Attack of the 50 Foot Ace

Mike Tucker and Robert Perry wrap up their story arc about the foretelling of Ace's death with Loving the Alien and they do so with reunions with friends and foes, Cyber gorillas, and giant ants. Even the state I call home, Wisconsin, gets mentioned. The Doctor is being held in a hospital and he asks the American soldier guarding him where he's from originally and the man replies, “Wisconsin, why?”

The year is 1959 and journalist Rita Hawks is covering a rocket launch in England. The Waverider, an experimental space plane, will be piloted by Thomas Kneale into orbit briefly and then returned to Earth. American president Eisenhower is supportive of the English effort to go into space, although perhaps a bit jealous that the Yanks didn't get there first. Backup pilot Davey O'Brien watches the progress of the flight from mission control at Winnerton Manor along with the top brass – both English and American - and reporters. Then something goes wrong. The reporters are hurried out of the room as technicians try to assess the situation and make corrections. An explosion rocks Waverider and sends it hurtling back to the Earth. However, contact is reestablished with the pilot: “Captain O’Brien here, sir. I didn’t think I was going to make it.”

Into this weird alternate reality come The Doctor and Ace. The Time Lord knows that this time and place in history is the key to stopping Ace's untimely death that was foretold in that perverted This Is Your Life show in Prime Time. Mel's death in Heritage only strengthened The Doctor's resolve to make sure Ace does not die a young woman. He performs an autopsy on Ace's body which reveals a tattoo saying “Ace and Jimmy, 1959”, that her last meal was a toffee apple, and that she'd had sex just prior to having a bullet put into her cranium. And, oddly, her exhumed body still bore a tag from St. Thomas' Hospital.

While Ace ventures off on her own, The Doctor investigates the hospital where he discovers Davey O'Brien's doppelgänger. He is expecting someone named Dumont-Smith who is a lawyer. It's off to Dumont-Smith's office where The Doctor runs into McBride, the private dick we encountered in Illegal Alien who is also inquisitive about D-S. They run into another friend from Illegal Alien, Inspector Mullen, who is on bomb disposal duty. The reunion takes a turn for the worse when giant ants burst forth setting off the explosives leaving Mullen sans legs.

Ace meets up with a strapping young lad ominously named Jimmy who works and, curiously enough, lives at the London Zoo. She is smitten and is happy bestow her favor upon him. The tension is ratcheted up slowly as first her hunger is satiated with a toffee apple and then later star-crossed lovers decide to get tattoos. When all proves not well between Ace and her beau, McBride comes to the rescue. McBride finds Ace locked in Jimmy's room at the zoo but his derring do gets the kibosh put on it and he finds himself in a darkened cage. In this, one of the more effective scenes in the book, he notices sparks casting a glow from the ceiling which reveal shadowy, ill-defined animal movements. Finally he discovers that he is locked in with a variety of apes that have been retrofitted with Cyber technology and that run on static electricity. They have these long poles attached to their bodies which touch the power source on the ceiling just like bumper cars. I found this scene to be very creepy.

Unfortunately for Ace, she too has her own reunion with a character from Illegal Alien – George Limb. This doesn't work out too well as it is he who kills Ace. It was rather odd reading the death of one of my favorite companions, especially in a way that wasn't heroic. She doesn't sacrifice herself in the line of duty to stop a phalanx of Daleks; she was the victim of a rather banal incarnation of evil.

Limb survived his trip in the Cybermen's time machine at the end of Illegal Alien and has been meddling with the web of time. Concomitant to his travels, the Cybermen trapped in hibernation at the end of the same novel are rediscovered by English authorities and the technology exploited. Although Limb's ability to navigate time is limited to about a decade from the early 1950s to the early 1960s, he gets enough glimpses of the fates of his future selves to worry. He decides to start selling Cyber technology to the Russians in an effort to cause a nuclear war and avoid his fate of becoming “augmented” with Cyber parts. Seeing Ace at the zoo, however, gave him another idea. He kills her in order to send a message to The Doctor. Limb's hope is that, once the Time Lord discovers Ace's demise, he would make his way that point in time where Limb could find him and enlist his help in changing his destiny.

It certainly worked but Limb's flirtations with time travel also cause rifts in the time-space continuum. Some of the alternate, parallel universes begin to intersect, hence the other Waverider with O'Brien as pilot, the giant ants, and other intrusions.

Tucker and Perry weave a wonderful story and create a lot of tension as the tale builds to a climax. Unfortunately the payoff just isn't there. At some point, Limb realizes that he can't escape, can't undo what he's done and kills himself. Mirabile dictu, all the damage done to the web of time which The Doctor spent so much time decrying is magically undone. If things were so dire, how did the death of Limb in one time line correct all the problems? There's still the other George Limbs in the alternate universes.

And what about Ace? Well, an Ace from one of the alternate time lines wherein everyone and everything is very large – hence those ants – makes her way into the primary/main time line where the story started. Very lucky. This 50 Foot Ace gradually and inexplicably shrinks down to “normal” size making her a suitable companion for The Doctor once again. So, not only was Ace, out of billions of people in that alternate universe, lucky enough to encounter a bridge between the universes, she automagically resizes to fit her new surroundings. Sounds like rather a lot of copping out instead of having to really deal with her death in a complex, nuanced way.

For all the worrying, all the mood swings, and all the depression The Doctor had on display over the past few books in this story arc, he sure takes Ace's death well. Almost in stride. He is all worried in Prime Time and feels compelled to dig up her grave. While on Heritage he is completely preoccupied by Ace's impending fate that he is totally listless and refuses to get involved, refuses to right wrongs. Here is determined to save Ace to the point where he is deliberately messing with the web of time. With all of the desperation and concern that he showed over the past few books, why does Ace's death seem to have so little impact on him? He is sorrowful and downs a few drinks but then it's back to business as usual. Yeah, he is angry with Limb but I never got the sense that, had the fate of our reality not been at stake, The Doctor's wrath would have been unleashed and he'd have opened a can of Gallifreyan whoop ass on George.

Loving the Alien is a classic DW romp. It has a great central mystery and there's a lot of fun and suspense to be had as characters from Illegal Alien are reintroduced and weird events flow from the intersection of universes that are meant to be parallel. Plus all of reality is at stake. But there were just too many dei ex machinae and I felt emotionally let down by the resolution of Ace's storyline. These books have done a lot to demonstrate that The Doctor may look human but is an alien. However, you can't spend books with The Doctor displaying a very human concern and being sad and then have him basically brush Ace's death off as yet another simple turn of the world. If The Doctor's view of life is that the incarnation of an individual from any old parallel universe is as good as the next, then why all the previous fuss?

Fun story but unsatisfying resolution to Ace's fate.

A Not Terribly Dangerous Method

In the opening of A Dangerous Method a horse-drawn carriage speeds down a road. The agonized face of Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley) is seen through the windows as she thrashes about. Arriving at its destination, the carriage door opens and Spielrein is taken away by some nice young men in clean white coats. She is given a room and met by Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) who will be her therapist, aiming to cure the fits of hysteria which plague her. Jung is calm and measured, almost to the point of being stoic, and he treats his patient pleasantly. He explains that his therapy will involve talking to her as he sits behind her and she tries to avoid looking at him. It's the latest cure for mental maladies devised by the sage in Vienna, Sigmund Freud.

With Jung in the background asking questions, Sabina writhes in her chair as she does her level best to answer them. This scene is the closest the film gets to the David Cronenberg of yore with his desire to distort, augment, and pick apart the human body. Knightley contorts her exceedingly bony body with her lower jaw looking like it is about to become unhinged. Sabina admits that, as a girl, she became sexually aroused when spanked by her father.

The movie flash forwards a couple years and Sabina has made significant progress. Her bouts of hysteria have stopped and Jung encourages her to pursue her dream of a career in psychanalysis. Jung is introduced to Freud (Viggo Mortensen) and the two quickly become friends, bonding over the meaning of dreams and the various conflicts of the id, ego, and superego. In addition to befriending the great Freud, Jung has remained a friend and mentor to Sabina with a sexual attraction bubbling just beneath the surface. Otto Gross then enters the picture. (A fantastic and too fleeting role for Vincent Cassell.) A former protégé of Freud, Gross discusses his views with Jung which involve a total disrespect for monogamy and the mantra "Repress nothing."

This sets Jung off on a new course. He is married but embarks on an affair with Sabina. His interests also collide with Freud's. An atheist, Freud held fast to science while Jung harbored pseudo-religious beliefs such as that there no meaningless coincidences – synchronicity. The two have their legendary falling out and Jung is no longer able to continue his affair.

A Dangerous Method was based on play which explains the focus remains on just three characters. There are some great scenes but Cronenberg is never able to integrate them into the larger story very well. For instance, early on Jung enlists Sabina as an assistant in a word association experiment. The subject is Jung's wife, Emma. He uses a rather weird device which I presume measured the conductivity of her hands – like a primitive polygraph machine. A coil is wound up and other devices are calibrated, Emma's hands are placed on gold pads, and a switch is thrown which presumably gets the juice flowing. Emma is in foreground on the far left side of the frame while Jung is sitting with his back to the camera on the right. In front of him sits Sabina who adjusts some part of the device. Jung says a word and Emma tells him the first thing that comes to her mind. It's a wonderful scene that bounces back and forth between the Jung's faces with pregnant pauses where Emma is slow to devise an answer.

Unfortunately the script has Sabina give her assessment of the experiment – the Jung's marriage is not in great shape – instead of leaving the audience to cull this from the facial expressions, pauses, and answers. I wish the script had found another way of letting us know that Carl and Emma's marriage is having troubles and that Sabina was aware of this. As it is, it felt insulting to have it spelled out for me in big letters. Furthermore, Emma is a peripheral character and this wonderful scene seems wasted on someone who has a very small role throughout the rest of the film.

