Last week I had a curious dream about me reading a crossover between Quantum Leap and Doctor Who.  This would not be particularly stunning except that I’m like the one contributor to this blog who cannot stand Doctor Who.1  Indeed, what made the dream amazingly vivid is that I was constantly thinking “Why am I reading this?  I don’t even like Doctor Who.”  Also, I have checked and I’m pretty sure the first Doctor Who was in the dream, which is disturbing because I wouldn’t have known what that guy looked like before he appeared to me in a vision.  This is like one of those creepy stories about somebody visiting an ancient castle for the first time and remembering a past life spent there, except that my past life was apparently a colossal dork.

After I woke up and thought about this some more, I realized that a) Quantum Leap/Doctor Who certainly makes sense and b) it would be cruel of me to withhold this concept from the universe just because it doesn’t turn my crank.  (I am choosing to pretend no one has ever thought of this before, despite the fact that Doctor Who has been crossed over with literally everything I have ever heard of.)  Maybe somebody else can get some mileage out of it.  So for those of you looking for a plot for the next great fanfiction, this one is on me!  (Adding the buttsex is up to you, though.)

continue reading "I’m meeting you halfway, you stupid hippies!"

1. Hopefully Seavey is being plagued by dreams about James Nguyen meeting Tommy Wiseau, to balance things out. [↩]

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

Fair warning: next week’s column will probably just be “Nothing is on TV that is better than playing XCOM. You should probably play XCOM.”

My weekly TV column is up for Torontoist.

(And yes, nerds: Arrow sucks. At least the pilot sucked, and hard. They are promising Deadshot for later in the season so I might watch that episode, but the acting is not very good and without that I’m just not gonna waste my time.)

Hello. I’m Jock, of Mad Jock’s Lawn Dominator brand fertilizer. Now, you might think that fall is the time where you finally stop shelling out for our product, but I’m here to tell you that this is the most important time of the year to fertilize your lawn. Except maybe for spring. And summer, of course. But it’s more important than winter, which requires only our ‘Mad Jock’s Winter Lawn Maintenance brand of fertilizer, sprinkled over the snow.

You see, our top grass scientists have discovered that fall is the time where the grass starts fattening up for the long winter season by bulking up  with extra nutrients, much like a bear eats more before going into hibernation. Your grass is building a layer of fat to insulate itself from the winter’s cold, and to sustain it during those periods when sunlight is scarce. If you don’t fertilize your lawn during this crucial period, your grass is going to wake up out of its torpor in the middle of winter, cold and hungry. When that happens, the angry grass might just break into your house, looking for food. It might find your pets…your children…even you. Do you want that? WELL, DO YOU?

Of course not. So buy Mad Jock’s Lawn Dominator Fall Spectacular Oktoberfert brand fertilizer, and cover your lawn with it to a depth of about six inches. Buy a few extra bags, just in case your neighbor’s lawn gets a wee bit pissy and you have to throw something to it around November to keep it from nibbling on the family dog. There’s never a bad time to buy our fall fertilizer. Except for spring, I suppose, or summer. Or winter. Those aren’t the best times to buy it, because you don’t need it. Which is why you should buy it then, to stock up on it for when you do need it. Which makes it the best time of all to buy!

Mad Jock’s Lawn Dominator. Seed your lawn. Seed it. Seed it hard, lad. Seed it all night long. That’s right, just like that. Oh, your lawn likes it when you seed it there, doesn’t it? Yes, harder…harder…oh, seed it, can’t you see how bad it wants it? No, don’t look at me, just keep seeding…a video-camera? Don’t be silly, I would never…where are you going? What do you mean, “To call the cops”? Wait, come back, just–SHIT!

