The Journal of the Browncoat Cat

This video appears on YouTube:

Well it is worth reposting this  because it looks as if whoever created that video was on the money.

In the climax of Series 29 of Doctor Who we were given a tantalising glimpse of Gallifrey, The Doctor’s home planet.  Since the series returned to the screens, this planet and its ruling Time Lords have only ever been mentioned in the past tense.  The last great Time War between the Daleks and the Time Lords ended with the destruction of this planet and the vast bulk of the Daleks.  It was a lose-lose situation which has powered The Doctor’s actions and his character development.  With  Russell T. Davies’ time in charge of the series coming to an end, we finally get to see this apocalyptic event.

The following is all speculation on my part:
The clip above is the first two scenes after the credits at the start of The End of Time Part 2.  It is obvious that the Time Lords have fallen under the sway of a mad, mad, mad man.  That Timothy Dalton is playing a Lord President of the High Council of Time Lords who is a Caligula or Nero type character.  That The Doctor returned to Gallifrey and found that no matter which side won the Time War, it was curtains for the Cosmos, as each side was as bad as the other.  That the only way to defeat the mad man at the pinnacle of power was to destroy both Daleks and his now rotten and corrupt home world.  The Time Lord Council talk about a weapon called the Moment, could it be that this was triggered by  a Time  Lord regenerating, and the reason why we did not see Doctor#8 becoming Doctor#9 is because it was being reserved for this episode, at the end of Russell T. Davies’ guardianship of the series.  That  immediately after the clip above, we will see Paul McGann appear in the current run of the series, but only to sacrifice that incarnation of the Doctor to save the Cosmos.

Time Lords Victorious

As has been shown many times in the series, The Doctor failed to destroy the Daleks, and now it looks as if he failed to destroy the Time Lords as well.   It is now apparent that the Time Lords knew what the Doctor was planning, and made their plans against it. The Matrix, the greatest computer ever sat at the heart of the Time Lord’s civilisation.  Maybe the Time Lords copied themselves into this great machine. That is why they resurrected The Master, a renegade Time Lord and criminal, who they knew he would run and hide and somehow survive the Time War.  They went back into his time-line and inserted something into his head when he was a child.  Throughout his career as a criminal and megalomaniac that implant grew in power, so that by the time he regenerated into his current body, it was an over-powering sound of drumming in his head.  It is now so strong that even The Doctor can hear it. That The Master taking over the Immortality Gate and turning all humans into a copy of himself  was part of the overall plan. The Master was acting under influence of the Time Lords all along. Because the drumming in his head was The Matrix  archived and compressed, like a cosmic .zip file.  When the Master created his Master Race, he created enough power for the Matrix.zip file to be extracted and bring the Time Lords and Gallifrey back.

This brings us to the rest of the episode:

With the Time Lords back, then The Doctor is in so much trouble.  He tried and failed to destroy them.  Treason on the highest level.  The Time Lords are going to want to punish him, and all appears to be lost.  But is it.  Who is the woman in white as played by Clare Bloom.  If you look at the last scene of Part One, then it looks as if she is one of the women with her head in her hands, standing behind Lord President Caligulanero.  Perhaps she is part of the opposition to this particular Time Lord’s regime and she has been helping The Doctor all along. After all, why does The Doctor keep running into Wilf Mott and his granddaughter Donna, her chosen pawns. The Doctor is already suspicious of the old soldier.  And what are the meanings of  all the cryptic messages she has been giving Wilf.  We shall find out on Friday night.

I sincerely hope that now the Time Lords and Gallifrey are back, that they were not resurrected for this one story only.  That they are back permanently.  Back in the background, subtly manipulating The Doctor, getting him to do their dirty work, just like in the original run of the series.  The big difference, as proven by the clip above is that now Gallifrey can be shown with scale and grandeur that the original run of Doctor Who just could not manage to produce on its limited budget.  Not that the current production team will be able to afford a visit to Gallifrey that often either, but at least when they do, it will look good.

Somewhere to the West of Lisbon

According to the GPS system, apparently for no  reason, at some time after 9.23am, when the Instamapper GPS Tracker app on my phone took a reference of my position using the GPS I abandoned my post at Treherbert Branch Library,  took off  without the aid of an aeroplane and flew to the point marked on the map to the left.  Why I should want to fly like Superman and then hover over the North Atlantic some two hundred miles to the west of the Portuguese capital is beyond me.  But according to the GPS this is what I must have done.  However, the most remarkable thing is that 21 minutes later, I was back in Treherbert, that was quite a remarkable journey.  A round trip of a smidgeon under 1,900 miles.

