By semi-popular demand!

(We were at a BBQ on the weekend, and Moby Dick came up in conversation, as we were all watching the sausages cook. A friend said, “Ooh, Moby Dick“ but I felt compelled to point out that, really, no one had read Moby Dick. Plus, didn’t Heathers name Moby Dick as a plausible catalyst for teen suicide?)

Nomination are open for Humiliation: Round Three, the round otherwise known as I’m Determined To Win One Of These, Even If It Means Humiliating Myself—After All, It’s My Blog.

A recap of the rules:

In the comment thread, nominate a book that you haven’t read but that you can reasonably assume everyone else has read.

Remember, you can only win by humiliating yourself by exposing a gap in your cultural knowledge. An obscure book won’t get anywhere.

As with last time, I’ll open a new thread after nominations close for us to vote on what we have and haven’t read.

Nominations will close—so we can keep the playlist comprehensible—on Thursday the 7th of August at 5.30 p.m.

I keep coming back to this game again and again and again, and every time I mention it, I complain about it.

That doesn’t seem entirely fair, given how much I actually enjoy the game. It’s variable but generally beautiful, and great fun to play, when it’s playable.

But it seems to me at the moment that it’s actually not playable, or not unless you’re prepared to devote an enormous amount of time to it.

Once upon a time, you could flip through your friends’ and the rats’ packs, hoping for a decent card, rummage through the markets to see if a coveted item had appeared, make a couple of low-level items, and still not waste more time than would have been required for a quick round of Freecell.

But that’s not the case now, and it’s all to do with the increasing dependence on pop-up cards.

Take the two new sets, for example: Lucha Libre and Toys, Toys, Toys.

To make the top-level item in Lucha Libre—the Title Belt—you require a Wrestling Ring, Blue Amigo, and Purple Diablo.

The Wrestling Ring is easy enough: it’s expensive, but you can buy it. But those two wrestlers! Both require a mask (in addition to boots, cloaks, or shorts). And masks are pop-up cards.

They’re rare pop-ups, as well: I’ve never seen the Purple Mask in the wild. So I can’t make Purple Diablo.

And I need more than one mask: to complete the set, I need to vault the Purple Mask, the Purple Diablo, the Blue Mask, the Blue Amigo, and the Title Belt. That’s three masks of each colour.

So far, I’ve found two Blue Masks. So my collection has large, frustrating holes in it.

Toys, Toys, Toys is even worse, if possible.

The top-level item there is an Electric Train, made from a Metal Robot, a Model Rocket, and a Hot Rod. The Model Rocket itself is made from three other items, but at least those are all available in the markets, as is the Hot Rod.

But that Metal Robot! He requires (of all things) a Bubble Wand and two Wooden Soldiers. The Wooden Soldiers, I’m sure it won’t surprise you to learn, are pop-ups. Once again, I have never seen one in the wild, although I did once gaze longingly at one in a friend’s pack.

And, remember, I need to vault the Metal Robot on his own as well as the Wooden Soldiers card itself.

Five examples of a pop-up that I’ve never even seen? Is it any wonder I’m becoming frustrated?

I’ve heard a friend say that his frustration with the game comes from the fact that the rats have nothing of value in their packs. When you play co-operatively, as we do, you don’t raid your friends’ packs, though they will grab cards that they know you need. So you rely on the rats to offer chances to steal interesting cards—and stealing cards is, after all, the stated aim of the game.

But, honestly, I’d rather buy everything—regardless of how slow and frustrating it is to build up credits—than have this reliance on pop-ups.

Because it’s ruining the flow of the game.

You can no longer just pop in and out of a game, planning on a quick flip through the packs. Chances are, not a single pop-up will appear in that time and, when you’re waiting for pop-ups and desperately reliant on them, the game then becomes an exercise in frustration.

I don’t know if the intention is to induce us to spend more time playing the game, but that’s the outcome of these changes to the game mechanics.

And I may be lazy and prone to procrastination—in fact, I dare say I am.

