Sudden Short Story 13

He walked at an easy pace through the cemetery, until he saw it. He paused for a moment, to consider things.
"Providence, indeed.... It seems that I was too late, after all. Too late? I'm not even sure any more. I suppose that I had this notion that I could save you from yourself, but now, even I am not immune to the inexorable march of time."
He sat down, his floor-length dark grey trench-coat passively saving him from the slight discomfort of sitting directly upon the wet grass, while seeming to match the skies which oddly had yet to rain.
"She only goes forward, now, you know. It's the perfect paradox, too: The only solution lies in the direction that I cannot travel. I guess that you were right in that no one can escape all the monsters, in the end."
He laid himself down upon the grass, looking up at the dark sky. Overcome with a new feeling, he closed his eyes for a few minutes, though he remained awake. Some minutes in, he spoke again:
"You know, normally, by now, I'd have some sort of clever insight to get myself out of this situation. It takes some getting used to, I'd say."
There was quiet again for a few moments.
"I still don't have anything. I suppose that there's not much point in giving status updates to a tombstone, though. Then again, I don't suppose that there's ever much point in it, but I seem to have picked up some strange habits lately."
He took yet another lengthy pause, before speaking again: "I sometimes regret it, showing you those ... strange vistas, I suppose. I suppose that there was something gained from it, of course, but I can't help but think that you'd have been the odd one out, the one who would have been happier if I'd never shown up at all. And I further suppose that that's the one thing that we always accumulate: regrets, the downside to living so very, very long...."
A few drops of water began to fall from the sky. "I suppose that that's my cue to go," he said, standing. "I think that I'll skip the war. I've had enough of wars for now. Maybe I'll just skip right to the Arab Spring. We'll see."
And with that, he returned the way that he came.

--- Author's note: Yes, I know: I suck at descriptions.

Sudden Short Story 12

... in the midst of running ...
... again ...

"Why didn't you tell me that you don't drink?"
"You never asked!"
"Well, I thought that you might make a point of it, what with travelling ancient Earth and all!"
"What, now I'm supposed to think of everything? Wait! Idea! Turn the ground behind us into mud!"
"What?!"
"You know, with the sonic thing!"
"It's not magic! That way!"
"Well it sure acts like it! Works on everything but wood? You might as well be the green freaking-- DUCK! What the blazes makes them so rutting persistent?!"
"You offended them! And besides, the power ring isn't magic!"
"I meant it in the literary sense, but this is probably a bad time for an academic discussion!"
"Wait, that's it!"
"Academia?"
"No, blazes! Do try to keep up!"
"But that's back... Frak it."

---
author's personal note: too many exclamation points, it seems, but I didn't want to go all-caps for that much yelling

Questions Raised by "The Curse of the Black Spot"

WARNING: The following post may contain spoilers for the Doctor Who episode "The Curse of the Black Spot" (S06E03).
NOTE: For this post, I will refer to the "Siren" interdimensional alien doctor thing as the "emergency medical hologram".

1. Why did the emergency medical hologram take men who had mere nicks and cuts? They're not life-threatening, and what sort of triage system involves blasting people across the deck of a ship just to get the guy with a scratch?
2. For that matter, why couldn't the men who had been cut be released? The emergency medical hologram can figure out that some humans in our dimension use paired rings to indicate marriage which, in some of our legal systems, authorizes the spouse to make medical decisions, but even after acquiring several DNA samples it can't figure out blood clotting?
3. Isn't Rory made of plastic? I wasn't sure, after season 5, whether the Rory that we were seeing was the plastic Roman or the regular human, what with time travel, paradoxes, the destruction and rebirth of our universe, the rewind, etc., but a certain conversation in "The Day of the Moon" basically told us that this Rory is the plastic one. That being said, would he even have DNA? I'm not sure on the details, but...
4. Isn't Rory made of plastic? That is, would he bleed if cut? Would a cut even be an issue? Moreover...
5. Isn't Rory made of plastic? Is drowning really an issue for him? Even if his lung cavities filled with water, does he really need the almost constant supply of oxygen that we do? Couldn't we just drain him and make him all better? I mean, at this point, does being one of those plastic people (whose proper Doctor Who title escapes me at the moment) do anything besides giving one eternal youth and making one functionally immortal?
6. And what sort of name is "Rory", anyway? This isn't specific to the episode, but it's apparently "Rory" and not "Roary", which just seems a bit silly to me. :P

