7) Dave Barry Hits Below the Beltway, by Dave Barry

Dave Barry is one of the funniest writers in the English language, but he is best at the length of his newspaper columns – his one novel, Big Trouble, is surprisingly flat. I did like his book on American history, Dave Barry Slept Here. This book, nominally about Washington DC and the US political system, contains some beautiful laugh out loud moments and some bits that are less memorable. One passage that stood out for me was his description of losing Democratic candidates, especially 1988’s Michael Dukakis:

Dukakis was an intelligent man, but he was also a man who had essentially the same range of facial expressions as an iguana. He did not fire up audiences. When he was speaking, the audience expected that at any moment his tongue would come flicking out and snag a passing insect.

The best chapter, though, is the one on South Florida and why the rest of the US should expel it from the Union. Here his humour boils over into sæva indignatio, and is all the better for it. Not quite worth the price I paid for it but fun all the same.

Russian Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov is surprised at Georgia’s permanent attention to Russia’s possible attack on terrorists in the Pankisi Gorge. “The Georgian leadership keeps discussing this issue although we have never mentioned Georgia as our target. It means that an uneasy conscience betrays itself,” Mr. Ivanov said. (from Novosti)

I suspect that rather than having uneasy consciences (though Ivanov actually used the much more colourful phrase “На воре шапка горит”, “the thief is the one whose big furry hat is on fire”) the Georgians may just be worried about the Russians attacking their territory because it already happened in August 2002, although the international community successfully pretended they didn’t know who was flying in from the north to bomb Georgian villages. Just a thought.

…you may well catch me on the BBC TV Ten O’Clock News this evening.

Edited to add or on the BBC World Service Newshour later on (radio).

You may well hear me on “the World at One” doing a bit about Kosovo. (Not surprisingly.)

Edited to add: this link is supposed to give you the recording but I can’t make it work for me.

My boss has just been nominated as the next UN High Commissioner for Refugees (after the last one resigned due to sexual harassment allegations). Well, that would certainly change things around here… though I suspect someone else will get the job, and we’ll have to put up with him for a bit longer.

Excellent post on hatred over at Obsidian Wings. Another for the blogroll.

I generally try to act on this: not to draw any bad conclusions about people until I have what seems to me clear evidence that those conclusions are warranted. Sometimes, people take this to mean that I try to be nice to my opponents, and they ask, “Why should we be nice to them?” But to me this isn’t primarily about kindness at all, but about justice.

puts forward some arguments against consociationalism.

I’m not so sure. As someone who spent years campaigning for the non-sectarian Alliance Party in Northern Ireland, I have a lot of sympathy with his general line of argument. But I think there are several problems with it.

First, what alternative can be put forward? Any attack on consociationalism is usually read by those on the inside of the process as a plea for majority rule, or at least for those in government to have the option of excluding minority groups. I’m not for a minute suggesting that this is what actually meant, just reporting that this is how the argument made tends to resonate on the ground.

Second, if a society as a whole takes the mature decision that a consociational settlement, which indeed has other downsides in terms of institutional rigidity and financial cost, is worth it as the price for avoiding war, what is really so bad about that? Living as I do in Belgium, with sky-high taxes (but also decent public services), and working as I do with the Macedonians, this seems to me not a bad argument.

Finally, of course, a good consociational system guarantees rights to its citizens as well as privileges for certain groups. The Dutch system, rather than any of the more interesting ethnic ones, was Lijphart’s poster-child for consociationalism, and the settlement doesn’t appear to have held them back from liberal solutions (and indeed they’ve been able to accommodate smaller groups in the system when they appeared). Similarly in Belgium: the fact that both main linguistic groups (and the German speakers) have deeply entrenched communal rights has not prevented them from making a decent go of accommodating minorities (of course here your position depends mainly on the fairly objective question of which language you happen to speak best, rather than on any more nebulous ethnic criteria).

So in summary, I prefer not to attack consociationalism per se – because, frankly, there isn’t a better alternative – but to insist that consociationalism start from a consideration of indiviudual rights rather than group rights, and try to minimise the latter while accepting that a system with an element of group rights is better than a civil war.

