Eruditorum Press

Devoid of both military and civilian applications.

Saturday Waffling (May 4, 2013)

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I dunno, we’ll see how this goes as a new feature. But let’s try a Saturday open thread, shall we? A “kick our feet up and talk about whatever for the weekend” sort of thing.

We’ll also make it the discussion thread for The Crimson Horror when it comes up. Going in, I’m torn on expectations. On the one hand, Gatiss. On the other hand, Gatiss’s last two scripts (Baskerville and Cold War) have been solid. On a third hand, Diana Rigg playing an over the top Doctor Who villain, which might well make all other arguments invalid.

And, of course, there’s Gatiss’s odd curse when it comes to inadvertent reactionary tendencies. Last time he wrote an inadvertent paean to mutually assured destruction that managed to sync with Thatcher’s death. This time Diana Rigg says stupid things about feminism just in time for his episode. I almost start to feel sorry for him.

Plus, of course, the extra suspense question: how much will I have to hurriedly rewrite Monday’s Unquiet Dead post after watching The Crimson Horror?

I’m writing this actually slightly earlier in the week, since I’m traveling Friday for that DePaul Doctor Who thing. Which I’ll try to write up impressions from and get up sometime next week.

And related to nothing even remotely covered by this blog in the course of normal service, has anyone ever had rillettes? Jill and I are going to a lovely place that we went to last time we were on Chicago for vacation, and are positively giddy over the prospect of getting to have the salmon rillettes we had last time again. Seriously. We’ve been talking about these rillettes for a week now. We’re horrible. If this blog becomes a food blog with an unhealthy obsession with rillettes next week, you’ve now been warned. Rillettes Eruditorum: A Psychochronography of Shredded Meat.

So, what’ve you got planned for the weekend?…

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Somehow We’ve Materialized, For A Split Second Of Time (The End Of The World)

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I have a budget now. Budgets are cool.

Hello. There are some new reward tiers at the Kickstarter that may tempt you.

It’s April 2nd, 2005. Tony Christie is at number one with “(Is This The Way To) Amarillo,” which features the Abzorbaloff. 50 Cent, Elvis Pressley, Will Smith, Gwen Stefani and Eve, Natalie Imbruglia, and Nelly with Tim McGraw also chart. Christie also has the top album, while The Killers and Green Day also make that chart.

Since last week, a sizable earthquake took place off the coast of Sumatra. Robert Mugabe held “free and fair” elections, which he proceeded to win by an implausible margin. And on the day this story airs, Pope John Paul II dies. Also, in all of this, it’s announced that Christopher Eccleston will be departing the series, leading absolutely everybody to conclude that David Tennant would obviously be taking over (although that wasn’t formally announced until the day Aliens of London aired). But today, on television, it’s The End of the World.

The single most important moment in The End of the World comes in a seemingly lightweight scene in which we see the robotic spiders scuttling down an air shaft. The camera is positioned at one end of the ducting, and the spiders are scuttling towards the camera. And one of them bumps into the camera. This, of course, is a joke about the supposed poor quality of special effects in classic Doctor Who, the joke being that the spiders are CGI monsters and thus cannot possibly jostle the camera except on purpose. So they’ve put in a deliberate “bad effect.” But perhaps more to the point is that they’ve selected a bad effect from within Doctor Who’s own history, namely the infamous scene from The Web Planet of a Zarbi plowing into the camera where they couldn’t do a retake because they simply didn’t have time in the studio that day.

I do not, I trust, have to go to the length of analysis demonstrated in Rose for every episode in order to show how the new series works. Episodes are made up of bibs and bobs of other television shows, characters from one type of show get shoved into another, and much of the drama is, at least partially, based on the question of what shows do or don’t hold power over the narrative. That’s the basic model for the new series – one that’s going to be used for practically every entry for the remainder of the blog. Likewise, I do not have to stress the way in which the invocations of things in particular places carries meaning. In an episode of television that is stitched up out of other television the particulars of what television you stitch into the lining of matter.