But I’m not sacrificing my work, my students, and my writing by spending more and more time looking for cards that never appear.

I’m afraid that as more collections come to rely on pop-ups and, consequently, the game shifts to a more time-intensive mode of play, my inclination to finish those Feats of Wonder is going to fall away.

Recycling my own material:

ME: Really, no day can be bad when it includes ducklings.
NICK: That’s true!
ME: The only things cooler than ducklings are otters. And maybe puffins.
NICK: Puffins are cool.
ME: I love puffins. When I take over the world, it will be at the head of an army of puffins.
NICK: A mighty army of puffins!
ME: Hell yeah, a mighty army. What other kind of army would you have?
NICK: A wussbag army of puffins.
ME: I’m going to blog that.
NICK: Well, just make sure “wussbag” isn’t a offensive term.

From mid-conversation:

ME: You don’t have a brain.
NICK: You don’t know that!
ME: You’ve already made that joke. I blogged it.
NICK: I know that. I was making an amusing reference to it using the power of amusement.
ME: You see, if you have to use the word “amusement” twice to explain your joke, then it isn’t funny.
NICK: You’re an exacting comedy client.

Every time Nick’s left the house in the past three days, he’s seen a family of ducks wandering around near the house.

Today, I came home from work and found them pottering around the back garden:

I’m only sorry the images aren’t a little clearer, but the drake became so noticeably distressed when I approached too closely—and, at his distress, the ducklings immediately disappeared under their mother’s belly—that I had to push the camera to its limits to get any photos at all.

But, really—is there ever a day so bad that it can’t be improved by ducklings?

This week’s live-blogging brought to you by half a bottle of wine and some Nurofen—not, I might add, ingested simultaneously.

I’ve also decided that it would be more practical to start each live-blogging episode—rather than my default pattern of live-blogging ABC New’s weather forecast—with a picture from Nick’s extensive collection of Doctor Who memorabilia.

(I suppose it’s not that extensive, by comparison with some collections that I’ve seen. But there are some odd items in there, as you’ll see in future weeks.)

Tonight, his pride and joy, and the lord and master of our living room:

It always worries me slightly when I have to pick him up by the head in order to dust. Still, at least he doesn’t shriek “Exterminate!”, unlike the bottle opener.

I can’t help but feel that the family photograph in the background—my great-grandmother, although it doesn’t really matter—is rather incongruous.

We’re still a couple of minutes out from the episode, by the way.

Nick fancies watching Freezing—since we’re now up to the before Doctor Who ads—but I think that’s only because it’s got Alex Kingston in it.

Aha! And here we go, with a recap of last week’s episode.

Martha! Hey, Martha! Why don’t you stay a while? And lovely Ross! Hurray!

And we even get a recap of the Sontaran haka that caused so much controversy (well, sort of) in last week’s comment thread.

Poor Donna’s grandfather.

NICK: Okay, at the very least, the sonic screwdriver should be able to shatter glass.

That’s a good point: don’t soundwaves shatter glass? And then at least Donna’s grandfather wouldn’t be choking.

Well of course Donna’s going with the Doctor. Oh, Donna’s grandfather should be a companion; he’s such a lovely, lovely man.

Nick’s impressed that Martha’s password is more than four letters. I bet it’s a non-sequential alpha-numeric password, too. Am I supposed to be thinking about that?

Ah, Sontaran sexism. Honestly, I’ve said this before, but if they’re a clone race, why would they be so misogynistic? Sure, they don’t need women for replication, but do they even have women?

Oh, the Doctor gives Donna a TARDIS key, but Nick thinks the moment is awkwardly delivered.

Whoops, the Sontarans have the TARDIS. And now this strange little megalomaniac Rattigan has gone to inform his students of “planetfall.”

Does he mean the death of the Earth, or is he using the term “planetfall” to mean something else?

Ha, the Doctor knows Martha isn’t what she seems. He’s not daft, that one. (Ooh, understatement.)

