Rhinoceroses Make Bad Brain Surgeons

Almost every time I walk past Wal-Mart, there's a guy out front with a guitar performing the whiniest and most insipid modern pop songs. More than once in a day I've heard him do "I'll Be"--you know, "IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII'll be your crying shoulder, IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII'll be love suicide, IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII'll be the greatest man of your life." He's so loud, it's like nails on a chalk board through a loudspeaker and it seems to take forever to get out of earshot.

I also walked past Target yesterday, which is slightly further away, but the front of that store is blessedly free of little white guys making me long for a Cybermen invasion. Seriously, someone needs to take this kid's emotions away. Or at least get him on drugs.

I got used to thinking of Target as the more liberal version of conservative Wal-Mart but then Target had that anti-gay rights scandal that spoiled everything. I guess it's still the lesser of two evils. I feel like the fact that the musician with his important hormones is allowed to play in front of the Wal-Mart is an extension somehow of right-wing laissez-faire philosophy, which, when it comes to art and free speech is something I'm totally for--though I guess it's more associated with left-wing nowadays unless you're talking about Ron Paul types who haven't quite made themselves conscious of the fact that too few people agree with their predilections to make a free society enjoyable for them. Normally I think busking musicians are fine, I figure the bad ones don't outweigh the virtues of the more colourful and human world street performers contribute to creating. But, holy fuck, this guy is getting close to changing my mind like having my skull ground against a cinder block.

Russell T. Davies seems to have a knack for starting seasons of Doctor Who off really well and ending them with cloying emotional foghorn blasts. I put it down to two things--he overestimates the emotional involvement capital he's accrued with the earlier episodes, and he's overworked. In the old series, there was a policy in place where script editors--show runners--weren't allowed to create scripts from scratch. Now Davies, if you count the Christmas Special, is writing five of the fourteen episodes in the tenth Doctor's first season. It's no wonder he seems fresher with the earlier episodes. David Tennant seems like he has more freedom to play around, too--I loved his teeth clacking along with his "I'm barefoot on the moon!" line in "Smith and Jones". And there are one liners I love, like in "The Runaway Bride"--"Only a madman talks to thin air and, trust me, you don't want to make me mad!"

I like Donna Noble and Martha Jones has a face like you see in one of those studies that come out now and then where researchers have created an image of the most beautiful face in the world based on average statistical preferences throughout the world.