• Congratulations, Mr Karimov! | European Voice
  My friend Andrew pens a hilarious (but deadly serious) letter to President Karimov.
  (tags: uzbekistan)
• Former missionary from Meath who helped southern Sudan win freedom
  I had lunch with him back in April – quite a character.
  (tags: sudan)
• Aspiring Aid Worker Interview
  "But I have a Masters Degree! I have been to Africa! I have a white arm band! Can I be an Aid Worker now?"
  (tags: work)

i) births and deaths

20 January 1934: birth of Tom Baker, who played the Fourth Doctor from 1974 to 1981 and has reprised the role on occasion since (most recently in the BBC audio “Demon Quest” series). For me he remains the definitive Doctor. Happy birthday, Tom!

20 January 1990: death of John Maxim/John Wills, who played the Frankenstein monster in The Chase (1965) and a Cyberman in The Moonbase (1967).

ii) broadcast anniversaries

20 January 1968: broadcast of fifth episode of The Enemy of the World. Bruce has switched sides and starts to help the opposition to salamander. Meanwhile the scientists trapped underground are getting restive.

20 January 1973: broadcast of fourth episode of The Three Doctors. The Second and Third Doctors persuade Omega to return the others to Earth, and then destroy him with the Second Doctor’s recorder. The Three Doctors are restored to their own timestreams.

20 January 1978: broadcast of first episode of The Armageddon FactorThe Awakening. The Malus attempts to manifest by draining energy from the villagers and the Tardis, but the Doctor defeats it.

20 January 1996: broadcast of first episode of The Ghosts of N-Space on BBC radio. The Brigadier is visiting his Sicilian uncle whose castle is under threat from modern mobesters and ancient ghosts.

iii) dates specified in canon

20 January 1920: birth of Toshiko Sato’s grandfather in Japan.

20 January 1941: Toshiko Sato and Jack meet the real Captain Jack Harkness (in the 2007 Torchwood story, Captain Jack Harkness).

• HOW TO: Force Apps to SD (Without Rooting) On Froyo
  One possible stop-gap solution while I consider my options
  (tags: phone)
• Europe not EU
  A vicious take on Catherine Ashton by Bruno Waterfield of the Daily Telegraph; not exactly an neutral source, but in this case he is much closer than usual to the Brussels consensus!
  (tags: eu)

Further to my previous angry post about the HTC Desire:

After further unsuccessful efforts with HTC’s Exchange ActiveSynch, which was unable to synch with my contacts (I have over 4000) without stuffing the phone’s memory beyond capacity, I finally found an email solution that did just enough of what I want to give the brick another chance: Touchdown, which at least doesn’t choke on my contacts and allows me to read and send emails, though at a cost. Its memory storage is still lousy – I have to take it down to only three days of archive, whereas the old Blackberry was able to cope with a couple of weeks, which means that by Monday morning it has become useless as a way of tracking things.

For non-work email, the Gmail interface really sucks, which is astonishing given that Google are behind both Gmail and Android. It simply refuses to sync the main interface; oddly when I select the ‘view all mail’ (including sent and pre-filtered) option I do usually get an up-to-date list of what I have recently received and sent, but then if a new mail has arrived in a thread to which I have already replied, it doesn’t show me anything in the thread after (and including) my first response, even when I refresh repeatedly. It also doesn’t seem to have access to my Gmail contacts when I write emails, which again is a massive fail.

It’s also still impossible to sync notes with Outlook, though there I have actually found a better solution which generally suits me more than Outlook notes – Evernote, which allows me to synch across all my computers and phones. I mainly use it for tracking my book reading and planning out the Whoniversaries, so it’s not a work-related issue; on the occasions when I do want Outlook notes for work purposes, I have still lost that functionality on the phone.

I keep on coming back to the contacts, because they are a big deal for me. More or less weekly I still get the ‘memory running low’ message, and looking at the memory usage of various apps the HTC contacts storage are always the second biggest after Touchdown. I can’t wipe Touchdown because that’s basically what I have the phone for, and I thought that since Touchdown is also storing contacts separately I probably didn’t need the HTC system doing it as well. (I don’t understand why it does this, and contra a comment on one of my earlier posts it is not possible to move them to the SD card.) That turns out to be true, but what it doesn’t tell you is that it also wipes the phone log, so you no longer have a record of the numbers you called or who has called you. That’s useful information which is now deleted forever, without warning.

