| Denial. Next comes STAYING IN BED |
[May. 10th, 2008|01:57 am] |
I started the Wikipedia page for next year's snooker rankings. So I could pretend that the snooker was still going on. But it's not.
Note to self: need to write cool perl script to generate this page, it was a bit too much work to do manually after every tournament.
Second note to self: even when I've written that perl script the snooker *still* won't be on.
Also, sad to note that barring some snooker ranking rule that I don't understand, both Tony Drago and James Wattana are off the main tour next year. |
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| Serial Digression |
[May. 10th, 2008|12:57 am] |
Just following up on my last post: the idea that procrastination is serial digression is very powerful. The feeling that you're just going to do one more thing and then get down to work is hard to push off. In fact, I sometimes find myself, after a big binge on my blogs, thinking "I'll just read one more blog then get to work" and then being unable to think of any remaining blogs I want to read. And then, instead of getting to work, sitting there till I think of one. Because it'd be a shame not to take advantage of that one more blog I'm letting myself read.
I've had good results this last couple of weeks by going back to Bloglines. My favourite political blogs are Atrios, Kevin Drum, Matthew Yglesias at The Atlantic, and Talking Points Memo (the last out of habit more than anything, Josh Marshall's lumbering sense of humour and point-missing partisanship are really getting on my tits). Until recently I was reading each of them individually, which led to a lot of just-one-morism... particularly on Matthew Yglesias's site, where it's all too easy to click through to empty vessel Andrew Sullivan and rewarding-but-leisurely-paced Ross Douthat etc, and from their blogs to other links, and so on and so on. Simply aggregating the four blogs I read most in one place means that (a) I don't have the easy links from the blogroll to distract me and (b) I usually have enough individual interesting posts in a single place that I can mentally commit to doing something else when I've finished reading them.
Of course, it also helps that there's a lot of interesting work to be done at the moment that's pretty much at least as interesting as reading blogs. That helps a lot. |
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| Distractions |
[May. 10th, 2008|12:47 am] |
I liked What's the Next Distraction? at Tools for Thought. "A more common source of procrastination is serial digression" it says. And "Procrastination is more than not doing priority tasks; it’s doing non-priority tasks". And "Consciously surfing the web for three hours is actually hard, but going to “just one” website is easy. Checking email for “a few minutes” is easy." they say. Yes, I say. Yes it is. But the post also ends with three tips for pulling yourself back from that "just one" website, and I think I might actually use two of those tips. |
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| Google desktop search |
[May. 9th, 2008|12:27 pm] |
I'm thinking of uninstalling Google Desktop Search.
- My email is indexed by Lookout, which isn't perfect but is fast and reliable, uses text-based filters (so you can do "from:XXX" to find only mails from one person as part of the query) and lets you click on columns to sort results. If Google Desktop Search showed the whole cached mail in the browser it'd still be worth using, because Outlook itself is sometimes pretty slow to display mails, but it seems to have stopped doing that and I can't find a preference to bring it back. So no need for GDS for email. (Note that Lookout is still available if you know where to look and still the best Outlook search tool I've found, though I'm currently trying out Xobni which looks promising).
- I never search local files. I just stick them in appropriately named directories on my file system. How 1995!
- So the only thing I really need to search is my web history -- that's where I have a lot of documents that I originally found more-or-less at random, that I haven't filed in an organized fashion, and that it'd be useful for me to refind. But GDS really sucks at this. It just doesn't seem to index most of my pages. For example, I've visited the top result from this search three times over the past fortnight, in one case keeping the page open for several days, and it still doesn't show up in my GDS results.
- My Outlook folders are 6 gig; Lookout's index for them is 0.5 gig; GDS's index is 4.1 gig. I only have 70 gig in total on my hard drive and Thinkpads don't have a larger hard drive available (different rant), so I'd rather have the 4.1 gig back.
