As resolved, I have just finished writing a piece on Kelly Link’s ‘The Faery Handbag‘. Not my best one in the series, but good to get back into the swing of it.

Saw this report during the week, and was amused to note that I have worked for two of the top ten (non-US) think tanks identified in the survey:

Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS), Belgium
French Institute of International Relations (IFRI), France
German Institute for International Politics and Security (SWP), Germany
Institute of World Economy and International Relations (IMEMO), Russia
International Crisis Group (ICG), Belgium
International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), United Kingdom
Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies (now merged into the Institute for National Security Studies), Israel
Japan Institute of International Affairs (JIIA), Japan
Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House), United Kingdom
Shanghai Institute for International Studies (SIIS), China

I’ve had dealings with all six of the western European ones but none of the other four, which I guess reflects the places that find my areas of expertise of interest.

If you’re interested in the top thirty American think tanks, they are:

I think I’ve had dealings with about half of them.

I met someone yesterday whose business card had her name and phone number embossed on it in Braille. Apart from my own general fascination with alphabets, my grandmother used to do some work with Braille, though I was never quite clear what – her eyesight was better than mine is. I spotted immediately that the Braille spelling on this person’s business card was wrong – her surname has six letters, but the Braille version had only five and was missing the one Braille letter I can actually recognise. (‘a’)

She works for an organisation involved with equality issues, though herself is not on the disability dossier, which explains both why they made the effort and why nobody had yet spotted the mistake. But I wonder how many people, in general, have their names in Braille on their business cards (and indeed how many of them have got it right), and I also wonder if this is actually much use for people with visual disabilities, who possibly on the whole aren’t in the same habit as I am of collecting small bits of card with very small writing on them.

posts about a bad experience with an Amazon vendor who had a 95% reliability rating and says she will never again buy from anyone with less than a 98% rating. I suspect she is in the right ballpark for what the safe cutoff should be. I also placed a fairly large order with an Amazon vendor with a 95% rating before Christmas, and not only did it never arrive but there was no response to my polite email enquiries asking if the order had ever been dispatched. Needless to say I’ve applied for a full refund from Amazon, and expect to get it. Looking through the Amazon feedback pages for Wessex Books Ltd / The Book Cupboard of Bristol, I find that their failure to reply to emails about disappearing orders is a recurrent theme (and in one or two cases the shop has actually posted grumpy responses to complaints from thwarted buyers, which would be amusing if they weren’t so unprofessional).

So I reckon ‘s cutoff point of 98% rather than 95% is about right. If they can’t deliver a satisfactory service forty-nine times out of fifty, just don’t risk your money with them.

Any fans of Iain Banks in or within reach of Brussels may like to know that he is speaking at Scotland House, Rond Point Schuman 6 (top floor) on Tuesday 29 January at 13h. Tickets are free but must be reserved in advance from brusselsevents AT scotland.gsi.gov.uk – thanks to for the heads-up.

As luck would have it, that is the same building as my office, so I will certainly be there!

(And I suppose in a way this continues the theme of Scotch whisky from my post yesterday…)

How do you pronounce “Chivas Regal”?

One hundred years.

…you start writing a post to send a message to someone and then realise that they are actually staying in your house so you can just tell them directly…

…and then you wake up, because it was all a dream…

…so you start writing a post about the dream, but your keyboard starts to behave really oddly…

…and then you wake up, because that one was a dream too!

dissects the meme.

dissects the candidates. (Hat-tip to )

84% Dennis Kucinich
81% Mike Gravel
80% Chris Dodd
78% Barack Obama
77% Joe Biden
74% John Edwards
73% Hillary Clinton
73% Bill Richardson
39% Rudy Giuliani
35% John McCain
32% Ron Paul
25% Mike Huckabee
25% Mitt Romney
15% Fred Thompson
14% Tom Tancredo

2008 Presidential Candidate Matching Quiz

Not a huge surprise; though I’m actually furthest from Kucinich on his foreign policy positions, where he is (as far as I can tell) pretty isolationist.

Myself, I’ve been very much influenced by the Washington Post piece in October about who is advising the front-runners on foreign policy. Clinton and McCain have easily the most heavyweight lists of experts, but Obama’s list includes my former colleague Rob Malley and several others with whom I feel instinctively in sympathy – Samantha Power, Dick Clarke, Ivo Daalder. (The Edwards team seems surprisingly mil rather than pol in balance; perhaps they have been updated since?) It is of course wrong to assume that because X is advised by Y that X will share Y’s views; but if Y is someone whose judgement I respect, and has chosen to support X, that counts for something too.