I was also disappointed by the spanking scenes. Part of Jung and Sabina's relationship involves him administering some good slaps across her bum. There are a couple brief shots of this but their subversive and erotic potential is squandered. These scenes tell us very little beyond the fact that they are having a fling with a modicum of BDSM involved. I didn't feel they shed much light on Sabina or Jung. Did they intend to tell me she was sexually liberated? Was I supposed to infer that Jung was a top? I just was not able to relate the spanking to much of the characters' actions or dialogue outside of the bedroom.

Similarly, the film didn't develop the relationship between Freud and Jung enough. When they do part ways, it doesn't seem all that tragic to me. Freud is avuncular and friendly but he also views Jung as being inferior. I get the ideas that drove a wedge between the two men but the emotional break was paltry. I think the film needed to be longer so that Jung's relationships with both Sabina and Freud got more time to develop.

Cinematographer Peter Suschitzky is a long-time associate of Cronenberg's and there's some great photography here. The early part of the movie is dominated by scenes having Jung and Sabina's faces both facing the camera. This type of framing contrasts with the shot-reverse-shot scheme for most scenes where Jung is talking to Emma. Seeing both Jung and Sabina's faces at the same time hints at their budding attraction but this framing device is basically dropped after their affection they have for one another is known.

While certainly not a bad film, I thought that A Dangerous Method lacked a visceral punch. For a story about the potency of sex and love, both the characters and the power of erotic desire all felt like they were dealt with at arm's length.

Madison, Meet Frankfurt

Back in October my mother, one of my cousins, and his wife were in town. We were walking down State Street when we ran into a guy making molds of the terra cotta facade of the Castle & Doyle building. My cousin is a docent at the Chicago Architecture Foundation so he asked the guy why he was making those molds. He replied that the building was to be torn down and the facade to be reconstructed. The look on my cousin's face said it all. He didn't have to say, "What a shame. It's such a beautiful building."

I explained to him the plan for the 100 block of State Street devised by Jerome Frautschi and his wife Pleasant Rowland which involves tearing down historic buildings not only State Street but also the north side of the 100 block of West Mifflin.

I thought of this incident when I read how Frankfurt has decided to go about reconstructing the Altstadt or Old Town. The Old Town is the old city center and was the downtown, essentially, for a long time starting in the 8th century.

The approximately 7,000-square-metre area in the heart of Frankfurt's old town will now be reconstructed on the basis of the original blueprints of the quarter. Once completed, it will comprise nearly 30 townhouses, eight of which being exact replicas of their historical predecessors...Various historical eras and styles are on display here, the reconstructed walls and bronze sculptures representing Roman times, the High Middle Ages and the typical design of the imperial palaces of the time.

In an effort to recreate a typically vivacious urban quarter, the buildings to be developed will feature residential space on the upper floors and shops, pubs, offices and restaurants on the ground floor. The design of the buildings, meanwhile, will resemble the style of the original constructions.

After a municipal jury had recommended a more modern development of the area in 2005, Frankfurt's citizenry raised its collective voice, demanding reconstruction of the site according to its former historical style.

It'd be nice if Madison had such an attitude for the Square and its immediate environs, including State Street. Frankfurt is a modern global city with plenty of skyscrapers yet the citizens there have decided that a certain area will have a very different look, one that preserves part of the city's long history. Here, the intersection of Mifflin and Fairchild Streets is poised to lose all historic character. In addition to the Overture Center, we're going to have the Central Library redux:





If Frautschi and Rowland get their way, there will also be this:





I would rather look at rusted fire escapes from the Overture Center lobby than that.

The last corner is slated to be home to a new joint museum for the Historical Society and Department of Veterans. (And because museums here apparently aren't important enough to have a building dedicated to them, there will also be office space for rent and retail space as well.) While there is no design yet, I'll bet a dollar to a doughnut that it's going to be a glass monstrosity like its neighbors on the adjacent corners.

While much of the Frautschi/Rowland plan is wonderful, I'm not keen on continuing to push for downtown Madison to resemble a suburban office park.

Regardless of how this particular plan pans out, I hope that this incident starts more conversation about downtown's historic buildings. As this Wisconsin State Journal article notes, the historic buildings on State Street that would be affected by the Frautschi and Rowland plan aren't in the greatest of shape:

For the most part, time has been unkind to the vacant commercial spaces and apartments on the historic 100 block of State Street, where W. Jerome Frautschi and his wife, Pleasant Rowland, have proposed a $10 million redevelopment.

A tour Monday of vacant spaces in six buildings revealed a mix of interior conditions ranging from usable to irreparable decay.

It's not time that has been unkind to the buildings, it's the owners. What's the point of a community's desire to keep historic buildings if the people who own them are content with letting them decay? If that handful of buildings on the 100 block of State Street range from usable to irreparable decay, then surely more farther down the street are in similar conditions. Just look at the Orpheum. A push is being made to relight the marquee but I don't believe there to be any such plan to replace the seats which predate the invention of the wheel, fix the areas of the walls and ceiling where plaster has fallen off, and so on. State Street is supposed to be the city's "premiere" shopping/arts/dining district with its historic charm yet parts of it are threatening to become the next wave of Ruin Porn a la Detroit.

I personally would like to see downtown retain what's left of its historic look and feel. But that means not only that we need to stop razing historic buildings, but also that they must be maintained instead of letting them rot.

New and Improved Security at State Office Buildings

So the state Department of Health Services building now has security guards forcing visitors to 1 West Wilson to "check in" before being allowed access to the public building.

It's all part of a security plan that's been in the works for two years, says Beth Kaplan, spokeswoman for the Department of Health Services. The Department of Health Services and Department of Administration building, she adds, are the "only two state agency buildings that still do not have this type of security plan in place."

Under the new restrictions, which are still being phased in, visitors need to check in with security guards before gaining access, and employees must wear newly issued security badges.

"only two state agency buildings that still do not have this type of security plan in place"?

You don't need to check in with a security guard at the Historical Society. You can just walk up and talk to someone about tax breaks for restoring your historic home or piss off an archaeologist by wanting to chat about pyramids in Rock Lake. The GEF 2** and GEF 3 buildings don't have guards. (GEF 1, if memory serves, introduced a security detail after 9/11 and kept it on after other agencies got rid of theirs.) What is this spokesperson talking about?

I suggest a flash mob at 1WW where everyone daubs some fake blood on their faces and approaches the security guards to inquire where they can find the contagious diseases department.

Bonus Conspiracy Theory: DHS, DOA, and DOJ have tunnels that go to the Capitol. Is this about making sure Walker and his benefactors can avoid the hoi polloi?

EDIT: **GEF 2 is apparently locked now. I haven't tried to get a parks sticker from the DNR lately but I guess you have to go through GEF 1' security to do so these days.

Iron Sky Has a Trailer

Nazis invade Earth from their swastika-shaped moonbase in spaceships shaped like zeppelins. To make matters worse, Sarah Palin is president.

Get Yer Amish Comestibles on Atwood Avenue

I saw a couple Amish folks today selling various food items over on Atwood Avenue today at the building on the 2700 block at Miller Avenue that seems to have a rotating cast of occupants. (Bongo used to be there and you can buy trees there at Christmastime.)

Anyone bought any comestibles there?

This Is What an Internet Troll Looks Like

A crew from the BBC show Panorama tracks down a troll.



I wonder if they've done a follow-up to find out how the asshole's community reacted to finding out that one of their own goes around leaving comments like "rot in piss you filthy nigger" on Facebook. What does offline opprobrium and shame do to trolls?

Between the Motion and the Act Falls the Shadow

Although not written by Mike Tucker and Robert Perry, Heritage was written to fit into their story arc involving The Doctor discovering that Ace's impending death, as shown in a scene in Prime Time, is true. Author Dale Smith has come up with a real slow-burner which is more about drought than running through corridors.

The book's title is also the name of a planet with an eponymous derelict mining town that never recovered from the discovery of how to make the mineral thydonium synthetically. On 6 August 6048 The Doctor and Ace take a shuttle to Heritage as The Doctor is keen on visiting some old friends, the Heyworths. They discover that the Heyworths are gone and that they're left in a dry, dusty town that is distinctly unwelcoming. Red sand blows everywhere and gets on and into everything. It seems that the only remnants of Heritage's previous life are the Fussies, the Roombas of the DW world, always running about sucking up the dust.

It isn't long after disembarking the shuttle that Sheriff – yes, no real name, just "Sheriff" – tells our heroes to leave. Of course they refuse and so Sheriff is forced to report the arrival of the strangers to the Noah Cross of Heritage, a man named Wakeling, who has a rather loud black bird at home as well as the equivalent of a young Evelyn Mulwray who, in this case, is named Sweetness.

While the planet is suffering a near permanent drought, so are the inhabitants. Most hide behind closed doors while the proprietor of the sole tavern, Cole, serves few customers. The townsfolk live in fear of the splenetic Bernard, a dolphin aided by a mechanical apparatus like we saw in Storm Harvest that allows him to walk, translates speech, and also has a couple six-shooters built-in. Bernard is Wakeling's heavy and he has his own underlings, Ed and Christa, a couple of young reprobates.

For his part, The Doctor is depressed. He carries the burden of knowing Ace's fate and has a distinct case of the mulligrubs. He sits listlessly at Cole's bar while Ace is eager to find out what happened to the Heyworths. Cole tells her that they might be able to get some horses from a man named Lee to go off in search of The Doctor's friends and so she leaves the gloomy Time Lord at the tavern. Ace finds Lee in a state of perdition having lost his love, Ryan. His horses have also disappeared. And so she sets off on foot to the mine where answers await her.

