Couldn't get too motivated to write anything the last few days, but that's not to say that there's nothing to write about. In the cycling world, Gilberto Simoni wins his second Giro today in decisive fashion. The first Giro I watched was a mere two years ago when Simoni ran away with it (helped that time by Dario Frigo getting booted out for drugs just when he was emerging as Simoni's main challenger in the mountains), and last year he was given the boot himself after a drug test found cocaine in his system which turned out to be from dental surgery he had just undergone. So this year was payback time for him and he performed in spectacular fashion. This year and in '01 he looked very cool and collected in the most difficult mountain stages, one might say almost Armstrong-esque, and the descents he would make (even the ones in the rain) were so death-defying they were hard to watch sometimes. It would be interesting to see him go head to head with Lance in the Tour, he seems to have improved his time trialing since last year and could pose a significant challenge if everything worked out right, although his team isn't as much help in the mountain stages as the domestiques of USPS. This was a clean Giro for once, too bad about Cipollini crashing out through no fault of his own, good to see Pantani actually making a difference, again with an unfortunate crash that wasn't his fault keeping him out of the top 10, but still his best finish in a grand tour in five years.



So in between stages I've been taking a break from season 4 of MST3K and started up watching Doctor Who in earnest again (partly because I finally got caught up on the DVDs after watching Armageddon Factor), picking up where I left off with Season 9 and Day of the Daleks. This is the watch the stories in order plan, along with reading the novelizations, following along in the Discontinuity Guide and the DW Magazine's Complete Third Doctor special. Day of the Daleks is, incredibly, the first Dalek serial since Evil of the Daleks at the end of season 4. Apparently Terry Nation took them away for a time to try to make their own series, in both the UK and US, but nothing ever came of it. As it was, their appearnce in this story was tacked on after it was written, so they don't have much to do, and, famously, there are only three of them. There's plenty of time travelling nonsense, but its still a good yarn, and really sets the tone established by Colony in Space in the previous season of what the series will basically look like for the next 10 years or more. I've always like the first two Pertwee seasons the most because they varied a ways from the norm with their mostly location filming and mostly grainy black and white look and their longer, primarily earthbound, verismo style. So season 9 is less exciting on the whole, but it has a few good ones coming up, and should lead up to the release of Carnival of Monsters in Season 10 next month right on schedule.



Technically, Pertwee should be "my" doctor, as, if I'd been living in the UK as a kid, he's the one I would've remembered watching first, contemporaneous with a kid's discovery of real tv. In the US, there was something of a lacuna in the early 70s, after the end of Star Trek and before Battlestar Galactica, although probably the Six Million Dollar Man and shows like that were around, but that's hardly the same thing, so some Doctor Who might've come in handy then if PBS had been showing it at the time. I don't remember the first Pertwee episode I saw, but since I was watching the Tom Baker episodes regularly by 1982, chances are it would've been when WTTW reintroduced the Third Doctor to Chicago audiences, which they would probably would've kicked off with Spearhead from Space. I do recall at the time that the first several runs through the Pertwee episodes they only showed the color ones, so it was probably after the move to Boston before I saw ones like Ambassadors of Death or Mind of Evil. The older I get the more I like the older episodes, even back before Pertwee's era, so I think its just a natural adjusting of equilibrium to the shows I would've watched when they were first made, had I been in the right country to do so.