Had three more successful recipes over the last couple of days, one New Internationalist, one Georgian, and one even from Good Housekeeping, which I shall record here.

I was dissatisfied with the Kenyan lamb stew recipe I tried last weekend from the same book, so this Colombian beef stew was in the nature of giving it a last chance. However, it worked pretty well, and served six just like the recipe said.

Colombian beef stew
Ingredients
1.5 kg stewing beef
50g dried apricots
50g raisins or sultanas
50g dried prunes
50g dried apples of pears
3 tablespoons oil
2 onions, finely chopped
4 cloves garlic, crushed
2 carrots, sliced
bunch of coriander (original recipe says a teaspoon of ground coriander but might as well use the real thing)
300 ml dry red wine
salt and pepper

Recipe:
1) Soak the fruit for an hour in water; drain it and keep the liquid
2) Saute the onions and garlic in a heavy pan for 2-3 mins. Then add the beef and carrots and cook for a few more minutes, turning the meat often. Then add the salt, pepper and coriander.
3) Now pour in the wine and the liquid from the dried fruit, and bring to the boil. Reduce the heat, cover the pan and let simmer for at least two hours.
4) Put in the fruit, cutting into smaller pieces if you like. Simmer again for another 30 minutes. Add more wine if the sauce is too thick, and serve.

It worked well – the heavy beef flavour deepened by the sweet fruit. We had it with potatoes, broccoli and the following surprisingly good recipe from the Good Housekeeping book, using up some odds and ends that had accumulated:

Braised celery with walnuts

Ingredients
a large head of celery
50g butter
1 onion, chopped
150ml chicken stock
50g walnuts
parsley

1) Chop the celery into 2.5 cm lengths.
2) Melt the butter, cook the onion and celery in it for 5-10 minutes, until soft but not coloured. Add the stock, cover and simmer gently for 20 minutes ntil the liquid is absorbed.
3) Stir in the walnuts and heat through. Turn into a warmed serving dish and sprinkle with parsley to serve.

I was doubtful about the mixed texture of crunchy walnut and floppy cooked celery, but there is not enough nut to really create a problem. This didn’t go far among six, and I would use greater quantities if cooking for more then four next time.

ხის სოკო: Khis soko, Georgian wild mushrooms

We had this the previous evening, as a side dish, and I was really pleased with it: for the first time, a Georgian dish that I cooked looked just like it did when I have had it in Georgia – I’ve had near misses, especially with khinkali, but this was perfect.

Ingredients:
500g flavourful mushrooms – the Georgian ხის სოკო means “wild mushrooms”.
3 eggs
2 tablespoons chopped fresh coriander
1 tablespoon chopped fresh mint
2 tablespoons chopped chives (though I used a shallot)
salt
pepper
50g butter

1) Chop the mushrooms very fine.
2) beat the eggs and combine with the herbs, salt and pepper.
3) melt the butter and cook the mushrooms quickly over a high heat. Do not let them give off liquid.
4) Add the egg mixture and stir until the eggs are just cooked through.
5) serve immediately.

Yum!

2) Doctor Who – Fury from the Deep, by Victor Pemberton

Ian alerted me to this novelisation (published in 1986, of a 1968 story) as being possibly one of the better ones of the later Target run, and I got it off eBay pretty easily. I admit I (and even more so my wife) had found the original story a bit lackingdoes make more sense than the original story and fills in some of the plot gaps and backgrounds to the characters, and Victoria’s decision to depart is decently foreshadowed. And the monster, as so often, is more convincing on the printed page. So I don’t regret buying it.
——————

…although none of these five really deserves to be called a “classic” in its own right, and one of them is quite possibly the worst of the show’s original run.

Planet of Evil, which followed straight on from Terror of the Zygons in 1975, is not bad, though not quite great. Frederick Jaeger as tortured scientist Sorenson is great, even if it’s a scenario that we’ve seen before. There are hints that Morestra is a real planet with a real political culture – how else could the commander, so out of his depth, have been put in charge? The Sarah/Doctor relationship is good too, and we have hints of the Doctor’s concept of his own role in the universe. This is in principle a similar story to a couple of Pertwee ones, Colony In Space and The Mutants, but ends up being nothing like as awful. But somehow it doesn’t quite come together to be memorable; if you’ve see the video collection “The Baker Years”, where Tom Baker reminisces about his time on the programme, this is the one story he can’t even remember making, and I can see why.

