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To all of you with #recallwithdrawal: Time to focus on Arlene and Micheal for #MMSDBOE!! #99percent MTI is officially endorsing Arlene Silviera for Madison School Board. Come meet her tonight! 100 WI Ave #700 5-7pm

1.25.2012 Madison School Board Candidate DCCPA Event Audio. Seat 1 Candidates: Nichele Nichols www.nichols4schoolboard.org email: nnichols4mmsd@gmail.com Arlene Silveira (incumbent) www.arleneforschoolboard.com email: arlene_Silveira@yahoo.com Seat 2 Candidates: Mary Burke www.maryburkeforschoolboard.net email: maryburkewi@gmail.com Michael Flores www.floresforschoolboard.org email: floresm1977@gmail.com via a kind reader's email

St. Vincent de Paul is helping local families brave the cold this winter through its 20th annual Recycle the Warmth drive.

The city of Madison released an ordinance to remind residents they will not tolerate snowy sidewalks.

After a county commission voted to extend the deadline to pay back a $200,000 loan, a unique Middleton museum will keep its doors open for at least another year.

A.J. Foyt suffers infection following knee surgery will miss Grand Marshall duties at Daytona's Rolex 24

Some music at the movies on 16 February.

Tom Terrell opines that Yes were funky.

Even the whitest band on Earth has black fans.

Faith is the book I've been waiting for Mary Gordon or Alice McDermott to write. These women are leading writers of Irish-American fiction, but neither has taken on the subject of the sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic church. Jennifer Haigh has done it instead, and done it well.

A Beloit man is in critical condition after failing to yield the right-of-way and crashing into a grain hauler, Rock County authorities said.

Maybe for more than one reason. (And who did write that atrocious mining bill, anyhow?)

Is this how Rick Santorum thinks he can win the GOP nomination?  Or is he hoping for a V.P. pick? On Friday, four days ahead of the primary, Santorum flew to his original home state of Pennsylvania to raise money and hold a media availability. Then he was headed south to his home in Virginia [...]

The Central Branch of the Madison Public Library has been closed for weeks now, awaiting the construction crews that will give it a complete overhaul. Ice and snow are piling up on the steps, the books have all gone into storage, the shelves are bare and furniture and fixtures have been sold off. An orange snow fence marks off the site, draped with a banner showing the new library and noting its opening in the summer of 2013.

Even this work of public art by artist O. V. Shaffer, which has stood in front of the downtown library since it opened more than 4 decades ago, has been put into storage. It's a hammered copper sculpture called Hieroglyph. It will be in storage until the renovation is complete. Not everyone likes the sculpture, but I've always been fond of it. Last I heard, it will go in the roof garden of the renovated library when it opens in the summer of 2013.

But tomorrow this dark, empty building will reopen for one day only and come vibrantly alive. The occasion is the Bookless event featuring numerous local artists, fun for the whole family, music and a whole lot more. It's also a fundraiser for the library (free admission for the family events in the afternoon, paid admission for the evening event that includes food and drink and music). That's tomorrow, Saturday, Jan. 28.

It's a unique, once-in-a-lifetime happening. Chances are, you'll never again have a chance to roam an empty library that's Bookless—filled with art instead of books, music instead of silence—and all for a good cause.

The Washington Post dropped a bomb today about Ron Paul that underscores what has been reported about his racist background, and bigotry against gay people.  The big news out of this story is that people close to Paul’s operations said he was deeply involved in the company that produced the outlandish and hate-filled newsletters. Ron [...]

Madison city staff is recommending the Landmarks Commission vote against some aspects of the development proposed for the 100 block of State Street, including the demolition of the Schubert Building, 120 W. Mifflin St., and the Fairchild Building, 122 W. Mifflin St. The staff recommendations, prepared by Amy Scanlon, the city's preservation planner, did not recommend against the plan as a whole, however.

I imagine that Prime Time is in large measure a parody of the BBC with the inhabitants of the planet Blinni-Gaar completely addicted to the mindless television programming on Channel 400. In fact, they are so totally given over to TV that few people actually work with automated combines harvesting the field where the TARDIS lands. Vogol Lukos runs Channel 400 with the aid of a computer system known as "Auntie", presumably as in Auntie Beeb, and he is quite happy to have The Doctor on his planet as he has some designs on making the Time Lord the star of a new show which will have literally the whole star system watching.

