How It Started vs. How It's Going: Harvest of Kairos Edition

How It Started vs. How It's Going: Logopolis Edition

A Riddle

You Are This: Wrong

Conflict in Literature: Blakes 7 Season Three

The King in Orange

Cat Science

Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: The Greatest Show in the Galaxy Part Four

Mags turning into a weredoge gets Captain Cook a high score from the audience. He tries to give the Doctor some exposition but the incidental music is going as crazy as Mags (maybe it is being performed by another weredoge?) and it is very hard to make out what the Captain is saying.

The little manny in the audience's eyes glow. The Doctor escapes from the ring but Mags chases him (doggys like chases). He goes up to the three audience members and all of their eyes glow now and this somehow causes the Doctor to fall back into the ring. He is only saved when Mags turns upon Captain Cook and the Captain goes

Ace and Kingpin look in the space bus for the missing piece of the medallion. The bus conductor robot tries to kill Ace, but when Kingpin finds the missing piece he gets his memories back. He remembers the robot has a self-destruct button and gets Ace to press it. Instead of simply going "blargh I am ded" the robot goes

Mags scares the clowns so she and the Doctor can get away. The mannys in the audience "want more" so the clowns turn on the Ringmaster and Morgana, making them do a disappearing magic act. Then all of the clowns do the thing with their hands.

I somehow don't think the Ringmaster and Morgana will be coming back. It's like Paul Daniels' 1987 Hallowe'en special all over again!

The mannys in the audience want the Doctor. He goes back so Mags can run away, and the clowns chase her (doggys like chases) in their scary black death car.

When the Doctor goes back into the Circus he goes into a special effect and winds up in a different sort of arena - one that is old and stone and not the Circus from before. The three audience members are still there, but they also look very different - made of stone with sinister faces.

The Doctor recognises them as "the gods of Ragnarok."

It makes sense that there are three gods of Ragnarok because there are three cat gods: Ceiling Cat, who sees all; The Maker of Cats, who made us into cats out of socks; and The Hoff. Nobody knows why The Hoff is the third cat god, but he is. Unlike religious mannys, who worship their gods, we are cats so we merely acknowledge our gods as equals.

The gods of Ragnarok are obviously bad gods because they use their giant eye to watch things from below, like Basement Cat does, while Ceiling Cat watches from above and is a good cat.

"I have fought the gods of Ragnarok all through time."

says the Doctor. While you might think that the Doctor has never met the gods of Ragnarok before now, remember that everything in this story is a metaphor for something else outside the story, including the gods. The gods say

"Entertain us!"
"Entertain us or die! So long as you entertain us you may live."
"When you no longer entertain us you die!"

The Doctor does magic tricks for the gods. They shoot some pewpewpews at him, but they don't kill him yet. They say

"You are nearing the end, Doctor."

and

"You are on the brink of destruction, Doctor. We want something bigger, something better."

This gives us a clue as to who the gods represent in the show but, just as this story has been doing throughout, I'm going to hold back on revealing the answers for now...

Mags meets up with Ace and Kingpin. Ace lures the clowns to where Chekhov's Bellboy's robot from part one is, and because she has the remote control now she can has it turn its pewpewpew eyes upon the clowns.

Five clowns come out of the clown car, which is not that many really but what can we expect on a BBC budget?

Ace, Kingpin and Mags steal the clown car to get back to the Circus quickly. The gods make Captain Cook come back to life as a zombie and he steals the medallion from Kingpin just before he can throw it down the well to where the Doctor is.

Ace and Mags together knock it out of Zombie Captain Cook's hands so it falls into the well, where the Doctor catches it and uses it to reflect the gods' pewpewpews back upon them. The gods and the "Dark Circus" (as Kingpin calls it) collapse, so the gods must have been load-bearing baddys.

The Circus tent explodes behind him as the Doctor walks away, not looking at it.

Kingpin and Mags decide to make a new Circus, one that can't possibly go wrong, mew. They invite the Doctor and Ace to join them but the Doctor declines, and the last line of the story is him saying

"I find circuses a little... sinister."

The Greatest Show in the Galaxy is a flawed classic. It has great and memorable baddys, and a plot which manages to be both an exciting mystery and, at the same time, an allegory for Doctor Who's place in the world at the time when it was 25 years old. It is a fresh and original story, and a fine way to conclude the anniversary season.

It isn't perfect - the mystery is so slow in playing out its hand that the first half of the story can be quite hard to follow at times, and this is not helped by the incidental music intruding on some key lines of dialogue.