Am I missing some ultral33t way of using GDS? I wish Google well and would like to love their products, but I feel like those 4.1 gigs are too valuable to pass up. |
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| What I hate |
[May. 8th, 2008|01:38 am] |
is being out, and driving home and thinking "at least the snooker'll be on when I get home", and then it isn't, because it's over. |
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| To be missed |
[May. 6th, 2008|01:44 am] |
Megan at From The Archives is dropping blogging. She and Scheherazade at Stay of Execution were in some ways the voices I valued most in the blogosphere: really into the details of their specific things (water engineering for Megan, sailing for Sherry) but mixing those particular enthusiasms with more general, big-hearted, precise posts that were kind about people and life. The nearest thing I have left is, I suppose, Slacktivist. I should delurk more around people I admire. |
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| The rankings |
[May. 5th, 2008|11:48 pm] |
I made the world snooker rankings page on Wikipedia sortable, because someone had to, and so you can get the provisional rankings FOR FREE by sorting on the "Points 2007/08" column. (Twice.) Some things I noticed:
- The top four in the official rankings -- O'Sullivan, Maguire, Murphy, Selby -- are the top four in the provisionals as well. I suspect this is a first.
- Mark Williams is provisionally back in the top 16! Hope that gives him heart to carry on, I love Mark Williams when he's playing well.
- John Higgins had a very poor season for a world champion -- 14th in the provisional rankings which must be some sort of record.
- But not as poor as last year's player of the year Neil Robertson, in at 22...
- But not as poor as Matthew Stevens, in at 28...
- But not as poor as Ken Doherty, Stephen Lee, and Steve Davis, in at 32-34...
- But not anything like as poor as poor Graeme Dott, the man who was liberated by winning the World Championship and then destroyed by losing it, in at 38. I hated watching Graeme Dott play till he was World Champion and suddenly magic sparks came out of his cue. Apparently he's snooker's current poster child for depression. Poor Graeme Dott.
- And of course my secret boyfriend Joe Swail who I HATE BUT LOVE BUT HATE, having been 17th last year and in 20th this year, is provisionally 18th. OH JOE I HATE YOU BUT LOVE YOU BUT HATE YOU.
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| Well, the snooker's over |
[May. 5th, 2008|09:10 pm] |
...wish it had been O'Sullivan-Maguire.
I'm trying to come up with an overarching theory about what kind of underdogs have a chance in World finals, because it seems like there's a niche that Ali Carter falls into which is also occupied by Graeme Dott in 2004, Nigel Bond in 1995 and Terry Griffiths in 1988, and it's different from Shaun Murphy in 2005, Joe Johnson in 1986, and Mark Selby last year. Seems like if you come from kind of somewhere you haven't got a chance, but if you come from nowhere you just might squeak through. Maybe it's that players who are consistently almost good enough get stuck in an almost good enough mindset -- like Griffiths certainly was in 1988, the first really boring final for many years -- but players who are still capable of surprising themselves have an outside shot of pulling it off.
Ah, sportswriting and intelligent design: the natural homes of the untestable theory. List of winners and runners-up here, if you want to roll your own. |
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| The snooker: yes yes yes I understand |
[May. 5th, 2008|12:52 am] |
how everyone can be cross with Ronnie for being good all the time. It is encrossenating, particularly when (as tonight) he wasn't that good but got the same score as someone who was really good would have. But Ronnie's spent so much time being not as good as he should be that I'm more delighted to have a poster child for redemption than upset to see no-one else have any possible chance of winning.
My standards of hating people for being too good were set back in 1992, when Stephen Hendry took ten frames in a row to come from 8-14 down and beat Jimmy White 18-14 in the World Championship final. That was just too good to be good and there was nothing enjoyable about it at all, no pots off the lightshades or extraordinary positional gambits that made the cue ball sing: just continually putting the cue ball in a place that was good enough to get the next pot, and then doing it again. The scrappy upstart was finally going to get his day, but he didn't; instead the establishment crushed him. In a that-thing-that-isn't-ironic-but-there's-no-better-word-for-it way, it was pretty much the same week that John Major won the 1992 election against scrappy upstart Neil Kinnock, so ever since then I've associated Stephen Hendry with John Major and with a general dread that the bad guys will always find a way to pull one out of the fire. We all felt pretty much the same way in my house at the time, I remember, except Bill who was a Scottish Conservative and was kind of insufferable for the next few weeks.