All of this is annoying but at the level of grit-my-teeth-but-get-on-with-it. But there are two more things which now have turned me into an active anti-HTC Desire evangelist. First of all, I suspect it of running data services without my permission when I am abroad, rather than simply being on-line at the moment when I am using it. A former colleague of mine found his was doing this – going on-line in the middle of the night when he was in Russia. Anyway my bills for November, a month when I did six foreign trips, were appalling even after I persuaded my service provider to retroactively apply a better rate.

Second, and this is the final straw, the battery life started off very short and seems to have been getting shorter and shorter. Last night I went to bed with it fully charged, used it to read fifty pages of an ebook (one of its better features, I’ll admit) and put it down on my bedside table. At 4 am it woke me with a beep to say that its battery was running low; ten minutes later it turned itself off. I was so angry about this that I have not been able to get back to sleep, and have only now calmed down enough to write this post about it. A phone that you have to keep plugged in all the time is, by definition, not mobile.

So the moral is simple: just don’t buy a HTC Desire, if you have a lot of contacts, want to use Gmail, want to use Outlook notes, want to keep records of who you have called and who has called you, and want a phone that remains charged for more than six hours at a time. If you are not in any of those categories, then probably its shiny assortment of apps and decent enough camera may make it a useful purchase. But it fails the basic functionality of doing email well and staying awake long enough for my purposes.

(See similar rant from here, interestingly with a different but much more appalling contacts-related experience.)

broadcast anniversaries

19 January 1974: broadcast of second episode of Invasion of the Dinosaurs. The Doctor and Sarah coordinate with the Brigadier, not realising that Mike Yates is part of the conspiracy. Once again the Doctor is threatened by a Tyrannosaurus Rex.

19 January 1982: broadcast of second episode of Four to Doomsday. The Tardis crew discover more about the plans of Monarch and the Urbankans; the humans they have met turn out to be androids.

19 January 1983: broadcast of second episode of Snakedance. The Doctor and Nyssa find more clues to the Mara in the caves; meanwhile Tegan and Lon are under its power.

19 January 1984: broadcast of first episode of The Awakening. The Doctor and Turlough, bringin Tegan to meet her grandfather, are surprised to find his village infested with Civil War soldiers and a monster in the church wall.

19 January 1985: broadcast of first episode of Vengeance on Varos. The sinister Sil persecutes the Governor, and the Doctor and Peri rescue Jondar from torture, live on television.

• 300 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Film Noir & More | Open Culture
  (tags: films)

This is a truly fantastic effort to locate every single Doctor Who story (shown/published/released up to January 2008) on the historical timeline, from before the Big Bang to the very End of Time. Although the cover claims it is the second edition, Parkin states that it is actually the fourth, and I hope it won’t be the last; quite apart from the TV episodes of Who, Sarah Jane and Torchwood (and K9?) shown since then, perhaps he might also go back and think of including the various short story collections and annuals and the Big Finish spinoff audios and books (the Dalek comics from TV21 magazine are already in).

Having said that, there are already “almost 800” stories covered here in more than 800 pages, with around 4000 meticulous footnotes and various slightly longer essays. I now understand the UNIT dating controversy much better than I did before. I had not realised that the evidence for Bernice Summerfield’s birthday is equally confusing. Parkin also goes to great lengths to demonstrate that several Second Doctor stories which I had mentally placed much later are probably set in the 21st century, and raises the interesting question of how the Cybermen in Earthshock could have obtained footage from Revenge of the Cybermen which is clearly set centuries later. There are other delightful details as well – I now know when the Doctor first met Winston Churchill (1899, in the Sixth Doctor novel Players) and have several more Shakespeare appearances to add to my list.

I picked up on just a couple of slips – an apostrophe has mysteriously infiltrated early mentions of the Scots Guards, and Susan reminisces about her home planet in The Sensorites, not Marco Polo. But in general I loved it. In particular, I think the book could be a useful gateway drug for fans of the TV series who are bewildered by the various series of Who books and audios, and are looking for guidance on where to start.

18 January 1964: broadcast of “The Expedition”, fifth episode of the story we now call The Daleks. The Thals agree to attack the Dalek city. Ian and Barbara accompany one group through the jungle and the Lake of Mutations.

18 January 1969: broadcast of fourth episode of The Krotons. The Doctor makes up some sulphuric acid; Zoe uses it to poison off the Krotons, and Jamie uses it to destroy the Dynotrope.

