Back in October, during our fabulous UK Stratford-upon-Avon Shakespeare geekfest, Jen, Stacey, and I decided to make a quick day trip over to Cardiff. While we were wandering around the Queens Arcade mall in search of lunch and toilets and Doctor Who calendars we encountered a strange photo session in progress.

At first we planned to ignore it, but later we walked by again and the people working on it explained that it was some sort of community photo mosaic project. We were invited to participate. “We aren’t Welsh,” we explained. “That’s fine,” they said, “it doesn’t matter.” Clearly these people had a quota to fill. So feeling a little self conscious I followed Stacey and Jen as we each had our photos taken in front of several different colored screens, all the while being directed to look “up and to the left,” then “down and to the right,” and so on and so forth. One of the photographers flirted with Stacey. No one flirted with me. Clearly the Welsh don’t deserve me. Next time I’ll go to Manchester instead.

After they’d taken our photos they gave us each a T-shirt and sent us on our way.

So what was this mysterious project, you ask? It was the “I am Art” project, a photo mosaic containing more than 15,000 images of about 3,000 people. After the photos were taken the people (not us) voted to decide which famous Welsh person the photo mosaic would be of.

Go ahead, think of as many famous Welsh people as you can. I’ll wait here.

…

Done already? Yeah. That’s probably why the big winner, the “Face of Cardiff,” wound up being 2007’s “X-Factor” (think “American Idol”) runner-up Rhydian Roberts (I was hoping for actor Gareth David-Lloyd but Rhydian will do).

Several months passed and finally the completed project was revealed. The three of us spent some time zooming in on the mosaic to find each other. It was loads of fun. Each of us appears multiple times—zoom in and see if you can find us!

Here’s a pic of the three of us from earlier that week so you know who to look for.

So that’s the story of how Stacey, Jen, and I came to be featured in a strange piece of Welsh art, one with the people of Cardiff, forever immortalized in a pop star’s head. WE ARE CARDIFF. WE ARE RHYDIAN. RESISTANCE IS FUTILE.

So after my long hiatus from reading, I needed to find something to read. What to choose? Do I go with something current, classic, or unknown?  Given I have read so little my options were practically endless. Imagine walking into a bookstore and not having read a single book found in the store. Where do you start?

Being really cheap and not totally sure that I would be able to read on my Android phone, I began browsing the free ebook selection. Next I needed to decide what type of book. I already knew I wanted to read fiction, but did I want a story that took place in space? Some far away fantasy world? Vampires, ninjas, pirates? I didn’t know.

While all of the books are virtually unknown to me, I have heard friends talk about some of them, and I’ve seen many film adaptations. Note: There will be a future post about my first experience with having a beloved book get converted to a movie. While film adaptations are not the same as the book, I felt that I needed to find a story I knew nothing about and had no preconceived notions of. This quickly started to limit my options.

In reality the selection process didn’t take that long. It’s only in hindsight that I fully understand what drew me to choose Treasure Island. I knew it had pirates, a character named Long John Silver, and did I mention pirates? So this was the perfect book–a fresh story to re-energize my mind.

Next: I will discuss what it was like to read a book after my long hiatus, along with a really short review.

Emily with the pigs.

One of the many kids.

Minister of Goats, the Rev. Laura.

This goat wanted to eat my jacket. Others were more drawn to my trousers.

Adorable and very friendly.

This goat kept trying to eat my hair.

Emily enjoys a cuddle with a kid.

All the kids love the Rev.

Emily, Lindsey’s mother, and Moira with the day-old goats.

The prime motivation for reading during this time was Book IT! This is an awesome program which rewards reading with vouchers for a personal pan pizza at Pizza Hut. As a kid the idea of getting my own personal pizza, which today at my age is ridiculously small, was awesome–especially given my dad’s cooking.

Then one day I discovered a magical device called the Amiga. Why read when I could be playing games, hundreds of games! Needless to say computers and video game consoles kept me busy for many years and got me out of the habit of reading.

Eventually I had to read books again. There was the required reading one has to do when in school. Titles like Call of the Wild, Where the Red Fern Grows, and To Kill a Mockingbird. Then there were the book reports where one gets to choose the book they want to read but is then forced to write about it. While many of these books I was forced to read were good, I wasn’t immersed in the story because I was focused on how to answer the homework questions. I suddenly found reading to be a punishment.

