the sound of drums

Apologies to all I left hanging at the last post there, but I had a sudden attack of Housecleaning and decided I had better take advantage of it before Social Services came to take Gaius away. Since that last post I have cleaned the bathroom including much scrubbing plus unblocking the drains, finished putting all my clothes away in bins in my new closet setup, ruthlessly tidied the remains of the garden, aired and installed the Fluffy Comforter on my bed, built a yarn-drying rack out of PVC pipe, prepared Evil Jello for a party and built a halloween costume from scratch out of stuff I found while I was doing the closet, done some more photography for the etsy shop which I have yet to label and post, wrangled all the library materials in the house and yes that counts as heavy housekeeping, installed a new toilet seat, put away the dishes, and, um, filled a saltshaker. So there. Before we get into Things Learned and the explanation for the video, have some of the Evil Jello:

( This jello is evil! EEEEVIIILL! )

I told you I wasn't to be trusted with that mold.

All right, for everyone who hasn't been scared off by that sight, the answer to our "What's Wrong With This Video?" quiz from Saturday-before-last is that was, in fact, the theme version from all the way back to Doctor #2 that someone had plugged in on top of the modern visuals to see how well it would fit. YouTube being the cornucopia of anoraks that it is, in fact, from the above link the curious can follow the entire development of the opening sequence, but I'll leave you to your own devices on that one rather than overload the rest of everybody who wasn't following the original discussion with a dozen embedded video posts (and because posting the post-1980 versions would be just plain mean). Just to prove that I could, though, my crash-course Top Ten list for the latecomers amongst us to start catching up with the 44 years of backstory might look something like this:

• Doctor #1, William Hartnell: It's sort of Required that one watch the very first episode, "An Unearthly Child", but as for actual entertainment value I'd then skip ahead to storyline number two, which is the very first appearance of "The Daleks", and holds up surprisingly well for any television circa 1963 much less the SF of the period.
  
  
• Doctor #2, Patrick Troughton: Due to the BBC's housekeeping policies of the period, only 6 out of Two's 21 storylines still exist in their entirety, and I've only seen one of those (hey, I wasn't born yet then and I'm just now catching up on dvds); still, "The Mind Robber" is entertainingly odd and surprisingly postmodern.
  
  
• Doctor #3, Jon Pertwee: This is about where I came in, and one that still sticks in my mind from this Doctor's tenure is "Inferno" -- Evil!eyepatch!Brigadier, anyone?
  
  
• Doctor #4, Tom Baker: The One With The Scarf, of course; "Genesis of the Daleks" (them again?) is probably the one to see from this period, since it works with long-running themes relating to both sides of the conflict and Nazi allegories are always fun to dissect.
  
  
• Doctor #5, Peter Davison: Got to pick "Earthshock" to represent Five, because we have to have Cybermen in this list somewhere!
  
  
• Doctor #6, Colin Baker No Relation: Um, well, "Mark of the Rani" doesn't have that much Peri in it, even if it isn't the Master's finest outing, and anyway you might eventually need to know these things.
  
  
• Doctor #7, Sylvester McCoy: "Battlefield" narrowly comes out on top as the high point of Seven's time on the job, mainly because we've got enough Daleks on this list already and not nearly enough Brigadier.
  
  
• Doctor #8, Paul McGann: Okay, so he's definitively canon, go ahead and watch the tv-movie if you really care, at least it's got more of the Master in it, anyway...
  
  
• Doctor #9, Christopher Eccleston: Who, when you look at it, actually got about as much in the way of storylines as Six or Seven, which is something at least (remember they padded them dreadfully back in the day); in the context of this list, "Dalek" is the one to go with for the overall picture, especially after "Genesis of the Daleks" above.
  
  
• Doctor #10, David Tennant: It's hard to judge the incumbent, but, again in the context of this list, "Human Nature" is the most spot-on hour of it for tying into and adding to the ongoing mythos, and it's got killer scarecrows!

(If you're still game by that point, the next step could be the multiple-Doctors episodes, starting with "the Two Doctors" which I nearly recommended as the better example from Six but decided Two's presence in it kind of disqualified it as a special case.)




And lastly, I did Learn some New Things as well:

• New Thing Learned for 10 October: Speaking of anoraks, Torchwood episodes are available through ComCast OnDemand starting the Mondays after they first air, which is good because all the timeslots seem to be bad for me, and my god I'm turning into one of those people aren't I. Not that I even particularly like the show in the first place, but one does feel a certain obligation to keep up with these things. [Source: finally thought to check after missing it once too often.]
  
  
• New Thing Learned for 11 October: Leather is stretched out by means of small clamps with pegs on them that fit into holes in a big mesh frame, in a process known as "toggling". I'm thinking of setting something like this up for the next time I need to block lace. [Source: Modern Marvels.]
  
  
• New Thing Learned for 12 October: To take a picture of your own head with a digital camera, point the lens at you and the LCD at the mirror. It still makes you look like an idiot, but at least you look like an idiot without a camera growing out of your face, which may or may not actually be an improvement sometimes. [Source: experimentation.]
  
  
• New Thing Learned for 13 October: Science has finally invented the mobile ATM. I'd worry about an electronic eavesdropper setting up across the street, but that's probably just me. [Source: example laid on by YarnCon 2007.]
  
  
• New Thing Learned for 14 October: CGI water-sprays can be rendered more accurately by imaging sand, which provides a particle size more appropriate than actual water. Now if only CGI of this caliber had been around back when they were doing "the Power of Kroll"... [Source: Doctor Who Confidential.]
  
  
• New Thing Learned for 15 October: Holography as a concept was invented more than a decade before the invention of lasers would make it practical. There is no Sanctuary. [Source: info-text track for "the Talons of Weng Chiang".]
  
  
• New Thing Learned for 16 October: A tubular cast-on can be done by knitting a swatch of half the desired number of stitches in waste yarn, then working (k1, p1 into bar between stitches) across, although I missed the bit about how to get the waste yarn back out, dammit. [Source: Judy Chan, October WCKG meeting.]
  
  
• New Thing Learned for 17 October: One of the Spanish Armada's bigger problems was that no two of their cannons took quite the same-sized ammunition, and furthermore no one had been careful enough about seeing that the ammunition loaded aboard a given ship necessarily matched any of the cannons on board it at all. Planning, people, planning. [Source: History Channel?]
  
  
• New Thing Learned for 18 October: Putting cinnamon in the Marshmallow Rice Squares was an experiment worth doing, but not really one worth repeating. [Source: hey, it was next to the vanilla...]
  
  
• New Thing Learned for 19 October: Europeans do occasionally measure things in terms of soccer fields, which it had occurred to me to wonder. Not that I know what "as big as a soccer field" looks like any more than "as big as a football field", but it's nice to know about the conversion factor just the same. [Source: Lost Worlds: Hitler's Supercity.]
  
  
• New Thing Learned for 20 October: Larger knives should be operated by pinching the blade between thumb and forefinger and then wrapping the other three fingers around the handle, rather than in a "mitten-fist" grip. [Source: Knife skills illustrated : a user's manual, Peter Hertzmann.]
  
  
• New Thing Learned for 21 October: The Home Despot I usually find myself in now provides produce-department-style bags to manage one's purchase of plumbing connectors in (see "built a yarn-drying rack out of PVC pipe", above). [Source: Home Despot on Oakton, Evanston.]