It won’t have escaped notice that the weather has been a bit cold round here of late. Some (including one who works in the same building as me) think we should take it in our stride, and to an extent I agree that one should try and be slightly Zen about it. But sometimes this is not easy.

Thursday night was a bad night. I was rather enjoying myself at a Bosnian embassy reception when I bit awkwardly on a (really yummy) piece of Baklava and my tooth, re-filled only that morning, began hurting like the blazes. I made my excuses to the ambassadors (the one I was talking to at the time, and the one hosting the party) and hurried as fast as I could to the tram and the Gare du Midi / Zuidstation. Less than 40 minutes later I had reached Leuven station, only 7 km from home. But Leuven was snowbound; the rest of the journey took over two hours, as buses failed to show up and trains were cancelled; eventually I trudged to the warmth of the Novotel and called a cab from there, jaw still aching.

Since then it’s been OK here, but we were really alarmed to hear of the Channel Tunnel being closed – and 2000 passengers stuck inside it! – since we were due to head over to the in-laws’ tomorrow for a couple of days before Christmas. There is no reliable information available on the Eurostar / Eurotunnel site; but in the Twitter era, you cannot escape instant and public consumer feedback. It is clear that traffic is backed up for hours around Calais and Dover / Folkestone, and there are worrying reports of chaos at the loading ramps. There is no way we can take the risk of travelling with a severely autistic child (who will turn seven on Monday) and being stuck in traffic for hours, so we are not going tomorrow – particularly since the forecast is for more heavy snow precisely in western Belgium and the Pas-de Calais overnight – and quite likely will not go on Monday either. Alas, no pantomime for F, and no reunion with Anne’s cousins either. But sometimes you have to accept force majeure.

It’s been a grim couple of weeks on the dental front. As reported previously, I went to the dentist two weeks ago for her to look at my upper left second molar (the upper left first molar was capped last year). She gave me mouthwash and painkillers to kill off the gum infection, and then did the root canal on Monday, filling half the tooth (commenting on how twisty my nerves were). As I left, feeling slightly euphoric in my morphine-induced daze, she said that if things didn’t get better she would have to look at the premolar on the other side of the capped tooth. Had a terrible night with pain that evening and went back to her first thing Tuesday. She drilled out the roots of the premolar, and put in a temporary filling which she then replaced properly on Thursday. At that point she also gave me antibiotics as my jaw is inflamed from some horrible infection. I am therefore off booze until Wednesday, and it still bloody hurts. The dentist expressed the hope that the antibiotics would sort it out, but I could tell that she wasn’t convinced, and she muttered about how I might need some more thorough investigation of my jaws in the New Year. Ow.

It’s been a good few weeks for us Who fans who follow audio as well as TV. The last two parts of BBC audio The Hornet’s Nest, starring Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor, shipped at the start of the month; for Fifth Doctor fans, we have had the last two of the three Big Finish audios set in Stockbridge and co-starring Sarah Sutton as Nyssa, and also a Companion Chronicle told by Mark Strickson as Turlough; the Sixth and Eighth Doctors both went to Blackpool, and the Eighth Doctor also went back to a future Earth to see his granddaughter; and for good measure I’m throwing in the animated story “Dreamland” and the audiobook “Day of the Troll”, both featuring David Tennant in his closing days as the Tenth Doctor. To put you out of your agony of suspense, I will reveal now that I thought the best and worst of these were the two Eight Doctor stories; read on to discover which was which. I believe I have avoided significant spoilers – though this is not always true of the reviews I have linked to.

I’m afraid my feelings about the five episodes of The Hornets’ Nest became steadily less enthusiastic as the story went on. Part 4, A Sting In The Tale sees Tom Baker’s Fourth Doctor investigating funny goings-on in a medieval convent. The plot was OK (no more than that) but I found some of the descriptions rather disgusting, and not in a fun way. My lapsed medievalist hackles did not particularly rise, but perhaps I wasn’t listening hard enough. The final episode, Hive of Horrors, explains why the Doctor chose Mike Yates, of all previous companions, to join him on this adventure as they join forces with the sinister Mrs Wibbsey to deal with the hornets. There was lots of potentially good stuff here and maybe it will have worked for some people, but I was not one of them. Somehow Baker’s performance and Paul Magrs’ script ended up as less than the sum of their parts; Richard Franklin doesn’t bring much to it as Yates (but I am not his biggest fan anyway). I think Baker needs a full cast to perform with and to; The Hornets’ Nest too often reminded me of Doctor Who and the Pescatons, which similarly had him doing both Doctor and narrator and other voices when necessary, and was the weaker for it.

Of the three Fifth Doctor audios in this batch, the best is the first in internal chronology, The Eternal Summer, the second of a trilogy of Doctor / Nyssa plays set in Stockbridge, which was the setting for a number of the Fifth Doctor comic strips in Doctor Who Monthly (and also for the wonderful “Autumn” segment of the Circular Time audio play). I only dimly remember the strips, but like Peter Davison I will now see if I can buy them; Jonathan Morris’ script combines nostalgia for those half-remembered stories with a decent sfnal plot which, even if it has been done several times before by Big Finish, is done well here. Particularly good also is Mark Walliams as UFOlogist Maxwell Edison, who falls in love with someone who is a fellow fan of Terry Pratchett. (Obviously that could never happen in real life, he said, waiting for the reactions of various parts of my friends list.)

The concluding part of the trilogy, Plague of the Daleks by Mark Morris, doesn’t really rise to the same heights. There’s a mysterious village with Something Going On, but the clue is in the title of the story. As cruelly comments, it might have been a better story without the actual Daleks.

The latest Companion Chronicle, Ringpullworld (another by Paul Magrs), stars Mark Strickson as Turlough telling a tale of travelling with the Fifth Doctor and Tegan. There is a very nice narrative device, with Alex Lowe oplaying one of the novelizers of Verbatim Six, telling, narrating and even shaping Turlough’s story. I was less overwhelmed by the actual plot, and poor Tegan gets a rough deal from Magrs’ script and Strickson’s imitation. The extra track of interview with Strickson, who now makes nature documentaries in New Zealand, is interesting though.