The last time I was anywhere near this spot was back in August when I was aboard the Grand Princess enjoying a very pleasant cruise.  I suppose the fact that the GPS tracker only checks my location once every 20 minutes or so, and is only being used for entertainment purposes means that this particular blip is more noticeable than if it was checking on my position every few seconds for a SatNav programme.  In that situation, the blip would quickly be disregarded by the system.

I have no doubt that The X-Factor is great television, and that Simon Cowell’s productions have been responsible for bringing talented people to the public’s notice.  I do find his arguement that The X-Factor has saved the United Kingdom from naff Christmas Number Ones to be arrogant in extreme. Yes, there has been some tripe at the top spot  in Chritmases gone by, but there has also been Return to Sender by Elvis Presely, Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen and  Don’t You Want Me by The Human League, to name a few.  Also,  there is the assumption by everyone in the record industry that the winner of The X-Factor deserve launch their careers as recording artists with a Number One at the Christmas after they have won the competition.  So it is not surprising that a campaign on the Social Networking web site Facebook has gained such momentum.

However, I do object to what they are championing as an alternative to to GI Joe McElderry’s lame cover of  Jump, a Miley Cyrus record (honestly, you could not make it up).  To call Killing in the Name of by the US band Rage Against the Machine music is stretching things, as it features a rhythmic chord progression that is almost melodic, tso you could call it music.  Its the sort of things youngsters learn and then quickly grow out of when they first form a Rock Band with some mates in their parent’s garage.  Having accepted that it is music, but only just, I definitely would not call it a song. Tunelessly shouting “Some of those that were forces are the ones that burn crosses” oer and over in no way constitute a lyric, it is a rant.  Other verses are just as repetitive and moronic, and is it really necessary to repeat the “F” word 17 times to get your point across.

Why should I care, after all, I cannot remember the last time that I bought a single, and I very rarely download MP3s onto my iPod these days.  I suppose that it is because I don’t like being manipulate.  Both SyCo, Cowell’s record company, and the Facebook campaign is trying to manipulate me and have succeeded in manipulating, for good or for ill the Christmas Number one this year, and I don’t like being manipulated.

At the start of the week, I received  a letter sent by the Neurology Department at the University of Wales Hospital to my GP.  The letter confirmed that I was suffering from Narcolepsy and that the previous diagnosis of Sleep Related Epilepsy was wrong.  The most important part of the letter was paragraph that stated that as the medication I was now taking had proven to be so successful, thee consultant Prof Smith saw no reason why I could not now apply to the DVLA to get permission to learn to drive.  He did say that I will probably have to have an assessment  at Rookwood Hospital before I could start.  When I went to see Prof Smith in May, it was at Rookwood Hospital, and I made enquiries there about what I would need to do to get the ball rolling.  Well, this letter was the first thing on the list of conditions, as it stated that the medical conditition that might impair my driving ability is now under control. So my New Year’s Resolution for 2010 is to learn to drive and pass my Driving Test by 2011.

Most British motor cars are exercises in masochism.  They still have manual transmission and   Why?  This Edwardian system of clutch and gear box is a distraction, it gets in the way of the important and pleasurable  part of driving, the actual driving itself.  With a manual transmission driving becomes secondary to engine management.  In the US cars come with Automatic Transmission as standard, no faffing about with gear sticks over there.  When I was in the Sixth Form back in the mid 1980’s I tried to learn how to drive a normal manual transmission motor car .  The Dyspraxia got in the way of that.  I was great with the actual driving part, the steering of a motor vehicle in the local traffic from Point A to Point B, but having to cope with gear changes as well was a nightmare.  So I gave up when I went to university in Coventry.  I always said that I would start again, on an automatic car.  People said I would not be a “real driver” because “real drivers” had true control over their vehicles through their gear boxes.  Yes I thought, you really are talking out of your gearbox, the British obsession with manual transmission is misplaced machismo which I can well do without.  I never got around to learning, the Narcolepsy got worse, and with the misdiagnosis of Epilepsy, the medication I was on failed to control it.  It just was not safe for me to drive.  All that has changed now.

Anyway, now the person I spoke to at Rookwood told me that because of the Dyspraxia, I should not even contemplate learning to drive on anything with a manual gearbox.  That I should go for an automatic first as last.

