The Journal of the Browncoat Cat

The nominations for the 2006 Hugo Awards have been published. It is not surprising that Doctor Who has received three nominations in the Dramatic Presentations: Short Form Category. The full list is below:

The biggest competition that I can see is the Battlestar Galactica episode Pegasus, which is a damn fine piece of television drama. There is no danger of the vote for Doctor Who being split by the three nominations, as the voting process for the award is by the Single Transferable Vote System. I firmly believe that a Rocket Statuette will be winging its way to BBC Wales in Llandaf after the ceremony in August.

I don’t think I have mentioned here that I shaved the beard of weeks ago. It was starting to get on my nerves, so I shaved it off. It was ironic, but I started growing it during a week off in November, and shaved it of during a week off in February.

I have just realised, to my horror, that I have not seen anepisode of the original series of Doctor Who for over a year. The new episodes starring Christopher Eccleston and David Tennant have eclipsed the original run. Tha fact that it has been repeated ad infinitum on BBC3 and UK Gold, and released on DVD has meant that the new series has given me a regular fix of Doctor Who. I will have to remedy this over the weekend. What is more, City of Death, the best ever Doctor Who story has been available on DVD for months now, and I have not yet bought it.

There has been so much good new stuff on television in the past two years. Not just the new run of Doctor Who, the new version of Battlestar Galactica is immense. The Mini Series that launched the new look Battlestar Galactica and last year’s stunning first season was event television, a must watch programme each week, This year it just gets better and better, especially this week with the introduction of Admiral Cain, the fascist psycho bitch from hell, and the Battlestar Pegasus. It is a tragedy that this series has yet to get a wider broadcast in the UK, it is part funded by SKY and has only been broadcast on SKY. When is the BBC going to come to its senses and by the terrestrial rights to this wonderful series.

20six Comment

Anon.
Yeah I watched an episode of the ‘New Battlestar Galactica’ round a pals at Christmas. Superb. The silence in space as the Crescent shaped Sylon? Silon? Psilon? Psylon? Ahhh it’s come back to me. Cylon ships swept in to attack. The vectoring flight that the fighter craft off the Galactica had. Quality.

Anon.
The one episode impressed me. Is the rest of the series as good?  

In the USA, a series of 22 episodes are spread out over the 38 week Season and key episodes are premiered in the Sweep months of November, February and May, when particular attention is paid to ratings. Whilst Britain does not have Ratings Sweeps, it does have Bank Holidays, and from what I understand from the rumours I have heard, Russell T. Davies has packed the upcoming series of Doctor Who with Sweep Episodes designed to be broadcast on Bank Holiday weekends. Now this will only work if the new series starts on Saturday, 1st April, 2006, as it will see:

• Holy Saturday, the Saturday of the Easter Bank Holiday will see the return of Sarah Jane Smith and K9 two of the Doctor’s most popular companions from original run of the series. If that is not Event Television, I don’t know what is.
• The Saturday of the Early May Bank Holiday sees the broadcast of The Rise of the Cybermen, the return
  of the Doctor’s second most popular foe.
• The Saturday of the Whitsun Bank Holiday sees the broadcast of The Satan Pit, the concluding part of a two part story that is the climax of the Doctor’s first televised visit to an alien world in since 1989.
• Finally, if Series Two (28) starts on First April, it will conclude on 24th June. Whilst this is not a Saturday of a Bank Holiday weekend, there is a possibility that that wil be the date of England’s first match in the knock-out stage of the competition.

The current signs and protents such as:

• The current edition of Doctor Who Magazine says that issue 368 which is due out on 30th March, will contain previews of the first two episodes of Series Two (28).
• The new childrens’ magazine show Totally Doctor Who is due to start in mid-April.

indicate that the new series of Doctor Who will begin on the Saturday before Easter, just like last year, and be just as successful. Except of course, Easter is about as late as it possibly can be this hear, with Holy Saturday falling on 15th April, 2006. This is an absolute rubbish time to start the new series. Its only advantage is that if is a Bank Holiday weekend. The carefully worked structure that I suspect Russell T. Davies has given Series Two (28) will come to naught, as the episodes I have listed above will fall on ordinary Saturdays.

I hate not knowing where I am, or where I am going. Being lost makes me feel so powerless. My worse experience getting lost was when I once missed a whole afternoon at a convention at the Sheperton Moat House hotel after I got lost on a quick jaunt to Walton on Thames for some thing to eat. I ended up walking along the Thames to Hampton Court. With the item that is now at the top of my Technotoys Wish List, I would never get lost again. I am talking about a Tomtom Mobile5 Bluetooth GPS Reciever plus Software which would turn my mobile phone into a satelite navigation system. the ultimate would be to have it intergrated with the Bluetooth headset I got with the phone, so that directions from the navigation software would be discreetly given to me alone. The main drawback is that the satnav reciever would be something else in my overstretched pockets that I would be likely to lose. However, I saw an article on this tech on television last week, and the article said that this tech is being incorporated into PDAs and smartphones, so when I upgrade my phone next, I might have it as part of the handset.

Thank God the Government has finally accepted that the Green Lobby are talking garbage when they suggest that massive wind farms are environmentally friendly. The government have turned down plans from Chalmerston Wind Power to build twenty seven monstrously ugly wind turbines, each 377 feet high, taller than St Paul’s cathedral, on a windy ridge at Whinash, between Borrowdale and Bretherdale, close to the M6 in Cumbria. They agreed with a Public Enquiry that said that the area was far too rural for such an intrusively industrial project that would blight the landscape.

The first load of garbage that Friends of the Earth said in support of this that the sight was already industrialised, claiming that the nearby West Coast Mainline Railway and the M6 Motorway have removed the rural nature of the area. Utter garbage, theses are narrow strips of road and rail possibly that blend invisibly amongst hectares and hectares of open countryside. If this project had gone ahead miles and miles of service roads for the project would have to have been built, along with miles and miles of powerlines on ugly pylons to take the generated electricity to the National Grid.

The major piece of garbage spouted is that these massive turbines are green renewable sources of electricity. Yeah, what about all the electricity that is needed to smelt the Aluminium these monstrosities are constructed out from. The main source of Aluminium for these turbines would no doubt have been Anglesey Aluminium, who get their power from Wylfa NUCLEAR Power Station. How many years will the turbines have to generate their “Clean” electricity before they cancel out all the dirty electricity needed to produce them.

The real green way of generating electricity from the UK’s massive wind reserve was shown on the BBC Wales news this week. It showed a house in rural Wales that had installed a small wind turbine that generated enough electricity to power the house and garden. The surplus energy that this small turbine produced could be sold to the National Grid, allowing the householder to move into profit within a decade.  The owner of the turbine said that there was also a turbine that could be fitted to the roofs of urban houses and supply them with their electrical needs. 

Having had the courage to turn down one stupid scheme, perhaps the Government will now turn down more, and the blight of monsterous wind turbines will be a thing of the past.