One neat thing about this story is that, excepting the epilogue, it all takes place in the span of one day. Kind of like a tense countdown to high noon in a Western. Chapters usually span about 20 minutes but some take up more time, some less. There is a modicum of action but it is much about the interior states of the characters. The Doctor languishes in his torpor, not wanting to get involved in Heritage's admittedly shady business; Cole laments the decay of the town; Lee dwells in heartbreak, agonizing over Ryan's disappearance and how the dream they once had was shattered; and so on. This is certainly one of the bleakest DW stories I've ever encountered.

The Doctor is finally shaken from his doldrums after learning that the Heyworths are dead. We discover that Mrs. Heyworth's maiden name was Bush, as in Melanie Bush. The former denizen of the TARDIS at some point got tired of running around with Sabalom Glitz and settled down on Heritage with her mister. The trouble started when Mel approached Wakeling, who reckoned himself a genius of genetics, about helping her and her husband conceive a child as she was afflicted with a malady that caused menopause to kick in early. Wakeling agreed but his hubris got the better of him and he simply cloned Mel instead of mixing gametes from her and Mr. Heyworth. An enraged Mel confronted the faux fertility doctor. Passions grew high and Wakeling accidentally killed her.

Wakeling promised the townsfolk that his research would yield fantastic results that would elevate Heritage and humanity and so they made a Faustian bargain. They let Wakeling escape justice in hope that their lives on a dusty backwater planet would be renewed by his discoveries. This reminded me of High Plains Drifter a bit insofar as having a whole complicit in the death of one of their own.

Heritage is the odd man out of the PDAs I've read. It sustains a gloomy mood, a feeling of emptiness, throughout. Most of the townspeople are wracked by guilt. They're like T.S. Eliot's hollow men. They eke out an existence in a dead land, their dried voices unable to conjure a word of courage nor a peep of regret. The Doctor is a confused mess, unsure what to do about Ace's fate. Ace, on the other hand, can only wonder what is wrong with her mentor. The spark has gone out of him as well as the desire to do good and champion the downtrodden. When she discovers that Mrs. Heyworth was Mel, she contemplates her relationship with The Doctor. He cannot always protect her and good does not always triumph. Ace matures here a bit. While her youth is keen on blowing stuff up with Nitro-9, she is beginning to see a bigger picture.

Select chapters are prefaced with quotes from various documents and books. There's a quote from Sweetness' autobiography and a blurb about Heritage from a text on colonization. The book's final chapter included a "fragment of a letter found buried in a desecrated grave" by a corporal from UNIT which expressed profound regret. Was it written by The Doctor after Ace's death?

Loving the Alien is next and it's written by Tucker and Perry. Presumably this story arc will come to a close.

Public Art Idea

I recently stumbled upon an article about these:





It's a brass diagram set into the sidewalk of Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood instructing pedestrians on how to dance. (Is that the rumba?)

How about a set of these for Madison showing how to do our official state dance, the polka? And perhaps more demonstating other moves?

Larry Kaufman Clouds Rail Debate

The latest issue of Isthmus has a letter to the editor from Larry Kaufman in which he takes issue with Marc Eisen's "Gov. Walker's fateful decision on rail". Eisen laments Governor Walker's decision to reject federal money which would have extended Amtrak's Hiawatha line to Madison and paid for various maintenance work on the line generally.

Kaufman writes:

"The simple fact is that America once had an extensive commuter rail network but it was rendered obsolete by 20th-century technologies. For short trips, cars provide far more convenience and point-to-point connectivity than trains, and planes are much quicker (and cheaper) on long trips."

If Eisen was writing about intercity rail, why is Kaufman conflating it with commuter rail? Intercity rail is exactly what it says: rail between cities. Commuter rail, on the other hand, it rail connecting suburbs and outlying areas with urban cores. This isn't to say that people don't commute on the Hiawatha but, even as Kaufman concedes in his letter, the ultimate goal was to make Madison a stop on a lengthier route which would stretch at least from Chicago to Minneapolis.

This reminds me of the great victory that anti-rail activists scored when debating the federal grant. I have encountered many people - and not all of them were Walker-supporting Republicans - who reiterated the refrain that the money was to be used to introduce service between Madison and Milwaukee. This is misleading. The money would have extended the Hiawatha line to Madison meaning that the route would have run between Madison and Chicago. Yet I am convinced that many people didn't know this. I have encountered several people who thought that the service was strictly between Madison and Milwaukee. Even Mike Ivey, a business reporter for The Capital Time here in Madison got it wrong:

But that request came after Walker — following up on a campaign pledge — had already rejected $810 million the feds allocated last year to establish a Milwaukee-to-Madison high-speed rail line.

That $810 million dollars would NOT have established a Milwaukee-to-Madison high-speed rail line, it would have added a new stretch to the existing Hiawatha line and connected Madison to Chicago and points in between. To his credit, Mr. Kaufman gets it right in a comment on another piece by Eisen when he refers to the plan as "the Chicago-Milwaukee-Madison route".

Kaufman's letter is also flawed in another way. He says that rail was rendered obsolete by the plane and the car ("20th-century technolgies") and implies that rail is so 19th century. The problem is that the car is not a 20th century technology. Like the train, it was born in the 19th century. Furthermore, he neglects to mention a significant government intervention which led to the decline of rail, namely, the interstate system. Not only did it allow people to jump in their cars and go, but it also helped open the door for trucks to make significant inroads into long-haul freight transportation. Railroads lost a lot of business to trucks, not just cars. It was not simply the invisible hand of the free market via the march of technology which brought down passenger rail.

For all of Kaufman's bluster about the "basic facts" of the superiority of the car and plane, the Hiawatha broke its annual ridership record last year with the route providing 823,163 rides in 2011, a 4% increase over 2010. Indeed, Amtrak's fiscal year 2011 saw more people than ever ride its trains. Not only are more and more young adults choosing to forego getting their driver's license and getting a car, but apparently adults from previous generations are increasingly finding the train to be a superior alternative to driving.

I Think Madison Could Use a Bus Terminal

A short while ago I observed Langdon Street outside Memorial Union and the Red Gym. There were: 4 Badger Buses, 1 Lamers, and 1 Megabus. A Badger Bus stopped in the westbound lane to let passengers disembark and blocked traffic. Madison Metro lost curbside space.

Madison could perhaps use a little infrastructure boost here.

Wisconsin State Science Standards Suck

The Fordham Institute has released its annual State of State Science Standards 2012" and Wisconsin gets a big, fat F.

The report (PDF) begins:

Wisconsin’s science standards—unchanged since 1998, in spite of much earlier criticism, ours included—are simply worthless. No real content exists to evaluate. In lieu of content, the “authors” have passed the buck by merely citing unelaborated references to the now outdated National Science Education Standards (NSES). Rather than using the NSES as building blocks for a comprehensive set of science standards, however, Wisconsin has used them as an escape hatch to avoid hard work and careful thought.

Exit Sarah Jane?

I'm not sure where Bullet Time is supposed to fit chronologically in the Seventh Doctor's era but it feels like it comes late in his tenure. He is companionless. And he is weary. He explains his neglect of sleep, "I see the faces of every death I'm responsible for every time I sleep. Every enemy, every friend I've lost, every innocent I've failed to save. So I stopped sleeping." You can glean many elements of the New Series from the books of the Lost Years when the show was off the air. With Ace being who-knows-where, we instead are presented with the return of Sarah Jane Smith who is in the Orient plying her trade.

This book gets a lot of points from me simply for its setting. There are side trips to Thailand, Moscow, and the Persian Gulf but it is mostly set in Hong Kong in 1997 as the city prepares to lose its status as an English colony and return to Chinese hands. A nice change from earthly stories set in London and elsewhere in the British Isles. Given the setting, most characters aren't white. There's even a black American Agent thrown in which makes for a good mix.

Bullet Time reads like a spy thriller. It's fast paced with danger lurking around every corner. Sarah Jane recently published an article about the sex tourism industry in Thailand and didn't make any friends for having done so. She is kidnapped by unknown enemies along at the Bangkok airport along with that agent going incognito, Tom Ryder, who tried to intervene. The plan is for them to be thrown out of a helicopter over the ocean to their dooms. Ryder, however, is more than meets the eye as he grabs a couple parachutes and dives out after Sarah Jane. This reminded me of that scene from Moonraker where Bond and Jaws duel it out in midair.

McIntee really went all out here and has thrown in everything but the kitchen sink. A couple hikers disappear in Cambodia after having backpacked out to an area reputed to be haunted and U.N.I.T. was following their every move. Sarah Jane makes her way to Hong Kong where she stops in at the Pimms Corporation for an interview. Head of security Tse Hung is a shady character while PR flack Yue Hwa seems much more amenable. Sarah Jane is escorted to see the big cheese and lo and behold, it is The Doctor sitting in the CEO chair. Of course, she doesn't recognize him as he is now in his seventh incarnation.

It turns out that Pimms is acting as a front for the Triad, a Chinese mafia family, and The Doctor is running drugs. Can this really be? A couple errand boys for the Triad go to exact punishment on one Ah Wing for his failure to pay his debts in a timely manner only to find a small pile of ashes where a body should be. This brings in the police in the form of Inspectors Katie Siao and Mark Sing.

Meanwhile the Russian submarine Zhukov detects a radioactive anomaly on the ocean floor and investigate. They find a deposit of a strange metal which is as light and flexible as plastic and also does not corrode. And, of course, there are aliens.

I this cloak and dagger fest McIntee deftly handles the numerous characters. One of those errand boys, Hong Yi Chung, gets a lot of type until his death while Inspector Siao's relationship with her partner is woven into the narrative fabric which features The Doctor pulling strings in the background as Sarah Jane tries to get to the bottom of things while U.N.I.T. does the same.

But very few people are who they seem. Just what is The Doctor doing heading a company that is running drugs? Has he really gone over to the dark side? Is Yue Hwa really as unassuming as he seems? Why does Inspector Sing always seem to get out of trouble with the internal affairs folks? Who is Chiu, the Chinese man with the purple eyes and blond hair? Is Tom Ryder actually with the DEA? There are a lot of assumed identities, double crosses, and people who keep secrets here.