Jodrel Banks? They’re rubbish, aren’t they? Didn’t they completely fail to spot the Vogon Constructor Fleet?

Another Rose flash!

The Sontarans are like trolls. And like roast potatoes. But I maintain that Ross is nothing like a pink weasel.

“Belittle” jokes to a Sontaran. Isn’t that a little racist? But Nick thinks that the Doctor has always been a little contemptuous of Sontarans, above and beyond their tendency to kill people. More Sontaran haka, but it seems that the Doctor has no more patience with it than some viewers.

Now, why is the Doctor speaking to Donna in code? Surely no one can actually get into the TARDIS? We’ve seen Daleks trying to break into it, and failing. No one can blow it up. It’s essentially indestructible. So does it matter if the Sontarans know that Donna’s in there? Ah, hang on: that’s just started to make sense to me.

Every time I see Luke Rattigan, I realise that the Sontarans aren’t the only ones in this episode with a Napoleon complex.

NICK: I think Rattigan thinks he’s acting in a completely different episode from everyone else.

Why didn’t it occur to Rattigan that maybe these people didn’t want to leave Earth and move to an entirely different planet? I like the fact that he constructed a breeding programme. Poor boy. But isn’t he a millionaire? He probably doesn’t need a breeding programme to pull girls.

I do feel for Donna in this scene: having the Doctor suggest a way in which she could help and communicate with him and then not being able to put that into practice must be devastatingly frustrating. The more I see of Donna the more I like her as a companion.

Donna’s mother, on the other hand, I could live without. She gets more and more unpleasant as the programme goes on.

Ooh, DefCon One! Nick always accuses me of going to that in arguments. Unfairly, I might add.

And why would nuclear weaponry be a good idea? Well, why is it ever a good idea?

Nick also worries that not all the nuclear-capable countries are on the same side of the planet, so would they all be able to use their weapons? He’s also not certain that they can launch nuclear missiles into orbit, but that’s another story.

Uh oh, Sontarans on the march. Oh, no, lovely Ross! Don’t say he’s in the line of fire! Dammit, not lovely Ross!

No, not Ross! Oh, damn, he’s dead. Poor, poor, lovely Ross. And stop calling him Greyhound 40, you horrible man! Ah, I see that the Doctor agrees with me.

The Sontarans aren’t very sporting fighters—should they really be shooting people in the back? I thought they were meant to be the ultimate soldiers. Oh, well: apparently this isn’t war—this is sport.

NICK: No, this is Sparta!

Brigadier Alastair Lethbridge Stewart! That’s exactly who we need. And maybe Benton: he can’t really still be a Sergeant by now. But we certainly don’t need Yates: he always was annoying.

Oh dear, Rattigan. It’s annoying when you realise that your war-mongering allies don’t actually want to help you achieve a Utopian society on another planet. But at least you’re not dead.

Donna as the Doctor’s secret weapon: I can believe that. She’s tough, Donna. She’s up for anything. But I don’t mind her being legitimately scared. I’d be bloody terrified.

The aspect of the show where the Doctor is constantly irritated by Donna’s belittling of herself is another aspect that I like—it’s understated at this point in the season, but persistent, and builds up to something intriguing.

Gas masks for the UNIT soldiers? I wonder what they could possibly be planning? And the Doctor definitely knows that Martha is not what she seems.

DOCTOR: Are you my Mummy?

That’s hands down my favourite joke of the season. Maybe of all four seasons. No: it doesn’t beat “Rose, I’m trying to resonate concrete.”

Ooh, the UNIT chappy is giving a St Crispin’s Day speech. Still better than the one in Independence Day.

(Do I mean St Crispin’s Day? I haven’t got time to look it up. But I always confuse it with St Swithin’s Day, for some reason.)

Now, using the Valiant to clear away the smog is a clever idea. I do hope that smug Sontaran is killed fairly soon, though. He’s starting to annoy me with his constant harping on the glory of battle.

