The Journal of the Browncoat Cat

For the past few days, I have been bugged by a pair of tunes in my head, that just will not go away,  The Hologram and Rose Defeats the Daleks by Murray Gold, from the Doctor Who soundtrack album.  Both these pieces come from The Parting of the Ways, which was the finale of Series One [27], the story that ended with the Doctor regenerating.  Now tonight sees The Last of the Time Lords the finale of Series three [29].  Is my subconscious trying to tell me something that I don’t want to hear?  That  the reason I am humming the regeneration music over and over again is because I know deep down inside that tonight we see a regeneration and the birth of Doctor#11.  I hope not, David Tennant has really hit his stride as Doctor#10 this year, and I am hoping that he stays in the role for at least another two years.

So, it might be a minor point, but it still annoys me. On-line or in Doctor Who Magazine and various other media people working on Doctor Who keep referring to the new Studio complex in Cardiff. Well, it’s not bloody Cardiff, OK. Upper Boat is in the Welsh County Borough of Rhondda Cynon Taff, a good ten miles north of the City and County Borough of Cardiff. OK.

For months now, there has been a persistent nagging rumour that Kylie Minogue will be appearing in the Doctor Who Christmas Special this year.  That whilst she was recently in Britain, she filmed a short insert that will appear at the end of Saturday’s final episode of Series Three [29], and that from next month she will be in Wales to film the actual episode.  This has caused all sorts of ructions within Doctor Who fandom, with certain elements decrying it as the end of the World, claiming that Kylie is a piece of  stunt casting too far.  All I can say is wait and see, Kylie is a great all round entertainer, capable of singing, dancing and acting, also she is the sort of big name that is going to get huge publicity and ratings on Christmas Day, if she does appear in the Special.

Thoughts
And in one bound, they were free, literally. This episodes starts with the Doctor, Martha and Jack arriving in an alleyway in Londiff, a brief flashback to how they escaped from the Futurekind at the end of the Universe and then strait on with the plot. I can’t help but feel slightly disapointed with this. It was obvious how they were going to escape from last week’s cliff hanger, I just wish they had spent a few more minutes on it.

God this was a bleak episode. For the second time in as many episodes, the Master crushed the Doctor into the ground. Game, set and match.

They showed us Gallifrey. Some seriously impressive effects from the Mill. An impressive city encased in a glass globe built in the valley of a towering mountain range. It even had the two suns and a burnt orange sky. Something tells me that at the end of this series, the Time Lords will be back in all their majesty, and a story set on Gallifrey is inevitable for Series Four [30].

Whilst we are talking about the Time Lords, not only did we see them in their post-Deadly Assasin bright robes with huge peacock tail colars, we also saw the young Master in the simpler War Games black and white robes. You can tell this series is being made by fans. Marvelous, marvelous, marvelous; splendid, splendid , splendid.

I can’t wait to see how this story works out. Is it Saturday yet?

I have been messing around with the the GIMP, the photographic manipulation software that comes free with Ubuntu Linux. Yes free. I have never been able to get to grips with Photoshop on the PC, let alone do the sort of jiggery pokery that I managed with the image on the left. Yes I could take the odd wrinkle out of a photo, or paint out an offending telephone wire, but never the sort of messing around I have achieved here. Of course, people who really know how to use Photoshop will probably scoff at my cack handed amateurism. They will be able to point out all the things I have done wrong.

All this because I saw a picture of a pretty girl on a t-shirt advert and thought, “shame about the shorts, lets have a bit of an experiment to improve the photo”. So I used the photo below, which appeared on this web log a couple of years ago. However, the way the two images joined together just did not look right, so I went back to the original, chopped the belt and the bottom of the t-shirt and super-imposed it over the join.

Alright, I admit it, this entire article was just an excuse to post photos of pretty women in short skirts. Its a fair cop.

Your Famous Movie Kiss is from Romeo + Juliet

“Has my heart loved ’till now? Forswear it, sight! For I never saw a true beauty ’till this night.”

What Famous Movie Kiss Are You?

