ROCH 2006: Now they're BOTH drooling blood...ew!

Bad sign. Very bad sign. Ok, that really was written in the book (I just double-checked). Some things need to be cut before they reach the screen, and this (IMNSHO) is one of them!

"Gu-gu!" "Guo-er!"

So, let's see. While searching for his Gu-gu (Little Dragon Girl), Yang Guo runs into more trouble. Surprise, surprise. It's Lu Wushuang and her cousin with the scary-looking human-skin mask. Li Mochou's back. There's the old crippled blacksmith. Some more fights. And we have a scene or two with East Heretic Huang Yaoshi (Huang Rong's father). From HYS's mentally handicapped martial granddaughter "Sha Gu", Yang Guo finds out that it was Huang Rong who caused his father's death.

This is a good time for a potty break, as Yang Guo goes into the throes of horrible acting and emoting on the screen. Good lord.

Right. I'd have quit watching by this point, but I've already paid for the damn series and now I want to see the train wreck. Yang Guo witnesses the cruelty of the Mongol invaders (more histrionics! Yes, it's a terrible thing, but they could have done the scene better), then meets up with the Golden Wheel monk again, and this time allies himself with him to kill Guo Jing (and Huang Rong). (Remember, these are Yang Guo's foster parents, his "Uncle" and "Aunt").

And we have the first appearance of Zhou Botong, the Old Urchin, at the dinner with Khubilai and the various recruited martial artists. The actor is unexceptionable. The strangest casting choice was for one of the "guest" heros: Ma Guangzuo. In the book, he's about 8 feet tall. In this version, he's a little dwarf! Very odd.

And here we have them going to Rivendell. Excuse me, the "Passionless Valley"... except they made it look like a cross between Rivendell and Lothlorien, with the trees, and the green-clad people dancing around with the flowers (what the hell?) and the airy-fairy music... And the vegetarian lifestyle...

We could have done without all the previous scenes of Little Dragon Girl meeting the lord of the valley and so on and so forth. That just kills the surprise of the scene where Yang Guo finds out. Ok, it wasn't that much of a surprise. When I first tried reading the book, that was where I quit in disgust. I hate those stories where the female love interest almost marries some other man, pretending for some reason not to recognize the male love interest. Well, you can pretty much guess what will happen. Up to a point.

This was never my favorite part of the books, and here it felt especially slow and draggy. And we have some cliches going: the daughter of the evil lord falls in love with the hero, etc. etc. But after the hero gets tossed with her into a pit full of crocodiles, the story gets more interesting. Even the crocodiles know martial arts (and lightness kung-fu!).

Magical "passion flower" poison. Heh heh. It sounds like the sort of thing that would be on a Doctor Who episode (the loveless planet where everyone is poisoned by the flowers! *cue spooky music and metaphorical discursions*). But there you go. Useful plot device.

This adaptation actually seems to follow the books pretty closely. If only they didn't drag everything out with such a heavy hand.

Alien life forms! Well, aquatic insects...

A Walk around the Pond: Insects in and over the Water

by Gilbert Waldbauer

As the title says, it's a tour of life as an aquatic insect, written by an
entomologist. Beautifully illustrated (I only wish there were more! A few
diagrams might have been useful) by Meredith Waterstraat. Most aquatic insects
live in freshwater (or salt marshes near the ocean) rather than in the oceans,
where the ecological niches seem to be filled by crustaceans and such, so
it's really a walk around the pond, streams, swamps, rivers, tree holes,
puddles, inside water-filled plants, and other spaces one might not immediately
think of.

Insects live on such a different scale from humans that they are almost an
alien life form, as far as our intuitions and expectations are concerned.
The water is less turbulent, and surface tension is a major factor.
Everything: how they move, how they breathe, and how they eat, hunt,
and reproduce is strange (from the human point of view).


Waldbauer has a chapter on each aspect of aquatic insect life, starting
with a "cast of characters" introducing us to each of the orders found
in the water. Many insects only live in the water for one phase of their
existence (usually the larval and nymphal stages). The discrete changes
in insects from one form to another is in itself startling to a human. (We
keep our infants close by, and feed them our food!)

Highly recommended.

Animals are autistic?

Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior

by Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson

Very interesting book from a different point of view than the evolutionary biologists and so on I've read more often. Temple Grandin has years of knowledge as a scientist working in the livestock industry. It's a different perspective than someone who spends her time in the field observing wild animals, or someone who conducts experiments on them. I don't necessarily agree with all her speculations and theories, but they're good ideas and worth thinking about.