Fast forward to today: I’m 32, and as of a few months ago I could only recall maybe 10 books that I had read during my lifetime. Ninety percent of these were kids’ books, of which I have fond memories, particularly Roald Dahl. I have tried to read books many times over the years, but I have found the process very frustrating. I find holding books uncomfortable; I have a hard time tracking the lines with big blocks of text; and I am easily distracted, or I can read several pages without actually processing what I just read. So basically no matter how interesting the story is–the process of reading was frustrating and required too much work. So I just didn’t read.

Then I discovered a new magical device. App really. The Kindle App for my Android Phone. I don’t remember what motivated me to install this app and use it to try to read, but what most people dislike about reading on their phone turns out to be what makes it the perfect invention for me. It’s comfortable to hold, and the screen doesn’t display a lot of text, breaking up what traditionally is a huge block of text into a bite size readable chunk that I find much easier to process. Suddenly, the technology that lured me away from reading was luring me back.

In the past three months I have somehow managed to read 5 books. Crazy sauce! Going forward I will blog about my reading experiences as an adult suddenly discovering the joy of reading. The free personal size pizzas are gone, but there are 30 years of good reads to catch up with.

Up next my first read: It’s a classic.

Beyond that it’ll be business as usual here at Docsmartypants.com. So welcome, Larry!

Doctor Who: The Doctor, the Widow, and the Wardrobe (2011) Matt Smith, Claire Skinner, Bill Bailey

It’s Christmas Day, so Larry and I pulled some Christmas crackers, put on our paper crowns, and watched the new episode of Doctor Who.

I’m glad that they’re finally airing Doctor Who episodes in the United States on the same basic schedule as in the UK. That being said, neither Larry nor I were huge fans of this episode. No big shock—I never seem to like the Doctor Who Christmas episodes as much as other people. Really I feel like this episode was a bit of a Christmas present from Steven Moffat to his mother or something, which is fine, except that I’m not Moffat’s mum.

On Christmas Eve, 1938, the Doctor falls to Earth in a spacesuit and is helped back to his TARDIS by Madge Arwell (Skinner). The Doctor says that if she ever needs his help she should ask for it by making a wish. (The Doctor is apparently some sort of Christmas angel/Tinkerbell/Jesus figure now.) Three years later Madge makes that wish after her husband is lost in the war. She is determined not to tell her children and ruin their Christmas. She takes them to an old house in Dorset where the Doctor is posing as the caretaker. His Christmas gift leads them to another time and place—one full of magic and danger and important lessons about the strength of women and mothers and wishing or something.

I’m such a Scrooge, but I just found the resolution of the plot to be a total copout. Larry agreed. (Stacey, feel free to argue with me about this.) I know, I know, Christmas miracles yada yada…it just didn’t work for me.

I did enjoy Bill Bailey’s very brief appearance, especially when he says to Madge, “Ma’am, please stop crying. I can’t interrogate you while you’re crying.” HA! I also enjoyed some of the quieter moments, such as the one between the Doctor and Madge about not letting the children know their father is dead. “What’s the point of them being happy if they’re going to be sad later?” asks the Doctor. “The answer of course, is that they’re going to be sad later.”

Larry liked the fact that Amy and Rory’s front door is painted TARDIS blue, which he found “ridiculously cute.” But overall he didn’t find the episode fun. He said, “It was ridiculously predictable and didn’t feel that Christmassy.” I think it was Christmassy enough, but I absolutely agree that it was predictable and just not that much fun.

You can do better, Moffat! Make your mum proud.

And that concludes the official DocSmartypants 25 Days of Christmas schedule. Hope you enjoyed. Happy holidays!

Merry Christmas!

(click to see the photos)

Somerville Holiday Lights

Last year on Christmas Eve, Larry and I were watching Jeremy Brett’s Sherlock Holmes face off against his nemesis at Reichenbach Falls. Larry was briefly traumatized, we watched another episode, and in the end it all worked out, despite some brief confusion over the fact that between those episodes they swapped out the actor playing Dr. Watson. Keeping with tradition, we decided to watch The Blue Carbuncle this year, the most festive of the Holmes mysteries.

