Lone Locust Productions

Category: Reviews

  • Lockdown Restaurant Review: Glover Home

    Lockdown Restaurant Review: Glover Home

    I think that we all have to agree that different people like different foods.

    There are, for example, people who eat vegetables and other items dug up from the dirt!  I find this behavior unconscionable; however, I have to acknowledge that different people have different attitudes.

    Just like people’s attitudes about food differ, so too do their attitudes about what to expect at the dining out experience.  For some it’s about the ambience.  For others it’s about the food.  And if it’s about the food, sometimes people make weird comparisons to “home cooked” foods.  Why is “home cooked food” the gold standard that so many people apply?  Let’s be brutally honest:  You may love your mother, but statistically speaking there is only an infinitesimal chance that her cooking – of any dish whatsoever – is the best in the world.  Rapidly approaching zero.  (Sorry, mom.)

    It’s wrong when you go to a restaurant to eat that you seek that “home cooked” meal experience.  You should demand something better.  It’s not shameful.  Professional restaurants have access to more talent, more experience, more ingredients, and more equipment than you probably have at home.  Embrace the experience.  Revel in it!  You never know when you might be trapped away at home, unable to go out to a restaurant to eat.  You’ll appreciate it then.

    With that in mind, yesterday we dined at the Glover Home, and I’d like to review the experience.

    Before we talk about the food, lets talk about the ambience and the dining experience.  We arrived at our assigned dinner location about 45 days ago.  In the time preceding the first dinner seating of the day, Michelle, James and I spent our time in the waiting area, which was a half-assed attempt at creating a living room feel.  There was a TV, two recliners and a badly-battered Ikea sofa.  There was also an exercise bike, a Nintendo Switch, with a couple relatively recent games which kept the kids occupied.

    The decor was clearly meant to simulate a living room, but was neither spotless nor decorated with tastefully chosen knickknacks as you would see on television.  The furniture wasn’t arranged in a close-knit fashion designed to encourage conversation, but was instead placed with an eye towards watching the television.  It had an eclectic mix of family photos (none of them in ornate gilded frames or even old-style black and white,) books and DVD cases – oh so many DVD cases.  Considering how many DVDs were available, I was seriously worried about how long the wait for dinner was going to be.  There was also quite a lot of just clutter.  Things stacked, as if forgotten, in corners and other out-of-the-way parts of the floor.

    Overall, I don’t know WHAT they were thinking and can only assume it’s some hipster thing.  I said it was an eclectic mix – that was to be the theme for the evening.

    Part of the unique experience of dinner at Glover Home is that one person, this time Chu-Wan, has to be designated to work the kitchen.  This is not the first time I’ve been to a “theme” restaurant where the establishment hands you the food to cook – Korean BBQs and outdoor hamburger grills come to mind – but usually the entertainment value in that (if you can call it that) is the group “shared experience” that it fosters.  Chucking one member of the party into the kitchen to do the work while the rest of the family plays Switch games in the waiting area just doesn’t cut it.

    There’s another problem with that arrangement, too.  The kitchen just wasn’t as well equipped as a commercial kitchen – I’m fact, I’m certain it wouldn’t pass a Maricopa County restaurant inspection – for lack of equipment if nothing else.  While I wasn’t too worried about food-borne contamination, the inadequate facilities and staffing meant that not all the food could be delivered at once.

    I don’t mean that like, the salad arrived before the soup, and the soup arrived before the main dishes – because there was no salad or soup.  Nor even do I mean that the sides meant to accompany the main arrived separately, because there were no sides.

    What I mean is that all four of us had the same main dish, but we could not all eat at once as the food had to be prepared in small batches.  (We’ll come back to the variety of the menu later in this review.)

    Technically, there was salad available.  In a bag, and you had to serve it yourself. Shredded cheese was available, as was unlimited croutons.  Well, unlimited until the box ran out. The choices of dressing were limited, but fortunately happened to be exactly the three dressings I eat: Italian, Caesar and Thousand Island.  The advantage to this do-it-yourself approach meant that one could have croutons, cheese and loads of dressing and just skip the lettuce altogether.

    Let’s talk a little bit about the menu.  You’ve heard about those pompous, poseur, hoity-toity restaurants that don’t give you a choice for dinner?  You just show up with your reservation and the chef has decided that tonight you eat steak tartare, asparagus in aspic and cranberry flan.  You eat it and you rave about it to your friends, no matter how gawd-awful it was, because you got the privilege of eating at the restaurant and if you didn’t like it you’re obviously the proverbial swine that doesn’t appreciate pearls.  Glover Home is a bit like that.  They serve four set entrees a week, and if you don’t like what they’re serving that night, there’s a box of croutons to eat. They don’t even print the menu, they just shout what’s for dinner from the kitchen.