I was not hugely impressed by The Nightmare Fair, by Graham Williams, when I read the novelisation back in the summer, and I was not hugely impressed by Big Finish’s audio production of this unbroadcast Sixth Doctor script. has analysed why this doesn’t work in greater detail, but basically, the plot doesn’t make a lot of sense, the Toymaker’s own problems are puzzling and his fate rather incomprehensible, and I just couldn’t really care what was going on.

I’m going to save An Earthly Child for a separate post because I can’t properly discuss my reasons for not liking it without spoilers. But Death in Blackpool is very good, and I hope the new series of Eighth Doctor plays keeps up the standard. Alan Barnes has written some of the best Big Finish audios, and he is on form here again: this is a sort-of sequel to The Zygon Who Fell To Earth, which was for my money the best of the second season of Eight / Lucie plays and which ended with the revelation that Lucie’s beloved Auntie Pat was actually a Zygon. Death in Blackpool picks up the story years later, with veteran Helen Lederer turning in a storming performance as Auntie Pat, and Sheridan Smith doing Lucie’s departure beautifully. For a Christmas-themed play it is surprisingly bleak – not one to play to friends and family to get them in a good mood – but very effective, and gets my vote ahead of Eternal Summer and Day of the Troll as the best of this lot.

I haven’t seen The Infinite Quest, the first animated Tenth Doctor story, so was intrigued by the concept of Dreamland, with Tennant as the Doctor and Georgia Moffett as his girl sidekick. I was a bit disappointed. The quality of animation is not very much advanced from the Hanna Barbera shows of forty years ago. Phil Ford’s story is a fairly basic aliens-in-Nevada one; I guess for kids who are excited or excitable by the whole Roswell mythos it is fun to see Who going there, but it didn’t really grab me. I was particularly sorry that Moffett, whose acting presence is rather gripping in both The Doctor’s Daughter and the early Big Finish play Red Dawn, seemed a bit subdued here.

Famous Scottish actor David Tennant reads Simon Messingham’s story The Day of the Troll. Messingham is a good writer, Tennant is a good reader, and the story pushes lots of buttons and does it well – creepy monster under the bridge (the troll of the title), evil plant intelligence, freezing future Britain (listening to this during this week’s snow was a bit uncomfortable), European government which has originated as a response to crisis, vulnerable kid who the Doctor has to try and save. All very good and recommended.

Posts since I last counted that got more than 20 comments – 42 in total, top 21 bolded, top 14 and top 7 in larger fonts.

25 Dec: The Next Doctor – 30 comments (that day’s Who)
27 Dec: Two things I have been wondering – 31 comments (bananas and bluestockings)
31 Dec: 2008 books poll – 21 comments (books I read in 2008)
31 Dec: Books I haven’t read – 49 comments (what I didn’t read in 2008)

02 Jan: In praise of… – 23 comments (the Channel Tunnel)
10 Jan: January Books 8) Starship Troopers, by Robert A. Heinlein – 53 comments (the usual Heinlein debate, mostly)
17 Jan: Actually, never mind what I think… – 38 comments (first of several polls on the Guardian 1001 books list)
18 Jan: Guardian books: Crime – 26 comments (more from the Guardian 1001)
19 Jan: Guardian Books: Comedy – 25 comments (and more)
28 Jan: Maternity leave – 38 comments (Which country other than Lesotho, Liberia, Swaziland, and Papua New Guinea does not have statutory paid maternity leave?)

06 Feb: My name is Nicholas. – 28 comments (My name is not “Nick”.)
08 Feb: Andrew Wakefield’s faked research kills children – 42 comments (I feel strongly about this. Did you guess?)

02 Mar: Identity – 23 comments (why I don’t blog anonymously but others should be able to)
05 Mar: March Books 2) Angels and Demons, by Dan Brown – 60 comments (this year’s winner!)
11 Mar: Which of these films have you seen? – 34 comments (the films Obama gave Brown)

05 Apr: Reclaiming þorn – 29 comments (an alphabet post)

08 May: STV – British Columbia and Ireland – 28 comments (electoral systems and why ministers should not be members of parliament)
10 May: Lightsecond – 21 comments (query about a detail in an sf story I was reading)
27 May: Silence in the Library / Forest of the Dead – 27 comments (rewatching Who from 2008)
28 May: Midnight – 20 comments (more 2008 Who)

01 Jun: Transatlantic linguistics – 35 comments (are pasties for nipples or for eating?)
10 Jun: Hellboy II: The Golden Army – “Let’s go to Antrim!” – 34 comments (most of the discussion being about correct pronunciation of Irish names)
11 Jun: The Dark Knight – “This town deserves a better class of criminal, and I’m gonna give it to them.” – 21 comments (discussion of whether it was any good or not)
15 Jun: Tuigim anois – 22 comments (origin of the verb “to twig”)
18 Jun: Monotheism – 48 comments (how to pronounce it?)

01 Jul:  Weirdo email – 36 comments
11 Jul: The Torchwood debate – 41 comments (the debate being, as so often, “was it any good?”)
21 Jul: July Books 27) Misspent Youth, by Peter F. Hamilton – 23 comments (answering my question as to whther I should bothe with any other Hamilton books, the majority answering in the negative)
23 Jul:  Etiquette, again – 20 comments

11 Aug: Fannish five – 25 comments (many questions, few of which I answered)
21 Aug: Poll prompted by reading Swift’s Directions to the Footman – 27 comments (how to spell “oxter”)

13 Sep: September Books 12) England’s Troubles, by Jonathan Scott – 21 comments (the seventeenth century)
23 Sep: CD&V – not getting my vote – 30 comments (banning the burqa, and fining cyclists without fluorescent strips)

09 Oct: Nobel Peace Prize – 35 comments (we were all surprised)
29 Oct: Films of 1959 – 23 comments (which have you seen?)