There's a Crack in my Beast Below

Right, I meant to blog about this quite a long time ago, but I forgot.
There's sort of a bit of an enormous plot hole in the Doctor Who episode "The Beast Below". Fair warning: There are spoilers regarding this episode of Doctor Who. Also, I'll probably talk as though you've already seen the episode, so it would be good for you to watch "The Beast Below" before reading this, if you haven't already.
So, at the end of "The Beast Below", it is discovered that the titular character (the beast below, not The Doctor), who has been propelling the giant city-ship up until this point, goes faster when it's not being shocked in the brain every few seconds. Specifically, the creature came to Earth in order to help the humans, though it couldn't communicate with them, which is supposed to have allowed this whole scenario to emerge.
To make sure that we're on the same page here: for literally the entire journey of the vessel (a few centuries in length), the beast below the city has been being shocked, in the brain, at very regular intervals. This is where I see an enormous plot hole. It means the following:
-Whoever was in charge of this project had to, somehow, decide to start shocking the alien in the brain once every few seconds before they left Earth orbit.
-Whoever was in charge of this project had to then implement this shocking plan, including making the brain-hole and constructing and activating the probe, again before leaving Earth orbit.
-The probe had to go the entire trip without breaking, needing replaced, or needing to be turned off to be cleaned, repaired, or updated.
-For the entire trip, the probe's power supply had to be uninterrupted.
-They had to never want to stop or slow down. Since they thought that the frequent shocks were keeping the beast moving, they would have reduced or stopped them to slow down or stop.
-Nobody ever said "Hey, what do you suppose would happen if we stopped shocking the creature for a few minutes?" - at least not in a convincing way.
-Nobody ever accidentally turned the device off.
-No scientist in the control room ever went rogue enough to sabotage the shock system. Also, nobody ever successfully broke into the control room or hacked into the controls to do the same.

Basically, the decision to set up this shock system was extremely unscientific - grounded only in ... well, absolutely nothing - and keeping it in perpetual operation would be a logistical nightmare - as anyone who has to maintain any system can tell you.

P.S.: I'd have given more/better details, but I'm going on memory, and the episode was quite a while ago. Like I said, I meant to blog about this and forgot.

The Doctor is Human

I've thought about this before, and yesterday, I figured that I should blog about it. The Doctor, from the SF show Doctor Who?, is human.
"But wait," says everyone who knows anything about Doctor Who?, "The Doctor is a time lord." You are correct*, and the time lords are human. It seems most likely that the time lords are the result of the evolution of an isolated human population. They seem morphologically and physiologically so similar to humans that their arising completely independently of Earth's biology would have to occur astronomically improbably. And, of course, being evolved from humans means that they are humans.
Let's compare and contrast. On the one hand, time lords have two hearts** and can regenerate. On the other hand, time lords are bipedal plantigrade pentadactyl tetrapods with opposable thumbs, fingernails, two forward-facing color-vision eyes set in closed ocular orbits in skull-enclosed heads with hinged jaws bearing white, bony teeth, pink, fleshy tongues, and soft, pliable lips, altogether capable of speaking human languages, ostensibly with the assistance of vocal chords. They also ingest food through this forward-facing face-holes and apparently have taste buds, too. Time lords also have fleshy, dish-shaped ears on the sides of their heads, hair that grows out of the tops of their heads, along their eyebrows - and, by the way, eyebrows - and reduced or absent hair elsewhere. Also, time lords have skin in that variegated sepia range (dark brown to pale peach-ish) that humans have, as opposed to, say, green or orange. Oh, and time lords can be killed by untreated cyanide poisoning.

That's basically my argument for why the time lords are human. There are other things, but I haven't actually seen proof of them. For instance, I'm assuming that time lords have spinal chords enveloped in vertebrae, which would make them chordates and vertebrates, respectively, but I haven't actually gotten a look at The Doctor's back well enough to tell if there are vertebrae there, so I didn't list them above.
Anyway, if you see anything that I should have included in my lists, then leave a comment below, but, more importantly, if you see someplace where you think that I might be wrong, then leave a comment below.
That's all for now.

*as long as you didn't add a clause asserting that The Doctor is not human
**The fact that time lords have hearts is a similarity, by the way.