Photos, Who, Victorians

[icepixie]

Okay, people, I'm jumping on the photo meme bandwagon. (How could I resist?) Tell me what mundane part of my life you want to see pictures of! Shoes, house, bookcase, computer, my favorite [insert noun here]...whatever. You can even request stuff from Kenyon or Exeter, since, given the amount of pictures I've taken over the last two years, it's not entirely unlikely that I'll have a picture of it.

Heck, request multiple things. I like taking pictures.

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So I watched "Pyramids of Mars" yesterday, and oooh. Sarah Jane is awesome. Competence is so becoming on a companion. Also, pretty dress. Not to mention just the right amount of snark and willingness to talk back to the Doctor. Hee.

The story was...not scary in the least, but that's okay. It was period, and that's cool. Tom Baker's googly eyes still kind of freak me out, though.

The Awesomeness That Is Sarah Jane inspired me to try "Genesis of the Daleks" again, and...it's just. not. happening. It should be interesting, but it's not. I'm somewhere in episode four or five, I think, and I just can't make myself finish it. Perhaps it has something to do with Harry.

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Part of me is giving serious thought to writing the Eight-and-Charley-meet-the-SAJV-gang crossover my brain keeps threatening. And then somehow making Rebecca Fogg Charley's great-great-grandmother or something, because hee.

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Judith Flanders's Inside the Victorian Home is love. Yay for social historians who can write both authoritatively and engagingly. As with all studies in the social history of the later nineteenth century, this makes me think that, had I been born then, around age four I would've gone up to my parents and said something along the lines of, "I've got...a disease...called, um...well, it doesn't matter, but the upshot is that I'm now a boy; please start treaing me like one," so that I could actually, oh, go to school.

Her chapter on servant life is one of the better ones as far as detail goes; in fact, it is so detailed that it makes me want to go lavish praise on the inventor of the washing machine, because OMG, ow. Taking apart a dress and sewing it back together by hand every time you wanted to wash it? Ack.

Comments

[alto2.livejournal.com]

"Pyramids of Mars" is one of the first Four stories I ever saw (or, really, one of the first DW ever), and granted, I was in about ninth grade, so maybe I was 13/14, but Sutekh scared the crap out of me. Not so much while I was watching, but I could not get that image out of my head later that night to save my life. It's one of the first times that ever happened to me, which is why I've become increasingly careful about the images I fill my head with. (That one doesn't really bother me now, though!)

I'm really fascinated by your reaction to "Genesis," though. It's one of those I'd most like to see again, of those I don't have on tape (which are many!). It's such a classic Who story, so I wonder why you're having so much trouble with it? Harry really bothers you? Pity, in any case--maybe come back to it later--I know I've tried books at the "wrong" time and am amazed at coming back to them a few years later how much better they've become ;)

I'd imagine the Victorians were thrilled with being able to wash anything at all--one of the Globe tours I was on in London regaled us with details of the water-soluble vegetable dyes used in Elizabethan clothing, which meant the closest you came to washing them was to air them for a while. Must've been a rather potent experience, standing in the sun for a show at the Globe! Does your book say how often they'd actually go to the trouble to wash a dress? I'd think not so often, unless you had tons of servants?

[icepixie]

Pyramids: I think it might be the wormhole-made-of-disco ball-lights that's throwing me off, honestly... ;) I dunno, Sutehk is just so...eh. He's a bit of a moustache-twirler Maybe it's not so much the villain as that I can't quite believe the main characters are ever in danger, for whatever reason. I tend to respond better (where "better" = get scared) to things like the creepy ticking robot at the beginning of GITF, or the ghostly typing in TDD.

Genesis: I don't think it's Harry. I think it's that I can't see much difference between the two factions, and I don't really get why I should care one way or the other. It's just so draggy. It could've been chopped to four episodes, easy.

Does your book say how often they'd actually go to the trouble to wash a dress?

Washing day was usually Monday. Common ideas of cleanliness-being-next-to-godliness meant that if you skipped a week, you would have immense guilt. Also, most people didn't have enough clothing to go more than a week without laundry. This is for people with at least one servant, which was all but the very far bottom of the middle class. Actually, I think even those without servants tried to do it once a week as well. (Much of the working class seems to have been composed of domestic servants. What few weren't in service, I suppose, didn't do washing all that often; the book concentrates on middle class domestic life, and so there's not a lot of detail about the ends of the spectrum. But the middle class had expanded by leaps and bounds in that period, so probably there were a lot of people who did their laundry once a week.)