There are a lot of characters who get introduced quite quickly - some of them only existing to get killed off or to provide some early exposition - with the result that they end up quite broad and one-dimensional. The character of Whizzkid is an example of this, as well as being an unnecessary and unwelcome caricature of Doctor Who fans.

"It was your show all along, wasn't it?"

Ace asks the Doctor. The gods of Ragnarok are the BBC Management. They can't kill the Doctor while he is still entertaining, not even though they want to, not even though he is their greatest enemy and stands against everything they believe in. They want "something bigger, something better" and yet are prepared to sit there while the Doctor performs his low-budget magic tricks one after another.
And then by the time they try to kill him off, it is too late.

Despite the TV series getting cancelled the following year Doctor Who is, of course, still with us - and by that I don't just mean the new series that came back to BBC TV in 2005. Target novelisations of the TV stories were available before they began to be released on VHS (and later DVD). In the 1990s they would be repeated on the satellite channel UK Gold, allowing cats and mannys who were too young to have seen them on the BBC to watch them and become fans that way. Plus there were many original book stories, comic strips, Doctor Who Magazine and Big Finish... and all that before the internets truly came along!

By its 25th birthday in 1988 Doctor Who had grown to be far more than just another TV programme. It was The Greatest Show in the Galaxy.

Epic Sax Manny at Eurovision

Yet more proof (as if any were needed) for how great Eurovision is. Here's Moldova's entry from 2010:

New Doctor Who announced...

... and still not a cat, nor even a doggy. Maybe next time...

In the '80s it was a publicity stunt. In the '90s it was a joke. In the '00s it became a possibility. Now it's a reality.

It just took a little time, that's all.

A Reminder to the Internets...

... The Evil Empire are the BADDYS!

10 Reasons Cats Don't Tweet

#catsdonttweet

#1. We are not birdies.

#2.

This election is a total sham and a travesty. We are not a democracy!

-- Donald Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 7, 2012

#3.

The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy.

-- Donald Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 7, 2012

#4.

My twitter has become so powerful that I can actually make my enemies tell the truth.

-- Donald Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 17, 2012

#5.

The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.

-- Donald Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 6, 2012

#6.

It's freezing and snowing in New York--we need global warming!

-- Donald Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 7, 2012

#7.

26,000 unreported sexual assults in the military-only 238 convictions. What did these geniuses expect when they put men & women together?

-- Donald Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 8, 2013

#8.

Hillary Clinton has announced that she is letting her husband out to campaign but HE'S DEMONSTRATED A PENCHANT FOR SEXISM, so inappropriate!

-- Donald Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 27, 2015

#9.

I refuse to call Megyn Kelly a bimbo, because that would not be politically correct. Instead I will only call her a lightweight reporter!

-- Donald Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 27, 2016

#10.

The election is absolutely being rigged by the dishonest and distorted media pushing Crooked Hillary - but also at many polling places - SAD

-- Donald Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 16, 2016

Quenta Sil-MEME-illion

Stoppit and Tidyup

in "The Weekend of Woe"

Tidyup woke up one fine Saturday morning. He had no idea what fate had in store for him, as several of his friends had decided to pay a visit.

 

"Muuuuuh!" he said

"Let's go and visit Tidyup today. You can drive," said Eat Your Greens to Comb Your Hair

"Alright then, but only if you phone The Big Bad I Said No! and have an argument with him," said Comb Your Hair to Eat Your Greens

"Right then, Eat Your Greens, we're coming down there too!" shouted The Big Bad I Said No!

"Let's see if Sleepy Old Go To Bed wants to come with us, seeing as we have no idea where Tidyup lives," said Stoppit, but it sounded like "Ee ee ee ee ee eeee."

"I have no idea where Tidyup lives either, but that's no reason not to go," said Sleepy Old Go To Bed, adding "Stoppit can use his mobile to get directions, if we get lost."

Which, of course, they did

But they got there in the end

Everyone got drunk and lived happily ever after

Except Stoppit who suffered greatly from bogvom, and later sinkvom

Sleepy Old Go To Bed and Eat Your Greens talked bollocks in the kitchen for hours, and Sleepy Old Go To Bed and Stoppit felt not-at-all-well the next day

The End

"Sorry about the sinkvom," said Stoppit

These aren't the droids you're looking for

Starcat reviews Star Wars comics: STAR WARS (part two)

The story so far: Luke and C3PO are looking for R2D2.

What's wrong with Luke's face?

