The Lyrics to Kumbaya actually make more sense, if you assume that "kumbaya" means "I have such a headache right now."

As some of you folks might have noticed, I posted a new Evil Twin a little while ago.

One of the things I like to do on the day I post one, is to ride the Stats tab, and watch the numbers climb.

After all the work I put into it, it gives me a good feeling to see that people are taking an interest.

So, onto the numbers... averaging every strip from the Patreon Pitch onwards, and excepting today's, here are Evil Twin's ratings:

Average Number Of Views: 451
Average Number Of Favorites: 24
Average Number Of Comments: 13

I'm not exactly what one might call a spiritual person. Nor am I among the "true believer" category. I like to think of myself as nicely skeptical.

I'm a fan of James Randi. Got a couple of his books. I used to post regularly on sci.skeptic on USENET, back when the internet was still just green text on a black screen. I even had a subscription to skeptical inquirer for a couple years.

But, once upon a time, I had something happen to me, that to this day I cannot fully explain.

At the time, I was attending The Joe Kubert School, comic book college, up in Dover NJ. But the place was such a stress-pit, that on weekends, I'd drive home to my parents' house in Delaware to rest up.

In those days, I was driving a 1985 Ford LTD wagon that had first belonged to my mom, then my Dad, and then my brother, who had rolled it on a church lawn (leaving the entire passenger side dented in) - so it was basically a rolling junk pile. And it was terrible on gas.

On Friday nights, I'd pack myself into it, fill my tank in Dover, and make the long drive home. Down the garden State Parkway to the NJ Turnpike, and then down the Turnpike to Delaware. It was a four hour drive, and it cost me two tanks of gas.

My usual trip plan was to drive two hours down the parkway to the Turnpike, and then hit the first rest plaza I came to, for gas, dinner and rest-room. Relaxed and refueled, I'd then make the remaining two hours down the Turnpike to Delaware, stopping at the final plaza for another refueling and another rest room break.

On the weekend of the incident, I started off as I always did, with one minor exception. I forgot to stop and buy gas before leaving Dover.

After I had been on the road for an hour, I looked down and saw that my fuel gauge was on empty. Pegged at E.

Now, I had run this car out of gas on several occasions, so I knew that once it hit E, it wouldn't go much further. I knew that I was hosed. I was doomed - well doomed. There was no chance in hell that I'd make it through rush hour traffic to the Turnpike.

And there were no gas stations between my location and the offramp to the Turnpike. The next gas station I could potentially reach was another hour away.

But all I could do was try to get as far as I could before that happened. So I pulled over into the right-hand lane, in anticipation of that moment that I'd feel the engine catch and the power steering go stiff. I also slowed down from 60 to 45, as I seemed to remember hearing once that 45mph was optimal for "miles until empty."

And, I started bargaining with the car. Don't let me down, old girl. Just keep on going. We can do this. I'll getcha a nice carwash and fill ya up with the good stuff, if ya just keep going.

Now, I needed to explain all that so you knew my state of mind, when what happened, happened.

Which was this:

The parkway goes over a lot of hilly country, and as I crested the top of one hill, the sky was laid out before me in a panorama. I had this sweeping vista that spanned across miles to the horizon.

And the sky was looking at me.

Plastered across the entire sky before me was a face. But not a Godlike face, or anything you'd expect.

It was a Native American.

Specifically, an an Indian Chief, with full feathered head-dress. It didn't move, it wasn't animated. It just looked at me. This face, filling the entire sky, etched in white and blue clouds.

And it looked like a photo. This wasn't a case of "that sorta looks like a bunny" - I was staring at a photograph that was photoshopped onto the sky. I could see every wrinkle, line and crag in his face. Every detail of the feathers in his head-dress. Every bead.

I naturally assumed I was seeing things, so I blinked a couple times. slapped myself a couple times so I knew I wasn't asleep. And I looked again.

And the face was still there.... and it stayed there for the next fifteen minutes, slowly growing less and less distinct, until the sky just looked like clouds again.

...and somehow, I made it to the Turnpike gas station. An hour away. On Empty. The car actually sputtered and died just as I pulled to a stop at the pump. It could not have been timed any better.