Long story short: nothing Ronnie can do can ever be that bad. Not only does he personally occupy the scrappy upstart niche, which means the only way he can do something as bad as Hendry in 1992 is by beating himself, which admittedly he does a lot but it's not the same; there's never the same air of remorselessness about him, of robo-Nazi perfection. The thing about Hendry in those days was: yes, he lost sometimes, but there was no interaction between him and the match. Mostly everything fired right and he won all the frames he needed to. Sometimes he missed stupid shots. But it felt like the chance of him missing a stupid shot had nothing to do with the tension of the moment or the status of the match; it was just to do with whether the wiring unexpectedly misfired or whether it did what it was supposed to. Watching snooker finals during the 90s was like watching the lottery and calling it drama. With Ronnie the drama's always real. Respect. |
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| Not, I repeat not, Constantinople |
[May. 5th, 2008|12:44 am] |
I haven't posted about my trip to Istanbul yet, have I? And I still won't, except to note that that bar with the beanbags that they recommend in the Irish Times travel section this weekend? That was where N*** and I went on the Monday night. And although the Irish Times is a bit sniffy about their Margaritas, they do a great and innovative cocktail called THE GHOST, which is a Margarita mixed with ABSINTHE, which by the way I tried, and although I can remember getting back to the lawn in front of the hotel I can't exactly remember getting from there to bed, and when I woke up in the morning it turned out someone had snuck into my room when I was sleeping and been sick in a neat pile on the carpet. I'm nearly 40! Anyway, I recommend this bar to people who are nearly 40 of any age, if they're buying drinks for me. |
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| Also, stupid Stephen Maguire |
[Apr. 30th, 2008|03:41 pm] |
I was so hoping for a Maguire / O'Sullivan final.... |
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| TSA bowling |
[Apr. 28th, 2008|06:05 pm] |
Rules of TSA bowling:
* Take all those circular coin bowls and put them in a triangle on the belt
* Run the belt at full speed.
* See how many of the bowls you can get to whack against the last bag that went through and fall over.
* Laugh with colleagues
* Return to regularly scheduled duties
I would have taken a photograph of it, but you know. |
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| STUPID JOE SWAIL |
[Apr. 28th, 2008|05:58 pm] |
That is all. |
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| Happy |
[Apr. 28th, 2008|12:03 am] |
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| Second round = first best! |
[Apr. 26th, 2008|07:55 pm] |
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So much for my claim that the second round is never interesting, as John Higgins was devoured by Ryan Day (who is OF THE UNDEAD) and Shaun Murphy lost before the semi-finals for the first time since before he was born. The road is open for my secret boyfriend Joe Swail... |
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| Second round = second best |
[Apr. 25th, 2008|03:43 pm] |
The snooker's in the second round and a bit less intense than the first round so far. I was about to claim that the last time anything interesting happened in the second round of the World Championship was in 1983 when Cliff Thorburn made his 147 and Dennis Taylor held Steve Davis to 13-11 (holding Steve Davis to 13-11 was pretty exciting at the time). But Wikipedia reveals that Mark Williams lost in the second round in 2004 when he was defending champion. To little Joe Perry of all people! So that shows me.
It turns out (again if you trust Wikipedia) that Mark Williams also lost in the second round the other time he was defending champion, in 2001 to my secret boyfriend Joe Swail. But since Mark Williams isn't defending champion this time it seems safe to assume the second round will be fairly uneventful and rather than watching it I can continue trying unsuccessfully to work out a strategy for tidying my desk. |
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| Cyrus update |
[Apr. 25th, 2008|09:17 am] |
Got a call this morning from a woman who said "IS THAT MY DOG HAVE YOU GOT MY DOG I'M CALLING THE POLICE ON YOU GIVE ME BACK MY DOG" and hung up. Apart from admiring the perfect AABA song structure I'm at a loss as to what to do. How do you tell whether these people are the dog's real owners or just chancers looking for a free dog? |
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| Domestic politics |
[Apr. 24th, 2008|05:11 pm] |
The cats aren't sure about Cyrus. They usually spread out around the house, but now he's here they've all clustered in one room so that when he comes into the room they can go big and hiss at him. It's nice to see them together. "Three cats... each with their own lives. But now an intruder is in the house. And these three very different cats must learn... to become a family." |
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| Cyrus! Perhaps. |
[Apr. 24th, 2008|04:39 pm] |
Here's Cyrus! ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) kristamm found him wandering the streets of Cabra yesterday and took him home, but it turned out kristamm's dog wanted to eat him all until he was gone, so now he's staying with us. We're putting up LOST DOG posters the length of Carnlough Road, but my theory is that his dad was rubbed out in a gangland slaying and the posters will end up yellowing in the sun and Cyrus will reach the end of the month as OUR DOG. He's a big sweetie, only about six months old, leash trained, great with EMLW, house trained most of the time, and he will curl up watchfully anywhere and turn it into a front step that he's in charge of guarding. Dizzy is pretending to be distant but when we went out to the park this lunchtime she turned into a big flirty showoff, chasing the football without any warm-up and waving it in his face and dancing all over the place. If his dad shows up, great; if not, there are worse things than having another very very good dog.
