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…those bizarre arguments tend to be made by professional politicians who really don’t like the increased choice that AV gives to voters. Every argument they make against AV seems to have at its heart the point that “You the voter should not be allowed think or do that”. Voters, on the other hand, voting under an AV system, think “I really like her, he’s okay, and I can’t stand that other guy with the beard”. The professional politicians on the No side just hate that voters should be given permission by AV to even think like that.
Monthly Archives: April 2011
BSFA Awards
In case you hadn’t heard:
Best Novel: Ian McDonald’s The Dervish House – congratulations, sir!
Best Short Fiction: “The Shipmaker”, by Aliette de Bodard.
Best Art: Joey Hi-Fi’s cover for Zoo City.
Best Non-Fiction: Paul Kincaid’s Blogging the Hugos – at least I gave this my first preference.
Not a bad set of results at all.
April Books 25) The Doctor Who Annual 1983
A couple of interesting things about this annual. For the first time it features behind-the-scenes articles on how the TV show is made, including interviews with Simon MacDonald of Visual Effects, Janet Budden and Odile Dicks-Mireaux about design for Castrovalva, and inevitably JNT himself who gets as much space as the others combined. The filler fluff seems to have otherwise been cut back and the stories are decent enough – the first one in particular is rather long by DW Annual standards. All stories feature Nyssa and Tegan, and the comic strip (only one this year) has Adric as well; and the last story features the Master kidnapping planes taking off from Heathrow, so completely different from any recently shown TV story then. The art is decent with the companions and Doctor looking more or less like themselves (though the Master looks more Delgado than Ainley).
April Books 24) Generosity, by Richard Powers
To be honest I was a little underwhelmed by this book, set in the present day, featuring an Algerian refugee living in Chicago who turns out to have been genetically programmed for permanent happiness and ends up fleeing her own sudden celebrity. I thought it was charming enough but not terribly profound, and the author’s appearances in parentheses wondering about what he will write next seemed to me rather precious. At least it’s not very long.
That means I’ve now read all six shortlisted novels for this year’s Arthur C. Clarke Award (which will be announced on Wednesday). They fall pretty easily into three categories:
Underwhelming – Generosity, by Richard Powers, and Lightborn, by Tricia Sullivan
Good, but seem odd inclusions on the shortlist – Monsters of Men, by Patrick Ness and Declare, by Tim Powers
Excellent, and I hope one of them wins: Zoo City, by Lauren Beukes and The Dervish House, by Ian McDonald. Local pride would incline me towards The Dervish House. Good luck to ’em all.
April Books 23) Blood Heat, by Jim Mortimore
What if the Silurians had killed the Third Doctor in the 1970s and taken over the earth, leaving the Brigadier and Liz Shaw as leaders of a hunted and dwindling human resistance? Jim Mortimore brings the Seventh Doctor, Ace and Benny to a parallel universe to find out. It was particularly interesting to read it soon after listening to a slightly different alternate timeline for Liz (The Sentinels of The New Dawn) and also the Ace-in-devastated-England stories, Project: Destiny and A Death in the Family, which Big Finish did last year. Mortimore writes engagingly and I kept turning the pages, but I was not totally convinced by some of the details – the use of the Tardis to sort things out at the end, or the Jo Grant time line, or the plausibility of two decades of human resistance (including a functioning nuclear submarine). Still, a pleasing read, with the ending setting up (I suppose) a story arc for the next few novels.
Whoniversaries 23 April
i) births and deaths
23 April 1975: death of William Hartnell, who played the First Doctor from 1963 to 1966 and again in 1972.
ii) broadcast anniversaries
23 April 2005: broadcast of World War Three. The Doctor, Rose and Mickey defeat the Slitheen by hacking into UNIT’s computers.
23 April 2011: broadcast of The Impossible Astronaut.
Delicious LiveJournal Links for 4-23-2011
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A British diplomat visits Majuro.
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Pavol Demeš visits Chernobyl, 25 years on.
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Chad Orzel reacts to my Hugos post with a confession of his own.
