Michael Lee's Train of Thought

The Long Tail: Massively parallel culture

I think this is quite interesting. I don't think it's as new as he makes it sound -- it's just, well, more so. But it looks like a blog that I'll want to review more -- how we all participate in different information sources and have our degree of specialization...

The Dregs - A Capella Irish Pub Music
Can't go wrong with some local a capella Irish music... fun stuff, and they have a show tomorrow with the release of their new CD.

There are two things that I thought I would never see:

a) Michael Grade singing the praises of Doctor Who

b) Roger Waters is going to be playing with Pink Floyd for the London Live 8 concert.

One would be tempted to make some comment about the Michael Jackson verdict, but honestly, I'm not that surprised, and that interests me a whole lot less than those two...

Labels: doctorwho

SyFy Portal is also campaigning for the best show not on American television...of course, Doctor Who.

Labels: doctorwho

Got to love that some Dalek 'kidnappers' demand Doctor.

Obviously, someone has too much time on their hands...

I had watched all of UFO a couple of years ago, and despite the delightful bright 1970 feel to it, it was a wonderously dark series that I enjoyed quite a bit.

I'm sad to see that two of the stars of the series, Ed Bishop and Michael Billington, have passed away with days of each other, according to this Gerry Anderson fansite.

A sad day for fans of British Cult television.

One of the reasons why I was excited by having Marv Wolfman and Len Wein at CONvergence this July is that for those of us who really first came to comics between, say, 1975 and 1985, the odds are really, really high that the first superhero comic you got, whether it was for DC or Marvel, was either written by or edited by one or the other of them.

I knew that Marv Wolfman was writing for Fantastic Four around issue 200, when I first started to read the comic regularly, but when I picked up Fantastic Four Visionaries: George Perez, Vol. 1 today, I discovered that Len Wein was writing for it before that, with some of the earliest comics that I ever got, when they would be packaged up in random groups of three, where you'd see what two of the issues were, but the third would be a surprise.

Labels: convergence

I got my copies of the two North American Doctor Who DVDs today, from Who NA, one place that I go to for many of a lot of my Doctor Who related purchases, especially CDs. And I was stunned to discover that the DVD for The Leisure Hive contained a flyer for the new Doctor Who series, and advertised the various new books connecting to the series. It's the first acknowledgemnt I've really seen from any official capacity that there even is a new Doctor Who series as far as this country is concerned.

It's very odd, considering that the series has been more successful in the UK than any of us could have possibily imagined, that there's been so little word about how it will get officially distributed in this country. There's a lot of enthusiastic talk in Doctor Who Magazine and online amongst British fans about how mainstream the series is now days, when it's almost as cultish as ever in this country.

As someone who has loved Doctor Who for over two decades, though, I'm happy that the new series got it right for the UK audience, as opposed to falling into the middle of the ocean trying to make it big in America. As I've pointed out before, it quite frequently takes a year or so for things to cross over to an American cable station.

Labels: doctorwho

I highly recommend Little Britain, an odd British sketch comedy show narrated by Tom Baker and starring Matt Lucas and David Walliams, with occasional appearances by Anthony "Giles on Buffy" Head. It's a hysterically funny series.

In the "how long does it take to get to America" curiousity file, I point out that this DVD originally came out in the UK in October of 2004, and will come out in August of 2005. It's aired on BBC America since 2004, and originally aired on the BBC in 2003. (There has since been a second series.)

Labels: comedy, television