Merry Christmas, Bannakaffalatta!

Last night, on my way to the Legion of Rassilon meeting, I stopped at a little fast-food Greek place for some falafel, since I didn't feel like yet another Carl's Jr. chicken salad. (The Legion meets at a Carl's Jr., which lets us take over a big meeting room space because we bring them lots of extra business in the evening when they don't get much traffic.) I ran into two other Legion members who had stopped there with the same idea, and so we had a pleasant chat over dinner. It was nice - my one (relatively minor) complaint with the fan club is that we all tend to show up, say hello, watch videos, and go home, so it was nice to get a little extra socializing in.

Then we went to the meeting and watched Voyage of the Damned, the latest Doctor Who Christmas special. I wasn't quite sure what to expect of this one. First, because it guest-starred Kylie Minogue. Second, because fan reaction this time around seems very polarized, with lots of fans being delighted and lots of fans demanding writer Russell T. Davies's head on a plate.

The short summary: Kylie was fine (not brilliant, necessarily, but equal to the part), and it was a good fun Christmas special. I think I probably liked it better than last year's The Runaway Bride. I think that the Christmas special does need to be judged a little differently than a typical episode of Doctor Who. Not that its being a Christmas special is an excuse to do any old rubbish, but I think that you need to expect that the Christmas special will be a light-hearted romp with a touch of sentimentality. Perhaps even a bit of schmaltz.

I have to admit that I kind of wanted the three-foot high spiky-headed red alien Bannakaffalatta to stick around as a recurring character. Even if Davies did make him refer to himself in the third person constantly, just so we could hear "Bannakaffalatta" as many times as possible.

I was going to try to do a detailed review, but instead I'll link to this really funny summary, which is more entertaining and probably tells you everything you need to know.

I'm not sure yet, but I think I like the new arrangement of the theme tune. We'll see how it stands the test of time.

Impressions from the Season 4 trailer: There is Donna. And Ood. And ancient Romans. Hey, was that UNIT? It looks like fun, but didn't tell me anything I didn't already know about season 4.

Impressions from the Torchwood season 2 trailer: Martha will pwn them all.

Actually, MovableType just hates me

So, I fixed the disk space issue over on Spaceling Cafe, only to discover that that was the least of my problems. I still can't update the blog because my previously perfectly functional MovableType templates are full of errors. I think my Movable Type installation may have been upgraded recently - my hosting provider does that for me occasionally, but this is the first time it's ever seriously broken anything.

It looks like the quickest fix might be to just rip out all of the code related to displaying comments, which would be inelegant. Or to grab some premade templates from somewhere. But I've had enough of dealing with it today.

Blog Service Semi-Restored

Well, I made dinner, and ate dinner, and took a trip to Borders with Daniel, and when I came home I had 7 emails notifying me of comment spam over on Spaceling Cafe. Oy vey. Somehow it peculiarly rankles to be getting comment spam on a blog I can't even post to. So, I did some crude surgery on the templates, and set comments to authenticated commenters only. And I was able to rebuild the blog. Yay!

I can't promise that this means the return of regular blogging service over on Spaceling Cafe, but it at least means that it's possible.

I am now going to make tea and watch some Doctor Who.