This all supports what you can say is the story's main case of misidentity – how The Doctor is no longer the man, er, being, that Sarah Jane once knew. Here The Doctor isn't the shining beacon of goodness that she once knew. He is playing his cards close to his chest and manipulating those around him. In the New Series, The Doctor meets up with Sarah Jane again and it is used as a way to further the idea that The Doctor is a loner, that, ultimately, you can't really get close to him. A companion will age while The Doctor merely regenerates periodically. The Tenth Doctor is warm but distant. Bullet Time treads much this same path but the Time Lord is even more distant and a bit confrontational. He tells her, "Perhaps you never knew the Doctor. How can a member of one species really know how a member of another species mind works, or how they think or feel? You've no frame of reference: you can only make assumptions and have beliefs." Elsewhere he says, "I know you’ve missed a Doctor who’s long dead."

This is like the "darker" Doctor we met in the show's last season, the one who would make Ace confront her fears and her past on his terms and not hers, but exaggerated. Here The Doctor's affection for his companions as well as his motives are hidden. I can't really tell if The Doctor's comments and attitude here are simply a put-on in order to get Sarah Jane to exit the scene for her own safety or whether he has really undergone a sea change. Either way, he is no longer the hero she once knew.

One thing I didn't expect from the story was to read about Sarah Jane's death. She is shot in the line of duty when she takes herself out as a bargaining chip for Ryder to use against The Doctor. Heart monitors at the hospital flatline. Can she really be dead? The book has an epilogue in which she chats with The Doctor but it is unclear as to whether she really survived at the hands of a preternaturally gifted cardiac specialist or if her friend was simply trying to find a bit of solace within himself in the wake of her death.

Although McIntee was able to juggle numerous plot lines and character, he arguably neglected the main characters, Sarah Jane and The Doctor. Fans who want their DW stories to follow the pattern established by the TV show where it's mostly The Doctor and his companions with cutaways to the villains to establish what they're up to will be disappointed by Bullet Time. Here Sarah Jane and The Doctor are treated as first among equals. I didn't mind this approach considering all of the mysteries woven into the plot. Plus the story was simply fun and I found myself perfectly content with getting my doses of our heroes meted out as they were.

A wonderful, if melancholy, addition to the DW pantheon.

Brewing Gose: Sam Adams & Early Wisconsin Immigrants

This is interesting. Sam Adams now has a label for their Verloren Gose. ("Verloren" is German for "lost".) It is apparently set to be the next entry in their Single Batch series which comes in 22oz. bottles. It's not a popular style, as you can guess from the beer's name. I have had one German version - Leipziger Gose - and one domestic – from Gordon Biersch at the Great Taste of the Midwest in 2010.

Gose is an obsession with beer expert and blogger Ron Pattinson so, if you want to know all about Gose, check out his blog. Here his brief description:

Leipziger Gose is one of the world's most obscure beer styles, an isolated remainder of northern Germany's pre-lager traditions. About the only similar beer still brewed in Germany is Berliner Weisse, though Gose seems to have at least as much in common with sour Belgian wheat beers.

It's a pale, top-fermenting wheat beer, flavoured with coriander and salt. There's a hefty lactic acid content and was probably once spontaneously-fermented. A description in 1740 stated "Die Gose stellt sich selber ohne Zutuung Hefe oder Gest" ("Gose ferments itself without the addition of yeast"). I've always suspected some sort of link with the gueuze of Brussels, though not because of the similarity of the names. That, I'm sure is pure coincidence.

From what I can tell, German Gose bier is generally less than 5% ABV so it would seem that Sam Adams is following the American trend of bigger beers. Still, it's nice to see an American brewer brewing this style. Even better is that it is the country's largest craft brewer which means that it will get pretty wide distribution. Hopefully this can help dispel the myth that all German bier styles are lagers and that all German bier is either a pale or dark variation of that style.

I have wondered if any Wisconsin breweries have historically brewed Gose or other lesser-known German bier styles. The Reinheitsgebot was strictly a Bavarian law until 1871 which means that most of Wisconsin's earliest German immigrants, who came from Baden Württemberg, did not come from a beer culture laboring under the Reinheitsgebot laws. Shortly after the Civil War, northwestern Germany became the epicenter of emigration to America until around 1885. Again we have a wave of immigrants coming to Wisconsin from areas of Germany that were not covered by Reinheitsgebot. The last great wave of German immigration to Wisconsin lasted from roughly 1885 until the outbreak of World War I and it was people from northeastern Germany that dominated it. The Reinheitsgebot was in force during this time but it is likely that many of these immigrants were well-versed in the bier styles of northern Germany which were quickly dying out at this time.

On top of this, Köln (Cologne) had its own Reinheitsgebot for much of the 19th century which outlawed bottom-fermenting beer.

Jerry Apps' history of brewing in Wisconsin, Breweries of Wisconsin, basically said that German immigrants brewed lagers. (At least that's how I recall it. I don't have the book in front of me.) While I don't doubt that they did brew primarily lagers for one reason or another, some German immigrants from outside of Bavaria must surely have brewed an ale commercially at some point. Is it really true that immigrants from Köln who came from a brewing tradition where it was illegal to brew bottom-fermenting biers never brewed a Obergäriges Lagerbier? No one from Münster or Düsseldorf ever brewed the version of alt that was popular in their respective city? Not a single Gose, Broyhan, or Kirschbier? This just seems implausible to me.

Of course the brewing culture from which these immigrants hailed is surely not the only factor which determined what kind of beers they brewed. Availability of equipment, ingredients, and the local tastes also played a role. Still, I find it very difficult to believe that each and every German immigrant brewed lagers and only lagers.

Exit Ace?

In The Curse of Fenric Ace told The Doctor, "Professor, I'm not a little girl" shortly before creating a distraction with a nice little temptress routine. Here Ace goes the whole nine yards and beds a member of the Mendeb bourgeoisie named Kedin Ashar. A first for me. My impression is that Ace beds quite a few gentlemen in the NAs but this is the first time she has done so in a PDA. Not a little girl indeed.

The problem starts when the TARDIS brings Second Doctor and Jamie to the Mendeb system but find the heat oppressive and no obvious way to interfere with another civilization. The Doctor vows to return but Jamie is not at all confident that the Time Lord will actually remember to do so. To help jog The Doctor's memory in the future, Jamie grabs a souvenir. Unfortunately the tchotchke ends up being a vital component to a communications system. Many years later Ace discovers the circuit and The Doctor's memory is jolted. They return to the Mendeb system in hope of returning the part, restoring communication between the inhabitants of Mendeb Two and Mendeb Three, and having a happy ending.

Despite having a time machine, nothing could ever go so smoothly. The TARDIS lands on a space station which resides in orbit between Mendeb Two and Three which were settled by the TAM Corporation many centuries ago. The company abandoned the planets and took most of their precious technology with them leaving the people behind to start anew. Ace is keen on adventure and has The Doctor leave her there to explore while he continues to Mendeb Two. Unbeknownst to our intrepid heroes, the inhabitants of Mendeb Three are quite technologically advanced in contrast to their brethren on Two. The aforementioned Kedin Ashar is Mendeb's Alfred Krupp, inventing and manufacturing arms for the scheming and treacherous Duke Vethran.

Things have gotten to the point where there are no checks on Vethran's ambitions. Ashar plots a putsch and enters the slave trade in order to fund his rebellion. He is kidnapping the peaceful folks on Mendeb Two, giving them a drug called SS 10 which strips them of their volition, and pawning them off to the petty nobility of Mendeb Three.

Ashar does his work from the space station where he runs into Ace who is almost immediately smitten with him. While he is also taken with her, he pines for his love, Tevana, who is being held in seclusion by Vethran as insurance. But Ace is able to operate some of the station's technology that has escaped the abilities of Ashar and his compatriots. The afterglow of their night at the horizontal disco wears off quickly once Ace figures out that the man she bedded is involved in human trafficking. Ashar has her drugged and sent to Mended Three where she will at least be safe, if a mindless slave.

Meanwhile The Doctor befriends Bep-Wor, the lone survivor from a village that was destroyed and whose inhabitants were forced into slavery. Bep-Wor follows The Doctor in hopes of being reunited with his love, Kia-Ga. The Doctor ends up being this Spartacus figure leading a rag-tag group of people against the slave masters of Mendeb Three while Ace is a slave that ends up in the service of Vethran.

There's no mystery here for The Doctor and Ace to solve. Instead we have one of those stories where The Doctor and Ace find themselves between two parties in conflict. I thought the opening gambit with Jamie snagging a vital bit of circuitry to be pretty lame. You'd think Jamie would know better than to screw with things wires and "flickering wee lights". That The Doctor and Ace are separated for most of the story may or may not appeal to any given reader. On the one hand, it deprives us of Doctor-companion banter. But on the other it gives Ace to prove her mettle instead of being dependent on The Doctor. (And it gives her time for some carnal indulgences.) Unfortunately she spends a lot of time under the influence of an SS 10-like drug, essentially out of commission until she can be the hero at the last minute.

I liked the meta love triangle here. Ashar works to rescue Tevana, Bep-Wor seeks Kia-Ga, and The Doctor tries to get back to Ace. Of the three, only the last comes to something akin to a happy ending. Tevana and Kia-Ga had both been dosed with SS 10 the effect of which The Doctor finds to be inalterable. Bep-Wor (what's with these hyphenated names for the people on Two?) ends his grief by ending his own life while Ashar sinks into the depths of perdition. Ace decides to stay and start a new life in the Mendeb system but is dissuaded by Ashar who, in the end, concludes that the only choice left is to simply carry on.