    This week’s menu was Japanese Curry Rice, Taiwanese San-Bei Ji (a chicken dish), Australian Meat Pies and Spaghetti with Meat Sauce.  What the heck kind of cuisine is that?  There’s no consistency or pattern.  Is it a Japanese restaurant, Taiwanese, what?  I don’t know how any establishment can hope to get a following when you don’t get to pick your meal AND don’t have a clue what type of food you’re going to get.

    They also do a weird special the other three nights a week.  They call it “foraging” in which all the diners are let loose in the kitchen and are forced to battle it out to feed themselves with whatever is available in the pantry and freezer.

    This review is for Australian Meat Pie night.  When the first batch of food arrived, we were called to the dining area.  Seating was communally around a utilitarian wooden table.  The decor, if you could call it that, was from the early Mid-Pandemic Lockdown Era (circa 2020 C.E.). The table had a considerable amount of divers clutter, including textbooks, bills, face masks, hats and bits of home improvement projects, all pushed to the side to make room for plates.

    There were also crumbs and other detritus left behind from previous meals giving the table the appearance of having been cleaned by teenagers as a token chore for earning their allowance money.  Condiments were available in the form of a mismatched Dalek-shaped salt cellar and pepper pot.  (I really liked the Dalek-shaped salt cellar, it added a touch of class to the table.). There was a napkin dispenser with the most varied array of mismatched paper napkins imaginable.  It looked all the world like it was stocked with leftover napkins from different fast food restaurants.

    Like everything else, the plates, utensils and cups were completely mismatched.  Beverage choices were water, sweet tea, plus three kids of soda served IN CANS.  Refills were available only for the water and sweet tea.

    When the entree arrived, as previously mentioned, they were divvied out unevenly, since a second batch was in the kitchen.  This prevented prevented Chu-Wan from being able to eat from the first salvo of pies.  The pies were small, almost the size of fruit tarts, which I don’t blame the chef for, it was a limitation of equipment available in the kitchen.  This meant that you needed three pies to make a decent-sized meal.  The food itself was fine, slightly unevenly cooked and, I think could have used a bit more garlic and Worcestershire sauce, but perfectly serviceable.  Not the best I’ve ever had, but not the worst.  Certainly palatable enough that you didn’t feel the need to reach for the box of croutons.

    One downside of the dining arrangement was that, with the waiting area so nearby, it was difficult keeping the kids at the table.  The allure of the Nintendo Switch kept drawing their attention away from food.

    For all its drawbacks, it has a certain indescribable appeal, we have after all, eaten here 45 nights in row, and you can’t complain about the price.

    Compared to the “gold standard” of the home-cooked food experience, I rate this 5 stars out of 5.  “It’s just like eating at home.”

    • The proof is in the eating.
    • Dining together, but the Switch is calling
    • Mismatch
    • Clean the bloody table!
    • DVDs, oh so many DVDs
    • Open hours: 24×7, Serving hours vary
    • Accepts credits cards: Yes, via PayPal
    • Accepts ApplePay: Yes
    • Accepts Android Pay: No
    • Reservations: No
    • Good for kids: Yes
    • Pet-Friendly: Yes
    • Attire: Casual (very casual)

  • The Instacart Experience

    The Instacart Experience

    We completed our first Instacart transaction today, and it was satisfactory; however, there were a few things that we either had to hunt for or discovered in the process.  For the purposes of passing this on to others, here’s an account of our experience and what we learned.

    Let’s walk through the experience first.

    You’ll be presented with a group of stores that are in your area that Instacart will shop at.  On Instacart’s website they have the stores broken down in three pricing types:  

    • Stores that the Instacart price is the same as the in-store price,
    • those that the price is higher than in-store price and finally,
    • those that are mixed… some higher, some the same.

    The store we normally shop at, Safeway, had higher prices, so we chose to go with Fry’s Food and Drug, which had the same pricing model.

    The Online Shopping Experience
    The shopping app is easy enough to navigate, with pictures of the various items and pricing.  We chose about 30 items, with an approximate total of $140.  In some cases we would be told that an item was out of stock, or, more often, that the item was in low supply.  In which case, it would prompt us to select an alternative and would make a suggestion.  In the two or three instances, the suggestions were generally satisfactory.

    One case was a bit weird.  I chose a box of frozen crunchy taquitos.  It warned me it was low and suggested crunchy beef and cheese chimichangas from the same company as an alternative.

    This was a new product that I was not familiar with but sounded intriguing. I wanted to try them, instead, I chose the option of “don’t replace” for the taquitos and then proceeded to add the chimichangas to my purchase list as a separate item.  It immediately told me they were low on them and suggested the crunchy taquitos as an alternate.

    The circular logic of this was a little odd.  (For the record, in the end, we only managed to get one box of chimichangas and no taquitos.)

