Last year I was a speaker at a conference with these people:

Left to right:
Mladen Ivanic, Bosnian Foreign Minister
Fraser Cameron of the European Policy Centre, chairing the meeting
Miomir Zuzul, Croatian Foreign Minister
Me.

Well, Ivanic resigned last month and Zuzul resigned this week. Fraser and I are still in our jobs though.

The Onion article I linked to has been archived. Here’s the text:

Fighting Insomnia

Insomnia—the chronic inability to fall and remain asleep—affects roughly 20 percent of American adults. Here are some tips to get a better night’s sleep:

Fighting Insomnia

• Although it’s tempting to use liquor as a cure for chronic sleeplessness, be warned: Liquor is quite expensive.
• Getting more exercise can help combat insomnia. If you suffer from sleeplessness, try shuffling from the bed to the kitchen, opening and shutting the refrigerator door, and shuffling back to bed.
• According to researchers at the National Sleep Foundation, there is an actual National Sleep Foundation. Yes, for real.
• If you are going to take pills to help you sleep, be sure you take enough to knock yourself out. Watching Good Morning America while sleep-deprived and tranquilized is a hellish experience.
• Use your bed for sleeping only. Conduct all reading, eating, phone calls, and sexual relations on the kitchen table.
• Try counting sheep, rather than the number of times you’ve failed as a wife and mother.
• If you got less than three hours of sleep the previous night, it’s important to inform everyone you meet of that fact all day long.
• If you’re having night after night of hours-long jungle sex when all you really want is a decent night’s rest, go cry on someone else’s shoulder.
• Minimize noise, light, excessive temperature—all factors that could potentially disrupt rest—by sleeping indoors.
• Sleeping pills can and do become addictive. Before you know it, you’ll be giving back-alley blow jobs for hits of Ambien.
• Remember: Insomnia is only a problem if you are employed or have a reason to live.

January: Gateway by Fredrrik Pohl. As good as I remembered it as being.

February: The five questions meme: I’ve seen this floating around, but part of the problem is catching it at the right moment and also finding someone whose questions you think you would like to answer!

March: [three book reviews:] A train to Paris, followed by a trans-Atlantic flight, is a good way to make further inroads into the books bought the other week in London.

April: Just discovered that is one of my colleagues at work. Привет, Игорь!

May: No long weekend in Belgium, but I’ll make the most of what I’ve got.

June: Two of my colleagues have been expelled from Indonesia.

July: This evening: train to Paris, for conference tomorrow.

August: The Year of Our War, by Steph Swainston: Well, this is depressing. A Cambridge graduate, like me, who has dabbled in archaeology, like me, and now works in vaguely international relations stuff, like me, but is about six years younger and has produced a stormingly good first novel.

September: I’d been thinking of doing a post about the tenth anniversary of the IRA ceasefire, pushed a little bit by ‘ reminiscences about the Bad Old Days, by ‘s latest post about terrorism, and by the fact that I participated in a live panel discussion with John Hume and Albert Reynolds about it on RTÉ radio yesterday (don’t worry, Dublin-based readers – you didn’t miss much).

October: Back from Portugal. Got to swim in the sea on Wednesday and Saturday; had lots of time today to look around Lisbon; stayed in a beautiful monastic retreat house (now owned by a Portuguese foundation).

November: Atonement: A very good book, this, which had been sitting on my “to-read” pile for far too long.

December: The scourge of insomnia.

Lots of books, lots of travel, a little politics. Am off to Rome for 24 hours later today.

2) The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, by Stephen R. Covey

I’ve got into the habit of buying and reading a self-help book every year or so – especially since I became a manager, an important role for which I have had no formal training. I must say I’ve found this to be one of the more useful ones I’ve tried; it goes far beyond the simple questions of running an effective office and concentrates on how to lead a more rewarding life.

The 7 habits are:
1. Be proactive
2. Begin with the end in mind
3. Put first things first
4. Think win/win
5. Seek first to understand, rather than to be understood
6. Synergise
7. Sharpen the saw

My own biggest difficulty has always been #3, the art of prioritising, but I found the reflections on the other points reinforced a lot of my own approach to personal development and offered some helpful further thoughts. The book is not too loaded with timeconsuming exercises – basically one short one at the start of each chapter. It is, however, a little repetitive.

Anyhow, I’ve found the author’s website and am downloading the planning software for a free trial – will report back on whether it works for me or not.

Sorry to hear it, so soon after I read A Contract With God.

Well, we’ve been watching them at the rate of one a night for the last week (last night we took a break so that Anne and I could go out). And my conclusions are as follows:

The Fellowship of the Ring: Lots more extended scenes and fewer completely new ones, compared to the film. The extra material was generally very good, though oddly enough two of the new scenes (the Elves passing through the Shire, and Aragorn’s mother’s tomb) seemed rather bolted on.

Unlike the other films we’ve seen most of the extra two DVDs here as well, and of course it’s all absolutely fascinating. The introduction to the special effects if anything deepens your appreciation of scenes like Hobbiton, Moria, Rivendell, and so on. It’s a bit sad that despite the mini-feature ostensibly on Tolkien, we don’t actually get more than still photos of the author himself – not even quotes from letters if I remember rightly. But we do get lots of good quotes from Tom Shippey and Brian Sibley. (And is that Patrick Curry the same one whose writings on astrology I used for my M Phil?)

The Two Towers: This was the one film we hadn’t seen in the cinema, partly because it came out just at the time that U was born but also I’d read in the review in Interzone that it took a lot of liberties with the plot. Well, indeed it does: Aragorn falls over a cliff; Faramir takes Frodo, Sam and Gollum as far west as Osgiliath; Pippin tricks Treebeard into going to war against Saruman; and the Elves save the day at Helm’s Deep. It all seemed worthwhile to me, except perhaps for the Aragorn bit (and another bot where he tells Eowyn his true age) which felt a bit bolted on. (Also we never find out what happens to the Elves who tuned up at Helm’s Deep.) I was sorry, however, to lose Gimli’s reaction to the glittering caves. More on this later.