This ending is bleak for more than just the Mendebians. Sure, Ace escapes becoming an SS 10 zombie but all is not well with her and The Doctor. She wants independence. She needs a break from her travels. For his part, The Doctor seems to have a touch of melancholia. He is unable to reverse the effects of SS 10, for one thing. But there is more to it than that. Ashar tells Ace in rejecting her offer to stay, "He needs you, Ace. He can't function without you. And, from what you tell me, he has a great burden to carry and much to do." Perhaps it is an angst that only Time Lords can understand.

What Will Happen to Ace?

I imagine that Prime Time is in large measure a parody of the BBC with the inhabitants of the planet Blinni-Gaar completely addicted to the mindless television programming on Channel 400. In fact, they are so totally given over to TV that few people actually work with automated combines harvesting the field where the TARDIS lands. Vogol Lukos runs Channel 400 with the aid of a computer system known as "Auntie", presumably as in Auntie Beeb, and he is quite happy to have The Doctor on his planet as he has some designs on making the Time Lord the star of a new show which will have literally the whole star system watching.

Mike Tucker returns here though he is without his usual writing partner, Robert Perry. A blurb notes that Tucker was a BBC special effects guy at the time he wrote the book. Perhaps the story is revenge on his employer. The guy obviously loved the Seventh Doctor and I can't blame him.

The Doctor and Ace wander the city, Blinni Prime, I think, and encounter independent reporter Greg Ashby and his cameraman Eeki Tek. Ace develops a crush on Ashby though he is really out to land an interview with The Doctor, hero of Coralee. Also out on the prowl are a band of bloodthirsty Zzinbriizi Jackals.

The Zzinbriizi are, unsurprisingly, doing the bidding of Lukos who comes across as a very one-dimensional bad guy – power-hungry and cocksure. Think the pirate captain from The Pirate Planet. Not as cartoonish with his own Mr. Fibuli to boss around in the form of talk show host Roderik Saarl. Since Blinni-Gaar has cameras pretty much everywhere, the planet is like one big reality show set. This frustrates The Doctor and Ace who find themselves unable to pull a stunt to gain access to Channel 400 HQ.

I really liked this element of the book. Lukos knows quite a bit about The Doctor and looks to get his hands on the TARDIS. The Time Lord scores a minor victory on a trek to Blinni-Gaar's moon where he discovers Channel 400's broadcast tower and a strange device that is wired into it but Lukos gets the upper hand. He lures The Doctor and Ace into one of the studios with a jungle set that proves to be bigger on the inside than the outside. Plus that pack of Zzinbriizi Jackals are hunting them down. And it's all being broadcast on television to boot.

Ace escapes with the help of a teenage girl named Gatti who must be the only teen in the whole galaxy who doesn't watch TV. Meanwhile The Doctor meets up with The Master who's had his TARDIS jury rigged into that jungle set. The banter between the two Time Lords is fun and we discover that the hold of the Cheetah People remains within The Master just as it did with Ace in Matrix.

Things take a turn for the worse when it is revealed that The Doctor's fellow defiant one is, in fact, not The Master but a Zzinbriizi given a nice disguise by the Fleshsmiths whom I first encountered in Relative Dementias. They have honed the ability to manipulate flesh to an art form. Here we find them in their hideout on the planet Scrantek and it is revealed that, not only has The Master come to them seeking a new body and been betrayed, but also that they've struck a deal with Lukos. He gets the whole galaxy watching Channel 400 whose signal has a Fleshsmith enzyme piggybacking on it which will turn the bodies of viewers into their modeling clay.

Since the Fleshsmiths have the ability to clone, you have to wonder why they took the long way and decided to plot this hideous and hideously complicated subterfuge to transmogrify people into the medium of their choice. Why risk meddling Time Lords when all you have to do is grab once person and you can have all the clay you want? Haste makes waste.

I liked Prime Time even if it was a bit over the top. The Doctor is true to character here as he makes the decision to save the life of the faux Master. And I enjoyed their verbal sparring as they ran through the jungle set. I think it's the first time I've encountered the arch villain in any of the PDAs and it was nice to have Anthony Ainley's version of the character in my imagination. Plus I appreciated the continuity from the TV show regarding his adventures on the Cheetah world.

On the other side, Ashby ends up being rebuilt by the Fleshsmiths which is nice and grotesque but ultimately feels tacked on. His former lover is herself a hostess for Channel 400 and their reunion seems like a convenient ploy to make sure the good guys prevail.

I find myself looking forward to reading the rest of the 7th Doctor PDAs written by Tucker and Perry because they've toyed with Ace here. There is plenty of her kicking ass and taking names but she also gets her 15 minutes of fame at the hands of Roderik Saarl. Stuck onstage and forced to watch images from her future, Ace breaks down emotionally. Images of her elderly mother and of her own grave were just too much. The book ends with The Doctor hunting down that grave and discovering that it is indeed real and not the product of Channel 400's effects team. Chillingly, Ace's body is that of a teenager and not an old woman.

Tucker and Perry have a couple novels left to explain this one.

Near East Side Looking to Brew Up a Storm

Brewer Peter Gentry is looking to open a nano-brewpub at 1148 Williamson, the former home of Indus Beads. It would be called One Barrel Brewing Company.

Someone else is also looking to open a brewpub in town and is apparently eying up Atwood Avenue as the location.

And yet another person is proposing to open a meadery on the 800 block of East Washington.

Joe or anyone else - are these folks with the MHTG?

My guess is that One Barrel is up for a fight with the neighbors. There was a neighborhood meeting on Tuesday about Gentry's plans but I haven't heard how it went. I suspect that Willy Street denizens who are already fed up with the noise from Plan B and the Wisco are going to put up a fight against another drinking establishment in their neck of the woods. Time will tell.

On a related note, the Joseph James Brewing Co. of Nevada will be opening a brewery in Franklin to brew for Midwest and Northeast markets. Not quite as big a story as Sierra Nevada opening a brewery in North Carolina but good news for Wisconsin nonetheless.

Others: Their Deaths and Their Shoes

(More here.)


John Tirman, the author of The Deaths of Others: The Fate of Civilians in America's Wars, wrote an very interesting and incredibly sad opinion piece for the Washington Post recently called "Why do we ignore the civilians killed in American wars?".

The major wars the United States has fought since the surrender of Japan in 1945 — in Korea, Indochina, Iraq and Afghanistan — have produced colossal carnage. For most of them, we do not have an accurate sense of how many people died, but a conservative estimate is at least 6 million civilians and soldiers.

Our lack of acknowledgment is less oversight than habit, a self-reflective reaction to the horrors of war and an American tradition that goes back decades. We consider ourselves a generous and compassionate nation, and often we are. From the Asian tsunami in 2004 to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the Haiti earthquake in 2010, Americans have been quick to open their pocketbooks and their hearts.

However, when it comes to our wars overseas, concern for the victims is limited to U.S. troops.

Tirman gives a couple of explanations for this. First is that Americans are good people who go out and kill savages. The second is the "'just world' theory" which says that people assume the world is an orderly place and get mad at people that demonstrate it to be anything but. Civilian deaths in war time don't jibe with the idea that Americans only kill bad guys.

The piece concludes with a plea: "More attention to the human costs may jolt the American public into a more compassionate understanding."

I thought of Tirman's article when I read this one. It describes the outrage felt by many Iraqis in the city of Haditha after Marine Corps Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich received a slap on the wrist for his part in the slaughter of Iraqi civilians there. In November of 2005 a roadside bomb went off killing one of Wuterich's squad and the Marines went on a rampage.

In all, 24 Iraqi civilians were killed – 19 in several houses along with five men who pulled up in a car where the marines were on patrol in Haditha on November 19, 2005.

The victims included 10 women and children killed at point-blank range. Six people were killed in one house, most shot in the head, including women and children huddled in a bedroom.

At first the military said that the Iraqis were killed by an IED and then the truth emerged. Eight Marines were charged but it came down to Wuterich after one Marine was acquitted and the rest had the charges against them dropped. For his part in the massacre, Wuterich agreed to a plea deal which saw him demoted to private, had his pay docked, and was given a 90-day confinement which he won't have to serve. The judge decided not to dock his pay the full amount because Wuterich has sole custody of his three daughters. If only such compassion was shown to the Iraqi children in Haditha on that day.

The upshot is that there are a lot of people in Haditha who are angry because they see American Marines getting away with shooting Iraqi children at point-blank range. I can only imagine the ill-will this judgment generated in the Middle East and in other Islamic areas when the news reached them.

Like that old Rare Bird song goes, sympathy is what we need. (Or perhaps empathy, more correctly.) As Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler wrote in his pamphlet War Is a Racket:

The Japanese, a proud people, of course will be pleased beyond expression to see the United States fleet so close to Nippon's shores. Even as pleased as would be the residents of California were they to dimly discern through the morning mist, the Japanese fleet playing at war games off Los Angeles.

I won't be voting for Ron Paul this autumn but this video, which I take to have been made by a PAC that supports him, has the right idea. Put yourself in the shoes of the people who have American soldiers and contractors occupying their homelands; put yourself in the shoes of someone who has American drones flying overhead that could send missiles down at any time; put yourself in the shoes of those unfortunate people in Haditha who had their friends and family members gunned down by American Marines.

The United States is ready to sanction certain banks that deal with Iran's central bank; the EU and Australia are boycotting Iranian oil; Iran, meanwhile, is getting ready to formally tell the EU to fuck off and is threatening to block the Strait of Hormuz.

In his State of the Union address last night, Obama noted that "America is a Pacific power". Our "defense strategy" for the near future is to keep spending more money and focus on the China. As I learned from reading Michael Klare's Resource Wars, "Over at the South China Sea, the region's powerhouse, China, is making waves by claiming an ever larger swath of the sea as its own much to the chagrin of other countries such as Vietnam, the Philippines, etc. Japan has an interest here as well as tankers that supply it with oil sail through the area."

Plenty of warmongering to be had.