The Martha clone’s not very clever, is she? Why does she go to the basement with the Doctor?

Why can’t you wear a T-shirt reading “clone” in front of Captain Jack? He doesn’t exactly need encouragement. And what kind of missing adventure could they possibly have had to make the Doctor think of that?

Ah, that Sontaran’s dead. I don’t really support shooting people in the chest, but he really was an annoying walking-potato, troll person.

Clone feed? Oh, ew. I don’t really like the idea of the entire planet being turned into a clone-breeding planet. Plus, as Nick says, surely Earth is a fairly long way away from the Sontaran empire? If it weren’t, surely it would have been over-run years ago.

The coat Martha’s wearing, is that the one the Doctor got from Janis Joplin? Actually, looking at the length of that coat on Martha, it would have been far too long for Janis Joplin, wouldn’t it?

I feel rather sorry for Rattigan in these scenes. He’s so thoroughly ineffective: even when he’s holding a gun, people just walk straight past him, as though he isn’t even there.

Set fire to the atmosphere? Oh, here we go. I’m sorry—I’m devoted to this programme, but this is really rather silly. Wouldn’t this kill absolutely everyone on the planet?

NICK: Right. Watch the Doctor destroy the avian population of the Earth.

And the way he’s saying “please, please, please”—it’s as though he saying, “Don’t kill everybody, mad experiment.”

I’m not sure why that UNIT woman kisses her superior officer. Relief, I suppose.

And now the Doctor’s making a grand sacrifice. But he can’t just send the machine up in the transport on its own, because that’s not the Doctor’s way. Even though this wouldn’t be genocide, which we’ve seen him baulk at time and time again—and we’ve never seen him commit yet, although we’ve heard about it. So he has to give them a chance.

I know Sontarans don’t fear death, but surely they should have some sense of self-preservation. Random death—and more haka!—doesn’t necessarily make you an effective soldier, surely? And is a waste of training, perhaps?

But that’s all right—Rattigan has made his sacrifice, instead. All those bodies on the Doctor’s conscience: this new version of Doctor Who has been a violent one, hasn’t it? Not as violent as some individual episodes of the original series, like “The Horror of Fang Rock,” but with more overall deaths, I think.

Hey, Donna’s grandfather! You should ask the Doctor if you can go, too. It breaks my heart, it really does: his desperation for something he’s never going to experience except by proxy.

No, stay in the TARDIS, Martha!

Oh, it seems she doesn’t have a choice. That’s interesting. And at least one more episode with Martha in it! Hurray!

Next week: “The Doctor’s Daughter.” With, quite literally, the Doctor’s daughter: Peter Davison’s pretty daughter.

From this Wikipedia page:

“Marilyn Manson covered “Tainted Love” and released it as a single from the Not Another Teen Movie soundtrack.”

Ha! Edgy.

Then I kept reading, found that it has been released along with covers of “Suicide is Painless” and “Bizarre Love Triangle,” and my heart broke a little.

Nick’s feet are particularly susceptible to tickling:

NICK: Stop!
ME: No.
NICK: I’m getting a headache.
ME: No, you’re not. (Note: sadism is an essential part of the tickling process.)
NICK: Oh, my brain!
ME: You don’t have a brain.
NICK: You don’t know that!

I’m sure you’ll be relieved to hear that I managed to get myself out of the situation with the revolving columns and the lava. Turned out I didn’t need to grab the rope at all: I could jump straight to the platform. Which is odd, since I couldn’t reach the revolving columns from the platform, going in the other direction, without the agency of the rope.

But that’s beside the point.

Tonight Nick and I planned to roll up characters for our Dungeons and Dragons campaign. (Why, yes: we are epic geeks. But then a fair number of people reading this blog are in our group—or we’re in their group—so it all balances out.)

But then it seemed that the Wizards of the Coast website was down.

Now that’s just unnatural.