The Invasion of Time, which was the 1978 end-of-season six-parter, is nothing like as bad as some people say. The Doctor’s apparent treachery to both Leela and his own people is very puzzling and watchable, and the scene when he explains to Borusa what is really going on is great; the cliff-hanger at the end of episode 4 is one of the best in the show’s history; not one of Leela’s great stories, especially given the unconvincing romantic departure, but Louise Jameson is as always very watchable; the concept of the Tardis having a vast hinterland of rooms to explore jars with some fans but not with me (in New Who, I wonder what lies beyond the console room of the redesigned ship). K9 also gets a reasonable amount to do, though the noise from his motor is painfully loud. The Vardans are a bit disappointing, but hey, who cares if one of them seems to have a Scottish accent – don’t lots of planets have a Scotland?

The Horns of Nimon was a story I missed first time round, as we were abroad for the Christmas season of 1979-80, and I realised it was the first story I’d seen with David Brierley doing the voice of K9 – rather jarring for those of us who are used to John Leeson’s chirpy tones. Again, this story has its detractors; I felt it was not awful, though again not really very good – the Anethans are so wet it is difficult to see why we should get excited about their survival; the Nimon costumes are pretty poor; the whole reading across from the Theseus myth feels contrived in a way that, say, Androids of Tara/Prisoner of Zenda and Brain of Morbius/Frankenstein don’t. But Graham Crowden as Soldeed is superb, and the Doctor/Romana relationship is not quite as obviously romantic as in City of Death but still very watchable.

I did catch Black Orchid first time round in 1992, and it was and is a rather charming story, the Doctor and friends relaxing in a 1920s country household and uncovering the family secret. Davison, playing cricket, and the two girls, partying and in Sutton’s case playing two roles, are great; Waterhouse as Adric won’t dance but will eat. I am left a bit uncomfortable, however, with the idea that you should hide your disabled relatives upstairs and then let then fall to their death off the roof.

From time to time as I’ve been watching old Who – say with The Sensorites, The Dominators, The Mutants, The Ultimate Foe or Battlefield – the thought has occasionally crossed my mind, “This story is bad; but is it as bad as The Twin Dilemma?” Memory fades, and sometimes fades mercifully; I remember thinking the The Twin Dilemma was bad on first broadcast in 1984, and rewatching it totally confirms that view. Every time I began to think that perhaps it wasn’t as bad as one of the other low points of Classic Who, it suddenly got worse again. Where to start? The extraordinary alienating and inconsistent characterisation of the Doctor; the utterly lousy acting of the titular twins; the appalling costumes of the gastropods; the basic incoherence of the plot (to pick two aspects of this, the implausible and poorly developed Doctor/Azmael relationship, and the bizarre decision by the Doctor and Peri to leave Lang alone and armed inside the Tardis); oh, it’s just awful. It’s amazing that the show lasted another five years after this.

So, in summary, Black Orchid and The Invasion of Time are surprisingly watchable despite their flaws; Planet of Evil not quite as convincing; The Horns of Nimon decidedly less so; and The Twin Dilemma should be skipped. It is firmly at the bottom of the Dynamic Rankings site and likely to stay there.

Cheering myself up on a wet Saturday afternoon (thanks to ).

Am-I-Dumb.com – Dumb Test

Free-IQTest.net – MENSA Test

Impossible-Quiz.com – Impossible Test

No way I’d join Mensa though.

Holiday time is often a time for me to relax by cooking, and I’ve tried a bunch of new recipes over the last couple of weeks. The most successful of these was the product of last-minute googling: I had bought a lump of pork labelled “spiering/spiringue” and was trying to work out what the heck it was – turns out that in most parts of America it is known as “Boston butt end”, though this side of the Atlantic I think you can just refer to it as the pig’s neck – and came up with this recipe, fortunately more than six hours before dinner time:

Ingredients:

1 lump of spiering/spiringue/Boston butt/pork neck
a small amount of Worcester sauce (in fact I used soy sauce, which I think was OK)
light brown sugar
apple juice
salt

Instructions:

Preheat the oven to 200°C. Place the pork in a casserole that is just large enough to hold it and has a lid. Sprinkle the roast on all sides with Worcester soy sauce. Then press brown sugar coating on all sides of the pork. Pour the apple juice down the side of the casserole to the bottom, being sure not to drizzle it on the crusted meat. Cover tightly.