On Christmas Eve, Sherlock Holmes (Brett) and Dr. Watson (Burke) look into the mystery of how a stolen gem ended up inside of a random goose. It’s more exciting than it sounds.

This is actually one of my favorite of the Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes stories, and it is the only one to my knowledge set at Christmastime. Brett was such a fantastic Holmes—by far my favorite of the classic Sherlocks. And Burke is a great Watson (although I came to love his replacement, Edward Hardwicke, just as much). I like my Watsons competent—as he was in the books—and both Burke and Hardwicke play him that way.

Half of the fun of any Sherlock Holmes story is the interplay between Holmes and Watson. There’s lots of it on display in The Blue Carbuncle. Brett and Burke have terrific chemistry, gentling snarking at each other in such a playful way that you completely believe that they are best friends. (Or life-partners, if you prefer that theory.)

Adding to the Christmas spirit is the conclusion to the story, in which—SPOILERS—Holmes takes pity on the thief and let’s him go, arguing that sending the clearly distraught fledgling crook to prison will only make him into a hardened criminal for life. “Maybe I am committing a felony,” he tells a disapproving Watson, “but I may be saving a soul.”

“After all,” he adds, “it is the season for forgiveness.”

Tune in tomorrow for Day 25: Doctor Who Christmas Special: The Doctor, the Widow, and the Wardrobe.

White Christmas (1954) Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye, Rosemary Clooney, Vera Ellen

Confession time: I didn’t watch White Christmas. I have watched it—loads of times. In fact I watch it every year, and I swear I own a copy. But when I went to watch White Christmas I could find no trace of it in my home: not on DVD, not on VHS, not on TV, not even on Netflix instant queue. So I guess I will go out and buy a new copy tomorrow, if I can find one. But in the meantime we watched The Ghost and Mrs. Muir instead, and I will write about White Christmas from memory, since clearly my copy was stolen by the ghost of Rex Harrison.

The basic plot of White Christmas is that Bob Wallace (Crosby) and Phil Davis (Kaye), who met in the war, have a successful song and dance act. But Bob is a hopeless workaholic and Phil wants some time off, so Phil plots to find Bob a love interest. They meet the Haynes sisters (Clooney and Ellen), who have a small act of their own, and they all end up at a struggling inn in Vermont that is run by Bob and Phil’s former commanding officer (Dean Jagger). To help the inn stay in business, Bob and Phil decide to bring their whole troupe up to Vermont and stage a big Christmas show, starring themselves and the Haynes sisters. There’s fake romance, real romance, misunderstandings, lots of great songs, a few not-so-great ones, a touch of patriotism, and of course, a white Christmas.

Danny Kaye absolutely delighted me when I was a child. I will now concede that he is a shameless ham, but that doesn’t stop my enjoying him in White Christmas. Bing Crosby, on the other hand, seems to have had the majority of his personality surgically removed. Is it possible that Kay was some sort of charisma vampire, sucking the life energy out of his costars? It would certainly explain Clooney’s performance, too. Ah well, despite some overacting on the left and some wooden acting on the right, I whole-heartedly love White Christmas.

I can still remember the first time I watched this movie when I was a kid, and it got to the scene where Bob and Phil stand in for the sisters so they can make a getaway from the nightclub they’ve been performing at. The guys do the “Sisters” number, and I laughed so hard that first time that I thought I might pass out. Even now it gets me—particularly the little looks they give each other and the obvious glee with which Phil thwacks Bob with that feather fan. Genius!

Obviously the number everyone thinks of when they think of this movie is “White Christmas.” I love that song, but there are plenty of other good ones in this movie. There’s also some fantastic dancing, especially from Vera Ellen (if you can pay attention to her footwork rather than how painfully thin she is).

White Christmas is a holiday staple for a reason: It’s a classic. It’s funny and fun to watch—full of color and music and dancing—and it’s got the obligatory happily-ever-after ending. I can’t really ask for much more. If you have a copy of White Christmas, go watch it. And if you have my copy (I’m looking at you, Ghost Rex Harrison!) please give it back to me, because Target is sold out.

Tune in tomorrow for Day 24: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: The Blue Carbuncle.