Little Storping-in-the-Swuff

Wow. Okay, so Microsoft are responsible for Windows, the Zune, WMP etc. but I’ve stil. got to admit, this is incredible.

Gattis took out a digital camera and placed it on the Surface. Instantly, digital pictures spilled out onto the tabletop. As Gattis touched and dragged each picture, it followed his fingers around the screen. Using two fingers, he pulled the corners of a photo and stretched it to a new size. Then, Gattis put a cellphone on the surface and dragged several photos to it — just like that, the pictures uploaded to the phone. It was like a magic trick.

from Popular Mechanics.com

This thing knocks the iPhone (another multitouch devise) into the long grass. This is as big as WIMP. Okay, sure, the Microsoft implementation is actually, when you look beneath the beautiful big screen, a big ugly black box. But the innovations is taking the technology (which isn’t new), making it big, and, crucially, setting horizontal so you can put stuff on it. Real stuff and virtual stuff. And have them interact.

Incredible. And I want one.

He’s after my nuts.

Chris Chibnall claims that the title of this week’s episode (42) is a playful homage to Douglas Adams, who once wrote a story about a ship plunging into the sun (with Marvin aboard) rather than having any connection to a popular Fox show whose title can be obtained by reversing the digits (as in “I’m the Doctor, and this is the longest just-under-three-quarters-of-an-hour of my life”). I suppose tribute has already been paid to that show in the form of Real Time. Anyway, Chibnall’s claim reminds of one of the questions I never got round to answering: “Is the Doctor personally aquainted with Arthur Dent?”

The question arises from the Doctor’s comment in The Christmas Invasion that Arthur Dent was “a nice man”. Could the Doctor inhabit the same “fictional frame” (from Andrew Harrison’s notion that fiction, however fantastic, will only break a defined set of real world “rules”) as that of The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy or does Douglas Adams lie outside the frame as it were, of Doctor Who, so that he is known to the characters of that world too as an author.

Any fictional “reality” cannot include itself without alienating the audience (thus the cast of Eastenders do not many everyday things just as the viewers do, but they do not watch Eastenders). So (although it came close in The Wire) in the fiction of Doctor Who there is not the programme Doctor Who as there is in reality. And so, by extension, the cast and crew and programme makers are excluded too. As Douglas Adams was a scriptwriter on Doctor Who that should include him, so if in the Doctor Who fiction Arthur Dent exists but his creater does not, then he surely exist in and inhabit that “reality”.

For a series of such scope and longevity, however, things are not quite this clear cut. For example, the Doctor has read J.K.Rowling, author of Harry Potter. She exists, in reality, of course, and the Harry Potter books have been filmed with the role of Barty Crouch played by… David Tennant. So the rule is not without exceptions. And the Doctor does have a particular fondness for Earth (in fact mostly British) culture of the 20th Century. He’s familiar with Eastenders, the Beatles, the Lion King, Jane Fonda, Duck Soup, Dylan Thomas and Back to the Future amongst others (although he does not read comic strips). So if Douglas Adams exists within the Doctor Who fiction, he’s likely to have read him. And there’s evidence for this in Ghostlight in which he asked “Who was it said earthmen never invite their ancestors to dinner?”. The answer is, of course, Douglas Adams, in The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Thus making Arthur Dent fictional.

On the other hand, there is evidence of overlap between the fictions of Who and H2G2 besides the Dent reference. In Destiny of the Daleks the Doctor is seen reading “Origins of the Universe” (which doesn’t exist in reality) by Oolon Caluphid (a fictional character shared with Hitch Hiker’s). And there are overlaps with other fictions, too: the British Rocket Group of Quatermass also feature in The Christmas Invasion.

But there are potential problems with such overlaps. In reality the Oolon Caluphid reference was inserted into the Who serial by Adams when he was a script editor. He later worked the plots of his Doctor Who serials City of Death and Shada into his non-Who novel Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. This gave rise to contradictions. Now Reg Chronotis was not a timelord, and the universe was saved by Dirk Gently rather than the Doctor. So here the fictions cannot coexist.

