Golf, Ghosts, God

I played golf this evening. Midsummer madness. I was terrible, which was pleasing, because on all indications prior I was so far beyond terrible the English language runs out of descriptive power. My team came 7th out of 8 teams. I was given a can of Belhaven Best and a bag of Smarties as a prize. Fantastic.
And Most Haunted Live is on. Yvette got scared by a weird raspy voice. Cool. Richard Felix, the dude I met in Derby at the Gaol sleepover, is doing some table tipping. Wahey! I still don’t believe in ghosts, but I am more and more convinced they should exist just for the coolness of it.
And I’m frikkin’ exhausted and don’t really know what’s going on. The long sunlight hours are screwing up already hazy sleeping patterns.
Yesterday, at scenic North Berwick, Malcolm and I got in trouble for balancing. I ate some kanafe or however it’s spelt, an insanely sweet middle eastern thing, and it gave me a deeply unpleasant sugar rush that is still playing out. Yah.
And Leon (of ‘Leon is a god’ fame) is in town with his lovely gf Laura. Tomorrow night I will seee them, yah!
All of this to say: I have several blog posts about the rapidly-approaching G8 event and protests here in Edinburgh. But I am in no state whatsoever to write them now.
Most Haunted Live is back on! Be careful Yvette! THE TABLE IS MOVING!

Doctor Who: Final Thoughts (spoilerfree)

Wow. That was cool.
It isn’t going to be remembered as one of the great TV show seasons of all time – it was too choppy for that, and the crisis resolutions were usually of a type that you can get away with sometimes but not all the time. If this seems like praising with faint damnation, it is.
This will be remembered as one of the great family TV show seasons of all time. Maybe the greatest. If you’re not in the UK it’s hard to convey just how big and mainstream it has been over here – everyone is watching it, I’ve got into random conversations with strangers about it, in the buildup to today’s final episode I witnessed about six different conversations about it among people from work. Kids love it. Parents watch it with their kids, and that’s magic. It’s such a huge success.
And it is still my show, the one I loved as a boy because it was the right mix of wild and scary and creative and moral and true. Everything is in the right place, everything works. The hearts beating in this show are the same ones from November 1963. It feels exactly as it should.
And it is still my show, of a piece with what has come before. It has even done the seeming impossible and made the misguided ’96 American co-production, featuring a wonderful Paul McGann and an incoherent and dismal plot, into a coherent part of the experience. It works its continuity magic not by explanation or reference – although fanboys like me could pick up loads of cheeky little nods – but by picking up the best spirit of what has come before and celebrating it in the new.
And it is still my show, over-brimming with hope for human beings with all our failures and our foibles and our pride, trusting us, loving us.
It’s the best revival of a TV show there will ever be.
Doctor Who will never be in my pantheon of truly great television. It isn’t Homicide or Freaks and Geeks or Buffy or Twin Peaks. But it is very very special. It is part of what pop culture should be. And it makes me happy to see it shine.
Hurrah!

Recognising a Cave

Finally got around to reading Catherine Chidgey’s ‘The Transformation’, a gift from a wee while back. Finished it today. It was a good read, more due to the confidence and pleasure of the prose itself rather than the way its tale unfolded. I found it quite curiously structured – I was halfway through before I felt the story was really underway, and the finale threatens some glorious grand guignol but then finishes on a soft note, a decision which to be honest disappointed me. Nor do any of the other characters stand up to the mighty wigmaker whose story this is; he dominates every moment of the book, and the triangle of characters is thrown askew as a result. In any case, the last third of the book I read without pause, which is a rare thing in my easily-distracted world and a pretty clear sign that I was engrossed. So, rock on.
Catherine is an acquaintance; I haven’t seen her for years but last time I did we said hello to each other. She grew up near to where I did, and knowing this I had a nice rush of pleasure to read one late passage in the book:
“The action reminded her of something she had done as a child, at a picnic. There had been a cave. She had wanted to touch the very back of it, but could not see where it ended, and had moved orward one step at a time, completely blind, her index finger a snail’s horn trembling at the brush of every web, expecting at any moment to feel cool stone against her palm…”
I’m sure every kid who grew up in the Hutt Valley knows the cave that must have inspired this sequence – the infamous Weta Cave in Percy’s Reserve. Man, that cave was creepy.
…you know, I did have a point about how my response to this overshadowed in some way the emotional response to the climax of the novel, and what this meant about, I dunno, reading books or knowing authors or something. I forget. Oh well.
(Catherine, if you ever google this up or something: g’day!)
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Yep, all this week’s blog entries have been nice softball topics. I’m easing myself back into it.