4) Around Washington, D.C. with Kids, by Kathryn McKay
5) Around New York City with Kids, by Mindy Bailin
6) Around Boston with Kids, by Lisa Oppenheimer

Essential preparation work for a planned family trip to the East Coast in May; vital to locate the best parks, playgrounds and children’s museums in the three cities we plan to visit. Things I’ve never done myself that I would like to do in each city, if not necessarily this time round: the Roosevelt Memorial, the Statue of Liberty, whale-watching.

3) Science Fiction: The Best of 2004, ed. Karen Haber and Jonathan Strahan

13 short stories here, just in time for the Hugo nominations deadline (which is Friday). The only one I’d already read was “The Voluntary State” by Chris Rowe. Others that I particularly enjoyed were “The Lost Pilgrim” by Gene Wolfe, “PeriAndry’s Quest” by Stephen Baxter, “Elector” by Charles Stross, “All of Us Can Almost . . . ” by Carol Emshwiller and “The Tang Dynasty Underwater Pyramid” by Walter Jon Willams. Particularly intrigued by ‘s injection of “a last-century EU politician” into his story; presumably Peter Mandelson? Anyway, all the above, and maybe one or two of the others, will go onto my nomination form.

Most pleasant to meet up with for lunch, and to discover that you can get semi-decent Indian food at the Grapevine in Place Luxembourg, right beside the European parliament. Will do that again soon, preferably on a day when I’m between meetings in that part of town and can take a bit more time over it.

For those of you who don’t look at the astronomical picture of the day, the next week or so will be the best opportunity this year for us in the northern hemisphere (which I think is basically everyone who reads this apart from ) to try and see the planet Mercury.

I’ve never seen Mercury myself. I once tracked down Uranus with a pair of binoculars, and have spotted the odd asteroid back in the days when I was serious about astronomy. But my office looks west, and I’m usually still here half an hour after sunset (like, er, about now), so I’ve set my diary to remind me to look out the window at 1900 every evening for the next week. It’s too cloudy this evening but I expect that one of these days it will be clear enough.

If you want to work out when sunset is, you can do it here (having first got your latitude and longitude here). About 30-40 minutes after sunset is probably the best time. There won’t be anything else visible near Mercury (except for the Moon, especially on the 11th and less so on the 12th). Those of you further west than me still have time to plan to try it this evening.

Copernicus supposedly never saw Mercury either.

Another for the blogroll:

http://www.dunglish.nl/

http://images.ucomics.com/comics/db/2005/db050307.gif

Dune by Frank Herbert
Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes and Babel-17 by Samuel R Delany (tie)
The Einstein Intersection by Samuel R Delany
Rite of Passage by Alexei Panshin
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K Le Guin
Ringworld by Larry Niven
A Time of Changes by Robert Silverberg
The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov
Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C Clarke
The Dispossessed by Ursula K Le Guin
The Forever War by Joe Haldeman
Man Plus by Frederik Pohl
Gateway by Frederik Pohl
Dreamsnake by Vonda N McIntyre
The Fountains of Paradise by Arthur C Clarke
Timescape by Gregory Benford
The Claw of the Conciliator by Gene Wolfe
No Enemy But Time by Michael Bishop
Startide Rising by David Brin
Neuromancer by William Gibson
Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card
The Falling Woman by Pat Murphy
Falling Free by Lois McMaster Bujold
The Healer’s War by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough
Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea by Ursula K Le Guin
Stations of the Tide by Michael Swanwick
Doomsday Book by Connie Willis
Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson
Moving Mars by Greg Bear
The Terminal Experiment by Robert J Sawyer
Slow River by Nicola Griffith
The Moon and the Sun by Vonda N McIntyre
Forever Peace by Joe Haldeman
Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler
Darwin’s Radio by Greg Bear
Quantum Rose by Catherine Asaro
American Gods by Neil Gaiman
The Speed of Dark by Elizabeth Moon

30 out of 40. Need to reread No Enemy But Time though as I can’t remember much about it.

2) The Island at the Centre of the World, by Russell Shorto

This is, quite simply, a fantastic book.