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Conrad Halling reacts to my Hugo post (and has some complaints about Livejournal).
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"The No-To-AV campaign leaflet is quite the most hateful document I have ever read, and I speak as one who has made a special study of the works of Dave Sim, and once read the Daily Express every day for a month."
Concealed ire and glee
This post locked for obvious reasons.
Ire
Some bloke called Marios Evriviadis, an assistant lecturer in international politics at a college in Athens which I have not heard of, has written a long screed about evil foreign pseudo-NGOs meddling with the Cyprus situation (can’t find the original but here is one of the places). As sometimes happens, my name is mentioned, which is what triggered my google-fu; I was surprised on running it through the online translator to discover that I apparently was forced out of my last job due to pressure from the Turkish government. Nothing could be farther from the truth, and I wonder if Mr Evridiadis has actually been misinformed by someone claiming to know the facts, or (more likely) if he has simply invented it in the expectation that nobody cold challenge his good story. I posted a brief statement in response, on those sites where it was actually possible to do so, and emailed Mr Evriviadis directly demanding a retraction, though I don’t expect to hear back.
Glee
I was also a little alarmed to receive from Chambré Public Affairs their election guide to the Northern Ireland Assembly election on 5 May. In general I like their work and approach, and I go back a long way with Will Chambré, the boss, who I played with when we were about seven. But this seemed to me to be treading a bit on my own territory, presenting a guide to each of the 18 electoral districts and speculating on the results. I was worried either that they might have copied my own material or, worse, that they might have done their own work and done it better.
But I was reassured on looking through their guide over lunch. Not only is it not ripped off from my own site, it is definitely not as good, with confusing statistics provided and some significant inaccuracies in the non-mathematical information. I note that it’s not downloadable from their own website (I was sent it by email), and wonder if Will has retrospectively pulled the plug on it. (It’s very bad of me to feel glee at someone else’s project not working out well, but sometimes I am a bad person.)
Whoniversaries 22 April
22 April 1942: birth of Denis Lill, who played Dr. Fendleman in Image of the Fendahl (1977) and Sir George Hutchinson in The Awakening (1984).
22 April 1984: birth of Michelle Ryan, who played Christina de Souza in Planet of the Dead (2009).
22 April 1989: death of Kenny McBain, who directed The Horns of Nimon (1979-80).
ii) broadcast anniversaries
22 April 1967: broadcast of third episode of The Faceless Ones. The Doctor convinces the Commandant to let him investigate the mysterious disappearances.
22 April 1972: broadcast of third episode of The Mutants. Jo, the doctor, Cotton and Stubbs are trapped in the caves by the Marshall, with gas closing in.
22 April 2006: broadcast of Tooth and Claw. The Doctor and Rose save Queen Victoria from werewolves; she founds the Torchwood Institute.
(Odd coincidence that Pauline Collins features in two episodes shown exactly 39 years apart.)
Delicious LiveJournal Links for 4-22-2011
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David Tennant's tribute to Elisabeth Sladen
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The report places considerable emphasis on the importance of achieving a more sustainable approach to security, energy, agriculture, and the environment. Again, it is important to stress that this narrative was penned by senior military thinkers, not the Sierra Club. The simple fact is that any clear-eyed analysis pretty quickly comes to the same conclusion: The United States has established an incentive system that just doesn't make any sense. It continues to pour tens of billions of dollars into agricultural and oil subsidies every single year even as these subsidies make the gravity of the environmental, health, and land-use problems the country faces in the future ever graver.
Whoniversaries 21 April
21 April 1927: birth of Gerald Flood, who played Kamelion in 1983 and 1984, and also King John in The King’s Demons (1983).
21 April 1935: birth of Anthony Read, script editor of Doctor Who from Underworld (1978) to The Armageddon Factor (1979), co-writer of The Invasion of Time (1978) and writer of The Horns of Nimon (1979-80).
