The Witching Well

BBC 7 is adding Doctor Who audio dramas to its lineup for the next few months, starting tomorrow with the first episode of Shada. This is an adaptation of the script originally written by Douglas Adams for the TV show, during the Tom Baker era, which never finished filming. The radio drama stars Paul McGann as the Eighth Doctor. If you don’t have the patience to listen to it in weekly serial format, it’s also available here as an animated webcast.

According to Big Finish, the makers of the dramas, next after Shada will be Storm Warning, also an Eighth Doctor story, starting on August 6. This one is not going to be available as a webcast, but it can be bought from Big Finish or from their American disributer, MOSV.

If all you know about Paul’s Eighth Doctor is the 1996 made-for-TV Fox-BBC movie, I promise you, he’s marvelous when he’s given a real script.

Well, he bloody well did it. He managed to take one red paperclip and trade up to a house. It boggles the mind, but there it is.

This is a thing of beauty.

Rabidsamfan pointed me toward Radio Dismuke, and it is simply lovely. Just the background music for writing a Jazz Age vampire story. Yay!

(Signing up for Live365 is free, if you don’t mind the occasional commercial, and there are lots of cool stations to listen to. I love having broadband!)

Someone please explain to me where all the American and Canadian Blake’s 7 fans are, that the series hasn’t been put out on DVD with Region 1 coding? Regions 2 and 4, yes. But not Region 1. How frustrating!

Wikipedia Birthday meme: Enter your birthday in Wikipedia and list 3 events, 2 birthdays and 1 death from that day.

July 5

Events:
1811 - Venezuela is the first South American country to declare independence from Spain.
1935 - The National Labor Relations Act, which governs labor relations in the United States, is signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
1975 - Arthur Ashe becomes the first black man to win the Wimbledon singles title.

Births:
1810 - Phineas Taylor “P. T.” Barnum, American circus owner (d. 1891)
1944 - Robbie Robertson, Canadian guitarist, singer, songwriter, composer, and sometime actor

Death:
1969 - Walter Gropius, German architect, founder of the Bauhaus school (b. 1883)

It’s Independence Day weekend here in the US, so everyone with a flagpole seems to be hoisting the stars and stripes, even if they don’t do it the rest of the year. Which is lovely. It makes for a festive atmosphere while we celebrate the founding of our country. Whatever is going on politically right now, the US was founded on some pretty keen ideas by some pretty courageous people, and it’s good to remember that.

But (and you knew there would be a “but,” didn’t you?) I have a few pet peeves to air about the way people treat their flags.

The Lord and Lady know how fiercely against criminalizing flag desecration I am. It’s a free speech issue of the highest order, and sometimes it takes some pretty strong symbolism to get people to pay attention to an important issue. I’m also against forcing the Pledge of Allegiance on school kids, especially while the words “under God” remain shoehorned into it. But it really gets to me the way people who think they’re honoring the US flag are actually insulting it.

How? By leaving it up in the dark and in bad weather. Or by letting it hang there until it becomes grubby tatters. The Girl Scout color guard in me just goes livid whenever I see a flag that’s out when it shouldn’t be, or that should have been retired long since.

So, as a public service, for those Americans out there who want to show proper respect for their flag, I give you an explanaton of basic Flag Etiquette.

I wanted to post this yesterday morning, but my web host was having some sort of server problem that didn’t clear up until after I left for work.

I find myself moderately heartened by the Supreme Court ruling on Thursday that declared Bush’s special tribunals for war-on-terror detainees are illegal. Seems that even his hand-stacked Court can’t tell him that he can ignore Common Article 3.

Of course, I expect that Bush is already looking for new ways to circumvent the law to get what he wants. Because, let’s face it, he sees the checks-and-balances system set out in the US Constitution as nothing more than an inconvenience.