Do women honestly not realise how stupid they look when they wear colourful short dresses over jeans or trousers. It makes them look as if they are too stupid to dress themselves as they cannot decide one style or the other, so they opt for both.

So, what is the first thing that the Wesh National Assembly is going to do with its new lawmaking (subject to approval from Westminster) powers.  Something useful, like the abolition of Prescription Charges in Wales or free bus travel for pensioners, or the abolition of stupid assesment tests for 7, 11 and 14 year olds, all of which done without lawmaking (subject to approval from Westminster) powers.  Are they going to carry on doing good things for the people of Wales now that they have more powers.  No the first thing that thing they are going to do is ban plastic carrier bags in Wales.  Give me strength.

 Why are they doing this, because Friends of Earth (you know, the people who want to industrialise vast swaithes of wilderness in the Hebrides and the Lake District with wind farms) have decided, (because they have little better to do and need to justify their existence) that plastic carrier bags (which can be used and reused and reused and then recycled) are a bad thing.  Come on Rhodri, I thought that you and the Assembly Government had more sense.

It is now three months since I bought my new PC and moved to Ubuntu Linux. One of the things I miss is the RISC OS desktop. I tried to get ROX to work, but it seemed to fall at the last hurdle every time, so I resigned myself to using GNOME, the desktop that comes as the default with Ubuntu Linux, that follows the Windows paradigm for a desktop very closely.

Then it struck me, all I had to do was change to the K Desktop Environment (KDE) used with the Kubuntu variant of this Linux distribution. It has more than a passing resemblance to the RISC OS desktop as the wide Panel at the bottom of the screen, with its chunky icons looked a lot like the RISC OS Iconbar. A little bit of customisation made the bottom panel look even more like an Iconbar, and today I discovered that the window manager (Kwim) had an optional RISC OS theme for the buttons. As in RISC OS, the close window cross to the much more sensibly placed on left hand side of the titlebar, safely away from the maximise/minimise icon. I have also set the colour scheme of the titlebars so that the active window is yellow, and the inactive windows are grey, just like RISC OS.

So, at least my computer screen now looks like something I can feel at home with.

It has now been revealled (by Tom Spillsbury, deputy Editor of Doctor Who Magazine) that at the Press Screening of this episode, Phil Collinson the Producer Doctor Who said that this was the first episode of the new series’ first three part story.  As this is the case, I will be writing a full review of Utopia/Sound of Drums/Last of the Time Lords after the story finishes.  In the mean time, here are my thoughts on episode.

Thoughts
So the Master is back then, back and within five minutes he regenerated.  The character has a history of taking over pleasant characters to do is dastardly deeds, Tremas in The Keeper of Traken, Bruce the paramedic in the TVM and now Professor Yana, although to be honest, Yana was the Master all along, hiding in human form, just like the Doctor in Human Nature/Family of Blood.  Sir Derek Jacobi was absolutely marvelous as both the kindly professor who was very similar in character to Doctor#2 and as the restored Master, dripping with evil intent.

It is still far to early to say what John Simm’s Master will be like, as he appears to be suffering from the same sort of post-regenerative trauma that afflicts the Doctor.  Although he appears to be very happy, as was stated by someone on the Outpost Gallifrey Web Forum, not only has he been released from years of being a nice human and is revelling in his wickedness, he now has a young new Time Lord body and has seriously screwed over his biggest rival, all in the course five minutes, this is truly the icing on the icing of a cake made from icing.

It is so nice to see Jack back, the real happy go lucky flirty Jack Harkness, not the maudlin bad tempered Jack who appeared in the first series of Torchwood.  Lets hope that this Jack will return to Twenty-First Century Cardiff and lighten up the second series of the spin-off.

I was a bit dubious about Humans still being around so far into the future, but there was a nice line of dialogue in the episode where teh Doctor says that having once evolved, humanity fills a niche within the universe and will continue to re-evolve from various sources to fill that niche, so although teh people in this episode looked human, they were a long way from the species that first appeared on Earth trillions of years ago.

More to follow…