The World Just Changed Again

“And here I have, well, unless I’m mistaken, a fan base which exists and is trying to organize for a show which has never appeared on television. Not a cancelled show — a show which has literally never aired on broadcast television.”
from Kung Fu Monkey
The pilot/trial episode of Global Frequency, based on (not worksafe!)Warren Ellis’ comic series, has been leaked on the net after being passed over by the US networks. It is worth tracking down. Warren is a big old crankybum but he is also profoundly and positively humanist and this is an astonishing piece of fiction.
The chance of it making it to series now is vanishingly small, but the idea is out now. It has escaped into the culture in a way the comic never did, and I hope it finds its way wider and wider. I’m going to watch what happens to the idea with interest. This is culture and media changing beneath our feet.
(And I think it’s not a coincidence that Global Frequency is the instance that opens new doors. Everyone who cares about the world can look in it and see hope.)
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Billy: I’m getting there. Sorry it’s taking so long.

morgue at large two

When I left NZ I did several months of glorious backpack wandering in Europe. Since then I’ve clocked up a good few trips, but nothing on that scale – well, now it’s back on the agenda.
August 17 I fly to Indianapolis, USA, for Gen Con (huuuge roleplaying game convention) where I will try not to spend my entire trip budget in the dealer’s hall.
November 16 I fly out of Caracas, Venezuala, to Edinburgh (arriving back here on the 17th).
In between: um, I have no idea. Stuff.
It’s gonna be great.
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And of course, on Dec 22 I fly out of Heathrow, back to Aotearoa, for keeps, for good, for real.

My Days Get A Soundtrack

For my birthday a while back, various lovely family members gave me a minidisc player walkman thingy. I am now, for the first time in my life, equipped for sound.
It’s kind of strange, really. I’m so used to having no sound when I’m out on the move but whatever’s bouncing through my head and the ambient whateverness around me. Now I suddenly have a soundtrack.
Also – it’s true what T told me, when you’re hooked up to your own soundmachine you notice other people hooked up the same. It’s like we’re all in the Freemasons or something.
Today I listened to Karen Hunter‘s ‘The Private Life of Clowns’ as I walked in the sunshine. That’s part of living in the future*, right there. Awesome.
I just hope I don’t walk in front of a bus or into a hole or something.
* just because you’ve all had walkmans since 1983 or whenever doesn’t make it any less future. Its a thematic sort of future I’m talking about. Don’t distract me with your petty ‘facts’ and ‘logic’.

I do have stuff to say

Honest. I’ve got all these cool things I could blog about.
But I’m trying to be disciplined. I want to tick off a few crucial things from my to do list before I get back into this blogging thing.
So here’s a generic ‘things I have done since not liking Revenge of the Sith’ post.
I saw King Kapisi, which was cool.
Ran a little roleplaying game thing, which was good and intriguing and I won’t get into it because it would be a long involved thing. But I haven’t scratched this itch for over a year so it was nice to do so. (Ran it with some awesome players who I have not run things for before, for extra bonus points.)
Came home far too late two school nights in a row.
There is an exciting rumour that I might be able to go to the Pixies.
Into the final chapter of Ron. Perturbed by the things I am doing in this final chapter. Can I possibly end a novel this way? What insane logic is at work here? (I’m doing them anyway.)
Er, that’s all.
Back to ‘work’.

Revenge of the Virus

So after being unwell for a week with a veritable cornucopia of different symptoms, I went to the Doctor. He said “Well, it’s a virus of some kind. Keep doing what you’re doing and it’ll come right.”
I gave up my decade-plus streak of not going to the Doctor for this? I feel disappointed. I was hoping to get a syndrome named after me at least.
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Saw Star Wars Episode 3 last night. In a word: unnecessary. In a few more words: [spoilers, mind] the first thing Anakin does after signing on to the bad guys is go and murder children? Wha huh?
In other words, I didn’t like it, and I didn’t like it way more than I didn’t like Eps 1 and 2 the day after I saw them. It was fanfic.
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Doctor Who, meanwhile, continues to be wonderful.