Today I learned that the only way to survive hell-week - nay, hell-fortnight - is to give myself one lovely treat per day. And no, television and naps (unless in the hammock) and shameless facebook stalking don't count; must be somewhat more special.

After failing to follow this rule on Friday and Saturday, and crashing horribly, I started over with a wonderful-as-ever post-church brunch on Sunday. Yesterday featured a lovely stroll in the Arboretum, and today? Today I read a new Sherlock Holmes story.

I've actually read just a small percentage of the Holmes canon, despite being a fan. Once I realized how much I loved them, and how finite was the proper Conan Doyle canon, I decided to parcel out the original 24* over as much of my life as possible. So I only read new ones when I really, really need it. (I am allowed to reread A Scandal in Bohemia as much as I'd like). Delayed gratification - I has it.

That being said, "A Case of Identity" is a bit rubbish.



*Yes I know there's the post-Reichenbach stories, but I've not touched those yet

This weekend I learned that having someone read to you for seven hours is an extremely engaging and rewarding experience, especially when you're in a theater full of people, and the thing being read to you is The Great Gatsby.

And while buying school supplies I was walking through Staples with an Englishman, who pointed at a tape dispenser and exclaimed "oh look, Sellotape!" I stared at him for a moment and then realized: THAT'S WHY SHE CALLED IT SPELLOTAPE!!! Good one, JK!

I am wondering how I can arrange it so that every weekend is as awesome as this one.

I suck at British

Four consecutive tweets:

Apparently the British for "emergency room" is Casualty. As in "she's going into labor, we have to get to a Casualty." How morbid is that?
39 minutes ago from web

And there's a BBC soap called Casualty (like ER), but for the longest time I misread it as Causality, which sounds like a much better show.
38 minutes ago from web

Crap I meant "she's going into labour." I suck at British. It's labour for all meanings of labor, right? She isn't switching parties...
7 minutes ago from web

oh god and there's no article for hospital. "She's going into labour, we have to get to Casualty." There. Glad I have no British followers...
3 minutes ago from web



Anglophilia fail.

I think I'm going to be giving up this travel blogging thing, because typing up my journal really takes much longer than I expected. So I say au revoir (with a really revolting French accent, but Jenny is tutoring me) with a couple lists.

Favorite names for Underground stops:

• Elephant & Castle
• Tooting Broadway
• Cutty Sark
• Cockfosters
• Barking
• Ickenham
• Bounds Green
• Swiss Cottage
• Wembley Park
• Canada Water
• Heron Quays
• Shepherd's Bush
• Mile End
• Stepney Green
• Burnt Oak
• Chalk Farm

Favorite names of varieties of roses in Regent's Park, as indicated by little signs next to thoroughly dead twigs in the ground:

• Perestroika
• Top Marks
• Yesterday
• Buff Beauty
• Golden Celebrations
• Wife of Bath
• Vidal Sassoon
• Eye Paint
• Eye Opener
• The Times
• Razzle Dazzle
• Bruce
• Summerfield Miranda
• Tiddles
• Conspicuous
• Dr. Eckener
• Narrow Waters
• Tall Story
• Falstaff
• Cardinal Richelou
• Mayor of Casterbridge

Bon voyage! (you mean bon voya-guh)

"You're going to Cardiff? Why?"

The Doctor and Rose Tyler walk down a snowy Victorian street. Rose is gleeful, but the Doctor glances sullenly at a newspaper.

Doctor: I got the flight a bit wrong.
Rose: I don't care!
Doctor: It's not 1860, it's 1869.
Rose: I don't care!
Doctor: And we're not in Naples.
Rose: I don't care!
Doctor: We're in Cardiff.
Rose: ....right.

Caerdydd! Home of Doctor Who, the Millennium Centre, and, um, a castle. Rather lovely, rather dull. Perfect place for a day trip, if you do it right. Which I did not. I was in Cardiff for a total of 23 hours, but only eight of them were at all viable.

My train got in at 3 pm, and after checking in at the (really nice, highly recommended) NosDa hostel, I walked down the river to the bay. Predictably, I started at the Doctor Who exhibition, but... it was a bit unthrilling. Just costumes and flashing lights and the occasional panel with an episode summary - like anyone visiting a DW exhibit would need such a thing - and some animatronic Daleks. Even the gift shop was pretty lame. So the most obvious stage of my Doctor Who pilgrimage was a bust.

