Sunday, August 05, 2012

Cavalock and The Time Lord Regeneration

This is actually an overdue post bout me having one of the best home-cooked dinners ever. I was extremely fortunate to be invited to a backyard steak dinner last month. The oh-so beautiful and cooked-to-perfection steaks were all done in this here smoker.


Unfortunately once the food started showing up at the dinner table, I pretty much forgot about snapping any more pix. All I can say is it was great food, even greater company and definitely a Saturday nite to remember.



 
A little geek speak time as I look forward to a new season of Doctor Who starting later this year and you catch the trailer right here.

You know it's kinda weird and mildly amusing to see geeks everywhere these days swooning over a 50-year-old British sci-fi series like Doctor Who. I recall reading the novels when I was in primary school decades ago. The books were primarily novelised adaptations of the TV episodes. Yup, that's how I fell in luv with the series, it was through the books cos I have never watched a single episode back then. I remember rather vividly reading about Terror of the Autons, who were alien beings who started animating innocent plastic objects or possessing fashion mannequins, then going on some killing spree. That certainly freaked me out as a kid.

I can't remember what exactly drew me to the books. Maybe it was the dramatic covers with the Doctor and all those alien creatures, cos that was the only time and place that I got any graphic representation of the stories. I believe I have my overactive imagination to thank for as I began to conjure up my own images of the Doctor's adventures. No Internet, no TV shows and certainly no Doctor Who comics either, just words on paper to turn me into, I like to believe, the first few real Doctor Who fans in this tiny country. Current reprints can now be found at local book stores like Kinokuniya, with the original covers too.


It wasn't until I, still in primary school, found the above book at now-defunct book store chain MPH, the Making of Doctor Who, that I really went nuts. It had everything I ever wanted to know about the BBC TV series in there. Bios of all the actors and characters (humans and aliens), behind-the-scenes notes and my favorite, synopsis of every episode till The Hand of Fear where the fourth Doctor finally parted ways with Sarah. Now again this was before Wiki and the Internet, so this little sci-fi encyclopedia never left my grubby little hands for at least a year. After reading each synopsis I would daydream about how the episode would look like on TV. Almost every story was left to my imagination!

But as the years went by, I had all kinds of other geeky stuff to occupy my time so Doctor Who and his companions took a back seat and I mean, waaaaay back seat. Fast forward to 2005 when news of a relaunch series shocked old geeks like me, not unlike a shot from a reactivated Dalek.

So there I was, caught up with the new or relaunched Doctor Who series with other new hipsters. I actually managed to pick up a bootleg DVD of the ninth Doctor series while in Hong Kong several years ago. And when I was in London, I picked up a more than a couple of official Doctor Who goodies. Today, I'm grateful to able to talk (mostly online) to other fans, something I could never do as little kid growing up.

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