With Hitch Hiker’s this particular issue does not arise because even though Adams used a Doctor Who script as the basis for Life, the Universe and Everything it had never actually made it into production. And even though the Earth was destroyed by the Vogons in H2G2 whereas it wasn’t in Who, it was later restored by the dolphins (so that’s alright) and anyway it’s in an unstable plural Z sector. Besides which there are myriad differences between Earth in reality and Who (we don’t have a King, a £5 coin, Harriet Jones was never prime minister, we were not invaded by Cybermen even once or giant arachnid aliens etc.) which seem far more problematic than any discrepancies with the Hitch Hiker’s universe.

So on balance, and until further evidence presents, we should conclude from the fact that the Doctor knows Arthur Dent wears pyjamas that he did actually meet him, and since the meeting is not mentioned in either The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy nor The Restaurant at the End of the Universe it must have been shortly after his arrival on prehistoric Earth. It must be said, though, that it was a little ungallant of the Doctor not to rescue him.

So John Sweeney has been ticked off for yelling at a scientologist, reports his former paper.

One of the things I loved about Sweeney’s superb account of the 1997 election in Tatton, Purple Homicide, was the quote on the back where he justified how he, as a supposedly impartial reporter, supported Martin Bell: “I am a journalist, but I am a human being first”.

Shouting at scientologists is a perfectly normal human reaction. I’d be suspicious of the people who don’t.

There’s a video here and the Panaroma goes out tomorrow.

What with the two week break, the coming soon trailer, and the fact we’re half way through the Doctor Who season, it’s perhaps time for a little review…

New Beginnings
Rose introduced Rose. The Christmas Invasion introduced Ten. The Runaway Bride introduced the post-Rose era. A classic motorway chase but some daffy science, not up to the standard of the previous Chrimble offering. Nor was Smith and Jones, which introduced Martha. Both enjoyable episodes, though.

Celebrity Historicals
Dickens in The Unquiet Dead was run a close second by Victoria in Tooth and Claw but Shakespeare in The Shakespeare Code is trailing them both.

The Face of Boe
The End of the World, New Earth and now Gridlock; they work rather well as a trilogy and all three have something to enjoy (tree people, kittens, etc.) A three-way draw.

The Old Enemies
“New” Cybermen in The Age of Steel/The Rise of the Cybermen were never going to better original Daleks. But the Cult of Skaro’s evolution in Daleks in Manhatten/Evolution of the Daleks didn’t match that of the lone Dalek either. Going to Noo Yoik was fun, though.

Back to the Present
While Aliens of London/World War Three was marred by Slitheen, anything with Sarah-Jane and K9 in it was going to be great regardless. So School Reunion scores over The Lazarus Experiment. The latter did have a big organ, but it’s getting difficult to tell the difference between the CGI monsters.

So, there we are. It’s been a solid season (if we ignore Evolution) but there’s been no Girl in the Fireplace or empty children yet. But then, that’s because the Moffat episode’s still to come…

Better get back to reading. Not only have I got Human Nature to get through in the next fornight, but the BBC have put up a prologue to 42.

And the 42 trailer they didn’t show after Lazarus is now available.

Episode 8 of the current Doctor Who (ie. the one after next, which itself is almost two weeks away because of pesky Eurovision) is called Human Nature, rather like the book by its author, Paul Cornell. Even though I’m steering clear of spoilerous forums, I have concluded there is a possibility that the episode may be an adaptation of the book (the first such Doctor Who adaptation, as far as I’m aware).

The BBC have published several Doctor Who ebooks on their website including Human Nature but it’s gone! There’s a message: “Human Nature will return, in more ways than one, in a few weeks… “ which rather confirms the adaptation theory, but is driving me up the wall!

I have a general principle with adaptations that I will read the original first (thus a film of a book I like to see after I have read the book). I might have let this one go, had I not had the opportunity to read it, and then had it snatched away. If only I’d saved the files to disk when they were available. So I begun to search… Maybe someone else had, and would be offering them for download? I tried to use Google’s cache (but it wasn’t complete). Eventually, thankfully, I found an old web archive: effectively the internet’s time machine allowing you to go back in time to when they were available and get them again. So I will get to read it before it’s on the TV.

On the internet, then, everyone can be a Time Lord.

“Rather than a bluebell wood” said my sister, “it’s a forest of garlic”. And it was.

This ramson floored glade lies on the banks of the Coly. A friend has just given me some ramsons for my garden, but they aren’t anything like as prolific as this. Yet.

A great opportunitity to try out iMovie 6’s well hidden time lapse feature presented yesterday, when my sister took Dad’s furniture out into his garden (don’t ask).