Oh Please God, No!

Yes!

The Cybermen are getting an audio series of their own! Details, however, are sketchy:

September will see the release of the four-part CD mini-series Cyberman, written and directed by Nicholas Briggs. Story details and casting are all deadly secret at the moment, but Nick has given us the following hints. 'It's set in the far future, on Earth, in space and on alien planets... perhaps even the odd familiar one.'

Cyberman, eh? Hmmm...

As I type, I'm watching a video of Uncle Tupelo's last performance ever from 1 May 1994.



Except for shorter hair, none of them look much different now. While the audio is pristine, having been lifted from the soundboard, the video was shot by someone in the back with a camcorder. It's not bad, though. It'd be nice if the shooter could have held a closeup for a while. Plus you get the occasional serving tray loaded with pitchers and/or bottles of beer moving in and out of the frame but I can't complain.

I invited Miss Rosie over this morning to help me cook cabbage rolls but she was readying for a venture to Ho Chunk with a friend who was celebrating her birthday. Since then, I've been putting off doing any cooking. I suspect that I'll get the filling done today but do the real labor of boiling the head of cabbage and peeling leaves later this week. Instead, I grabbed a glass of raspberry liqueur-laced iced tea and retired to the deck for a spot of reading. I sat out there for a few drinks or so before I tired of wiping sweat from my eyes and watching it drip from the tip of my nose. Returning inside, I finished reading Matt Ridley's Genome and began that book about Blade Runner in earnest. Genome was an exceptionally interesting read. It's a bit humbling to think that such a small bit of organic material such as a single chromosome is what separates me from someone with Down Syndrome. Almost incredible is the fact that a zygote becomes a person as Ridely describes in the chapter entitled "Self-Assembly". We've got these Hox genes which build the various bits of our bodies and they do so in a particular order, namely, bow to stern. All the building blocks of our bodies know where to go and what do to when they get there. Reading this book has given me only the most cursory cursory view of genetics but it's awe-inspiring nonetheless. I mean, all these hoolies that just make proteins for a living and they come up with those things known as people. People like Jay Farrar who make music listened to by people like me who enjoy and are moved by it. Gametes get together, genes do their thing, and - BAM!! - you get a person packed with emotions and instincts. A creature with consciousness who feels pain, loves, is happy and sad; a being that creates and destroys and must navigate a world full of other similar creatures.

So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth,
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth.

Plus the book is full of other tidbits. E.g. - I didn't know that chimney sweeps suffered from high rates of scrotal cancer due to coal tar exposure. Nor did I know that our bodies have cells which, when they spot other cells in trouble, can "order" these other cells to commit hara-kiri. Our bodies are truly weird and wonderful things.

As for the Blade Runner book, I'm only a couple chapters in. I have bounced around previously and looked at the pictures and read bits hither and thither before but I've finally sat down and started at the beginning. So far it's been nothing special. It's been introductory remarks and a brief once-over of Philip K. Dick, the author of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which is the novel upon which the film is based. I've read all of Dick's novels, several of his short stories, and a couple biographies of him so it was familiar ground. Still, there's plenty of juicy bits to come including the evolution of the script and the two lead actors with their on-set squabbles.