kristamm called him Buster, but under the "finders keepers but minders namers" rule we get to rename him, and something about his nose looked very classical. So Cyrus it is. |
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| Waiting for Joe |
[Apr. 23rd, 2008|02:07 pm] |
I'm watching the World Snooker Championships, hoping yet again that Joe Swail can make it back into the top 16 in the rankings. I've loved Joe Swail ever since he reached the World Championship semi-finals in 2000, beating John Parrott from three down with four to play, and became the first player under the current system to reach the top sixteen, drop out of the top 32, then get back into the top 16. It turns out that Joe and I have a lot in common, viz:
| Joe Swail | Me |
| Born in Belfast | Born in Belfast |
| Partially deaf | Bemused |
| Plays snooker well | Plays snooker |
Reached world semi final in
2000, 2001 | Makes good scrambled eggs |
Anyway, since 2001 Joe had a few bad seasons and dropped back out of the top 32, and this year he's in with a shot of being the first person ever to get into the top 16, drop out of the top 32, get back into the top 16, drop back out of the top 32, and then get back back into the top 16. Here's how the ranking points stand before the world championship:
12 Graeme Dott* 27144
13 Marco Fu* 27000
14 Joe Perry 26825
15 Mark Allen* 25725
16 Matthew Stevens* 25413
17 Ken Doherty 25119
18 Mark King 25000
19 Jamie Cope* 24744
20 Joe Swail 23725
21 Stuart Bingham 23625
Joe's 20th, so he needs to overtake 4 people. The players marked with a star are already out, and as I write Ken Doherty is 7-2 down and likely to go out too -- an amazing turnaround for the person who was top of the provisional rankings this time last year. Reaching the second round has got both Joe and Mark King another 1000 points, putting Mark King on 26000, which means Matthew Stevens, also amazingly, didn't make it back in. So Joe's target is realistically to get ahead of Mark Allen. These things are usually quite complicated, but in this case they're not: if Joe can get to the quarter-finals he'll be on 25925. One match away! But then of course Stuart Bingham will reach the semis and spoil everything.
Anyway, Joe's next match is against Liang Wenbo, assuming Liang beats Ken Doherty. Fingers crossed...
BTW, am I wrong or has there been an unusually high number of great first-round matches this year? |
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| 2008 books: The Blackwater Lightship |
[Apr. 23rd, 2008|03:04 am] |
Joyce said that the idea of Ulysses was that if Dublin were to be destroyed it could be recreated from his book; Colm Tobin appears to be trying to do the same thing in this book for the Irish family. I'm in two minds about this. The observation is very precise, everything in it rings true, and it evokes the Ireland of 1990 (when not everyone had a mobile phone) so exactly that it feels like a perfectly done period piece. And the final exchanges between the lead character and her mother are perfectly pitched. On the other hand it all seems a bit inconsequential. It held my attention well after the first 70 or so pages and then it was over.
(ETA (I always ETA)): So CBS made a TV movie of it, and the voiceover to the trailer goes "After years apart... three generations of women will struggle... to be a family again." I can't say this makes me better disposed to the book.
Also, how does she end up spending so little time actually with her brother, and how does it go so unremarked on? |
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| Planet of the Ood |
[Apr. 20th, 2008|12:08 am] |
Hooray for the return of "Planet of the" titles! ( and more... ) |
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| What they should do, mobile phones edition |
[Apr. 12th, 2008|01:54 am] |
They should really have a site where you could go and type in your usage data from the last four months and they'd tell you who to get mobile phone service with and what plan to get with them. I'm actually trying to work this out myself at the moment, but with an Excel spreadsheet and for Vodafone only; I could see myself making something with JavaScript later, but the ideal is a site more like this. Sadly, that one's US only. Oh well. |
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| Good software update practices |
[Apr. 7th, 2008|11:40 pm] |
So here's the problem: ( A simple yet infuriating dialog box )
With iTunes comes the Apple Software Updater, and a couple of weeks ago the Apple Software Updater starting telling Windows users that Safari was available, even though they hadn't already chosen to install it. Space out, and click on the "Install" button on the dialog above, and you have a whole new program that you never consciously decided you needed. The questions are: (1) is this good or bad? And (2) what can I do about it?