18 January 1975: broadcast of fourth episode of Robot, which is the first I remember watching all the way through. The robot starts disintegrating people, but the Doctor manages to destroy it with metal-eating virus.

18 January 1982: broadcast of first episode of Four to Doomsday. Rather than Heathrow, the Tardis lands on a spaceship controlled by Monarch and inhabited by humans from four different eras of history.

18 January 1983: broadcast of first episode of Snakedance. Rather than Earth, the Tardis lands on Manussa, home of the Mara; Tegan is possessed by it and gets away from the Doctor and Nyssa.

• Apology Accepted – Grasping for the Wind
  This is a slightly peculiar exchange but one feels that both interlocutors are doing their best to be decent human beings.
  (tags: sf)
• The LinkedIn Blog » Did you use one of these 10 most overused buzzwords in your LinkedIn profile this year? «
  Top 10 overused buzzwords in LinkedIn Profiles in the USA, 2010: "Extensive experience"; "Innovative"; "Motivated"; "Results-oriented"; "Dynamic"; "Proven track record"; "Team player"; "Fast-paced"; "Problem solver"; "Entrepreneurial".
  (tags: work)
• Daily Nation: – Africa |South Sudan's lost white tribe: the Juba Greeks
  "The Greeks of south Sudan are a tribe. We are not Dinka, we are not Acholi, but we are south Sudanese," George Ghines says proudly as he recalls that it was traders like his family who first founded the regional capital Juba. – I've been to his restaurant, the Notos; highly recommended.
  (tags: sudan greece)

A few people have been doing this, so here is my contribution:

Instructions:

1.) Your name and/or username
2.) Where you’re from
3.) The following words: Aunt, Roof, Route, Wash, Oil, Theater, Iron, Salmon, Caramel, Fire, Water, Sure, Data, Ruin, Crayon, Toilet, New Orleans, Pecan, Both, Again, Probably, Spitting Image, Alabama, Lawyer, Coupon, Mayonnaise, Syrup, Pajamas, Caught, Orange, Coffee, direction, naturally, aluminium and herbs
4.) What is it called when you throw toilet paper on a house?
5.) What is the bubbly carbonated drink called?
6.) What do you call gym shoes?
7.) What do you say to address a group of people?
8.) What do you call the kind of spider that has an oval-shaped body and extremely long legs?
9.) What do you call your grandparents?
10.) What do you call the wheeled contraption in which you carry groceries at the supermarket?
11.) What do you call it when rain falls while the sun is shining?
12.) What is the thing you change the TV channel with?

Read this passage from The Speech Accent Archive:

“Please call Stella. Ask her to bring these things with her from the store: Six spoons of fresh snow peas, five thick slabs of blue cheese, and maybe a snack for her brother Bob. We also need a small plastic snake and a big toy frog for the kids. She can scoop these things into three red bags, and we will go meet her Wednesday at the train station.”

http://vocaroo.com/?media=vmce5oPWRXB2DkDSv

broadcast anniversaries

17 January 1970: broadcast of third episode of Spearhead from Space. Meg Seeley brings the swarm leader to the Doctor, Liz and the Brigadier; meanwhile General Scobie is confronted by his own double.

17 January 1974: publication by Target Books of Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion by Terrance Dicks and Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters by Malcolm Hulke, based on the 1970 stories Spearhead from Space and Doctor Who and the Silurians, kicking off the Target novelisations which remain the single biggest sequence of Doctor Who books.

17 January 1976: broadcast of third episode of The Brain of Morbius. The Doctor restores the Sisters’ flame, and Solon forces Sarah to help him operate on Morbius.

17 January 1981: broadcast of third episode of Warriors’ Gate. Romana is rescued by the Tharils and brought to join the Doctor at a feast on the other side of the Gate. K9’s condition continues to deteriorate.

• The Earth Beneath Her Feet – How Slippery?
  If you really want to know the meaning of the Dutch phrase, "zo glad als een aal in een emmer snot", click on this link.
  (tags: languages)
• How not to do business: Holyrood’s Scotland Bill Committee « Devolution Matters
  Dubious goings-on in Holyrood.
  (tags: scotland)
• Language Log » Ben Ali speaks in Tunisian “for the first time”
  On diglossia in Tunisia.
  (tags: languages)

Took Nigel Slater’s advice and cooked a slow roasted lamb for dinner, having first smeared it in a paste of garlic, cumin and thyme. It was delicious. I almost fell off my chair in shock when young F, usually very sceptical of any new taste especially if it is a sauce, was moved to declare that he liked the gravy. Sadly I did not have chickpeas in stock for Nigel Slater’s recommended accompaniment, but boiled potatoes, steamed carrots and peas with a dash of mint seemed to do the trick.