So, rather than rolling up my lovely Elven Ranger—who should be a good melee fighter but also have decent ranged skills, unlike Gudris, my late lamented dwarf. First to die! Honestly, that’s just embarrassing—I’m lying on my living-room floor with my chin on a ceramic elephant, singing along to Dobie Grey’s “Drift Away.”

It’s as good a way as any to spend a Saturday evening.

Basically, I’d written an extremely ranty—but eloquent and amusing—post about the fact that Microsoft Word all but destroyed my sanity this afternoon, causing me to waste five hours on what turned out to be thoroughly wasted time.

And then things just became worse, since the computer insisted, when I tried to save the draft, that I wasn’t connected to the Internet, and the entire thing disappeared into the ether.

(Still, I suppose it gave me a chance to make a bad pun. It’s also an ignorant pun, since I’ve never actually listened to OK Computer. I mentioned this recently to a friend to whom the album is essentially a religious experience and, even though we were talking via instant messaging he still managed to infuse a distinct sigh into his “Oh, how I envy you!”)

So now I’m even more disappointed by electronic communication.

(It doesn’t help that I’m stuck on Lego Indiana Jones: I managed to leap from a rope to a moving column and across a lake of lava to collect an artifact, but I’ve died over twenty times trying to leap back onto the rope. I may never be able to leap on to the rope, but then I’ll be stuck on this level for ever. A dilemma, but I can’t see my way out of it.)

I don’t have the heart to repeat my rant about the ways in which Microsoft Word attempted to drive me either into Bedlam or into an early grave, but it comes down to this: once I had finally compiled my three appendices (which alone took well over a year to put together) into a single Word document—with a view to converting them to the university-specific PDF format, sending them to the Graduate School, and having the degree conferred—Word suddenly had a conniption.

Apparently, the file was too large for Word to handle.

It seemed to feel that this could best be dealt with by taking the third appendix—my pride and joy, in its way—deleting fully half of the words on each page, and filling the resultant gaps by randomly spacing out the remaining words.

This was after a serious of events including randomly removing my columns and refusing to allow me to insert a page break at the end of a section.

I would wash my hands of the thing altogether, but I really do need to get this PDF sorted out. It’s the only way the Graduate School will accept the thesis.

And so there’s nothing for it but Microsoft Word.

I’ve been reading Nancy Mitford.

I know I shouldn’t automatically associate Mitford with Nazis, but I can’t help it. When I read The Pursuit of Love or Love in a Cold Climate—and at the moment, I’m reading Highland Fling, which I have in an anthology with Christmas Pudding and Pigeon Pie. The anthology is, in a rather twee fashion, called Pudding and Pie—I can’t help but think of Diana Mitford and her irritating claim that, even in prison, it was lovely to wake up and think that one was lovely one, and her husband Oswald Moseley, and Unity Mitford, who shot herself (not fatally) when Germany lost the war and who, according to some British tabloid, probably The Daily Mail, may have had Hitler’s child.

Actually, looking at that list, that is rather a high number of instances in which the Mitfords are involved with the Nazis.

But, it’s odd: I love Wodehouse.

Perhaps I’m slightly influenced by the fact that we’re currently working our way through season two of Jeeves and Wooster, with Hugh Laurie and Steven Fry, and I’m enjoying it immensely.

I think, though, that a large part of my enjoyment is the set-dressing. All that gorgeous Art Deco furniture—beautiful walnut-veneer sideboards and lovely, lovely lamps. I have a weakness for lamps, especially Art Deco lamps. I do have one nice one, see?

But that’s beside the point.

I know Wodehouse is somewhat suspect, as far as his political leanings are concerned. But somehow, this doesn’t affect my enjoyment of his books (although the sad, nostalgic tint that creeps into the later ones, twenty or thirty years removed from their original milieu, do somewhat spoil my enjoyment).

But Mitford I find oddly irritating, and it’s not only because of the plethora of comma splices scattered through the novels.

