Things I Believe

1) Rose and the Tenth Doctor were lovers.

2) Good fanfic about Rose and the Doctor does not exist.

3) The idea of Ianto/Jack slash is both conventional and boring.

4) The essential bourgeois conservatism of fandom is revealed by the fact that fanfic embraces the idea of incestuous homosexual relationships but not threesomes - even when one of the characters involved is canonically omnisexual.

5) Being shocking for the sake of being shocking is neither shocking nor iconoclastic nor interesting.

6) Torchwood does the "effect top secret job has on your private life" beats better than Spooks.

In other news: internal monologue - still Welsh.

Doctor Who, 3x01 "Smith and Jones"

I miss Rose.

A Thought or Two...

As the square kilometre around the Canadian Vimy Memorial is actually Canadian soil - "the free gift in perpetuity of the French nation to the people of Canada" - that means that the Third Reich actually occupied one square kilometre of Canada during World War II.

Nazi fuckers.

I wonder what it was like for the Canadians fighting in France in 1944, what the sons and younger brothers of the men who fought at Ypres, the Somme, Vimy, Passchendale and throughout Canada's Hundred Days, felt to fight to retake the same soil their countrymen fought and died for a bare generation before? Someone must have written about it, I suppose.

Meanwhile, it's a sign of how much the world has changed in 60 years, Canadian soldiers are looking at leasing German tanks for service in Khandahar (hey, we're a northern nation, our tanks aren't air conditioned for use in deserts, okay? They were bought to fight the Soviets along the West German front, eh).

At the same time, I watched CBC's World War I documentary, The Great War, a look at Canadians in the First World War through the eyes of their descendants. The Great War is a combination of military history, family reminiscences, recreations with a touch of reality TV-style living history mixed in. As I watched, I thought about the traditions linking the Canadians of 1917 and those of 2007. Then, when the whistle blew, the piper would climb to the top of the trench and play the regiment forward into battle. Today, the strains of the pipes are still heard on Canadian bases, in the laments that mark the journey of our dead home again.