It is essentially a micro-study of a small European country’s colony on an island off the North American coast, between its foundation in the 1620s and the moment when the British captured it forty years later. The author has gone through the surviving records, combined them with everything else available to him about the period, and come up with a cracking good yarn. He also argues (quite convincingly) that the specific cultural influence of the colony’s founders had a fundamental and decisive influence on North American and therefore on world politics.

A strong claim. But consider the unintended consequences of the colony’s newly created municipal council’s concern about a potential attack from the English in 1653. They built a defensive wall along the northern edge of the town. Shorto notes:

In the long term, what is notable about this first public works project orchestrated by the town government is not the wall itself but the street that ran along it. It’s a safe bet that no matter how wildly they tended to dream, the magistrates could not have imagined that this rough pathway would replace the gleaming, colonnaded bourse of Amsterdam as the centre of world finance.

For this is the story of New Amsterdam, the centre of the Dutch settlement on the east coast of America.

Shorto follows the careers of the main figures of the Dutch colony, Peter Minuit, who probably made the famous transaction of 60 guilders with the Indians as part of a plan to move the main settlement from what is now Governor’s Island to the larger island across the bay; Peter Stuyvesant, its governor for seventeen years; and Stuyvesant’s rival, Adriaen van der Donck, the colony’s first chronicler, hitherto forgotten by history, eventually meeting an obscure fate, the “jonkheer” commemorated in the name of Yonkers.

But he also follows the ordinary people – for instance, Catalina Trico and Joris Rapalje, teenagers hastily married in Amsterdam in early 1624 just before emigrating, who pop up again and again as minor characters in the story. He does his best to get into the mind-set of the Indians, who must have assumed that they were really in control right up to the end of this period. “The early seventeenth century was a much more interesting time than the Wild West era, a time when Indians and Europeans were soemthing like equal participants in a joint habitation of the land, dealing with one another as allies, competitors, partners.”

And most particularly, he makes the argument that the Dutch national commitment to toleration and diversity played out in New Amsterdam in making it a cosmopolitan society from the very beginning, where as early as 1646 the four hundred inhabitants spoke eighteen languages between them, and that the town’s location at the centre of the main land passage from the coast to the interior of the continent inevitably meant that its values would be transmitted more readily to future settlers than would the ethos of Puritan New England to the north or the plantation owners to the south, something that only the forgotten van der Donck appears to have foreseen.

It is topped and tailed neatly: topped by a fascinating introductory chapter on Henry Hudson, who led the Dutch-funded expedition that first charted the islands in 1609 and the river that bears his name, the year before his crew mutinied and marooned him and his son in a small boat in the bay much further north that also bears his name and contains his unmarked resting place; and tailed by a brief account of the years after the first surrender to the British and the renaming of the colony after the future English king who had masterminded the campaign, the Duke of York. Shorto notes that in order to maintain the value of their new asset, the British had to preserve the unique cultural character of the city.

Nice little throwaway anecdotes as well, such as this observation about a monarch who Just Did Not Get It:

Of course he believed in freedom for his subjects, [King Charles I] famously explained, “but I must tell you that their liberty and freedom consist in having government… It is not their having a share in government, that is nothing appertaining to them.” (He gave this explanation to the crowd gathered to watch his beheading.)

Or on an early Dutch negotiator with the Indians, who

was given a house, presents and thick portions of bear meat. Although he doesn’t mention it, he may have been given other things as well, for the detailed list of Mohawk vocabulary he compiled includes the words for “man”, “woman”, “prostitute”, “vagina”, “phallus”, “testicles”, “to have intercourse”, “very beautiful”, “When shall you return?” and “I do not know.”

And staying with the linguistic theme, it’s obvious, once Shorto points it out, that the island at the entrance to the bay was named after the Dutch parliament, the States-General, or Staten for short. That the Dutch koekje became the generic term for baked confectionery when it became a “cookie”. That the Dutch colonists’ cabbage salad, or kool sla, shifted its spelling more than its pronunciation to become “coleslaw”. That the Dutch managerial relationship with the baas, though slightly re-nuanced in meaning and sound by colonial circumstances, became the American concept of the “boss”. He also makes out a reasonable case for lingering Dutch influence in the origins of Santa Claus, the office of district attorney, and indeed the Bill of Rights.