Slow roasting is such a great way of cooking meat. Every time I do it, I kick myself for not doing it more often. All it actually requires is the ability to think about the meal several hours in advance. Alas, that seems to happen all too rarely.

I’m totally delighted with Big Finish’s rediscovery of Jago and Litefoot, two incidental characters from the 1977 story The Talons of Weng-Chiang. Jago is a down-at-heel theatre manager, Litefoot a police pathologist, and together they fight strange occurrences in late Victorian London. Big Finish brought the original actors (Christopher Benjamin and Trevor Baxter) back together for a one-off story in 2008download or CD) and another has just come out. The plays are almost entirely without reference to Doctor Who continuity, so can be enjoyed by anyone who wants something slightly steampunkish or vaguely Gothic.

I enjoyed the latest set of stories (again, download or CD) every bit as much as I had hoped. Big Finish have commissioned some of the best Who spinoff fiction writers for this project, all of them with solid records of novels and audios behind them. Also, I felt that the four stories hung together rather well despite being by four different authors, with a coherent plot arc (give that it is on the published synopsis, I think I can reveal that it involves vampires) which goes through the necessary permutations and then comes together satisfactorily at the end – indeed, I thought it worked better than the first series did.

The best of the four for me was the third, Jonathan Morris’s The Theatre of Dreams, which does a bit of tampering with the fourth wall (if an audio play can be said to have a fourth wall) as well as paying homage to Jago’s supposed theatrical roots. I am increasingly impressed with Jonathan Morris, who also contributed a lovely C.S. Lewis / Tolkien homage to last month’s Doctor Who Magazine. Mark Morris’s The Necropolis Express also has some gloriously creepy scene-setting (and I find that, although the real Necropolis Train Company ran south to Brookwood from Waterloo, there was also a northbound funeral train line from King’s Cross to New Southgate). Apparently the two Morrises are not related. For completelness, the other two plays are Litefoot and Sanders by the prolific Justin Richards, and The Ruthven Inheritance by Andy Lane who did an earlier Who/Holmes crossover.

I regret to say that I was spoilered for the twist at the end of the fourth play by a Wikipedia page which I thought was on a completely unrelated subject, and which I looked at only a day after the four plays were released for downloading; so the Wikipedia contributor responsible must have worked pretty fast to deprive me of some of my pleasure in listening. But I am no longer surprised when I am reminded that Wikipedia’s values are different from my own.

I took myself off yesterday to the M Museum in Leuven, hoping to catch the Anjou Bible exhibition (though as it turned out I was a month too late). I did browse in the permanent exhibition, and my eye was very much caught by the wonderfully colourful and heartfelt late nineteenth century rural scenes of Frans Van Leemputten:

The Distribution of Bread in the Village

Candle Procession at Scherpenheuvel (Triptych)

(Both sourced from Wikipedia)

But that wasn’t the main attraction for me: I was much more interested in the Mayombé: Masters of Magic exhibition, of ritual artefacts from an area mostly in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo. It’s rather difficult to catch the sense of these figures in photographs – and certainly I felt almost sorry for them, imprisoned in sterile museum cases rather than in use in their fertile homeland – but this one will do as an illustration:

(Photo by Hugo Martens, taken from herehere.)

I was fascinated by the nails in each figure, apparently one for each spiritual intervention which involved it, and by the mirrors that many of them have on their bellies. But it was a bit frustrating that we were told of photographs showing some of the various figures actually in use in situ in the late nineteenth century, but not actually shown the photographs (other than a rather rabidly propagandistic film made by missionaries at a later date). And there was little exposition of the wider context of what Belgians were doing there in the first place, a topic that this country still has not really got to grips with.

As for fetishism and veneration of body parts, I was rather stunned to come across these items on display:

(Better picture here, not taken by me.) It’s an actual 17th century reliquary with an actual skull in there – quite a small skull, I thought, with no record of whose it might have been.

And in the next case we have this:

An array of human, presumably saintly, bones, laid out on a cushion rather as a posh Belgian restaurant might present the hors d’œuvres or the after-dinner sweets. A display card called on visitors to compare and contrast with the practices of the Mayombé, which I think is fair enough.