But outside was the Millennium Centre, which really is impressive in its own right. Welsh is a beautiful and absurd-looking language, so a massive carved wall of Welsh really does make for an interesting and worthy city icon. From there I started a walking tour I'd printed from the BBC website, which was theoretically supposed to take four hours. It actually took 20 minutes. There's just not all that much to see. Roald Dahl Pass is just some pass named after Roald Dahl. And there's, like, a church. Meh.

But I turned on the little boardwalk around the bay, and lo! There was the entrance to the Torchwood hub! I was very impressed to find that the geography of the hub's area, as shown both on Torchwood and the parent show, is consistent with the real world (ie, Jack was running from the right direction in LOTL, etc). The hub's door is covered by a rusty grille, with some old newspapers tacked up behind it. I took a closer look. "New Mayor, New Cardiff" announces a headline, under a photo of Margaret Blaine, nee Slitheen. Squee! Enormous squee! I guess it's just been chilling there since they filmed Boomtown in 2005. You can keep your animatronic Cybermen and life-size talking Daleks - this is the sort of thing that fills my heart with fannish glee. I was grinning like mad for a good ten minutes.

There was one other happy fan moment of note - spotting 10 and Captain Jack waiting for a bus. If you're gonna do cosplay, boy, wandering around Cardiff dressed like Jack Harkness is the way to do it. Plus there are few images more hilarious than the Doctor boarding a public bus.

Alas, after having exhausted all the outdoor sightseeing, I suddenly discovered that it was 5:30, and EVERYTHING had closed. The restaurants and bars were open, but that's of no use to a solo traveler. Also, everyone appeared to be in high school.

And so, at a loss for what else to do on a Tuesday night in Cardiff, I went to the movies. And by "went" I mean "accidentally snuck into." And by "accidentally snuck into," I really do mean "accidentally snuck into." I think they use an honor system or something? Whatever. I was on an escalator, and next thing I knew I was in a cinema, and a movie was about to start. So I sat down to watch it.

It was "Twilight."

Okay, so, I really enjoyed it! Which is to say, I really enjoyed it in the way that I didn't enjoy the Dirty Dancing musical. Here was some awfulness that you could really sink your teeth into! Fangs, rather. ::rimshot::

I'd sort of gathered from the zeitgeist of Twilight-hate that the most objectionable element was the pro-abstinence shilling, but that is so very much the least of its problems (and not at all present in the first movie). Rather, in the very established tradition of classic vampire stories (cf, Dracula), Twilight is a rape fantasy. And a stalking fantasy. That huge creeper in bio lab is not a huge creeper if he has dreamy eyebrows. Being stalked is not only okay, but desirable! As is ditching your friends, family, and life for a guy. And ignoring all warning signs, of the flashing neon variety as well as menacing folktales from your token Magic Red Man, that the guy is a huge creeper. Who watches you while you sleep. And follows you around town. Oh my god I feel dirty just thinking about it.

Twilight actually made me cry. I cried from frustration, and anger, and sadness that in 2009 I was watching this movie in a theater full of 10-year-olds and their mothers. It was the sexuality, gender, and genre issues that were tackled by Buffy, but with all the nuance, awareness, and problematizing thrown out the window. Poor, poor Joss. He tried, he really did.

After that exercise in frustration, I hung out at the hostel bar for a few hours with a sargeant in the American army who just finished a ten month tour in Afghanistan, and a street magician on his way to a magic convention in Blackpool who currently lives in Spain but migrates with the tourist season. I didn't tell them a thing about myself, because jeez did I lose on the interestingness count in this crowd.

In the morning I visited the Cardiff Castle, which despite being many centuries old was entirely gutted in the 1890s, so that was also a bit unimpressive. Mostly I liked the pen of falconry birds, who were there not to put on a show for the tourists, but to keep pigeons and squirrels out of the castle. I was particularly enthralled by the bold orange eyes of the eagle owl, though I don't know if I found him terrifying or wanted to give him a cuddle. And then I wandered through the very nice city center till my train back to London, and discovered that Cardiff has great shopping, if only you're there during daylight.


So for anyone planning a trip to Cardiff: Travel at night. Bring a friend for the bars. And dress like Captain Jack.

Cambridge, UK-flavour

Cambridge, Cambridge, Cambridge. I just returned from a weekend in Cambridge, and oh my. It is just so excessively, ridiculously beautiful and ancient.