    When you complete your order you pay through the app and apply the tip for the shopper.  I’ll discuss pricing later.  They place a hold on your credit card for an amount greater than, but not unreasonably so, the amount of your order.  In our case, it was a $190 hold.

    Between the time you complete shopping and when the shopper is dispatched to the store, you have the option of adding or deleting items.  This was handy because we didn’t do the most organized job of shopping and added a couple extra items along the way.  Because the hold was larger, they did not require additional charges to add items.

    One of the options you can choose is to let the shopper leave your groceries at your front door without interacting with you, which I can’t see how that works, but since we knew we’d be home and we ordered ice cream, that just seemed a non-starter.

    Scheduling
    Things are weird right now.  Stores are running low on everyday items.  Delivery services are experiencing unprecedented demand.  I don’t think we can say that the Instacart schedule experience was typical.  It wasn’t bad, but it probably wasn’t typical.

    We placed our order late on Wednesday.  We were presented with two options, either a scheduled time slot, the earliest being Monday of the following week, or “whenever available”, which would be any time between Friday and Sunday of the current week.  As we were in no hurry, and home all day, but didn’t want to wait till the next week, we chose the as-available option.  We were told we would receive a notice when shopping began.

    Each day I checked the app to see what it had to say, each day the window for shopping shrank.  First Friday through Sunday, then Saturday through Sunday, and finally just Sunday.  At least it didn’t start adding days on the end.

    The Shopping Event
    8:00 AM Sunday morning I got a notice from Instacart that my shopper was starting shopping.  It is not uncommon for us to sleep in well past 8:00 AM on Sundays, but as it happens, I was awake.  This could have been a very different experience if we’d slept through it and left the shopper to their own devices.

    The notice included the name of the shopper and the ability to chat with them.  Soon thereafter I started getting notices that they had substituted items.  The first was perfectly reasonable.  The store brand of baby spinach was out, and so they substituted the name-brand equivalent.  No problem.  It appeared that this was “done deal” based on the notice I got; however, when I went into the app, I noticed that it gave me the option to approve or make an alternate request.  None needed, so I approved it.

    Next we had a box of standard cheddar goldfish crackers for my kids, and they were out, so the shopper substituted “Flavor-bast goldfish.”  Which I think is an improvement; however, for whatever strange reason, my kids won’t eat them.

    In this case, I did not approve the substitution, but instead recommended a smaller box of the standard goldfish.  I took this opportunity to use the chat and told the shopper why I rejected it.

    Once the shopper knew I was there and actively paying attention, we got a lot more interactive.  There were several other items that weren’t in stock, but now I would get a photo of the picked over shelves and asked “what would you like me to pick from what’s here?”

    This worked pretty well, although it was sometimes a bit difficult to tell what was on the shelf.  On some occasions he just listed the alternative.  For example, we wanted Mission Brand taco seasoning, and I just got a question that said, “they don’t have Mission, but they have Ortega or Pepe Sanchez brand which would you like?”

    I don’t know if their system favors sending the same shopper to the same account every time, but I could see how if you got a “regular” shopper, they would begin to know your preferences and get better at it.

    Even though we made a lot of the choices via chat, they always ended up in the app for me to approve, which was fine.

    He let me know when he was done shopping, and then a few minutes later he let me know that Fry’s didn’t have enough checkers working and the lines were long and that it would be a while.

    We had a couple jokes about everybody thinking Easter morning at 8:00AM would probably be empty and they all went shopping.

    The Fry’s is two miles from my house, and my groceries arrived in about 15 minutes from when he finished checking out, which is a little longer than I would expect, but I’m familiar with the drive to my house and he wasn’t.  It certainly wasn’t unreasonably long, and my ice cream was in a cold bag to keep it frozen.

    He thoughtfully brought the ice cream to the door first so we could get it into the freezer ASAP.  He, and an assistant, brought all the groceries to my doorstep, set them down outside, and with cheery wave through the screen door and six feet of social distancing that separated us and a hearty! “hi-yo, Silver away,” he was gone.

    Ok, he didn’t really say that, but I imagined it as he drove away.

    The Pricing
    There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch and that goes for grocery delivery, too.  Instacart offers two plans, one is a subscription service which eliminates the delivery fee.   Obviously, for a trial run, we didn’t opt for that option, instead paying the delivery fee, which is a remarkably cheap $3.99 – if you’ve ordered more than $35 worth of merchandise.  That’s what you’ll find on a casual look at the website.  In fact, it’s a price so cheap you have to ask, “how the hell is this a viable business model?”

    Dig a bit deeper and you discover that Instacart charges a 5% service charge, which, on our order worked out to about $6, plus the $3.99 and it was $10 total.

    But it doesn’t stop there, and here’s an area that I really want some clarification on.  Does the shopper get any of that?  Instacart also charges a tip, which is technically optional, but morally not.  The default amount is also 5%, but we bumped it to an even $10.  Instacart is quick to point out that 100% of the tip goes to the shopper, but is that all they get?

