Well, a veritable feast this evening, with not one but two subjects which I am fascinated by.

The woman who chose Buffy was very very good on the first round, and at half way was joint first on 15 points. She then let the side down badly, I felt, by insisting that the great thing about Buffy is that the show makes vampires look interesting. Silly old me, watching it for the humans. Despite this she made a creditable recovery and lost by only one point.

The bloke who chose Eleanor of Aquitaine got noticeably harder questions, I thought, but was also not very good at answering them. He got confused between William the Marshall and Hubert Walter, not a good sign, and was way behind in fourth place after the first round. He didn’t do too badly on general knowledge but it was too late.

(The winner was the guy who chose the Diggers. I’ve read The World Turned Upside Down so I knew a little about them but that was years ago.)

Dress Code:
-You are advised to come to work dressed according to your salary.
– If we see you wearing Prada shoes and carrying a Gucci bag, we will assume you are doing well financially and therefore do not need a raise.
– If you dress poorly, you need to learn to manage your money better, so that you may buy nicer clothes, and therefore you do not need a raise.
– If you dress just right, you are right where you need to be and therefore you do not need a raise.

Sick Days:
We will no longer accept a doctor’s statement as proof of sickness. If you are able to go to the doctor, you are able to come to work.

Personal Days:
Each employee will receive 104 personal days a year. They are called Saturdays & Sundays.

Bereavement Leave:
This is no excuse for missing work. There is nothing you can do for dead friends, relatives or co-workers. Every effort should be made to have non-employees attend the funeral arrangements. In rare cases where employee involvement is necessary, the funeral should be scheduled in the late afternoon. We will be glad to allow you to work through your lunch hour and subsequently leave one hour early.

Bathroom Breaks:
Entirely too much time is being spent in the toilet. There is now a strict three-minute time limit in the stalls. At the end of three minutes, an alarm will sound, the toilet paper roll will retract, the stall door will open, and a picture will be taken. After your second offense, your picture will be posted on the company bulletin board under the “Chronic Offenders” category. Anyone caught smiling in the picture will be sectioned under the company’s mental health policy.

Lunch Break:
– Skinny people get 30 minutes for lunch, as they need to eat more, so that they can look healthy.
– Normal size people get 15 minutes for lunch to get a balanced meal to maintain their average figure.
– Chubby people get 5 minutes for lunch, because that’s all the time needed to drink a Slim-Fast.

Thank you for your loyalty to our company. We are here to provide a positive employment experience. Therefore, all questions, comments, concerns, criticisms, complaints, frustrations, irritations, aggravations, insinuations, allegations, accusations, contemplations, consternations and input should be directed towards someone who cares.

The Management

4) Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, by Amanda Foreman

I’m not in principle a big fan of the 18th century, but I read McCullough’s John Adams just over a year ago and have spent today in bed with the Duchess of Devonshire, as it were. They were contemporaries (she was born just over twenty years after him, and he died just over twenty years after her) but neither book actually mentions the other’s subject, though they must surely have met when Adams was in London in the 1780s, given her interest in America.

The fact that Foreman’s book is two hundred pages shorter than McCullough’s has nothing to do with its subject’s shorter lifespan. Their public careers were in fact close to contemporaneous. Adams, aged forty, was thrust into prominence by the Constitutional Convention in 1776; Georgiana, aged only 23, had become a national figure by 1780. Adams’ career ended with his presidency in 1801, though he lived another quarter century; Georgiana succeeded in putting together the Ministry of All the Talents, which took office in February 1806, just a few weeks before she died.

Foreman’s is much the better book. I confess that I had very little idea who Georgiana was before I picked it up from the lower recesses of my “to read” pile. As I said above, I don’t especially care for the 18th century. But Foreman made me care much more about the politics of the time, the factionalism between Fox, Pitt, Burke, Addington, Grenville, and the rest, far more than McCullough’s rather blasé treatment of the Federalist/Republican split.

It must also be said that Georgiana had much the more interesting love life of the two. There is not even the faintest whiff of suspicion about Adams’ fidelity to his wife Abigail. Georgiana had three children by her own husband and a fourth by one of her lovers, and Foreman concludes, having tantalisingly raised the question, that we will never know quite how physical her passionate friendships with other women were.

