Meanwhile, on the other side of "The Pond"...

View of White Cliffs of Dover from France by J Marsh is licensed under CC BY 2.0

For various reasons (one of my sons wanted to watch Doctor Who), I'm watching PBS at the moment, which apparently turns into a poor American's mirror of the BBC on Saturday nights. While I wait for things to get moving and for the episode to start, I figured I'd see what's on BBC News:

Is the French National Anthem Racist?

Well, it's not the Horst-Wessel-Lied, if that's what you're asking.

The Carribean colony that brought down Scotland

The Darién is still a mess, even in modern times. If you've ever asked yourself why you can't just drive to Argentina, like, right now, it's because of the Darién Gap. In a way, it's nice to know that there are still places modern technology can barely touch, especially when previously forbidding places like the North Pole are accessible via pickup truck.

10 things we didn't know last week

Look - the BBC can do whimsy, too! For example, we now know the limitations of snail homing abilities.

Co-op Group members approve governance shakeup

Though it sounds like a bad day at the local Dr. Bronner's soap distributor, it's actually something far worse - the Co-Op Group was founded over 150 years ago, employs over 100,000 people, and has interests in several industries in Great Britain, including banking and insurance. It's the latter two that have absolutely decimated the Co-Op Group's balance sheet over the past few years, to the tune of £2.5 billion.

Long story short, the economy might be improving, but it's not improving for one of the largest companies in the financial capital of the planet. That's not a good sign.

With that, Doctor Who is on. Don't blink...

What's my cultural dealbreaker?

Vintage Television by Gary Lund is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.

This article on the A.V. Club got me thinking - what is my cultural dealbreaker? What is something that, if a new acquaintance came up to me and said, "Hey, I like this," I would roll my eyes at and walk away?

I'm going to start with one of the answers I more or less agree with:

Caroline Siede
I’m going to get a bit meta here and say that my pop culture dealbreaker is a person with a pop culture dealbreaker. While that might seem like conflict avoidance, it’s actually just a way for me to defend my horrible, horrible taste. I have a high tolerance—perhaps even a sadistic fondness—for truly terrible entertainment. 

My taste in pop culture is legendarily bad. I bought a TJ Hooker DVD box set that is at a friend's house because, if I tried to watch it at home, I'd no longer have someone to sleep next to or share the rent with (slight exaggeration, but still). I own several They Might Be Giants and Weird Al Yankovic albums. I've also been spending more time focusing on family, work and politics and less time following pop culture - note that this isn't some sort of grand statement of maturity or superiority but simply an acknowledgement that my priorities have changed and I have responsibilities now that I didn't have previously. Consequently, I'm not going to begrudge someone their opinion on pop culture - there are things I like, there are things others like, and I'm secure enough in my own taste where I don't feel particularly threatened by what others like if it happens to differ from my own. To be honest, given the virtually nonexistent amount of time I have to keep track of what's new and exciting, finding someone who likes something I don't gives me a rare opportunity to expand my horizons a bit.

That's not to say that I don't have strong opinions about certain pop culture products, though. First, someone else from the original article that I agree with:

Caroline Framke
I agree with 90 percent of what Other Caroline said about not liking pop culture dealbreakers, except that I totally have a pop culture dealbreaker. I do an actual, physical double take when someone tells me they like the Saw movies. It’s one thing to like horror—I don’t, but only because I’m too skittish for a genre that thrives on sudden movements—but torture porn is vile. I just can’t see the appeal or the point of watching a demented psychopath peel co-eds’ knuckles off with a rusty fishing hook. So while anyone who does like Saw won’t necessarily lose my respect, they will make me back away slowly.

One of the reasons I enjoy reading, whether you're talking about blogs, books, or whatever, is that I oftentimes find myself experiencing a feeling about something that I can't quite put into words. When I watched the first Saw movie, something about it felt almost morally offensive to me in a way that I couldn't quite pin down. Then, I watched Saw 2, and felt the same feeling even more strongly than before. What frustrated me about the feeling was that it was different from my usual objections to most horror movies - they're mindless, they require a suspension of disbelief I have troubles reaching, they're thinly veiled morality plays. Then I started reading some of Bob Grimm's reviews about the Saw movies and that's when it hit me - torture porn. The Saw movies were nothing more than porn, only instead of sex, it was torture. There was no plot. There was no acting. It wasn't even all that scary. It was just people getting tortured for no particular reason. Now I finally had a term I could use to sum up my feelings, an anchor that I could use to ground the emotional state those movies created in me. Without reading those reviews, I would have labored under an endlessly inchoate sense that something was wrong with those movies, a wrong I wasn't previously familiar with.

No, I didn't like Hostel, either. Thanks for asking.