Finally I was caught by the expression on the face of this statue of St Hubert:

He looks like he has had enough!

i) births and deaths

16 January 1979: death of Peter Butterworth, who played the Meddling Monk in The Time Meddler (1965) and The Daleks’ Master Plan (1966).

ii) broadcast anniversaries

16 January 1965: broadcast of “The Slave Traders”, the first episode of the story we now call The Romans. The Tardis crew are relaxing in a Roman villa. The Doctor and Vicki decide to walk to Rome, and the Doctor takes on the identity of a murdered musician. Barbara and Ian are captured by slavers.

16 January 1971: broadcast of third episode of Terror of the Autons. Plastic daffodils are programmed to asphyxiate people all over Britain, and the Doctor is attacked by his telephone cable.

16 January 2008: broadcast of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, starting the second season of Torchwood. This is the one with James Marsters appearing as Captain John Hart; the team prevent him from destroying Cardiff and he disappears remarking that he has ‘found Gray’.

iii) date specified in canon

16 January 2197: The Sixth Doctor and Evelyn Smythe materialise on the spaceship Valiant, as recounted in Nicholas Briggs’ 2006 Big Finish audio The Nowhere Place.

This is a collection of 50 short stories by Anton Chekhov, dating from the 1881-1886 period before he hit the big time, none of them apparently published in English before 1999. I have not read any Chekhov (I tried one of the plays as a teenager, but bounced off the dramatis personæ) so this was fairly new territory. The stories are all very short – the total length of the book is only 234 pages; even so they are interesting enough, reflecting contemporary Russian urban lifestyles, especially if you happen to be a young doctor. A number of them take interesting narrative forms – telegrams, diary entries, dreams. Most of them are meant to be funny, but some of the humour has definitely faded over the centuries. An introduction to a Great Writer previously unknown to me, which has done me no harm at all.

None of the stories passes the Bechdel test; I think I spotted two occasions where a female character addressed a group of people including another female character, but in both cases talking about a man.

I’m afraid I was simply not convinced by Titus Alone. In fact, I was bored and confused by it. Titus, having run away from his home, finds himself in the neighbouring industrialised countryside (where people have never actually heard of Gormenghast, despite its absolute domination of its own hinterland). He becomes the object of obsession – in particular of the two women, Juno, with whom he has a love affair, and Cheeta, who rejects him and then develops a bizarrely elaborate plan to humiliate him by throwing a party at which various aspects of Gormenghast are satirically brought to life, but also of the self-appointed guardians from the Under-River. The imagery was intense, and I suppose it is in some way a spiritual and allegorical journey for Titus growing up, but in the end he ends back exactly where he started, and it did not work for me.

Also fails the Bechdel Test. I had hopes that the mysterious Black Rose would have a conversation with Juno, but she died before waking up.

broadcast anniversaries

15 January 1966: broadcast of “Escape Switch”, tenth episode of the story we now call The Daleks’ Master Plan. The Daleks take Steven and Sara hostage and force the Doctor to hand over the taranium core. But the Doctor steals the directional unit from the Monk’s Tardis.

15 January 1972: broadcast of third episode of Day of the Daleks. The Doctor travels to the future, is captured by the controller and the Daleks, and subjected to mind analysis (summoning images of the First Doctor and Second Doctor).

15 January 1979: broadcast of third episode of The Face of Evil. The Doctor and Leela are captured by the Tesh and narrowly escape being subjected to particle analysis (disintegration); the Doctor confronts the mad computer Xoanon.