But an interesting subject doesn’t guarantee a good biography. Foreman has done the legwork, seeking out primary sources and secondary sources, not ashamed to tell us when she feels she has got something especially new (as in her account of Georgiana’s construction of the new government in 1804-06), and stringing it all together to form a coherent and compassionate account of a complicated life. And she makes a convincing call, based on her research, for women’s history not to be segregated from men’s history. Georgiana’s indirect influence was considerable. On one or two occasions she exercised direct influence, as in 1783 when (aged 26!) she persuaded the Prince of Wales not to push his luck with the government lest it fall. Her impact on election campaigning methodology in 1779 and 1784 seems to have been considerable, and largely her own idea. The tragedy was that her male political allies were so useless, shown most clearly by their screwing up in the Regency crisis in 1789.

Her experiences in Paris and Belgium during the revolutionary years would be material enough for a book on their own, but are just an interlude here. (She was on intimate terms with Marie Antoinette, and left Paris just before the Bastille was stormed.) In 1792 she was back in France again, to give birth to Charles Grey’s child, exiled from England by her husband in an episode which seems to have resulted in her taking up science rather than sex as a diversion. Georgiana’s own expertise in mineralogy and chemistry, we are told, was recognised by her male contemporaries, and she also sponsored the discovery of nitous oxide (actually this is one poiont where I would have liked a few more details).

She had her faults. Addiction to gambling, most obviously; a certain amount of wishful thinking as well, both in her personal life and in politics (her trust was often betrayed, by her husband’s lover Lady Elizabeth Foster, and on a wider political level by Fox and indirectly by Napoleon). But I find it possible to comprehend and forgive. In particular, she stuck her neck out in 1798 to insist that the minimum of force be used to oppose the Rising in Ireland that year, and did her best to get Catholic Emancipation (though that foundered on the rock of George III’s intransigence). I wish there were more biographies like this.

Slept really badly last night – I thought at the time due to having had too heavy a lunch yesterday. Still, made it into town in time for Very Important Meeting at 9. Then went to the office, but rapidly realised that I just wasn’t up to it and baled out before midday. Have spent most of the time since then in bed, and so will miss a work dinner this evening I had been rather looking forward to.

Thinking about it I have been feeling a bit under the weather for the last week, and slept very badly last Thursday night as well, so perhaps it’s some minor bug that has chosen today to come to a head and not just the grilled bacon and sausage at the Irish pub near work. I do hope so – I have a busy day scheduled for tomorrow. (And I like the food at the Irish pub as well so would hate to think it was the problem.)

On the plus side, I did a good deed on Monday – driving to lunch at the European Commission, I saw a cyclist drop her handbag right in front of me. She zoomed blithely on; I stopped the car, picked it up, tried to catch up with her (but was stymied by one-way streets), found her Commission ID card and handed it in to the guards at the front desk. On my way out of the building to my lunchdate I bumped into her again at the next corner. She was very relieved, and very nicely sent me a bottle of Spanish wine and Belgian chocolates as a thank you, which arrived at the office this morning.

Though in my current state it will be a day or two before I enjoy them.

3) The Jennifer Morgue, by

I got this book from the author himself; he very kindly beamed a copy from his PDA to mine across the table at an Indian restaurant in Dublin last month. Just as well, as it won’t be out in hardback until the end of this year and the paperback comes out next February. (At work we have an average turnaround between final text and publication of perhaps 48 hours, with little amendments still possible up to the last minute; the longest I’ve had to wait was for the paper we decided to launch in three languages simultaneously, so had to wait two weeks for the translation; I am aware that for commercial publishers conditions are rather different.) I had actually had a look at some of the earlier chapters in draft, and am gratified to see some of my suggested tweaks were accepted. (And indeed acknowledged in the introduction.)

It’s a sequel to The Atrocity Archives, and thus to the Hugo-winning novella “The Concrete Jungle”; Bob Howard works for the little-known British government agency combining cutting-edge information technology with combat against the forces of darkness of the type first described by H.P. Lovecraft. As usual, Charlie writes breath-takingly fast and smart prose, in a story that takes the standard James Bond plot and warps it through disturbing dimensions. The settings, memorably evoked, include the Caribbean island of St Martin, shared between France and the Netherlands, in and around which most of the action takes place; I hadn’t previously heard of it but it turns out to be quite real.

There are a few mind-numbing in-jokes – the villain’s head of security is named after a well-known figure in British sf fandom, and Bob’s middle initials are a neat subtle touch. The reader who doesn’t get these will I think be entertained anyway, and there may well be others I didn’t spot.

Added to the end of the book is a brief meditation by on “The Golden Age of Spying”, mostly entirely factual but including an amusing little interview with Blofeld set in Transdniestria. That doubles the number of sf stories I have read referencing that peculiar place (the other being Walter Jon Williams’ “The Green Leopard Plague”).