21 April 2002: death of Terry Walsh, stuntman and actor in many Old Who stories.
ii) broadcast anniversaries
21 April 1973: broadcast of third episode of Planet of the Daleks. The Doctor and the Thals escape from the Dalek base.
21 April 2007: broadcast of Daleks in Manhattan. The Doctor and Martha land in New York in 1930 where the Daleks are attempting to merge with humans.
Delicious LiveJournal Links for 4-21-2011
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Big list of tributes – the ones that caught my eye listed separately.
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BBC / Russell T Davies tribute
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Iain Coleman's tribute
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Lynne Thomas' tribute.
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The Doctors' tributes.
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Tom Baker's tribute.
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Millennium Elephant's tribute.
Elisabeth Sladen
I write from London, where I will be taking young F to the Doctor Who Experience this morning, after last night’s unexpected and very sad news that Elisabeth Sladen is no more. There are some lovely tributes to her already: see
For myself, she is the first Classic Who companion who I remember clearly. Numerous female fans have written of her importance as a role model for girls, but this was not absent from the way we boys related to her either – being the Doctor’s friend, the one who gets to travel with him for fun and danger, was a cause of envy and emulation. Her relationship with the Doctor taught me important lessons about mentoring which I try to implement in my life to this day. As I’ve commented before, her character really blossomed in the Sarah Jane Adventures when she acquired a group to mentor in her own turn, rather than being saddled with the chinless wonders she was given as comic relief in the first K9 spinoff and the 1990s Pertwee audios.
I’ve been trying to identify my own favourite Elisabeth Sladen moments. Her two farewells, of course, in The Hand of Fear and School ReunionPyramids of MarsDeath to the DaleksThe Monster of PeladonEnemy of the BaneSarah Jane Smith audio plays. But if you want to listen to a lesser-known jewel of Elisabeth Sladen, in I think her only appearance in the Whoniverse where she does not play Sarah or her double, I strongly recommend you get hold of Walking to Babylon (will cost you a fiver), one of the very first Big Finish audios, adapted by Jacqeline Rayner from a Kate Orman novel about Bernice Summerfield, where she plays the ancient priestess Ninan-ashtammu and does it superbly. There’s always more of her material out there if you know where to look.
The BBC faces a tough choice now about the Sarah Jane Adventures, in that apparently half of the next series had already been filmed. In my own view there are only two real options: leave it at the end of Series Four (as Big Finish left her at the end of their sequence of audios), or engineer some teachable moment about Sarah Jane’s own demise. The latter is much trickier, yet I somehow hope they do it, and do it well; Sarah Jane Smith and Elisabeth Sladen deserve no less.
Whoniversaries 20 April
i) births and deaths
I’ll comment more later, but like everyone else I was very sad to see that Elisabeth Sladen’s name is now in the minus column as well.
20 April 1951: birth of Louise Jameson, who played the Fourth Doctor companion Leela from 1977 to 1978.
20 April 1968: broadcast of sixth episode of Fury from the DeepThe Making of Doctor Who by Malcolm Hulke and Terrance Dicks, the first book about the show.
20 April 1974: broadcast of fifth episode of The Monster of Peladon. Eckersley’s treachery is revealed.
Delicious LiveJournal Links for 4-20-2011
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I don't expect my colleague to share all my beliefs about how to weigh the political equality of citizens against the freedom of billionaires to spend their money on politics. But I do think that if we don't agree that rich people have more political power than poor people and that they use that power to pursue their economic interests, then we've really got a communications problem.
Election Essay 3: How will the boundary changes impact?
(Written for Stratagem, 19 April 2011)
Boundary changes are both a curse and a blessing for the psephologist. The process of sitting down with copies of the maps of changed districts, and allocate votes for the various parties in past elections to small fragments of constituencies, and then adding them up and trying to believe the answer, is one of mind-numbing complexity. On the other hand, one tends to find that very few other people have tried it, and that fortunately those who do tend to reach much the same conclusions.
