Stuff that Annoys Me

So it’s essay time yet again, which means you get to find out what I think about any given thing that pops into my head, when Doctor Who’s not on.

People who say ‘a joke isn’t funny if you have to explain it’

I should qualify this one; there are jokes that are simply too complicated to be funny, but more often than not the person who utters this infuriating phrase, after you’ve lined out the punch-line, was the only person in the room who didn’t get it. My response to this is always to say “I didn’t have to explain it, I only had to explain it to you.” It is infuriating when you’re trying to tell a joke or exchange banter in a social situation and people blame their own slowness on you.

Why was Kylie Minogue in Doctor Who one time?

Yeah another one about Doctor Who – sue me. Why did the production team of Doctor Who feel like they needed to pull in an Australian pop singer to do the job of an actress. Yeah, I know she was an actress before being a singer, but there were far better people out there who could have played the part of Astrid Perth. The most recent Christmas Special (“A Christmas Carol”) saw the casting of Katherine Jenkins and rather than it just being to get her fans involved with the show, he specific talents as a singer were made integral to the plot and resolution of the episode.

Do the writers of Sarah Jane Adventures think the audience is retarded?

Yeah, I know this series is written for kids, but even kids don’t need to be spoon-fed some things. For example a really annoying thing happens in the crossover episode “The Death of The Doctor” while the Doctor is using some sort of awesome, shiny machine to do a sort of teleport body swap with Clyde. This is actually done quite well to start with, with Clyde being the only one aware of anything different, until everyone else notices that on of his hands has changed into one of the Doctor’s. He then says the line “That’s not my hand, because my hand’s not white.” I don’t get why the writers felt the need to remind the audience that Clyde’s black. The fact that he was sporting a hand that wasn’t his was obvious; it didn’t need to be explained any further than the first part of the line.

The Existence of Twilight

Do I even need to explain this? Ok, given my rants about people who write to the BBC to complain about what they perceived hour of filth and violence they had sit through watching Torchwood and how these people should just invest in an off button for their television set, it might seem quite hypocritical to hate the existence of something that I am under no obligation to read/watch/ever interact with. But my problem is not with the books themselves, but more what they symbolise in our modern world.

It centers around the single element of being astonished about the fact that the books of the Twilight Sage can be classified as novels. A set of books filled with spelling mistakes and some of the poorest grammar I’ve ever seen, based on the most superficial elements of the most lazily written “love story” in literary history. While trying to think of a good way to summerise what’s wrong with the love story in these books, I ended up stumbling across the perfect way to describe it, while watching a youtube review of the Star Was prequels. In that, long time sci-fi commentator, RedLetterMedia, said of the love story in those films, something along the lines of “look two attractive people in a beautiful location, that means they’re in love kids.”

The fact that such lazy writing can earn a person so much money pisses me off to no end. J K Rowling made a lot of money, by writing a series of books about morality and good and evil, in the guise of a story of a boy wizard. Stephenie Mayer wrote a template for the perfect domestic abuse victim and topped it off, by making all the supporting characters so fucking superficial and forgettable.

And while we’re on Twilight as a subject, can someone explain to me just what Alice’s power is? She can see the future of any given person so long as said person doesn’t change their mind. Um…anyone can do that; that’s not a special power.