I’m quite pleased to announce Dalek Sec has arrived and has happily posed for a round of photos; the FlickrUploadr is being a real bitch and won’t upload anything to my account. I wanted to at least get a couple posted and these were two of the better ones.

And yes, I did use the lightbox. It works wonderfully! I need to make a bigger one, since this isn’t quite big enough, at least for a Dalek.

Or even every other day. That’s not to say nothing’s been going on, though. I’ve just been working on other things, like, well…finding a job, which by the way, is not going so well. But more on that later.

Taking my cue from old friend dotk over yonder on the East Coast, I’m gonna hit ya’ll up with a mega-update post. True dat, yo.

The job search. Oh, the job search. Hopefully something turns up in about nine weeks or so, because I don’t know how unemployment extensions work. I’m still looking, every day and have even given up the job site emails in favor of that crazy new-fangled RSS. I’ve gone pretty ape-shit over RSS, but that’s not for this part of the mega-update. A friend of mine from the bookclub I belong to gave me a tip about an employment agency a couple weeks ago and yesterday I had an appointment. The online testing I had to complete prior to the appointment kind of pissed me off: for the Word and Excel portions of the testing, I was unable to use keyboard shortcuts that I know work because I’ve been using them for fifteen years. Oh, that made me so mad that for those questions, I didn’t even fuck around with going through the menus. I just skipped them altogether. My emm was a bit concerned about it, but I told her my scores would be high enough for it to be apparent I knew what I was doing. I was given my results yesterday and am pleased with them overall, although I know both would have been closer to 100% had those goddamn shortcuts worked the way they’ve always worked in the past. I might be all about open source, but come on! I cut my teeth on Microsoft products. The typing test results shocked me so badly that I asked the woman with whom I was meeting if she was certain that was accurate. I do not type 62 WPM and I never have. I think maybe 50 WPM was my previous high score. The best part about the testing was this: although the testing website said a Mac could be used, upon scrolling down a bit further, I was informed the test was only available on Windows machines. Wha…? Whatever. I had to go to 101 and use the emm’s laptop!

This isn’t a well-publicized bit of intel, but I am getting ready to go out of town in a couple of days for a week. Star Tattoo Girl turns three today and since the emm and I were not able to attend last weekend’s birthday party, we thought visiting afterwards would be grand. I talked to Birthday Star just a little while ago and she is very excited about seeing Grammy and Auntie Mickey, but who’s more excited out of the lot of us, I’m not sure. It’s probably a tie. I still remember so clearly three years ago when the sister called the factory to tell me about the baby (no one knew what Smudge would be prior to birth), the (wo) answered the phone before I’d even had a chance to process it had rung and from around the corner, called to the brand new Auntie Mickey to talk to the sister. Those types of things I miss about the (wo). I’ve been giving a lot of thought to sending her an email, and from what Betty told me, the (wo)’s been thinking the same thing, but just doesn’t know what to say. Neither do I, naturally, even almost three months later, so perhaps it’s just better if I let it go and walk away totally.

The second part to Sarah Jane Smith - Fashionista Fever! has been written and posted here, but is waiting in the wings for some final edits to come from Wes at scary-crayon. This installment is much more image intensive than the first and although the opportunities to totally dis Sarah Jane regarding her clothing were not as numerous this time around, I managed to write about a thousand more words, give or take. It’s still snarky, though; I wrote to a friend of mine in New York and told her about it, saying, “…for all its snarkiness, I hope a sense of my absolute adoration of (Sarah Jane) comes through, too.” And I’ve utilized Lightbox this time around, since I really like the way it looks on other websites

More news on the Doctor Who front: I have officially bought my first Doctor Who toy - Dalek Sec! I don’t count the sonic screwdriver as a toy, per se, since not only can I scare the straights when I press the buttons and it makes noise, but I can also write notes to the straights and leave them on their car windows. In regular ink or invisible ink! I really hope he arrives before I leave so I can play with him on the airplane. If there were any air marshalls to be found on my upcoming flight, what are the chances they may be fans of Doctor Who and wouldn’t taser me into submission if I started saying, “EXTERMINATE! WE ARE THE SUPERIOR BEINGS!” in my very best Dalek voice?

