Now, if I could only actually remember to post this weekly, I’d have a weekly feature! That’d be awesome! Anyway… This week — today, in fact — brings us two bits of geek news that sort-of peg the WTFBBQ meter, along with some actually fun announcements. No reviews in this installment, however.
Category Archives: Unsolicited Opinion
This week in random, shameless geekery
In which I ramble on about “Encounter at Farpoint”, Star Wars: The Old Republic, and a woman building a TARDIS.
Politics: Understanding American Health Care and Welfare Attitudes 101
In order to understand why so many Americans think that affordable health care is a privilege — hell, to understand why so many Americans think that eating is a privilege — you need to go back about 450 years, to the foundation of the Puritan movement, and more to the point, to its theological underpinnings.
The Tudors: Clean and Dirty
It’s an open secret that, despite being as avid a student of Tudor history as someone who isn’t actually in academia can claim to be, I kinda like The Tudors, meaning the Showtime series written by Michael Hirst. I freely admit that I like it despite its lack of historical accuracy. I have no illusions …
Getting Started with Doctor Who, Part 3: Tom Baker & Sarah Jane Smith
After giving it some thought, the Tom Baker article is being broken up into three parts: the Sarah Jane years, the Leela years, and Romana years. There’s just too much good material to talk about during this long tenure. It’s difficult not to think of Tom Baker as being the “definitive” Doctor. Not in the …
Getting Started with Doctor Who, Part 2: Patrick Troughton and Jon Pertwee
In 1966, it became clear that William Hartnell could not continue to star in the title role of Doctor Who. He loved the job, but he was in increasingly ill health, and and arteriosclerosis (and the resulting diminished blood flow to the brain) meant that his memory was failing. At a time when episodes were …
Getting Started with Classic Doctor Who: William Hartnell
A week or so ago, I found myself posting, first as a comment and then as a separate entry in my LiveJournal, an article enumerating recommendations to a friend as to which episodes of the classic Doctor Who series were the best ones to focus on out of the vast body of material already released …
“Keyboard? How Quaint!”…well, maybe not?
I have several post ideas queued up waiting for my brain to reorganize itself after several very stressful weeks, but today I came across an article thanks to Slashdot that I feel a need to comment upon. The article is entitled, “Rest in Peas: The Unrecognized Death of Speech Recognition“, by a fellow named Robert …
Doctor Who: The Davies Era
Let’s start out with the obvious: Russell T. Davies ressurrected Doctor Who. In the process, he also completely re-created the concept of “family television”, meaning television the entire family actually watches together, as opposed to something the kids watch while the parents ignore them. He did two things that everyone, himself included, were fairly sure …
The iPhone, the Apple Tablet, and the future of Consumer Computing
I have a number of fellow geek friends who are deeply distressed by the current trend in computerized gadgetry, in particular, the iPhone and the much rumoured, but, as of this writing, still entirely vapourware Apple tablet device. Myself, I think it’s pretty much where the industry’s been heading since the day the first truly …