The Journal of the Browncoat Cat

I bought myself a new vacuum cleaner on Saturday, in the Aberdare branch of ASDA. A sexy Ferrari red, bag-less model designed with all the sweeping curves of a sports car, and a powerful 1,600 watt motor for powerful suction. All the vacuum cleaners on display had similar designs. Obviously, the people who design these appliances are trying to make the hoover more appealing to blokes.

So, I have now been on this ship for four days, and finally I have been able to access this web log, so that I can do an on-the-hoof update.  The Grand Princess will be passing within a mile of Stromboli at 2am, so I am staying up for long enough to see my second live volcano within a 24 hour period.

The first was Vesuvius, which I climbed this afternoon as part of a shore excursion to see Pompei and the volcano that destroyed it.  Fascinating fact is that the pre-Roman people who founded Pompei used the word Pompa for five, as   Pompei gained its name from the fact that five villages merged to form the town, obviously the pre-Romans had some celtic influences in their language, as that sounds very similar to the Welsh for five, which is pump. (pronounced pimp).  So, Pompei was very impressive, and I got a far better idea of what the Romans must really have been like than from any other set of ruins.  It must be because they were so well preseved by all the crap that Vesuvius dumped on the site.

So, going up Vesuvius was very similar to heading up a mountain path in South Wales.  In other words steep and slippery.  Just take plenty of stops to get your breath back and away you go.

The guide at the top of Vesuvius pointed out that the cable car that was destroyed by the 1944 eruption was the fincular railway that the song Fenicli Fenicular had been written to advertise. Now I have that damn tune playing in my head, and I can’t shake it.

I am fairly certain that many of the first drafts of the scripts from Series Two (28) of Doctor Who were written with Christopher Eccleston in mind, and that the scripts were tailored to his Doctor. When it was announced that he was leaving, much jiggery pokery was needed to make the scripts more David Tennant friendly. The most obvious example of this for me was The Idiot’s Lantern, which has large swathes of dialogue that sounds as if it was originally meant to come from the mouth of Doctor#9 and the bits that made it more of a Doctor#10 story didn’t quite work.

Of course, with Tennant now entering his second series as the Doctor, the new batch of scripts will have been written with him in mind, the stories will be tailored to his version of the Doctor. It will be interesting to see how the series progresses from here.

20six Comment

Virginia/Doctor9fan / Website (13.9.06 21:57)
I agree that several of the scripts seemed to have been written with Chris’ Doctor in mind, the earlier ones especially as you can easily see Chris delivering the dialogue or running down yet another corridor.