sundries - #ashtag, celiac, doctor who

[rm]

Airports are now shut until 1am tomorrow, at the earliest. The Met office is also working to move to give further ahead closing notice, so we can anticipate better, as opposed to viewing this in six hour chunks.

25% of the particles are apparently falling to ground in much of the UK. Whether this is a health risk depends on which agency is talking. The thing about being in the EU is that there are a lot more authorities than in US, and so there are more contradictions, and, more importantly, a greater sense of when people are lying just to maintain order.

The Met office says conditions are getting worse and that we should expect this to go on for days. Our flight is still listed as Wednesday, but since they expect the ash cloud to go on at least that long, honestly, I'm not sure we'll get out before the weekend.

Today we move to a guest room offered by friends of a friend. And if I told you some of the people involved in getting that sorted: a) you wouldn't believe me and b) fuck the epic Internet drama.

I have, of course, been linked to the HuffPo piece on surviving the apocalypse. I've got that last one down, kids. Although as several people noted, this shit is probably all my fault in the first place.

Despite contradictory information from everyone, it seems Patty and I will be able to get some compensation from the airline when this is over. We could actually apply now, but I don't think we should -- I don't want to look like the problem customer until they get us out of here.

Emotionally, I'm sort of all over the place. On one hand, adventure! and I do love it here. And I can more or less work remotely here, although some things are difficult. On the other hand, I hate not having control, I miss our bed, and this is all very frustrating. And it feels harder to deal with, you know, pretty much anything. Which brings us to some non-#ashtag news.

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Last night I had one of the worst experiences I've ever had with celiac disease in a restaurant, where waiters lied to me about my food. I wound up not getting glutened, because I put my foot down. But when I ask if something has gluten and you tell me it's just stuffed with cheese and then it comes and it looks like it's stuffed with bread so I ask you to double check the correct answers are not:

- to agree to go check and then never return to the table
- to send a different waiter over to point at it and say it's cheese (I'm Sicilian, fuck you)
- to suggest I try it when I say it's not cheese after I've already informed you I have a severe allergy (excuse me, would you like me to need to be hospitalized)
- to leave it on the bill
- to grudgingly take it off the bill and then say it was just chicken and mushrooms -- if that were true (and I really, REALLY don't think it was) why couldn't we have least gotten that answer at the beginning?

Pretty much every meal we've had here has ranged form good to spectacular and I did not need this shit while stranded here because of a volcano. It was extremely upsetting, and made me doubt the legitimacy of my concern. Because they are the restaurant, they must be right. Who am I to not believe them? But there was NO WAY, that food wasn't potentially dangerous, especially after I was lied to whether it was bread or not. It really shook me.

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Everyone is noticing different, seeminly intentional, arc-specific, echoes from past Doctor Who and Torchwood episodes in the Moffat season so far. Add yours in comments below (BEWARE, spoilers through 5.3) -- I'd like to get a full list, and I know I've tweaked to totally different things than others.

Comments

Amy's Choice "echoes"

[firefly124.livejournal.com]

Are you still wanting to collect people's thoughts on this stuff here? Because I seem to be the only one doing it, and if I'm annoying you by cluttering your inbox, well, I'd rather not be annoying. Plus, if you've not seen the ep yet, these comments are inherently spoilery, and despite the occasional slip, I really do try to avoid spoiling people. So, if you'd rather I stopped, please just let me know.

For now, on to the thematic echoes for this ep, and the big, glaring one would have to be, "What's the point of you?"

Dear Moffat: If you're not doing this to some purpose, I may have to scream. Loudly. That is all. (Yes, I know he didn't write the ep, but he presumably has something to say about what things are included as part of the shape of the season.)

Once again, I spent much of an ep wondering if I was just seeing things that aren't really there, making something out of nothing, and then here's a direct quote from "End of Days," in a very similar context.

There were some definite resonances to Donna's alternate life in SitL.

The Dream Lord kept reminding me of Bilis Manger. This may be in part because a) I'd caught a spoilery thing on my flist wherein EoD was mentioned and b) I've been rereading The Twilight Streets. Or it may be that something about him flickering about between timelines really did evoke Manger. Even if he did turn out to be a manifestation of the Doctor.

40 minutes before crashing into a sun, albeit a completely impossible one, reminiscent of "42."

Parasitic aliens that keep their hosts alive and healthy - "Reset." Though I suppose that's arguably something any evolutionarily successful parasite would have to do.

There were some things about the village that reminded me visually of "Countrycide," which was topped off by the whole running to hide in the butcher's thing. However, it might just be that the visual stuff has more to do with a common style of rural British architecture that looks very uncommon to my Yankee eyes.

All that said, as much as I enjoyed the ep, I was more than a little aggravated (this may be something of an understatement) that a) Amy was willing to commit suicide, not caring if that was the real world, because she'd lost her man, and b) said man found this romantic/validating/whatever. No, it wasn't the real world, but she explicitly said she didn't know that for sure and didn't care, and that's supposed to be okay.

I'm realizing I didn't add in thoughts about Vampires of Venice. This is largely because I didn't see anywhere near as much of the sort of echoes as have been coming through in other eps, though the encroaching "silence" reminds me both of the planets disappearing at the end of S4 and the "something in the darkness" bit in TWS1.