    A little weird is that you pick the tip before it’s even been assigned to a shopper.  In fact, there are rumors that the shoppers pick and chose which jobs to take first on based on the tip.  There are further rumors that buyers sometimes put a big tip to lure rapid service, then change it afterwards (which you are allowed to do) to a lower amount.  The flaw in that system is apparent.

    I tested the “change tip” system and bumped my shopper a couple more bucks along with a five-star rating.

    Is There Even More Cost?
    Yes.  Yes, there is.

    One of the “options” presented on your account is to attach store loyalty cards.  We have loyalty card for both the store we normally shop, Safeway, and for the backup store that we used for this Instacart experiment, Fry’s.

    You can save quite a bit of money using loyalty cards, but unfortunately, neither Safeway nor Fry’s were included.  (It does say that more stores are coming soon.)

    This was not a deal-breaker, but disappointing.  It certainly means that without the loyalty cards, we would be inclined to not use Instacart on a regular basis until they implement.

    I have my doubts they ever will.

    Along with our groceries, we also got the actual store receipt.  This allowed me to compare what we were charged by Instacart and what they paid in the store.  They don’t match, but I was able to reconcile it, and, of course, the difference is in Instacart’s favor.

    The prices quoted on their site, and charged, are the listed store prices, so, to be clear: I paid what I was quoted and expected to pay, so I am making no assertion that a “fast one” was pulled.

    Instacart has their own loyalty savings card which was used on the transaction.  This resulted in a  VIP shopper savings to them of $3.81, which they pocket.  It doesn’t sound like much, but remember my 5% service fee was only around $6.  This is like paying for another 2-3% in addition to the service fee.

    Chump change, right?  Not to Instacart it isn’t.

    At the bottom of the receipt, Fry’s thoughtfully provides the year-to-date savings for that loyalty card.  The bottom of my receipt proudly says, “Annual Card Savings $681,736.25.”

    It’s mid-April.  That’s a 3.5 month take, representing an average of over $6,600/day, for just one supermarket chain in their network.

    And who knows how regional that is?  Fry’s is a Kroger store.  Does that tally include other Kroger brand supermarkets or just Fry’s?  Is it regional or nationwide?

    Having that kind of money coming in on the margins is why I doubt they’ll ever implement loyalty cards.  It’s a dead loss for them to do so.

    Let me posit that this is an area ripe for abuse, too.  For example, citing my spinach example above.  I asked for the cheapest spinach because… it’s spinach, and it has no place in the home or kitchen whatsoever.  That notwithstanding, my family wanted spinach.  Fine.  But I’m not spending money on “premium” spinach if I don’t have to.  The item I selected was $1.99, but they were sold out, and the replacement cost $2.29.

    Now, this didn’t happen, but what if the replacement had a VIP loyalty card savings of $0.30?  Could a situation arise where the shopper, realizing a more expensive alternative would net more back to Instacart might base their on-the-spot decisions to Instacart’s advantage?  Would there be any incentive for them to do so?  Could that include perhaps “overlooking” and item in stock in favor of an alternative?

    I was active and participating in the shopping, but it’s clear that the shoppers have some autonomy to use their discretion if you are not available when they’re shopping.

    There is absolutely no whiff of anything like this happening in my dealings with Instacart, but like the rumored tip juggling I mentioned before, humans will find a way to game a system to their advantage if they can.

    Finally, and this is just the most minor of things…. We bought two carrots and the prices just don’t match.  Instacart charged us for 0.5 lbs. of carrots but the receipts says 0.45 lbs. of carrots, for a net discrepancy of $0.05.

    At a guess, I’d say that Instacart rounds up to the nearest half pound.  That feels a bit like those clever (yet dishonest and misguided) programmers that once figured out that they calculate interest earned on savings accounts and funneled the truncation error into a separate account and accumulated a fortune.

    Conclusion
    All in all, it’s a handy service and the process worked well.  The final breakdown on pricing was:

    • $118.26 groceries (per store receipt)
    • Delivery fee: $3.99
    • Service Fee: $6.10
    • Tip: $12.21
    • Carrot scandal: $0.05
    • Loyalty Savings Lost: $3.81

    Total of fees/tips/charges:  $26.16
    Fees as percentage of total grocery purchase: 22.1%

    22% does seem just a bit much for it to ever be our go-to option for grocery shopping.

  • iMovie for iPad2

    Some time back, I wrote a review of iMovie on the iPhone 4. This was shortly after the app was first available and I didn’t give it a very good review. It was buggy, limited and difficult to control with precision.

    Now, with the advent of the iPad 2, Apple has revamped iMovie to be a universal iPhone 4/iPad 2 app. I’ve recently had the opportunity to try out the iPad version in a real-world situation.

