The Ninth Strange Day

I wish people would learn
That line breaks in places
That seem unlikely
Does not
Make
It
Poetry.

I don’t even subscribe
To the theory
That all poetry must
Rhyme
But writing
Like this
Makes me think
You talk
Like a Valley Girl
And every
Line
Must end
With an Uptalk inflection
Like you’re asking
A question

I was watching National Geographic channel last night. They had a show on about the genetics of dogs. Apparently all the different variations in size and colour and body type and temperament and ability are the result of a .2% difference in DNA.

A genetic change can be bred into a dog in a very short time, too. Genetic defects happen just as fast, but that’s where the show got interesting.

If they can isolate the gene that causes the problem (the example they used was a breed of dog that is genetically predisposed to blindness), they can inject a virus that contains the correct sequence and improve if not completely fix the defect. Then it can be bred out of the dog.

(Sure, just by mixing the bloodline you could possibly breed it out, but this is a little more of a guarantee, and it means the parent dog has an improved quality of life, too).

If that weren’t nerdy enough, the real big nerdy part of me made an undignified giggle-type of sound when they mentioned “recoding the DNA with overriding information”. I think a lot of you won’t get that reference.

Kitti: I wonder what they call people who live in Cardiff? Cardiffians?
Me: I believe they call them Welsh.

Torchwood will be on BBCAmerica starting the 8th of September.

Excited? A bit. Because that means DVDs for our region aren’t far behind.

So I says to my friend Eve…

I’d like to see a cross-fandom story that has Captain Jack Harkness, Captain Jack Sparrow, Captain Jack Aubrey (Master & Commander), Jack “24″ Bauer, Jack-from-Will-and-Grace, Jack Ryan from the Tom Clancy novels, SG-1’s Jack O’Neill, and Jack Skellington, all having lunch at Jack-in-the-Box.

To further complicate things, also participating are Jack McCoy, Dr Rodney McKay, John Sheppard, and Jack “Lost” Shepard.

John Sheppard: McCoy!
Rodney McKay: What?
John Sheppard: Not you. Jack!
All-the-Jacks: What!
John Sheppard: No! McCoy!
Rodney McKay: Sheppard!!
Jack Shepard: I’m over here!
McKay: NOT YOU, JACK!
Jack Aubrey: Me?
Sheppard: No, not you Captain Jack.
Jack Harkness: Someone call me?
Everyone: NO!
Jack Sparrow: It’s like a bloody game of Marco Polo.

I suppose I could also have Dr McCoy, to really confuse things. And SG-1’s Daniel Jackson. But that would just be getting silly.

We have digital cable. We’ve had it for quite some time and it’s really nice. The music channels are good, and there are channels we couldn’t get otherwise, and some of them are ones we love.

One of the channels we get as part of our digital package is BBCAmerica. For some reason, though, it was out for about six months. It started out as an intermittent thing. We’d call the cable company and do the “reset via phone” thing and it’d be okay for a while.

Then it would work during the day, but we’d lose it around 7pm.

Then it was never there, and we started losing channels through 109 to about 118.

Kitti finally called the cable company (again) and said this was really getting silly, and we’d already had the cable box replaced once and it was really just a mass of failure and so the tech this time was actually helpful.

Long story short (too late), we have BBCAmerica back.

So. The depressing thing. To celebrate the fact that it’s back, we were watching Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares.

And then it happened.

Between shows… between the end credits of one and the start of the next… there was a public service announcement that said (paraphrasing) “These shows contain people with funny accents. If you can’t understand them, turn on closed captioning!” in this cheerful, happy, helpful moderately Cockney accent (possibly recorded by the same guy who does the Geico Gecko).

I thought it was a joke. And then, between shows, there it was again.

Dot… dot… dot. That’s right up there with the time I found out that “Trainspotting” was re-recorded for the US market, with the accents toned down (both of which rank slightly below the time I saw a version of “Mad Max” that was dubbed into American English).

It’s the friggin BBC! It’s British television! I think anyone making the decision to watch the channel will already know the people have “funny” accents.

Once and ONLY once have I had to resort to turning on the captioning. We were watching “The Acid House” and the Scottish slang was so thick and the lines in one of the stories were spoken so rapidly that we honestly couldn’t follow it. Reading it at least gave us better context, so we could figure out the slang.

Sigh. Just sigh. I suppose they’ll start putting that same warning on SciFi, before Doctor Who, because… y’know. Accents.

Though they really ought to include it before Stargate, because dude, who says things like “zed pee em” instead of “zee pee em”? Crazy Canadians with their wacky, hard to understand accents.

I’m a frequent reader and I will read just about anything if it’s well written. Things that are dry or condescending take me forever. Fiction with two-dimensional characters is a huge turn-off, but I’ll chew through it (I have this rule about finishing a book no matter how much I dislike it). All the reading leads me to learn strange things. Sometimes on purpose. Sometimes accidentally.

With things I’m trying to learn, I can read them and be told about them but I really don’t start learning until I’ve had a chance to try it for myself. Sometimes it results in a monumental failure. I don’t mind that. Unless I’ve got a deadline and can’t afford the delay. Usually I realise things are about to fail before they fail and have time to fix them.

That last thing is what I find interesting. The whole time I’m working on something the rest of my brain is apparently processing data. All of a sudden there will be this *ding* and the thing that will potentially fail will pop up and I’ll go “Oh!” (sometimes out loud) and go back and fix whatever it was. Fortunately I’m only writing documents and code examples, and not something that would be impossible to correct. I don’t think this would be a good way to build an engine or a nuclear something-or-other, so if you’re also prone to thinking like this, I don’t suggest those career options.

Sometimes it’s not a “fix” but a realisation. I’m not talking about things like accidentally “discovering” that Control-A will select all the text, but suddenly thinking “Oh that’s how I can do this!” when you weren’t even (consciously) thinking about how to do “that” at all.

Aaaand sometimes those flashes aren’t even related to the thing I’m working on, so I usually have to keep a tab or Notepad open so I can get the ideas down before I lose them.

I like that about me. I like that my brain works like that. I’m not so crazy about it when the “a-hah!” hits at three in the morning, but most of the time I’m cool.