When you see Harvard for the first time after seeing other colleges, you may find yourself thinking "Oh, so that's what they're trying to do." And then you see Cambridge. And no, no - THAT's what they're trying to do. I think this may even be an appropriate situation to get a bit Platonic, vis a vis C.S. Lewis. Harvard is the Shadowlands of Cambridge. It's nice enough in its own right, but Cambridge is the real thing.

However, the first thing I did in Cambridge was to... see a lecture by one of my old Harvard professors. About Harvard. I was visiting my wonderful friend Con, who is a Harvard-Cambridge fellow, and he and the other fellows were attending a lecture by the Reverend Peter J. Gomes, Professor of Christian Morals and all around enjoyable fellow. It was the tenth anniversary of something or other (possibly the tenth anniversary of the 300th anniversary of something else?) and so Gomes was invited to speak.

The Harvard fellows and I were the only people at the lecture who were 1) not in academic gowns, and 2) not white old men. Gomes himself excepted on the latter, of course. His lecture was on the historical connection between Harvard and Emmanuel College, and though the topic was more interesting in Gomes's hands than it would have been in anyone else's, it still got a bit dull. I did perk up at an unexpected Radcliffe Choral Society shout-out, though! We performed at the tricentennial of something or other, apparently. Guess the Glee Club has somewhere more exciting to be for that one.

After the lecture, Con and I explored. Con hadn't explored most of the Cambridge colleges, and he takes very seriously the rules about not walking on the grass and not wandering past fences marked "private". I, however, remember fondly a very silly evening exploring Jesus College with Jenny and Kavita and a video camera, and additionally have a personal mission of helping my more rule-laden friends to unburden themselves of these issues, so explore we did. We even walked on the grass. A little.

In typical Con fashion, he got himself a concussion last week, so he couldn't drink and forgot the odd English word here and there. At dinner, he said something like "I'm glad I had food, my poor concussed brain needs the primary sources." I looked at him, puzzled. "Oh, wait, I mean... raw materials! Needs the raw materials." I found this a fascinating slip. I, and many people, would replace a forgotten phrase with something that sounds similar, or something of like context. Con's brain used a phrase that was conceptually equivalent in a completely different frame of reference. I have smart friends.

On Saturday, Con and I took a walk to what he'd called a magical discount shopping heaven, which turned out to be... T.K. Maxx. Like T.J. Maxx but, umm, with a K for some reason. Only difference seems to be that at the UK version, they sell Dalek voice-changer helmets at the checkout line. I am both pleased and disoriented to be in a land where my obscure, esoteric obsession is the stuff of discount center checkout queue doodads.

We spent rather a long time at the grocery, because we like groceries, and had a lunch of random items from teh deli counter, each of which turning out to be another unappetizing variation on greyish meat wrapped in dough. Oh, Britain! Then we went to a JCR-type thing back at Trinity and cooked... casado! Well, actually, gallo pinto. Rice and beans. (this is because the last time I saw Con was when I stayed with him during Costa Rica tour, after having spent the previous three weeks eating nothing but rice and beans). We had a lovely Valentine's dinner party for all the Cambridge Harvard lonely-hearts.

And then Sunday we were supposed to go punting, but the punt rental companies disagreed due to some bothersome rain. So we went with our plan B of walking over the meadows to Grandchester. Rain and snow meltage had turned the meadows to marsh and the path to mud, but we decided to sacrifice our shoes and sludge ahead. It felt very authentically British, slogging a half hour through mud on a grey day to reach a tea place. Sunshine would have been lovely but wrong. And anyway, Sylvia Plath used to do this walk regularly (along with a litany of other literary figures, as the brochure at the tea place was quick to note), and she never would have stood for sunshine. And it was still quite beautiful, if squishy. Over tea in Grandchester, we decided that the only person worthy/capable of sustaining a relationship with Peter Gomes would be Garrison Keilor. They could orate anecdotes at each other from across a very long breakfast table.

Then a sludge back to Cambridge, and a lovely choral evensong at Trinity Chapel, and more exploring and hanging out. Cambridge is a wonderful place, and it sounds like students there are held to amazingly higher standards than at Harvard, and actually receive, like, educations worthy of the institution's reputation (whoa, novel idea), and basically I am jealous and want to stay.

In other news, Jelly Babies are surprisingly good.