Luke is too involved now to go back and resume his old life. He is over the rainbow, and just like in The Wizard of Oz that means the story becomes colour from this point on. That seems the obvious reason for the sudden transition to colour pages to me, though I have heard some cats put forward the alternative explanation that the black and white pages were written before the invention of colour.
Gamma Longcat's theory, that some pages are black and white to keep down production costs of the comic book, is not taken seriously by other cat academics and I mention it only out of a sense of completeness.

The scene of combat between Luke and the Sandmanny plays out differently here than in the film version, with Luke being seen to be struck by the Sandmanny's weapon, accompanied by a "WHRAF" sound, but he is then rescued before being sent to sleeps.

Now we are introduced to Ben Kenobi, who confirms he is Obi-Wan Kenobi in accordance with the law of conservation of narrative detail.

The plot moves swiftly to the scene where Ben Kenobi sees Princess Leia's message. The message itself is different in the details: Princess Leia names her father as "Bail Antilles, Viceroy of Alderaan" and addresses Ben Kenobi as both "General" and "Commander".

This leads on to Ben Kenobi telling Luke about his father and the Jedi Knights.

The compression of the story from the film to the comic is felt keenly on this page. Luke is given his lightsabre and told about Darth Vader and "the Dark Side of "the Force"", but in the film this scene is contrasted with us seeing Darth Vader make use of the Dark Side aboard the Death Star.

Luke, briefly sporting a 5 O'Clock shadow, does not want to go to Alderaan with Ben Kenobi, but is talked round to it in a couple of panels. This misses out one of the most gratuitously scary* film scenes in all of Star Wars when Luke goes home and sees Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru turned into skeletons by Stormtroopers - the event that convinces him to go with Ben Kenobi and sets into motion all that follows.

* Or at least it was until betrayed and murdered by the Dark Side of internets memery.

I don't know why Ben Kenobi's face is blue in this picture.

They go to Mos Eisley Spaceport where Ben Kenobi uses the Force to hypno-eyes Stormtroopers. This serves a dual purpose within the narrative: to both escape from the Stormtroopers, and to demonstrate to Luke (and us viewers) what the Force is capable of in the hands of a Jedi Knight.

We meet Han Solo and Chewbacca, both great characters (although Han is basically only a prototype for Lando Calrissian). The scene when Ben Kenobi chops off a manny's arm with his lightsabre is omitted, so when Han says

You're pretty handy with that sabre, old man.

then we must either assume he knows of Ben Kenobi by reputation, if we didn't know about the missing film scene, or else groan at the pun if we did.

Here Han wants to be paid

Ten thousand.. in advance.

and for the sake of brevity we don't see Ben Kenobi haggle him down to seventeen. I think that's what happens, I'm not good at numbers.

Instead we skip straight to the Millennium Falcon flying into space, missing out the brief action scene of the Stormtroopers catching up and shooting at them. That means the above pictured panel is our first sight of the Millennium Falcon in the comic strip.

Up to this point various film scenes with Princess Leia, Darth Vader and Governor Tarkin have been missed out to keep the action with C3PO and the other heroes. But now we reach an important scene that cannot be dropped so, for one page only, we cut to...

This is our first meeting with the principal baddy of Star Wars, Governor Tarkin of Whitstable. He shows he is a baddy straight away by blowing up the planet Alderaan. Taking up half of the page, the planet blowing up is one of the biggest and best pictures in the comic so far, as if to emphasise its importance to the plot.

Even though this is not a cliffhanger, it seems to me that this is a dramatic moment on which to leave things for today. Join me next time when our heroes will reach the Death Star and attempt a prisoner transfer from cell block 1138.


Appendix 1

There are lots of different versions of the Star Wars film that have been released over the years, and it may be that you know a different one from us cats. The format in which we are familiar with Star Wars is a VHS transfer of a Betamax recording of the September 1983 showing on the Grampian region of the ITV channel.
In other words: the best version of Star Wars.

While the first set of adverts were paused out of the recording, we are fortunate that the second ad break remains on the video. This occurs between Luke taking his "first step into a larger world" and Governor Tarkin receiving news from Dantooine.

There are eight adverts, and because they are adverts from 1983 they all look very dated now, like they come from another world that existed long before us cats or even the internets were made. These adverts are:

1. Smarties



2. Maxell Video Tape



This is an especially exciting advert because there is a cat in it!

3. The Great Composers magazine



This advert is useful in dating the broadcast of our copy of Star Wars to 1983, due to its publication date. Another advert appears in a later ad break that is even more useful for this purpose, but I will discuss it when we reach that advert.