    We recently had an employee appreciation event at my work and a co-worker and I used our iPhone 4’s to record video and pictures of the event. I then proceeded, at the event, to edit the video on my iPad.

    Combined with editing my last vlog entry, I reel I have a good basic grasp of the new iPad iMovie experience.

    (more…)

  • OSX Time Machine – Brilliant or Bust?

    Aren’t backups a wonderful thing?

    As an IT professional, I can tell you that most people never backup their computers.

    Organizations are a bit different. Most recognize the need for backing up, but fewer actually test their backups.

    In OSX Leopard, Apple recognized that people don’t backup their computers. Further, they recognized that, increasingly, our lives are recorded on our computers – from our personal documentation to our priceless photographic memories. In Leopard they introduced Time Machine, an automatic backup and recovery system designed to make the process painless and automatic.

    I’ve used Time Machine since it first came out and, like most most people, I’ve had no real reason to need it.

    Oh… I’ve restored the occasional file, but it’s never been critical… until now.

    When we were burglarized two weeks ago, they took, amongst other things, my wife’s iMac. We know that the burglary occurred between 10:30 and 11:30AM because at 10:38, her iMac made one last Time Machine machine backup across the network. If there was any positive thing to take from this it was that we had a full and complete backup of her machine in Time Machine format. But how well would that work when we went to restore it onto a new computer?

    For starters, we had some data that we needed immediately. Part of the Time Machine enhancements in OSX Snow Leopard is the ability to open other machine’s backups, so we were able to use my laptop to open and verify her backup, plus grab some important files right away.

    Now that her replacement computer has arrived, it was time to put the backup to the real test: Restoring her entire old computer backup onto a new computer, with a completely different hardware configuration. The old computer was a 24″ iMac with 350Gb of disk – 200Gb used – the new one, a new model MacBook with 250Gb disk.

    The first thing I did after the burglary was to backup her backup – before I started trying to restore files from it. Time Machine backups are stored in a single file and I copied that file from the network backup drive onto a spare external drive. I had hoped that I would be able to use the external drive to restore the backup as that would be faster than pushing the entire restore across the local network.

    When the new MacBook arrived, I plugged in the external drive and fired up the machine per the instructions. When you setup a new Mac, it allows you to copy your data from another machine – a real timesaver if you’re migrating from one machine to another. One option is to copy from a Time Machine backup.

    Unfortunately, this didn’t work. It simply failed to recognize the external drive as having a Time Machine backup.

    My remaining option was to try to restore from the network. I joined the local network and the MacBook instantly spotted my Time Machine drive.

    That’s when the next problem occurred. The drive I use is a terabyte drive, partitioned into 4 different drives, each containing the Time Machine backup for a different computer on my network. The MacBook spotted and reported all four drives. I selected the one associated with the iMac and it asked me to log in. It went into a never-ending wait, displaying simply the word “connecting…”

    While that continued on for half an hour (before I gave up), one of the other drives almost immediately popped up stating “1 Time Machine Backup Found.” This was worrisome. Could it be that Time Machine was too confused by having four different drives? Certainly, I didn’t wish to restore the drive it was indicating was available. All the while, the “right” machine was failing to complete its connection.

    I tried several times, using both my wireless connection and a hard-wired connection, with no difference in result.

    Eventually, I decided that I’d see what happened if I selected the “wrong” Time Machine backup. Lo and behold, it presented a backup that was for the right computer. It somehow was showing me the backup for my wife’s computer on the Time Machine for my computer – probably because I had opened her Time Machine with my laptop to restore those files right after the burglary.

    And so I began preparing for the restore. There was just enough room to restore everything and after it thought about the backup for about 10 minutes, I let me select everything at start the backup.

    Estimated restore time over the gigabit LAN: 5 hours 10 minutes.

    Here I am, six hours later and it has just finished.

    And what’s the verdict? It was slow, a bit problematic to get going, not entirely intuitive, disappointing in that it couldn’t see the external drive with a copy on it but ultimately absolutely brilliant!

    I am looking at an almost exact copy of my wife’s computer, intact and catching up on back e-mail and a few system updates.

    Time Machine really saved our bacon on this one!

  • Primeval – Season 2 – Episode 1 – Review

    Primeval is back for its second series. Last time, we were left on a cliffhanger, where Prof Cutter, having fallen in love with Claudia Brown, returns from the Permian to discover that time has change, and Claudia no longer exists.

    How could they “fix” that one? Find out after the jump.
    (more…)

  • Sounds Like Doctor Who

    I found this review I’d (nearly) completed back in 2000 of the early Big Finish audio adventures. I’d just discovered them at Forbidden Planet in London and purchased the first 10 before returning to the states.

    For your amusement, and my archiving of writing projects, here’s my year 2000 take on Big Finish, in days long before anyone believed a Time Lord might be back on the BBC.