The boundaries for this year’s Assembly elections are being used for the second time, following last year’s Westminster election, and probably for the last time, assuming that the House of Commons is reduced to 600 MPs as scheduled and that there is no premature dissolution. They replaced the 18-seat boundaries which had been used for every election from 1996 to 2007. In some cases – the five south-western constituencies, and North Down – there was in fact no change. Some of the other seats, however, were quite drastically altered.
The biggest net change is to Strangford, where seven Castlereagh wards were moved to the Belfast constituencies in return for three South Down wards being added at the other end. I make the net shift of 2007 voters about 3,000 unionist votes (2,400 DUP and 600 UUP) out, about 200 nationalist votes (mostly SF, though they are still a long way behind) coming in, and Alliance down by a net 800 or 900. Given that the seat had the closest result in the entire 2007 election, the DUP’s Michelle McIlveen defeating the SDLP’s Joe Boyle by a mere 31.05 votes, one has to count it as rather likely that the SDLP will make the breakthrough here which they have been close to in the last few elections.
The second biggest change is East Belfast, where five of those Castlereagh wards are added from Strangford at the cost of two going to South Belfast. Here I make the net change of voters 3,600 extra unionists, based on their 2007 performance (2,600 DUP, 800 UUP and 200 others); 300 fewer nationalists (200 SF, 100 SDLP); and 200 more Alliance. These shifts are, however, eclipsed by the massive change in voter behaviour which saw Naomi Long elected Alliance’s first Member of Parliament in 2010, defeating DUP leader Peter Robinson; the 2007 results are of limited use as a guide to voting in 2011.
North Belfast is one seat where, though the changes on the ground are drastic, with six Newtownabbey wards being added, the electoral consequences are fairly minimal. I reckon that SF and the DUP in North Belfast both gain 1500 voters who supported them elsewhere in 2007; but the SDLP gain 1000, the UUP 900 and Alliance 700. It barely changes the percentage vote share for the parties.
South Antrim is a slightly different matter. It loses five wards to North Belfast and gains one from Lagan Valley; I make the net shifts 800 fewer unionist voters from 2007 (fairly equally split between DUP and UUP), 500 fewer Alliance voters and 1,500 fewer nationalist voters (perhaps 850 SF to 650 SDLP). In 2007, the SDLP’s Thomas Burns beat the DUP’s Mel Lucas for the last seat by less than 1,200 votes, so all one can say is that his defence of his seat has been made tougher.
South Belfast gains two wards from East Belfast and two from Castlereagh. By my count they have 2,200 unionist voters (1,600 DUP and 600 UUP) in 2007, 1,100 nationalist voters (700 SF and 400 SDLP) and also 700 Alliance voters. In 2007, Sinn Féin’s Alex Maskey was only 700 votes ahead of the second DUP candidate, Christopher Stalford, so again his defence has been made tougher.
Lagan Valley, as noted above, loses a ward to South Antrim and, more significantly, one-and-a-half wards to West Belfast. I reckon that removes 1,200 unionist voters (900 DUP and 300 UUP), little difference to Alliance (for whom the areas in question are not hotbeds of support) and 3,800 nationalist voters (2,400 SF, and 1,400 SDLP) – this is almost half of the 7,900 Nationalist voters of 2007, and exactly half of the SDLP’s support. It’s very difficult to see a nationalist seat being retained in Lagan Valley in that context.
East Antrim, however, goes the other way, losing one ward to North Belfast and gaining three from North Antrim, with a net loss of 900 unionist votes (600 DUP and 300 UUP) and 200 Alliance votes, and a net gain of 1,600 nationalist votes (900 SF, 700 SDLP). The SDLP missed their seat here by less than 900 votes in 2007; if they can remain the larger nationalist party (which they were not in 2010) they should be able to make a gain.
West Belfast gains those one-and-a-half wards from Lagan Valley and thus also gains 400 unionist votes (300 DUP and 100 UUP) and 2,800 nationalist votes (1,800 SF and 1,000 SDLP). I don’t see that changing the results very much.