There are some amusing moments: the one I’m reading now, Highland Fling, brings the old regime and the young fashionable people into direct conflict during grouse-hunting season in Scotland. And I did laugh when the central character, an artist, talks about how Scotland is a specifically Victorian landscape, clearly intended by the Almighty for the delectation of Victoria and Albert—although Hugh Trevor-Roper made the point more intelligently fifty-two years later in his essay “The Invention of Tradition: The Highland Tradition of Scotland” (in Eric Hobsbawn and Terence Ranger’s The Invention of Tradition).

I think, ultimately, it’s the Bright Young Things that annoy me.

Bertie can be frustrating. Anyone who manages to fritter away his life purely on the basis of inherited wealth becomes a little irritating after a while. But he’s not annoying like Mitford’s Bright Young Things.

I suspect it’s their arrogance: their constant assumption that no one who isn’t not only of the leisured, moneyed classes but also of their own social grouping could possibly know anything about art or literature that really makes me start grinding my teeth.

If they contented themselves with buying ridiculous clothes, getting smashed on cocktails before the dinner hour, and joining inappropriate clubs—as Bertie does—then they probably wouldn’t irritate me so much.

But then, Bertie never came out and insisted, as Fanny does in Love in a Cold Climate, that women who raise their children without nannies gradually become morons while their children become barbarians.

If he had, he almost certainly wouldn’t have been able to win me over again.

Because I’m a little worried about that.

As I may have mentioned before, I am obsessed right now with Lego Indiana Jones for the Nintendo DS.

Only in my leisure hours, mind.

But obsessed.

It’s enormous fun, especially now I’ve finished it in Story Mode and can play all the episodes in Free Play, which is vastly more fun (and more productive: generally, most of the maps and artifacts you need to collect can only be accessed in Free Play, when you can switch between characters. So you have a small character to climb through hatches, a Knight of the Cruciform Sword to open certain doorways, creepy priests who pull people’s hearts out to allow you into different areas, and so on.)

But what’s bothering me is that there are two characters on each level: one you control and one controlled by the computer.

(When we played Lego Star Wars, it was two player, and both characters were controlled by us. Which led to its own problems, since Nick isn’t used to co-operative play, and kept running off while I was trying to build things.)

But when one character is computer controlled, it gets quite frustrating.

Sometimes they become stuck behind things, and you have to run back half a level to guide them out.

Sometimes they’re unusually dull: I was driven to despair a few nights ago trying to navigate a dinghy. You can only navigate these if there are two people in them. But I got stuck. My computer character—Willie, the irritating night-club singer in Temple of Doom—leapt out of the boat. I couldn’t leap out without falling in the water and dying: trust me, I tried every possible angle. But she, daft cow, wouldn’t get back in the boat! (I always did dislike her.) So there I was, unable to move, all because this silly Lego figurine was posing, in my tuxedo, on the banks of the river with an umbrella!

Hmmm.

Sometimes, the computer characters actually kill you, by blocking the point of access when you’re jumping, so you fall in, say, a pit of lava.

And sometimes the computer characters get in your way. This is unusually annoying when you’re leaping from train carriage to train carriage (Last Crusade) or from truck to truck while having exploding barrels thrown at you by a Nazi (also, oddly, Last Crusade.)

And then there’s nothing for it but to repeatedly punch them in the face until they either move or, as a secondary effect, die and re-materialise somewhere else, somewhere less annoying.

But often my sidekick is Marcus Brody.

And I really liked Marcus. I was devastated when we watched the most recent film (this was a devastation that came on before the fridge was nuked and before the events of the last fifteen minutes) and I realised he was dead.

I really don’t want to punch Marcus in the face.

I want to punch Nazis in the face. Little Lego figurine Nazis. That’s the point of the game. (Although Lego apparently doesn’t call them Nazis. They’re generic villainous Germans. But I call them Nazis, and so does Indy.)

But if Marcus won’t move out of my way, what choice to I have?

None, really.

I just have to punch him in the face and then feel like a cad for the rest of the evening.