    Sounds Like Doctor Who

    Do you remember the sound of a Dalek control room? The mechanical resonance of the Cybermen voices? The hiss of the Ice Warriors? The scream of a companion or the 6th Doctor’s pompous, over-the-top pronunciation of the word “I”? The electronic sparkles in the classic theme music?

    If you’re like me, Doctor Who was more than the sum of its parts. The story, the actors, the visuals and the sounds all came together to produce something magical… something that has been missing for a long time, since the end of the 7th Doctor’s last series.

    There’s no doubt that, since that time, the Doctor Who New Adventures books have been quite prolific, continuing the adventures of all the Doctors. Quite frankly, they leave me flat. Sure, they use the same old Doctors we know and love, but they just don’t do them justice do they? If the book cover didn’t have the face of the Doctor on it, would you always know which Doctor it was supposed to be?

    There’s more to Doctor Who than just writing. It was the actors who brought the characters to life, and the technicians who realized whole new worlds for us week after week. While it can be argued that through a book your imagination is free to develop worlds beyond the limitations of television, that just isn’t really true with Doctor Who. That universe was fully developed on TV and the imagination just tries to recreate it.

    I’m happy to report that last year, the BBC licensed Big Finish Productions to produce new episodes of Doctor Who, featuring the original actors and for the last year they have produced 11 new four-part Doctor Who stories starring Peter Davison, Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy.

    What’s the catch you say? Well, they’re not television episodes, they’re audio dramas, and I must say, it is good to hear the Doctor again!

    Big Finish productions has wisely decided to stick with the original actors for their stories. There will be no first, second or third Doctor stories, nor will they substitute other actors for the companions.

    So far they have lined up stories featuring Peter Davison, Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy and Paul McGann as (respectively) the 5th – 8th Doctors. While no promises have been made, they are also trying to secure the services of Tom Baker for a 4th Doctor story.

    Companions and other regulars that they have enlisted include Nicolas Courtney (The Brigadier) Lala Ward (Romana II), Sara Sutton (Nyssa), Mark Strickson (Turlough), Nicola Bryant (Peri), Bonnie Langford (Mel) and Sophie Aldred (Ace)

    New adventures are published monthly and are available individually or through a 6 or 12 month subscription service through Big Finish’s web page at http://www.doctorwho.co.uk.

    Reviews. (Rated from * to *****)

    Episode 01 – The Sirens of Time **
    Starring Peter Davison, Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy as the Doctor
    Written by Nicholas Briggs
    4 episodes

    Gallifrey is once again invaded by an overwhelming force. The Time Lords, once again rendered powerless, use their last bits of power to try to manipulate three incarnations of the Doctor to save themselves. But why are they trying to kill him?

    It’s sad to say that the Doctor Who stories most eagerly anticipated — the multi-doctor stories — are usually some of the most poorly realized. The Sirens of Time is no exception and doesn’t succeed in breaking the curse. The problem with multi-Doctor stories is that it’s difficult to juggle more than one leading character, especially such strong leading characters. The Sirens of Time tries a new approach: each of the first three episodes focuses on a different Doctor, they only come together in the final episode.

    While this is a novel approach to the problem, it doesn’t give enough time to the three story threads and instead of being integral to the plot, seem to be incidental to the final episode, which is, in turn, too hurried towards its conclusion.

    What should have been a slam-bang opener to this new series of Doctor Who adventures is instead more of an appetizer plate for the adventures to come.

    Episode 02 – Phantasmagoria ***
    Starring Peter Davison as the Doctor and Mark Strickson as Turlough
    Written by Mark Gatiss
    4 episodes

    London, 1702. The Doctor and Turlough arrive amidst a rash of disappearances of young men. What is their connection to the infamous Diabola Club and is Sir Nikolas Valentine the devil himself?

    This episode is very much in the spirit of the 5th Doctor’s psuedo-historical episodes with the tried-and-true formula of an alien trapped on Earth using means to escape that do not sit well with the Doctor.

    Peter Davison’s and Mark Strickson’s performances are spot-on with the TV adventures, but the supporting casts’ performances are a bit too camp. One can easily imagine them all wearing wigs, false moles on their faces with frilly shirts waving silk handkerchiefs around foppishly while speaking – but then, perhaps that’s the idea.

    I’ve always considered the 5th Doctor to be one of the weaker Doctors, but in audio forms he holds up surprisingly well.

    Episode 03 – Whispers of Terror ***½
    Starring Colin Baker as the Doctor and Nicola Bryant as Peri
    Also starring Peter Miles as Curator Gantman
    Written by Justin Richards
    4 episodes

    The Doctor and Peri arrive at the Museum of Aural Antiquities, a museum for storing the sounds of history, just as an intruder is mysteriously murdered. Can the Doctor and Peri find a way to stop a creature made entirely of sound from escaping and unleashing havoc on the world?