So the next time you're in a voting booth or listening to some politico lecturing you on the necessity of invading another country, put yourself in the shoes of those at the other end of the barrel of American guns or standing beneath American drones.

Spanish Bishop Decries Tempting Teens (And Jesus Loves Him Some Wheat)

Those poor priests. The ones who sexually abuse children. According to a bishop named Bernardo Álvarez it's all the fault of the victims because they're just a bunch of tempters and temptresses.

His comments were that there are youngsters who want to be abused, and he compared that abuse to homosexuality, describing them both as prejudicial to society. He said that on occasions the abuse happened because the there are children who consent to it.

‘There are 13 year old adolescents who are under age and who are perfectly in agreement with, and what’s more wanting it, and if you are careless they will even provoke you’, he said.

And of course he threw in the obligatory homophobia during this round of comments as well.

On a slight tangent, I found this article about the manufacture of communion wafers here in the States. As I read I wondered what Catholics who have Celiac disease do when it comes to communion. I read on.

The Catholic Church requires that hosts be made of wheat in order for communion to be valid, but there is a small number of Catholics who suffer from coeliac disease, a hereditary autoimmune disorder that makes it impossible to digest the protein found in wheat gluten. In the 1980s, people with coeliac disease began to agitate within the Church for alternatives to the wheaten Eucharist, that they might participate more fully in Catholic services; but the Church remained intransigent on the point.

Apparently Jesus will only transubstantiate from wheat so the Church turned its back on the gluten-intolerant in its flock. Finally in 2001 an ultra-low gluten version was developed which passed papal muster and that of those with Celiac disease.

My understanding is that Jesus consecrated wheat bread hence the need for wheat wafers. But doesn't the story go that he also consecrated grape wine and not fresh grape juice? If unfermented grape juice is passable for communion these days, then why not rice wafers? Is there some passage in the Bible where Jesus smotes spelt or explains why he won't reify in rice?

I can just imagine a bunch of Sophisticated Theologians® sitting in the basement of The Vatican arguing over why their omnipotent deity preferred wheat and won't let his body be sorghum. It'd be just like that scene from The Name of the Rose.

Jiro Dreams of Sushi

If my stepkids could have their way, they'd be eating sushi from Edo for three squares a day. Hopefully this movie will make its way to a theatre in Madison so we can see it together. If not, I guess we'll end up watching it on Netflix.

Alexios in Absentia

I recently watched the first episode of a new BBC programme called The Crusades. The show is hosted by Thomas Asbridge, a medieval historian. I have heard good things about his book The First Crusade: A New History and have it on my to-read list. And so it was very disappointing to actually watch the television program.

The first part is called "Holy War" and it is an account of the First Crusade. It begins by showing the statue of Urban II at Clermont where he gave his adamantine call for crusade in November 1095. The show quotes Urban as saying that there were a bunch of barbaric Muslims in the Holy Land making life horrible for fellow Christians. Asbridge describes how nobles such as Raymond of Toulouse, Bohemond of Taranto, and Godfrey of Bouillon signed up. Much is made of Urban's promise that those who die will have their sins forgiven. In other words, it's a holy war and those who fought in it did so for the love of their god. It's a very appropriate introduction considering what follows. But it's also jumping the gun, in my opinion.

Now, I'm no scholar of the Crusades but even I sat there waiting for Asbridge to mention the name of the Byzantine emperor, Alexios I, who had written to Urban asking for Western help against the Seljuq Turks in the spring of 1095. He never did. I'm also no scholar of the history of scholarship of the Crusades but my impression is that Asbridge's "new history" is one that emphasizes the religious duty that crusaders felt they had and minimizes what is perhaps a more traditional view which holds that the noblemen who led the First Crusade were less interested in doing God's work and more keen on crushing their enemies, seeing them driven before them, hearing the lamentation of their women, and gathering up all their booty. Fair enough. In my last adventure learning about The Crusades, a sense of religious duty was definitely one of the motivations mentioned. The problem is that Asbridge never mentions Alexios I by name and says, strictly in passing, that Byzantine emperors had appealed to the Latin West for help in the past. All the emphasis on piety and duty relegates the fact that Alexios I asked for help in March 1095 and that this was a prime factor in Urban calling for a crusade in the first place to the deleted scenes featurette on the forthcoming DVD. Plus Byzantine emperors loved to dangle the carrot of reconciling the Latin Church with the Eastern Orthodox one. When Urban made his speech, it had been just over 40 years since a papal legate and the patriarch of Constantinople excommunicated one another.

I found this part of the show confusing. Asbridge notes that Jerusalem had been in Muslim hands for a few centuries and that seemed to work out OK so there was no new and urgent reason to take Jerusalem. Urban was faced with a problem in trying to motivate people to retake the city. Asbridge takes Urban to task for lying about Muslim treatment of Christians in the Levant but he never really establishes why Urban called for a crusade in the first place. It was like he pulled a new religious duty out of his ass. Not only was Alexios' plea ignored but I don't recall the program saying a word about how it had become incredibly difficult for Westerners to make pilgrimages to Jerusalem.

Alexios at least gets mentioned – referred to only as "the Byzantine emperor" – when the main contingent of Frankish nobles arrive in Constantinople. Other than this, the Byzantines aren't mentioned at all. Asbridge devoted a few seconds to the so-called "People's Crusade" which arrived in Constantinople first. Comprised of pilgrims and some minor nobles, it proved to be an unruly mob which not only massacred Jews along the way (which was mentioned briefly in the show) but also pillaged the area outside the walls of Constantinople (not a peep about this). This is important because the show recites the words of the one of the important Frankish nobles in the second wave upon meeting Alexios which leads viewers to believe that all was well with the Crusaders and their host. However, this was not the case. Alexios was really unamused by the first wave of crusaders and was thusly highly suspicious when the second arrived. He made the leaders take an oath of fealty to him, gave them provisions, and sent them on their way so that they'd be the Muslims' problem, not his.

While in Anatolia, the Crusaders were joined by some Byzantine forces, a fact that Asbridge never mentions. I think that the Byzantine troops had all returned from whence they came by the time the Crusade made it to the Levant, but this certainly is no reason to avoid noting their presence altogether. Asbridge focuses on the fierce resolve of the Westerners in face of some terrible trials and tribulations and it cannot be denied that they encountered some adverse situations, to say the least, and overcame them. Their story is truly remarkable. But Asbridge goes too far with this Hollywood-esque underdog-beats-the-odds approach. Context is left out and details get ignored. Antioch and Jerusalem are mentioned but why was Edessa left out? It was one of the three crusader states that were established in the wake of the First Crusade.

In addition to the Byzantines being left out, I think that only a single Muslim was mentioned. It's sort of ironic because Asbridge talks about Urban II making the Muslims out to be the dreaded "Other" and demonizing them, yet Asbridge basically does the same thing. When the Crusaders battle Turks for the first time, he says that the leaders were caught off guard as they'd never encountered Muslims and their style of fighting. Perhaps I'm confusing this crusade with a later one, but I thought that at least one of the nobles on the First Crusade had fought in the Reconquista and was familiar with their opponent's tactics.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if this program was written under the impression that it would be 90 minutes or 2 hours long and that some producer made the decision to cut it down and make it into such a narrow story worthy of Hollywood. From what I can tell, Asbridge is a scholar of some repute so the omission of so much information must surely have been anathema to him.

Aside from all that's wrong about the program, there are several good elements to the show. First is that you get to see some pretty pictures in HD. It was great to see the last remaining section of the wall which surrounded Antioch in the late 11th century as well as a few books which are some of the precious few primary and secondary sources we have. The illumination/gilding looked magnificent. (Although you have to laugh at his feigned surprise at seeing these books. The guy has a doctorate in the subject and is a published author. He has no doubt seen all these texts before.) I want to give Asbridge and the makers of the show my great thanks for not doing reenactments. I'd rather look at illuminated codices than watch reenactments. The only computer-generated anything was probably the maps, which they made good use of in orientating the viewer. Some CGI reconstructions of cities wouldn't have been bad but I like the stylistic decision to stick with real things that you can stick a camera in front of. There were some awkward shots, though. The program made use of contemporary footage of the Levant and hearing Asbridge's narration about Muslim attacks while seeing some gentlemen at a table playing a game and drinking tea was, well, awkward.

Lastly Asbridge deserves credit for taking time at the beginning of the show to explain and emphasize the role of religion during the Middle Ages in Western Europe and how this helped explain the answer to Urban II's call. Westerners live in secular nations these days whereas a thousand years ago religion was ubiquitous and had the Church had a large role in both secular and quotidian affairs. Securing an afterlife in heaven was a much greater priority then than today.

While there was much to like about this first episode of the series, I am still amazed at just how much was left out. One needn't go on about the state of Frankish political affairs or the different factions in Anatolia, but I just don't understand how you can talk about the Crusades and all but avoid mentioning the Byzantines. The narrative here is so narrow to be misleading. Hopefully part 2 will be better.

"The real face of America is Guantanamo"

Guilty of nothing, Lakhdar Boumediene, was thrown into Guantanamo and tortured. He was there seven years. His life in is ruins. Yet most Americans don't care. Where are the "progressives" on this? Oh, that's right. It's all Obama-approved so they dare not say anything.

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The Stormwatch Brews as the White Sea Snaps

Considering that Matrix was a big letdown I wasn't quite sure what to think when picking up >Storm Harvest. Would it be as bad as its predecessor? Or would it be a return to form? I mean, Perry and Tucker did write Illegal Alien which was quite good so perhaps Matrix was an aberration. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Storm Harvest kicked some major butt.

Most of the Seventh Doctor PDAs that I'd read until this point had gloomy settings. London during the Blitz, a spooky old nursing home and underwater spaceship, and Whitechapel with Jack the Ripper on the loose. Even the a rural village in The Hollow Men utilized the cover of night and underground passages. And they all took place on Earth. Here I found welcome relief from the murkiness as Storm Harvest takes place on 43rd century Coralee, a planet whose surface is mostly oceans. About 98% of it with the paltry bit of land that human colonists have given over to resort development. Like a planetary Club Med. There's beautiful blue oceans, sand, and sun – a marked contrast to the previous novels.

