God Save the Burrito

Every weekend, I get a bean and rice burrito and go over to my friend Tim's house to play video games. Last week my burrito had green ink all over the tortilla and shards of plastic in the beans, so I've been looking around for a new Mexican place. Yesterday I was in a part of town I don't normally go to and saw this Terminator 2 pinball machine in a place called Los Primos, part of a chain apparently with only three locations. They have already mastered the chain restaurant technique of smaller, duller burritos for higher prices.

I don't think sex on Doctor Who is as new as everyone thinks is. Three oozed virility over Liz Shaw, Two and Jamie had an odd tendency to spoon when they were crouching behind cover, and Four and Romana were just obviously a couple. I guess it's more explicit now, sort of. I finished the two parter "The Empty Child" and "The Doctor Dances" last night--the Wikipedia entry says "dancing" is a metaphor for sex, which I don't think I really needed explained to me. I think the real difference is that the characters are a little more cavalier about flirting with each other in dangerous situations.

But I quite liked the pair of episodes--I loved the rather interesting Sci-Fi explanation for the gas mask zombies--I was worried we were going to go spiritual again like we did at the end of "The Unquiet Dead". Instead, we had a genuinely creepy menace and a genuinely interesting explanation for it. Which is not to say the corpse stealing aliens in "Unquiet Dead" weren't interesting, it's the maid's talking from the grave that bothered me--in almost thirty years of the classic series, they never resorted to unambiguous supernatural like that. It seems to relate to another of the things I'm a little disappointed by in the new series, which is the sentimentality. "Father's Day" was effective I thought, though the universe lining up to make a character sacrifice himself went a bit overboard for me. And "Empty Child"/"Doctor Dances" has a lot of "England will prevail in the end" stuff that was a little too patriotic for me, particularly when the Doctor starts marvelling at how resilient the English are in the face of the German threat--how the Germans were unstoppable "until one tiny damp little island says, 'No. No. Not here.' A mouse in front of a lion. You're amazing the lot of you." Even when the Doctor was rubbing elbows with British establishment, I never got the sense of this particularly patriotic perspective from him. I would have preferred in place of this speech maybe one about how, in humanity, the grace of people struggling for survival contrasts with those seeking to destroy and conquer.

Here's a daddy long legs yesterday who may have bitten off more than he could chew;