• The Way the Future Blogs, an online memoir by science fiction writer Frederik Pohl » Blog Archive » Chip Delany, Part 2: The Miracle of Dhalgren
  "Since Dhalgren’s publishing history still elicits minimal interest, let me try to straighten some of it out. Fred, you came to see us in our three-room second-floor Paddington Street flat in London, twice, once when we weren’t in and our upstairs neighbor was baby-sitting for not-quite-year-old Iva; then you came back, a second time, when Marilyn and I were both there. That’s when I told you about Dhalgren—and probably exaggerated the number of times and places it had been submitted. … Undoubtedly this is the story I told Fred the evening he dropped in unexpectedly to say hello (along with the tale of Iva’s befuddled citizenship problems), as we sat chatting for an hour or so with my infant daughter’s blue- quilted baby basket on the rug between our feet, in front of the electric fire. Fred can be wonderfully warm hearted, and I think he took to the young expatriate couple … That’s the actual story. But I can see the places misunderstandings might have crept in."
  (tags: sf)
• BBC News – Queen tribute singer Harry Hamilton with Alliance Party
  Hamilton got more votes than any other UUP / UCUNF candidate at 2005 election – has now joined the Alliance Party!
  (tags: northernireland)
• Breaking Up Is Good to Do – By Parag Khanna | Foreign Policy
  The coming partitions must be performed with a combination of scalpel and ax, soft and hard power. Above all, the world must recognize that these partitions are inevitable. Our reflex is to fear changes on the map out of concern for violence or having to learn the names of new countries. But in an age when any group can acquire the tools of violent resistance, the only alternative to self-determination is perpetual conflict. 
  (tags: politics)
• The European Union and British Sovereignty | Nosemonkey's EUtopia
  A long piece, with fascinating diversion into Bill Cash's revolutionary theory of the British constitution.
  (tags: eu ukpolitics)
• The Way the Future Blogs, an online memoir by science fiction writer Frederik Pohl » Blog Archive » Mass Murder Courtesy of the NRA
  "What is a Glock, and what is it designed to be used for? It’s a rapid-fire weapon that can accommodate a 30-bullet clip, and it has only one real use. It’s of very little value for hunting or for Grandma to keep under her pillow to repel burglars. What it is good for is the killing of groups of human beings by a single shooter, and for nothing else.
  For that reason, it was outlawed by federal statute until 2004, when that law expired and our Congress, cowardly as it always is when it comes to offending the National Rifle Association, failed to renew it."

  Most of us foreigners are baffled when we hear discussion of a 'gun control debate' in the USA. To the unbiased observer, it is clear that the debate is over, and the wrong side won.

  (tags: usa guns)

Having greatly enjoyed the first volume of this manga series, I am glad to say that I thought the second kept up the standard. It is the start of what may be an extended flashback to the 1630s, shortly after the plague that killed most of Japan's men.

The young noble monk Arikoto, presenting his respects to the shōgun, is detained and learns to his horror that he is to become one of the shōgun's catamites; but of course, the shōgun is actually a young woman, her father having died though this has been kept secret. It is an intense tale of sexual violence, secrecy, and intrigue, and of flawed human beings overcoming awful personal histories. I will be interested to see where Yoshinaga takes it in future volumes.

I am slightly disappointed that this revolutionary situation isn't used to examine the broader societal impact of the altered post-plague sexual politics; of course the title of the series is explicitly "Ōoku: The Inner Chambers" so I guess we will continue with the focus on the ruling household. Perhaps the shōgun Yoshimune, introduced in the first volume, will use the knowledge gained from the flashbacks to show us the rest of Japan. Even so, it seems to me odd that the feminisation of the ruling elite is accepted by all (including, so far, the author) as a matter of deep shame, that must be covered up at all costs.

On the other hand, I have been genuinely shocked to see complaints in other reviews about the use of archaic English to translate certain Japanese forms of address. I know little of Japanese, but I know enough to realise that this is a Big Deal, and therefore a big challenge in terms of catching nuance for an English translation. Faced with this problem, the translator, Akemi Wegmüller, has done a fantastic job. It really annoys me when people get this wrong, but she has got it completely right.

I did not take careful note, and an open to correction on this point, but I think that this volume of Ōoku fails the Bechdel test. Arikoto is the central character, and in most of the scenes where he is not present, he is the topic of conversation. But I may be wrong.

i) births and deaths

14 January 1934: birth of Richard Briers, who played the Chief Caretaker in Paradise Towers (1988) and Henry Parker in A Day in the Death (Torchwood, 2008).

14 January 1974: death of Paul Whitsun-Jones, who played the Squire in The Smugglers (1966) and the Marshal The Mutants (1972).

broadcast anniversaries

14 January 1967: broadcast of first episode of The Underwater Menace. The Doctor and friends land on a marine volcano around 1968. They escape sacrifice to the god Amdo, but Polly is threatened with transformation into a fish creature.

