who have put on an military uniform and defended a certain set of ideals and beliefs that we all take for granted every single minute. America is a brilliant, beautiful idea, but not a perfect one, and it can be hurt and it can be dented, but it’ll always be stronger than some cheap thug, no matter where he lives, no matter what he looks like, no matter what he worships. It can only be killed by those who give up on the idea, or who sell it out bit by bit in the name of “freedom.”
from here.
The death of what we consider to be an evil man on the other side of the world doesn’t bring back all those special people that we lost but hopefully it helps some people to breathe easier. Hopefully it reminds us why those people were special to us and hopefully we never forget what they meant to us. I’d like to say that hopefully it makes us appreciate each moment we have on this planet all that much more, but we should’ve been doing that long before now, and of course should continue doing that to the moment we draw our last breath. Hopefully someone like Bin Laden will never ever come close to challenging that idea every again.
I’ll admit to being conflicted or just confused about this news and how I should be feeling, but I’m lucky. Lucky to be here, lucky to be typing this in the land of the free, home of the brave. I’m lucky that I didn’t lose anyone ten years ago on that strange September day or in the fights and wars that followed. Who Osama Bin Laden is and what all of this means is something for you to decide. I can tell you that I don’t view this man’s death as closure, but honestly, I won’t look down on anyone who gets it from this news.
Thank you, mom. Thank you, God. Thank you, Barack Obama. Thank you, Donald Trump (with your stupid ass hair and head full of shit). Thank you, Pakistan. Thank you, India! Thank you, everyone who’s ever stood up for what they believed in and put that belief above themselves. Thank you, Bill Murray. Thank you, internet jokesters and “expert thinkers.” Thank you, Doctor Who. Thank you to the moon and to The Onion, both. Thank you, mainstream media. Thank you, “Mission Accomplished.” Thank you, those who agree with me, and thank you to those who would never agree with me in a million years. Thank you, Jack Donaghy, and thank you, Condoleezza Rice and thank you, Margaret Cho (for guest starring on 30 Rock). Thank you, strange new/old world that has such people in it. Thank you, post-Now. Thank you to everyone who thinks this matters and everyone who knows that it really doesn’t. Thank you to all those who never forget and especially thank you to those who are doomed to remember.
I saw this picture posted on the internet a little while ago…
…and I had a might good chuckle.
The terrorists are always winning. And the terrorists are always losing. And the battle will keep raging and hopefully we’ll never forget what we’re fighting for or who we should actually be fighting.
It’s doesn’t even matter that Superman’s no longer an American citizen or that The Rock had the #1 movie at the box office this weekend AND knew that Osama was dead before you did because…
Well, because the story’s not over and the dream is never ending.
And like PKD said, Maybe the Empire never ended?
Like fake MLK said, “I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy.”
It’s been over 24 hours now and tonight when I go to bed I’ll be thinking the same thing I was thinking last night, “Okay, so Osama’s dead. And what will tomorrow look like?”
Three days.
Three days. That’s how many are left in 2010.
That is so wild, right? The end of the science fiction year that wasn’t too science fiction-y, sadly. Or maybe it was and I just wasn’t paying nearly enough attention. Or maybe I’ve just gotten so accustomed to the very pedestrian and incredibly mundane and boringly sexy science fiction-y aspects of my normal life?
from here.
I’m sure it’s something like that. Absolutely. Definitely. Whatever.
Also, this:
from here.
In this year, in this world of internetting and bloggery and social media, I had five very simple goals that I laid out at the start of 2010 and wanted to complete by year’s end. In order of my own personal interest and their importance, they were:
1. Not going to tell you (you’re not ready for this one yet, folks)(and neither am I).
2. Not going to tell you (forthcoming).
3. Not going to tell you (total abysmal failure).
4. Not going to tell you (worked, but was embarrassing and not worth mentioning again).
5. Getting 2,010 tweets in 2010!
The fifth one is the one that I’m going to definitely accomplish. Unless I lose both hands sometime in the next three days. Or lose my phone or computer or both. Or unless an EMP just wipes out all technology in the country/world.
But, well, I just don’t twitter much. And getting 2,010 tweets in 2010 was a silly, frivolous goal that I jokingly threw out on my twitter sometime back in… I don’t know what month, but sometimes those things you only jokingly declare are the ones that stick with you. It was somewhere around the start of the year, I believe, and I think I had less than a thousand tweets then and was probably tweeting an average of four to five tweets a month, roughly.
