Plague house The back is broken Doctor Who
I can't think of anything better than a solid dose of Philip K Dick to ensure that your fever dreams will be truly disturbing and icky. As a masochist from way back, way to go!
I just finished The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch - which I liked, although I thought the ending was a little abrupt - and started Martian Time-Slip. I dislike it intensely so far, mostly because - and I am well aware of the irony here - there doesn't seem to be a single likeable character in it.
Wednesday, April 06, 2005
In what seems like a first for me, I’m the only one in my household that appears to be completely free of the cold epidemic. Simon and Fiona are both more or less incapacitated, and Jimbo is wandering about in a daze with puffy eyes and a sniffle. And here I am with nothing more than a sore throat, which is more easily explained by the vast quantities of pulverised slate I inhaled on the weekend than by an otherwise symptomless infection.
Since I’m about to come into a frantic amount of work in the lead up to my trip to Fiji the week after next, I am obviously incubating a viral episode of ebolic proportions, which will strike some time in the next couple of days, laying waste to my good health and good works.
Fortunately, I just started reading a collection of Philip K. Dick novels, so I should be fine if I have to spend a week in bed.
With the past weekend, I finally passed what I’ve been thinking of as a critical milestone in the house renovations – the removal of the last little area of slate tiles. This was, no word of a lie, a bastard of a job. We did a much larger but much more accessible area last year when we demolished the kitchen, but we’d left the flooring of the hallway between the lounge, kitchen and bathroom intact until we were ready to put down a replacement. That time has come, so through Saturday and Sunday, Jimbo and I smashed the hell out of the floor with a sodding great crowbar, prying and scraping and stabbing and breaking things from every imaginable angle.
This was hell on the wrists, the shoulders, the lungs (lots of thick, grey dust) and, say to say, the floorboards, which were frequently gouged and/or shredded by our endeavours. Nothing structural was damaged, though, and it will all be hidden by the timber laminate we’ll be laying over the top of it this weekend, so it will end up having been worth the tears.
We’ll also be teaching ourselves rudimentary tiling – we managed to crack the old tiles in front of the fireplace, which we’d been meaning to leave intact. So they had to be ripped up too and will be replaced under the supervision of Brenda and Soozie (who renovated their own bathroom recently, and thus know grout and related whatnots).
This, dear friends, is fun.
Just watched the second episode, The End of the World last night. It’s fantastic – better than the premier episode, with a much tighter script and sense of pace. It was a little sad that they resorted to an extremely clichéd and ridiculous set-piece to create climactic tension, but on the plus side the jokes were good (the music-related jokes are just inspired and as clear an indication of what’s new about this format), the guests were fabulous, and the Doctor and Rose are rapidly making their play for the best Doctor-Companion partnership ever (the competition for which, for my money, is 4th Doc and Sarah, 2nd Doc and Jamie and 7th Doc and Ace).
Also saw episode 19 of Lost over the weekend. Without being spoilery, I love a TV show that has the self-confidence to spend 42 minutes on trite and obvious plot developments just so that when they sling in The Huge Freaking Surprise in literally the last two seconds, it really hits like a bomb. Nice finish to an otherwise mildly disappointing Locke episode.
Oh, and I forgot that we also watched the end of season 1 of Battlestar Galactica. Breathtaking. See this show. It gives and it gives and it deserves your love.
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