Doctor Who Project: The Web Planet

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Whatever power has got hold of the TARDIS has taken your pen! Of course, ha ha! Now then, there’s something for us to solve!

No sooner do our temporal travellers extricate themselves from a web of Roman palace intrigues then they find themselves in a literal web, with the TARDIS trapped by an unknown force on the planet Vortis, better known as “The Web Planet” (Story Production Code N).

TARDIS on Vortis

From the start, this story attempts to break new ground by creating an entirely alien world, both physically and narratively, with uneven results. One can see obvious seam lines in the background flats, and in an effort to provide a sense of space, the camera occasionally pans a bit too high, revealing the two-dimensionality of the background. Plus a man in an ant costume (a Zarbi) runs into a camera.

Zarbi go bonk

There’s plenty of running through corridors, multiple scene changes in each episode (since, of course, Ian gets separated from the Doctor and Vicki, and the three of them are separated from Barbara, all by the third episode), and often the scenery is jostled by actors. But given the limitations of studio shooting—not just spatial but temporal and financial as well— one can only applaud their willingness to go for it. In particular, the sound work, with an ominous chirping whenever the Zarbi appeared, helped strongly to carry off the ambitions of the visual effects team.

Speaking of the second episode of the story, “The Zarbi,” producer Verity Lambert noted:

This was an extremely difficult episode to do technically, in that there had to be a tremendous amount of scenery in the studio, and apart from the breaks necessary because of scene changes, there was the added problem that we had not used the Zarbi, except briefly in episode one, and it was impossible to tell until we got into the studio the kind of difficulties we would run into with dressing them and moving them from one scene to another.

(Quoted in Howe-Stammers-Walker, Doctor Who: The Handbook: The First Doctor)

They were, essentially, making it up as they went along in terms of putting an ambitious science fiction show on air in a tight time frame and an even tighter budget. So we can rightly forgive them any wires we see pulling the butterfly-like Menoptra through the air or the odd extra limbs on the pillbug-like Optera.

But can we forgive them for the plot?

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Great Moments in Cinema: The Purple Guinea Pig in Twice-Told Tales

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I’d like to believe that with Vincent Price films, what you see is intended to be taken literally, without a hint of irony or camp. Thus it is that we are expected to recoil in horror as Doctor Rappaccini, played by Price himself in his Twice-Told Tales (USA, 1963) injects a guinea pig with a poisonous concoction.

Guinea Pig in Trouble

So far so good—lots of smoke and a twitching guinea pig model. Convincingly scary as a concept played with a bit of subtlety. But then, alas, it turns purple.

Guinea Pig in Purple

See, because it was poisoned, it turned…oh, nevermind.

With any luck, once you stop laughing you’ll turn to the source material for this portion of Twice-Told Tales, “Rappaccini’s Daughter” by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Not much laughter there, and also no guinea pig.

Together Yet Apart: Necco’s SkyBar

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Chocolate goes with just about everything—nuts, caramel, ice cream, bacon—and yet most candy bars either restrict you to one or two complementary flavors, like chocolate and peanut butter, or mix a ton of flavors together, so that you get chocolate-caramel-pecan-marshmallow-wafer in every bite. But sometimes you want to sample discrete tastes in small bites. Enter Necco’s SkyBar.

Necco's SkyBar

Four flavors—caramel, vanilla, peanut, fudge—each in its own milk chocolate compartment. The chocolate itself is of standard American milk chocolate quality, good but not great. (The slight hazing on the chocolate in the picture comes from the refrigeration of the bar for a month or so; I buy these in bulk online.)

But you’re not buying a SkyBar to sample 60% pure cocoa varietals; it’s all about the four flavors, which are quite pronounced. The peanut is not peanut butter but rather strongly peanut flavored, while the vanilla packs an agressive punch. I’m not entirely taken with the caramel or fudge segments, but they work as components of the entire chocolate symphony.

See, the real trick with a SkyBar is to eat the segments in a particular order, to balance the flavors and build an overall taste. My preferred approach is caramel, fudge, peanut, vanilla. The two outside segments are caramel and fudge, and if you orient the bar incorrectly upon snapping the first segment off, you might have to alter your approach to, say, fudge, peanut, caramel, vanilla. Once you get the first segment, you can figure out the order of the rest from the wrapper.

Like much of Necco’s product line, SkyBars can be difficult to find outside their home New England/New York market, but if you happen to see one on a candy rack, grab it. It’s two hundred calories well spent. As you’re walking it off, you can think about the order in which you’re going to eat the next one.

(Update, August 2023: Necco has gone out of business, alas. An enterprising general store owner purchased the brand name at auction and is selling SkyBars to a grateful public. I cannot vouch for the verisimilitude yet, but I can only applaud the effort at keeping this iconic candy bar alive.)

Winter Offensive 2012 After Action Report

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For many wargamers on the East Coast, the real holiday is not Christmas, when you never get the games you want anyway, but the Martin Luther King, Jr. weekend, when Winter Offensive is held in bucolic Bowie, Maryland.