And The Web Planet is a spectacularly weird thing to evoke. The Web Planet is not what you would call a highly acclaimed episode. It got phenomenal ratings at the time, was novelized, and was quick out to VHS, and so it’s unmistakably a classic episode that loads of people have seen, but that’s not equivalent to a lot of people liking it.…

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Stories, Titles, and Kickstarter Updates

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Someone asked me, and I found it an entertaining question, what I thought the most jarring mismatches in story quality vs title quality were. I noted, for instance, that The Ark in Space, Rose, and all of Power, Evil, and Remembrance of the of the Daleks set were spectacularly underwhelming names for great stories, as are City of Death and The Mind Robber, whereas Nightmare of Eden, Let’s Kill Hitler, and The Arc of Infinity are all rather lovely names with stories that really don’t come close (though really, what story could be good enough to be called Let’s Kill Hitler?)

But then I asked what I find the more interesting question: what stories most perfectly match their titles in quality. I suggested Delta and the Bannermen as one that, regardless of how much you like it, is almost exactly as good as its title suggests. Someone else went for Love and Monsters. You?

Also, there’s two new Kickstarter rewards – a sort of scaled down version of the “signed and numbered books” version and another high roller option. I’ve been finally watching Game of Thrones, about which I knew basically nothing, and doing short recaps on another social media venue, and have been quite enjoying that, and thought it might be fun to run a few short-run features on other media here, just to see what sorts of things are a good fit for me and attract interest.

So here’s your opportunity. Want me to write up the entirety of Firefly? Always wanted a systematic close-reading of that 1990s classic of Avengers crossover Operation Galactic Storm? (No. Nobody has ever wanted that.) Looking to see me go back to video game criticism and do Mass Effect? Itching for an overview of the films of Darren Aronofsky? These and any other topics can be yours for $200 over here. (Don’t feel like it has to be an object that breaks sensibly into four parts. You pick the topic, I’ll figure out how to get four posts out of it.) Only about $4000 to go before we get the William Blake book.

Back to writing Dalek with me. Well, actually, Rob Shearman already did that, so I’ll be going with writing About Dalek.…

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People Made of Smoke and Cities Made of Song (Rose)

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HAI!

Musing on From Hell and its connections to Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, Alan Moore posited that in holistic detection “you wouldn’t just have to solve the crime, you’d have to solve the entire world that the crime happened in.” Brilliant. Slap out some business cards. El Sandifer: Holistic media critic. Get to work. Except this terrain is slippery. The distinction between world and crime becomes vague,until everything becomes a crime scene, ready for its evidence bag giftwrap and careful analysis. Still, in a world of crime scenes there must be kings. The random acts of vandalism, wall scrawl fiction for the anoraks huddling under the bridge, must in time add up to something. To the big one. The shocking crime in an otherwise nice neighborhood. “These things don’t happen here.” Of course they don’t. Ropey sci-fi programs that haven’t been popular since the 1970s don’t come back to be the biggest thing on television. That’s not how this works. And yet here’s the crime scene, splatters of anti-plastic everywhere. No point in getting all holistic now. This time we keep it simple. We just solve the crime. Tape off the scene, form a perimeter. Perform whatever banishings you feel appropriate. And then let’s get to work. Forty-four minutes and ten seconds of history, rounded by yellow caution tape. Go slow, be meticulous. What the hell happened here?

A brief stab at showing the world – a perfectly ordinary thing for what we might charitably call “this sort of show.” The music swells, the camera accelerates, and we plunge breathless. (Already we are invoking old things – Doctor Who has begun an episode like this before.) We fall into the world, towards Britain, towards London, and then… into an alarm clock.

