With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
The good life, as I conceive it, is a happy life. I do not mean that if you are good you will be happy - I mean that if you are happy you will be good.
Too much sanity may be madness and the maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be.
I enjoy paying taxes. With them I buy civilization.
2003-01-02 - 12:17 a.m.
So I survived New Year’s Eve without an emotional scratch. I actually went through with my Doctor Who Marathon. I watched two serials with my Tom Baker, the Fourth Doctor, my favourite. It should be obvious that the best way to spend the ultimate celebration of chronology is by watching the adventures of the most famous of all Time Lords. I guess this will need some explaining for some, if not most of you.
Doctor Who was a series on the BBC. It was first broadcast in 1963 and ran for over 25 years. Over the years seven actors played The Doctor. It was explained on the show by The Doctor regenerating. He was a Time Lord, not a human and they have the ability to regenerate ten times. He was over 750 years old by the end of the series’ run. When The Doctor Regenerates, he not only changes his looks but his whole personality.
Doctor Who is one of my defining obsessions. My username on FHDC is DrWhoFru. DW has one of the great virtues as Buffy. It blends serious stories with a dry sense of humour. The humour is somewhat more whimsical than on Buffy. It often revolved around The Doctor’s idiosyncrasies. The Fourth Doctor was very Bohemian. He combined brilliance with childishness. One of my favourite quotes of his was; There's no point in being grown up if you can't be childish sometimes. The key to his success in The Invasion of Time one of the serials I watched was his ability to
If you notice, I always call him “The Doctor.” His name was not “Doctor Who.” That was the title because no one knew who he really was. They didn’t say he was a Time Lord for years on the show.
When the show declined it did so for exactly the same reason that Buffy declined, they lost the fine touch needed to balance the serious story with the humour. It became heavy handed with the humour just thrown in, not integrated into the stories. It lost the subtly.
One piece of Doctor Who Trivia. Douglas Adams was the script editor for part of the Fourth Doctor era. He wrote a number of Episodes including City of Fear in which John Cleese made a cameo. There was one serial Shada, that was not completed because of a strike at the BBC. Adams recycled the plot as Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency.”
Before the Doctor Who Marathon I watched Woody Allen’s The Curse of the Jade Scorpion. I had missed it in the theatre. I love Woody Allen and try to see all his comedies, I have been remiss the last couple of years. It was brilliant. It worked not only as a comedy but as a mystery. Woody’s character is an insurance investigator who commits jewel heists under hypnosis. He is investigating the thefts and doesn’t know that he is the perpetrator.
This afternoon I saw a few episodes of another of my defining TV series, Max Headroom. Doctor Who lasted for over two decades, Max Headroom only lasted 14 episodes. For those of you too young to remember Max was something of a sensation for a while in the late eighties. Max was a cyber human, a computer program based on the mind and memories of Edison Carter, a TV reporter “20 minutes into the future.” The thing is Max existed before the show did. He was a pitchman for Coke, and had a talk show where he’d interview celebrities. I was never fond of these so I was shocked to find out how good the show was. It was live action cyberpunk. The show also managed to balance humor and drama. It took place in a far bleaker world than either Buffy or Doctor Who. A dystopia where TV networks run the world and it is illegal to turn off the television. They don’t even have off switches. The satire was Swiftian, and the look unique. The closest thing to it was the film Brazil which oddly enough I didn’t like.
Being able to see Max Headroom is what cable TV is about. It wasn’t popular enough with the masses to justify its existence on the networks but to a small core audience it’s priceless. It is running on Tech TV that I get now that I have digital cable.
I had some other things to write about today but I think I’ll save them for tomorrow. Not much should happen to be between now and my next update. I’ll just add that my friend Marc called today and he said he can see DVN Saturday. I can’t wait.
The International Jewish Banking Conspiracy - October 07, 2008
On the Road to Westchester County - October 06, 2008
Inside the Madison Square Studio - October 05, 2008
I'm a Bosniac and I'm debating like I've never debated before - October 03, 2008
Islands in the Stream of Consciousness - October 02, 2008
Email me: GordonLew at gmail
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. Horvendile 2003-01-02