People are constantly trying to find something that makes humans unique among animals. It's like a Holy Grail (and like the Holy Grail, probably a mythical object: whatever humans have, some animals out there have it too, if not to the same degree.) Here, Grandin suggests that autism in humans may point to one of those differences. "Normal" humans are blind in ways that "animals" (here meaning mostly mammals and birds) are not. Interestingly, this blindness extends to the human scientists studying animals! Autism may be a help in overcoming that blind spot, as autistic humans may lack (to a greater or lesser degree) the same types of mental abstraction that animals lack, enabling the autistic human to perceive things better from the animal's
point of view. This also helps in understanding the talents that an animal may have which humans don't.

Highly recommended. Great insights and examples. VERY sensible approach to regulating meat-packing plants. Keep it simple, focus on the goal (humane treatment of the animals) by having a short, easily quantifiable checklist, rather than drowning the issue with complicated 100-item forms and administrivia and detailed regulations, which only causes people to ignore
the whole thing. Regulate the results (unstressed animals), and let the plant take care of the implementation. The speculations about the co-evolution of humans and dogs is also fascinating. Definitely worth further research!

Animal trainers in training!

Kicked, Bitten, and Scratched: Life and Lessons at the World's Premier School for Exotic Animal Trainers
by Amy Sutherland

This book is pretty much about what it says in the title and subtitle. The
premier school referred to is the Exotic Animal Training and Managemet
program (EATM) at California's Moorpark Community College. An
interesting topic, marred by the annoying (to me) "journalistic" style of the
writing. I.e., skip about from one "character" (usually a student or
a teacher) to another, telling a bit about each with some quotes and some
background, summed up with the writer's impression of each. Here and there
she marvels at this or that, and intersperses vignettes of life at the school
with some infodumps about this or that animal or school program.

Sounds like a fascinating place, and it's interesting to read about how the
humans and animals interact and influence each other, as well as the culture
of the "hard core" animal trainers. I would have preferred a more
in-depth view, something with more focus, perhaps a book written by someone
who WAS a student there, rather than someone following them around for a
year. At the end of the book, you still feel like a tourist.
Fun but superficial.

Doctor Who: Human Nature/Family of Blood

Eh. Very well executed (in parts), but still irritating. Creepy scarecrows, forsooth. We've had the robots, the cyborgs, the pepperpots, the clowns, the tentacled faces, the animated shop dummies, etc. So why not scarecrows? At least they can do a better job of scaring humans than scaring crows. And there's a psychic boy, and an evil little girl. There's always an evil child, isn't there?

Not a very original plot (see also Harlan Ellison's Outer Limits story "Demon with a Glass Hand" Peter S. Beagle's "The Last Unicorn", Diana Wynne Jones's "Dogsbody", to name three off the top of my head) but still entertaining, and we haven't seen it done onscreen with the Doctor before. This was written by Paul Cornell based on his New Adventure "Human Nature", adapted for the tenth Doctor and Martha. Probably an improvement (for one thing, David Tennant pulls it off much better than Sylvester McCoy would have.) There were lots of great scenes in this two-parter. It benefited tremendously from having the luxury of time for some character development.

But it's still a cliche. (And full of plot holes.)

"Every single time! I tell them, 'Don't fall in love with a human.' Rule one. Don't fall in love with a human!"

Real humans go to ridiculous lengths to find the right person to fall in love with, but every time these transformed folks find True Love. It just falls on them. Even if the immortal turns into a freaking DOG ("Dogsbody" by Diana Wynne Jones) they STILL fall in love.

The plot goes the same way every single time. Every single time! The temporary mortal has to turn back into a supernatural being in order to save lives (which wouldn't have been in danger if the supernatural being hadn't gone there in the first place). Someone who knew the person both as an immortal and as a mortal observes and shakes head in exasperation and knowing. Someone is sad. The immortal can't or won't turn back into a mortal once the crisis is past. Whee.

And he did it to be kind?! Since when was Mr. "No Second Chances" Doctor that nice? Well, I suppose the scene where he says "Don't come after me. Consider yourself warned." is just implied.

The Doctor should just admit to his human fetish already. He wanted to be a human, and this was just a convenient excuse. The ending shows he could easily handled things without going to so much trouble to turn into a human.

I miss the old days when the Doctor was an alien wanderer, not a god. But I suppose once they slap the "Last of " label on someone, the mythical factor goes up.

But I like David Tennant's Doctor a lot more this season. Maybe it's that his performance has improved, or just that the Rose character is gone. Lovely portrayal of a human "John Smith". And this Doctor seems to have a talent for acting (unlike, say, the seventh Doctor).