This is not where we’re supposed to be; drum and bass montage of Billie Piper, eponymous Rose, in a high speed run of fast cuts, going about her day. A banal shop-girl’s existence in the buzzing heart of London. Trafalgar Square, in amongst the swirl of double decker busses, what stands out is the aggressive willingness of the episode to date itself, from Rose’s trendy-almost-to-the-week overly pink bedroom to a Starbucks and an advertisement for The Lion King appearing in shot. It takes all of a minute for us to know Rose, to know her living situation, her well-meaning but slightly oafish boyfriend, her uninspiring job. We all know her. There’s not a viewer in Britain who does not know her after this sequence. Ten point eight million of them. More than anything else on television that week save four Corries and a pair of EastEnders. Eighteen percent of the country. In unison run smack into Rose Tyler, Sun-child of the popular culture.

And yet haunting this montage is a series of odd cuts and shot framings. A camera staying on for a second after Rose has left the shot, focusing on a lone mannequin, or a shot inexplicably framed so that a trio of mannequins are the focal point instead of Billie Piper.…

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New Kickstarter Stretch Goal, And a Thing in Chicago This Weekend (EDIT: Plus a Big Finish sale)

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It’s time for this to become the
second best Doctor Who/Blake
crossover book ever published.

I know, I’d been going to shut up until Wednesday. But this is cool and I want to get the word out.

I’ve just opened a new stretch goal on Kickstarter – an ambitious one for if we can reach $15,000. A number that seemed unthinkable two weeks ago, but now seems ever so slightly possible. In the same vein as the Logopolis volume, a stand-alone version of my essay on The Three Doctors. You may remember that essay as the sprawling William Blake-style analysis of the story.

And so, of course, the book will be William Blake-style – an oversized, full colour book featuring, as its centerpiece, the Three Doctors essay done in the style of a Blake illuminated manuscript. It’ll also include some new explanatory essays, including one that actually explains the essay instead of that gently mocks the very idea of explaining it.

I’ve also opened up a new way to increase your rewards – the $10 TARDIS Eruditorum Starter Pack, in which you get all three existing volumes for $10, delivered as soon as the Kickstarter ends, and then, for good measure, get the revised Hartnell volume when it comes out. That’s available as a standalone pledge level, or can be added to any existing pledge for $10. So if you’ve not actually bought the books yet, here’s your opportunity to, in effect, buy two and get the third one for free.

You can give me your money here.

Also! I should have mentioned this much earlier, but this Saturday, May 4th, I’ll be appearing at a one-day colloquium at DePaul University in Chicago, IL. I’m on roundtable panels at 10am and 11am, but far more interesting people than I, namely Rob Shearman, will also be there, at one point giving a live commentary track on Dalek while I frantically rewrite my post on it.

The webpage for that event is here. If you’re in the area, I hope you can make it by and say hi. To Rob, of course.

EDIT: If any of the coverage of Big Finish during the Wilderness Years (or elsewhere) has intrigued you and you want to check it out, Big Finish is holding a 10% off sale on their entire stock for May 1st. Details are here.

I assure you, there’s stuff there worth spending money on. In particular check out any of Rob Shearman’s stuff, Marc Platt’s divine Spare Parts, the much-loved Doctor Who and the Pirates, the wonderful Companion Chronicle Find and Replace (featuring Jo Grant and Iris Wildthyme), and probably loads of other stuff people will point out in the comments as particularly good. (Josh Marsfelder, for instance, will tell you to buy Robophobia.)…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 60 (The Second Coming, Casanova, Honey to the Bee)

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So here we are. New website. I would have launched it right with Rose, but, well, it was easier to throw the switch on the weekend. So yes, this is now properly just “my website,” with TARDIS Eruditorum as its primary but not exclusive feature. These posts will still go up reliably in the morning on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, with other content filling in as the spirit moves me, so to speak. You can also tour the various pages up above for status updates on various projects, links to buy all sorts of stuff, and the like. Welcome, and thanks to the lovely Anna Wiggins for getting this thing set up. If it falls on your head and causes serious injury, sue her, not me.