Another cultural touchstone that I'm not particularly fond of is The Big Bang Theory. I'm not going to go into lengthy detail about why - that's something other people have dug into far better than I can. However, if I had to sum my feelings up in a sentence, I'd say that I'm not sure if the show's laughing with me or at me, and I'm quite certain I know what the audience is doing. I've been compared to Sheldon enough times by enough people to know that it's not a good-natured comparison, which tells me plenty about the audience for that particular show.

Finally, there's news television. I'm lumping MSNBC, Fox News, CNN, RT and the rest in this pile - I don't care what your ideological spectrum is, it's all crap. At its best, it's affirmation, not information. At its worst, it's repetitive sports television for people that want to feel "smarter" than people that watch SportsCenter. Go ahead, explain to me the difference between analyzing a late-April baseball game for half an hour, inning by inning, and masticating on the latest developments in the Benghazi "scandal". Explain to me how one has more impact on the world than the other. Take your time. Or perhaps you'd like to explain to me why I should care that some cute American girl may or may not have killed someone in Italy. Don't get me wrong, I follow the news. I just read it. I can skim news, filtering out the time-filling outrage fuel, a lot faster than I can sit through a commercial-laden news show. I can draw my own conclusions without having some talking head somewhere explain to me which side "lost" this particular down possession inning... er... news cycle.

Even so, I have friends that liked the Saw movies (at least the first couple, anyway), I have more than a few friends that enjoy The Big Bang Theory - and yes, they even remained friends after comparing me to Sheldon - and I even have friends that watch news television from time to time. Different people are into different things and different people are not into different things. That's part of what people interesting - learning not only what we like from each other but also discovering what we don't like.

Now, if you'll excuse me, someone on the Internet just said that Scream Blacula Scream is vapid and unwatchable. I'll be back after I explain via geometrical proof why they are hopelessly wrong.

An Older Man and a Young, Impressionable Woman

AV Club recently finished their retrospective review of the new Doctor Who's 2nd Season, which is as far as I've made it into the "new" series myself. Since the theme of the season was the nature and lasting power of 10/Rose's relationship, especially as the season moved along, I figured I might as well do the fashionable thing and chime in on the relationship as well. Granted, it's been several years since the season was initially released, so I doubt I'm going to break any new ground here, but better late than never, I suppose.

At its core, Rose's relationship with the 10th Doctor was pretty straightforward - he's an older (about 700 years older, more or less), well-traveled gentleman and she's a young, impressionable woman. Rose loves the Doctor in a near-obsessive, all-consuming way, the way a teenager falls in love with someone. She wasn't just willing to sacrifice her previous life - her family, her friends, her job, her neighborhood, everything - for the Doctor, she actively encouraged him, practically begging, to take her up on it. The 9th Doctor was reluctant to do that; he cared for Rose the way an father-figure or an older brother might, at least until the end, and attempted to preserve some distance between the two. The 10th Doctor, however, actively reveled in the attention in the same way that a 40+-year-old millionaire might appreciate the unbalanced devotion of a pretty 18-year-old - he enjoyed the way she made him feel, the way she encouraged instigated his long-forgotten, more youthful tendencies (hence the running gag with Queen Victoria in "Tooth and Claw"), and rewarded her accordingly.

Unfortunately, at least for Rose, the Doctor had 700 years of perspective to draw from. He could never feel the same way about Rose that Rose felt about the Doctor because the Doctor ultimately had a life outside of Rose. Rose's entire existence had become co-dependently wrapped around the Doctor's - she lived exclusively for him. The Doctor, however, had a life before Rose and he knew that he would have a life after Rose. Sooner or later, the relationship had to end, either through death, boredom, or Rose getting sucked into a parallel universe. The writing was on the wall after the "The Girl In The Fireplace" - as fun and eager and complimentary as Rose might have been, she would never be an intellectual equal to the Doctor, someone that he would be able to look at eye-to-eye and experience attraction from that connection. When the Doctor found the Madame de Pompadour, and when she clearly expressed interest in him, his reaction was not that of a man guilty of betraying a lover but instead a man lost in a desert, enjoying a rare, satisfying drink. Without the Doctor, the Madame de Pompadour was still the mistress of the King of France - Rose, however, saw herself as nothing without the Doctor and they both felt that acutely.

In the end, for Rose's health as well as the Doctor's, the relationship needed to end. Rose needed an opportunity to discover that there is life after the Doctor, though I wouldn't be especially surprised if, like a lot of people that endlessly yearn for a particularly intense, lost love, she never really recovers. The Doctor, meanwhile, needs someone that he can respect and can look him in the eye, someone that can hold him more or less responsible for his actions.

Now to see if he finds that in season 3.