14 January 1974: broadcast of second episode of Underworld. The Doctor, Leela, Jackson and the crew explore the planetoid around the P7E.

iii) date specified in canon

14 January 2594: Benny Summerfield turns up on the planet of Tyler’s Folly (in Lawrence Miles’ 1997 novel Down).

• GeoCurrent Events: Why Is Belgium a Country?
  Not sure if I agree with all of this: "Most western and northern European countries grew out of kingdoms or federations whose people gradually coalesced (more or less) as nations, gaining unity through common identity. Belgium, by contrast, emerged from a different regime of sovereignty, one in which territories passed among rival multinational dynasties, through war or marriage, with no regard to local desires or ethnic boundaries. The Belgian identity that began to develop after independence in 1830 was always precarious, and is now being shattered through regional resurgence made possible by European integration."
  (tags: belgium)
• The Best Way to Use the Last Five Minutes of Your Day – Peter Bregman – Harvard Business Review
  "Every day, before leaving the office, save a few minutes to think about what just happened. Look at your calendar and compare what actually happened — the meetings you attended, the work you got done, the conversations you had, the people with whom you interacted, even the breaks you took — with your plan for what you wanted to have happen. Then ask yourself three sets of questions:
  * How did the day go? What success did I experience? What challenges did I endure?
  * What did I learn today? About myself? About others? What do I plan to do — differently or the same — tomorrow?
  * Who did I interact with? Anyone I need to update? Thank? Ask a question? Share feedback?"
  (tags: work)
• Independent Diplomat: Employment
  Jobs going at my employers: 1) Media Advisor to be based in New York, 2) Intern to work with me in Brussels.
  (tags: work)
• The Irish Economy » Blog Archive » Divide and conquer
  "Of course ordinary French and German taxpayers are going to be angry at lending their money to an insolvent state with lower tax rates than their own. Why wouldn’t they be? Of course ordinary Irish taxpayers are going to be angry at having to pay for high interest loans designed to bail out foreign banks. Why wouldn’t they be? And while ordinary Europeans get angry with each other, with unpredictable political consequences, capital walks away scot free."
  (tags: ireland eu economics)
• And Then There Were Seventeen…. | afoe | A Fistful of Euros | European Opinion
  "In a blog post which has gathered a certain notoriety, Paul Krugman recently sent the Estonians his condolences. I will send them, not my condolences, but my congratulations, and these not for the somewhat dubious honour of being allowed to join the Eurozone, or even for having carried out a highly successful “internal devaluation” (this outcome is still in doubt), but rather for their stubborness, courage and tenacity. These are indeed hard (and enduring) men and women. "
  (tags: eu economics)
• Locale::Maketext::TPJ13 – search.cpan.org
  "Imagine that your task for the day is to localize a piece of software — and luckily for you, the only output the program emits is two messages, like this:

  'I scanned 12 directories.'
  'Your query matched 10 files in 4 directories.'
  So how hard could that be?"

  (tags: languages)

i) births and deaths

13 January 1923:birth of Jack Watling, who played Professor Travers in The Abominable Snowmen (1967), The Web of Fear (1968) and Downtime (1995).

ii) broadcast anniversaries

13 January 1968: broadcast of fourth episode of The Enemy of the World. The Doctor and friends escape Salamander’s base, at the cost of Fariah’s life. Salamander visits the underground base where he has imprisoned his scientists.

13 January 1973: broadcast of third episode of The Three Doctors.The Second and Third Doctors confront Omega, and discover that his physical body has been destroyed.

13 January 1979: broadcast of third episode of The Power of Kroll. The Doctor realises that the fifth segment is part of Kroll, and retrieves it, destroying the giant creature; most of the miners are killed and the Swampies survive.

13 January 1984: broadcast of fourth episode of Warriors of the Deep. The Doctor regretfully wipes out the reptiles with Hexachromite gas. “There should have been another way.”

iii) date specified in canon

13 January 1213: On the 13th day of the 13th year of the 13th century, on the 13th moon of the 13th planet of the 13th galaxy, the Doctor and Rose encounter the Triskaidekaphobes (in the September 2006 Doctor Who Adventures strip, “Triskaidekaphobia” by the ever excellent Alan Barnes).

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The second book of the famous trilogy, in which the evil Steerpike’s plans to dominate Gormenghast Castle are resolved in vicious single combat with Titus Groan, the 77th earl. When I first read this, at least a quarter of a century ago, the two scenes that really stuck in my mind were the grotesque deaths of Deadyawn the headmaster, killed in a bizarre incident where his wheelchair intersects with a deadly schoolboy game, and of the twin aunts of Titus and Fuchsia, locked away by Steerpike to die in isolation. I was surprised on rereading by quite how early in the book both events come. For the rest of it, Peake’s obsession with disability as a marker for moral iniquity is rather dubious (the ‘Thing’, an unspeaking girl who represents freedom, is the acme of physical and spiritual perfection, while Barquentine, Deadyawn and indeed Steerpike are mutilated and evil). But it is a gloriously baroque description of life in a very peculiar place, and it gets pretty intense in the final chapters, when the castle is flooded and the Countess and Titus stalk Steerpike through the rising waters.