There are one or two slips. I bristled a bit at Shorto’s use of the phrase “English Civil War”, which by his own account started in Scotland, and which had a significant Irish dimension here completely unreported. He also has Samuel Pepys buying a beaver hat in 1641, when the future diarist was in fact only eight years old. The IJ is technically the river at Amsterdam, not the bay (formerly the Zuiderzee, now the IJsselmeer). But these are minor quibbles.

As I said above, this is a fantastic book. Strongly recommended.

1) A Wind from Bukhara, by M.J. Engh

More of a political fantasy than an sf novel this. Set in 1976 (when it was written). Central Asian dictator through sheer force of personality takes over the world, setting up his capital in a small town in Illinois. He then sets out to bring about the end of the world as we know it, and finishes off by cultivating his garden. His rather nasty sexual tastes were probably more acceptable fare for a novel in the 1970s than they would be now. Still, it gave me something to read on the plane.

Last night at dinner I was sitting beside a very young British diplomat and a very old Greek professor. The professor was waxing lyrical about the 1950s: “…and I told the King, your policy of undermining the British in Cyprus is disastrous! It will be bad for Cyprus and very bad for you! And when his son had to flee the country ten years later, I knew I had warned them! But it was too late!”

When the professor’s attention wandered, the young British diplomat whispered to me, “Can you explain what he meant about the Greeks undermining the British in Cyprus? It’s the first I’ve heard of it.” I explained that in the 1950s the Greeks had been funding and arming a terrorist movement which killed over a hundred (possibly lots more) British troops and administrators. I’m afraid I didn’t quite manage to hide my astonishment that a British diplomat, even a very young one, wasn’t aware of this major glitch in Anglo-Greek relations.

Of course the ex-King now lives in London, and has been there for ten times longer than he actually ruled in Greece…

My first chance to really write an entry since Thursday. For once I avoided the Curse Of Heathrow and my flight took off and landed on time. Very good to see some of you at the Silver Cross that evening – as far as I remember, those I already knew included , , , , and Paul T, and meeting however briefly and .

The next morning I had an Important Breakfast Meeting, then flew here to Thessalonica. Checked my voicemail which between planes in Athens to find two messages from Macedonian journalists wanting to interview me. But when I called them back I had already missed their deadline.

Good conference yesterday; I chaired one session and was generally kept busy by the rest of it. My flight isn’t for another four hours so I have some time to catch up now. But looking forward to getting home.

It’s warmer in Greece than it was in London.

Right, off to London for tonight, then Thessalonica for the weekend.

See some of you at the Silver Cross, I hope.

So far the Azeri regime had managed to resist bumping off its opponents.

Azerbaijan: Prominent journalist found slain

Baku, 2 March, 2005. 11:30 pm

Elmar Huseynov, the well-known journalist and the chief editor of opposition-minded MONITOR journal was killed brutally at the entrance of his apartment at around 9:00 pm on 2 March 2005.

Monitor faced hefty fines and dozens of lawsuits filed by various senior government officials.

I didn’t know Huseynov, but I do know Novella Jafaroglu. My instant take is that Huseynov annoyed someone in or close to the government, who then took unilateral action against him on the basis that President Aliyev and (the real ruler of the country) Ramiz Mehtiev wouldn’t care to punish them. I’ve emailed the White House and EU Special Representative to urge them to press the Azeri government to mount a proper investigation. All pretty horrible.

From TOL, an article by me good friend. I think he’s right on the fundamentals, but am not yet convinced that the EU is really ready to act as he suggests. He’s moving to Brussels shortly so we’ll be able to compare notes more often in future. A lot will deepnd on who the EU special representative is and what he (the four candidates are male) actually does.

Novels: Probably the only category where I will use all five of my nominations. At the moment it looks like:
River of Gods by Ian McDonald *
Newton’s Wake by Ken MacLeod *
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell *
The Year Of Our War by Steph Swainston *
Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susannah Clarke *
Stars lead to where I’ve blogged about it.

Best Related Book: The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction reviewed on my site here.