02 Nov: Sparked by a conversation last night – 20 comments (have you heard of Ian Paisley?)
07 Nov: Riddle me this – 25 comments (use of the words “blond”, “ovate” and “willowy”)
22 Nov: Sudan – 26 comments (pictures)

05 Dec:  Kröd Mändoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire, and other bad TV shows – 33 comments (which have you seen, or even heard of?)
06 Dec: Pronunciation poll – 20 comments (how do you say “asia”?)
16 Dec: Livejournal v Dreamwidth – 35 comments (the genderfail scare)
17 Dec: Not everyone uses our calendar but most have a word for December – 42 comments

So it’s polls, controversial science fiction, and real life evil scientists that generate the most comments here.

One interesting thing (well, interesting to me) is that as Facebook starts to devour the internet, my posts of LJ entries to there are starting to spark discussion as well – and it is a completely different set of posts which get the most attention. More than ten comments were made on the following (there may have been others, but it is very tedious to chase these things down on Facebook):

07 Jul: One thing from last night’s Torchwood… – 12 comments (Queen Victoria erroneously described as HRH)
10 Jul: And so, shortly after his resurrection… – 13 comments (Torchwood again)
28 Jul: eBay etiquette – 11 comments (a troublesome seller)
01 Sep: Ireland: same-sex marriage – 36 comments (discussion became heated)
10 Sep: Unpopular belief – 13 comments (why the House of Lords should not be replaced with an elected body)
02 Oct: Referendum Day – 10 comments (deleted when the discussion got seriously derailed, but was originally about the Irish Lisbon referendum)
04 Nov: Cometh the hour, cometh the man – 10 comments (Herman Van Rompuy)
09 Nov: The Fall of the Wall, twenty years on – 11 comments (Berlin)
19 Nov: Didn’t see that coming… – 13 comments (Catherine Ashton’s appointment as EU foreign policy representative)
20 Nov: One interesting thing about Catherine Ashton… – 10 comments (she has a Dalek in her living room)

Now, six of these are fairly hard politics posts, and I guess my facebook readership, being more reflective of my professional environment, is more likely to comment on those. But I find it peculiar that of the various posts I made about Torchwood: Children of Earth, two scored high on Facebook but a completely different one scored on Livejournal. I guess it is sometimes just a matter of the post catching the attention of potential commenters; a matter more of luck than judgement.

is 70 today!

Thanks to the 97 people who have so far answered yesterday’s scripts poll. The results are rather neatly bunched into four groups: 14 could be seen by at least 83 of the 97; there were a further 8 in the 47-62 range; there is a cluster of 3 which could be seen by 15-21 people; and one outlier which only I could see when logged in using Firefox.

95 Δεκέμβριος Greek (10-20 mn)
94 Декабрь Russian (100-200 mn)
92 ธันวาคม Thai (50-100 mn)
92 ديسمبر Arabic (200-500 mn)
92 דצמבר Hebrew (5-10 mn)
90 दिसंबर Hindi (200-500 mn)
89 டிசம்பர் Tamil (50-100 mn)
89 Դեկտեմբեր Armenian (5-10 mn)
88 ਦਸੰਬਰ Punjabi (50-100 mn)
88 ડિસેમ્બર Gujarati (50-100 mn)
85 クリスマス Japanese (100-200 mn)
84 聖誕節 Chinese (over 1 bn)
83 크리스마스 Korean (50-100 mn)
83 დეკემბერი Georgian (2-5 mn)

Taking it for granted that everyone could see the Latin alphabet clearly, this list includes the correct scripts for nine of the world’s ten languages with most speakers, and 23 of the top 25. I’ll address the missing languages when I get to them; the odd inclusions here are Greek and Hebrew (understandable for cultural reasons), Armenian and Georgian (which despite their small number of native speakers are geographically convenient to the massive information technology hub of Russia, and also relatively easy to code) and Thai, which quite probably says something abut the relative openness of Thailand compared to some of its neighbours.

62 ডিসেম্বর Bangla (100-200 mn)
61 డిసెంబర్ Telugu (50-100 mn)
61 ಡಿಸೆಂಬರ್ Kannada (20-50 mn)
61 ഡിസംബര്‍ Malayalam (20-50 mn)
60 ޑިސެމްބަރު Divehi (200,000-500,000)
58 ܟܢܘܢ ܐ Aramaic (2-5 mn)
54 ᑎᓯᒻᐳᕆ Inuit (20,000-50,000)
47 ᏓᏂᏍᏓᏲᎯᎲ Cherokee (20,000-50,000)

Actually these eight subdivide pretty clearly into three groups. Bangla, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam are South Asian scripts which somehow have not achieved the penetration that their number of speakers would have suggested. This is particularly striking for Bangla which unlike the other three is the sole official language of a sovereign state. Divehi (which is the official language of the Maldives) and Aramaic may not be obvious partners, but in fact both scripts are related to Arabic, so if you have coded for one you may as well code for the other. Inuit and Cherokee are the two least-spoken languages on the entire list, and I suspect that their alphabets may not be all that widely used even by native speakers (Latin transcription of both languages is fairly common), but like Georgian and Armenian they have the advantage of being relatively easy to code and on a convenient continent for coders.

21 ዲሴምበር Amharic (10-20 mn)
18 දෙසැම්බර් Sinhalese (10-20 mn)
15 បុណ្យណូអែល Khmer (5-10 mn)

The Ge’ez script is used for Tigrinya as well as Amharic, so may need to be bumped up a population category; notably it is the only indigenous African script in the list. All three of these score rather lower than one would expect for the official language of a sovereign state (two sovereign states if one counts Eritrea as well as Ethiopia).

1 ဒီဇင်ဘာ Burmese (10-20 mn)

Isn’t that shocking? Burmese script is not easy for us alphabet-users, but really is no more difficult than the other South Asian and South-East Asian scripts. I would be interested to know more about the politics and policies which have put Thai so far ahead and Burmese so far behind compared with their neighbours. You may remember that Cory Doctorow’s book Little Brother is to be translated into Burmese, Karen (which also uses Burmese script), Shin and Kachin; I think this survey rather illustrates why that is a good idea.