Great bits: Gollum is the real star here. Not just the special effects but the story of potential redemption of someone whose life has been poisoned by the Ring. Treebeard and the Ents are not bad either, though I wished they had looked a bit more solid. And of course, the flooding of Isengard takes your breath away – especially when you consider certain recent awful events in the real world.

The Return of the King: We start with a huge deviation from the book – interestingly not in the film either – as Saruman and Wormtongue both get killed at Orthanc. So on the one hand we who have read the book know that the Scouring of the Shire is not going to happen; but on the other hand, added to the variations from the text in the previous film, there’s a real sense of suspense now about whether the ending will actually go as planned. The film becomes also a bit of a Bildungsroman for Merry and Pippin. The parallels between the grievously wounded Frodo and Faramir were a point I had missed in the cinema.

And when Sam does return, and the little Gamgees (played by the little Astins) leap into his arms, and he says, “Well, I’m back”, well, anyone whose eyes do not moisten has no soul.

The set piece that made the biggest impression on me in the cinema, the lighting of the beacons, was much less impressive here; small screen vs big, I suppose. On the other hand, Shelob, the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, and the climax at Mount Doom are still fantastic. And the extra length actually makes the hail-and-farewell scenes at the end, which seemed excessive in the film, seem better paced to the work as a whole. Finally, let’s hear it for the Mouth of Sauron, gloriously horrible in the DVD though knifed from the film.

Overall: C’mon, folks, Liv Tyler is pretty good actually. And while it jars at first for the young hobbits to have such different accents, and Gimli to be cast as comic relief (so we lose the Glittering Caves bit), it actually makes him a more rounded character than in the book. Also the relationship between Frodo and Sam (and by extension Gollum) in my view acquires much greater depth in the Jackson treatment, simply by allowing Frodo to be more visibly flawed (and perhaps Gollum to be a little smarter). In sum: I liked it.

Basically, we who have loved the book for decades are incredibly lucky. (Anyone out there remember the 1978 Ralph Bakshi version, which ended with Frodo and Sam adrift in the river, Merry and Pippin in Treebeard’s clutches, and the others besieged in Helm’s Deep?) This is not just a full-length treatment but a quintuple full-length treatment, made by fans for fans. And its success bears witness to the success of Tolkien’s own project to write an epic “linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama”. We won’t see the like of this again; it’s exceptionally rare for a such a popular film to capture the spirit of such a popular book in this way. (I don’t know but I suspect the last, perhaps the only other, example may have been Gone With The Wind, in 1939.) And I’ve still got the extra material on the other four and a half DVD’s to get through. Further enjoyment awaits.

1) Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky/ Фёдор Михайлович Достоевский

Father Ted said something along the lines of, “I liked the crime bit but I found the punishment a bit of a drag” (of course now I actually need the exact quote I can’t find my copy of the scripts), and that was pretty much my feeling for several weeks, to the extent that I read a number of other books in the meantime. Finally, encouraged by , I gave it a concentrated push over the last few days, and was duly rewarded.

The book has three stars – Raskolnikov himself, the actual criminal; Porfiry, the detective (whose surname I don’t think we ever learn); and the city of St Petersburg, whose geography is a key part of the novel. The edition I have has a helpful map at the front which I’ll now go back to. It’s not geography bound to the same extent as Ulysses – but then, what other novel is? – yet I feel a certain confidence in the rest of the story once it’s clear that the author has thoguht out the setting properly, even if (as in this case) it was a setting he knew well because he was living there at the time.

Anyway, I think I’ll come back to this one. A decent literary start to the new year. And who knows, if I succeed in my ambition of improving my Russian I may be able to try it in the original:

В начале июля, в чрезвычайно жаркое время, под вечер, один молодой человек вышел из своей каморки, которую нанимал от жильцов в С—м переулке, на улицу и медленно, как бы в нерешимости, отправился к К—ну мосту.

Early in July, in exceptionally hot weather, towards evening, a young man came out of the garret in which he lodged in S. Place and slowly, as though in hesitation, walked towards K. bridge.

This has been very amusing.

Despise Nerds:
2. Allegedly.
7

Not Nerds:
10
11
also 11
14

Nerd Wannabe:
20
24
31

Lightly Nerdy:
, from whom I got it in the first place, 40
also 40
47

Low-Rank Nerds:
51
56
62
Me 65

Mid-Rank Nerds:
70
72
74
also 74
79

High-Nerds:
86
also 86
just beaten by ‘s 87

and finally in the Nerd King God category:
97
also 97, but beaten by
with a score of 98.

Edit Now updated with lots more scores!
Later edit See here for and his friends.
Final edit, almost a year later All hail with his score of 99!!!

My friends

My interests

See here for your own.

Happy birthday, and !

Over at LanguageHat, they’re having trouble with Gogol’s phrase, “Ах ты, Оподелдок Иванович!”

…word for word, it means “Oh you, Opodeldok Ivanovich!” Opodeldok was clearly not an actual Russian name, so I looked it up in my trusty Oxford dictionary (where it is listed under the more usual spelling оподельдок), and there it was—helpfully defined as “opodeldoc.” I let out a bellow of rage at the perfidy of the lexicographers who had taken the easy way out, refusing to give the user the slightest actual help, requiring an additional trip to the OED.

Fortunately the Oxford English Dictionary was able to help, so there is a happy ending.

A good set. (via )

My own New Year Resolution is to have another crack at learning Russian.