South Down loses three wards to Strangford. I reckon that the 2007 levels of support in the area in question was 2,700 unionists (1,700 DUP and 1,000 UUP) and 1,000 nationalists (evenly divided). This may be enough to gain nationalists a seat, but it may not – the UUP’s John McCallister beat the SDLP’s Michael Carr for the last seat by over 3,000 votes in 2007, which looks on the face of it like a sufficient cushion.
East Londonderry and Foyle have a straight transfer of two wards to the former from the latter. I make the 2007 results in the area concerned about 700 unionists (600 DUP and 100 UUP), and 2000 nationalists, equally split between the two main parties. (Again, not a strong area for Alliance.) This doesn’t make much difference in Foyle; it nudges nationalists closer to a third seat in East Londonderry, but probably not close enough.
Finally, North Antrim is very much affected by the loss of three Moyle wards to East Antrim: a heavily nationalist area, I make the shift 900 SF voters, 700 SDLP voters and a handful of unionists. The SDLP’s Declan O’Loan had a comfortable margin of more than 2,000 votes over the DUP’s Deirdre Nelson, but that becomes much less comfortable under the new boundaries.
In summary, one can see the boundary changes having the following likely effects:
Unionist gain from nationalists: almost certain in Lagan Valley, possible in South Antrim, South Belfast, and North Antrim.
Nationalist gain from unionists: almost certain in Strangford and East Antrim (though Alliance seats in both are also potentially at risk), possible in South Down.
But of course, this analysis is based on voters supporting the same parties in 2011 as they did in 2007, whatever the boundaries may be; and we can be pretty certain that that will not happen.
Whoniversaries 19 April
19 April 1969: broadcast of first episode of The War Games. The Tardis lands in what appears to be a first world war battlefield, and the Doctor is sentenced to death by firing squad.
19 April 1975: broadcast of first episode of Revenge of the Cybermen. The Doctor, Harry and Sarah arrive at Space Beacon Nerva to find many dead crew members, a mysterious golden asteroid and Cybermats.
19 April 2002: webcast of “Death Comes to Time, Part 1”, which is, confusingly, the eleventh episode of Death Comes to Time.
19 April 2008: broadcast of Planet of the Ood. The Doctor and Donna visit the Ood Sphere and liberate the Ood from their human masters.
Delicious LiveJournal Links for 4-19-2011
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Encountering JRRT, but in a different way.
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Curing procrastination.
Game of Thrones, Episode One
So, for those of you who have seen it, what did you think?
The show seems at present to be very much the Sean Bean / Eddard Stark story, along with his two younger, brighter children (I mean Arya and Bran, very effectively portrayed by Maisie Williams and Isaac Hempstead-Wright; Rickon from the books is abolished), and then the parallel story of Emilia Clarke/Daenerys over the ocean. This obviously means downplaying some of the other viewpoint characters, but really these are the most interesting ones, apart from Tyrion who we don’t see a lot of in Episode One (though Peter Dinklage shines in every scene). It is precisely the centrality of the kids that makes me wonder about the target audience; Martin’s books are not children’s books, and the TV version is definitely not a children’s programme, so I wonder if adult viewers will really be able to identify with the smaller people.
As I said at the top, I liked most of the adaptation in terms of how it brought the book to life for me, but the Wall/Jon Snow/Catelyn subplot didn’t quite seem to me to come off. Michelle Fairley’s chemistry with Sean Bean is a bit variable (by contrast, she’s much better with their supposed children, which is just as well, considering). Richard Madden is even more of a cipher as Robb Stark than the original character is in the books. And I know that the Northern Irish climate is to blame for this, but the Wall didn’t quite seem cold enough to me (other than that, the show looks absolutely gorgeous).
On the plus side, the Daenerys/Viserys/Drogo realisation is fantastic. Again, I have the advantage of knowing what is to come, and that Daenerys’ rise will be a contrast with the fall of all the Starks and Eddard in particular. If I didn’t know that she has better times ahead, it would be quite hard to tolerate the way in which she is used as a piece of dynastic meat by her brother and the man she is forced to marry, even more viciously on the screen than in the books.. Emilia Clarke is effective and memorable as the sacrificed virgin; I hope she’s able to keep it up when she becomes the warrior witch-queen.