4. Spry Crisp 'n Dry



5. McCain Pizza

I can't find a video of this on the internets. McCain Pizza is a kind of manny noms. The advert is most noteworthy for having Ian Holm provide the voiceover.

6. British Gas fires

Another advert that I cannot track down on the internets. The advert claims that

they're so beautiful to look at

so it is a shame that you cannot judge for yourselves, mew.

7. The Home Computer Course magazine



This is the second advert within the same ad break to have an Ian Holm voiceover. He must have been a very busy manny in the early 1980s.

8. Jaffa Cakes



This advert from the internets is too long to be exactly the same one as we know from Star Wars, but if you missed out the first 16 seconds then it would be the same.

Cosmos: Sisters of the Sun

This programme begins with a short sequence on the dawn of astronomy when ancient peoples all over the Earth used the human talent for pattern recognition to name constellations and use their movement in the night sky to predict the seasons.

For the real meat of the episode we jump forward to the late-19th century. A scientist called Edward Pickering employed "computers" - a team of women - to map the stars, taking years to classify hundreds of thousands of stars.

The team was led by Annie Jump Cannon and Henrietta Swan Leavitt, who used spectroscopy to determine the stars' chemical composition and came up with 7 categories and 10 sub-categories with which to classify them.

The animated segments of the episode beautifully show them working at their day jobs as Tyson's respectful voiceover keeps things interesting.

Cecilia Payne came from the UK to join their group and worked out that the categories they had come up with corresponded to a star's temperature. Her PhD thesis was that stars were primarily composed of hydrogen and helium (something I would have assumed was known before then, but before Payne made this discovery astronomers thought that stars were made up of the same elements as the Earth and in roughly the same proportions). If Tyson's voiceover was respectful before, he is positively in awe as he describes this, saying it pioneered modern astrophysics.

The next section of the programme is on the life of stars from 'birth' to 'death', including the sun - we see the sun becoming a red giant in 4 to 5 billion years, then collapsing again into a white dwarf, as Tyson discusses the atomic processes that cause these transformations.

Other stars have different fates in store depending on their size and mass, and if they are part of binary star systems. The heaviest stars end up as supernovas, black holes, or hypernovas. Eta Carinae is 100 times heavier than the sun and could become a hypernova, destroying entire star systems and their planets up to hundreds of light years away from the centre of the explosion. Tyson reassures us earth is 7500 light years from Eta Carinae and is safe, but will see it as the brightest star in the sky when it goes.

Tyson closes the episode by talking about how the milky way galaxy would look from the point of view of a globular cluster, in one of the most poetic speeches in all of Cosmos - and echoing closely Carl Sagan's lines from the original series:

"A still more glorious dawn awaits.
Not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise.
A morning filled with 200 billion suns.
The rising of the milky way."

There's a reason that Cats Don't Tweet

This is what things like #gamergate look like to cats.

Hint: Servalan is a baddy. Context.

Douglas Puglas, I Presume?

Brer Rabbit boss 'hates' fans who spoil show's secrets

Brer Rabbit chief writer Bunny has attacked fans of the show who reveal crucial plot lines ahead of transmission.

Bunny's comments were prompted by briar patch postings by Brer Rabbit fans.

"You can imagine how much I hate them," she told Big Gay Longcat's Big Gay Longblog. "It's only fans who do this, or they call themselves fans.

"I wish they could go and be fans of something else."

Before the current series began, a fan posted the entire plot of the first two episodes on a briar patch forum.

They were among a number of fans who were invited to a press screening, at which the production team asked people not to give away spoilers.

"It's heartbreaking in a way because you're trying to tell stories, and stories depend on surprise," said Bunny.

"So to have some **** who came to a press launch, write up a story in the worst, most ham-fisted English you can imagine, and put it in the briar patch is heartbreaking.

"I just hope that guy never watched my show again, because that's a horrific thing to do."

She said the majority of Brer Rabbit fans were "spoiler-phobes" who refused to go to the briar patch for fear of finding out any information in advance.

"They want to preserve the surprise," she said. "The tragedy is you have to work hard at that now."

Bunny said she believed that keeping elements of storylines under wraps was an essential element in drama.

"Stories depend on shocking people," she said.

"Stories are the moments that you didn't see coming, that are what live in you and burn in you forever.

"If you are denied those, it's vandalism."

The current series of Brer Rabbit continues on BBC1 on Caturday.

Clever. Clever. Not that clever.

Look, Google's "Auto Awesome" (mew) is clever enough to recognise that this picture from my earlier post about Aftermath shows a kiff, but not clever enough to realise how inappropriate adding a load of hearts to the picture is. Lol.