Yes, Attention Must Be Paid.

I get quite a few contacts from families, and it is painfully evident that their perception is that, in general, attention is NOT being paid.

A couple of other activites of interest:

http://www.RunForTheFallen.org

http://www.athousandthanks.us/

Just a couple of minor clarifications: The WaPo site, while nearly the most comprehensive, is less so than Zeitlangers. I can say that with confidence, because I link to all their pictures unless I can find better, which is the case for quite a few. The MilitaryTimes newspapers maintain a very good site.

http://www.militarycity.com/valor/honor.html

It is particularly good because they copy newspaper articles and post them - so even when the original article gets archived by the hometown paper, it is still there on their site. They are generally up-to-date within a few days. I have links to their site as well as WaPo and whatever else I can find.

Now the flat earth folks will have another one to explain…

whee!

tonight’s dw episode felt kind of like a chef who pulls out all of his regular ingredients to be used to enhance the main dish, such as the kosher salt and the basil and the oregano and the idea of pan-searing, the accompanying vegetable with a good red wine, but without the main dish.

and then the chef proudly serves you all of the stuff on the plate and you’re thinking, “but where’s the actual dish?” and he says, “ah, the main dish isn’t important, it’s how you *prepare* the main dish,” and you say, “yeah, but you still need the main dish to make sense out of the preparations,” and then he puffs off after saying, “you will never understand my art!” and you’re left with these sophisticated enhancements to a dish that doesn’t exist, and boy, are you starving.

most people’s impressions of jenny were that she was going to come back as part of the series finale, and i’ll have to say i’m glad. It’s true that the introduction of her character tried to stick a 3-d personality into a 2-d characterisation, but even so i found the character charming and thought the actress did pretty well with what she was given.

but yes, the emotional connection between the two of them was something that should have been explored over a lot of episodes, not packed all into one. she’s born, he rejects, they connectr, she dies, he cries. all in 45 minutes.

As far as the plot point of the war taking only 7 days instead of many years, i actually liked that well enough because it felt like the least “reset button” realization that we’ve had for a long time in the series when compared to, say, the shocking (?) discovery that the toclafane were the utopian futurekind. i think that the implications behind the war only being seven days and the effect it had on the warring factions were a little stretched, but whaddya gonna do.

and yeah, martha was pretty useless in that episode, and frankly was fairly useless in the sontaran story too, which is a shame. if i was freema, i’d be pretty pissed off about it. her character deserved better.