Doctors and Companions!

We have seen the new Doctor Who at last. Toys and I did a mini-marathon on the first three downloads and then followed it up the following night - last night - with epsiode 4, and to cut to the chase, I don't know when I've been this excited about a new show. I pretty much went immediately to the good ol' BBC Cult site and ran around downloading wallpapers, which are doing that pleasant screen-savery cycle through on my machine right now. Ahhh. ( Various Doctor Thoughts, Old and New )

I'm Not Dead Yet...

Looks like my poor beleagured immune system hasn't given up the ghost yet - I'm pretty much over the cold I got with such a vengeance halfway through Thursday, so that's half a day of sinus misery coming, four days of actual head cold, and one half day (less, really) to full recovery. Not bad. Probably just not as virulent a strain of whatever as the last few colds I'd had over the last few years (typically with chest coughs that last months), or maybe I'm better rested these days. Whichever it is, I'm grateful.

And damn, but I am proud of myself! To celebrate my return to something like normal energy and lack of overt ear-stuffiness, I took myself out for a bike ride and - yes! - finally made it all the way out to the ocean and back through Golden Gate Park, a ride I've been wanting to work myself up to for some time. Bear in mind that a) my bicycle has no gears, but is a sort of grown up's foot-brake-style beachcomber, and b) on my previous rides, I've limited myself to a straightaway with only gentle inclines going out and back, about a 30-block circuit. The beach ride is almost exactly 40 blocks out and then the same coming back, not counting the 4-block cutover from my street to the park itself, which is more than twice my usual route and includes actual hilly grades to navigate - small ones, granted, by SF standards, but no joke either with no low gear. I had to stop a couple times for rest - one collapse in nice green grass, and one point around 20th Ave where I had to get off and push the machine up a particulary stubborn hill, both on the return leg - but all in all, I made good time, didn't feel like I was having a heart attack, and managed to hump the rig back up my apartment stairs at the end without much trouble, usually the hardest part. Now, if I can just keep this up... we'll see how long it takes me before I can dare to try the Presidio, which has a) bigger hills and b) more and faster traffic. By then I'll be butch, by gum. Feel my muscles! Um, you know, in the future. When I have them. : )

Indomitable

Spamming now today, I'm afraid. But oh my, now this. I mean, I'd gone hunting around for icons of new Doctor and whatnot, but then here's this whole site about the Tom Baker love. And I can't help but love the sensibilty of whoever made a desktop picture out of one of the Doc's best quotes on the human species, even though the image quality isn't so great, there. From "The Ark in Space": Homo sapien. What an inventive, invincible species... it's only been a few million years since they crawled up out of the mud and learned to walk. Puny, defenceless bipeds, they survived flood and famine and plague. They survived cosmic wars and holocausts. And now, here they are, out among the stars, waiting to begin a new life... ready to outsit eternity. They're indomitable. Indomitable!

It is really hard to capture in a single image the whole "thing" about Tom Baker, isn't it? He's not easily summed up in a photo. So much of it's the movement and the voice, the posture. His features are... quirks, really. Endearing, but nearly irrelevant. Like the hat and the scarf. It's the whole package that makes him attractive, even though objectively he's not exactly what you'd point to and say, "now there's a dreamy one!"

And actually, now that I think about, I can point to this phenomenon to explain something to whoever might like to dismiss fangirlish Spike love as merely due to JM's abs and chiseled cheeks. No, it's not that shallow, folks, really. Not that I feel like I should have to excuse myself if it was.

I'm so sad the image quality is so low on that picture with Sarah Jane and her beach ball! Must a source for high-quality screencaps. Or learn to make them myself...