Doctor Who Dream

The Doctor and I (Rose Tyler) were walking around this “get away” ship dock for a sightseeing trip, and a blue particle ray hits a ship, but nothing weird happens to it. The ship was round and flat, like a disc. It was silver with a bunch of shiny gadgets on the outside of it. We were both interested, so The Doctor handed me his psychic paper and said, “Rose, reserve us a spot onboard.” He walked off to examine the part of the spaceship that the blue particle ray had hit, and found no visible damage.

I walked up to this one eyed alien that had legs made out of some sort of yellow light, and when I showed her what I wanted on the psychic paper she said passengers were only allowed onboard this trip if they were married, so I pointed to The Doctor and said, “Yes, we’re married, and he’s wonderful.” So we ended up having to pretend we were married, and we were welcomed onboard.

We were shown to a beautiful suite, and we were told that we could get room service any time we wanted, and we were told where the main gathering area of couples would be in this area of the ship. When the guide was gone, The Doctor snuck the TARDIS onboard using his sonic screwdriver. The reason this is is because of some protocol that The Doctor had set before coming onboard with me.

We went to the main room to socialize and get some food, which was really amazing chicken and rice. The Doctor even commented on how excellent the food was. He told me he could feel the ship increasing in speed and commented on how it was very unusual, and went on rambling and mumbling to himself and walking around and acting like his head was about to burst. Everyone was staring at him, and a passenger asked, “Is he always this odd?”

I replied, “Well, he’s just a little bit insane. The doctors said it was because of something to do with personality shifts that keep him in a slight state of psychosis, but I still love him.”

They all nodded and told me how kind and romantic that was.

After the evening we went to our suite, and The Doctor pulled out his sonic screwdriver to see which direction we were traveling, and found it to be North East. He couldn’t think of what could be to the North East of where we were docked, so he just gave up for the time being, hopped into bed, and patted the empty space next to him for me to hop on to go to sleep.

The Doctor started rambling on about how he couldn’t figure out what was going on, and I had this strong urge to kiss him, so I did. He looked at me for a second or two with an interesting look on his face, and then he started kissing me back. I fell asleep in his arms.

The next day when we woke up, he said, “You kissed me.”

I said, “Yes.” The emotion of love that I felt was amazingly strong. “Can I do it again?”

He smiled and came and snogged me again, and held me close. My thoughts were of how much I loved this trip, despite if something bad was going on. I just got the man I love to show me affection.

We got ready to go out to explore, and I got separated from The Doctor. I hid because the woman who welcomed us onboard was explaining to someone that we were traveling to somewhere that would lock us in time and space.

Then there was a flashback in my dream from the alien woman’s point of view. The creature was observing the earth and “The Great Survivors” of the universe, humans. She decided to get couples onboard her ship after that so she could do testing on the race and their children to discover the secret to their survival.

I ran to the main room, and when I got in there I went to tell The Doctor what I had overheard, but when I got in there all the doors started to shut and lock, but I stopped the door successfully for about fifteen minutes until I got shoved back in the room by an alien and locked in. I went and told The Doctor what I had heard, and this man came out of the shadows. He was a stowaway. This man said that he had a gadget that, if the right coordinates were put in it, they could get up to the main deck and stop whatever was going on. It was a wristband of sorts that reminded both The Doctor and I of Captain Jack Harkness’s time vortex manipulator.

The Doctor used his sonic screwdriver to get the coordinates, and the man put them in. Both of them put their hands on the vortex manipulator and when the man punched the button nothing happened. When the coordinates on the man’s vortex manipulator wouldn’t work, he told me it was because of where we were headed, straight into a time pocket nebula. We could stay in there for hundreds of years without being touched by time, age, or space, or anything. He then told me it was a rather hard thing to get out of, and that we had to get the ship stopped at all costs. The Doctor then smiled and called the TARDIS to him, explaining that his ship, actually being a capsule, would be able to travel until we actually got into the nebula. We got in the TARDIS, and that is when the dream ended, unfortunately, because I woke up.

I can, however, guess at the ending. I knew the reason that we were being taken to the nebula through the point of view of the alien, so when we got to the main deck I would have been able to get The Doctor to find out why the alien was taking the humans inside a time pocket nebula. We would have stopped her and turned the ship around, enjoyed telling everyone that things were okay and good and safe, and then hopped back in the TARDIS and left to a new area of time and space, and a new adventure.

