Month: June 2024

RIP Chesterfield

Well this is fucking shit. If I ever wanted someone from Doctor Who to make it to a full hundred, it was him. So close. Immensely glad now that Russ got to make one final appearance, however brief, in Jodie Whittaker’s last episode. I think this person on Bluesky summed up his importance:

Very important point. Hartnell’s Doctor is very much in antihero mode for those first few stories; I think it’s notable that, halfway through “The Daleks”, he would’ve abandoned the Thals to their fate had he not discovered the Daleks still had that fluid link. It’s Ian who actually convinces the Thals to put up a fight and solve the issue. I’ve often wondered what happened to the Doctor before the series began to make him like that…

Milkshake as a deadly weapon

Nigel Farage got milkshaked!

Farage — who rocked Westminster Monday by u-turning and announcing he will stand in Britain’s election as leader of the right-wing Reform Party — was hit with the drink as he exited a Wetherspoons pub in Clacton.
The banana-flavored milkshake from McDonald’s soaked his hair, face and parts of his clothes.
Speaking to POLITICO after the protest, Farage admitted to being rattled by the “quite violent” incident — but described it as an occupational hazard on campaign walkabouts.
“If somebody chucks something and it hits you in the face, it could be anything, it is a bit scary,” he said.
He added: “It was quite violently done. This doesn’t happen to Keir Starmer, this doesn’t happen to Rishi Sunak. You know why, they don’t go out and meet hundreds of people and this is the risk of doing it.”

Also you’re an even bigger cunt than they are. That doesn’t help you.

This photo (taken by Ben Stansall, to give credit where it’s very much due) is astonishing to me; the timing of it is glorious, and somehow I find this even funnier than the photo of that implacable curve of milkshake actually hitting Farage. The young lady was, obviously, arrested for assault, but I wouldn’t be surprised if a substantial number of people offered to pay whatever fine she may attract…

What’s in the box?

Spotted this on Tumblr recently (part of that reading up on esoterica I mentioned the other day), the TOPY manual of “television magick”. Never actually read it, but this did remind me that I read something once about how one of TOPY’s “television as a magical tool” things was to use a TV set as a scrying tool, by tuning it off channel and watching the static to see what appeared in it. I forget if this was preceded by consumption of mind-altering substances or not. I’ve often wondered how this would work in the modern digital TV age when there isn’t any more TV static as such, maybe a bit of glitching but that’s all since analogue transmission was shut down, at least as far as I know. Then again, some of the people on this forum reckon any surface will do, so I presume even a TV switched off entirely is also good… and I’m sure those folks would know, they’re posting on a forum run by a noted “black magician” who isn’t at all a piece of shit who inspired a teenager to kill people with a text written for a frankly Nazi occult organisation. Those are people whose opinions you can probably trust…

Christian Pseudoscience

I saw this posted online to mark the hundredth anniversary of this very peculiar case:

Yes, A.G., we all like to think nothing bad can possibly happen to us ever, but that doesn’t happen in reality, and much as you may have begrudged that $50 (worth about $870 now) fine, you’d have been in a lot more trouble if the building had burned down and people died cos they didn’t know how to get out of it. Fucking idiot. I’m only surprised we don’t see this sort of “safety regulations are against my religion” nonsense more often…

Ming puts the boot in

Marc Campbell posted this rather intriguing item on his Facebook recently:

I suggest right clicking to open it at full size (though even then it’s not always easy to read). Two interesting things about this: 1) the art is by Gene Bilbrew, and 2) it’s from 1966. I mention this cos I didn’t know bootlegging was evidently enough of a thing then to be the subject of this ad for Charles Mingus’ self-distributed records (an enterprise his Wiki entry is weirdly silent about)… I have read Clinton Heylin’s Bootleg but it was many years ago so I don’t recall what he had to say about bootlegging before rock bootlegs took off in 1969 with Great White Wonder; I know from other sources that piracy was an issue in the classical music industry well before that, but I don’t know about the jazz world. But apparently it was enough of a thing for Mingus to use to promote his own stuff…

Who’s on first

Just by way of a followup to my note on “Dot and Bubble” yesterday, someone on Bluesky linked to this article about Ncuti Gatwa, which ends with this:

Before we leave, I’m reminded of a story that Gatwa had told me about his first day filming the new series of Doctor Who. It was a night shoot and Gatwa was tired. Even so, he says, he came down the steps onto the sound stage, saw the Tardis, and laughed in disbelief.
The first scene Gatwa shot, he claims, is a pivotal point in the new series – “the final scene in episode five. People will remember that scene.” As the cameras started rolling, it was the make-or-break moment. Gatwa remembers thinking: “You have to dig deep and pull out something that will blow everyone on this set away – and I bloody well did.” Ncuti Gatwa leans back, and lets out that laugh again.
“I heard someone say: ‘That’s why he’s the Doctor.’”

Yes. He bloody well did indeed. I had no idea that was his first scene for the new series (apart from “The Giggle”, I presume). I imagine everything after that was comparatively easy for him.

One of them

Slightly uncertain how I feel about the latest Who. After watching it I saw some comparisons to Black Mirror, which I’ll take other people’s word for cos I’ve never watched Black Mirror, but this sort of “how social media/AI will fuck us up” plot appears to be the sort of thing that show does from what I’ve gathered about it… anyway, that’s only partly what it’s about; there’s Tractator-like creatures eating people out in the streets of Finetime, but ultimately the people of Finetime prove to be the real monsters. This is another relatively Doctor and Ruby-light episode, so Callie Cooke winds up carrying most of the episode, and in the end she proves to be kind of perfect casting, in that she somehow looks exactly like the sort of character she’s playing, especially in the climactic scene where she refuses to be saved by the Doctor cos he’s, you not, not from around there. He’s not like the rest of them. Hardly the first time the show has handled racial issues, but with the current Doctor being who he is it had more bite to it this time. Still, as with last week, I felt it could’ve done with a couple more minutes runtime; I felt like things were being left unsaid that should’ve been, and this week you couldn’t just ascribe it to supernatural wibbly woo like you could last week. It was good but something in the execution was a bit off-putting and I’m not sure what; this is one I think I’m going to need more viewings to fully get.