As I said, to this day I cannot explain what occurred that day. The logical side of my mind still thinks maybe I just hallucinated the face. Was it just a perfect arrangement of clouds and an overactive imagination?

But I can't explain how that car made it to that gas station.

It is done.

Well, mostly.

The surgery is complete. Yesterday was spent with my tech buddy, tearing apart both of my computers and rebuilding them into one massive mega-rig, and one jukebox video player. Windows XP is no more. Windows 7 has been installed, as has the SSD.

And everything is in an uproar. Now begins the tedious process of reinstalling everything, and tweaking everything, in the hopes of making the environment within the computer feel like home again.

I have to say, my initial reactions to windows 7 are not favorable. It's big and dumb. Style over substance. It clearly wasn't designed by or for people who use computers. Stupid see-through plasticy windows. Pointless useless information blaring at me from every direction. Why would I need to have every window tell me my firkin' network workgroup? What zero-retention imbecile needed this?

There's also the problem of my monitors.

I have two identical monitors. I-INC iP221 model number.

I have them set up in a dual monitor configuration.

For some reason, Windows 7 correctly identifies the left monitor by manufacturer. The right one is identifies as a generic PNP Monitor, which means the video settings for each monitor are different.

The left monitor (correctly identified) appears to be locked permanently at 1920 X 1080
The right monitor (generic PNP) isn't.

Now, when I say, locked permanently, that doesn't mean it doesn't allow me to change the resolution. I'm being allowed a choice of resolutions lower than 1920 X 1080 - and since I like to run at 1600 X 900, this would not be a problem except for one thing.

The left Monitor, the one correctly identified by manufacturer, when you change the resolution, you don't actually change the size of the image. So, if you set it to 1600 X 900, the image shrinks. It displays a 1600 X 900 image, at 1920 X 1080 resolution. And then you have to stretch it to compensate, and that makes it go all fuzzy.

The right monitor, identified as a generic PNP Monitor works perfectly. sharp, crisp, resizes to any resolution with no need to stretch it to fit.

In short, the one that is working properly is broken, and the one that isn't working properly is working perfectly.

It's maddening.

It all just reinforces my opinion on upgrading which is this: NEVER DO IT. If you must, do it only when it cannot be avoided by any other means. Only when being dragged, kicking, screaming and clawing is how they'll get you to change. Do not go gentle into that good night. RAGE! Rage against the change, because it's going to suck.

...and the bouncing **** and the bouncing **** and...

I've taken that BDSM test that has been doing the rounds, and it scored me as being only 30% pervert. The questions seemed a bit narrow focused though, lots of talk of rope, pain and urinals. Not really anything about ewok orgies, or crosdressing care bears. I suspect my kink-measurement was simply too far off their meter.

Anywho, my results:

== Results from http://bdsmtest.org/ ==
80% Exhibitionist
80% Voyeur
75% Non-monogamist
63% Switch
55% Experimentalist
50% Bondage Receiver
50% Daddy/Mommy
50% Girl/Boy
38% Submissive
34% Dominant
30% Pervert
30% Primal (Prey)
26% Brat
25% Bondage Giver
24% Brat Tamer
23% Primal (Predator)
21% Masochist
20% All-Rounder
20% Vanilla
16% Sadist
13% Slave
9% Master/Mistress
0% Degradation Giver
0% Degradation Receiver
See my results online at http://bdsmtest.org/result.php?id=51558

Oddly, while they think I'm 30% pervert, they also think I'm 20% Vanilla. I guess that means I'm 50% ballast.

Eugene Levy and Catherine O'Hara of former SCTV fame have a new show, with the TV-Unfriendly name of Schitt's Creek.

I was somewhat excited to hear this, because I love SCTV. I love Eugene Levy, and I Love Catherine O'Hara. More to the point, the concept behind the show sounded hilarious.

The concept is this: a rich, trendy couple and their spoiled kids suddenly find themselves homeless after their business manager runs off with all their money, and the IRS seizes what little they have left. Now, they've been forced to move to a small northern mountain town that the father of the family once bought as a joke. Basically, Green Acres without the pig.