After the depressing events of Matrix, The Doctor and Ace retreat to Coralee for some R&R. I found the picture of The Doctor stepping out of the TARDIS onto the beach with his trouser cuffs rolled up to his knees while clutching a red bucket along with a small shovel to be genuinely funny. (Oh, and he had a kite too.) He builds a sandcastle in the shape of the City of the Exxilons (it's from Death to the Daleks - had to look that one up) which he gets to glow. Again, I was humored but this time by the picture of a cable running from the TARDIS to a sandcastle.

Of course all is not well on this pelagic holiday. A research vessel, the Hyperion Dawn, is savagely attacked on the high seas by unknown forces with both the crew, minus one survivor, and the ship being shredded to pieces. The beauty of this opening sequence is its pacing and it extends through the whole of the book. Perry and Tucker let events unfold at a natural pace with no last second tweak foiling a complex plan and saving the day in one fell swoop when multiple stratagems over a couple hundred pages couldn't do the trick. They build a sense of menace and nurture it until it becomes dread.

In the scene we witness the crew working and learn a little about them. A couple divers work below while the rest of the crew prepare equipment on the ship. There's a bit of friendly banter with crew leader Holly Relf calling one of the divers by his nickname, "Bruiser". Things seem to be going well until the divers realize that all of the fish have dispersed. Not a single one remains in sight. They radio up to the surface and Relf decides to bring the divers back up immediately. The wench attached to the safety lines gets rolling. Relf is forced to fight the urge to vomit when she sees that all that is left of the diver is one incredibly mangled body. She is about to issue a strategic advance to the rear when the ship heaves. It is now under attack and the results won't be pretty.

Back on the shore The Doctor and Ace meet Edwin Bryce, a travel writer who is almost fond of the drink. He has written a cookbook consisting of the finest Androgum recipes for novices (Yay! A Sixth Doctor reference!) and is currently researching his next tome which will be a chronicle of his travels in the colonies. He blathers on about Coralee's original and highly bellicose inhabitants as well as a race of hideous creatures called Krill. The only thing left of the aboriginal population are their great cities which are ruins submerged beneath the waves.

This piques The Doctor's curiosity and trips some alarm bells too so he heads to the colony's administrative building. To get in, he does what many college students have done: creates a fake ID. Posing as an agent of InterOceanic, he gains entry where he meets, or rather discovers the colony co-ordinator, Brenda Mulholland, unconscious in a meeting room. He also inveigles his way into a mission to check out the wreck of the Hyperion Dawn with one Professor MacKenzie.

Meanwhile Ace decides to take the tourist route with an underwater sight-seeing tour of the ruins that Bryce described. The submarine is captained by Rajiid, a rather dashing Indian gentleman (Yay! A person of color!) that Ace is attracted to. Also part of the crew is the cicerone, a dolphin named R'tk'tk. Here in the 43rd century, dolphins are outfitted with headsets which translate their clicks into English. There are also these exoskeletons with mechanical tentacles that they use to move about on land. Professor MacKenzie has a cetacean companion as well named Q'ilp who smokes a cigar when out of the water and likes to talk smack. These dolphins could have been really cheesy characters but are done well. R'tk'tk and Q'ilp engage in some verbal sparring as dolphins are, as we learn, a quarrelsome bunch who have a few hundred ways of offending one another's immediate family members. (A nice nod to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, if you ask me.) And it isn't the humans who get all the action. R'tk'tk and Q'ilp get their chances at a bit of derring do. The cetaceans aren't relegated to being a prop in the background and they don't end up being delphinus ex machina either. They are just eminently likeable characters that have full subsidiary roles.

And then there are the Cythosi, a despicable race which have a penchant for keeping humans as slaves. Although they await in their ship out in space, they are monitoring the events on Coralee closely.

In addition to loving the change of scenery, I also appreciated that Storm Harvest had a fair number of non-humans. The Cythosi, Krill, Dreekans, and any number of alien tourists. Plus those dolphins. Perry and Tucker ably juggled them all. But the best part of the story is how the authors built up the menace with a bit of creepiness here and an attack there until it was all-out doom and the reader is confronting a base-under-siege story. Perry and Tucker leave themselves plenty of pages after the menacing and nearly indestructible Krill begin their assault and they come up with something a bit like Aliens. Truth be told, I was genuinely creeped-out by it all. Despite knowing that our beloved heroes would live to fight another day, I had a very hard time putting the book down.

I adored Storm Harvest and Perry and Tucker get bonus points from me for having The Doctor say, "I'll have you know that back on Gallifrey I was renowned for my sartorial elegance!" That made me chuckle. Easily the best Seventh Doctor PDA so far.

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An Idea Whose Time Has Come for Madison

A pozoleria!





I could murder a bowl of pozole right now. Too bad Pozoleria San Juan is in Chicago. The Chicagoist is on the case.

Pozole, a traditional Mexican soup made of hominy, or dried maize, kernels, is the speciality of the restaurant, although a wide variety of flautas, tacos and tortas expand the menu. Keeping true to their heritage, the pozoleria offers three kinds of pozole: roja, verde and blanca, each representing a color of the Mexican flag.

I'll have mine mit chicharrón y aguacate, bitte.

Plus they're open 24 hours on Friday and Saturday and until 1AM the rest of the week. I can see a roadtrip in my future. Get an early start, have some pozole for breakfast, and then cruise around town.

Return of the Scrapyard

Matrix is another Seventh Doctor PDA written by Robert Perry and Mike Tucker. The pair of them wrote four of the eleven 7th Doc PDAs while Tucker did one solo. I'm not sure how they managed to hoard so many of the 7th Doctor slots but, as I plow through them, I am getting to know their style.

The book begins with a mysterious figure huddled in a Gothic cathedral concocting a clay figure with its pale, bony hands. A dash of necromantic energy and POOF! – the figure disappears. We then join an introspective Doctor who stares out at an ocean. He's brooding over his inability to relate to his companions on an emotional level and laments that he is no better in this respect than his Time Lord peers which he abandoned. Suddenly a golem appears out of nowhere. After a brief chase into a lighthouse, Ace dispatches the thing with some of her Nitro-9.

The Doctor and Ace retreat to the friendly confines of the TARDIS only to discover that an evil, yet familiar, presence has infiltrated the old girl. It taunts The Doctor and tears at his mind. Finally he realizes that this presence has taken advantage of the TARDIS' telepathic circuit so he removes it. Thinking that Ace is in danger, The Doctor decides to leave Ace in the care of himself or, rather, his first incarnation, and so it's off to London in November 1963. But things there are wrong. For one thing, there are zombies running around. Another is that it appears that his previous self had never been there. He and Ace run into old companions Ian and Barbara who don't know a Doctor nor Susan. After Barbara explains how things got to be the way they are, The Doctor decides to travel back to the point in time and space when things went awry for Earth's history: Whitechapel, 1888.

Almost immediately after landing in a shipyard, The Doctor becomes a Time Lord possessed and attempts to kill Ace. But at the last moment he is able to fight the force which possesses him allowing Ace to flee. At this point, I knew that this was going to be one of those stories in which The Doctor and his companion were going to be separated for a time. I just didn't think it would be for as long as it was. Every once in a while as I read I took note of how long it had been since The Doctor made an appearance. "Ooh, it's been 50 pages." "Man, 80 pages and no sign of him." Separating The Doctor and Ace isn't a bad thing. Giving The Doctor amnesia so that he is basically absent from the story for most of it also isn't necessarily a bad thing when you've got a companion like Ace who is resourceful and interesting in her own right. The problem here is that the story is just a mess.

And it's a mess from the beginning. While I appreciated the sense of gloom and foreboding that Perry and Tucker create (and sustain throughout), the story just starts too abruptly for my taste. Why is The Doctor brooding? From information learned later in the story, I think an argument can be made that his mood at the beginning of the story is related to the machinations of the villain but I don't think that link is ever made explicitly. The opening scene with the golem just feels out of place and thrown in just because Perry and Tucker needed to start somewhere. It's too short and golems don't have a big role in the rest of the story.

The pall hanging over the heads of our heroes only deepens in Whitechapel, and that's a good thing, as is Malacroix, the sinister ringmaster of a circus that has set up shop in London. Ace's story of survival on the mean streets of Whitechapel makes for a good tale. She meets various minor characters that add to the atmosphere and, more importantly, the struggle brings out the Cheetah that remains inside her from the TV story Survival. Malacroix will stop at nothing to have her in his troupe of freaks.

Exposing the traces of the Cheetah planet that still reside within Ace complements The Doctor's dilemma well, namely, that the bad guy here is the Valeyard, that distillation of The Doctor's darker elements from his penultimate incarnation writ large and given corporeal form who was featured in Trail of a Time Lord in Sixth Doctor's final season. Given that the Valeyard is the mirror image of The Doctor, he is an extremely interesting character with lots of potential. Unfortunately Perry and Tucker can't capitalize on the opportunity.

At the end of the book, the Valeyard reveals his blasphemous machinations. In short, he survived defeat on the television show and absconded away with the Dark Matrix, a vast repository of all the "forbidden thoughts" of every Time Lord that died, inside a TARDIS. He then set about capturing all of The Doctor's previous incarnations and fostered their evil sides. The Valeyard landed his TARDIS underneath a church in Whitechapel and began his scheming.