And even more news, via a few different sources: The Brigadier will be appearing on The Sarah Jane Adventures next season. YES! I can’t even express how excited I was to read this and am now waiting even more impatiently than before for the new episodes.

I’m not sure when it happened or why, but I totally heart the Brigadier. And I fer realz heart Harry even more.

Around the villa, there’s not too much to report at all. The toy box project I was so stoked about a few months ago has pretty much stalled for the time being. Right now, it’s acting as my dining room table/workbench/desk away from the TARDIScloset and because it’s in such sorry shape, I don’t feel badly when I nick it with a box cutter or my water glass drips on it. I suspect that will all change once I get it gussied up, so I’m really pulling back on that right now. I made a lightbox this morning just because. It’s certainly nothing fancy and I still need background paper for it, but all in all, it came out quite well. I’m very happy with it and as soon as I get Dalek Sec, I’m going to give it a try.

strange cousin susan continues to be tweaked; I updated to Wordpress 2.6 just this afternoon, after backing up the files and the databases with a handy little plugin I found, since the directions found here about database back up might have been written in Greek for all I was able to understand until the plugin saved my bacon, so to speak. I’ve added an RSS feed and found a random image generator so I can showcase the collection of lady pictures my friend Anneke gives me trouble about. I’ve also finally gotten a PGP key, although it was generated from GPG, since that’s free and from what I can tell, the same thing. Searching for my public key on a few different key servers turned up some old keys I’d forgotten about, not to mention a couple on Mysterious Stevenson. It’s hard to believe it’s been almost eleven years since then.

I’ve realized how painfully long this post has become, so I’m going to hold off on the recent trials and tribulations with various open source programs, not to mention the overall love affair I’m still carrying on with it, despite those disappointments.

There have been other things filling my days and sometimes even my early morning hours. No longer am I waking up at 1:30am or 2am like I was for a while. Now there are nights I’m just going to bed at 1:30am or 2am. That hasn’t happened too often, but in the last week or so, I’ve definitely noticed a change in the hours I keep at the end of the day; mornings are still early, but not ass-crack-of-dawn early, though. A nice change, after all the years of getting up early for work and then in the last few months at the factory, getting up even earlier for work.

Sarah Jane mp3s are being uploaded pretty regularly; I’ve got only two more serials left to re-watch as back-end work for Fashionista Fever!, so I suspect this will slow down by week’s end. But, then there’s always the last two episodes of Doctor Who with which to work, not to mention season one of TSJA…

Entirely too much time is being spent creating images for lol capshunz, but I’m having entirely too much fun with it. I’ll eventually need to incorporate more than just Doctor Who capshunz, but due to the insane number of screen caps I’ve got scattered amongst two laptops, that might not happen for a while.

Fashionista Fever! has taken on a life of its own and is now a multi-part project; “A Clotheshorse is Born” has been uploaded and will cross-post on scary-crayon tomorrow. I had no idea I’d have such a blast writing it, but as I said to Wes in a recent email, “It’s been really quite fun, the obvious joy of rewatching all the S! J! S! serials again notwithstanding. Writing again has been good for me, makes me use the brain I feel sometimes atrophying.” Thank goodness, since there are at least three more installments for sure, with the possibility of at least one additional critique of non-serial specific observations - what some may call total over-analysis - but we’ll see.

In order to make these projects (and any others) more accessible, I’ve included direct links to each one’s page in the left-hand sidebar. Handy!

Lest anyone think I’ve been working on these outside projects and watching movie after movie (I’ve pretty much abandoned TARDISvision because everything I’ve watched recently has been a repeat - or a three-peat - until last night, actually) exclusively and conveniently forgetting I’ve now been unemployed for two months to the day, believe me, I haven’t. There’s a pretty rigid schedule I’ve instituted and have been very successful in adhering to it Monday through Friday. Afternoon naps are pretty much a thing of the past, although I will admit dozing off yesterday after lunch while trying to watch “How Awful About Allan.” To be honest, saying I tried watching it isn’t exactly right: I dozed off during the beginning credits. There was something about combining the talents of Aaron Spelling, Anthony Perkins, Julie Harris, and Joan Hackett into a made-for-television vehicle that signaled snoozeville.