**sound of running footsteps**

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

Annnnnnd right off the bat we’ll put this behind a big ol’ spoiler tag for those who are behind on Season 7 of ‘Doctor Who’…

continue reading "My Question About ‘The Angels Take Manhattan’"

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

For those of you not already aware, it’s a new season of ‘Doctor Who’…and before I do the jump-cut that separates out the spoilers for those who haven’t seen the season premiere yet, let me just say how utterly strange it is to be a fan of ‘Doctor Who’ in an era where that series is enjoying such tremendous popularity. This year at DragonCon, Doctor Who cosplayers outnumbered Star Wars, Harry Potter, Star Trek, and any three Joss Whedon series you’d care to name. Full Daleks, TARDIS dresses, and Elevens too numerous to count. It’s a good feeling, don’t get me wrong; this isn’t one of those, “If you weren’t reading ‘Timewyrm: Revelation’, man, you can’t really understand what it’s like to be a fan!” rants that you occasionally see when something cult becomes mainstream. But I’ve spent the vast majority of my life as a Doctor Who fan, probably since I was two or three years old, and for the vast majority of that vast majority I could expect to meet another fan (outside of the Internet fora specifically designed to assist Who fans in congregating) perhaps once, twice a year. It was an obscure British import with laughable production values (especially compared to ST:TNG, which slightly overlapped the classic series in its dying days) and black-and-white repeats. To see it now rise from the ashes as a world-conquering juggernaut, right around the time that Star Wars and Star Trek (the Big Two when I was a kid) are fading to some extent, it’s…surreal. I keep expecting people to change their minds.

But since they’re not doing that, let’s talk ‘Asylum’, shall we?

continue reading "My Sneaking Suspicion Regarding ‘Asylum of the Daleks’"

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

When The Golden Girls debuted in 1985, Bea Arthur and Betty White were both 63, Estelle Getty 62 and Rue McLanahan 51.

Accordingly, were there to be a big-screen remake: Meryl Streep is currently 63, as is Sigourney Weaver. Cybill Shepherd is 62. And Bonnie Hunt is 51.

Alternately: Jessica Lange, Pam Grier, Julie Walters and Meg Ryan.

SOMEBODY NEEDS TO GET ON THIS, PEOPLE.

The WWE, for all its flaws, is generally a company I think of as having a good visual sense when it comes to their product. They aren’t selling iMacs. They’re selling wrestling, and typically their sense of design works in conjunction with that to produce media that is designed to sell their product, which means: make it exciting, make it thrilling, make it epic. This is not a brand that necessarily needs cool, iconic, classy design to sell their product. (One of the things about the “minimalist” trend of design that is so popular on the interwoobs now is that so much of it is so pointless – why do you need a minimalist poster of Wolverine? He is fucking Wolverine. He is a midget with claws who kills people, usually ninjas. Why do you not want a poster of him killing ninjas with his claws instead? But I digress.)

Anyway, my point is this: the new WWE “signature” that starts off their shows now as of the thousandth episode of Raw is just god-awful. (It is all the more awful when you consider that, at about the same time, they replaced the horrible, cheesy Nickelback-sung opening for RAW that they have had for a few years with something much better.)

It is boring. Some non-confrontational minor key piano that could be the intro jingle for any late-night infomercial, a bunch of still photos, a lens flare. Worse than boring, it is incredibly non-specific – I mean, after John Cena and Andre the Giant the photos rapidly become less and less easy to distinguish, because they are being obscured by the WWE logo which is also hard to distinguish, so I’m not sure what the point of that was. Please recall that this is trying to sell an organization whose raison d’etre is “let’s put two guys in a ring and have them try to beat each other unconscious.” (Yes, yes, it’s fake, but that’s not the point. Wolverine is fake too, you know.) How does this signature sell that? It does not sell that. Not at all. Rather than being the visceral image the WWE needs to push its product, it is instead sterile.

But worst of all, it replaced the awesome signature the WWE has been using for the better part of a decade:

That conveys the same sense of history that the new signature seeks to provide (and more comprehensively), but it’s exciting, possibly because it’s not just a stupid series of still images set to elevator music but instead shows actual fighting and wrestlers saying cool things and doing cool things and is set to a simple expanding crescendo that is nonetheless intense. It is a good signature – one of the best they’ve ever done if not the best. Replacing it is not necessarily stupid so long as something better comes along, but the new thing – it is not that thing!