Place the roast in the oven and immediately turn the heat down to 95°C. Roast without opening the oven door for about 5 hours, until the meat is so tender that it pulls apart easily. If the meat does not pull apart easily, cover, and return to the oven and roast 30 minutes more. Check again, roast 30 minutes more as needed.

Pull the meat apart and remove the bone (actually my chunk was already filleted). Stir the salt into the juices at the bottom of the pan. Serve meat in its delicious juice hot or at room temperature.

This was really yummy, the meat ended up juicy and tender and very very tasty. I really hadn’t tried slow cooking before, and must now add it to my repertoire.

I had a couple of other experiments too. One from my sturdy Good Housekeeping book, labelled French roast chicken, not particularly exciting in terms of technique but very tasty, was simply to roast a chicken stuffed with fresh parsley, tarragon and butter, with bacon strips over the breast, rather than my more usual practice of onion and sage.

Another, less successful in my view though consumer reports were favourable, was a lamb stew recipe from Kenya from the New Internationalist food book. Stew is tricky anyway, as Diana Wynne Jones has noted. The recipe called for stewing a single large (2-kilo) chunk of lamb shoulder in a spicy onion base; I did it with two smaller chunks, which may have been part of the problem, and the flavour seemed to mainly remain at the bottom of the pan. The potatoes never actually merged with the rest of it and I ended up extracting them and serving them separately, which no doubt did not help the consistency of the stew either. So I am left a little suspicious of the recipes in the book, though I will try a couple more.

And for Christmas dinner we had the now-traditional boar, which seemed to taste particularly good this year – perhaps because I allowed it to marinade for three whole days. As with the slow-cooked pork, patience is rewarded.

A big day for birthdays – many happy returns to , , , , and !

1) Macedonia, by Harvey Pekar and Heather Roberson, illustrated by Ed Piskor

Long-term readers will know of my obsession with Macedonia. This is the story of peace activist Heather Roberson, who went there in the summer of 2003 to find out how the 2001 conflict had been prevented from escalating into another full-scale Balkan war, and acquired an obsession to match mine. She and Pekar portray well her fascination with this paradoxical, contradictory country, exploring Skopje and Tetovo with excursions to Belgrade and Pristina, and I found much to agree with – the curious mixture of paranoia and pessimism which otherwise enlightened individuals sometimes display; the Hotel Ambasador and the Irish Pub in Skopje, the Hotel Moskva in Belgrade, the attitudes of the international officials involved with the local process. Indeed, one or two of the internationals depicted are people I know – mostly identifiable because of the positions they hold, though they are not named and their physical appearance in the book is quite different in real life. One particularly impressive character, who oddly enough has just renewed contact with me via Facebook and LinkedIn, is given a completely different profession in the book to real life but is none the less clearly recognisable to anyone who has met him.

I’m not sure how interesting the book would be to people who don’t share the same level of fascination with the country as me and Roberson. It’s very text-heavy in places, with an awful lot of background information needed to set her experiences in context (though it seemed to me mostly accurate, with only one or two points where my eyebrows rose in disagreement). Her basic paradigm, that conflicts can be resolved through application of the rule of law, is quite a complex area to explore through the medium of the graphic novel and it’s not quite clear what her conclusion actually is, once she has seen her idealistic propositions tested in practice. Also, I’m not sure that she and Pekar quite manage to communicate the sheer charm of the country and its people of all ethnicities; I think the casual reader may end up being rather surprised or sceptical that she likes the country as much as she says she does. And there were a number of annoying errors in the Macedonia/Serbian phrases and street signs shown.

It may not be up to the standards of Safe Area Goražde, but it is nonetheless a fine effort, and certainly would be good reading for anyone thinking of getting involved in Balkan politics these days.

I resolved yesterday to make my new year’s resolutions today (other than reading resolutions). I’ve spent a bit of time this morning with the goal-setting Facebook app, which has been some help, though I’m keeping most of those goals, personal and professional, to myself.