I'm about 85% through the first episode of it. It really isn't living up to the promise of that. And, most of what's wrong with it is that it's one of those sitcoms that takes itself way too seriously. No laugh track. Barely any incidental music. And no jokes. There have been a number of "humorous situations" presented, but not one of them has had the comedy potential explored in any adequate capacity.

It's dry. it's boring. It's unpleasant.

This should have been Sammy Maudlin and Lola Heatherton in a wacky fish out of water comedy. Instead, Levy comes off as cardboard. Subdued. Subtle. Unfunny. Ohara seems adequate in her role of a spoiled rich woman, but she's not taking it Over The Top enough for it to be funny. it just comes off as tragic and uncomfortable.

Chris Elliot is in it too. He's come the closest to actually delivering a joke, but even he's being hamstrung by the bland presentation.

I really wish we'd get past this flaky trend of comedy being presented in a serious manner. Devoid of humor, and barren of joy without any sense of comedic timing or delivery.

I might as well be watching a soap opera, except that would probably be funnier - albeit unintentionally.

And it's not just that the characters are all instantly unlikable. Basil Fawlty was a horrible person, and The Young Ones were ugly, disgusting, violent cretins, but they were also comedy gold.

You can make your cast unlikable and still manage to make them funny.

But it seems nobody on this show is either capable of that, or is being allowed to. it almost seems as if a palpable fear hangs over the entire production. The fear of funny.

Got to keep it low key. Real. As if we expected to win an award for Most Serious Comedy.

I wish they'd get over themselves, stop treating comedy like drama, and write some fucking jokes.

It seems that the problem I talked about in my previous journal:
http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/6421501/

...was being caused by a broken javascript.

If any of you folks are still having this problem, do a ctrl-F5 and it will cause the javascript to reload. This should fix it.

Are FA's Check All and Check None buttons on the submissions listing page missing for everybody, or just me?

I really hope they didn't do something as boneheaded as removing them. I use those every day.

I have just watched the worst episode of Dr Who ever. I would gladly tell you the title of it, but it hasn't got one. For this is an episode which exists only in the depths of my fevered mind.

The story goes like this:

I had downloaded the latest torrent of the new episode, and I was all excited, because love it or hate it, new Dr Who was new Dr Who.

At the start of it was a commercial, which I thought was odd, because the BBC don't do commercials, do they? At least not the usual cheapo UHF late-night low budget trash commercials, which is what this was... Anyway... this was followed by the opening titles, so it was off and rolling.

And following the titles was another commercial, and then another, and then another...

I thought maybe I had grabbed the BBC America version, which tends to be heavily edited to make room for commercials, so I opened a browser window and my torrent client and started checking to make sure it didn't say BBCA on it, and it didn't...

Meanwhile, there's another commercial, and another....and now we're at the half-point of the video file's run time without any trace of the episode starting. And I'm starting to think now that I've downloaded a joke file. A fake episode put up to trick folks who were torrenting for the real one.

So I load up one of the more popular Dr Who chat forums and go looking for reviews of this episode to see what is being said about it.

The fans have given it 10 out of 10 stars. They've declared it the greatest, most brilliant episode of all time. They're using terms like deep, and bold, and powerful. And then I get to one reviewer who says it was the bravest, most avant-garde thing he'd ever seen...Imagine...making an entire episode told through nothing but commercials.

And as I look back to the video, we've reached the last minute of the program. There's a shot of a darkened street, with the lights of a city in soft focus in the background. TARDIS lands, Capaldi steps out. He pauses, taking a deep lungfull of city air which he lets out with a cloud of steam in the chilly night. Then he gets back into the TARDIS which takes off. Cut to end titles.

And I'm looking at this, and looking at the reviews, and I just don't get it. There's no story. There's been no reference to The Doctor, or Daleks, no TARDIS until that final shot, nothing even remotely science fictionish, just a bunch of cheap gawdy advertising.

It was about this time that the cat hopped into bed with me, waking me up. I'd fallen asleep while curled up with a book (a star trek novel - sectiion 31) and the whole thing had been just a bad dream.