I also liked the music, and the opening titles, showing the interlocking primitive politics of the kingdom as clockwork mechanisms, are at least memorable even if not quite technologically correct. And I’ll watch the next episode, of course.
Whoniversaries 18 April
18 April 1928: birth of David Whitaker, the first script editor of Doctor Who (from An Unearthly Child to The Dalek Invasion of Earth) and writer of The Rescue (1964), The Crusade (1965), The Power of the Daleks (1966), The Evil of the Daleks (1966-67), The Enemy of the World (1967-68), The Wheel in Space (1968) and The Ambassadors of Death (1970); also of the 1965 stage play, The Curse of the Daleks, and of two of the first three novelisations, Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks (1964) and Doctor Who and the Crusaders (1965).
18 April 1929: birth of Peter Jeffrey, who played the Pilot in The Macra Terror (1967) and Count Grendel in The Androids of Tara (1978).
18 April 1930: birth of Angus Lennie, who played Storr in The Ice Warriors (1967) and Angus MacRanald in Terror of the Zygons (1975).
18 April 1956: birth of Eric Roberts, who played the Master in The TV Movie (1996).
18 April 1971: birth of David McDonald, better known as David Tennant, who played the Tenth Doctor from 2005 to 2010.
ii) broadcast anniversaries
18 April 1964: broadcast of “The Temple of Evil”, second episode of the story we now call The Keys of Marinus. Barbara defeats the evil bottled brains.
18 April 1970: broadcast of fifth episode of The Ambassadors of Death. The Doctor blasts off to investigate the Mars probe for himself.
18 April 2010: broadcast of Victory of the Daleks. WOULD YOU LIKE A CUP OF TEA?
iii) date specified in canon
18 April 1906: the San Francisco earthquake, as featured in Andy Lane’s extraordinary 1994 novel, All-consuming Fire.
An awful lot of birthdays today, David Tennant being the last but not the least. If you want your child to be involved with Doctor Who, perhaps you should plan a hot date with your partner around 18 July…
Gibbon Chapter XLIX: Iconoclasm, Charlemagne and the Holy Roman Empire
This chapter has three parts: first, the growth of the controversy about the use of icons in religious worship, and how this drove a wedge between the Pope and the Empire; second, the rise of Charlemagne and the re-foundation of the Western Empire; and third, the subsequent re-foundation of the Holy Roman Empire and a brief sketch of its history, finishing by contrasting the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV, at his coronation in 1356, with Augustus, who started it all. I must say I found it a really enlightening chapter; I had had no idea that it was iconoclasm that made possible the rise of the Carolingians and brought an end to the Byzantine presence in Italy. (Is that still the received scholarly wisdom?)
See also my reflections on Gibbon’s anti-Catholicism, Pope Joan, and scholars and gentlemen.
2010 BSFA Award for Best Art
Just realised that I needed to catch the voting deadline for the BSFA awards, and I have hastily ranked the nominees for Best Art as follows, before scanning and emailing my ballot:
1) Ben Greene – ‘A Deafened Plea for Peace’, cover for Crossed Genres 21
2) Andy Bigwood – cover for Conflicts (Newcon Press)
3) Charlie Harbour – cover for Fun With Rainbows by Gareth Owens (Immersion Press)
4) Adam Tredowski – cover for Finch, by Jeff Vandermeer (Corvus)
5) Joey Hi-Fi – cover for Zoo City, by Lauren Beukes (Angry Robot)
6) Dominic Harman – cover for The [sic] Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut (Gollancz)
I don’t claim to have much aesthetic sensitivity in this area, and am impressed by Maureen Kincaid Speller’s analysis of the nominees in the course of which she comes to a completely different and probably more robust set of preferences.
(My votes in the other categories: Best Novel, Best Short Fiction, Best Non-Fiction. I never got round to listening to the podcasts, and have excluded one of the others, so my Non-Fiction ballot has votes for only three of the five.)