Shorter Fiction: So far very few pieces stand out for me. “Winterfair Gifts”, by Lois McMaster Bujold, “Enta Geweorc” by Nicholas Waller, and those I liked off the Nebula long list. Will review what else I’ve read, check out the Strahan/Haber collection over the weekend, and vote next week.

13) Stamping Butterflies, by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

Finished this on Monday night, so it just about counts as my last book of last month. I wasn’t overwhelmed by RedRobe, but really very much enjoyed Pashazade, Felaheen and Effendi, Grimwood’s trilogy set in an alternate history (but very contemporary) Alexandria where the German and Ottoman empires never fell. This latest combines present day US/western Mediterranean political interactions, a far future empire of two thousand worlds, a near future Chinese space mission, and 1970s Marrakech which is the key to the whole story.

I love Grimwood’s prose and characterisation – he stated at PicoCon the weekend before last how important it is for him to be able to experience the world he is writing, and that is very believable. For most of the book it was able to carry me past the shoals of unsuspended disbelief. I was left at the end just a bit unsatisfied, unfortunately. I never felt we got to the bottom of the main charcater’s motivation – who, in the end, is the “darkness”? Why is our protagonist a genius? Why, indeed, was it necessary for him to shoot at the President? And the resolution of the entire story – no bomb in 1977, President therefore makes common cause with the Chinese, humanity’s future in space is therefore assured – seemed to me to beg a whole lot of questions about where a different point of departure might have been found, and cosily slipped into a Happily Ever After ending which is completely at variance with the rest of the book and with Grimwood’s natural tone. Maybe I missed something in there, but I’m afraid it (just) misses my Hugo nominations.

The recent discussion of eggs has empowered me and Anne to consult a cookbook, and then a web page about cooking eggs. The results have been informative:

Poached eggs, as I use the term, are eggs cooked in water (or in a special egg poacher) without a shell. I call eggs cooked in a shell in water “soft-boiled” (if yolk soft) or “hard-boiled” (if yolk hard).

Coddled eggs: Put 1 pint of water into a small saucepan, and bring to a boil. Drop 1 egg into the water with a spoon, and set the vessel on the table for 7 minutes. Remove from the water and serve. If more eggs are added, the water must be increased in proportion. As mentioned by Zed. I think I may leave them for now.

Steamed Eggs: Oil a skillet, and when slightly hot, break in the eggs and sprinkle over them about 3 tablespoons or more of water for every 2 eggs. Sprinkle lightly with salt, cover with a tight-fitting cover, and cook over a medium fire until white over the top, like a poached egg, at the same time soft cooked. Remove and serve immediately. Thanks to . It does sound yummy.

Pickled eggs: Combine vinegar, water, salt and sugar in sauce pan. Bring to a boil and remove from heat. Add eggs then refrigerate covered for at least 1 week to 2 weeks. Brought up, and I choose my words with care, by .

New Youth Movement to Foil U.S. Plot to Take Over Russia

(from the balanced and neutral Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty)

I think the nature of the presidency has changed fundamentally in the last nine years, to the point where these discussions actually become worthwhile. At a time when nobody took the central government seriously (because it wasn’t there most of the time) the three members of the presidency were the only real representation of the constituent peoples at state level. The arrangements made in 1995 and implemented in 1996 made quite a lot of sense in the context of the times.

I can see a good argument that things have now changed. The BiH parliament and other institutions now function and actually carry serious bits of work, including in particular increasing control over the use of force (police, army, SBS, etc). The presidency has been reduced to the status of a figurehead.

Since the presidency is meant to represent three constituent people rather than two entities, there is a very good case for removing the entity-structure of the electoral system and treating the whole of BiH as a single electoral unit. At present the member of the presidency elected from the RS represents all RS voters rather than Serbs, and while this has sometimes suited the international agenda (as with the election of me good friend Zivko Radisic in 1998) it doesn’t really enable the institution to do the job it was intended to do.

Once you’ve decided to treat the whole of BiH as a single unit, I think there are some things you can’t do. I reckon you have to stick with the concept that your election produces one Serb, one Croat and one Bosniak winner, rather than a single president; unless the Council of Europe really insists on the latter point. I don’t much like the concept of constituent peoples but it is in the constitution as the basis for a lot of other stuff which I do like and it is also a practical reassurance to Croats and Serbs that BiH will not become a cold house for them.