But I see it as a fascinating glimpse into my subconscious. Is this how I view the program now? Unintelligible junk, a bunch of trashy commercialism with a title sequence? And that no matter how much random noise it is, the fans will always declare it brilliant, because it's got the name Doctor Who stamped onto it?

Maybe?

Anyway, the cat's getting annoyed with me because I've sat up to type this, when really I should be lying down so she can use my tummy as a self-heating bed.

Better go be warm.

Dear Terrorist Idiots,

I know there's not much chance you will read this, because one of you is dead, and the other two are in police custody, but I felt that I would be remiss if I allowed your actions in France, at the Charlie Hebdo humor magazine to go without comment.

So...

Someone insulted your religion.

They drew a satirical cartoon about it, which you found offensive.

And so, to defend your religion from this disresepct, to show that you are no joke, and will not be laughed at, you murdered the artist of the cartoon, and the editor of the magazine it was printed in, and everyone else who was in the room at the time with them. I guess, because you felt you were on a roll...

What needs to be pointed out about this is the effect it's had.

I honestly don't care a bit about what you believe. But if your intent was to demonstrate that your religion isn't the violently insane caricature that was depicted in those cartoons, then you have failed, because you've demonstrated the exact opposite.

And if the intent was to scare other cartoonists from daring to follow in the footsteps of those you gunned down, it seems that not even that worked, either. The wave of cartoons which have flowed in the wake of your idiotic act, and which take the piss out of you and your beliefs, has been somewhat tsunami-like.

What you have demonstrated is this: You are exactly the joke, as depicted.

And you have done far more damage to your religion's reputation than any cartoon ever could.

Congratulations.

Job well done.

Tell me if any of you folks out there have ever noticed this.

I mentioned it to a cousin of mine a while back, and he thought I was crazy. But I swear it's true.

I can hear it when it's about to snow.

There's a kind of dull flatness to the air. Everything sounds extra close. Your breathing sounds about five times louder inside your head. And it's quiet. Like, crazy quiet.

I went out about half an hour ago, to pull my rent out of the ATM. And there it was. The sound. The snow sound.

After getting back, I checked the weather app on my ipad. Sure enough, there's snow coming within the hour.

I can't be alone in this.

So have any of you folks ever heard it?

Do you know what I'm talking about?

No, I'm not here to complain that some hack has copied another artist's drawing, or anything like that.

I'm here to discuss something bigger.

Let's talk copyright.

Up until 1978, copyright terms were limited to 28 years, with a one-time 28, year extension, if one wanted to do the necessary paperwork.

However, that changed, when a lot of money ended up in a lot of pockets, and copyright terms got shoved way out to "life plus seventy years" - and at least for me, it's impossible to read those words without seeing them as a jail sentence.

So, here, on the first day of 2015, let's take a look at just a few of the works of art that the media conglomerates, and their purchased politicians have stolen from you, me and the public domain:

Sci-Fi Horror movie The Blob
Chuck Berry's Johnny B. Goode
Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo

.. just three examples from 1958 - which assumes the extra 28 year extension was purchased for those works.


And if the extension hadn't been purchased (which was more often than not, the case), you'd be seeing works from 1986 entering the public domain:

Movies:
Big Trouble In Little China
Short Circuit

Music:
Master Of Puppets - take that, Metallica.
Van Halen's 5150
They Might Be Giants self-titled debut album


...again, just a few examples.

That these things are not now public property, free to be used by anyone anywhere for any reason speaks to the power of money and the depth of corruption in our political system. Under the hands of the likes of the RIAA and MPAA, Copyright has gone from a good idea, to a literal crime against humanity.

The theft of our culture, for profit.

Happy Public Domain Day, people.

Let's remember the fallen.

http://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/public...../2015/pre-1976

So, I guess it's safe to assume that everyone who was going to see this year's Doctor Who Xmas episode has done so.

Rather than a plod through the entire plot, let me just hit a few key points:

It wasn't horrible.

Moffatt deserves a kick someplace indelicate for teasing the audience with Clara going, and then not going.