Speaking about TARDISvision, I need to post an update. Yes, it’s true. I finally watched a current episode. With the tenth Doctor. And companion Donna Noble. Just as this season is coming to an end. Since this is the first show I’ve actually watched this season most of the references to previous current episodes went right over my head as I watched. But reading the wiki article refreshed my memory on a few others. I was going to bitch about the causal nexus/”Logopolis” reference (thank you, wikipedia!) just now, but then realized how sickly ironic that would be, since there was a certain reference to a certain companion working for a certain magazine that totally didn’t go over my head.

The only other two episodes I’ve seen from this season were “Poison Sky” and “The Sontaran Stratagem,” and I was sick as a dog for both; thus I don’t count them at all. Perfect, since I’ll have almost a full season to get me through the upcoming drought.

…or how I’ve managed to procrastinate all flippin’ day and now find there’s more behind-the-scenes work to be done before I can get this article off the ground? With the tele-top misbehaving over the past couple days, I’m loathe to even attempt this back-end work on it. That leaves me the trusty Mac, which I can’t use at the moment because I’m working on something else that’s hogging my only disk drive.

You might be interested to know exactly how I’ve dragged my feet and fucked around since about half past six this morning; really, it’s not even fucking around-well, some of it isn’t. I mean, paying bills and balancing bank accounts and grocery shopping shouldn’t be seen as such. Neither should doing laundry and the dishes, nor eating lunch.

But perhaps some other stuff falls into the feet-dragging category: working on new pages at strange cousin susan, but only after creating them once and deleting them purposely; uploading sound files for one of the new pages here; trying to figure out why HandBrake wasn’t doing what it said it would do; Twittering; getting lost at Flickr, wikipedia, and boingboing; reading Azumanga Daioh; organizing files on the computer, even though it wasn’t really a pressing need; tweaking Adium’s appearance ad nauseum; looking for new system icons; and watching two parts of a Doctor Who serial having absolutely nothing to do with my article. At all. Oh, and let me not forget this: plucking my eyebrows. Yes, that absolutely had. to. be. done. today.

Thank God I didn’t paint the toy box. It was far too warm and might have taken away precious time from fine-tuning Adium. Again.

I know I’ve been watching more Doctor Who than is likely healthy lately (since Monday, I’ve watched five serials), but I swear it’s only after I spend the first half of the day on my job search. It’s not even that rewarding because there’s something going on with a) the disks, b) the disk drives, and/or c) VLC/Nero. I’ve yet to test the files on my Mac, because I’m afraid to find out it’s really something with the Windows laptop; it’s pretty much totally replaced my television, and if it dies, I’m not sure what I’m going to do, except press Myrna Loynux into service. I hope to God I don’t have to do that, since I’m not good with Linux at all, and I strongly suspect the disks wouldn’t play because there’ll be Something Very Important missing and I’ll have little or no understanding of How To Install Something Very Important.

I’ve an ulterior motive for watching all these serials, at any rate; similar to that project of old, the infamous Pussy Galore Exegesis (which is still lurking on my hard drive, needing only a good editing and minor rewriting, but still technically unfinished for all of that), which is a typical-of-Mickey over-analysis of the character, her wardrobe, and her sexual orientation, there’s another typical-of-Mickey over-analysis of Sarah! Jane! Smith! and the improvements seen in both her wardrobe (pink striped sox and cammies!) and hair over her time with the Doctor, a thought mentioned a few days ago in an earlier post. Never mind how the character of S!J!S! improved so much; what’s important here is the superficial things…clothing and hair. Wes expressed some interest in an article for Scary-Crayon, and since I do enjoy the over-analysis of such things, I jumped at the chance. I’ve found on a disk all the screencaps uploaded to Flickr of most of the serials in question some months ago now, so I won’t have to download the ones I want to use, thank goodness. What I will have to do, however, is figure out what the hell’s going on with the tele-laptop because the way it’s running now, I couldn’t get a good screencap if my life depended on it.