( Put on your suit and open all the hatches ) |
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| Family |
[Apr. 7th, 2008|02:39 pm] |
EMLW and Dizzy and I went to the beach at Portrane. There was a blustery north wind blowing. EMLW wanted to go on my shoulders but I said no, we'd fall over, she had to go in the stroller. Dizzy loves the wind on the beach. She danced around and snapped at her tail and pounced on nothing.
After a bit I checked on EMLW. Her face was red from the wind. "Are you cold?" I said. She did the sign for cold, BRRRRRR!. "Do you want to go back to the car?" I said. She shook her head no. We pushed the stroller through some little beach streams until she said she wanted to walk. We walked into the wind together, slowly, leaning into it, her with a big smile on her face. When we turned round to head for the car I scooped her up and let the stroller go. It raced away from us across the bumpy sand. We chased it and caught it just before it fell over and she laughed and laughed and laughed. |
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| What They Should Do, Google search edition |
[Apr. 7th, 2008|10:11 am] |
If you include the word "map" in a search query, they should automatically give you a "See the results of this search on Google Maps" link. Because (a) the Google Maps homepage takes longer to load than the ordinary Google homepage and there's no reason why you should have to load it all to do a maps search (b) you can't by default search straight in Google Maps from the search box in Firefox (c) it'd be cool.
Also, they should have a suggestion box.
(It's actually a bit frustrating to try and work out how to submit a suggestion. The members-only group Google Enthusiasts said "The best place to post your suggestions for Google Web Search is right here in this group!" but that's not something the average Joe will think of. Elsewhere, you're directed to the Web Search Center, but there's no suggestion box there. Sometimes there's a link at the bottom of the Web Search Center page saying "Answer a few questions and tell us how we're doing", but that seems to be JavaScripty popup magic that Firefox blocks because when I click on it it just reloads the page. I feel like Google isn't as nimble as it used to be.) |
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| What They Should Do, Wii edition |
[Apr. 7th, 2008|09:44 am] |
What they should do is make little Wiimotes with only the motion sensor, attached to velcro strips so you can strap them to your ankles. Then you could play Dance Dance Revolution without a mat.
You read it here first.
Also, if they did ones with motion sensors and rumble packs that you could put inside your knees, you could make a pretty awesome horse riding game. |
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| Doctor Who: Partners in Crime |
[Apr. 5th, 2008|07:13 pm] |
Three things.
1) Yes, it was Doctor Who by the numbers to an extent; but to another extent it was Rose redux, with the comforting familiarity of that episode but also the energy that hasn't been in the show so consistently since the Ecclestone season. Great to see episodes like this, where you open with the Doctor already deep into the plot; I feel that with only 45 minutes to tell a story they need in general to be starting the story further in. (ETA: Just to be clear, this means that I enjoyed it a lot but I'm not likely to have it top of my list for rewatching).
2) Did the little fat creatures remind anyone else of the milk carton from Coffee and TV?
3) I missed what happened after Donna started to talk to that blonde girl but I assume there weren't any shocking revelations in the rest of the episode. Right? OH NO SORRY I MEAN ZOMG ZOMG ZOMG ONE ONE ONE ONE ONE ONE ONE |
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| Top tip |
[Apr. 3rd, 2008|10:17 am] |
To stop driving off with stuff left on top of the car: if you're putting something on top of the car, put your car keys down on top of the car too. I've been doing this for a while now and it's pretty much foolproof. |
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| They Should Listen To Me |
[Apr. 1st, 2008|11:07 am] |
Hmmm... LJ has no referrer log and no entries in the FAQ about it. What They Should Do is let you see your referrer log. Then they should put an entry in the FAQ. About it. |
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| Overriding equals(Object) in Java |
[Apr. 1st, 2008|01:35 am] |
(Updated 2008-04-01 -- see end of entry)
Turns out that I had lots of classes that implemented MyClass.equals(MyClass) but that if you're doing that, you actually have to override MyClass.equals(Object) and if you're doing that you also have to override MyClass.hashCode(). ( There's more... ) |
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| RebTel update |
[Mar. 31st, 2008|03:14 pm] |
(From here)
Hmmm... so RebTel is working well for Steph, calling US landlines in the evening. But I'm having a lot of trouble using it to call 1-800 or 1-886 US conference numbers during US work hours -- it's essentially ringing out. Perhaps it expects some kind of signal on pickup that single-endpoint calls give out but conference calls don't? |
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| Facebook status |
[Mar. 31st, 2008|02:07 pm] |
I love the Facebook status line -- one sentence is about the length most of my thoughts can sustain, and as such updating my status has pretty much taken the place of actual blogging for me. But What They Should Do is have two status lines -- one short, for your current mood / the joke you just thought of; one longer, say up to 512 or 1024 characters, for things your friends actually need to know about what's going on with you at the moment. So the longer one could be "is in Boston" or "is [insert description of recent medical adventures]" and the shorter one can be "fixed that plug" or "IS TEH LOLZ!". As things stand, "has just eaten icecream" succeeds "is fighting pancreatic cancer" succeeds "feels like some ice cream" and the important stuff kind of gets lost in the mix.