    During his tenure as the Doctor, Colin Baker got some pretty awful stories. Whispers of Terror is better than most of his original stories and leads me to hope that the 6th Doctor’s character will be give a chance to shine in the audio dramas in a way only hinted at in the original series.

    The most interesting feature of this story is the use of an audio-only creature and a twist ending which could only be realized in an audio play.

    The voice of Peter Miles should be instantly recognizable to any Doctor Who fan as he has played many a notable character in the series over the years.

    Episode 04 – Land of the Dead ****
    Starring Peter Davison as the Doctor and Sarah Sutton as Nyssa
    Written by Stephen Cole
    4 episodes

    Alaska, 1994. The Doctor and Nyssa arrive in the arctic wilderness. The only dwelling in the area is the residence of millionaire Shaun Brett and it’s under attack by monsters.

    A few more stories like this and I could get to like the 5th Doctor. This story has the feel of a “classic” Pertwee/Baker era story, but has been well tailored to the 5th Doctor. The Alaskan wilderness provides a tight, claustrophobic backdrop for the attack of the Permians, a new race of monsters for the Doctor to battle.

    The cast is quite good on this one, but their American accents wouldn’t fool anyone.

    Episode 05 – The Fearmonger ***
    Starring Sylvester McCoy as the Doctor and Sophie Aldred as Ace
    Also starring Jacqueline Pearce as Sherilyn Harper
    Written by Jonathan Blum
    4 episodes

    The Fearmonger is an energy creature that lives inside others and fuels fear in others and then feeds on the emotions. What is its connection to the ultra right-wing nationalist New Britannia party and their candidate for president, Sharilyn Harper?

    I’m of mixed emotions on this story. It is a textbook 7th Doctor storyline with all the annoying characteristics therein: It starts with the Doctor and Ace already hunting the creature; the story implies that the Doctor has dark secrets in his past and Ace’s insecurities are once against twisted like a radio-knob. None of these are characteristics that I liked from the 7th Doctor’s final season. The attempts to re-invent the character I think helped hasten his demise on TV.

    That said, I must admire the writer’s skill at recreating that atmosphere for this 7th Doctor story. One of the things I’ve enjoyed about these audio dramas is that obvious care has been given towards re-creating the correct “feel” for each Doctor. You couldn’t drop any other Doctor into this story, it just wouldn’t work.

    Jacqueline Pearce, probably best known as Servilan from Blakes 7, guest stars in this episode as (what else?) a power-mad politician seeking the Presidency. Nearly 20 years has passed since Blakes 7 was on the air, but she doesn’t sound a day older.

    Episode 05 – The Marian Conspiracy ***½
    Starring Colin Baker as the Doctor
    Introducing Maggie Stables as Dr. Evelyn Smythe
    Written by Jacqueline Rayner
    4 episodes

    Tracking a distortion in the fabric of time, the Doctor meets Dr. Evelyn Smythe, a historian, whose own history is vanishing, starting with her ancestor from the Tudor times, John Whiteside-Smith.

    The Doctor takes her back to the time of Queen Mary to unravel the mystery, whilst conspiracies abound to remove Mary and replace her with her half-sister Elizabeth. When the queen decrees that the Doctor (going under his pseudonym Dr. John Smith) should marry Lady Sarah Whiteside, can it be that the Doctor destined to be the father of Evelyn’s time-distorting ancestor?

    This story heralds the arrival of the Doctor’s first new companion for the audio dramas, Evelyn, an elderly professor of history with a penchant for chocolate.

    This is a straight historical drama, with no aliens, monsters or time-hopping villains dealing with the conflicts between the Catholics and Protestants during Tudor times and the 6th Doctor fits in quite well, although one suspects that the Doctor’s clothing would gather more comments than Evelyn’s cardigan sweater. My biggest complaint is that no satisfactory explanation is ever given as to what upset the time stream in the first place.

    Episode 07 – The Genocide Machine ***½
    Starring Sylvester McCoy as the Doctor and Sophie Aldred as Ace
    Written by Mike Tucker
    4 episodes

    The library on Kar-Charrat contains all the published knowledge of the universe, but fortunately hardly anyone knows of its existence. The Doctor and Ace arrive just as the Daleks decide they need a library card.

    Here’s another perfectly adequate Doctor Who story played out for the 7th Doctor marred only by the fact that Daleks are in this story.

    The Daleks have always been a naff bunch of villains, with a stupid physical design and insipid lines to recite. In audio, only their grating, annoying voices remain – not an improvement, really. Nonetheless, as Dalek stories go, it’s better than most, thankfully avoiding bringing Davros into the story.

    The Genocide Machine is the first in a super-series called The Dalek Empire. Future stories are planned.