Stephen Cole is one of the most consistently good Doctor Who writers, and I was glad to pick up this Telos novella when last in London – a range that has not always impressed me, but this is one of the good ones. It is a little odd – the old man and the girl who travels with them only decide at the end of the story that they will adopt the identities of “the Doctor” and “Susan”, and the story combines the fairly standard base-under-siege-by-telepathic-horror story with a rather subtly done reflection on establishing and keeping identity. Worth looking out for.

Clarification / correction – when I ask “can you read” in the poll (which of course I cannot edit now) I meant “can you see the letters clearly”, not “can you read and comprehend”!!!

For those languages marked with asterisks, I couldn’t find or didn’t like the word for ‘December’ so used ‘Christmas’ instead.

Musing a bit more on yesterday’s kerfuffle, I think Livejournal come out of it rather well and Dreamwidth rather badly.

Livejournal’s senior manager responded to me with the words “this was a mistake” and assured me that the proposed change was not being implemented. Their Customer Care folks then followed up with an explicit statement that “We understand that gender is not binary, and intend to respect that understanding for our users.” That seems to me entirely satisfactory. Someone wrote something which did not suit the organisation for which they work, and it is therefore not being used. In the public policy environment where I work, that happens all the time, particularly if (as I suspect here) there are people of varying linguistic and cultural backgrounds involved. Indeed, what is unusual here is the level of transparency at the drafting stage – a rather courageous approach for which one sometimes (as in this case) pays a price.

The whole kerfuffle began with a post by one of Dreamwidth’s co-owners, a former Livejournal staffer, which inaccurately presented the coding change as a done deal, an irreversible decision. You will note also that in the comments on yesterday’s post, a Dreamwidth staffer accuses Livejournal of lying to me, without evidence; and also makes the shocking assertion that Livejournal has been listening to its users, as if this were in some way outrageous.

Dreamwidth have gained a number of extra customers from Livejournal out of all this, based on a report from their own leadership which turns out not to be true, with the flames of this controversy being further deliberately fanned by their own staff even after Livejournal had resolved it. It is very easy to whip up fears of oppression among people who experience it regularly. It is more difficult in such circumstances to admit that you were wrong. I don’t think this affair looks very good for a company which was supposed to represent a more ethical approach to the business of blogging.

I am also perturbed by comments I have seen here and there about this somehow being the fault of the Russians, including the fact that the senior Livejournal manager who responded to me and to many others does not write perfect English and has a foreign name (which looks Ukrainian rather than Russian to me, but what do I know). Really, folks, get a grip. You have no idea how privileged you are to be native speakers of the world’s main language of communication. In any case I seem to remember that the frequency of Livejournal screwups was much greater, and that they were handled far more ineptly, when it was owned by Americans. SUP are running a tighter ship; the President of Russia is one of their customers.

An occasional correspondent emails me to ask about this passage from the memoirs of H.H. Asquith, the British prime minister, of 24 July 1914 (which I have transcribed on my website:

Later we had a meeting at Downing Street – Redmond [the Irish Nationalist leader], Dillon [Redmond’s deputy], Ll[oyd] G[eorge], Birrell and I. I told them that I must go on with the Amending Bill, without the time limit: to which, after a good deal of demur, the Irishmen reluctantly agreed.’

I should explain that for some enthusiasts of Irish history, rerunning the partition of the island is a favourite pastime, and the most significant point of departure is the conference held at Buckingham Palace in July 1914, to try to get agreement on what parts of Ulster should be excluded from the jurisdiction of an autonomous Home Rule government in Ireland. Unionists wanted the permanent exclusion of all nine counties of Ulster; Nationalists were prepared to accept the temporary exclusion of the four counties with Protestant majorities. Asquith, as prime minister, rapidly settled on the six-county unit we have today as the obvious compromise, largely because the Unionists indicated that they too would settle for it. But the passage above indicates that on the day the negotiations broke down, Asquith was instead heading for “county option” the holding of referendums in each county. My correspondent asks:

As I read this, Redmond and Dillon were prepared to agree to ‘County Option’ permanently, rather than for only 6 years.  I think that, if implemented, this would have led to a 4-county Northern Ireland.  It does seem strange that this concession was not revisited when Lloyd George carried out his negotiations in 1916 [when he was asked to find a way of implementing Irish Home Rule immediately after the Easter Rising, but failed].  I would be interested in any comments you might have.

My reply:

I think it’s pretty clear that Carson et al – the Unionists in Ulster – were prepared to go to civil war – which they would have won – rather than give up Tyrone and Fermanagh. So Asquith would have been unable to sell such a deal to them and the British Conservatives in 1914. In any case I wonder how solid Redmond and Dillon’s agreement was – I don’t read it as more than assent that Asquith should try this course, but they had probably made the same calculation as I do above, ie that it would not fly with the Unionists. Having said that, of course your interpretation may be correct; there was a Nationalist delusion that any Northern Ireland state of any size would be economically unviable and would wither away. (Similar arguments were successfully used in Cyprus in the 2004 referendum campaign, but in both cases they proved incorrect.)

To be honest I think it was a lucky escape for all of us. The experience of such referendums elsewhere has not been happy. The very prospect of the vote would have been a spark for horrible violence, probably not restricted to Fermanagh and Tyrone. Since the UVF were better prepared than the Nationalists or the British Army in 1914, a referendum proposal would certainly have triggered mass displacements of Catholics by Loyalists from all over what would probably have become the Six (or Five and a Half) counties. The Upper Silesia plebiscite of 1921 shows what can happen. The Unionists had no interest in allowing due process to separate Tyrone and Fermanagh from the other four counties. The border as it was established reflected the balance of potential coercive force at the time it was drawn – as do most borders.

You also ask about 1916. Lloyd George was after a quick fix, and holding six county option referenda in the middle of a war is not a quick fix. He needed something that the leaders could agree to, and implement, right away. I imagine that if he had succeeded, there would have been no elections until after the war was over but Redmond would have been put immediately in charge of a 26-county administration of some kind.