Maybe I should just reinstall VLC. Maybe it’s been corrupted somehow. Oh, wait. I know…Tammy corrupted it, Tammy and her rubber dinosaur boyfriend. I think it’s all over but the shouting, then.

Still working on clearing out the folder where I keep all sorts of random images for inclusion in future posts. It’s not going so well because I keep adding things to the folder faster than I’m posting them. The two pictures here are of Star and Bar. The top photo of Bar shows what seems to be a magical flying high-chair tray; what is not pictured is el cunado holding the tray just outside the border of the photo. Makes it that much more interesting, I think, because it really does look like the damn thing is airborne. The second photo shows Star’s unnervingly intense blue eyes; this is one of my favorite pictures because of the subject and because it came out so perfectly. No doctoring on either photo, no cropping, either. These are straight from the Fuji.

I suspected weeks ago I was very possibly overdosing on Who: to wit, this incident which cemented the truth of my suspicion. I was still rather sick, but not sick enough to say sick as a dog and walked outside for the first time in days, only to see this random scene and…

the absolute first thought to cross my mind was Doctor Who, specifically The Sontaran Experiment:

I’m not making this up because I can’t; I’m simply not that creative. We happened to be outside on Wednesday and the sister had put everything back in the yard after the lawn guys had been mowed it the day before. It was our last chance to get any family pictures taken (there are not many of the sister, the niecettes, and Auntie all together in one photo), so we decided to take advantage of it. After a few shots of us and then the sister, el cunado, and the niecettes, I turned to walk back to the picnic table and saw the beach balls there on the lawn, laid out like so many transmat thingies. In my still slightly feverish state, I seriously expected any one of the TARDIS crew - or any combination thereof - to magically appear among the orbs in the sister’s backyard. Well…not really. That’s a wee bit of exaggeration, naturally, but still somewhat accurate for all that.

Another sure sign is laughing outloud at the villians because they’re just so ridiculous. I mean, really…the Nimon looked more like a Mithric sacrificial bull in drag, and the Mandrels had bell-bottomed legs. I understand it was the 1970s and all, but how seriously can anyone take villians who look like mutant refugees from late in that decade ? Those are the two most recent serials I’ve watched and actually decided mention the absolute absurdity of the villians, at least from a visual standpoint. I may have to do this on a more regular basis, since I find it so amusing.

Possibly one of the strangest and most alarming signs I’ve been watching too much Who and should branch out into other things (I’ve certainly got enough backlogged to keep me busy for quite a while, even without a job) is giving serious thought to including on the sidebar a list of companions with/who is the:

• Best/worst hair
• Best/worst wardrobe overall
• Best/worst single outfit in an episode
• Best/worst lines
• Most/least annoying attitude
• Most/least annoying overall
• Favorite overall
• Favorite of the moment

et cetera, et cetera.

This brilliant idea actually came to me as I watched The Horns of Nimon and found myself admiring Romana’s hair; not only is it a beautiful shade of blonde, but it almost always looked freshly brushed and shining, and it’s so long. I know from experience that’s almost an impossibility, well…at least with my hair, anyway, and especially at that length.

I sincerely commend her on the lack of Marcia Brady-ness to her hair, especially because it’s one length and parted in the center. Some of us are not lucky enough to have attractive cowlicks, or the ability to believe cowlicks can be a hair-fashion plus and not a total minusy minus minus.

Naturally, Romana 2 would win that category, hairbrushes…hands down, although S!J!S!’s hair improved about a billion percent between her first and last appearances. For that matter, so did her wardrobe. That, though is a post worthy of exclusivity and will definitely appear one day, complete with screen caps.

Thank goodness Romana wasn’t wearing one of those odd little hats this time around! I really don’t like them; the only hat I’ve liked on any companion is the purple and green number Romana 1 sported. Oh, and of course, I love the knit cap S!J!S! donned for The Sontaran Experiment (see the picture above-she’s so adorable!).

There were a couple more things I was going to list here, but they’ll have to wait for now. Maybe when I get around to posting them, there will be additional signs to know you’ve watched too much Doctor Who.

