There's a line in the labor anthem "The Internationale" that some might say I should pay attention to: "We'll change henceforth the old traditions."



Well, maybe next year.

Speaking of "The Internationale," I put together a Spotify playlist for May Day that features eleven, count 'em, eleven different versions of that song! French, English, Russian, German… whatever your language, I've got you covered. As long as it's one of those four. There's a way to embed Spotify playlists, but it uses iframes and LJ has never played nice with those, so just click the link below and you can play it in the Spotify application.

May Day playlist

Obviously you'll need Spotify to listen to that. Despite an atrocious interface, it's worth downloading if you don't have it, especially if you're here in the US and you have a Facebook account, because in that case it's free for unlimited use. In other countries, I believe you get six months free and after that you're limited to ten hours a month. Unless you live in Canada or Australia, in which case it's not available to you at all. Sorry, dudes. Here's a YouTube video of the Billy Bragg version, which isn't available on Spotify for some reason. Too bad, it's my favorite.


 

I saw a discussion on Twitter this morning about Community and The Magnificent Seven:

@jujujulieta awwww, bummer. If you were to try Magnificent Seven, would Joel be Steve McQueen or Yul Brynner?

— Scott (@Zev04) April 30, 2012

The answer to that seems obvious to me: Joel is Yul, because Brenner played the main character and received top billing. But that got me thinking about which study group member would be which Magnificent Seven character. They match up pretty well!

• Jeff is Chris (Brenner), the veteran gunslinger. Not only is Chris the main character, he put together the group and was its de facto leader. Plus, check out this promotional still from The Magnificent Seven. Blue shirt, jeans, black hat: exactly how Jeff was dressed in "Introduction to Statistics."
   
• Britta is Vin (Steve McQueen), who signed up after he went broke gambling. Britta's not a gambler as far as we know, but she's bad with her money in other ways. Plus, she loves leather jackets, and Steve McQueen could wear the hell out of a leather jacket.
   
• Polish/Palestinian Abed is Irish/Mexican Bernardo O'Reilley (Charles Bronson). The characters don't have much in common beyond that, but hey, it's not an exact science.
   
• Shirley is Britt (James Coburn), the quiet cowboy who was deadly with a knife. Granted, Shirley's not that quiet, but her outward good cheer masks a steely inner resolve. And she will cut you.
   
• Annie is Chico (Horst Buchholz), the inexperienced hothead. She's the youngest member of the group, eager to prove herself. Maybe she's not much of a hothead, but she has tendencies in that direction.
   
• Troy is Lee (Robert Vaughn), the gunfighter who lost his nerve. This parallels what happened to Troy in high school, when he injured himself doing a keg flip because he couldn't take the pressure of playing in front of a scout.
   
• Pierce is Harry (Brad Dexter). Harry signs on because he believes there's treasure to be found; when it becomes clear that's not the case, he leaves, but ultimately returns for the final battle. This is essentially similar to Pierce's behavior in "Abed's Uncontrollable Christmas"—he leaves when the cookies are gone, but comes back to continue helping Abed find the meaning of Christmas.

When I was originally posited these to @Zev04, he suggested Chang as Calvera (Eli Wallach), the head bandit, and Dean Pelton as a villager. Chang certainly works as the villain of the piece, but his double-dealing in "A Fistful of Paintballs" suggests another character: Sotero (Rico Alaniz), the villager who invited Calvera and his gang back into the village in hopes of avoiding a battle. That leaves us without a Calvera, though. Dean Spreck? Vice Dean Laybourne? Mike the bully? None are as satisfying as Chang.

As for the Dean, he's got to be Miguel (Natividad Vacío), the villager who was so excited about learning to use a gun that he couldn't shoot straight. And of course Leonard is the Old Man (Vladimir Sokoloff).

Note: Cross-posted to community_tv.

@LaraRoseH Your tweets from when I slept have clarified some things for me. It seems to me that a lot of what you say only makes sense if you assume "fan" and "Rose/10 shipper" are synonymous. E.g., the idea that you can't find people to discuss the show with. Which seems impossible given that the audience has grown since 10 left. Likewise the idea the show is too different under SM. It is different, of course; it would have to be, since RTD and SM have different visions and are trying to tell different kinds of stories, but change is integral to Doctor Who, even lots of really big changes happening all at once. (See, for example, the transition from 2 to 3, which had not just a new Doctor and new companions but went from black-and-white to color and had the Doctor stranded on Earth without a working TARDIS.)

