Doctor Who

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“He had gone often alone into the void places seeking the Imperishable Flame”

It’s the day of the moon today.  By which I am not referring to Doctor Who, series 6, episode 2 (the second part of a two-parter) which was called The Day of the Moon, if memory serves.  That was a good episode, and it tied into a long arc of a storyline that Stephen Moffat had put into motion in series 4, when he wasn’t even the show runner yet.  But it has nothing to do with my first sentence, today.

No, I am simply referring to the fact that this is Monday, the weekday named (in English and some other languages) for the moon.  It’s also the last day of August in 2026.

I occasionally wonder, what if Tsukino Usagi, AKA Sailor Moon, recognized that her name was associated with the first day of the work week (and of the school week).  I wonder this because Usagi is notoriously not fond of having to go to school.  She’s also something of a crybaby, and I can just imagine her lamenting the fact that her Sailor Senshi name is linked to the start of the work week.  I can also imagine her being jealous of Sailor Venus, since in Spanish at least, that is associated with Friday (Viernes).  Sailor Venus probably wouldn’t care.

And it also only just occurred to me to wonder what had happened to Sailor Pluto once Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet*.  I mean, if she’s really more associated with the God of the Underworld than with the now-dwarf planet, as does seem to be the case in the manga and anime, then I guess it’s fine.

Perhaps Sailor Pluto wryly smiled and shook her head indulgently upon learning that the humans had named a very small, very icy object among countless other similar objects, with a highly eccentric orbit that isn’t even in the same plane as that of the planets, after her namesake.  And she might indulgently shrug upon hearing of the more recent reclassification.  She probably didn’t care much, but she might well have known.  She was one of the Sailor Senshi who never seemed really to revert to a truly mortal form nor to have been reincarnated as a normal human.

Okay, well, that was a weird little discursion that handily demonstrates some aspects of my rather niche nerd status.  I went from Doctor Who right over to Sailor Moon (while making passing references to planetary astronomy).  That’s fine, though.  I really like both…series, sagas, stories?  I’m not sure the best word to use to encompass them both.  Perhaps “universes” is good.

It does annoy me that we now use the word “universe” when referring to things that might be merely one of many, of perhaps infinite, things, when “uni” means one**, with the implication that it is the only one.  I wish we could find a better term, so we could go back to using Universe, with the inherent capital “U”, to refer to whatever encompasses everything.

I had intended to use the term “metaverse” in my own stories, such as The Dark Fairy and the Desperado, that dealt with many planes and subsections of existence, but then Fuckerberg stole the term.  And I did start thinking about it and using it way before he arrogated it to his pathetic little virtual empire.  Then I had to switch to “Omniverse”, which may actually be a more accurate term than Metaverse, but it doesn’t sound as good in my opinion.

So, yeah, now (even in legitimate physics) there is the general use of (small u) universes, which is almost inherently contradictory.  Many Worlds may be better, but its a little nonspecific.  There are, many worlds, many worlds just in our solar system.

Maybe the term “polyverse” might work?  Perhaps “facets”?  I don’t know.  I suppose it doesn’t matter much.  It’s just me dwelling on and being bothered by things that don’t really even register to most other people.  Thoughts unlike those of my brethren, indeed.

I hope you have a great day.

*I was resistant to the notion when I first heard about it, from my kids as it turns out.  But I looked into it, and I heard the arguments‒perhaps most accessibly addressed by Neil DeGrasse Tyson‒and I was convinced.  It turns out that the international astronomical community doesn’t lightly go and change the designation of something, knowing there will be many pissed off Boomers and Gen-Xers (Hello!), but does so only with very well thought-out reasons.

**Though, to refer to cartoons again, Uni was also the name of the little unicorn on which the barbarian character doted in the cartoon Dungeons and Dragons from way back when.

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Well, ain’t we a pear, Raggedy Partridge?

Well, today it really is Christmas Eve, with just one “Eve”.  We are approaching day zero, then there will be no more “Eves”.  You might say we will be eves dropping (har).  But don’t worry, there will be no associated invasion of privacy‒except perhaps by Santa Claus, who supposedly sees you when you’re sleeping (creepy) and knows when you’re awake (vaguely threatening).  Also, he supposedly knows if you’ve been bad or good, but we are not given any list of criteria‒not so much as one criterion, in a pear tree or elsewhere‒by which he measures or judges your goodness or badness.