Romana 1…isn’t she lovely?

Okay, so I’m two episodes into “The Stones of Blood” and there was something really bugging me about the woman playing Professor Emelia Rumford…I mean really bugging me. Honor Blackman kept popping into my head, although they are absolutely worlds apart from each other, but I couldn’t figure out why.

After a bit of wiki research, I found the following information:

Beatrix Lehmann (1 July 1903, Bourne End, Buckinghamshire - 31 July 1979, London) was a British actress, theatre director and author.

Lehmannn trained at RADA and made her stage debut as Peggy in a 1924 production The Way of the World at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith. As well as her extensive theatrical career she appeared in films, on television, and wrote short stories and two novels including Rumour of Heaven first published in 1934 (ISBN 014016166X).

In 1946 Lehmann became director and producer of the Arts Council Midland Theatre Company.

In 1978 she gave a memorable performance in the Doctor Who serial The Stones of Blood as Professor Emilia Rumford. She also played Susan Calvin in two episodes of British science fiction series Out of the Unknown. In 1979 she played Mrs Pleasant in a film version of The Cat and The Canary. Other roles include parts in Z-Cars, The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, War and Peace, Love for Lydia, Staircase, and Crime and Punishment.

She came from a family of notable achievers: she was a daughter of humourist Rudolph Chambers Lehmann, and her great-uncle was the Henri Lehmann the artist. Her brother was writer John Lehmann and her sister was novelist Rosamond Lehmann.

There are 12 portraits of Lehmann in the British National Portrait Gallery Collection.

It hit me like a ton of bricks: In 1979 she played Mrs Pleasant in a film version of The Cat and The Canary. Well, of course that’s why Honor Blackman was popping into my head; they both were in the movie. I won’t even touch the bit about Honor Blackman’s connections to Wilfred Hyde-White, who was also in the 1979 movie…at least not now.

And then a bit more wiki research lead me to this bit of fun:

Director Darrol Blake originally offered the role of Vivien to Honor Blackman, who declined the part as she felt Beatrix Lehmann had all the best material. Blake then asked Maria Aitken, who wasn’t interested. Susan Engel was finally hired for the part. Blackman would later appear in the Sixth Doctor serial Terror of the Vervoids (1986).

Ohh, this type of trivia is one of favorite things in the world!!

I swear to the gods in Valhalla that I’m going to post stuff about my trip. Soon. But until then, I leave you with this clip from YouTube, full of Sarah! Jane! goodness (there’s no other kind of S!J! !!) and an adorable outfit (and another pair of striped sox…I <3 striped sox), not to mention something nasty in the plastic box she's carrying...

The Hand of Fear (1976)

Perhaps it was the particular date causing the tears to roll down my face at the end of “The Dalek Invasion of Earth” earlier today. Perhaps I’ve got the beginnings of PMS. Perhaps I’ve been saving up my tears over other things for too long now. It may be a combination of all three. Watching the Doctor double lock the doors to the TARDIS, thereby leaving his granddaughter Susan behind caused innumerable tears to fall and I cursed that man, I cursed him good and loud for doing it to me again, for this is certainly not the first time I’ve cried watching the fool show (and no, I have not watched the last S! J! S! episode yet), and I’m quite sure it won’t be the last (yes, I’m still holding off on the last S! J! S! episode).

There were tears for Adric. There were tears for the second Doctor when he sent Jamie and Zoe back with no real memories of him. There were tears for the third and fourth Doctors when they regenerated into the fourth and fifth Doctors respectively. There may have been tears early on in my Who education for Rose when the Doctor left her behind in that parallel world. There were tears for the sixth Doctor because of Mel. There were tears over Tegan because…well, it was Tegan.

No, not really. I’m just being mean to Mel.

I’m exaggerating about Tegan, but only by this much.

To quote a bit from an email I recently sent:

Yes, I still prefer Barbara over Susan, but I will no longer unequivocably declare dislike of anyone in the Whoniverse. I learned my lesson with Pertwee. That being said, Tegan does not, nor ever fall into that category, should you be wondering…