    Episode 08 – Red Dawn ***
    Starring Peter Davison as the Doctor and Nicola Bryant as Peri
    Written by Juston Richards
    4 episodes

    The Doctor and Nyssa arrive on Mars at the same time as Earth’s first manned mission does. And then they awaken the sleeping Ice Warriors. What happens when the human and Martian races meet for the first time?

    This story spent too much time beating us over the head with philosophical arguments that were resolved for the Doctor in Curse of Peladon all those many years ago. Otherwise it’s a straightforward tale of interspecies misunderstanding.

    Again, the American accents are almost comical.

    Episode 09 – The Spectre of Lanyon Moor ****½
    Starring Colin Baker as the Doctor, Nicolas Courtney as Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart and Maggie Stables as Dr. Evelyn Smythe
    Written by Nicholas Pegg
    4 episodes

    The Doctor, the Brigadier, UNIT, a lonely moor and a malevolent alien lifeform trapped since before recorded history — can there be a more classic setting for a Doctor Who story?

    This is a by-the-numbers Doctor Who story, with all the old familiar plot twists and cliffhangers. What’s so surprising is how pleasant it is; like a favorite, old shoe that’s well broken in and still fits well. Colin Baker’s Doctor is at his pompous best meeting up for the first time with the Brigadier, while Evelyn plays the part like an old-time companion — falling into dangerous situations in a way that would make Sarah Jane Smith proud.

    I only give this episode 4.5 out of 5 because I want to leave some room for improvement in the future!

    Episode 10 – Winter for the Adept **½
    Starring Peter Davison as the Doctor and Sarah Sutton as Nyssa
    Also starring Peter Jurasik as Lt. Peter Sandoz
    Written by Andrew Cartmel
    4 episodes

    The Doctor and Nyssa arrive in a haunted chalet in the Swiss Alps, blocked off from the outside world due to a killer blizzard.

    And that’s where it ends…

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  • Doctor Who – Survival – Review

    “…somewhere the tea is getting gold.”
    (more…)

  • Doctor Who – Keeper of Traken – DVD review

    The Keeper of Traken has been released as part of the “New Beginnings” boxed set which also includes Logopolis and Castrovalva
    (more…)

  • Doctor Who – Utopia – The Sound of Drums – Last of the Time Lords – Review (sort of)

    Utopia, The Sound of Drums and Last of the Time Lords was the three-part finale to the Tenth Doctor’s second season, and featured the resurrection of the Master, the Doctor’s greatest foe.

    I’m not going to do my usual breakdown on these episodes, suffice to say that Utopia, even with its rather pathetic representation of the end of the known universe was a great episode. Derek Jacobi’s performance was amazing as both professor Yana (stupid, stupid name) and the Master.

    His turn as the Master was all too brief, being replaced by John Simm, late of Life on Mars, as an absolutely bonkers Master – and I don’t mean that in a good way.

    The story rapidly tanks throughout Sound of Drums and plumbs new depths in Last of the Time Lords. It’s the poorest ending I can think of in a long time – perhaps since the end of Life on Mars, so, not that long actually. A John Simm curse perhaps or just a stupid idea.

    Although I like Simm, I did not like this portrayal as the Master just being nuts. I preferred him much more as a calculating, arrogant villain. It’s a sad crutch of writers these days that they cannot simply portray someone as “evil.” To be evil they seem to think, you have to be crazy. Crazy characters aren’t interesting.

    So much promise, such a letdown.

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  • A pleasant surprise at SOGO

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    One of the things I love about Taipei at the plethora of bakeries. Maybe it’s because ovens aren’t as common in homes here, but you’re never very far from fresh bread in Taipei.

    Bakeries back home suck, to put it kindly. Most of them are just supermarket bakeries, the others make boring breads or worse, bagels and such, and their hours of operation are miniscule. I want to be able to buy fresh garlic bread on my way to work each morning.

    But back to the story.

    We were in the basement of the SOGO Fuxing store and I noticed the FlavorField bakery. Now, since bakeries are a dime a dozen in Taipei, I wouldn’t have given it a second look except they had a sandwich bin with several western looking sandwiches. Several looked promising, so I grabbed a “French Pastrami sandwich”, whatever that means exactly, to try when we got home. As we were buying something, we decided to grab some garlic french bread and some croissants, too.

    The sandwich was really good. I’m really unsure if it’s supposed to be a “french pastrami” sandwich or a french “pastrami sandwich”, if you see my meaning. The meat wasn’t what I typically think of as pastrami, but it was a cured beef of some kind and quite tasty. If was on the freshest french roll I’ve had in years and topped with lettuce, onions, mayonnaise (or something similar) and some oily spices. (The spices might have been integral with the onions, which appeared to have been soaked in oil.)

    It was the best sandwich I’ve ever had in Taiwan. (Taiwan is, to be sure, not a nation of great sandwiches, but this one was quite good.)

    Coincidentally, the croissants and the garlic bread were excellent also. As bakeries go, this one is a notch above.

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