Sunday, April 13, 2003

His Eyelashes were the bars of a gilt cage

I'm reading Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth right now. It's great. My current financial and personal life make me keenly aware of what the heroine, Lily Bart is going through. We think very, very much alike and seem to have our emotions run parallel as well. Anyway, there's that for what it's worth.

And since Mark asked

This week's theme seems to be excessively nerdy Dr Who references and that's all the Putney Common thing is. BBC books -- well, their contracted author Paul Magrs -- have introduced this great new character over the past few years, called Iris Wildthyme. She's a bad parody of the Doctor. First of all, she was an old, fat whinging woman who wheezed around in a gin-soaked stupor lusting after the most current Doctor. (Not a difficult thing to understand). Then she changed into a Bond-esque, gold lame-catsuited blonde bomshell. She's always accompanied by very pretty, sexually ambivalent boys.

Anyway, her TARDIS is stuck in the form of a doubledecker Number 22 bus to Putney Common, as seen here. Note the presence of noted snappy dresser and great hero, Jon Pertwee also on the cover. Actually, this is a great book noteable for featuring deadly robotic sheep.

She's also in this book, The Blue Angel, and this book, Mad Dogs and Englishmen. The first has a very pretty glass boy on the cover and the latter is remarkable book, featuring giant talking poodles with ray guns, vicious parodies of George Lucas and J R R Tolkein and Noel Coward as the bad guy.
Seriously, you gots to look at these covers.

And, just for the record, here is a picture of Paul McGann as the Eighth Doctor. He is cute.