(While we're talking about the old series, I'll also say that while having the Doctor regenerate without a prolonged coda may arguably be unfair to fans, it's also the norm. It may also be worth noting that if you remove the coda from 10's regeneration and have him regenerate immediately after sacrificing himself to save Wilf, it's almost identical to the way 5 regenerated in "The Caves of Androzani," which most longtime fans hold up the the best regeneration story the series has ever done. Here's the regeneration scene: http://youtu.be/qvAenK95PfQ)

(ETA, April 26: Coincidentally, I just happened to read a review of "The Caves of Androzani" that makes the point that Spectrox poisoning that ultimately forces the Doctor to regenerate occurs in the first of the four episodes, making the entire story a prolonged pre-regeneration coda. But my main objection to 10's coda wasn't that it was a coda, but that it was maudlin and redundant. (The latter especially, because the one part of the coda that worked for me was his visit with Joan Redfern's granddaughter, though that may have something to do with my feeling that losing Joan was a far more profound loss for him than losing Rose.) And speaking of 10, I'd be interested in hearing your take on the criticism of the RTD found in the comments. Start here—which doesn't mention RTD at all, but when that conversation starts, it's in response to that comment.)

Back on point, I think the show under SM is largely the same as it was under RTD or John Nathan-Turner or Barry Letts or Verity Lambert. The actors and props have changed, as has the storytelling style, but it's still the same show, which is why Doctor Who is so amazing. It's always changing, yet it's always the same. Not every storytelling/production approach to the series works equally well, but at the same time none of them have been complete failures nor unqualified successes.

But that constant change makes it hard to be a fan of! Especially, I think, for modern, ship-oriented fans. If your fanaticism is directed toward 10's relationship with Rose, any deviation from that will be viewed negatively (see, for example, the Hugo Award-winning "The Girl in the Fireplace," which Rose/10 shippers hate and nearly everyone else loves) and its disappearance could cause you to lose interest altogether. And it goes without saying that those fans would feel personally insulted if the new producer was less than wholly complimentary toward Rose. (Full disclosure: I thought Rose was a very good companion. Not the best ever—not even 10's best—but definitely in my top five. And while I don't know how SM insulted her, it's not that hard to find insulting things to say about Rose. I liked her, but let's ask Mickey Smith if she ever did anything that deserved to be insulted.) But it's not just a NewWho phenomenon; I know there were people who stopped watching when Tom Baker left. Or when the Doctor was stranded on Earth. 6 drove away a lot of people. It's an inherent risk when a show changes, and no show has ever changed as much as Doctor Who.

And I totally get that! Having been in situations where a change in direction or the departure of certain characters prompted me to drop a show, I understand why some of them chose to give up on the show when the specific thing that they were fans of went away (or will go away, in the case of the Ponds and Matt Smith). I'm just not convinced they're actually Doctor Who fans.

Lastly, I still don't understand what you're saying about the budget. To my way of thinking, quality and budget have very little to do with one another. A bigger budget may have made the Scribble Monster or the Dobby!Doctor look better, but "Fear Her" still would've been 10's weakest story, and the idea of being able to rejuvenate yourself by attuning yourself to the collective psychic energy of the planet would still be silly hand-waving. Conversely, a more realistic giant bug-thing wouldn't have made "Turn Left" better, except in the most superficial way. (See also the movies Jaws and Alien.) But I'll admit my opinion on this may be informed by having become a fan during its original run, when the effect were genuinely bad even by the low standards of the day.
 

Earlier today I was thinking about character names, and for some reason the name "Mrs. Frouchy" popped into my head. If you know anything about American Girl dolls, you may recognize the name; she was the matron of Cold Rock House, the orphanage featured in the series of books starring Samantha and the made-for-TV movie based on them.

I've always loved the name. It is, to quote me, "delightfully Dickensian." It's also a name that, I realized today, is homophonically shared by a prominent philanthropist here in Madison, Jerome Frautschi, who just happens to be married to Pleasant Rowland, the founder of American Girl. What a coincidence!
 

Yesterday, I drove down to Dekalb, Illinois, to attend a lecture at Northern Illinois University by Dr. Paul Booth, a professor of new media and technology at DePaul University, entitled "Fan I Am: Hyperreal Fandom and Parody." He was speaking on a subject peculiarly near and dear to my heart: Inspector Spacetime fandom.