A plausible character, I thought. But obviously not plausible enough. Always more than a little alarming when this happens to people one has actually met.

I am not a huge architecture fan. But I am of course interested in the ways in which international politics is institutionalised, reified even, and on my way home from work the other day I was pondering on the architecture of the various public buildings I visit. So, I thought, why not make an LJ entry on my impressions of those foreign ministries I have been to twice or more, listed in order of population of country below.

USA: The Harry S Truman Building, so renamed in 2000, built in 1947-1961 (see me standing outside it here). A rather soulless office environment, though full of bustle and with a strong sense of internal hierarchy. Most memorable for the entrance hall with flags of all the states with which the USA has diplomatic relations – see picture here – which is just as well as you tend to spend a long time in the entrance hall clearing security. From 1875 to 1947 the State Department was in the Old Executive Office Building, which I find much more atmospheric, although also a bit more dilapidated (now home to among others the National Security Council, which is why I go there).

Germany: The Auswärtiges Amt at the Werderscher Markt in Berlin. Perhaps the most architecturally interesting of the foreign ministries (with compretition from the Irish). Certainly the most historically interesting (in German here). Originally built as the Reichsbank between 1934 and 1940. Badly damaged in the war (its president condemned to life imprisonment at Nuremberg for complicity in war crimes and genocide). Became the seat of the East German Conmmunist Central Committee from 1959. Was then the meeting place of the short-lived multi-party Volkskammer of the DDR, and thus the place where reunification was ratified by the former East Germany. Foreign Ministry since 1996. The old 1930’s core building is now fronted by a beautiful 1990’s entrance with water features, but the most memorable feature must surely be original, the paternoster lift which takes you between floors – somewhat nerve-racking when you first encounter it.

UK: The building on King Charles Street between Whitehall and St James’s Park was built between 1861 and 1868, the Foreign Office as such having been created in 1782. George Gilbert Scott famously wanted to build Gothic, but Lord Palmerston, then Prime Minister, insisted it be Classical and so it was (if you want to consider what might have been, Scott also designed and built the Albert Memorial and St Pancras Station about the same time, and was given more of a free hand). Originally the building housed the India Office, the Foreign Office, the Colonial Office and the Home Office, but the Foreign Office absorbed two of the others and kicked the third out. The aerial photo demonstrates how difficult it is to get a feel for the exterior of the building in the cramped architectural environment of Whitehall; the Foreign Office have however put on a nice on-line tour of the interior. Feels inside like what it is, a building that has been used as office space for 150 years, with the inevitable cycles of decay and regeneration.

France: The Quai d’Orsay is the oldest purpose-built foreign ministry building on my list, built between 1845 and 1853. The picture here shows the gardens at the back and the formal entrance, and if you took the on-line tour you could get the impression that the whole building is like that; however, I usually get the unprepossessing business entrance on the quayside, and then find my interlocutors in windowless rooms off peculiar landings of staircases that would once have been much grander. The Foreign Office in London must have been like this not so very long ago, and I hope the French make some effort to improve the working environment since the function rooms are so very impressive.

Italy: The Farnesina Palace (not to be confused with the sixteenth century Farnesina Villa downtown). Unlike their German counterparts, the official ministry website is a bit coy about what exactly the building was doing in the first quarter century of its life, before the Ministry moved there in 1959; it is, however, impossible to describe the architecture accurately, however coy you may be about it, without using the word “fascist” somewhere. It has to be said that it is a well-designed office building – reputedly the biggest or second biggest office building in Italy – along three principal corridors with different departments clearly labelled, and gives off a certain hum of professionalism. The worst thing about it is that it is so far to the north of the city centre.

Austria: The Bundesamtsgebäude, between the Ballhausplatz and the Minoritenplatz, house the Chancellery, the Interior Ministry and the Foreign Ministry, and were built between 1983 and 1987.

Netherlands

Belgium

Ireland

here. This review-in-advance of tonight’s RTE documentary celebrates “the singular vision of The Third Policeman, with its amoral murderer lost in a hellish world where garda sergeants are more bike than man, thanks to molecular exchange. It is as bleak and morbidly funny as anything by Beckett, only more recognisably Irish: hell looks alarmingly like the midlands, and all the blacker for that.”

Hat-tip to Bookslut, who reviews The Third Policeman here.

Those of you who are able to watch the documentary, please let me know what it is like!