I think this is a pretty bad-ass bit of conniving but Perry and Tucker don't utilize the Valeyard to the full extent. He hides in his TARDIS making golems and saying stock bad guy things like "Now you have are in my grasp, Doctor" and "She cannot interfere with my plans!" (These aren't direct quotes, mind you.) For such a wonderfully evil character, he just doesn't do a whole helluva lot beyond pulling the odd string until the very end of the story where The Doctor foils everything with due haste. That The Doctor is in a self-imposed state of amnesia and absent for most of the story compounds the problem because these two aspects of the same being confront one another for a paltry amount of time when their encounter should have been lengthier and more meaningful. We should have learned more about The Doctor and, perhaps, have any new revelations tie in with the weltschmerz that he felt at the beginning of the book. It feels like an opportunity to add depth to The Doctor's character and have a really big showdown was wasted.

There's another character that deserves mention and that is Joseph Liebermann. He is a kindly old Jewish man that takes in Johnny, a.k.a. The Doctor when he cannot recall his identity. Liebermann seems resigned to his fate – the Jews are always blamed. The curious part is that he is very old – more than twice as old as The Doctor – yet we learn very little about him and what accounts for his longevity. He is perhaps the Wandering Jew of Christian folklore. The book has six parts and each part is prefaced by a short scene that is outside of the main story. Part Six opens with Liebermann identifying himself as Isaac and he is in a bar in Salt Lake City when the Eighth Doctor pops in and strikes up a conversation with him. Liebermann reveals that he was given the name Joseph by a man call Ananius. Perhaps this Ananius is Ananias of Damascus, a disciple of Jesus Christ.

Other scenes include Pontius Pilate being told that one Cartaphilius has gone on a journey, Joseph encountering some treasure hunters in the desert of Qumran, an old man looking in Antwerp discovering that he is young again, and an old man giving some solace to a young girl.

Perry and Tucker could have been laying the groundwork for Liebermann to return in a future book but I cannot find any evidence to support this notion. Thusly I can only conclude that they said all they wanted to say about him here. Just as Ace's inner Cheetah reflects the Doctor vs. Valeyard duality, Liebermann seems to be yet another analogue of The Doctor. The pair fix clocks together, many of which line the walls of Liebermann's home. As Johnny, The Doctor performed a supernatural card trick in a bar which Liebermann correctly surmised as being his attempt at constructing a matrix.

But the important part is that Liebermann, like The Doctor, wanders. Also like The Doctor, he tries to help others. However, he is weary. Is The Doctor getting fatigued as well? It's possible that his little bout with ennui at the beginning of the book is a symptom of this (or perhaps it was the result of his previous incarnations being pulled from their timelines.) Regardless, the book doesn't dwell on this although later books in the series may return to this notion.

While there is a plethora of interesting ideas here, Matrix ultimately fails because it's too big of a mess. Furthermore it woefully neglects the villain with the Valeyard doing precious little and being disposed of all too quickly.

In Praise of the Oxford Comma

I thought this was a funny little demonstration of why the English language needs Oxford commas. But I ran into a real-world instance today up at Salon in David Sirota's piece "What makes a progressive?" In describing some of Ron Paul's positions on issues, he writes:


"At the same time, though, when it comes to war, surveillance, police power, bank bailouts, cutting the defense budget, eliminating corporate welfare and civil liberties, Paul is more in line with progressive goals than any candidate running in 2012 (or almost any Democrat who has held a federal office in the last 30 years)."

(Emphasis mine.)

Paul does not run on a platform of eliminating civil liberties yet Sirota's statement is unclear with the comma. It should read "At the same time, though, when it comes to war, surveillance, police power, bank bailouts, cutting the defense budget, eliminating corporate welfare, and civil liberties..."

Doctor Who: Relative Dementias by Mark Michalowski

While Relative Dementias was the eighth 7th Doctor PDA to be published, it is the first in order chronologically. Author Mark Michalowski places his story between Battlefield and Ghost Light both of which were part of the final season of the Classic Series.

Like most of that season and all of the 7th Doctor PDAs I've read so far, this story takes place on Earth. I liked how Relative Dementias opened with a burst of short scenes that fail to include The Doctor and Ace. The prologue introduces us to Graystairs, what I took to be an old folks home. It's a staccato series of bits of conversations that are derived from the elderly and the senile being left at Graystairs by their families. I was vaguely reminded of those "Camera Eye" sections of the U.S.A. Trilogy by John Dos Passos. This gives way to another short section in which we meet a female character who is on watch on a shoreline of some sort. We have no idea what she's keeping an eye out for or why she is in a new body that has a bum fingernail.

Next we meet Doctor Joyce Brunner. She is a member of UNIT and knows The Doctor. However, Dr. Brunner knows the Third Doctor (and Bessie too!). She has brought her mother to Graystairs, which is somewhere in rural Scotland, but has some "vague concerns" about the place. So she contacts The Doctor the only way she knows how: sends a postcard to the PO box in London that he gave her. And lastly before our intrepid time travelers enter the scene, we get a brief glimpse inside Graystairs with orderlies being ornery and fussing over the disappearance of one of their patients, Eddie.

I don't doubt that some people would find this rapid-fire introduction of places and characters, some named and some left anonymous, to be confusing. But it does lay out many of the story's building blocks from the get-go and, quite frankly, I don't mind being a bit confused. Indeed, I rather like that sense of bewilderment because it means that the game is afoot.

The Doctor and Ace finally enter the picture as they traipse around London in 2012. They make a stop at the residence of Countess Gallowglass who runs a little post office for aliens on Earth so that they can get their mail. The Doctor hasn't checked his in quite some time and is perturbed by something he received. He keeps his cards close to his chest and really pisses Ace off when he locks her out of the Console Room. She can hear him speaking with someone else but can't discern much more than that.

Just when we think that Michalowski is finished giving us the introductory material, he throws in a diver in some body of water somewhere who finds a dome underneath the surface. Yet another place and person to contend with.

With a highly irritated companion, The Doctor sets course for Muirbridge in 1982. He explains to Ace that an old friend of his, Dr. Joyce Brunner, has some reservations about a facility claiming to have found a cure for Alzheimer's disease and he's bound to investigate.

As you can imagine, not all is as it appears at Graystairs. A bald albino man sits alone on the top floor crying to opera while patients go missing and one even gets total recall. Ace and The Doctor investigate things separately which leaves the former on her own when she stumbles across a teleportation device in Graystairs' basement. She fends off the albino's henchwoman, Megan, with a frying pan before being teleported to an alien ship that features Graystairs patients neurally hooked up to a computer in what we later find out to be a parallel processing array. Ace gets to be a hero here, in addition to being something of a badass. She plies her heroics on the ship solo and eludes that albino, whom we find out is named Sooal and guess what planet he's from. His motives lie far away from curing Alzheimer's.

Ace ends up in the North Sea where she meets up with a certain diver and, if you don't want some major spoilers, skip this paragraph. She finds out that she's near the Orkney Islands, hundreds of miles away from Muirbridge. In a neat twist, Ace sends a postcard to The Doctor pleading for rescue. He gets it in 2012 along with Joyce's missive. There are eventually two Aces running around Muirbridge which, after you find this out and think back, explains some of the mysterious occurrences from earlier in the book. Michalowski handles this little temporal discommotion very well.

Spoilers over.

At one point in the story, The Doctor gets hooked up to the array on the space ship and has a couple visions. One involves Leela, which he realizes is a memory from his past, but the other is of a lone, baleful gray eye looking at him through a broken window that shimmered orange and brown and yellow. It whispers to The Doctor and asks if he'd forgotten him already. The Doctor ponders this vision at the end of the story and I am wondering if it will be addressed in another of these PDAs.

Being set in the time period of the show's last season, Relative Dementias does include some Cartmel Masterplany stuff. The mysterious vision is one element that can be ascribed to it. Another is Brunner's son, Michael. Michael is in UNIT, or rather was in UNIT. He's gone AWOL and is wrestling with telling his mother. His decision to desert his post came from much anger and confusion. Amongst the reasons is The Doctor who, although he has helped humanity, has also been responsible for the deaths of many people including Michael's friends and comrades in arms. It's a far cry from intimations about The Doctor's mysterious past but I think it fits in with an overall darker view of him and engenders some ambivalence about him as well. This is something that have fit well in the last season of the New Series.

 Michalowski generally keeps his characterizations of The Doctor and Ace within the boundaries set by the TV series. I've noticed that there's a general consensus amongst fans that, for the 7th Doctor, portraying him and Ace in a way that is consonant with how they were portrayed on TV is a good thing. (Conversely, fans of the 6th Doctor books praise authors who portray him in a less acerbic manner than he was on TV and more like the character that Colin Baker and Big Finish developed for their audios.) And I suppose it is. This certainly gives the books a certain familiarity. On the other hand, I am curious if any of the authors tweaked the characters a bit. I'm not looking for a 180 but for some development, some expansion. So far I haven't found that in the PDAs but it may happen yet. I'm not complaining, mind you. Perhaps the Virgin New Adventures take our beloved heroes in new directions. I shall find out.

With Ace being separated from The Doctor for quite a while and the fact that she takes charge, saves people, and kicks a little butt, it's easier to see how she is a precursor to the companions of the New Series. While there's no Nitro 9 here, Ace is a partner to The Doctor and not simply a damsel in distress and/or springboard for the Timelord to relay his deductions. Michalowski portrays her as capable, smart, and independent yet also as a teenager still figuring out what it means to be an adult. She blushes when meeting a cute young man yet is able to adjust to being thrust onto an alien space ship like a consummate pro.

Relative Dementias kept mostly to the blueprint established by the TV show but it tweaked the formula a little bit. There are more subsidiary characters here and it was fun to read as Michalowski established them independently and then drew them all together. Plus there's Michal who views The Doctor as someone who brings death in his wake as opposed to a savior to humanity. But it's mostly The Doctor and Ace battling an alien baddie. The time travel twist was icing on the cake.

The Thing in 60 Seconds With Pingu

Pingu is, according to Wikipedia, "a British-Swiss stop-motion claymated television series...about a family of anthropomorphic penguins at the South Pole."