A History of the World in 100 Objects
Woke this morning in some discomfort due to minor but inconvenient medical complaint, and in the course of driving to doctor and then the pharmacy and then back home, I finished listening to the last few installments of A History of the World in 100 Objects, which has been my recourse when I run out of Doctor Who audios since I finished a rather unimpressive BBC history series on the British Empire four months ago.
A History of the World in 100 Objects is really excellent. A hundred thirteen-minute programmes – so 22 hours in total – each taking a single exhibit in the British Museum and telling its story. By concentrating on the material goods, Neil MacGregor, the British Museum’s director, is able to take us on a journey across cultures, taking them on their own merits, knocking down preconceptions and prejudices about pre-industrial and non-Western societies. He starts with an Egyptian mummy (as a methodological marker – the rest of the first tranche of programmes are about the stone age) and ends with a solar-powered lamp, reflecting on hos that is changing the world, especially the developing world. All of the programmes are excellent and it feels a bit invidious to single out any, but I felt MacGregor’s own excitement when describing two of the best-known items in the BM – the Rosetta Stone and the Sutton Hoo helmet, the latter of which features Seamus Heaney – an attractive feature of these programmes is the number and quality of the guest speakers, alternating between experts and celebrities (most of whom are of course experts in some way anyway). But really the whole set of audios is absolutely superb, and if you have the sort of lifestyle where the occasional thirteen-minute gap could be filled with some enlightenment about matters historical, you can’t do better than start with this. My only serious complaint is that it is now over and I’ll have to find something else to listen to.
Whoniversaries 17 April
17 April 1924: birth of Clyde Pollitt, who played a Time Lord (the Chancellor) in The War Games (1969) and The Three Doctors (1973).
also 17 April 1924: birth of Kevin Lindsay, who played Linx in The Time Warrior (1973-74), Cho Je in Planet of the Spiders (1974), and Styre/The Marshal in The Sontaran Experiment (1975).
17 April 1941: birth of Brian Miller, who played Dugdale in Snakedance (1983) and Harry Stevens in The Mad Woman in the Attic (SJA, 2009); is also married to Elisabeth Sladen.
ii) broadcast anniversaries
17 April 1965: broadcast of “The Warlords”, fourth episode of the story we now call The Crusade. Barbara escapes; Ian retrieves her, the Doctor and Vicki; and the time travellers depart.
17 April 1971: broadcast of second episode of Colony in Space. Jo talks to the colonists, and the Doctor talks to the IMC; and is threatened by the killer robot, again.
Delicious LiveJournal Links for 4-17-2011
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"it is my great regret to inform you that Atlas Shrugged: Part I is neither good nor good-bad, but bad-bad-bad-bad. I dreamed, not of sesame chicken, but of my own swift and merciful death, and that of the director, not necessarily in that order."
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Baby penguin being tickled. OMG teh cutez!
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The headline slightly exaggerates – she was basically doing work experience with her MEP. And I'm aware of at least one professional interpreter at the European Parliament with a serious visual impairment – an Irish bloke who sometimes gets the same train as me – and would not be surprised if there are many others. But in any case it's a nice story.
Heroes of Sontar, and The Sentinels of the New Dawn
Barely at the midpoint of the month and there are two new Big Finish audios to enjoy: the main range release brings the Fifth Doctor, Turlough, Tegan, and an older Nyssa together with abunch of Sontarans, and a Companion Chronicle has Liz Shaw timewarped in Cambridge.
Heroes of Sontar, by the reliable Alan Barnes, is the better story of the two. At first it seems a rather peculiar and not necessarily successful attempt at a humorous twist on the Sontarans, as a bunch of deadbeat veterans are sent on a mysterious mission to a planet deep in Rutan space. But this being Alan Barnes, all is not what it seems, and Janet Fielding and Mark Strickson in particular get some good moments as Tegan and Turlough as the Tardis team work out the awful truth behind the apparent absence of sentient life on the planet. Poor Sarah Sutton is not as well served as the older Nyssa, though she gets some sentimental moments with Tegan near the end, and I was not wild about the characterisation of the Doctor. But I was much more impressed by Barnes' ringing of the changes on the Sontarans here than by, say, Colin Brake's retake on the Judoon.