A few areas I do feel comfortable noting here, though: a) cranking up my Russian course, bought in 2002 but allowed to slip rather – it should be ideal listening for one leg of the commute; and b) reviving a couple of my writing projects, in particular i) reviews of joint Hugo and Nebula winners, currently stuck at Hell is the Absence of GodBible. Both of those will be tracked here.

1) Odd Man Out (1947)

I’d been wanting to see this since reading about it in Ciaran Carson’s The Star Factory, for purely personal interest reasons – the setting in Belfast, the connection with Doctor Who – but it really is a brilliant film in its own right. Even though you pretty much know what is going to happen right from the very beginning – terrorist bank raid goes wrong, the wounded leader staggers around the city pursued by friend and foe alike – the tension is maintained throughout. James Mason is superb as the central character, suffering angst and flashbacks, inspiring loyalty and love; and the whole thing is beautifully directed with great background music.

The approach to Belfast is … peculiar. The film starts with a fantastic establishment shot from the air, coming in over the Lagan and zooming in on the Albert Clock and High Street (also the setting of the climax); but at one point we see the police inspecting a map of a completely fictional unnamed city on the edge of the fictional Fernagh Lough. However the trams in this city clearly go up the Falls Road! And while most of the adult actors seem to have southern Irish accents (basically because they were recruited from the Abbey Theatre in Dublin) the extras are definitely from Belfast – there’s a beautiful scene with a dozen kids who the BBC was trying to track down recently.

And there’s William Hartnell – only in two scenes, as Mr Fancy, the barman in charge of the “Four Winds” saloon (clearly based on The Crown, but equally clearly a studio set rather than the real thing), and sixteen years away from becoming Doctor Who: he none the less has a couple of very characteristic moments. His second scene has been Youtubed here and here: look at the way his eyes are moving about 1:25 into the first clip – we’ve certainly seen that before! – and listen his rant for the first half-minute of the second clip – very Doctor-ish until he uses the unnervingly colloquial word “quid”!

Anyway, a good start to the year’s viewing.

Was: B6 d- t- k+ s u– f+ i o+ x- e+ l c-
Now: B9 d- t- k+ s+ u– f i+ o x– e+ l+ c–

We had a very nice evening last night; F’s friend Bt and his mother and her partner came over and organised a raclette evening for us in our own kitchen, for which we were also joined by and his fiancée. At midnight we spilled out onto the street to watch the fireworks, the little boys jumping up and down with wild excitement, and our Francophone neighbours came over to share the excitement. So we had four languages being spoken as 2008 began, with Bt and his family chattering away in Dutch, the neighbours talking to us in French, and the future Mrs on the phone in Hungarian to her family in Slovakia. Great fun, but getting up this morning was a slow process!

Classic literature: Last year I resolved either to read In Search of Lost Time, or else finish Don Quixote and read Catcher in the Rye and The Tin Drum. I managed the latter two, got no further with Cervantes and am just over halfway through Proust. It should not therefore be impossible to finish both Proust and Cervantes this year, and then I think I should reread some of the classics – Middlemarch in particular would probably reward another look.

SF: Last year I resolved to read three out of A Princess of Mars, Tau Zero, Grey Lensman, Again, Dangerous Visions, The Female Man, Last and First Men, Deathbird, and Dhalgren – in fact I managed all but Grey Lensman (which I won’t read; I have given up on Smith) and Again, Dangerous Visions, which I should be able to get through if I have some long journeys during the year (which is not unlikely). I need a new list of classic SF, and the SFBC has supplied oneChildren of the Atom by Wilmar Shiras, I Am Legend by Richard Matheson, Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice, Little, Big by John Crowley, The Rediscovery of Man by Cordwainer Smith, On the Beach by Nevil Shute, Rogue Moon by Algis Budrys, Stormbringer by Michael Moorcock and The Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks. I should be able to read at least four of those nine in 2008.

Comics: I got a lot of good recommendations in this post, and will try to work through another five or so of them.

Backlogged Books: This time last year I had 143 books on my unread list, and hoped to get through a third of them. In fact I managed 75, more than half. Of course, there has been a steady process of replacement, and my unread list is almost at the same level again, with 138 on it (one listed twice!), listed below in the order that I logged them on LibraryThing; I should be able to read a third of them. As with the previous entry, you can tick the ones you have read if you like:

A lot of people on are doing this: basically, mark any of these books which you have ever read (not just in 2007).