I’ll allow I might have been overstating the case in last night’s slightly excited post about Doctor Who. After all, Russell’s current ‘incarnation’ includes ‘73 Yards’.

Still, ‘Lux’ was tons of fun.

I just watched the latest Doctor Who episode, ‘Lux’. It was gloriously meta. Who needs fourth walls? And with a love note to the fandom in the middle.

The best episode RTD has done, certainly in this incarnation. IMHO, obviously.

I should note it’s Petroc Trelawny’s last day on the BBC Radio 3 Breakfast show today. I’ll miss his dulcet tones, and especially his weird pronunciation of ‘Bach’.

Radio saying SpaceX’s latest launch will be the first to orbit over the north and south poles. That’s wrong, of course: there have been plenty of circumpolar satellites. I wonder if it’s the first human-occupied one to enter that orbit; or just the first commercial one to do so.

Carrot Weather catching the vibe of the day as usual.

A screenshot of Carrot Weather, saying ‘You were the only one who wasn’t invited to that military-strike-planning Signal group chat.’

I tried the ‘Hey Siri, what month is it?’ question, since people have being saying it can’t answer that.

It gave me to today’s date. Which seems fine. It’s more than I asked for, and includes the information I wanted, so…

When did the 20th of March become the first day of spring? I saw lots of mentions of it yesterday, and they’re even saying it on Radio 3 this morning.

Currently reading: Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose 📚

And on page 40, this quote:

Finally—and there is no way to convey this unless you read the sentence aloud or at least, as your first grade teacher cautioned you not to do, say it silently, word by word, in your mind

What are they teaching kids in American first grade? What does she mean, you were taught not to say it word by word in your mind? How do you read without doing that? Or at least learn to read?

This isn’t a story so much as a floating mass of jellyfish tendrils with which the viewer intermittently comes into contact. And the show’s premise is a joke that neither a Hollywood millionaire or a Silicon Valley behemoth have any right to make. It’s a long, long exercise in seeing how long your customers will tolerate being laughed at.

I don’t agree with the early part of this New Statesman article, but there are some good points in it, not unrelated to my post the other day.

Just heard the first ice-cream van of the year. Whaaaat???