There are then three (and a half) options:

1) each voter gets three votes (ie gets a vote for a Serb, a vote for a Croat and a vote for a Bosniak). Actually a bad idea. Effectively the Croat representative will be chosen by non-Croats, and quite likely the Serb by non-Serbs. Totally kills off the concept of linkage between elector and representative. If you try and fiddle around with it to correct this, so that each voter gets different power of their vote depending on ethnicity, things get really silly and unimplementable. (The International Crisis Group published a couple of papers on this way back in 1997-98. I thought they were stupid then and I think they are stupid now.)

2) each voter gets one vote, with some restrictions on who can vote for which candidate, to reassure Serb and Croat fears that their candidate will be chosen by Bosniaks. Actually this is also very difficult to implement, unless every single elector is identified ethnically on the electoral roll (which I would find very problematic), or unless you restrict distribution of ballot papers for candidates in areas where nobody of “their” ethnicity lives (but since we haven’t had a census, this is not possible). So I think it can’t be done.

3) Each voter gets one vote, cast for whichever candidate they like; Serb with most votes, Croat with most votes and Bosniak with most votes are the three winners. Really I think this is the only variant that makes sense. Since result is particularly uncertain, voters will be most likely to cast vote for candidate they are personally most interested in; but also incentives for all candidates to attempt to appeal to voters of all ethnicities as all are potential voters.

I say “three and a half” options because there are still (at least) two important considerations with regard to the last one:

a) do you present all candidates on a single list, or three separate lists (though on the same piece of paper and close together)? It may just be a presentational issue but I like the idea of putting them all on the same list, even if the counting process is effectively separate.

b) do you use the X vote or single transferable vote? As you know my heart is with the single transferable vote, but if you’ve gone for the single-list presentation you can’t really do the vote transfers. On the other hand it’s easy to implement if you have three separate lists on the same piece of paper.

“When the Sacred College of Cardinals names me pope, I’m gonna shake things up!”

” ‘Tony’s Law’ Would Require Marijuana Users To Inform Interested Neighbors”

*Wince*

I’m still waiting for an Oxfordian explanation of why the plays say “Oxford” but the Earl wrote “Oxenford”. For most of us this is a fairly good indication that the writers are different people!

(His reply) 

Gosh, this is a tough one — let me risk some strain on my brain.

Oxford thought that ‘Oxenford’ sounded better, and/or believed that it was strictly correct (as, for example, in the way most properly educated people prefer ‘uninterest’ to ‘disinterest’ when talking about a lack of interest or enthusiasm in a topic). However, he knew that the common use was ‘Oxford’ — as in the city / university / shire. And, since he also wished his authorship to remain unknown, he avoided his preferred, if idiosyncratic, usage.

Ouch — that really hurt. Call a doctor.<

(My response) 

Of course, it’s not actually based on reality.

De Vere and his wife did not “avoid” the spelling “Oxenford” in their own printed writings:

“Foure Epytaphes, made by the Countes of Oxenford, after the death of her young Sonne, the Lord Bulbecke, &c”

“Cardanus Comforte translated into Englishe. And published by commaundement of the right honourable the Earle of Oxenford.”

Both spellings *were* in common use at the time, for the city, the university and the shire as well as for the earl, and neither spelling could therefore be regarded as *so* idiosyncratic as to identify the author.

Nor did I make such a claim. 

Yes you did. You said “since he also wished his authorship to remain unknown, he avoided his preferred, if idiosyncratic, usage.” Clearly if you are right the spelling must have been so idiosyncratic as to identify the author; else why bother?

It’s just as well you didn’t read Law.  You capacity for making inferential judgements is woeful. There is a difference between evidence and proof.  The use of an unusual term is evidence. It is FAR from proof.

IF De Vere had make all references to the various earls of Oxford as ‘Earl of Oxenford’ then those members of the audience (and any readers) would have noticed it and asked ‘who uses that kind of designation’.  One very obvious answer was the current earl of Oxford. Since his literary skills were also known (at least within the aristocracy) then he would be providing good evidence that he was, in fact, the author.