The scouse girl who was Dancing to Slade should have immediately been hired to replace Clara.

and most importantly of all:

...and this is where the (more spoilers) tag comes in, so stop now unless you want to read some wild conjecture that may be potential spoilers about the future...

ready?

here goes....

They aren't awake yet.

If you'll recall my earlier review, of the season finale:
http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/6241794/

I stated this:
"The theory is, all of what happened in this episode is a dream ... all the logical errors and pieces that don't fit together are supposed to point to the fact that this isn't reality. None of it is real - from the very first moment of the episode, we're being lied to."

That is, more or less, exactly what The Doctor says in this episode, about dream states being disjointed.

And how does the season finale end? Santa arrives, and makes a comment about the story conclusion.

And here's what I'm taking as the biggest clue of all:

The Doctor states that they won't know the dream is over until they wake up with a visible wound where the Dream Crab sank it's feeding tube into their skull.

At the end of the episode, after everybody wakes up, nobody has a wound.

I'm betting that we're going to see a re-visiting of the "it's a long story" quote, and the book scene at some point. Because it seems likely that this dream isn't over.

The question now is, how far back does this dream go? Because, as I also pointed out:

"If you were talking on the phone to someone, and they got hit by a car and died, resulting in their phone, most likely, being dashed to the ground for a passer-by to pick up... don't you think you'd hear some of that? "

Did the dream state begin before Danny died?

Before the Moon somewhat impossibly turned out to be an egg?

Before they met a fictional character.... Robin Hood?

Could the entire season end up wiped from continuity with a Bobby Ewing shower scene? And that's a big IF, because if you'll remember, the season started with a regeneration.

I'm actually interested to see how this comes out, now. And that's something I haven't said about Doctor Who for some time.

Let's hope the payoff is, if not better than the fan conjecture, at least as good an idea.

Go on, Moffatt. Let's see if you can pull this off.

After many discussions with our legal department, it has been determined that we may deliver to you the following message.

To whit: Although you are under no legally binding requirement to do so, management generously extends this opportunity to have a reasonably acceptable end of year holiday style festivity, if you should so choose.

On your own free time, of course.

Wow.

Ok, so... last night I got to witness, what I can only describe as an anti-Patreon circle jerk.

And what I found to be the most amazing thing about it, was what was being complained about. No, they were not angry about artists going pay-per-view, and using Patreon basically as a paywall.

No, they were mad about it being used as a tip jar.

It was an argument that could have come out of the mouth of a Ferengi.

"You were going to draw that anyway! Why should you get paid for it!?"

"Why should I subsidize your hobby! How dare you try and make a living by drawing pictures! It's not like it's even a real job anyway!"

I could barely get my head around it.

Aparrently, if you aren't running Patreon as a pay-per-view, you're just a lazy, good for nothing bum, who isn't making any effort at all to give people any value for their money.

Am I dense, or is that opinion more than just a bit mental?

What do you folks think? Sound off.

And please, Try to keep your responses civil.

It's Friday.

It's Xmas season.

Screw productivity.

Let's play with SPIROGRAPH!

http://nathanfriend.io/inspirograph/

Some time back, on the ios App Store, ATARI released "ATARI's Greatest Hits."

This game package offered you the chance to buy and play vintage Atari 2600 games, and arcade machines including such hits as Centipede and Tempest.

You could buy the games in packs of five for a buck or, pay ten bux to get em' all at once. Later, they added "token" play, where you essentially bought arcade tokens, and could spend them to play a game once, without buying the game itself.

And all was good.

But, a few years went by. A few ios system updates happened.

And now this package is incompatible with ios 8, the only version that Apple will allow anybody to install anymore.

And yet, it hasn't been pulled from the app store. Apple and Atari still accept in-app purchases for content they know they have no means to actually deliver.

I found it out the hard way. I spent my ten bux just now. And all I got for my money are write errors, any time I try to launch one of the games. Won't download the content. Won't install the purchased games. Won't play worth a damn.

And still, there it sits, in the app store, waiting for the next sucker.