That was my reply to my correspondent. The one point I should have added, of course, is that Asquith was rather prone to changing his mind, and what he thought he would do on 24 July might well have been a different matter the following week, even without the distraction of war breaking out in Europe.

Like a number of you, I imagine, I woke this morning to find news of the latest livejournal screwup in several places on my friends list. Users, we were told, were henceforth to be forced to specify their gender as either "male" or "female", with no allowance for those who do not want to be identified by gender, for shared accounts, for robots or for Elder Gods. Shocked by this news, I did a post of my own, and emailed one of the higher-ups at LJ to register my dissatisfaction. I got this reply:

thank you for your feedback.

However, the code update that you refer to is not live and did not have any chance to go live. That was a beta release, we always push code to beta to see if everything works correctly. In many cases it does not and we either fix bugs or pull the code from the final release plan.

We were going to add a gender field to the sign up user flow, which is fine, but by mistake it became a mandatory "female/male" field for everyone. This is why this is not going live. And this is what beta releases are for, to see problems and solve them before any user faces a problem.

I would appreciate if you share this information with your friends that are also concerned. I am sorry that you were misinformed.

The source of the original story was here, which is an entry on the Dreamwidth account of a former Livejournal employee who is one of the founders of Dreamwidth, which is in direct competition with Livejournal for customers. Just sayin’.

Edited to add: I also received this response from LJ’s feedback team:

Thank you for taking the time to contact us with your concerns. We understand that gender is not binary, and intend to respect that understanding for our users.

At this time, the code you reference is not live on the site, and will not become so in the future. We know that you, and many other users, have serious concerns about any requirement to specify gender, so we’d like to take a moment to explain events and our position further.

The intention of this code was to change the sign-up process to include a field for the selection of gender; that the code would completely disable the “Unspecified” option at the same time was deemed unacceptable. While the code in question had gone to our beta (testing) server, it had not gone to our production server, and will not do so due to this problem. Furthermore, we’d like to clarify that code posted to the changelog community is not always final, as such code must then go through the beta testing process and can often be changed before actual implementation.

Additionally, some erroneous information has been spread regarding the potential public display of the gender field. We would like to clarify that gender is not currently publicly displayed on the profile, nor anywhere else on the site, and there are no plans to change this behavior.

Regards,
 LiveJournal Community Care Team

See also sensible contributions from in comments below.

I’ve been encountering a lot of fictional people called Sowerby lately. The Sowerby family – Martha, Dickon, and their unnamed mother and ten siblings – play a large role in The Secret Garden. Farther south, Mrs Sowerby is one of a number of characters living in Stockbridge played by Susan Brown in Plague of the Daleks the latest Big Finish audio in their main Doctor Who series. And farther south again, I’m also reading Trollope’s Framley Parsonage, where there is a villainous Sowerby who I hope will come to a sticky end.

I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone of that name in real life.

• mizkit: I will never be Irish.
  If you can’t stand the cold, stay out of the kitchen…
  (tags: ireland funny)

• Chapter XII: Tacitus, Probus, Carus, and the rise of Diocletian
  Ten years in which at least five emperors reign (Tacitus, Probus, Carus, Carinus and Numerian), with the usual litany of war and murder, though in fairness most of them are relatively good generals and administrators. But we finish with the ascent of Diocletian, of whom we will hear more.
  (tags: gibbon)

This is not a terribly impressive book. It is a more or less chronological account of details of history featuring the Jesuits, with no deep analysis and rather few hard facts – nothing at all to explain their internal structure, miserably brief accounts of how they were founded in 1534 and re-established in 1814. Wright is slightly better on the various political controversies that Jesuits have been involved in, though even here his analysis basically amounts to there being two sides of the story. He is good on the Jesuits’ contribution to science. He is wholly inadequate on their contribution to colonialism. I can’t really recommend this book.

I found this interesting discussion between Paul McGann and one of the Big finish team (not good at recognising voices and he doesn’t introduce himself) in the bonus track to "An Earthly Child", the new Big Finish play with him as the Eighth Doctor and Carole Ann Ford reprising Susan. (download extract here):

McGann: And I didn’t know either that it’s an old character, or at least that the idea that the Doctor had a family goes right back to the beginning, doesn’t it, right back to the early 60s, during Bill Hartnell’s reign.
Interviewer: It does. I mean, the very first episode of Doctor Who was William Hartnell as the Doctor with his granddaughter Susan, played by Carole Ann Ford, and that –
McGann: Of course – Carole Ann who’s in this now!
Interviewer: Yes!
McGann gasps.
Interviewer: She’s the same character.
McGann: Now that, I didn’t realise.
Interviewer: Yeah!
McGann: So there’s all this, sort of, symmetry…
Interviewer: Yeah!
McGann: God, how fantastic! It’s the next generation of where she left off.
Interviewer: Yeah! It picks up from exactly the same place where she left the series in 1965.
McGann: That’s… just too spooky. But kind of great as well, isn’t it!?
Interviewer: Marc [Platt]’s done a pretty seamless job in carrying on the story from where it finished.
McGann: But tell me why, em – let me interview you for a minute – why did we… I mean, I’ve played Doctor Who, why didn’t I know that Doctor Who had ever had kids, that there was a family involved? Is it something that people are coy about, is it something that’s not spoken of, is it a bit of a taboo subject?
Interviewer: I don’t know, actually. I suppose it’s a bit of an area of the show that some producers have chosen not to go in.
McGann laughs.
Interviewer: I have to say Russell T Davies and the team at Cardiff were very supportive of us doing this story, I mean they were very helpful. So it is –
McGann: Initially I felt, well, is it because somehow the Doctor over the years has become a kind of ascetic figure, you know, there’s something… we can’t imagine the Doctor having, we can’t imagine the Doctor having sex, or something. There’s something el- you know what I’m saying, so, is that the reason? I’m just trying to figure out why, why don’t people talk about this kind of thing?
Interviewer: I suppose what it could be is, if the Doctor has a family, it domesticizes him…
McGann: Perhaps.
Interviewer: …in a way, so it gives him roots and ties him down, whereas he’s always portrayed as this wanderer, and quite an isolated figure at times.
McGann: Right.
Interviewer: So…
McGann: It’s me that’s sex-obsessed, then.
Interviewer laughs.
McGann: But that’s a good point, then isn’t it – that it perhaps somehow goes against the grain, and also it kind of rings true, you can see, you know, even, presumably as Bill Hartnell’s character developed and then later on into the other actors that played him, it was more impotant that the Doctor, as you say, remains a kind of wanderer, you know, someone who –
Interviewer: A drifter.
McGann: A drifter, yeah. Somebody essentially quite rootless.

