Doctor Who Themes, original and remixes

Awesome! Every Doctor Who theme ever made, all strung together for comparison's sake:

A couple of observations. First, I could have sworn that the first season of Tom Baker as Doctor Who had the swarm of stars tunnel and diamond logo, but they show Jon Pertwee as having that particular visual.

The Sylvester McCoy theme's visuals (and also the music, but not to such a great extent) illustrate everything that was wrong with 1980s television science fiction, and television logos in general. (See DVNO's Justice video for a brief and clever refresher of the horror that was 80s television logos.) What I find interesting about the McCoy and McGann era is how they took the second part of Ron Grainer's soundtrack, bits he wrote but were only available on the original BBC album (of which I own a copy).

If you listen closely during the Christopher Eccleston theme, you can hear an additional underlying violin theme that's become a staple of action/adventure movies, a "hurry, hurry" cliche that can be found in every soundtrack from the video game Halo to the movies 2012 and the Clash of the Titans remake. It's there in the Tennant theme as well, along with a driving heartbeat bassline.

Matt Smith's theme steals shamelessly from the X-Files, and is almost unrecognizable for several seconds as you wait to get into it.

If you want to waste your entire freakin' day, head over to WhoMix and enjoy hundreds (and I do mean hundreds) of pro-am remixes of the Doctor Who theme song.

(no subject)

A reader on Andrew Sullivan's blog comments:

I find it impossible not to comment that everything Frum says about Israel applied to US support for, and dependence on, the Apartheid-era South African regime. ... Confirmation of the superiority of a market economy? Check. You only have to ignore that, in both countries, the benefits of that superior economy only applied to the chosen people.

I likewise find it impossible not to comment on the way the same is true in America: the benefits of the "superior market economy" only apply to the chosen people: in the case of America, though, the chosen people are simply those who are wealthy. Economist Lane Kenworthy submits this graph:



I know this is going to piss off some of my readers, but I honestly think that there's been a long-running class war in this country, between a congealing "meritocracy" that maintains its position by encouraging a social groupthink, and the rest of us.

Warren Buffet started the conversation when he said, "There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning." The rich class is engaged in the practice of wealth generation capture; it's not that these people create significant capital or root out significant inefficiencies, but that they're successfully exploiting the inefficiencies of the human brain-- inefficiencies that can't be overcome-- and tying up potential competition, in order to ensure that their portfolios continue to rise and everyone else's continues to fall.

Inequality has never been greater in this country; you cannot convince me that the wealthy class deserves and ever-growing share of the wealth generated in this country because they themselves produce the ever-growing economy.

Unfortunately, there are 50 to 70 million Americans "who would voluntarily vote themselves and their families into living in a cardboard box under an overpass, roasting sparrows on an old curtain rod over a tainted wood fire, as long as their vote ensures that the gay, black, Hispanic, Muslim, liberal or whatever in the next cardboard over doesn't even get the sparrow or the fire."