And, of course, this is the last post before Rose. Though the way the Kickstarter is going, I expect that any moment now the Rose post will be going up as a backer-exclusive update there. And it’s very much a calm before the storm thing – the low key post before Wednesday’s storm. Last bits of groundwork for the new series. Several points that are tentative and may need refinement. I’m categorizing it as a Pop Between Realities, but we could just as easily call it Notes Towards a Study of the New Series. Or just a discussion of the period of anticipation and lead-up to the new series.

One of the things that jumps out most in Russell T Davies’s early interviews about Doctor Who is his continual focus on the series’ engagement with the tabloid press. It’s easy to pretend this is some sort of landmark moment, but it’s not really at all – John Nathan-Turner was an inveterate tabloid-stoker who carefully and meticulously maintained the series’ public profile by, for instance, letting slip that perhaps the Doctor was going to regenerate into being a woman, or using the hoax title The Doctor’s Wife to try to smoke out someone leaking production information (and, of course, get a wave of publicity to boot). In this regard, Nathan-Turner’s newfound legacy as tabloid-certified paedo (as opposed to actual one) fall somewhere in the grey area between irony and inevitability.

This leaves anyone who wants to, perhaps, criticize Davies for stunt-casting Billie Piper or Catherine Tate on any sort of “purity of the series” grounds in an unfortunate bind. They are hard-pressed to contrast it unfavorably with the Nathan-Turner era, since in that regard Davies’s only sin was actually getting the viewing figures Nathan-Turner dreamed of. One could suggest that the Hinchcliffe and Letts eras were above such stunts, and you’d be more or less correct, but that direction ignores the fact that the nature of British television in that era meant that a merely reasonably popular program like Doctor Who was such a central cultural experience that it didn’t need to go out of its way to connect to other parts of British culture any more than Marmite and the Shipping Forecast did.

But there’s still something jarring about it coming off the wilderness years – the sense that Doctor Who is suddenly catering to The Sun fits bewilderingly poorly with Sometime Never… and Zagreus coming out.…

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Outside The Government 9 (This Town Will Never Let Us Go)

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If you missed yesterday’s mini-post, I’m releasing Wednesday’s entry on Rose (over 13k and as good as I hoped it would be) as a backer-exclusive update on Kickstarter if we reach $10k there. So if you want to see it early, please consider our wide variety of inexpensive reward tiers. Also, if you’ve never bought any of my books, I’ve got a new reward tier that gets you all the existing ones in ebook form for $5 less than they usually cost. Plus you can pre-order the Logopolis book via Kickstarter. It’s all right over here.


So here we are. A spinoff of a spinoff. Doctor Who’s own planet Dust – the furthest extension of its narrative reach. The single most remote object that can possibly be called Doctor Who. Faction Paradox. Its effect on the world is vanishingly small. It could be wiped from history, completely removed from Doctor Who’s warp and weft, and the observable effects would be exactly zero. Faction Paradox has had no visible influence on Doctor Who, or, for that matter, on much of anything save perhaps itself. Its writers are marginal, its ideas arcane, and, notably, even Lawrence Miles hasn’t bothered to write for it in years.

The Faction, of course, wouldn’t have it any other way. Authorized ghosts, given free license to operate in the shadow of the greater text, Faction Paradox has never been more at home. This is their nature – the parodic, mocking reflection of the established order of things. The idea of Faction Paradox as a monster hit of mainstream culture isn’t just ludicrous on the face of it – because really, who would want to read this crap – it’s wrong. That’s not what Faction Paradox is designed to do. They’re designed to lurk in the shadows. Even here, in the book named after them, they do not appear as such. It’s never quite clear who, in the story, actually is Faction Paradox. All three main characters might be Faction Paradox agents. None of them might be. Faction Paradox is too obscure and marginal even for the most marginal thing in Doctor Who history.