London, day 1

12 February 2009, 16:30

Today is the bicentennial of the birth of Charles Darwin, and I am sitting in Westminster Abbey, waiting for a ceremony in his honor. I think this is nine kinds of awesome. But it is bloody COLD.

My hostel in London is just down the block from Southwark Cathedral, home of the John Harvard Chapel and a particularly sparsely attended RCS tour concert in 2006. After arriving from the airport and checking in, I popped in to Southwark to see if there were any visiting choirs I could go support, but sadly, there are none. Unless their pubmen are slacking. I gave a hello to the Harvard chapel and got trapped in a noonday prayer. At least I didn't get trapped in the dressing room this time...

I walked along the bank of the Thames for the next few hours. I love listening to people talk as they walk past - there's so much variety in British accents! Even within the London accent. I can't place the accents, of course, though I'd like to pull a Higgins and write out speech patterns in IPA, but at least it is in my ear well enough now that I can hear the variance.

I spent a couple hours at the Tate Modern, which is my favorite modern art museum. Granted, I'm only comparing it to MOMA, but I can only enjoy MOMA ironically. Outside, a street musician was playing Bolero on a steel drum, and if you bear in mind that Bolero's sole reason for existence is as an exercise in orchestration, you'll gather the silliness of the arrangement for solo steel drum.

After a couple hours at the Tate (favorite piece: Roy Lichtenstein's vamp on Monet's haystacks), I continued down the embankment till I hit the London Eye, the big ferris wheel. Now, I'd meant to do my Doctor Who tourism all in one set, but hey, there I was. So I ran across the bridge to the Parliament side and stood by the Royal Air Force memorial and imagined that the blue-ish smudges on the pavement were from the TARDIS. ::shame::

13 Feb 2009, 15:00

Evensong was lovely, and afterwards we huddled around Darwin's grave for a wreath-laying and some words. From there, I was expecting a public forum on Darwin and (vs.) God, so I made my way through the cloister to the event.

At the door, a vicar was checking names on a list. Odd. My name wasn't on any list, but he let me in anyway. At the next door I was handed a glass of wine. Also odd. With a little investigation I determined that this was actually a book launch, invite only, and the debate I had in mind was actually in May. Ah well, might as well enjoy a book launch!

I had a lovely chat with an archivist of Darwin's letters. The whole evolution/creationism divide that stirs up so many emotions in the States is, apparently, quite unknown in the UK. The book being launched, "Darwin and God", was the first on the subject to be printed in the UK. She asked me why the fuss that's risen at home in the last few decades, and I could only guess at the causes. Reaction to increasing secularization of public life? Political rise of the Christian right? An exceedingly potent production of Inherit the Wind? Or perhaps Americans really are, on this as well as a host of other issues, rather a bit stupid.

A waiter came around intermittently, re-filling wine glasses, and I had to actually keep a close count this time, as I had the rare occasion to invoke my "# of drinks < # of hours slept out of previous 48" rule. A good rule, and a rule that should probably go without saying, but on such occasions it can be quite necessary.

However, the rule only works to prevent disaster - it is not an efficient safeguard against standard issue poor-decision-making. And, oh, did I make a poor decision.

You see, I accidentally went to a musical. How does one accidentally see a musical? Let me tell you how one accidentally sees a musical. One accidentally sees a musical by walking through the theater district. Alone. At 7:30. With nowhere else to be. Tipsy. That's how you accidentally see a musical.

It was Dirty Dancing: The Musical.

I have seen some pretty bad theater in my time. I don't mind bad theater - I mean, I DO, in that it is a frustrating loss of time and money, but often you can learn as much from seeing it done wrong as from seeing it done right. And Dirty Dancing really is a promising candidate for musicalization, whatever your feelings on the film itself. Cult following + strong clear emotions + intrinsincally theatrical subject matter + period setting = musical.

However. Dirty Dancing: The Musical was not a musical.

There were no original songs. But it wasn't a jukebox musical either. Convention would be to put contemporary popular tunes into the mouths of the characters, but Baby and Johnnie never sang. So they danced their emotions, right? Well, they did dance... to the songs in the movie soundtrack... but they never danced outside the "we're practicing for a performance" context. And yet, it had a musical book. This was a libretto that someone wrote before finding a composer and lyricist, and then decided that composers and lyricsists are totes overrated, and staged it without 'em. Dirty Dancing : The Musical is a musical. Just someone forgot to write the songs.