For those of you who aren't familiar with Inspector Spacetime, it is a TV show within the universe of the NBC sitcom Community. It was introduced in the first episode of the third season as a British science fiction show that premiered in 1962. The main characters are a mysterious man called the Inspector, who wears a bowler hat and a trench coat, and a man named Constable Reggie, who dresses as a police officer. They travel through space and time in something that resembles a red telephone booth, and fight mechanical creatures called Blorgons, which shoot laser beams out of guns attached to their bodies and shout, "eradicate!" (In other words, it's a Doctor Who knock-off.) And until the tenth episode of the season, that was literally everything that was known about Inspector Spacetime.

Despite that, a TV Tropes entry about Inspector Spacetime was created two days after the episode aired, and fans started inventing a history for the show: which actors had played previous incarnations of the Inspector—not to mention that there had been previous incarnations—names of previous Constables, other enemies, and so on. A message board followed quickly. Then an "Inspector Spacetime Confessions" site was created on Tumblr, and people started writing fan fiction and making fan art, and doing all the other sorts of things fans do. But they were doing it in support of a property that, in large part, they themselves had invented. Because of this unusual overlap of producers and fans. Dr. Booth believes Inspector Spacetime fandom to be "a key text in fan studies and social media."

As a big fan of Community, I was naturally interested in the topic. But I was also a little worried about what Dr. Booth might say, because the promotional materials issued by NIU didn't mention Community, just Doctor Who. Now, I'm a fan of Doctor Who, and have been for 31 years, but it distressed me to think that Community might go unmentioned, so it seemed important that an actual Community fan be present just in case someone was needed to speak up on behalf of the show. (Being a fan makes you do weird things. Which is sort of the point of the lecture, come to think of it.) And since my grandmother happens to live in Dekalb, I had another (arguably better) reason to make the two-hour drive.

I plan to do a more thorough write-up of the presentation and post it over at Community 101 later today or tomorrow, but for the time being (and so I can find them quickly, Twitter being fairly miserable when it comes to making old Tweets easily available), here are the Tweets I made during the lecture:

( #faniam )

And if that wasn't enough for you, here's a recording of the whole lecture by randomthunk!

 

Tuesday was Election Day here in Wisconsin! An election day, I should say: the second one of six we'll have this year. Back in February we has the primary for municipal offices—mayors, supervisors, school board members, that sort of thing—and judges. Yesterday was the general election for those races, and the Presidential preference primary. Next month we have the primary for the recall of Governor Walker, and in June the actual recall election. In August we've got the U.S. Congressional primaries, then finally in November the general Federal election.

As usual, I spent the day working as an election official. It was not a busy day—we approached but failed to reach 400 voters among the two wards my polling place serves—so I had a chance to winnow down the stack of puzzles I carry in my backpack to do on the bus. By the end of the day, I'd completed four crosswords—three daily, one Sunday—three word searches, three Jumbles, three Cryptoquotes, six KenKens—three 4x4 and three 6x6—and one sudoku. Productive!

( What I did other than puzzles )

( Results in my local races )

( Odd results in McFarland )

( Problems in Waukesha )
 

Spotted these on darkpoole's Facebook page today. It's a series of advertisements for LEGO, each one depicting… well, try to guess. You can click on the pictures to see them at a larger size, though I can't imagine that would help any.

Hey, check this out:

Everyone, @JHeaton416's avatar is amazing. And that's high praise coming from my ugly naked ass. #TroyVsAbedThurs8pmNBC

— Andy Bobrow (@abobrow) March 28, 2012

Andy Bobrow is one of the Community writers, and the avatar he's talking about is essentially the same as the one used on this post. (The only significant difference between the two is that Twitter version has a white background instead of a blue one.) But he's not the only person associated with Community to comment on my avatar:

Now, if someone from the Obama campaign would just take notice…

Pursuant to yesterday's post about Mass Effect 3:



Via chainsawsuit by Kris Straub
 

If I had one of those supercomputers like you see in the movies—you know, the kind that can scan every database and website instantaneously—I'd use it to compile a list of people who have criticized George Lucas for changing the Star Wars movies to better suit his own personal creative vision.

And then I'd compile a list of people who didn't like the way Mass Effect 3 ends and have demanded that Bioware change the ending to something they, the gamers, like better.

Then I would cross-reference the two lists to create a third list, containing the names and addresses of everyone who appears on both lists.

Then I would use my vast personal fortune—my assumption is that if I had a supercomputer like that, I would also have a vast personal fortune—to visit every person on that third list and smack them right upside the head.