Uppsats två, mitt dröm

Förra veckan gick jag till en fantastisk fest. Mina vänner Megan, Jill och Sarah kom med mig. När vi kom, vi var överväldigade med doften av läcker mat. Vår värdinna, Janie, uppmanade oss att hjälpa oss med maten. Megan och jag är inte blyga om sådana saker, så vi grävde i till färsk frukt och pasta. Eftersom Megan äter snabbare än jag, hon hade två plattor innan jag hade avslutat min första. Det fanns alla möjliga läcker efterrätter och jag valde kakan med smör grädde glasyr på tårtan. Då jag hjälpte mig till glassen. Maten verkade komma från en oändlig källa.

Efter att jag slutade äta jag bestämde mig för att mingla. En grupp fick tillsammans och vi spelade ett kortspel kallat ERS (egyptiska råtta skruv). Det var en kille i gruppen att jag inte kunde ta mina ögon ut av. Han var en mager pojke som hade stora hår, väldingt fint hår. Efter spelet, han talade till mig! Han sa hans namn var David Tennant och att han var från Bathgate, West Lothian, Skottland. Vi gick runt och han presenterade mig för ett par av hans vänner. Deras namn var John Barrowman, Billie Piper, Sophia Myles och Freema Agyeman. Vid den här

tidpunkten höll jag på att dö av upphetsning. Här, i detta parti, var fyra personer som jag tittade på tv och älskade!

Självklart, insåg jag snart att vi hade gått till fel hus. Den part som mina vänner och jag skulle vara på var tvärs över gatan. Vi var på en Doctor Who Reunion fest! Det fanns provsjungar det att bli de närmaste följeslagare på showen. Jag deltog och jag fick en del! Min framtid var med min favorit visa. Naturligtvis, mitt i firandet, en hög pipa buller skrek genom rummet. Allting blev svart och när jag öppnade mina ögon, min väckarklocka var ringmärkning och jag var i sängen. Min bästa fest man någonsin aldrig hänt.

For all you swedish speakers, I know that this has terrible grammar, etc. It was my lame attempt at writing a creative essay in swedish.

British Humour vs. American Humor

The Scene: a kitchen in Elizabethan London.  Sir Edmund Blackadder (Rowan Atkinson) is trying to teach his idiot servant Baldrick (Tony Robinson) to add.

Using beans as counters, he fails repeatedly—with Baldrick concluding that four beans must add up to “a small casserole.”

“I see, Baldrick,” Sir Edmund says, giving up with a sneer.  “The Renaissance was just something that happened to other people.”

After reading this you probably realize that this is from a British TV comedy.  One way to tell is the historical reference (the Renaissance), whereas an American sitcom plays on, at best, pop culture knowledge.  Another way to tell is the condescending put down by a more intelligent figure.  All that this scene needs is a bawdy insult or a slap upside the head to make it a model of British Comic dialogue.  

American humor focuses more on physical and slapstick comedy.  There is less stress put on understatement, so the humor tends to be a little more open; instead of satirizing the social system through exaggeration, American humor takes more observational techniques.  On the other hand, British humour uses verbal humour as a key element.  It generally features puns, nonsense, black humour, eccentricity, satire and sarcasm, understatement, and irony.  Due to the last two, many jokes go unnoticed in British humour unless you are familiar with it.  

Dennis Kratz, dean of undergraduate studies at the University of Texas at Dallas and a professor of literature, states, “British humour has long been more pointed than American humor.  Americans really have a general fear of offending sensibilities, a fear of the insult, while British comic performers are masters of it.”  American TV producers want people to welcome characters into their homes every week, so the characters being likeable is, in a sense, enforced.  However, the British feature lead characters are manipulative, obnoxious, contemptible and self-indulgent.  It is hilarious to watch their artfulness, self-delusions, nasty insults and the educated way in which they slander each other.  

Kenneth Rexroth, a 1957 journalist, stated, “Great humor has a savagery about it.  This is why British humor stands up better than American in this century—particularly British bawdry.”

The British class system is the reason the lashing out flourishes on the network level.  “They’re stuck where they are,” says Kratz.  “They’re not going to advance.  So they take it out on the people around them because ultimately it doesn’t matter.  It’s a comedy of frustration.”