To revisit one question there, who would want to read this crap? Well, the answer, in practical fact, isn’t Doctor Who fans. At least not in any substantial body of them. Faction Paradox gives every appearance of being just barely profitable enough to publish, bouncing among several small presses over the years. It’s compelling enough to keep gong, in no small part because it’s obvious that many of the people working within it are absolutely fascinated by it, but its readership is tiny. I mean, I outsell Faction Paradox. Coming up with potential readerships is perhaps easier – reading This Town Will Never Let Us Go almost constantly reminds one of Grant Morrison. More than anything actually published under the Doctor Who name, up to and including Morrison’s Doctor Who work, this is the Doctor Who-related piece one can hand to a fan of The Invisibles and say “here, you’ll like this.”…

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Apropos of Nothing

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What’s really interesting about Hide and The Rings of Akhaten is the consequence of Neil Cross being brought into Doctor Who. It tells us that Moffat was watching Luther, and that the shows were cross-polinating. Doctor Who and Luther, of course, currently share a tradition of being meaty character parts. The appeal is that they’re big, broad, theatrical parts that give the actor a solid platform on which to build a definitive performance. Then they go on to get character parts as villains in American co-productions, and that’s how they make the real money. See also David Tennant as Barty Crouch, Christopher Eccleston as every movie part he’s played recently, et cetera. Except it didn’t really work for Tennant – his movies never took off – and he’s come back for another round of television where he’s bankable; Broadchurch. (Is it good? Should I watch it?)

So, Doctor Who’s a chameleon of a show. That’s its Raison d’etre under Moffat; it will jump around and imitate all sorts of things in a schizoid fashion. And one of the biggest things Doctor Who has never really intersected with is the Prime Suspect style of show. Long stories where you know the villain and state of play at the start of it, and the pleasure is in watching the lead actor work through it. And where that very open perspective is contrasted with an emotional drama. So we have a story in which the mystery plot is one in which we watch the main character come to a conclusion we already know, but the emotional plot is one where we and the main character move along together. Luther is similar, but with a clever twist in the form of Alice Morgan, who plays the Irene Adler sort of role of simultaneously being a villain and a romantic interest. And so every episode (for the first season at least) the crime plot unfolds completely open whereas the emotional plot plays dangerously closed.

The open approach is a structure that works trickily with Doctor Who, because it needs some equivalent of a crime. And Doctor Who doesn’t quite do crimes. (Nor does Sherlock, apparently – Series 2 has exactly zero episodes about Sherlock solving a crime.) Typically it’s only possible to do that sort of open storytelling with a baroque alien invasion plot. So, for instance, in The Bells of Saint John we know who the bad guys are and what they’re doing, but we build a mystery around why, since their plan is horribly over-elaborate. But it’s hard to build an emotional plot around that, since having the Doctor fall in love with the femme fatale is just jarring and a bad idea. (Unless it’s the Master.)

All of which is just to say that this is, structurally, how to understand the River Song story. It’s an attempt to find a way to the Luther plot structure in Doctor Who. So instead of a crime we have a time-wime. But we and the Doctor still both know who did it: River Song.…

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You Were Expecting Someone Else 19 (Scream of the Shalka)

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The list of proper “alternate Doctors” is relatively small: you’ve got Cushing, of course – the alternate Doctor who has actually impacted culture in any meaningful sense. You’ve got the Curse of Fatal Death set of Doctors, but they were never actually meant to be taken as seriously as they are. And you’ve got Trevor Martin, but since he was in a 1974 stage play that nobody knew much about until 2008 when Big Finish did an audio adaptation, he’s pretty firmly purely a trivia answer.

It’s worth thinking a little bit about the nature of “alternate Doctors” in this regard. Our pool of three noteworthy interests contains exactly zero that were ever intended by anyone as a serious alternative to Doctor Who. Cushing’s Doctor existed only to provide a platform upon which Dalek thrills could be built. The Curse of Fatal Death was, as noted, a joke, though for all its quality it turned out to be not nearly as funny as fans taking it seriously as a plot to kill off Doctor Who by burning through the remaining regenerations, a viewpoint that is fascinating in its utter wrongness. And Trevor Martin was a disposable product to handle the fact that Jon Pertwee didn’t want to do the show. None of these are “alternate” Doctors, as that suggests some sort of fully functional alternate history in which they are Doctor Who, and none of them could possibly support that. They’re trivia answers.