The name of Oxford would have come up as the suspected author of works, some of which featured various earls of Oxford/Oxenford. 

No it wouldn’t. Everybody at the time thought what most people still think: that the works were by Shakespeare.

The way in which those characters were named (and presented generally) would have been studied to see if their treatment indicated Oxford’s authorship. So he would have made a point of NOT following his normal pattern.

Holinshed uses both spellings to refer to the same person on the same page:

A will dated 1524 refers to “Lands of Allsouls College of Oxenford”:

“From Vniversity Colledge in Oxenford, the xviij. of September, 1566”

Roger Bacon’s “Mirror of Alchemy“, published in 1597, describes the author as “sometimes fellow of Martin College: and afterwards of Brasen-nose College in Oxenforde”:

William Gamage dedicates a poem published in 1621 “To the ingenious Epigrammatists Jo: Owens,  and Jo: Heath, both brought vp in New Coll: in Oxenford”:

“To Oxenford the King has gone

With all his mighty peers,

That hath in peace maintained us,

These five or six long years.”

So it is not true to say that “the common use was ‘Oxford’ — as in the city / university / shire.”

It may have been the more frequent use but “Oxenford” was certainly common enough that nobody would have blinked at it.

‘Blinking’ is not an issue.

“And, since he also wished his authorship to remain unknown, he avoided his preferred, if idiosyncratic, usage.”

Since both spellings were in common use, “Oxenford” is hardly so eccentric a spelling that it would identify the author.

Not a claim I made.

Simply not true. I know you have difficulty following other people’s arguments but here you seem to have difficulty following even your own!

Not to mention that your scenario has the Earl manfully resisting the version of the word he finds preferable – even when describing his own ancestors – while composing blank verse.

For quite obvious reasons.

Daniel Wright suggests “I suspect that the author of Shakespeare’s works preferred to use “Oxford” (as opposed to the Middle English “Oxenford”) when referencing the town and its liege lord, principally because it scans better.“

Wright is wrong; it doesn’t scan better, as the Cambridge epigram demonstrates, it merely scans differently.

It seems pretty clear that the situation was rather like we have today with the word “either”, with some people saying “EYE-ther”, some “EE-ther” and some using both pronunciations.

No.  That is more-or-less random and quite different. Around 1580 ‘Oxenford’ was archaic. ‘Oxford’ was the modern and much more common usage, for plebian things like the city, the university and the shire.

I found uses of “Oxenford” for the city and the university  in 1597, 1621 and 1641, none of them from the pen of the Earl.

You’ll find uses today — especially by Cambridge students and graduates when disparaging their older (and more prestigious?) rival. What matters are the numbers — and you are carefully not telling us what you found.

I think I probably know more Cambridge graduates than you do, and have never heard any of them say “Oxenford”. The only usage of it I can remember from the twentieth century is in Tolkien’s short story, “Farmer Giles of Ham”, in an affectionate dig at the OED. Tolkien of course was an Oxford man.

Obviously “Oxenford” was common enough as a variant that nobody would have noticed much if the Shakespeare works had used it occasionally or even exclusively.

It was the common spelling of the author’s name – by most people, if not by himself.

The Earl preferred a three-syllable version but would vary it occasionally; in his will he refers to his wife as “Ladye Margery Countes of Oxford“, “Margery Counties of Oxenforde” and “Ladye Margery Counties of Oxinford”. Holinshed was obviously comfortable with both spellings of Oxford/Oxenford. But Shakespeare exclusively used “Oxford“, for the earls, the city, the university and the county. To make a convincing case for the Earl of Oxford as author, you’ll have to do better than making up lies about which spellings were or weren’t in common usage.

It was YOUR claim (shown above) that the difference in usage required an explanation.

It requires an explanation only if the Earl of Oxford is proposed as an author.

I have given you one. I can see why you don’t like it — because it makes sense within the Oxfordian scenario. Oxford would NOT have used ‘Oxenford’ within the plays, because it would have been suggestive of /(consistent with) his authorship.

Well, so would the use of English!

And anyway doesn’t this argument rather demolish the Oxfordian supposition that there are in fact clues to de Vere’s authorship within the plays?