Funny that McGann, though obviously very aware of Hartnell’s Doctor, had never before heard the Susan parts of the back story. But I think he and the other guy successfully identify why the Doctor has never since been portrayed as having a family.

What is the difference, if any, between overalls and dungarees?

This is the simplest of the end-of-year memes: post the first sentence of your first post for each month of the year. I add a short explanation though this is not traditional.

January: We had a rather quiet New Year’s Eve last night. A post about the turn of the year.
February: A story of a young boy who becomes involved in a secret romance – some similarity with McEwan’s Atonement, though the outcome is quite different. My review of The Go-Between, by L.P. Hartley.
March: Big Finish have returned to an old theme in Who: the search for the Key to Time, as originally carried out by the Fourth Doctor and his Time Lady companion Romana in 1978. Review of three Doctor Who audio plays.
April: Not mine, but ‘s of Bujold, starting here, and ‘s of The Lord of the Rings, starting here. Two series of Tor.com blog entries about rereading great sf/fantasy.
May: Dreamwidth: nwhyte. My little-used Dreamwidth account.
June: When you see the word “pasties”, do you think of: food? nipples? both? neither? One of my occasional linguistic polls.
July: Locked entry about an encounter with a weird person.
August: AP piece about my work – would be interested to know if it is in the print as well as the on-line version of the New York Times: (link). Big media story about my job.
September: Okay Then: Health Care : Whatever. My link to Scalzi.
October: Pathetic Motorways. My link to another cool site.
November: Sit down for breakfast. Local vegetation by the Nile.
December: More often than not, I complete the last leg of my morning commute by train, arriving at the railway station at Brussel/Bruxelles-Schuman, which is within a hop, skip and jump of my office. forensic railway archæology.

• Making Light: Peter Watts, distinguished Canadian SF writer, arrested by US border police while trying to re-enter Canada
  (tags: sf usa)
• Dr Peter Watts, Canadian science fiction writer, beaten and arrested at US border Boing Boing
  (tags: sf usa)
• Helping Out Peter Watts – Whatever
  (tags: sf usa)
• Not the Best of Possible Worlds.
  (tags: sf usa)

Truly bizarre.

Well, there’s a bit of etymology I had never considered: that the usage of “smashin’!” in English to mean “that’s very good!” originates from the Irish phrase “is maith é sin!” which has the same pronunciation and meaning. Glorious.

Surprising to read that this was the very first anthology of Doctor Who short stories, published back in 1994 (other than the various annuals and fan publications). There is a supposed framing narrative of the Seventh Doctor visiting a California psychic to get readings of objects from his pockets, thus providing the stories, but it is not quite necessary enough to be convincing. Some contributors have since gone on to great things; some have disappeared completely. My favourite was Jim Mortimore’s “The Book of Shadows”, about Barbara Wright marrying one of Alexander the Great’s generals and ruling Egypt – particularly interesting to come to this so soon after Farewell Great Macedon which has a very similar theme. Also I gave a cheer for David Auger’s “The Golden Door” which features Dodo, though it is not very special otherwise. Hoping to read a few more Who anthologies rather than novels this month – you have been warned.

• Chapter XI, which is mostly about Aurelian
  A chapter full of thrilling incident. The catastrophic Gallienus is replaced by Claudius II, and he in turn very quickly by Aurelian, who conducts a series of successful military campaigns – against the Goths, reconquering Gaul and then also defeating the fascinating Zenobia of Palmyra – before being in turn assassinated.
  (tags: gibbon)

I was greatly entertained the other week by SFX’s list of the ten worst SF/fantasy shows of the decade (10: Hex, 9: Hyperdrive, 8: Jericho, 7: The Listener, 6: Blade, 5: Masters of Science Fiction, 4: Painkiller Jane, 3: Kröd Mändoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire, 2: Demons, and 1: Flash Gordon). But I was rather perturbed to realise that I had not heard of a single one of them; my diet of Who and its spinoffs, and earlier devotion to Buffy, somehow didn’t lead me to experiment with other sf shows. (I did try the new Prisoner, but just like I lasted only 20 minutes.)

So in a spirit of sientific enquiry I obtained and watched all six episodes of Kröd Mändoon, to assess whether SFX’s ratings were reliable. My mature judgement: SFX are probably right. Kröd Mändoon is rubbish, desperately trying to be funny but basically running through adolescent jokes about sex while waving swords about. At least the episodes are only twenty minutes long, and it filled a few commutes nicely.

But never mind what I thought; what do you think?

The Tenth Doctor wakes up in a mysterious museum which appears to contain relics of his past lives; tended by Martha Jones, he finds himself reliving certain experiences of each of his previous nine incarnations, until he works out what is really going on. (Set shortly after Journey’s End.)

With any multi-Doctor story, you have to assess the writer’s success in characterising each Doctor (and companions), and with comics you have to grade the artists’ ability to depict the actors’ faces as well. The Forgotten scrapes a pass mark on both counts. There are some seriously jarring notes in both the One/Ian and Three/Brigadier scenes, which suggests that Tony Lee doesn’t quite get the male companions (Jack Harkness is in the vicinity but unseen at a later point in the narrative). And unfortunately Stefano Martino, the artist for issue 3, is rather awful at portraying Ten, Four and Five. (Pia Guerra and Kelly Yates are at least adequate for the other five issues.)

