Saturday, May 07, 2016

Don't Leave the Pond

I took this picture of a crow across the street from where I live yesterday. In the general see-sawing of the weather, the past couple of days have been cool and rainy. The pendulum swings back to hot about a week from now. It really feels much more like early spring than May in the way Autumn has become hotter than summer.

At the university yesterday, I came across this turtle making steady progress up a hill.

He was striding confidently away from the koi pond towards the hard, inhospitable library. Probably the rain had confused him. I picked him up and carried him back, setting him on the edge of the pond.

He just looked at me as though to say, "What's your problem?" I imagine with all the students normally clustered around the pond the turtles are pretty used to people.

I hope he didn't immediately resume his march the moment I left.

I only had time to listen to one Doctor Who audio play this week, a 2007 story called Valhalla. It's interesting for apparently being a Seventh Doctor story set not long before the events of the TV movie that introduced the Eighth Doctor--he's travelling alone and thinking about hanging up his hat, applying to a career placement office on Jupiter's moon, Callisto. It features Michelle Gomez, who currently plays Missy on the television series, as a one-off companion named Jevvan. So she's met both the Scottish Doctors.

She's very good, too, giving some imaginative inflection to lines for a character who's basically an average office clerk. The story, written by Marc Platt, who wrote the very good Seventh Doctor television story Ghost Light, is not terribly remarkable, being an alien invasion in the midst of a colonial revolution. But it's pretty good for that.

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