One of the most watched American sitcoms is The Simpsons.  You may think that this uses savagery, which it does in its own right, but even it keeps its characters lovable.  Episodes commonly end with Bart admitting to pranks and Homer and Marge rekindling their love.  It is not to say that no American sitcoms have had mouthy main characters.  In fact, All in the Family and Sanford & Son had mouthy main characters.  However, nearly all of the shows like this, including these two, were modeled off of British originals.  

Kratz says, “American culture gives lip service to breaking rules, but it’s really much happier when the social order is firmly re-established at the end.  American popular culture is more moral and conservative than we think it is.  We get sidetracked by the sex or violence on the surface.  What our popular culture is always telling us is that the nice person wins.  It’s better to be good.  I like to tell my classes that America is where Catholics, Protestants and Jews can all be Calvinists together.”

The British, in the end, will always be a step ahead when it comes to comedy.  They use historical references to add humour into their shows, and their storylines are knit together tight.  The show The Blackadder is a great example of this.  The Blackadder started out with Edmund Blackadder as the illegitimate son of a medieval king who is constantly plotting to take over the throne.  At the end of the series you see that Edmund is brought down to the rank of soldier in the trenches of World War I.

Then you have the shows that make the Brady Bunch seem toxic.   These are the Britcom “cozies”: Good Neighbors, ‘Allo, ‘Allo; Are You Being Served? 

Why would people want to watch these shows with mean-spirited losers and gay German Nazis?  It could possibly be because there is something sadly heroic in their hopeless efforts.  

“It’s very British,” Mr. Rankin, one of the stars on The Monty Python Show, says.  “Basil is a quintessential type of Englishman, the way we often see ourselves—the heroic failure.  The entire British Empire was a heroic failure.”

However, we will cut the Americans a break.  British television series only have six episodes to a season in some cases, whereas American television seasons last much longer.  Lenny Henry, the star and creator of Chef!, says, “You guys do a very long run so I think anybody abrasive or mean or nasty after 12 episodes, you start thinking, ‘Well, yeah, I’ve seen that.  What else have you got?’”

For God so Loved the World

We are all bound by the chains of iniquity.  The fall of man would have guaranteed us a spot in Outer Darkness with Satan and his angels if Christ had not come, but he did, and we are given the choice to yield to the enticing of the spirit and come unto Christ.  Jesus is both the Father and the Son.  If he were not there to make intercession for us we would remain in our fallen state, in bondage to that awful spirit who is the devil, never to be resurrected.

“And because he dwelleth in flesh he shall be called the Son of God, and having subjected the flesh to the will of the Father, being the Father and the Son-- The Father, because he was conceived by the power of God; and the Son, because of the flesh; thus becoming the Father and Son--” (Mosiah 15:2-3).  Christ is the beloved son of God, the one who offered us the way to become gods and goddesses.  Through coming to this earth and subjecting himself to the laws of his Father, doing his Father’s will, he shows himself as the Son of God.  However, because of the infinite atonement he made he takes on a second title; he takes on the title of Father.  As we partake of Christ’s mercy, he cleanses us of sin.  As fallen humans we are reborn through Christ, making him our father and brother in one.  

If Christ had not come to this earth as a sacrifice for sin, we would have no one to make intercession for us, and justice would overrule mercy, for nothing that is unclean can dwell in God’s presence.  For surely we will stand in God’s presence to be judged of our works, whether they be good or evil.  On that great day, we will stand there in our guilt and tremble, begging for mercy and for justice to stay her hand, and Christ , having gained power over the bands of death, is able to extend his hands in mercy, having satisfied justice with his atoning blood.

In order for Christ to be able to intercede on our behalf we need to hearken unto the words of the prophets and look towards Christ, using him as our anchor in all things.  “For these are they whose sins he has borne; these are they for whom he has died, to redeem them from their transgressions.  And now, are they not his seed?” (Mosiah 15:12).  As each individual strives to bring peace to others, bear good tidings and tells the world of salvation and the God of Zion, they become a child of Christ; they become one of his seed.