As with the previous volume, and for the same reasons, a Bechdel technical pass; Fuchsia talks to her nanny again, and the demented twins burble at each other, without men necessarily being mentioned. They are all dead by the end of the book.

Note on the first book, revisited: It’s slightly odd that the first volume of the trilogy is actually the one in which Titus figures least, though it bears his name.

broadcast anniversaries

12 January 1974: broadcast of first episode of Invasion of the Dinosaurs, billed simply as Invasion. The Doctor and Sarah land in a deserted London under martial law, and are attacked by first a pterodactyl and then a tyrannosaurus rex.

12 January 1980: broadcast of fourth episode of The Horns of Nimon, ending Season 17 prematurely. K9 rescues the hostages and the Doctor and Romana blow up the Nimons’ complex.

12 January 1982: broadcast of fourth episode of Castrovalva. The Portreeve turns out to be the Master, and the whole of Castrovalva based on Adric’s computations. The Doctor rescues Adric and leaves Castrovalva to fold in on itself, trapping the Master.

12 January 1983: broadcast of fourth episode of Arc of Infinity. Omega attempts to transfer across to our universe, but the Doctor prevents him; and Tegan rejoins the Tardis.

12 January 1984: broadcast of third episode of Warriors of the Deep. The Doctor kills the Myrka, but the Sea Devils take over the base.

12 January 1985: broadcast of second epsiode of Attack of the Cybermen. The Doctor helps the Cryons attack the Cybermen, and Lytton, dying, kills the Cyber-Controller.

date specified in canon

12 January 1898: death of Florence Sundvik (in The Curse of Fenric, 1989)

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While I have been diligently logging anniversaries and rewatches, I’m behind with my logging of recent Who. Quinnis tells the story of how the First Doctor and Susan almost lost the Tardis, as mentioned in a throwaway line in The Edge of Destruction, and now at last told through the pen of Marc Platt. It’s a good adventure – unusually penetrable compared to some of Platt’s more complex scripts, and Carole Ann Ford (reprising Susan, and the narrative voice) and Tara-Louise Kaye (playing Meedla) successfully evoke an alien world with a pre-industrial culture, very peculiar architecture and even weirdly bird life. Given that it is set before the first televised Who story, no knowledge of continuity is demanded of the listener.

However, I am not happy that for the third consecutive story (after An Earthly Child and Relative Dimensions) a mistake made by Susan puts the world / the Doctor / everything at risk. I don’t recall this plot line ever being used for the classic series; it’s a bit unfortunate to do it even once, but three times in a row? Bring back the Susan whose grandfather was Geoffrey Bayldon, and who became President of Gallifrey. Also Tara-Louise Kaye is a bit uncertain as the guest cast, but we are told in the extras track that she was unwell on the day of recording. (Also that she is Carole Ann Ford’s daughter.) And I thought it odd that a story set before the recent Eighth Doctor audio Relative Dimensions should be released after it.

So, rather oddly, an audio that I would recommend more strongly to listeners with no knowledge of Who than to those more familiar with the relevant continuity.

i) births and deaths

11 January 1941: birth of Malcolm Terris, who played Etnin in The Dominators (Second Doctor, 1968) and the Co-pilot in The Horns of Nimon (Fourth Doctor, 1980).

11 January 1995: death of Peter Pratt, who played the Master in The Deadly Assassin (Fourth Doctor, 1976).

ii) broadcast anniversaries

11 January 1964: broadcast of "The Ambush", fourth episode of hte story we now call The Daleks. The Doctor and friends escape the Dalek city, and the Thals are ambushed by the Daleks; the Doctor realises that the Daleks still have the mercury fluid link.

11 January 1969: broadcast of third episode of The Krotons. The Doctor and Zoe prepare to attack the Krotons, who still hold Jamie prisoner in the Dynotrope.

11 January 1975: broadcast of third episode of Robot. Sarah goes the the Scientific Reform Society and discovers that Kettlewell is one of the conspirators. Hild Winters and Think Tank retreat to their bunker.

11 January 1982: broadcast of third episode of Castrovalva. The Doctor, Tegan and Nyssa explore Castrovalva; but the captive Adric makes an appearance and the town starts to fold in on itself…

11 January 1983: broadcast of third episode of Arc of Infinity. The Doctor's execution has been faked by Hedin, who is under the control of Omega.