c2c gets nationalised

One of East London's railway operators, c2c (no official definition of that) is being brought back into public ownership as of Sunday 20 July.

I have to say it has been one of the better private operators. Frequent services, pleasant trains and an early adopter of Oyster/contactless; well it had to be due to sharing three stations with London Underground.

I don't know how quickly things will change visually; for one thing the Great British Railways legislation has yet to be introduced.

Does sticking a new vinyl on something make things automatically better? I doubt it. Public organisations can muck up just as much as private ones. Especially rail operators. 

But we shall see. I wonder if we'll get a new livery any time soon?

Not the most ultrasound episode (Review: 'Fringe' 1.16, "Unleashed")

Walter Bishop, bless his heart, is the kind of man who really needs a conservatorship or something like that. He may be a certified genius, but he's frankly certifiable in other ways as well, liable to be a danger to himself or others if carefully monitored by Astrid and/or Peter.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

So, with the revival currently working its way through the pilot stage, I have decided to watch the original series that is currently on Disney+ and ITVX here in the UK.

While I have seen the Kristy Swanson movie, Buffy was not something that I ever watched growing up. The fighting female of my formative years would be one Sydney Bristow of Alias as previously discussed on this blog... of course, when you realised their full names are Buffy Anne Summers and Sydney Anne Bristow, you can see that Abrams was clearly influenced by Joss Whedon in more than one regard.

I've watched the two-part series opener, "Welcome to the Hellmouth" and "Harvest". I'll definitely be watching some more, that's for certain.

At more than one point during this, I started wondering what show I was actually watching. In the climax of the first episode, Xander and Willow are in a mausoleum with a bunch of vampires closing in on them. Willow screams - a reasonable one, not the Full Victoria. Then Buffy enters with this line:

Well, this is nice. I-it's a little bare, but a dash of paint, a few throw pillows... call it home!

This is exactly the sort of line you can imagine one of the post-2005 Doctors from Doctor Who saying, maybe with some slight alterations. Now, I know that Russell T Davies was heavily inspired by Buffy when he brought back Doctor Who but I hadn't quite realised how much! There's even a bit at the end about how Sunnydale is going to rationalise a vampire attack at a nightclub or just forget it happened.

Also in terms of further comments:

• Cordelia is a shallow, mean woman. If I didn't know about her later development, I'd be comparing her to Libby from Sabrina the Teenage Witch.
• How young everyone looks! Sarah Michelle Gellar was just 19 when she started doing this.
• Also, some very 90s fashion - and computers. The Internet is something that Giles is not overly familiar with.
• You get to see a bunch of people in this that you've seen in other things. The first guy to get killed was in CSI: New York. Darla's actor would later be in Defiance. I could go on.
• Also, I don't think Julie Benz's prosthetic fangs quite fit.

Anyway, I might do some more posts on this.

It's Mr Lava Lava (Review: 'Star Trek' 3.22, "The Savage Curtain")

I'd make a "four score" joke, but this is actually episode 77 of 79; TOS not quite reaching the 80 episode mark.

In any event, I got a feeling this was going to be a weird one just from the description on Netflix... 

Israel vs. Iran

It's been rather a long-time coming. I blogged out a playthrough of a game on this scenario that came out in 2010 and I ran an award-winning RP that had it happen in 2015.

In any event, the Israelis have decided that the best way to deal with someone you feel wants to kill you is to kill them first, hence they have launched this massive attack on Iran.

Things though are very different than they were in 2015. Syria is no longer under the reign of Assad. Saudi Arabia was on the brink of normalising relations with Israel before October 7 happened. Hezbollah and Hamas are a shadow of their former selves. While Israel's missile defence system is blunting Houthi attacks. They already damaged a lot of the Iranian air defence capability last year during their previous round.

Iran's options are now limited to trying to wreak havoc on the Straits of Hormuz, something the US and GCC will not stand for, even if Donald Trump is not really keen on major foreign wars - he's more a fan of beating on brown-skinned immigrants who aren't actually doing any real harm.

I feel sorry for the Iranian civilians who are likely to get caught this by virtue of being in the wrong place at the wrong time - or related to the wrong people. Also the conscripts who will be killed as a result of this.

Perhaps this could have been avoided, but Netanyahu wants his grand victory. 

Let's hope something better emerges out of all this.

Massive Dynamic Risk Assessment, or a lack thereof (Review: 'Fringe' 1.15, "Inner Child")

Stop me if you've heard this one before...

Frederick Forsyth 1938-2025

Frederick Forsyth is one of the authors that has definitely influenced me in my own writing, with a strong eye for technical detail and the sort of knowledge only gained from actual experience; he did stuff that quite literally risked his life in the name of research. Also, his stuff is a cracking good read; I re-read The Day of the Jackal when the TV series came out and it holds up very well.

(I have strong memories of following the Jackal's journey through a 1982 European road atlas I happen to have access to)

Definitely a legend in his profession - we will not see his like again, I'd say, at least not for a while.

Israel is seeking to ethnically cleanse Gaza

They may not want to kill all the Palestinians there, but they certainly want them to go somewhere else. That is a crime regardless of how many of them supported or support Hamas.

It is past time for targeted economic sanctions and a suspension of arms sales.