Were it not for Christ’s great sacrifice and atonement that he made for his people we would have all perished.  Oh how great would be our sorrow had there been no redemption, for there would be no resurrection, and the grave would have power over our bodies, and that evil Satan over our souls, and death would have swallowed all nations as a snake swallows her prey.  “But there is a resurrection, therefore the grave hath no victory, and the sting of death is swallowed up in Christ.  He is the light and the life of the world; yea, a light that is endless, that can never be darkened, yea, and also a life which is endless, that there can be no more death” (Mosiah 16: 8-9).  Christ’s light extends through all spheres of time and space, saving all who lived, live, and will live in this universe.  Due to the resurrection, each individual will stand at the judgement bar in their own resurrected body to await their fate.  If the individual has chosen to do good throughout their life, repenting and following Christ, then they will be granted eternal happiness and glory.  However, those who have chosen evil works will reap what they sow, and that reward is eternal misery and damnation.

God extends his arms of mercy towards us all the day long, and we, in our carnal state of sensuality refuse to accept his loving arms of mercy and do not depart from that which we know is wrong.  Being commanded to repent, but still refusing, for people are swift to do iniquity, but slow to remember the Lord their God.  Just as King Noah’s people, the people of this age live in a time where iniquity is in abundance, and it often causes us to be lifted up in the pride of our hearts when things go well for us.  When we lean unto our own understanding and forget God, that is the time in which we should fear the most.  For, just as King Noah’s people, if we as a people continue in our iniquity and do not have a change of heart, we will surely be brought into bondage and destroyed, for God will not suffer the people of this nation to live in this promised land while iniquity abounds.  

“And now, ought ye not to tremble and repent of your sins, and remember that only in and through Christ can ye be saved?” (Mosiah 16:13).  As teachers and leaders, we need to set the example of righteousness for the next generation.  The only way that we are saved is through Christ.  Repentance is a commandment, and it is given for our good.  The rising generation needs to know of their Redeemer and of the wonderful and necessary gift of repentance.  “Teach them that redemption cometh through Christ the Lord, who is the very Eternal Father.  Amen” (Mosiah 16:15).

Ian Frazier

So, every friday this fall semester I have been going to the English Reading Series at BYU.  The main reason for that is because I am enrolled as a student in that class, but anyways...  Ian Frazier, the best essayist in America, came to BYU to do a reading, and I just had to post my reaction.

This was quite possibly the best reading I have been to all year.  From the beginning of this reading to the end I was mesmerized, having no clue what was coming next.  Ian Frazier has truly earned the title as the best essayist in America.  Those of us who came in and thought that this would be just a regular reading were very pleased to find that we would be brought something much better.

The first thing that comes to mind on this wonderful morning that I am spending in Missouri is the essay called Bad Advice.  Just like they trusted a book to tell them that a paper bag would not catch fire if covered in grease and put in coals, I trusted that my shampoo bottle was strong enough to hold shut and not spill because it was in a secure position.  My wonderful bag was full of dress clothes that needed to be worn this morning at eight o’clock AM.  After a rather long and bumpy flight and tedious drive to the hotel, I opened my bag to discover that all of my clothes were covered in the green goo that was my shampoo.  The bag was covered in it, and my companion and I couldn’t get it out completely.  All my clothes are currently hanging up to dry in hopes that they will be dry enough to wear in six hours.  I suppose that I could use my blow dryer to try and dry them faster, but with my luck the clothes would catch on fire.  It was my own bad advice that was followed, but still it was bad advice.  So, for those of you that are traveling, I would suggest putting your liquids in a ziplock baggie so that if things spill it is an easy cleanup.  

There are several things that come to mind when I think of Ian Frazier, and the first thing seems to be the words THOU SHALT NOT.  I loved how he took the time to reword scripture into something that is hilarious and great to listen to.  I realize that some would call it blasphemous (especially zealots on BYU campus), but looking at it in a literary perspective it is brilliant.  Which brings me to a list of my own Thou Shalt Nots.  Thou shalt not put shampoo in a luggage without it first being put in a ziplock baggie.  Thou shalt not try and ascertain which way south east points without first consulting the lady who works at the parking lot in the rental car center.  Thou shalt not forget the directions which the parking lot lady shall tell thee.  Thou shalt not blame the parking lot lady for giving bad directions.  Thou shalt not blame the car stereo for the bass being too loud, nor shall thou blame the people who made the machine, for it was not their fault that the bass was so high it shook the whole car when thou tried to turn on the radio to a decent station.

I typed this up while I was in Missouri, quite obviously.