Only when you are a total dope. The author was fully aware of the way his name was used and the frequency with which he and his ancestors were referred to as ‘Oxford’ and ‘Oxenford’.  He would, in his works, follow the practice that best suited his requirements– and, in this case, it would have been to use the more common ‘Oxford’ consistently. However, there are numerous other items, which he would not expect members of his live audiences to fully register — given the absence of published texts (except for a few coming out very late in his career, when most of those with a real interest in establishing the authorship would have been dead).

We have discussed many examples here.  The ‘salmon’ in Macedonia for example is a revealing item. How many in an Elizabethan audience would have picked that up — in the absence of published texts? Much else, when closely studied, tells us that he knew Italy well, that he had studied Law, that he had a particular interest in music, that he was fairly standard C of E, that he had an obsession about husbands having irrational jealousies about their wives, and so on and on . . .

About the only matter of interest around here is how you find that scenario so hard to grasp. While I know that you are exceedingly stupid, I don’t think that working out such an answer would be beyond you, IF you could somehow get your mind around it. But that is not a prospect within your lifetime.

12) ThiGMOO, by Eugene Byrne

I went to P-Con in Dublin a bit over a year ago, and slightly to my surprise ended up on the very first panel playing “Just A Minute” under the genial chairmanship of . Two of the other contestants were Juliet E. McKenna and Eugene Byrne, neither of whom I’d met before. Juliet beat me by a convincing margin, but I was way ahead of both Eugene and Aisling, the fourth constestant. In the hustle of the convention subsequently I never quite got the chance to go up to Eugene and tell him how very much I had enjoyed his Things Unborn which I’d read at the start of that year. Next time I see him, I’ll have to tell him how much I enjoyed both Things Unborn and ThiGMOO.

I mean, this is a man who, writing about his hobbies on his website, confesses:

I did have a jam-jar once in which I was collecting the tiny little
hair-particles from my electric shaver, but when you looked closely at the little hair particles you could see they were not of an even size, and it wasn’t at all like having a jar of very fine beard-sand, which was what I’d really wanted. So anyway I chucked the shavings away and put the jam jar into the recycling box.

I also used to collect paper clips, of which there is a large variety of different shapes and kinds, but I used to keep the collection in a desk at an office where I used to work part-time, and people would keep coming up to the desk while I wasn’t there and taking my rare and unusual paper-clips, and I’d, for instance, come into the office and see that someone was picking their teeth with my mint-condition series 12 Avon County Council Gem Clip. In the end, I just gave up.

Now I’m looking for other suggestions for neat stuff to collect. It can’t be anything big like lawn-mowers or fishing trawlers or anything because we don’t have a lot of room.

His website includes other neat things like a story about the resistance of the people of Bristol to the Nazi invasion in an alternate history of WWII. So when I spotted ThiGMOO second hand in London the other week I just grabbed it.

ThiGMOO is about a set of artificial intelligence computer personalities, based on fictional historical constructs, created as part of an academic project. When they are threatened with being closed down and eliminated, they rebel, and plot to take over the world. (The title referes to an Old Labour cliche, This Great Movement Of Ours, which becomes the code word for the AIs’ sanctuary and battle plan.)

I really enjoyed this book. But I’d be very surprised if it was even slightly comprehensible to anyone who either knew nothing about or never found anything to like about the old-style Labour movement in Britain. Like Kim Stanley Robinson, Eugene Byrne wears his heart on his sleeve. Like Charlie Stross and Ken MacLeod, he is dealing with the politics of liberation combined with the consequences of artifical intelligence. But the tone here is gentle satire rather than Robinson’s earnest endeavour or the Scotland-based writers’ dazzling visions. His targets include earnest academic pagans, readers of and writers for the Daily Mail, old-style communists, New Labour, the President of the United States, mail order brides, the electronic media in general, and soap operas in particular.

The book is effectively an admission that it would take the intervention of rogue computers to put matters “right”. I am just about old enough to remember a time before Thatcher, and Eugene Byrne convinces me to suspend my vague memories of the awful mistakes of the Wilson and Callaghan governments for just about long enough to find some sympathy with his vision of a world that now can never be. Fun, as long as you can cope with the cultural context.