And eventually I just thought, yeah, I can do this shit, why not? Because it’s stupid? Stupidity has not stopped me from doing anything ever in my life.
Also, this is the 825th post on your friend neighborhood Counterforce. That’s wild. We didn’t make it to 1000 posts this year, but that’s perhaps for the best. Personally, I’m just shocked that I managed to ramble on for nearly 2,010 tweets. I mean, what a silly declaration. Thinking back upon it, at first I was like this:
And then I was like this:
You understand.
Oh man, how creepy is this photo below?
Right?
Also, New Year’s Eve is almost upon us. Time to celebrate!
Also, this is fog porn:
from here.
And this is the first x-ray picture of a lightning strike:
from here.
Speaking of “science fiction,” the recent Doctor Who Christmas special was fucking wonderful.
So fun and smart and a nice little twist on Dickens’ A Christmas Carol cause, hey, why can’t the ghosts of Christmas’ past, present, and future be time travelers and holograms?
Michael Gambon was brilliant, but ruthlessly mean and joyously funny in places. And while the show did play around with some of it’s own rules towards time travel (and that’s why we have rules about time travel, folks: so they can be broken!), I found the idea of one watching their own past and memories change before their very eyes to be fascinating. Plus, the interesting but slight references to “the silence.” And I had to love the nice little nods to the recent JJ Abrams Star Trek movie with the copious lens flares on display of the crashing starship’s bridge.
Honestly, it was just nice to have Doctor Who back. The trailer for the upcoming season at the end of the special was a nice little tease as far as potential goes. Can it be April already?
Also, I’m worried that this (below) is what women must think of me whenever they see me…
from here.
Sigh. And I’m just trying to be normal and cool and down to earth and approachable. We can’t all be perfect, can we?
from here.
Oh well. Remember this always:
from here.
This is a picture from Tron Legacy…
…which I hear was pretty terrible, but that Olivia Wilde was the best part of. Is it me, or is Olivia Wilde totally the new Angelina Jolie?
I mean that based on a lot of things, like her acting ability, her potential, the type of roles she’s taken in the past, but also based on her seemingly having that same ability that Angelina Jolie has to turn straight girls a little curious.
You know?
This is an abandoned theater in Detroit:
from here.
This is a monolith:
This is some good solid crazy fun rough housing:
And this is some old school adorable chillaxing right here:
The last six months or so on this blog and in my life have been… weird, to say the least. I’d go into more details here, but quite frankly, I don’t want to. I’ll just say that due to illness in my family, my life got a bit… derailed and I’m astonished that I’m seeing the end of this year without having gone totally insane. Or maybe I have already gone totally, stupendously insane and it’s just helping me see the end of this year more clearly? Like 3D glasses? That’s a comforting thought, right?
Anyway, at some point this will all be over and I’ll get back to some kind of semblance of “normal,” whatever that is. Are we still doing that? “Normal?”
Hopefully, if we’re lucky, we’ll be right back to asking “Who’s your daddy?” in no time flat.
This is what religion looks like:
from here.
And this is my basic worldview in a nutshell:
This is an example of the happy medium between sanity and fear:
This is an example of how Batman is both a master of surprise and also quite probably a huge pervert:
And sadly, no matter what we say or do, Lost is still over and done with:
Oh well. Three days to go. And then…
Fingers crossed about something exciting happening in those next three days (after all, a good deal of people on this planet thought that their magic wizard man came back from the dead in that same amount of time) but not holding my breath. Exciting, but not too exciting. Wow me, thrill me, blow my mind, fuck me over and fuck me up (but in a good way, please), but remember that when the sun comes up, I’ve still got bills to pay and TV shows to catch up with. Three days to go, promises to keep and miles to go before we sleep, and a long journey sprawling ahead of us through mountains upon mountains. This is both the place we made together and the journey we started together and I’m gonna be there with you. And wherever we end up, whatever new definition of home or normal we excavate, when we do we’ll turn to each other and say, “This must be the place!”
The Goddamn Batman.
from here.
From the internet:
RIP Leslie Nielsen.
RIP Irvin Kershner.
Your 2010 holiday gift shopping sorted.
Here’s something you clearly (don’t) need: pocket chainsaw.
The top 5 most shocking things about WikiLeaks.
“Vladimir Putin is Batman and Dmitry Medvedev is Robin.”
Celebrities quitting twitter for charity.
from here.
