*swears at library catalogue*

I hate OLIS. Not only did it insist that we have no books by Richard Southern, which was obviously untrue (as was demonstrated by looking for individual titles), but I also spent three quarters of an hour looking for an author who I only subsequently discovered was unlocatable on the system because some idiot had misspelled his name

Bah, say I.

(no subject)

It's an obvious enough joke, in a Private Eye sort of way, but I can't help sniggering at Ship of Fool's service of thanksgiving for the smoking ban: http://ship-of-fools.com/Features/2007/no_smoking_service.html

Though I am grateful, actually, despite the idiocy of having to display no-smoking signs in churches (in spikey establishments, it's silly on an extra level)

In other news, I've been watching Inferno, the alternative dystopian universe Doctor Who story, in which Three discovers that actually there are worse places to be stuck than our 1970s Earth with a consultancy job at UNIT... What's striking is how different it is to the Star Trek: Mirror, Mirror, where the evil was of a cartoony. camp, over-sexed nature. Inferno is a very British fascist state, and the characters, while twisted away from their natures in 'our' universe. Mirror! Liz is even more buttoned up and proper than her original, but not a scientist and boiling with anger (probably because she's bored). In the Star Trek version, she'd have been wearing leather and carrying out dodgy experiments with unpleasant sexual undertones: this is more believable, sadder, and more frightening. The Brigade-Leader has analogous traits to the Brigadier: the 'good' Lethbridge-Stewart would never, on being informed that a prisoner can't be found in the ID databases, joke "ah well, if he doesn't exist, he won't feel the bullets", but there's something recognisable in that sense of humour. All in all, strangely convincing, despite the de-evolving wolf people, and I'm looking forward to seeing the conclusion, though I don't suppose it will be happy.