I was less wild about The Sentinels of the New Dawn by Paul Finch, which turns out to be a sort-of prequel to the Lost Story Leviathan, adapted by Finch from a script by his father Brian. Liz Shaw, having recently left UNIT, summons the Third Doctor to Cambridge to help her with a case of timewarping machinery which turns out to have political implications for the year 2014. It didn't especially grab me, though Caroline John is always good to hear; a slightly personal grumble is that I wish people who actually know Cambridge would write Liz Shaw stories – time travel experiments would surely be a bit more likely to be done at the Cavendish rather than at DAMTP as here, DAMTP not being well known for its experimental facilities (or indeed inclinations). Maybe things are different in the Whoniverse. (I recently became familiar with the term Brit-picking; is there a specifically Cambridge version of it which I suffer from?)
Industrial archaeology revisited
Last week I wrote of the abandoned steam tram line which passed through Sint-Joris-Weert. A little subsequent googling came up with these two picture postcards showing the two stations in operation, railway on the left, steam tram (with rails in front of it) on the right:
I can’t read the sign on the near end of the tram station – its inscription seems to start with ‘Ma’. The sign saying ‘Sint-Joris-Weert’ or possibly ‘Weert-St-Georges’ (or both) would have been over the front door.
I reckon that the upper picture is the earlier one, given that the road seems not to have been tarmaced and that there is no tree at the near end of the railway station – the tree is still there today (and I do mean today – picture taken this morning):
I notice also that the steeple of the tram station has been replaced by a smaller structure at some point.
Non-Belgians may be amused by the nature of the fast-food stall in front of the old tram station today, waiting to serve spectators at a bike race this afternoon.
April Books 22) Judgement of the Judoon, by Colin Brake
Another Ten-on-his-own Who novel, this time featuring a feud between crime lords on a spaceport, a petty thief recognisable by his skin colour, a seventeen-year-old girl detective (whose name is Nikki rather than Mary Sue), and on the plus side a Judoon commander who is actually allowed to develop a character. Rather minor stuff, frankly.
April Books 21) A Question of Blood, by Ian Rankin
Another excellent Rebus novel, let down a little bit by the end – the solution to one of the mysteries depends on someone simply by coincidence having been in the right place at the right time and then doing something rather unexpected conveniently for the plot, another mystery depends on the memory of one of the viewpoint characters and is revealed to us only at the very end though presumably the character in question has been aware of it all through the book. Also I now have spotted that whenever we start to hear in great detail about Siobhan’s (Rebus’s sidekick’s) observations of her surroundings, something ‘orrible is about to happen to her. But on the way there we have the usual brilliant interweaving of professional jealousies, moments of heroism, awful politicians (a recurrent Rebus/Rankin theme), music, and stories from various levels of society which intersect each other in unexpected ways. Pretty accessible to the newcomer as well, I would think.
April Books 20) Declare, by Tim Powers
I rather liked Declare. As a fan of both Tim Powers’ earlier work and of John Le Carré (though I haven’t read either for years), I was impressed both by the audacity of the one trying to write like the other, with added djinn (rather than gin) and by the fact that he pretty much succeeded in pulling it off. It added local colour that I read the passages set around the Soviet/Turkish frontier while myself on a business visit to a former Soviet state which unexpectedly turned out to include a reception at the residence of one of the Western ambassadors posted there. He captures the tone of the disheartened and disreputable spy thriller awfully well, with the added awful secret that is not merely national security but too dreadful to be told or even fully described (“Lovecraft meets spycraft”, though that tagline gives the incorrect impression that the style is particularly Lovecraftian). I should add, however, that I think Le Carré tends to do slightly better by his women characters than Powers has managed here. Not a quick read, but I enjoyed it.