It took a few minutes of Googling to find the message board, where the programmers who wrote it were fielding complaints from the user-base, and explaining that even though they were no longer employed by Atari to work on the app, they had provided a fix to Atari, free of charge, that Atari hasn't implemented.

This is a class-action lawsuit waiting to happen.

Blatant, outright fraud.

I'm assuming anyone will actually see this.

It seems like we've been living the week that wasn't, here on FA.

The Administrator Notice Process countdown is currently at 93%, (it's nice it's moving again, since it seemed to spend most of yesterday stalled at 85%) and I'm getting the feeling that until it finally hits the big 100, nobody is like to really post much of anything.

And I can sort of see why.

Posted a journal earlier in the week. Nobody responded.

Tuesday's episode of Evil Twin has just over 30 viewers, which is about 300-some shy of it's usual viewing stat. And again, not a single comment posted on it.

Not really much point in uploading anything if almost nobody's going to even know it's here.

I hate working in a vacuum.

If you see this, make some noise.

In case you spent most of today under a rock (or more likely, trapped under a pile of sale-crazed bargain shoppers) here's today's big news: The Star Wars trailer is out:



Considering this new Star Wars is being brought to you by J.J Abrams, A.K.A, the man who ruined Star Trek, it looks, somewhat surprisingly, not horrible.

That sword's a bit silly, though. Lightsaber - TO THE EXTREEM ™

Of course, there's almost nothing to the trailer. It's really more of a teaser. No scenes of Han, Luke, Chewie or Leia. A couple fx shots, some sinister music, BAM HERE COMES THE THEME....

We'll probably have a better idea of what we're dealing with when an actual proper trailer gets released, sometime next year.

But for now... feast yer squinties on that Falcon Barrel Roll.

Maybe we'll actually, finally get the movie we should have gotten, instead of all that prequel garbage.

Cards against humanity recently attached four optional questions to the ordering process for one of their gaming products.

They were surprised when people actually answered them.

The results speak for themselves:
https://www.holidaybullshit.com/facts

Pandas. Yes, they are all that.

UNF.

So.. just finished it.

Another trading card series of an episode. All moments, very little connecting tissue.

On the good news front: Clara is gone! Write her off. Never speak of her again. She is no more. She is an ex-parrot.

On the bad news front: how many times can you throw up your hands and go "Oh for FUCK'S SAKE!" in a single episode? All the times, that's how many. Facepalms aplenty to be had today.

Cybermen do not work that way.

I am so sick of the comedy slapstick Master. It was dumb when he was a guy, it's still dumb when he's a girl. Bring back the Delgado archetype or never use this character again. I will kick you someplace indecent. This is not a threat, it's a promise.

I also took note that they tried to hand-wave all the crap that last week's episode screwed up, by hanging a lantern on it. Sorry Moffatt. You blew it, and we all saw you.

Still not sure how I feel about what they did to the Brigadier. Just Moffatt shitting on another beloved character, I guess.

Can he please just go now?

You folks have probably seen these in stores. You may have even bought a few. Digiorno popularized 'em. Most stores have their own store brand version nowadays too.

I've had a few, and been... well... not too thrilled by them. They promise "just like delivery!" but what I usually ended up with was tough as cardboard crust on the outside, raw dough in the center. Just not that big a success.

But I've worked out a little trick that improves things greatly. It takes a little extra pre-planning, but it's worth it.

Here's the deal. Forget the directions on the box. Ok, sure - take note of the temperature and cooking time, but that's it. It's usually about 425, for twenty minutes IIRC.

First things first: take the unopened pizza box out of the freezer. Put it in the fridge, and let it thaw. This takes about a day. I sometimes let them sit for two just to be sure it's thawed all the way through.

Once your pizza is thawed, carefully get it out of the packaging and put it on a cookie sheet covered with aluminum foil (I like non-stick reynolds for this) Careful doing this because it's going to be floppy and a little stretchy.

Now - put the pizza, on the cookie sheet into a cold oven. That's right. DO NOT PRE-HEAT. Why do we do this? Because as the oven slowly begins to heat up, that raw pizza dough is going to do what any yeast dough subjected to warmth does - start to rise.