I left shortly after intermission.

as Napoleon never said...

Jenny and I were having a very serious discussion about the class system in England and the USA… as relates to Bertie Wooster.

Jenny: I love that Bertie never has money problems. It just makes him so innocent and free to have relation-induced mishaps

Liz: I love that class of British people who just have income without doing anything, like the Darcys. We don't have that in America. Even the absurdly rich, their money comes from somewhere. Generally some scrappy great-grandfather who invested in trains or somesuch.

Jenny: Whereas in England, money coming from somewhere is a low-class idea.

Liz: Right.

Jenny: Money, like wine, gets better with age.

Well, that is a fine aphorism, is it not?

Liz: Did you just make that up?

Jenny: I think so

Liz: You should embroider it on something, or start using it as an aphorism and see if it gets picked up.

Jenny: You mean I should just drop it into conversations?

Liz: Yes.

Jenny: All those conversations I have about old versus new money?

Liz: No, just irrelevantly. And, introduce it with "as they say.”

Jenny: See if it gets picked up as conventional wisdom.

Liz: Or give a different citation every time! Like, “as the Good Book says, money like wine gets better with age.”

Jenny: Or "as the Bard tells us..."

And then we got a little carried away…

Liz: As we’ve seen with President Obama...

Jenny: As I learned from Sesame Street...

Liz: as my grand-pappy Old Reliable used to say...

Jenny: as the Eskimos teach us...

Liz: as can be inferred from a close reading of Durkheim...

Jenny: as it says on Mount Rushmore...

Liz: as Ben Franklin, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, and the Marquis de Sade all said at one point or another...

Jenny: as I learned on my first day at Hahvahd...

Liz: as my years in the circus taught me,

Jenny: according to the great clown himself...

Liz: as the prophet speaketh to me...

Jenny: as you yourself have noted...

Liz: as the ancient runes translate...

as is scribbled on this cocktail napkin that I'm waving in your face...

Jenny: as Dumbledore said to Harry on page 519 of the Half-Blood Prince, 12.2 lines from the top...

Liz: As Justice Brandeis noted in the fourth footnote of the Carolene decision...

Jenny: As Joan of Arc herself was about to say...

Liz: as Napoleon never said...

as was viciously mauled in the substandard translation of Hugo's Miserables...

Jenny: as Madame de Pompadour probably said, before everyone forgot why she was famous...

Liz: fanTAStic gardener.

(that will be funny after you watch Doctor Who)

as my alphabet soup spelled last night...

as Jim Marvin once said while demonstrating the proper distance between Mars and Spain...

Jenny: as it probably says in Doctor Who, but I couldn't tell you because I still haven't watched it even though I have this friend, see, who makes references to it all the time, and I think I'm going to have to watch it soon or she's going to come after me with a broadsword in my sleep, and maybe like cut off my ANKLES, or something, or possibly my entire lower half, and anyway, I think there was an aphorism in here somewhere...

Liz: as the negative infractions of the patient's pituitary gland suggest...

as it says on the manufacturer's label, which you really shouldn't have removed, really, that was a bad idea...

Jenny: as the surgeon general might warn you...

Liz: as she said....

You get the idea. And that’s right, folks - this is the duo that’s spending two weeks together in Europe. By the end of which we will either have begun speaking entirely in an incomprehensible invented language of inside jokes and Buffy references, or will have jumped off the train somewhere in Spain and run screaming in opposite directions across the plain. In the rain. Mainly.

Liz: Jenny, why are we SO AWESOME?

Jenny: I don't know, Liz, but I think we just can't help it. It is our burden to bear.

Well, I've written a play.

It doesn't have a title yet, and it is still at least two full rewrites away from performable. But Draft 1.5 is done enough that I made Columbia's deadline last night, by the skin of my teeth (I love you, 24-hour emergency window at the big post office by Penn Station!), and it should be a real second draft by my next deadline on the 9th.


Things I Learned About My Writing While Working On This Play:

1. I cannot write in a vacuum. This was by far the biggest project I've ever undertaken that did not involve either collaboration or feedback from a workshop. It is MUCH harder alone. And also much less fun.
   Conclusion: don't write in a vacuum. Things improved exponentially when I finally showed my sister a draft, and I should have involved her earlier.
   
   
2. I am incapable of not writing jokes.
   Conclusion: Lampshading it by having consciously joke-making characters is working so far...
   