Suzuki Splash

So what sort of car would I like.  Something small and nippy.  I like the old Suzuki Wagon-R because they had a nice lot of headroom and legroom.  They have now been superseded by the Suzuki Splash.  I would like to have a closer look at one of these vehicles.  The photo on the left is shows one in my preferred colour.  Looks like I had better start saving my pennies.

OK, so I have missed five days. Believe it or not, my life got in the way of my web log. Anyway, back to business. This clip was shown as pert of Bernard Cribbin’s appearance on Loose Women.  Its just great, but what else do you expect from Bernard Cribbens.

Take a good look at the picture that is the background of this web log, for soon it will be history.  For soon a Dutch company is going to rape the fair country again by placing 94 wind turbines, the only environmentally harmful source of renewable energy,all along the top of those mountains. For two hundred years the glacial uplands of south Wales have been despoiled, first by the coal industry, then by the moronic monoculture of the Forestry Commission, and now by these fools who are going to industrialise and ruin forever vast tracks of the Rhondda. Electricity from massive wind farms consisting of a large number of massive wind turbines will never be green. The government only supports it because it is an easy option. By backing these monstrosities, they can claim to be doing something to help prevent climate change.

The company responsible for these monstrosity recently sent out a brochure full of lies and half truths.  With photo-shopped image of what the Upper Rhondda will look like once the turbines have been completed.  photo-shopped in such a way that the turbines appeared to be invisible.  When the turbines are standing  everyone will be able to see just how high the opacity was set at on the image layer of those photos, because in reality, these windmill will be eyesores for generations to come, and it will be far too late to complain.  Also, the Lieing Dutchmen left out the most important image, showing just how close these turbines will be to houses in Tynewydd and Treherbert, and just how close to the Rhigos Mountain Road they will be.

Oh well, the only hope is that the engineering problems raised by building these massive eyesores in such a harsh environment will prove to much for people behind this scheme to pocket.  Thirty odd years ago, the people laying the pipeline to supply domestic North Sea Gas to Welsh homes were over-awed by how quickly weather conditions could deteriorate atop these mountains.  Building the turbines will take so much longer.  Maybe what looks good on paper will prove impossible in practice.  I can but hope.

OK, so a simple entry for today’s Advent Web Log, because I am off Cardiff today at the TIMELESS Christmas Lunch.  The clips are from the BBC’s YouTube Channel,  The  feature a brief teaser for The Grufallo and a longer teaser for The End of Time, David Tennant’s final hurrah as The Doctor in this year’s two part Doctor Who Christmas Special.  The second is the long Christmas Indent that will be shown before most prime time programmes on BBC One between 12th and 31st  December, 2009.  They are both, as some Americans might say, just totally made of AWESOME dude!

I was not really happy with the decoration atop the Christmas tree in work, and neither it seems was my mother. When I popped up my mother’s house last night she showed me the Baroque angel she had just bought for her Christmas Tree and its twin sister for my tree in the Library.

The whole Christmas Tree ritual is deeply pagan and the Catholic Church tried their best to stamp the practice out. In Poland and Eastern Europe, the Teutonic Knights would put to the sword anyone who dared to celebrate Yule in any way shape or form. It is therefore ironic that the introduction of the Christmas Tree tradition into Britain is credited to Prince Albert von Saxe-Coberg Goethe, the German husband of Queen Victoria.

I suppose that as the baubles on a Christmas Tree were originally the last of that season’s apples, it iss appropriate that  the tree has mostly red and yellow gold baubles.  I should replace the nine purple balls with green ones. After all, when was the last time you saw a naturally purple skinned apple?

In these days of festive excess, one string of external lights seems a bit tame, but back in the early 1980’s when my father first bought a strip of external fairy lights for the front of the family home, they were revolutionary. Over the years three sets of lights have been hung prettily from the eves of the bay window.  The hooks stay up all year, only the lights are put away at Twelfth Night.

Every year, the worse part of putting up the Christmas decorations for my mother is hanging theese lights around the bay window at the front of her house. It is either bitterly cold when lights are due to go up, or raining so heavily that putting a step ladder up infront of the house is near to impossible.  Then there are the actual hooks, with are incredibly fiddly little things that have to be twisted slightly to allow the wire of the lights to be inserted into them. This is not the easiest of things to do on a rickety step ladder.  I am so glad that I did not have to put them up this year.  Although it will probably be me who has to take them back down again at the start of January.