At the same time there is definitely cause for fannish glee. There are an awful lot of companions featured here (in order: Susan, Ian, Barbara, Steven, Jamie, Zoe, the Brigadier, Jo, Sarah, Harry, Leela, Romana II, Adric, Nyssa, Tegan, Turlough, Kamelion [!], Peri, Mel, Ace, Rose and Martha) and most of them are at least half-decently done. Putting aside my whining about the recognisability of the faces, the art is excellent. The story has a certain internal integrity and ties in rather well (as it turns out) to New Who’s Season Four, though with a decent number of continuity references to the whole of the series. Thoroughly good fun.

I had never read this children’s classic (nor have I read Burnett’s other well-known works, Little Lord Fauntleroy and A Little Princess), but like a lot of people who watched mid-70s kids shows on the BBC I have tremendously fond memories of the 1975 TV version, in which Mr Craven was played by John Woodnutt, aka the Draconian emperor / Broton the Zygon leader, and the three main child characters were played by actors who have since disappeared (though one of them is active in local drama in New Mexico).

I do remember starting to read it as a child, and being deterred by the grim first couple of chapters, where Mary’s parents die and she is sent to her uncle’s isolated Yorkshire home where she is insufferably unpleasant. I wish I had kept going. It is a lovely story of psychological and physical healing through close encounters with the regenerative forces of the natural world and also, y’know, just being nice to people.

The wind must have been worse than I realised today, because I found I had something in my eye a couple of times as I read the last chapters. Perhaps the plotline of a disabled child whose condition markedly improves resonates more with me these days than it would have thirty-four years ago.

Horrible toothache this morning. Persuaded dentist to see me at short notice. I go back to them on Monday. Root canals have been mentioned.

When I first watched The Web Planet two years ago I really didn’t rate it. In my current rewatch, it is the first story where I have revised my opinion significantly upwards. Unlike the other non-Dalek sfnal stories so far it looks weird rather than crap. I think I appreciate it much more now that I have got my watching brain acclimatised to the mid 1960s, as it were; and perhaps it is easier to take it an episode at a time rather than sitting down to watch all six. The Menoptra and Zarbi (and the Animus) are much more convincing aliens than the Voord or the Sensorites, the sets are excellent and the vaseline on the camera lenses adds to the air of alienness. It is no wonder that this was one of the very first novelisations, or that the first Doctor Who annual had not one but two stories set on Vortis. (The Optera and Venom Grubs are still a bit less convincing, but I was able to rise above that somehow.) We also see a lot more of the inside of the Tardis than ever before. Lots of good character moments for all four regulars, with Barbara saving the day.

The Crusade is a well-plotted historical story, such a huge contrast with The RomansMarco Polo and one of the best scripts, in terms of wordsmithing, ever performed on Who. In fact it’s an interesting story for gender roles and racial perceptions: much of the plot is about the parallel fates of Joanna and Barbara, one resisting marriage to Saladin’s brother, the other resisting rape and torture by El Akir – meanwhile Vicki attempts to protect herself by cross-dressing. Hartnell gets some comedy moments with the chamberlain and the clothes merchant (and in one scene both) but the focus is generally elsewhere and this is not a bad thing.

The first episode of The Space Museum is one of the best single episodes of the Hartnell era. The creepiness of the time weirdness in the Tardis, the crew’s apparently ghostly presence on Xeros and then their discovery of themselves as exhibits all makes quite a stunning 25 minutes of television. (See also here and subsequently.) The problem is that once the Moroks and Xerons start actually talking, they are very dull. Somehow Richard Shaw as Lobos the bored and cynical governor / curator comes across as a bored and cynical actor, and sucks the life out of the story on his first appearance. On the other hand Hartnell is well on form (especially in his outwitting of the mind probe) and his absence from Episode Three is sorely felt. Vicki also gets some good moments as she organises the rebels (who sadly are a rather drippy bunch, acting without enthusiasm). This is I think the first of the many stories where the Doctor and friends land on an alien planet and help the rebels overthrow the oppressors, and perhaps the only such story which also involves time paradoxes; either plot line would (and in later stories did) make an excellent yarn but somehow the combination fails to gel. Luckily the Daleks turn up at the end to remind us to keep watching.

The Chase seems like an attempt by Terry Nation to combine the episodic story-telling of The Keys of Marinus (and later, Blake’s 7) with the Daleks and also with his own original genre, comedy. It cannot be described as a roaring success. I note that there is basically a separate story for each episode (the opening two-parter on Aridius, the Empire State Building and Marie Celeste, the House of Horrors, the Doctor’s Double and the Dalek/Mechanoid battle) but it doesn’t really cohere. Apart from the Beatles, the music is the worst for any story so far – soft comic jazz with added xylophones. Some of the monsters are grossly unconvincing – everyone singles out the Mire Beast of Aridius, but the fungoids of Mechanus are worse. Having said that, the Doctor seems more upset at Ian and Barbara’s voluntary departure than for any other companion bar Rose – Hartnell actually seems to be crying at the end. Also NB that the Beatles are the first explicit and direct contemporary reference in Who. (The band Susan listens to in An Unearthly Child are fictional, and Planet of Giants could have been set ten years earlier.)

So, farewell then, the Coal Hill School teachers. Barbara’s role as the more mature woman, part mentor and part viewpoint, was never revived. (The Romana / Adric relationship has some echoes but fails for other reasons; Liz Shaw is brainy but also hierarchically junior; I think Donna Noble shares some of Barbara’s characteristics, but Donna is trying to act younger than she really is, while Barbara is more confident in her own maturity.) Her reduction to screaming terror in An Unearthly Child already seemed uncomfortably out of character, and overall she is a voice of sanity we never quite get again.

This is not to minimise Ian, who is the first of a long run of action-oriented male sidekicks (Steven, Ben, Jamie, UNIT, Harry) but is also much brainier than any of his successors. This does create dramatic conflict with the Doctor, of course, as Ian chafes at being junior male to someone so infuriating. (NB that the successive male companions are all from hierarchies so are more used to taking a lead from their elders.)