This Spider-Man musical sounds like just the kind of crazy train wreck that you want it to be.
Here’s what Christopher Nolan thinks of your Inception fan theories.
Natalie Portman, Halle Berry, and Tom Hanks to star in the Wachowskis’ version of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas?
Actor decapitates own mother in Masonic attack inspired by The Matrix.
The bad sex in fiction awards!
Fox Nation reprints anti-Obama article from The Onion, doesn’t mention (or possibly realize) that it’s a joke.
Music by David Lynch.
Previously on Counterforce.
An interview with Jorge Luis Borges.
from here.
This is just weird: Taylor Swift and Jake Gyllenhaal.
From 1993: The future of the internet!
David Foster, from 1998: “I’m not a journalist and I don’t pretend to be one.”
from here.
Klaxons “Twin Flames.”
The little white lies of online dating revealed.
Is this the year that we make contact? Maybe.
Doctor Doom vs. Doctor Who.
Are we about to be inundated with a wave of movie versions of the works of Haruki Murakami?
Batman and Robin investigate “The Carbon Copy Crimes.”
from here.
D. J. Caruso on why he quit the Y The Last Man movie. Wants to make it a TV show instead, huh? Someone owes me a check. You fuckers.
Suck on this: Animated Southland Tales prequel.
How does Commissioner Gordon really feel about Batman?
Do women avoid talking to their fathers because of evolution?
Edgar Allan Bro.
Hercule Poirot kitties. LOL.
from here.
Shocking link between people who like Batman and people who like pornography.
How to survive a mass extinction.
A Spanish woman claims that she owns the Sun and you can bet your ass she wants you to pay her for its usage.
from here.
Late night weird.
Two things, two videos:
1. From his show last night (I believe) this is Jimmy Fallon playing Neil Young performing Willow Smith’s “Whip My Hair” with special accompaniment by Bruce Springsteen (as played by Bruce Springsteen):
It’s always amazed and fascinated me how Jimmy Fallon isn’t very interesting or funny as, well, himself. In fact, he seems kind of robotic. But he’s always been very shrewd in his impressions and imitations, especially back in his SNL days.
2. Maria was telling me the other day that she’s been watching a lot of Craig Ferguson’s show lately and that she finds him amazing and so wonderfully weird. I agreed with her based on the few times I’d seen his show, even though those times had been so long ago. Then today I caught the interview with Matt Smith from Doctor Who…
I just love how bizarre it is. Ferguson is the closest there is on late night TV to having that kind of special, manic energy that Conan O’Brien has, but I love that it feels less practiced, more out of control, more improvised. Like you’re literally spending an hour in the wee small hours of the morning with a surly, most likely drunken Scottish man (that’s Ferguson’s own tattoo up top there, a reference to Benjie Franklin, yo) and he’s holding some celebrities hostage inside your TV. There’s truly this feeling that anything can happen, that it could be really great or really terrible but either way, it’ll be fun.
Go write your novel.
It’s NaNoWriMo, so go write your novel. Though you probably shouldn’t wait just until it’s NaNoWriMo to be doing that, but whatever. And while you’re at it, go vote.
Meanwhile on the internet…
How to blog.
Why we always vote on Tuesdays.
5 year old girl gives birth.
A man fights a shark to save a woman’s life!
Roger Ebert hates top 10 lists. And your face!
Brazil elects first female president.
Nerdiest signs from the Rally to restore Sanity and/or Fear.
Good NaNoWriMo advice from Merlin Mann.
A look back on the possible alternate futures of Back To The Future.
Gavin Rossdale’s past is more interesting than this present.
I don’t understand the appeal of Bret Michaels, or his dick (featuring Miley Cyrus’ mom).
Carey Mulligan looks amazing after finally dropping that dead weight otherwise known as Shia LeBeowulf.
Here’s the plot of a potential romantic comedy for you: Justin Long and the internet film critic (who thinks he sucks).
It’s so wonderfully dorky, but I think this TARDIS dress is really cool and adorable:
Schwarzeneger bans welfare use for psychics and pot.
NaNoWriMo/LOL Cat pictures from here, but also from here, here, and here.
Shirley Manson says that Garbage is coming back with an album and a tour.
I think it’s time I started developing shows for either CBS or ABC.
Could you give up showering?
The GoldenEye video game getting remade with Daniel Craig.
Can social media break up a marriage?
Kill your co-workers (with kindness)!