By the time the oven is up to cooking temperature, your crust will have risen nicely.

For cooking time, I tend to go for about half an hour. This is the twenty minute cook time, plus the ten minute oven-warm up time.

After time's up, take it out, and let it cool for about ten minutes before serving.

Viola - soft bread crust. Cooked all the way through.

Depending on your own oven, your cook time may vary, so you may want to pop the light on after twenty minutes and give it an eyeball to see how it looks.

But, there ya go. I've found that this works much better than following the directions on the box.

Enjoy.

Ok, so I've had a good few days to let last week's episode bubble about in my head.

Since my immediate review didn't really touch on any actual points of the episode, I figured I should at least sit down and make some notes about my thinking.

Let's start off with the big picture. This episode is a mess. Logically inconsistent. Reliant entirely upon shock value. It's basically a series of "shock" moments that Moffatt probably thought were cool, but which don't really fit together in any meaningful sense.

Let's go through a few of these.

Danny is talking to Clara on her phone. but during the conversation he gets hit by a car and dies. And Clara finds this out when someone picks up the phone and tells her "Sorry, but he's dead."

So, what's the big error here? If you were talking on the phone to someone, and they got hit by a car and died, resulting in their phone, most likely, being dashed to the ground for a passer-by to pick up... don't you think you'd hear some of that?

So, the TARDIS lands in a huge mausoleum filled with fish tanks, inside of which sit rotting skeletons (which are actually cybermen, with their cyber bits rendered invisible by the magic water) - after much ado and a few monologues, The Cybermen are released, and begin to march out of the building. The Doctor follows them and surprise.. it's all inside St. Paul's Cathedral. Which is one of those famous and popular touristy places in the middle of London, which is usually full of tourists (and is in fact surrounded by tourists when the Doctor emerges), who might just have noticed during one of the tours, that someone had replaced the entire inside of this national landmark with something not at all St. Paul Cathedralish. (in fact, as the cybermen emerge, a touristy type looks at them, and then ignores them, walking past into the building)

Edit: Just checked wikipedia. St. Paul's Cathedral is a working church. Hourly prayer and daily services. Not the kind of place you can install a massive evil corporate headquarters, let alone laboratories and acres of fishtanks into without anybody really noticing.

And of course, The Master is now a woman. And while it's been established that this can actually happen, what makes this revelation particularly stupid, is that everything this character has done and said throughout the episode has been completely at odds with it. The complex science project being undertaken is more fitting to The Rani (who everyone was expecting her to be) and at one point, she comments "I'm the one you left behind..." Which fits Susan more than it fits The Master. (Because the last we saw of The Master was when he body-tackled Rassilon, throwing himself into the gallifreyan timelock. )

It's a story built out of moments. And while it might make for a really amazing trading card set, it makes a lousy tv episode. You get bounced from one to the next, without them ever really connecting with each other. It's about as disjointed as you can get without just pasting together random scenes from random episodes.

So now, the big question - is this a defect or a design? It's going to be many days before we find out one way or the other, but one fan theory that is making the rounds to explain it all is this:

Nothing in this episode is actually happening.

In this story we're introduced to a little device called a "Dream Patch" - a device that induces a dream state when applied to a person - Clara takes them out of a bookshelf in the console room, and uses one on The Doctor in an attempt to steal his TARDIS. He later reveals that it didn't work, and he was just letting her dream that her hijack attempt was successful.

The theory is, all of what happened in this episode is a dream, resulting in one of those patches being used on either Clara or The Doctor, or Danny, or maybe even all of them, before the episode starts. That all the logical errors and pieces that don't fit together are supposed to point to the fact that this isn't reality. None of it is real - from the very first moment of the episode, we're being lied to.

I'll be interested to see if this is actually the case, or of it's just wishful thinking - trying to retcon rubbish.

Moffatt, you have one week.

Let's see if your story outcome is any better than the fan theories.

My review of today's Doctor Who:

There's the water tank.

There's the shark in the water tank...

..and here comes Fonzie on his water skis.

And THERE HE GOOOOOES!