This venerable Advanced Squad Leader tournament, held annually by Multi-Man Publishing, has transformed from a purely ASL tournament to an eclectic gathering of gamers of all stripes. Twenty years ago, a table occupied by a non-ASL game would have been unthinkable, but now, owing in part to MMP’s growing stable of game lines, roughly twenty percent of the creaking, uneven tables in the increasingly crowded conference rooms host other wargames and even a few Euros.

Winter Offensive 2012

In conjunction with the usual band of misfits (Doug Bush, Chris Chapman, and John Slotwinski), I once again managed to play a grand total of zero games of Advanced Squad Leader. My tally for the long weekend includes a loss as the Russians in The Tide at Sunrise (played using the useless optional Naval Rules), a win as the Russians in Storm Over Stalingrad, a loss as the Egyptians in Yom Kippur, and a second place finish in a three player Le Havre using a civic building strategy that lost to the inevitable coal/coke/steel shipping strategy. A four player Space Empires finished inconclusively, though I must say that my Royal Realm of Red Ravagers was well poised to conquer known space…

As ever, MMP put on a good show, with a record attendance somewhere north of 120 participants. Any more and they’ll have to open up a third conference room, which would help alleviate some of the space issues. These non-ASL games take up some serious table space.

A Philadelphia Sandwich Tour, Part Three

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Sarcone's Deli in Philadelphia, PAWith three sandwich stops already in Philadelphia’s Italian Market, one might think we had sampled the full range of tastes on Ninth Street, but the epic Philadelphia Sandwich Tour had one more stop on this street.

Having just consumed a sublime meatball sandwich, washed down with a birch beer, at George’s Sandwich Shop, we headed north on Ninth for a few blocks until we came to the home of all that lovely, crusty, seeded hoagie bread, Sarcone’s Bakery. We didn’t stop in for fresh rolls, though, because a bit further down the block sits Sarcone’s Deli. A simple fact about all fresh foods is that their essential taste is best closest to the source, true for Tastypies and Guinness alike. Forty feet is pretty close to the source, and these rolls were fresh, befitting the best hoagies (but not necessarily the best sandwiches) on the tour.

Of all our stops, Sarcone’s was the busiest. The phone orders came in steadily, even as the line to place carry out orders grew and grew. A crew of four worked steadily, slicing long loaves of that delectable bread down to hoagie size and layering it with meats, cheeses, and sundry toppings. And if I’m not mistaken, there was a signed Brian Propp Flyers jersey overseeing the proceedings. Classic Philly right there.

We ordered two hoagies, though had my constitution been up to the task, I think I would have ordered the entire menu. Our first hoagie was the acclaimed Junk Yard Special (turkey, proscuitto, sauteed spinach, roasted red peppers, sharp provolone, mozzarella, red wine vinegar, oil, and herbs), a hoagie featured on the Food Network (auto-play video).

The Junk Yard Special from Sarcone's Deli in Philadelphia, PA

Of course, I managed to take the picture of the Junk Yard Special with the non-seeded side of the roll facing the camera (I was hungry, if you can believe it, and eager to dig in), but the essential quality of the hoagie’s construction can be seen. There’s so much going on at once in this hoagie. The herbs and red wine vinegar help to tie everything together, and the variety of textures at play—the soft, oily red pepper, the salty smoothness of the cheeses, the crack of the crust—made for an incredible gustatory experience. This is high food art right here.

And yet, our second Sarcone’s hoagie, The C.C. (roast beef, sauteed spinach, roasted garlic, sharp provolone, Balsamic vinegar, oil), proved a point I’ve come to realize about truly, truly great sandwiches.

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A Philadelphia Sandwich Tour, Part Two

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The first day of the Philadelphia Sandwich Tour, scrumptious as it was, served merely as appetizer. Cue the music from Rocky, because day two is the main event, taking place in Philadelphia’s sandwich epicenter, the Italian Market.

Truth be told, the Italian Market is only nominally Italian these days. As we walked along South Ninth Street, we saw tons of Asian and Hispanic markets, including a live poultry shop, and had our gustatory purpose been less narrowly defined, we’d have eagerly stopped in a taqueria or a dim sum restaurant. But this is not a Philadelphia Burrito Tour, so on to the sandwiches!

We took SEPTA’s Broad Street Line to Ellsworth-Federal and walked a few blocks down Federal to one of Philadelphia’s most famous hoagie shops, Chickie’s Italian Deli. Rick Sebak’s Sandwiches That You Will Like, the Citizen Kane of sandwich documentaries, profiled Chickie’s, and I was afraid that it would be crowded from the get-go, but given the cold weather, we were the only customers when we arrived around 11 A.M. on a Saturday morning. I hadn’t counted on the shop being quite so small—really just a narrow aisle upon entry where you place your order, with the rest of the shop given over to the food preparation area. So, we sat outside, in the cold. We sacrifice for our art.

VIP Seating at Chickie's Italian Deli!

The owners and staff were busy making catered sandwich platters, but they gave our order priority when we walked in. Given the number of sandwiches that we would be eating throughout the day, I opted for small size, and person behind the counter gave me a look and pointed to the sample roll for the small size—not a seeded Sarcone’s roll cut from a larger loaf, like the medium and large sizes, but a plain, single-serve roll. I must not have had enough coffee, because I still picked the small size regardless. Don’t order the small at Chickie’s! The roll is so important to a proper hoagie, and I made a rookie mistake.

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