   
3. I am very good at ending scenes. I am okay at starting scenes. I am rubbish at the middle parts.
   Conclusion: You know what has lots and lots of short scenes? Television.
   
   
4. All of my characters sound vaguely British.
   Conclusion: I watch too much British television.
   
   
5. My plots have a tendency towards the "slow reveal of a complicated backstory" style because I get too into world-building.
   Conclusion: Uhh... Work on that?
   Alternative: Become a tv show-runner.
   
   
6. I am excellent at banter (see #2) and casual or casual-seeming conversation. And pretty good at pacing big reveals. I am very self-conscious at Talking About Feelings, and generally make someone leaven it with jokes (see #2) because, well, I don't like Talking About Feelings.
   Conclusion: Get used to it.
   Alternative: Sitcoms.
   Second alternative: Musicals. The feelings are the lyricist's problem.
   
   
7. It is much, much easier to write two-person scenes than any-other-number-of-person scenes.
   
   
8. I tend to forget that in non-musical plays, you can have things like protagonists with vague motivations (no need for an "I want"!) and you don't need "finales" or any of that jazz. But that does mean you need to replace the 11 o'clock number with an 11 o'clock Scene of Awesomeness That Keeps People Awake, which is harder without dancing and trumpets. And sadly, you have to take care of the emotional stuff yourself, instead of letting it be the lyricist's problem. (see #6)
   Conclusion: The fact that I'm in a librettists' workshop and read/see far more musicals than plays probably isn't helping my effort to not default to musical format...
   
   
9. I am very good at writing my way out of corners.
   Conclusion: More corners.

I will probably add to this list as I think of more lessons learned.

Oh yes, the story! It's about two young graduate students working in a lab in the Netherlands, developing a Large Hadron Collider-style particle accelerator that, according to one guy, might accidentally invent time travel. And might also accidentally destroy the world.

Here's an impressive picture of the real Large Hadron Collider. I don't expect my set to look like this:

Hello, strangers.

I seem to have accumulated a rather significant amount of google traffic, thanks almost entirely to the "ate a violin" post and everyone's internet crush Randall Munroe. I made that post not actually to draw people to my blog - seriously, if that were the intent, I'd have more consistent content round these parts - but because I was curious how many people would read the XKCD blog, search the first term in that post, and then follow through to the resulting links.

The answer: a lot.

Hullo, xkcd fans! ::waves::

And while I'm getting all this random international traffic...

Can anyone recommend a graduate-level dramatic writing program in the U.K.?

I'd like to consider studying in the U.K., but my anglophilia does not extend to the university system and have absolutely no idea how to go about finding good programs. I'm talking to you, random Welsh stranger reading this - if you're thinking "well obviously she knows about the blahdiblah program, but I don't know of anything other than that", then you should leave a comment telling me about the blahdiblah program, because I in fact do not know about it.

In other news, the Doctor Who Christmas special airs in six days. (which is to say, there are six days till Christmas). This is excellent because:
1) new Doctor Who to reward me in the middle of my awful never-ending application slog!
2) spoilers, real actually spoiling-y spoilers, now abound on the internet, which means I have to avoid the internet, which means I am forced to focus on my awful never-ending application slog. Yay?

Thoughts on 45 years in Time and Space

Had my second piece in io9 today - a news story on the recently released BBC documents detailing the creation of Doctor Who, 45 years ago. You can check it out here: The BBC Tried To Ruin Doctor Who - Before It Even Began.

45 years ago this Sunday, the first episode of Doctor Who was transmitted in Great Britain. This was the day after the Kennedy assassination - which is to say, by some measures, the first day of modernity. The beginning of The Present Day. Death of innocence and all that jazz - and no doubt the tendency of public school editions of history textbooks to cut off right around the Kennedy assassination has something to do with this as well.

For me, though, the dividing line is not about the socio-political implications of 1963. It's just the dividing line, that's how it is. Before 1963 is the past. After 1963 is the real world. And Doctor Who, fittingly enough, straddles that hazy line between yesterday and today.

Watching "An Unearthly Child" for the first time as strictly a 2005 revival fan, it's not immediately apparent that this is the same show we love and obsess over now. Sure, there's a police box in a junkyard, and a young girl is calling an older white dude "Doctor." But the control room is unrecognizably groovy, and William Hartnell bears little resemblance to our modern Doctors in both appearance and performance.

