I have not been in a chatty mood lately. Herewith, slightly random updates:

--Newest musical discovery: French singer Francis Cabrel. Scary facial hair, folk/country music, sweet romantic lyrics that aren't syrupy in the least. Also, I can hear his accent, which amuses me. (He's from the South, and doesn't try to hide it. When he was just starting out, the record company tried to clean up or obscure his accent; he was Not Pleased and disowned the resulting recordings.)

--I got my hair cut yesterday. I went to the cheap place that gives OAP discounts rather than the hyper-trendy place with the copies of Hip Hotels. I always feel out of place in the hyper-trendy salon, but in the cheap salon I felt like I'd stepped into a time machine: the place looked like it hadn't changed since 1987. The other clients were all at least 30 years older than me, and the staff were unwelcoming. They weren't rude; just... quiet. I was kept waiting for 20 minutes without any indication of how much longer I'd have to wait, or any hint that they remembered I was there, which was disconcerting. I'm used to a bit of chat when I get my hair done, and this time there was none. Literally, none. I'm also used to thinking that the hairdresser's chat is tedious, but the lack of it left me feeling uncared-for, and although the cheap place is massively cheaper than the other place, I'm not all that eager to go back. Hrm.

--Speaking of time machines... Andrew Rilstone sums up my chief objections to the direction New Who is taking. It's not fundamentally about the dodgy gender issues, or the toxic relationships, or the weird quasi-religious way RTD treats the Doctor, or the incoherent ethics, or the plots that don't make sense, or the jokes that aren't funny. It's about the way RTD wants to have his cake and eat it too -- to tell stories from a perspective located both inside and outside the Whoniverse, without acknowledging the precarity of this narrative position. And this has been a problem from the start: he's been making fourth-wall-breaking smartarse gags since Series One. One or two throwaway gags of that nature per series wouldn't hurt it, or not irrevocably; but RTD's persistent refusal to pick a stance and stick with it, even when he's being serious, has made it impossible for me to care about his characters. He acknowledges the ridiculous artificiality of the situation one second, and then asks us to believe in it completely and take it completely seriously the next. That's just not tenable.

(This is also why I hated Adaptation. The finale of that film involves a metatextual shift that moves us from a narrative level we've been asked to accept as "real" to one that is acknowledged[1] as "unreal". As such, it was impossible for me to take it at face value, and if you weren't willing to take it at face value it had pretty much nothing else to offer. It was a gag along the lines of "and a happy Christmas to all of you at home!" except extended to last about twenty minutes. Excruciating.)

Some people are not bothered by that kind of thing. More power to them. I am bothered, and there are lots of other niggling issues I have with the series that are pushing me to drop my emotional investment.

--I sent an email to the London Review of Books in response to this article, which is bad in almost every conceivable way. Worse: it gives the superficial impression of being terribly learned and intellectual while actually being riddled with factual errors and wild misinterpretations. (I don't even know if the LRB accepts letters by email. *sigh* Oh well.)

--I paid off my credit card today. From a certain perspective, I should have done this months ago (gasp! the interest!), but the psychological moment was not yet right.

It says something about my financial acumen that one of my first thoughts after I left the bank was "hey, now I can buy an Xbox!" Um. On the other hand, I still do not possess an Xbox, despite having passed a shop that was selling them a couple of times today, so. My self-control does assert itself every now and then.

--Strange Horizons is really very good. Especially the fiction: their standards are very high and there's lots of unexpected stuff in there. But they don't seem to have a working RSS feed, which bugs me. Now that I've figured out how to use them, RSS feeds have made the web more usable almost to the degree that Google has -- Google makes it possible to find information on almost anything; RSS makes it easy and painless to keep track of frequently-updating websites without having to keep a bookmark file the size of your house. So I've gone from not caring about RSS feeds to being deeply annoyed when sites I like don't have them. (So RSS feeds are like dishwashers, then?)

--olethros: we found your bicycle helmet. The sofa had rolled over it. I'll bring it round on Friday evening, or earlier if you need it.


[1] That is, by the perceptive viewer -- if you don't get what's going on you'll just be confused.