I expect there's already some group that's lobbying for this. In fact, I expect there's 20, they all have non-overlapping membership, and there's no search term that'll find them all. |
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| First day of spring |
[Mar. 31st, 2008|12:33 pm] |
The hour went forward at the weekend and today was absolutely gorgeous. I was brought intensely back to younger days, sitting in in the afternoon watching the World Snooker Championships, with the curtains pulled over so the light wouldn't reflect off the TV screen but smelling the freshness of the air through the cracked-open window. |
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| The VOIPy goodness of RebTel |
[Mar. 27th, 2008|05:49 pm] |
(see update here)
I've been using Skype ever since we moved back to Ireland, but have consistently had poor to unacceptable results with SkypeOut calls (ie calls to phones) and frequently had not great results even with Skype to Skype calls -- the other people on the line have frequently commented that my voice quality was very poor.
Things seem to have been getting worse recently. For a while I thought this was due to underinvestment in the main network after eBay acquired it. Recently, though, I ended up making a Skype call from a car in a parking lot in Boston over a free WiFi connection that I just happened to pick up, and was told that my voice sounded much better than usual. Based on that, I now reckon the bad voice quality was more likely due to excessive contention for the ADSL upload bandwidth as more people in my neighbourhood get broadband. This is also consistent with the observation that I almost always got good quality from the other party on the line -- there's much more download than upload bandwidth in my neighbourhood.
Apart from the upload I'm reasonably happy with Eircom's service and I've heard discouraging things about the alternatives (Irish Broadband etc) so I wanted to find a solution that would be cheaper than simply using my landline / mobile (for all the international calls I want to make) but didn't have to fit through that narrow outgoing pipe. I looked at calling cards but they didn't give great savings -- still around 20c/minute for calling the US as opposed to about 30-40c a minute which I seem to be getting off Vodafone at the moment.
Much more promising are the various VOIP services that are reviewed here. Of those, I've just today tried RebTel and liked it so much I signed up immediately.
The RebTel model is: you use their website to register your phone. Then you register foreign numbers that you want to call cheap, and for each of those numbers it assigns a local / domestic number and texts it to you. You call the local number over the standard network, paying domestic rates, and then the call gets forwarded as VOIP over a backbone at a rate of about 1.5 c/minute depending on the country. There's also a callback option where the recipient, if they're also a RebTel user, can call you back on a domestic number of their own; with this option the RebTel part of the connection is entirely free.
In three trials today, the voice quality was excellent both up and down, there was no delay, and connection time was almost immediate. I joined up immediately. Time will tell how well it works in the long run but it's clearly way preferable to Skype.
BTW, if you're interested in joining, let me know in the comments so I can invite you -- there's the usual free minutes for getting new customers deal. |
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| Torchwood in finally good shocker! |
[Jan. 24th, 2008|02:27 am] |
Finally!
That was the first episode that really felt like an integrated whole, not an ordinary story from some ordinary series with TEH GAY bolted on. I was reminded, having recently rewatched Spearhead From Space, of some of the classic UNIT action sequences; a single lumbering monster, invulnerable against a gaggle of men with guns, is perhaps the iconic image of the Pertwee years. Considering that Torchwood and UNIT are organizations with *koff* somewhat similar briefs, it's funny that it's taken this long to play up that angle (disclaimer: I missed about half the episodes of series 1, so this may not be true).
And a nice arc being set up, and sweet Gwen being sweet, and all the Torchwoody goodness you could want. Let's hope they keep this up. |
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book recommended it, and it's handy for where