And more importantly, it just feels different - the pacing, the direction, the slightly horrifying moment when you realize that this Doctor prefers to kidnap his companions, rather than politely ask them aboard. It's old and creaky and dreadfully British. It is, essentially, alien.

But then this man called the Doctor hits the dematerialization circuit. And the moment you hear that unmistakable, unchanged groan of ancient engines - the familiar and fantastic thrill of the TARDIS, our TARDIS, in this program broadcast half a century ago - it feels just a little bit like time travel.

JK Rowling's 2008 Harvard Commencement speech - The Drinking Game

[repost from Facebook, back-dated accordingly]

JK Rowling’s Harvard Commencement Address
DRINKING GAME
June 6, 2008

By the 2008 Commencement Choir


Single drink for each mention, unless otherwise noted:

About herself
- being a single mother
- writing on napkins in coffeeshops
- if she wrote her speech on a napkin
- if she claims to have still been thinking about what to say in the speech last night
- if she got the idea in Drew Faust’s bed last night
- Talks about what inspired her
- Talks about her kids
- Quotes directly from her own writing
- Denigrates herself in comparison to the other people on stage
- Talks about her own college days
- Talks about her shiny new Hahvahd degree
- People lining up at midnight for books
- How long it took to get the books published
- Number of books sold
- Richest woman in the world
- Her earnings vs Harvard endowment
- If she stutters, Liz gives Harker a dollar
- If she drinks, waterfall

Harry Potter
- If she reads us an original story
- If that story is in the Harry Potter universe, squeal happily
- Actual new info about Potterverse, two drinks
- Uses phrase “Potterverse,” three drinks

Harvard vs. Hogwarts (drink in general, and one for each specific)
- Annenberg
- Houses
- Academic regalia
- Compares Faust to McGonagall
- Compares Voldemort to George Bush
- Compares Yale to Durmstrang
- Whomping willow
- Quidditch
- Sorting hat as metaphor for college admissions/life


General
- ___ is the real magic
- Drink at every pun
- Imagination
- Creativity
- getting kids to read
- God, or the lack thereof
- Puritans, witch-burning, Salem
- Following your dreams
- Luck (felix felicis, two drinks)
- Women speaking at commencement
- Mentions that Drew Faust is, in fact, a girl
- if she talks about homosexuality
- if she talks about gay marriage
- If she outs any new characters
- If she outs Drew Faust
- If she outs herself
- If she has sex with Drew Faust on stage, drink till blind
- If she mentions Ted Kennedy, drink till your liver cries

British
- pronounces something funny
- attempts Boston accent
- Criticizes American politics
- Tony Blair
- British vs American education
- Other Cambridge
- The Queen
- Btdubs, Dumbledore is a Queen

Graduation speech cliches
- provides a dictionary definition
- asks a rhetorical question
- forgets to answer rhetorical question
- mentions The Facebook
- consulting sucks, Econ majors drink
- references Faust’s speech
- references what she did with Faust last night

Unlikely stuff (drink as much as you want)
- Potter Puppet Pals
- If it becomes Naked Time!!!
- Harry and the Potters back her up
- If the Happy Brigade are aurors
- Fan fiction, one drink. Slash fan fiction, three drinks
- If Larry Summers appears
- If Larry Summers appears in conjunction with the Avada Kedavra curse

Magic
- If she is wearing any Harry Potter paraphernalia
- If she utters any spells
- If she uses an Unforgivable Curse
- If she uses any fake Latin, sing the first verse of 10,000 Men
- If she performs a magic trick, finish your drink
- If she performs real magic, finish the bottle
- If she bursts into flames and rises from the ashes, pour drink on flames
- If the steps of Memorial Hall open up and a basilisk emerges, run like hell
- If the graduates have crossbows under their academic regalia, steal one from the nearest CS major

Music
- References the choir
- References the band
- If she says Glee Club needs women, RCS drinks
- Any editorial comment or look from Jim
- If the band plays the Harry Potter theme
- If she sings at all
- if she announces the release of her upcoming solo pop album, chug
- If she compares Fair Harvard to the Hoggy Hoggy Hogwarts, sing a round of “Weasley is Our King”
- If she says “baller,” finish all drinks on campus


If she never mentions Harry Potter, chug until tour

HP7 Drinking Game

[relocated from Facebook, and back-dated. composed prior to the release of the seventh book]

Weinbloom & Wolahan bring you:

HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS
The Drinking Game

We recommend using M&Ms in lieu of actual alcohol for this game, unless you are particularly talented at reading while smashed.