There is not much spinoff fiction featuring Ian and Barbara, but I do recommend Paul Leonard’s Venusian Lullaby, set in between The Dalek Invasion of Earth and The Rescue. William Russell has made a couple of Big Finish plays, one of which reprises Ian; Jacqueline Hill appears as a misguided priestess in a late Fourth Doctor story but is unfortunately no longer available.

In some ways The Time Meddler feels like a revamp of the very first story, An Unearthly Child, with Steven’s sceptical astonishment at the Tardis, followed by a return to a primitive feuding society in which the key female role is played by Alethea Charlton. It is great fun (with the significant exception of an implied rape scene). Steven gets a great introduction to the Tardis, and we have a nicely depicted Northumbrian community, under assault from contemporary Vikings. Best of all, we have the Meddling Monk, the first fellow time traveller the Doctor has encountered. Forty years on, we know of course what is going on, but if you watch with fresh eyes the suspense is done rather well – we don’t see the Monk’s Tardis till the end of episode 3, though it’s clear that the Doctor and Monk know each other of old, leaving us (and Steven and Vicki) to catch up. Good marks also for the closing sequence of the Tardis crew’s faces against a star field.

The only completely missing story of this run is Galaxy 4, which means we are in a slightly chalk-and-cheese situation. From surviving clips, the look and sound of the alien planet was pretty impressive – I see it is Geoffrey Hodgson who gets the credit for the background noises, which really deserve to be described as incidental music. It’s also a rather interesting reintroduction of the Doctor, now shorn of his original companions, as an ethical hero – the Rills recognise his moral superiority, to the point that they are prepared to sacrifice themselves for him if necessary. And the story itself has a more explicit moral message (“don’t judge by appearances”) than most Who stories. This third season starts with far future allegory and ends with contemporary political commentary, by way of epic and slapstick. Having said all that, unfortunately the actual plot details of Galaxy Four are pretty silly – why on earth would the Drahvins send the Doctor and Vicki to capture the Rills’ ship? What possible scientific basis can there be for the planet exploding? Poor Steven, as Peter Purves bitterly points out, ends up playing a part originally written for Barbara. It is a somewhat wobbly start to the new season.

< An Unearthly Child – The Aztecs | The Sensorites – The Romans | The Web Planet – Galaxy 4 | Mission To The Unknown – The Gunfighters | The Savages – The Highlanders | The Underwater Menace – Tomb of the Cybermen | The Abominable Snowmen – The Wheel In Space | The Dominators – The Space Pirates | The War Games – Terror of the Autons | The Mind of Evil – The Curse of Peladon | The Sea Devils – Frontier in Space | Planet of the Daleks – The Monster of Peladon | Planet of the Spiders – Revenge of the Cybermen | Terror of the Zygons – The Seeds of Doom | The Masque of Mandragora – The Talons of Weng-Chiang | Horror of Fang Rock – The Invasion of Time | The Ribos Operation – The Armageddon Factor | Destiny of the Daleks – Shada | The Leisure Hive – The Keeper of Traken | Logopolis – The Visitation | Black Orchid – Mawdryn Undead | Terminus – The Awakening | Frontios – Attack of the Cybermen | Vengeance on Varos – In A Fix With Sontarans | The Mysterious Planet – Paradise Towers | Delta and the Bannermen – The Greatest Show in the Galaxy | Battlefield – The TV Movie >

More often than not, I complete the last leg of my morning commute by train, arriving at the railway station at Brussel/Bruxelles-Schuman, which is within a hop, skip and jump of my office. Schuman station was opened almost forty years ago (in December 1969) as part of the first axis of what has evolved into the Brussels metro system, between there and the De Brouckère station in the city centre. But I was surprised when I came across a Baedeker map of 1910, almost a century ago, which appeared to show the Schuman station in situ six decades early:

(For those who don’t know Brussels, the station is question is signified by the word "Halte" about half way down the right hand side.)

I delved a bit deeper and came up with this slightly more detailed map:

This time the mysterious proto-Schuman is dignified with the title of "Station" rather than "Halte", again a block west of the Rond Point.

A little more digging reveals that the old station of Wetstraat / Rue de la Loi was opened in May 1865, nine years after the track had been laid between Bruxelles-Nord / Brussel-Noord and the station we now know as Bruxelles-Luxembourg / Brussel-Luxemburg, and closed in 1922. I guess that the commuters of the early 20th century preferred to take the tram between the east and centre of the city, rather than the train which loops quite a long way to the north. Me, I rather enjoy sitting in a comfortable carriage for an extra six minutes.

All trace of the old station has now gone. Today’s Schuman metro/railway station is a fairly horrible modern jumble of stairwells dotted with fast food stalls, slightly to the south of the area marked on the maps as the Wetstraat / Rue de la Loi station, which is now a patch of ground now overshadowed by the west wing of the Berlaymont. Likewise, the covered market shown in the 1910 maps is now a bleak European Commission building beside the escalators which descend from the Rue de la Loi / Wetstraat to the Chaussée d’Etterbeek / Etterneeksesteenweg.

(NB that the metro station marked near the Schuman railway station here is actually Maalbeek / Maelbeek; the Schuman metro station is marked at the roundabout.)

But we can get an idea of what it might have looked like from the surviving closed station immediately to the north, at the Chaussée de Louvain / Leuvensesteenweg, where two slightly overgrown staircases descend to unused platforms from the main road. The railway at Schuman is at about the same depth relative to the surrounding street level.

It is now a jazz venue.

I am left with one rather minor nagging mystery. The Belgian railfan (ie trainspotter) site I linked to above has the new Schuman station at 5.8 km from Bruxelles-Nord / Brussel-Noord, and the old Wetstraat station slightly further south, at 6.1 km. But an inspection of the maps makes it clear that the difference is certainly in the other direction; the Wetstraat station was north of the road, the bulk of Schuman is south of it. Unless there is some strange convention that you measure the start of the station from the leading edge of the platform? Since today’s Schuman is a stop for international services, which I doubt was ever true of the old Wetstraat, I suspect its platforms continue rather further to the north under the Boulevard Charlemagne than was the case for its predecessor. (Or, more simply, perhaps the Belgian railfan site has got it wrong…)