"Ssh-- ssh ssh ssh-- he's waking up."

"Huh... buh... wha? What's going on? Who are you?"

"Ssh! Hey, dude. Are you... Don Andreychuk?"

"Uh, what? Who are you?"

"Dave, um, I've got some bad news for you, dude. You... have cancer."

"What?!"

"Yeah. It's, um, yeah, terminal cancer. Bone cancer."

"What?! Who the hell are you? What is this?!"

"See, your doctor didn't know how to break it to you gently, so he sent us to your house. Yeah. You've got terminal bone cancer, dude."

"What?! What?! Oh my [BLEEP] god!"

"Yeah, we figured you'd be pissed. See, we were talking on the way over about how to do this, and Jimmy here tried to come up with a little song about it but he couldn't work out what a dancer would be doing here and then he ran out of rhymes, so, you know, we figured just rip that Band-Aid right off, right?"

"[BLEEP] [BLEEP] [BLEEP]"

"And, yeah, your insurance doesn't cover it. Hey, wait, Prancer, that's one of Santa's reindeers, isn't it?"

"Mother-[BLEEP]"

"Oh, wait-- I think he's crying. Is he crying? Um... Jimmy, get in there with the-- are those tears? Yes! We have tears! And that's... 27 seconds! Yes! Danny Andreychuk, you've just broken the record on... It's A Crying Shame!"

"What?! Oh my god! You're Johnny Knoxville!"

"Yes I am! And you have won-- wait for it-- you have won this episode's grand prize of 10,000 American dollars!"

"Holy [BLEEP] [BLEEP]! Dude, your show [BLEEP] rocks! Damn, I watch it all the time!"

"Thanks for that, Darcy!"

"Dude! I'm on TV!"

"Seriously, though, you've got cancer."

Pass the word on. Whisper it, shout it, write it down on a note and pass it to the person sitting next to you and hey, I saw that, now bring it up to the front of the class and read it out loud so everyone can hear it.

Teaser from Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog on Vimeo.

It starts here on July 15th.

Actually, I probably should have put this up before those 31 people dropped by from my link on James's blog. Um. Carry on.

There's one big problem with the "hints" that Russell T Davies keeps dropping about the Time War, and it's this: Too Many Nouns.

"I was on the front lines at the Fall of Arcadia." "I was there when the Dalek Emperor seized the Cruciform." "I saw your timeship fly into the jaws of the Nightmare Child at the Gates of Elysium."

Name-dropping all these nouns without any context makes us want to know what the bloody context is fer cryin out loud, and if it goes on for too long, we start to suspect that there isn't any. Once is backstory, twice is world-building, but thrice means it's time to deliver.

Now that Russell's no longer devoting all his energy to the TV series proper, let's see a book about the history of the Time War. We don't have to believe it necessarily; it doesn't have to be considered canon; I'm not even thinking of it as a novel, but as a kind of faux reference work. But it would be nice to know that there was a detailed backstory here, rather than just a game of Time War Mad Libs.

"I fought in the Battle of Place Name when Specific Dalek Type opened/stole/activated the Grecian Mythological Thingy. And you try to tell the young people of today that, and they won't believe you."

I look at T'Pol as she lusts after Archer
While her pon farr Quantum Leaps

According to today's Social Studies in the Globe and Mail:

A small group of students at the University of Wyoming is tackling English 4050/5560: Interstellar Message Composition. In one of the semester's first classes, Prof. Jeffrey Lockwood asked the students to summarize the human condition in 250 words, then 50, then 10. [...] At the close of the semester, the students will send their writings to the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute in Mountain View, Calif. Their efforts may one day inspire a message to another world.

10 words: "Please don't kill and eat us, especially not our children."

Just popped onto eBay to look for obscure Dr. Who stuff. While I was there, I also checked out the feedback I'd given to others in the past. I'd done so twice. One comment said "Prompt, efficient and courteous service." The other said "Prompt and efficient."

First thought?

Shit shit shit, the other guy's going to think I thought he wasn't courteous! You stupid thoughtless insensitive bastard! People will glare at you and spit on your shoes when you walk past them on the street!

There's something so wrong with me.

If you were being chased by a swarm of bees, and you found a shotgun full of buckshot, and you picked it up and you fired it at the swarm of bees, and every single piece of buckshot hit one of the bees, wouldn't that just be the coolest thing ever?

After watching The Unicorn and the Wasp with Brandon:

"Don't know if you recognised her, but Agatha Christie was one of the lesbian detectives in Jekyll."

"What??!"

"...I mean, it was the same actress."

"Oh. Gotcha."

I really need to get caught up on my Battlestar Galactica. This morning, my alarm woke me up at 6:20, and I immediately pulled myself out of bed, staggered over to the computer, and e-mailed James: "I just woke up from a dream in which it turned out that Starbuck had actually been to Narnia."

I doubt that I'll be going to see the Prince Caspian movie. I've become considerably more cynical since I saw the first one, and even then I couldn't help but notice that when the handsome blond blue-eyed boy went into battle alongside the allegorical Christians, he used tactics he'd learned from the people who'd been bombing his London home during World War II. Yuh-huh.

While I'm at it, I wish the other departments at work would understand that, in order to do our job properly, we in the closed-captioning department need the best quality audio that it's possible for them to give us. This week's edition of HypaSpace featured a guy who said that board games are steadily growing. It also came to us with no audio in the left speaker due to a dubbing bay with a loose cable, and very nearly went out captioned as "Board games are deadly boring." Slightly different meaning there.