Enjoy!


Take a drink every time:

Harry’s scar hurts

Someone shouts in ALL CAPS

Hermione encourages reference to “Hogwarts, A History”

Three drinks if someone other than Hermione mentions “Hogwarts, A History”

Malfoy insults someone’s parents

2 if someone actually manages to restrain their anger when Malfoy insults their parents.

Five drinks if we finally get a decent “your mom” joke in response

Drink if Ron and Hermione start bickering

2 if Ron and Hermione start snogging

Trelawney predicts someone’s imminent death

Rowling foreshadows someone’s imminent death

2 when someone actually dies who wasn’t foreshadowed at all

Aunt Petunia purses her lips

Bad pun in a proper noun (ie, Diagon Alley)

Two drinks for a good pun

There’s evidence that journalists and newspapers in the Wizarding world are corrupt

Two drinks if a journalist does something good

Hermione runs away to do something without any explanation

Drink every time you get furious about a character’s immense and stubborn stupidity

Snape sneers

Lupin looks shabby

Tonks trips over something

Neville trips over something

Peeves smashes something

Hagrid breeds something

Ron or Harry refer to S.P.E.W as “Spew”

Nearly Headless Nick adjusts his head

Someone new stops calling Voldemort “You-Know-Who”

2 if she explains the "triumphant look"

Dobby extolls Harry's greatness

Ron runs from spiders

Fleur kisses someone on the cheek

Someone says Harry has his mother's eyes

Harry tallies the remaining horcruxes

3 if RAB is NOT Regulus Black

Finish if Harry ends up being the only one who thinks Snape is good

If Snape really truly is evil, send JKR a Howler

Someone says something darkly

2 if Neville and Luna hook up

2 if Harry attempts to use an Unforgivable curse

Finish the drink if he succeeds

Have another entire drink if he is immediately filled with remorse

Harry returns to the curtain at the Department of Mysteries

2 if he finds Sirius there

Kreacher sulks

Harry complains about the unpleasantness of apparition

2 if Neville saves the day

Fawkes returns

Harry enrolls at Hogwarts for his seventh year after all

Harry pines for Ginny

Mrs. Weasley cooks

Hagrid is a poor cook

Any "sickening thud"

Harry enters a pensieve

Mrs. Weasley's clock is referenced

Hermione has exam anxiety

2 if Hermione has exam anxiety though not enrolled in school

3 if someone ends up going to college

4 if it's a Muggle college

Finish the bottle if it's Harvard

The first chapter starts outside Harry's point of view

The last chapter ends outside Harry's point of view

There's an epilogue summarizing the rest of everyone's lives

Any clearly slash-y line that slipped past the editors (ie, "Who's Cedric, your boyfriend?")

Ron and Hermione make each other jealous

Aberforth Dumbledore appears

Aberforth Dumbledore appears, with goats

Hogwarts has a drastically reduced student population

Hogwarts is under threat of being closed

Petunia displays more knowledge of wizarding world

2 if the Dursleys do something right for once

Muggles get involved in the war

Hermione mentions, talks to, or (gasp!) visits her parents

Hermione sneaks into the Hogwarts Library while not a student

The three don't fit under the invisibility cloak

This Lupin/Tonks thing turns out to be something else entirely

Harry has a monster in his stomach/chest/other awkward body part

2 if JKR writes a remotely legit romance subplot

Mutter grumpily if she completely screws up Ron/Hermione

Malfoy is shown sympathetically

Snape is shown sympathetically

There's a connection between Godric's Hollow and Godric Gryffindor

Any time someone we've heard of dies

Harry remembers that everyone he loves is dead

Ron gets in the way

Ron does something really great and important

Ron gloats about great and important thing for next three weeks

If it takes Ron more tries to pass his apparition test than it took you to pass your driving test (sulk in the corner if you still can't drive)

Harry doubts his father's integrity

2 if Harry manages to win the day without having destroyed all the horcruxes

3 if Harry is a horcrux

Finish if Harry kills himself

Voldemort is destroyed in an as-yet-unpredictable fashion that isn't avada kedavra

Finish if Voldemort is destroyed with love. And complain loudly.