Signed on to MSN Messenger as nicholas.whyte@gmail.com – and will now switch to GAIM as recommends.

At Strange Horizons, here.

2) A Man On The Moon, by Andrew Chaikin

On recommendation from and , I picked this up at the children’s bookshop in Tervuren last weekend (but in the grown-up section). And it is a good read. It concentrates almost exclusively on the crews of the nine space missions that actually went as far as the moon – the six landings, the two preparatory flights, and Apollo 13, the flight that failed. (Hey, I now remember reading Henry S.F. Cooper’s 1973 book, The Flight that Failed, back when I was bout 11.) This means a certain narrowness of focus – although one does also get a sense (more than from the Neil Armstrong book) of the massive numbers of people involved with the Apollo project at every stage.

It’s a good narrative but without much depth. I was initially puzzled by some curious repetitions of familiar material about a third of the way in, and a little later a sudden shift of concentration to the (extensive) scientific work of the latter three moon landings, but oddly enough Library Thing gave me the crucial clue – the reason it reads a bit like three different books stuck together is precisely that it is three different books stuck together, the originals having been the story to Apollo 10, Apollos 11 to 14, and Apollos 15, 16 and 17.

The last section of the book, with its strong emphasis on the science of the Moon landings, is perhaps surprisingly the most interesting, outdoing the drama of the first landing of Apollo 11 and the crisis of Apollo 13. The politics of getting a serious scientific component into the lunar programme in the first place, and then the psychology of persuading the astronauts to take it seriously, are a rather fascinating story, with ups and downs – a down in particular for the non-scientist astronaut who was bumped off the very last lunar mission for his geologist colleague. “He told a reporter that the toughest thing he could remember doing in a long time was explaining to his kids that he wasn’t going to the moon.”

The politics of astronaut selection for the various missions also makes interesting reading, particularly in contrast with First Man. Chaikin, writing ten years earlier than Hansen, seems to buy Armstrong’s own instistence that there were no special reasons why he was chosen as the commander of the first lunar landing; it was just his turn on the roster. This is belied by other evidence even in Chaikin’s book, in that the spot had in fact been offered to another astronaut. This makes Armstrong’s role a conscious choice rather than a default option; and when one considers the stronger ego of Pete Conrad, the next astronaut in line, one can see why the decision was made to stick with Armstrong. Incidentally, of the three moon landings before they got serious with the science, Armstrong appears to have done much the best job of gathering and recording moon rocks.

So yeah, a decent enough account, but I will be looking out for more.

, I guess you’ve seen this?

Certainly we alway have the subtitles on when we can, because of background noise from children.

(Hat-tip .)

Posters are up all over the village advertising an open air religious ceremony and candle-lit procession to take place on 1 May at the local cultic centre. The distant past is sometimes surprisingly close in this country. Can anyone tell me the Flemish for “Beltane”?

PS – this is my new icon for Belgian-related posts, though I know less appropriate in this case than in some others!

From and :

Seems to mean entirely “how many people’s friends lists are you on”, which is not quite the same thing as “popularity”. Those listed as being ahead of me are , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , and .

Edited to add: All explained here.

The in-laws got this for free from the Guardian or somehing, and brought it over. Gosh, it isn’t anything like as bad as I had been told. Generally beautiful to look at, with occasional dodgy effects to remind you that in 1984 sf films looked like Doctor Who rather than vice versa. Sting’s acting, which I had heard was atrocious, is certainly no worse than anyone else’s, including Kyle MacLachlan. Lynch did manage the tricky feat of combining long periods when the pace seems very slow with cutting out large amounts of the plot, which leaves the end result a bit confusing (which of course he took to greater lengths in Twin Peaks), but all the basic elements are still there. Diehard Herbert fans (and they are among the most hardline groups I have encountered in fandom) were no doubt annoyed by the liberties taken with the ending, but since that was one of the aspects of the book that least overwhelmed me I can live with it.

I’m not saying that it is actually a good film, mind. Just that its virtues, few though they be, have not been sufficiently credited, at least not to me.

1) Mappa Mundi, by Justina Robson.

Read for review elsewhere. (Will send review to in the morning.)

As told here. (Hat-tip to .)

Here. (Hat-tip to .) Includes “Common People” and “Wish You Were Here”.

If this link works, it will show you how to find the English-language children’s bookshop, Treasure Trove, at Moorselstraat 294a in Moorsel (near Tervuren). Great place, though I suspect difficult to reach without a car.

Here.