Which brings us to Scream of the Shalka. On the one hand it’s clearly a trivia answer – the hardest answer to “name the three contexts in which Richard E Grant has appeared in Doctor Who.” On the other, we have to remember that this was a completely sincere attempt at rebooting Doctor Who, intended as such a big deal that Davies cited his guilt over killing off the project as part of why he hired Cornell to write Father’s Day. (That and Cornell being bloody good, of course.) Richard E Grant was announced as the official Ninth Doctor, and the plan was that this would spin off into a proper series of Doctor Who. It’s just that before it actually came out it got completely pre-empted by Russell T Davies, and so Grant became an alternate Doctor by default.

And so the first and most obvious question to ask about Scream of the Shalka is whether it ever could have worked. Is this in fact the first properly “alternate” Doctor – an alternate launching point into forty years of new adventures, as Cornell breathlessly hyped it before the bottom dropped out. Certainly much of the familiar scaffolding is there: we have a post-traumatic Doctor with a new status quo following some hazily defined event. The Master Robot ruefully seeking redemption is charming, not least because Derek Jacobi is a national treasure who’s having an absolute blast. The villain is solid, which is impressive, as there was an awful lot else to launch in this story and doing a mediocre villain that’s just a placeholder against which the Doctor gets to define himself is a pretty standard response to that problem.…

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Time Can Be Rewritten 41 (The Gallifrey Chronicles)

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Good morning everyone. Some orders of business before the post. First of all, the Kickstarter continues to be blowing me away. As I mentioned over the weekend, I was needing more stretch goal ideas. T. Hartwell had the winning idea: an art book version of the Logopolis entry formatted to look like a Choose Your Own Adventure book. Read about it here, and consider contributing. The costs for ebook and print editions are the same there as they will be on Amazon, so if you’re even going to buy the Hartnell second edition when it comes out, go ahead. There’s also some new rewards to check out.

Second, if you missed it, I got invited to join Mac Rogers as a panelist on Slate’s Doctor Who recaps for this season, and got to discuss Hide with him this week. Given that the episode had what some are immodestly calling a shout-out to this blog (I remain silent but terribly amused), this was perhaps an auspicious omen. Certainly I had fun, and if you want a preview of some of my thoughts on the Moffat era it’s probably a good read. That’s up over here.

Let’s talk nightmare briefs, shall we? Here’s a corker: you need to wrap up the Eighth Doctor Adventures because the Eighth Doctor is no longer the incumbent. Accordingly we need to fix this whole mess we’ve made of destroying Gallifrey because, well, everyone knew that had to be cleaned up before it got handed off lest there be some massive disjunct between the Gallifreyless Eighth Doctor era and the Gallifreyful Ninth Doctor era. Of course, it’s possible the television series is going to go down as one of the most epic failures of modern television and the series is going to go crawling back to the novels, so however you wrap it up, it should probably not foreclose anything. Oh, and your book is actually going to come out a few months after the new series starts.

The list of people you can call to get this nightmare brief settled is, historically, very short. Peter Grimwade was good at this sort of stuff. Ben Aaronovitch had his moments, and also, for that matter, had Battlefield. Pip and Jane Baker, for all their faults, really only wrote as many stories as they did because they could handle assignments from hell. In books, of course, Kate Orman and Jon Blum lived for this sort of stuff. And then there was Lance Parkin. Lance Parkin, who so loves nightmare briefs that he tends to create them for himself. And who had closed out the previous book line, thus making for a neat piece of symmetry.

Another piece of symmetry appears on the cover. This is the third Eighth Doctor Adventure to feature the Seal of Rassilon on the cover, the previous two having been The Eight Doctors and Interference Book One. This is an odd trilogy, to say the least, but one that manages to capture the overall arc of the Eighth Doctor Adventures surprisingly well, from their beginnings as crushing disappointments to their flare of promise in the middle through to their awkward but not entirely lacking in quality latter days.…

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