Mike Tucker returns here though he is without his usual writing partner, Robert Perry. A blurb notes that Tucker was a BBC special effects guy at the time he wrote the book. Perhaps the story is revenge on his employer. The guy obviously loved the Seventh Doctor and I can't blame him.

The Doctor and Ace wander the city, Blinni Prime, I think, and encounter independent reporter Greg Ashby and his cameraman Eeki Tek. Ace develops a crush on Ashby though he is really out to land an interview with The Doctor, hero of Coralee. Also out on the prowl are a band of bloodthirsty Zzinbriizi Jackals.

The Zzinbriizi are, unsurprisingly, doing the bidding of Lukos who comes across as a very one-dimensional bad guy – power-hungry and cocksure. Think the pirate captain from The Pirate Planet. Not as cartoonish with his own Mr. Fibuli to boss around in the form of talk show host Roderik Saarl. Since Blinni-Gaar has cameras pretty much everywhere, the planet is like one big reality show set. This frustrates The Doctor and Ace who find themselves unable to pull a stunt to gain access to Channel 400 HQ.

I really liked this element of the book. Lukos knows quite a bit about The Doctor and looks to get his hands on the TARDIS. The Time Lord scores a minor victory on a trek to Blinni-Gaar's moon where he discovers Channel 400's broadcast tower and a strange device that is wired into it but Lukos gets the upper hand. He lures The Doctor and Ace into one of the studios with a jungle set that proves to be bigger on the inside than the outside. Plus that pack of Zzinbriizi Jackals are hunting them down. And it's all being broadcast on television to boot.

Ace escapes with the help of a teenage girl named Gatti who must be the only teen in the whole galaxy who doesn't watch TV. Meanwhile The Doctor meets up with The Master who's had his TARDIS jury rigged into that jungle set. The banter between the two Time Lords is fun and we discover that the hold of the Cheetah People remains within The Master just as it did with Ace in Matrix.

Things take a turn for the worse when it is revealed that The Doctor's fellow defiant one is, in fact, not The Master but a Zzinbriizi given a nice disguise by the Fleshsmiths whom I first encountered in Relative Dementias. They have honed the ability to manipulate flesh to an art form. Here we find them in their hideout on the planet Scrantek and it is revealed that, not only has The Master come to them seeking a new body and been betrayed, but also that they've struck a deal with Lukos. He gets the whole galaxy watching Channel 400 whose signal has a Fleshsmith enzyme piggybacking on it which will turn the bodies of viewers into their modeling clay.

Since the Fleshsmiths have the ability to clone, you have to wonder why they took the long way and decided to plot this hideous and hideously complicated subterfuge to transmogrify people into the medium of their choice. Why risk meddling Time Lords when all you have to do is grab once person and you can have all the clay you want? Haste makes waste.

I liked Prime Time even if it was a bit over the top. The Doctor is true to character here as he makes the decision to save the life of the faux Master. And I enjoyed their verbal sparring as they ran through the jungle set. I think it's the first time I've encountered the arch villain in any of the PDAs and it was nice to have Anthony Ainley's version of the character in my imagination. Plus I appreciated the continuity from the TV show regarding his adventures on the Cheetah world.

On the other side, Ashby ends up being rebuilt by the Fleshsmiths which is nice and grotesque but ultimately feels tacked on. His former lover is herself a hostess for Channel 400 and their reunion seems like a convenient ploy to make sure the good guys prevail.

I find myself looking forward to reading the rest of the 7th Doctor PDAs written by Tucker and Perry because they've toyed with Ace here. There is plenty of her kicking ass and taking names but she also gets her 15 minutes of fame at the hands of Roderik Saarl. Stuck onstage and forced to watch images from her future, Ace breaks down emotionally. Images of her elderly mother and of her own grave were just too much. The book ends with The Doctor hunting down that grave and discovering that it is indeed real and not the product of Channel 400's effects team. Chillingly, Ace's body is that of a teenager and not an old woman.

Tucker and Perry have a couple novels left to explain this one.

Apple sold 37 million iPhones in Q4 2011, 89% of those were iPhone 4S.