World Enough and Time

So David Tennant is engaged to Georgia Moffett.

For silly fannish reasons, this delights me.

One of the disappointments of recent Doctor Who is that we haven't seen Jenny again.

Just watched this - the Barrowman and Tennant act.

I am in a state of fannish joy. Oh, those guys. Those wonderful guys.

maaseru sent me a link to this interesting article about David Tennant in Hamlet. I liked the opening line with its link between this and "The Shakespeare Code": "For the second time in his career, David Tennant is finding himself saving Shakespeare." But even better, a connection I'd never thought of:

Tennant ... has no difficulty in making the transition from the BBC's Time Lord to a man who could be bounded in a nutshell and count himself a king of infinite space.

I'd never thought of the Doctor in the TARDIS as "a king of infinite space", but now I think of it, I can't imagine a better description of him.

Ever since Tennant became the Tenth Doctor, I've thought he had a good dollop of Hamlet in him: clever, mercurial, eloquent, suicidal. I wonder how the Doctor got along with his mother, and whether he had an uncle. Or a stepfather.

I'm tired of the condescension shown to SF in these articles, though, as if Tennant and Stewart have never done Shakespeare before, or as if Star Trek and Doctor Who fans are too déclassé for such highfalutin Tudor drama - as if they don't really want the riffraff wandering about the premises.

It's all storytelling, and one of the great virtues of Shakespeare is that he was never a snob. So why do the people producing his plays become so patronizing?

josanpq was over today for fun, frolic and goodies. She brought me two seasons of Black Books, which I never heard of before, but she thought I'd enjoy it. And a beautiful book from the National Geographic Society called Men, Ships and the Sea - the great selling point being the flyleaf diagram of a tall ship with all sails furled and labelled, and the lines, and the masts, and the knots. The book is full of beautiful pictures, as National Geographic Books are wont to be, and - being second hand - there's a note stuck between two pages, with a picture of a teddy bear holding a pen, and someone has written: Hold for John Walter. Ian - Jan 20/04". I love mysterious notes like that. Think it's in code?

josanpq told me about last week's episode of Grey's Anatomy, which had a subplot of a gay romance between two soldiers - she showed me the sequence on YouTube, but unfortunately that clip is now down. But there's another version here.

And she showed me a scrumptious publicity picture of David Tennant: one of my favourite actors in one of my favourite roles of all time. ( To be or not to be... )

I had fun browsing that site, with it's Doctor Who series 4 trailer and comments to which I could relate oh so easily:

...Every time Donna got to the "He looks like a man, but he’s a legend, and his name is the Doctor" bit, I would just be a screaming melting fangirl puddle of goo on the floor of that tiny Parisian hotel room. It was sad and pathetic. But this is who I am.

How is it that the Doctor does that so easily to us fangirls? I think I like this FlickFilosopher: she likes both Doctor Who and Slings and Arrows. Good taste.

And I love her eye-rolling conclusion after watching "Voyage of the Damned": They’re sick, these Brits. And I love 'em for it.

Then people posted cool links on the Bujold list today. Love it when they do that! james_nicoll posted the link to a fascinating look at our solar system at Solar System Visualizer, which doesn't look like so much at first, but when you start playing with it - wow! Check out the stuff orbiting around Jupiter. Or Saturn. (Love the name Ymir, well familiar to me from Thor comics.) Then Epsilon Eridani... that is just so - exotic. A name out of science fiction. Well, out of science too of course, out of astronomy, but I read more fiction than science.

And commorified posted the link to "Futility Closet", fun to browse.

I finished watching Blackpool this morning. I loved it. As a genre, it pretty much defies description: murder mystery, soap opera, black comedy, musical, psychological drama - bits of all of that mixed together, and I'm not sure it wasn't a morality play more than any of the rest, though what the moral was, I'm not sure.

My only complain is that I wanted it to be the story of DI Peter Carlisle, played by David Tennant - imagine a sexy Columbo with a ruthless edge, who likes ice cream.¹ It was, in fact, the story of ( Ripley Holden, played by David Morrissey... )

The Sun has a photo and its own choice twist on the Doctor Who filming going on in Cardiff. Complete with sonic screwdriver jokes and a first-paragraph reminder that Barrowman thinks Tennant is hot. At least they saw fit to include Freema Agyeman in the item.

Made me laugh.