I suspect that any true Santa Claus* would be very forgiving, especially with children, especially if they were trying.

Okay, sorry, that was all silly.  Then again, I guess some people do call this the silly season.  At least, that’s what Martin Riggs called it in Lethal Weapon, when he was trying to talk down the would-be jumper on a building.

They caught/saved that guy (with Riggs’s help) by inflating one of those big Hollywood air cushion things like stunt people use in movies.  I don’t see how that could work in real life to stop an attempted suicide, though.  How would they get such a thing into the correct location?  One is supposed to land in such cushions back first, but someone trying to kill himself would not bother, nor would he aim for the center of the thing, or indeed for the thing itself.

I suppose it’s better than using one of those circular net/trampoline type things, such as one can see in old cartoons.  I’ve never seen one in real life, not even in old pictures, so I’m not sure they aren’t one of those Hollywood-based, self-referential tropes that never really were like anything that truly existed and was used.

I guess such a net might at least have the advantage that it can be maneuvered.  But if someone is falling long enough for those below to make significant adjustments, that person is going to be moving fast when they hit that little net.  And the net is only a few feet off the ground, so even if all the people holding the net can keep their grips, either the person falling is going to slam into the ground below the net with their speed not reduced significantly, or‒if the net has very strong elasticity so it can decelerate a falling person fast enough that they won’t hit the ground‒hitting the net will kill them more or less as readily as hitting the ground would kill them.

Physics can be a bitch sometimes, but I still love it.

Maybe if they had big, premade blocks of aerogel or something it might work.  Does anyone know whether aerogel has been tested to see how well it slows and/or stops rapidly moving/falling objects and how cushiony it is?  If so, is such a person reading this blog post?  If so, I invite you to share that knowledge below, in the comments.

Okay, while I must admit that I never actually plan out any of my blog posts**, this one is more undirected than many.  Or maybe that’s only the way it feels to me.  Maybe I feel chaotic and undirected, but the reader finds the post entirely logical, pleasantly whimsical, and smoothly written.  I don’t know and I seem unable to tell.  If anyone wants to comment about that in the comments below, you would be most welcome.

Anyway, I’m going to leave you with a picture with a Christmas message from the 12th Doctor.  The picture is from the Doctor Who 8th series Christmas special, Last Christmas.  The title doesn’t refer to the previous year’s holiday, but to the fact that every Christmas is the last Christmas for someone.

Despite that sad and heavy line, the episode is quite quirky.  In it, the Doctor and Clara Oswald, with the help of Santa Claus (Really?  Well, it’s hard to tell for sure.), played by Nick Frost (the perfect name for an actor to play Santa, right?), fight these alien crab beings that look a lot like face huggers**** and which feed you dreams/hallucinations while they slowly digest your brains.

A question has just occurred to me:  Could Santa be a time lord?  I can think of how it could work; certainly a TARDIS as the “sleigh” could help explain Santa’s ability to reach every Christmas-celebrating house in one night.

Even more thought-provokingly, I have a storyline worked out in my head in which Jesus was actually a time lord who used the chameleon circuit to be reborn as a baby and was given to Mary and Joseph to raise.   John the Baptist would actually be the time lord’s companion, who‒at the River Jordan, of course‒opens the fob watch containing his essence and returns the time lord to his true self, thus the whole “holy spirit coming to Jesus…”

Anyway, I won’t get more into that; I don’t want to offend anyone too much.

By the way, the words on the picture below don’t come from the episode in the picture.  They are from the 12th Doctor’s last speech to himself to prepare for his regeneration.  Indeed, these are almost the last words of that speech.  I will close this post with the subsequent, final words of the 12th Doctor.

“Doctor…I let you go.”

*According to Ze Frank, Morgan Freeman is attempting to create a true Santa Claus.

**Okay, well, “never” may be an exaggeration.  But if I ever have planned out a post, it was probably a one-time thing or so.  Certainly I strongly suspect I could count the occurrences on the fingers*** of one hand.

***Am I considering the thumb as a finger in this assessment, or am I not?  I won’t tell you, but I will say that I am almost certain that it doesn’t make a difference either way toward the accuracy of my “fingers of one hand” comment, unless the hand was Yoda’s or Nightcrawler’s.

****This is noted within the episode, and sets up a particularly good joke: