Current Titus Alone, by Mervyn Peake It’s the End of the World: But What Are We Really Afraid Of?, by Adam Roberts The Fountains of Paradise, by Arthur C. Clarke
Last books finished Comet Weather, by Liz Williams Mostly Void, Partially Stars, by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor
“Sandkings”, by George R.R. Martin Chasm City, by Alastair Reynolds Enemy Mine, by Barry B. Longyear The Doors of Eden, Adrian Tchaikovsky Inside Out: A Personal History of Pink Floyd, by Nick Mason
Next books Romeinse sporen: het relaas van de Romeinen in de Benelux met 309 vindplaatsen om te bezoeken, by Herman Clerinx Foucaults Pendulum, by Umberto Eco
Thu, 12:56: Cryptophone firm and Belgian police clash over ‘cracked’ drug trafficker messages https://t.co/sWhBD7WdOy Frankly, I am unconvinved by either side’s story here.
Thu, 13:45: RT @why0hy: @nwbrux I remember being highly impressed when US law enforcement authorities said that it had “traced” the origin of the ilove…
Thu, 16:38: RT @deannawol: @why0hy @nwbrux I looked at the code as part of a project in Uni and yup, I laughed so hard at how it had been portrayed in…
Fri, 00:00: 200 hours left to nominate for this year’s Hugo Awards! If you were a CoNZealand member, and you want to nominate, check now to make sure that you are in the system.
12 March 1907: birth of Arthur Hewlett, who played rebel scientist Kalmar in State of Decay (Fourth Doctor, 1980) and doomed passenger Kimber in Terror of the Vervoids (Sixth Doctor, 1986)
ii) broadcast anniversaries
12 March 1966: broadcast of "The Plague", second episode of the story we now call The Ark. The Doctor, Steven and Dodo are on trial; but the Doctor is able to find a cure for the plague, and all watch as the Earth is destroyed.
12 March 1977: broadcast of third episode of The Talons of Weng-Chiang. Leela watches as Weng Chiang kidnaps a girl and drains her of her vital essence, and flees to the sewers.
12 March 1999: broadcast of The Curse of Fatal Death, Steven Moffat's first Doctor Who script, starring Jonathan Price as the Master, Julia Sawalha as Emma, and Rowan Atkinson (and also Richard E. Grant, Jim Broadbent, Hugh Grant and Joanna Lumley) as the Doctor.
12 March 2008: broadcast of From Out Of The Rain (Torchwood), the one with the creepy cinema.
This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging which will fall in 2023. Every six-ish days I've been revisiting a month from my recent past, noting work and family developments as well as the books I read in that month. I've found it a pleasantly cathartic process, especially in recent circumstances. If you want to look back at previous entries, they are all tagged under bookblog nostalgia.
July 2010 was quite a heavy travel month for me, starting with Kosovo (in advance of the ICJ ruling), a day-trip to the Hague, then a brief trip to London, and a long trip to Juba and Kampala where I was part of the delegation of Southern Sudan (as it then was) to the African Union summit, and ending the month with my sister in Burgundy. I Skyped with F the day before his 11th birthday from my hotel in Juba.
This was my fourth and last trip to South Sudan, and my only visit to Uganda so far. As you can tell, my colleague and I somewhat stuck out among the Southern Sudanese delegates in Kampala; we are not tall enough. On the left, we are meeting with the then Foreign Minister and his Undersecretary; on the right, with some of the Southern Sudan team in Kampala. The very tall chap, Ador Akok Athuai, is 7'2", 218 cm, certainly the tallest person I have ever met.
I took a hasty couple of photos which seemed remarkable enough at the time: Colonel Gaddhafi, the leader of Libya, brushed past us with his entourage as we loitered on the shores of Lake Victoria waiting for lunch. There was no sign of the rumoured bodyguard of trained Ukrainian superwomen, though we understood that he was making his way to his personal travel tent, pitched further along the bay behind us.
Seven months later, his regime had crumbled, and fifteen months later, he was dead in a ditch. (The chap he was talking to, the then president of Comoros, was also out of power less than a year later, but that was just because his term of office came to an end and he did not stand for re-election; I'm glad to say that he is still alive.)
I also visited Makerere University in Kampala, where my father had taught for several years in the late 1950s. There were still some records of his presence, though the university has had some tough times since. I identfied the corridor where his office would have been.
This is also the month that I started my daily Whoniversary blogging, first time around.
~9,200 pages (YTD 52,100)
Rather appallingly 0/21 (YTD 34/165) by women
Equally appallingly 0/21 (YTD 11/165) by PoC (as far as I know)
This month's reading was dominated by the Bloody Sunday Report, on which more next month, and the first of the three two-volume compilations of Gibbon's Decline and Fall. Apart from that the best book was The Sun Also Rises, which I had not read before; you can get it here. The worst was the very disappointing 1973 Doctor Who Annual, which you can get here (at a price).
Thu, 10:45: Society of Editors chief quits after row over Meghan racism statement https://t.co/XIdEZLM0tz …but it is not clear that the lesson has been learned.
Lots and lots today, including two significant events on 11 March 1967…
i) births and deaths
11 March 1945: birth of Graeme Harper, director of three Old Who stories (including a large part of Warriors' Gate, for which he was not credited), ten New Who stories (counting Time Crash) and three Sarah Jane Adventures stories
11 March 1952: birth of Douglas Adams, writer of The Pirate Planet (Fourth Doctor, 1978) and Shada (unbroadcast but would have been Fourth Doctor, 1980), co-author of City of Death (Fourth Doctor, 1979) and script editor for Season 17 (1979-80); best known, of course, for other things.
11 March 1960: birth of Robert Glenister, who played Salateen in The Caves of Androzani (Fifth Doctor, 1983) and Thomas Edison in Nikola Tesla's Night of Terror (Thirteenth Doctor, 2020).
11 March 1963: birth of Alex Kingston, who plays Professor River Song in New Who.
11 March 1967: birth of John Barrowman, who plays Captain Jack Harkness in New Who and Torchwood.
11 March 2000: death of Charlie Morgan, who played Songsten in The Abominable Snowmen (Second Doctor, 1967) and the Gold Usher in The Invasion of Time (Fourth Doctor, 1978).
ii) broadcast anniversaries
11 March 1967: broadcast of first episode of The Macra Terror, which is the first to use the new opening sequence and therefore the first time that the current Doctor's face appears on screen before the story starts. The Tardis lands in a colony where people are behaving very strangely and are not on any account allowed to talk about the giant crabs.
11 March 1972: broadcast of third episode of The Sea Devils. The Master summons the Sea Devils from the sea; the Doctor repels them from the beach but they attack the prison.
11 March 1978: broadcast of sixth episode of The Invasion of Time, ending Season 15. The Doctor destroys the Sontarans with a D-Mat gun – hooray! Leela stays on Gallifrey with Andred – Boo!
iii) date specified in-universe
There is a poster for British Science Week 2016, starting on 11 March, at the back of Miss Quill's classroom in The Coach with the Dragon Tattoo (Class, 2016).
It took me a while but I eventually spotted it. (British Science Week apparently had ten days that year.)
This is also the episode in which we see a lovely shout-out to the very first of the regular characters to speak in Old Who:
Also, they made me do mental arithmetic to a metronome; I once wetted myself with nervousness under this torture So my father sent me to King’s College School, Wimbledon. I was just seven years old, the youngest boy there, and they went up to nineteen. My father took me away after a couple of terms because he heard me using naughty words, and because I did not understand the lessons. I had started Latin, but nobody explained what ‘Latin’ meant; its declensions and conjugations were pure incantations to me. For that matter, so were the strings of naughty words. And I felt oppressed by the huge hall, the enormous boys, the frightening rowdiness of the corridors, and compulsory Rugby football of which nobody told me the rules. From there I went to Rokeby, a preparatory school of the ordinary type, also at Wimbledon, where I stayed for about three years. Here I began playing games seriously, grew quarrelsome, boastful, and domineering, won prizes, and collected things. The main difference between myself and the other boys was that I collected coins instead of stamps. The value of coins seemed less fictitious to me. The headmaster caned me only once: for forgetting to bring my gym-shoes to school, and then gave me no more than two strokes on the hand. Yet even now the memory makes me hot with resentment. My serious training as a gentleman began here.
This was the one Great War book that I picked up on our trip to Ypres last September, knowing of course CLAVDIVS, Jason and Belisarius (the last of these I found pretty soporific when I read it long ago). It's a really good read. A bit more than half of it is one of the classic accounts of the war on the Western Front, the gritty horror of battle conditions vividly conveyed; Graves also gives us a good perspective of what soldiers actually thought, generally nothing like as jingoistic as those at home, himself in charge of Welsh soldiers some of whom had very little English; he became a friend of Siegfried Sassoon in the trenches and lost many to whom he was close. The narrative is leavened by shafts of gallows humour.
It's topped and tailed by his early life – grandson of an Irish bishop, great-nephew of the German historian von Ranke, awful public school where his longest-lasting friendship was with one of the teachers, George Mallory, eventually the best man at Graves' first wedding before he died on Everest – and the the period after the war, when he ended up at Oxford as tenants of John Masefield and his wife (who incidentally was an Ulsterwoman), having married the young but very feminist Nancy Nicholson, with what appears to have been every single living English poet livinginthe neighbourhood.
But he was obviously too badly affected by PTSD from his wartime experiences to be able to settle in England, or with Nancy; after a brief excursion to Egypt (where he later heard that Nasser had been one of his students) he leaves for Majorca never to return. It's a good and quick read, and you can get it here.
This was both my top unread non-fiction book and my top book acquired in 2020. Next on both piles is Carrying the Fire, by Michael Collins.
Tue, 15:07: RT @IrishTimes: Our most-read right now: Meghan and Harry’s critics accuse them of being money-hungry careerists, but that’s hilarious comi…
Tue, 22:00: 250 hours left to nominate for this year’s Hugo Awards! If you were a CoNZealand member, and you want to nominate, check now to make sure that you are in the system.
Wed, 10:45: Professor �amon de Valera Jnr: A hypocrite and baby thief at the heart of the Irish establishment https://t.co/fQ4TkppaMN Wow.
Wed, 11:43: RT @davidallengreen: Have gone from not having any particular opinion of Meghan Markle to becoming a huge fan The disruption she is causin…
10 March 1956: birth of Lesley Dunlop, who played Norna (with her very '80s haircut) in Frontios (1984) and Susan Q in The Happiness Patrol (1988).
10 March 1975: birth of Yee Jee Tso, who played Chang Lee in Doctor Who: The TV Movie (1996)
ii) broadcast anniversary
10 March 1973: broadcast of third episode of Frontier in Space. The Master appears in the guise of a Commissioner from Sirius IV; meanwhile the Doctor is imprisoned on the Moon.
iii) date specified in canon
10 March 1942: setting of Sub-species, Eleventh Doctor/Amy/Rory comic strip in Doctor Who Adventures #202 (2010).
It was Saturday night, and the girls were getting ready to go out. They were meeting up with David and some other guys at Romans to see a band.
I'm always interested to read books by my twins, people who like me were born on 26 April 1967 (see also Warren Read and Trish Doller). This one is frankly not as good as the other two, but it is closer to my personal experience, being the story of a confused Catholic student's sexual experiences at university; not terribly erotic, funny in places, you can see from quite an early stage how it's going to end. Our heroine has an unusual sexual red line; she's OK with sleeping with boys under the right circumstances, but she is saving her first orgasm with a man for her marriage. Everyone is entitled to their own kinks, I suppose. There's good local colour of central Illinois (the university is referred to as Central Illinois University, but it's clearly meant to be Eastern Illinois University in Charleston, and there's a field trip to Springfield). You can get it here.
This was the non-genre fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is Splinters and the Impolite President, by William Whyte.
Mon, 16:05: UK ‘balancing books on backs of Yemen’s starving people’, says UN diplomat https://t.co/u9WGU1j28C “Global Britain”: less trade *and* less aid.
Tue, 10:45: RT @BEERG: Interestingly, all the business voices quoted in this piece complaining about the “Frost approach” to the EU are British. It is…
9 March 1951: birth of Chris Clough, who directed Terror of the Vervoids (Sixth Doctor, 1986), The Ultimate Foe (Sixth Doctor, 1986), Delta and the Bannermen (Seventh Doctor, 1987), Dragonfire (Seventh Doctor, 1987), The Happiness Patrol (Seventh Doctor, 1988) and Silver Nemesis (Seventh Doctor, 1988)
9 March 1958: birth of Alan Wareing, who directed The Greatest Show in the Galaxy (Seventh Doctor, 1988), Ghost Light (Seventh Doctor, 1989) and Survival (Seventh Doctor, 1989).
(So more than half of the Seventh Doctor's TV stories were directed by people who celebrate their birthday today.)
9 March 1997: death of Terry Nation, creator of the Daleks, writer of the stories we now call The Daleks (First Doctor, 1963-64), The Keys of Marinus (First Doctor, 1964), The Dalek Invasion of Earth (First Doctor, 1964), The Chase (First Doctor, 1965), Mission to the Unknown (First Doctor, 1965), The Daleks' Master Plan (First Doctor, 1965-66, with Dennis Spooner who always claimed to have done most of the work), and of Planet of the Daleks (Third Doctor, 1973), Death to the Daleks (Third Doctor, 1974), Genesis of the Daleks (Fourth Doctor, 1975), The Android Invasion (Fourth Doctor, 1976) and Destiny of the Daleks (Fourth Doctor, 1979), as well as the Peter Cushing films Doctor Who and the Daleks (1965) and Daleks – Invasion Earth 2150 AD (1966). Not to mention Blake's 7.
ii) broadcast anniversaries
9 March 1968: broadcast of sixth episode of The Web of Fear. The Doctor's friends rescue him from the Intelligence, but he is annoyed; he had reversed the circuits to drain its mind instead.
9 March 1974: broadcast of third episode of Death to the Daleks. The Doctor and Bellal penetrate the City of the Exxilons.
9 March 1982: broadcast of second episode of Earthshock. The Doctor tracks the androids' signal to a space freighter, goes there by Tardis and is arrested.
9 March 1983: broadcast of fourth episode of Enlightenment. The Doctor and Turlough win the race, and are awarded Enlightenment.
9 March 1984: broadcast of second episode of The Caves of Androzani. The Doctor and Peri have been rescued by Sharaz Jek; they escape him and get mixed up with Stotz's smugglers.
9 March 1985: broadcast of first episode of Timelash. The Doctor and Peri land on Karfel, and the Doctor is forced to go back in time to 1885 to retrieve an amulet.
This is the sixth of the seven dates in the year on which six episodes of Old Who were broadcast.
Second paragraph of third chapter (“Skin and Bones”, by Tina Makereti):
It was spring. He went about the place tilling and planting and from time to time felt an urge. He’d look down and see his own weighty erection and think What am I supposed to do with this?
This was a thank-you-for-volunteering from CoNZealand, last year’s Worldcon. It’s an anthology of both newly commissioned work and pieces published in the last forty years or so, addressing the core strands of Māori mythology. I confess I felt somewhat thrown in at the deep end; it was only as I reached the end of the book that I found quite a large and useful chink of explanatory matter that would have helped my appreciation of the stories. For once I would advise readers to start at the back.
At the same time, I’m very appreciative of this sort of effort. I’ve read an awful lot of adaptations of Celtic Myth, and the Matter of Britain has not exactly been neglected by recent writers either; the Matter of Aotearoa is important too. And even without the background knowledge of What It’s All About, these are generally good stories by names which are new to me – the only author I’d previously head of is Keri Hulme. I guess the ones that grabbed me most where those with links to cultural setups I already knew about – eg “Māui Goes to Hollywood” by David Geary, which mixes Māui the trickster with 20th-century mythical figures like Elvis and Marilyn Monroe, or “Moving Mountains” by Clayton Te Kohe, which looks at shared history, culture and creativity through a music fan’s love for a long-since dissipated band. But they are all stimulating and I think I would like a paper copy of the book, to be able to riffle between stories and explanation more readily.
This was at the top of my pile of books by non-white authors. Next on that is Riot Baby, by Tochi Obyebuchi.
Sun, 20:00: 300 hours left to nominate for this year’s Hugo Awards! If you were a CoNZealand member, and you want to nominate, check now to make sure that you are in the system.
Sun, 21:27: RT @GerardAraud: As a diplomat, I am quite interested by this new method of negotiation the UK has been experimenting since Brexit : insult…
Sun, 21:55: RT @Odobes1Luminita: We are 7 women Permanent Representatives to the EU. Not only ambassadors of our countries, but also ambassadors of the…
8 March 1940: birth of Christopher Wray, who played PC Groom in The Dæmons (Third Doctor, 1972) and Leading Seaman Lovell in The Sea Devils (Third Doctor, 1973)
ii) broadcast anniversaries
8 March 1969: broadcast of first episode of The Space Pirates. Space Pirates are destroying navigational beacons; the Tardis lands on one and the pirates blow it up.
8 March 1975: broadcast of first episode of Genesis of the Daleks. The Time Lords send the Doctor, Harry and Sarah to Skaro, where Davros is experimenting.
8 March 1982: broadcast of first episode of Earthshock. Paleontologists disappear and the Tardis appears in an underground cave system, attacked by androids under Cyber-control.
8 March 1983: broadcast of third episode of Enlightenment. Turlough is rescued by the Buccaneer, whose captain invites the others over for a party.
8 March 1984: broadcast of first episode of The Caves of Androzani. The Doctor and Peri get poisoned, captured and (apparently) executed.
8 March 2002: webcast of "The Child, Part 1", fifth episode of Death Comes to Time. I'm just going to note the anniversaries to this in future, the plot is too peculiar to summarise.
8 March 2010: broadcast of Dream-Eaters, ninth episode of the Australian K9 series. K9 must figure out how to destroy an ancient alien weapon before everyone's dreams turn into a waking nightmare.
iii) date specified in-universe
8 March 1702: setting of Big Finish audio Phantasmagoria (1999)
Second frame (more or less) of third story in original and translation – you must read the text from right to left, of course. Both sentences are spoken by Sui's genius father.
This was one of the works of 20th-century sf set in the year 2021 that I listed a while back, but it took me a while to get hold of the English translation of the first volume. This is manga written for a teenage girls' magazine, which is not a sub-genre that I am at all familiar with; Vermillion the robot is being taught how to be human by his creator's teenage daughter Sui, and Feelings ensue.
I had to get to grips with reading right to left, and with the very fluid approach to frames – the story sometimes flows all over the page; and there's a lot of incidental detail that is hinted at rather than shown or told. But these are five solid enough sf stories with a firmly shared setup; Sui and her father are enmeshed in a society where some have an irrational hatred of robots, some are jealously trying to move in on her father's trade secrets, and Sui herself is trying to be a normal teenager in 2021 with a beautiful boy robot waiting for her at home. (Her mother is not mentioned at any point.)
It did seem to me that Vermillion the robot is a perfect unthreatening boyfriend in that he is good company, helps out with the house work and not a sexual prospect in any way – in the very first story, he calls out a predatory professional contact of Sui's father's; there is genuine physical peril for the characters in most of the stories, which Vermillion is usually able to help them to escape from. I still hate cute anthropomorphic robots as a theme, but this was far enough off my usual beat to keep me interested. I don't think I will bother with any more, though, I don't think that there will be any development of the overall story arc; it's really a case of this month's perilous situation. Still, you can get the first volume here.
I was trying to imagine how a British version of this would have looked, and actually it's not too difficult; scanning the storylines of Bunty over the years shows that a number of them did have robot-based plots. (There were fewer in Mandy, but still more than one.)
Sat, 12:53: RT @David_Kitchen_: The Power of Three is shallow and feckless, but Mindwarp is nasty. So Power of Three it is!
Sat, 12:56: RT @ClaireRousseau: I’ve no idea of the context being QTd below, but that LeGuin piece on non-SFF audiences assuming they can reinvent the…
Sat, 13:47: RT @scraphamster: Calling it ‘The Trolley Problem’ is such a neat way to jettison human responsibility onto the inanimate object. We should…
Sat, 23:55: RT @AstroKatie: This lander lasted almost an hour before succumbing to temperatures like the inside of an oven and pressures like a kilomet…
Sun, 11:21: RT @davidallengreen: The United Kingdom government says yet again it will break international law – and why this is daft, dangerous, and di…
Sun, 11:31: RT @Mij_Europe: Look at the state of these numbers. Then interpret Frost’s actions towards EU Cabinet league table by Conservative Party g…
7 March 1930: birth of Brian Hayles, writer of The Celestial Toymaker (First Doctor, 1966), The Smugglers (First Doctor, 1966), The Ice Warriors (Second Doctor, 1968), The Seeds of Death (Second Doctor, 1969), The Curse of Peladon (Third Doctor, 1971) and The Monster of Peladon (Third Doctor, 1974).
7 March 1934: birth of of Gordon Flemyng, director of Dr. Who and the Daleks (1965) and Daleks – Invasion Earth: 2150 A.D. (1966)
ii) broadcast and production anniversaries
7 March 1964: broadcast of "Five Hundred Eyes", third episode of the story we now call Marco Polo. Ping-Cho tells the story of Ala-eddin; Barbara is trapped in the cave of Five Hundred Eyes. (One of the lovely colour photos from the set.)
7 March 1970: broadcast of sixth episode of Doctor Who and the Silurians. The Doctor finds a cure for the Silurians' plague, but they capture him.
7 March 1981: broadcast of second episode of Logopolis. The Doctor and Adric travel to Logopolis on the instructions of the Watcher, not realising that they have brought Tegan with them and that the Master has followed them.
7 March 2005: Christopher Eccleston films his final scene.
iii) date specified in-universe:
7 March 2006: setting of World War Three (Ninth Doctor, 2005)
Driving Miss Daisy won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1989, and three others: Best Actress (Jessica Tandy as Miss Daisy, at 81 the oldest ever winner), Best Makeup, and Best Adapted Screenplay. It lost in five categories, all to different films; that year’s Hugo winner, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, won one (Best Screen Editing) and lost two.
That year’s other Best Picture nominees were Dead Poets Society, which I have seen, and Born on the Fourth of July, Field of Dreams and My Left Foot, which I haven’t. IMDB users rank Driving Miss Daisy16th on one system and 32nd on the other, which is a tick worse than Out of Africa and the lowest aggregate placing for any Oscar winner since Tom Jones.
I have seen 13 other films made in 1989, as final year studies and student politics started to sap my time. They are (in rough IMDB order): Dead Poets Society, Batman, When Harry Met Sally, Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Ghostbusters 2, Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, Henry V, Shirley Valentine, Scandal, The Tall Guy and Jesus of Montreal. I have to say I’d rank Driving Miss Daisy behind all of them except the woeful Star Trek V.
None of the cast had been in previous Oscar, Hugo or Nebula-winning films, or in Doctor Who.
Well, this didn’t especially grab me and I don’t have a lot to say about it. There’s nothing particularly wrong with it, and a couple of things that are right, but I’m putting it a bit below half way down my league table, below The Last Emperor but above Rocky. It’s a gentle character study of an old lady and her slightly less old chauffeur, over the years from 1948 to 1973, set in Atlanta; she’s Jewish and he is black. (NB this is the second Oscar-winning film largely set in Georgia; the first of course was Gone With the Wind.)
I felt it slightly pulled its punches on social commentary; Hoke has witnessed a lynching, long ago; the Werthans’ synagogue is bombed; he is deeply offended by the manner in which she invites him to hear Martin Luther King speak; but these are two people (three counting her son, who is played by Dan Aykroyd and is the other major character) who are destined to get along, without massive drama or, frankly, much of a character arc. The soundtrack is particularly annoyingly upbeat and would have been appropriate theme music for a not-too-taxing soap opera.
So, on the more positive side, this is the first Oscar-winning film with an African-American lead since In the Heat of the Night, 22 years earlier, which makes it, er, the second ever. (We’ve had two Oscar-winning films with Asian leads in the last decade, in 1982 and 1987.) Morgan Freeman is always watchable and delivers a solid and convincing performance here. It’s also worth noting that it’s one of the least funny roles in Dan Aykroyd’s career, and he too carries it off well.
The movie belongs to Jessica Tandy, who is engagingly sympathetic even at her most crotchety, and particularly in her fading final scene, and deserved her Oscar.
I went and found the original play by Alfred Uhry. The opening of the third scene is:
Lights fade on them and come up on Daisy, who enters her living room with the morning paper. She reads with interest. Hoke enters the living room. He carries a chauffeur’s cap instead of his hat. Daisy’s concentration on the paper becomes fierce when she senses Hoke’s presence. Mornin’, Miz Daisy. DAISY: Good morning. HOKE: Right cool in the night, wadn’t it? DAISY: I wouldn’t know. I was asleep. HOKE: Yassum. What yo’ plans today? DAISY: That’s my business.
The play is a three-hander with Daisy, Hoke and Boolie the only visible characters, so we lose Boolie’s wife Florine, the cook Idella, etc (they and others are referred to but not seen). This of course makes for a tighter script, but I feel that the film built solidly on what was already a decent enough (and Pulitzer-winning) story, and of course could show us what Atlanta actually looks like in a way that can only be conveyed less directly on stage. Apart from that, all the good lines from the film are here, and I think it’s possibly the script least changed from the original material of any of the films I have seen. You can get it here.
I’ve already done this year’s Hugo winner, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, so it’s Dances With Wolves next. I thought it was was a load of rubbish when I first saw it; let’s see if I have mellowed in the last 30 years.
Fri, 12:24: A must-read post for anyone interested in the functioning of government in the UK. The government may not have admitted liaibility formally, but the terms of this settlement make it clear that they knew they were going to lose, and lose badly. https://t.co/eX69xHX5eZ
Fri, 12:45: RT @cmclymer: Hi, it’s me, your neighborhood reasonable adult. I heard Dr. Seuss books were “banned” in a Virginia school district, which s…
Fri, 12:56: RT @BritishSave: Eustice wrote to the EU about ‘surprise’ over shellfish. EU wrote back showing him his own letter to stakeholders on D…
Fri, 16:18: RT @LimerickWild: A pleasure to meet today with 2 specialists of the battle of Landen/Neerwinden, Messers. Uyttebroek & Wauters and with Mr…
Fri, 19:10: RT @chrisgreybrexit: Brexit unhinged. New post on my Brexit & Beyond Blog analyses a busy Brexit week: the NIP row and rising NI tensions,…
Fri, 20:48: This is a really good point. The recent MFF negotiations are a good case study – the EP pushed hard for a lot of things, did not get all of them and eventually voted through a compromise including elements which were supposedly utterly unacceptable a few weeks before. https://t.co/Ta5irqjsZS
Sat, 11:16: RT @redhistorian: So many of our Brexit problems have a common source: the govt’s refusal to be honest about the deal it negotiated. It per…
6 March 1972: birth of Julian Simpson, director of The Rebel Flesh and The Almost People (Eleventh Doctor, 2011).
ii) broadcast anniversaries
6 March 1965: broadcast of "Crater of Needles", fourth episode of the story we now call The Web Planet. Ian and Vrestin meet the Optera; Barbara tries to link with the invading Menoptera but they are massacred by the Zarbi.
6 March 1971: broadcast of sixth episode of The Mind of Evil. The Thunderbolt missile and the Keller machine are both destroyed, but the Master escapes.
6 March 1976: broadcast of sixth episode of The Seeds of Doom, ending Season 13. The Krynoid grows to enormous size but is destroyed by the RAF.
iii) date specified in-universe
6 March 2006: setting of Aliens of London (Ninth Doctor, 2005).
This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging which will fall in 2023. Every six-ish days I've been revisiting a month from my recent past, noting work and family developments as well as the books I read in that month. I've found it a pleasantly cathartic process, especially in recent circumstances. If you want to look back at previous entries, they are all tagged under bookblog nostalgia.
Edited to add: Oh yeah, this month saw the first Belgian election in which I voted after becoming a citizen. I voted Green for the lower house and Trotskyist for the Senate.
This was also the month of the Bloody Sunday report, back in the days when there was a British prime minister who thought that shooting civilians is sometimes wrong.
On a happier note, the World Cup kicked off and I ran a series of polls on my LJ asking people to predict who would win; and also did some hypothetical number-crunching.
Current Titus Alone, by Mervyn Peake Chasm City, by Alastair Reynolds Mostly Void, Partially Stars, by Joseph Fink Inside Out: A Personal History of Pink Floyd, by Nick Mason
Last books finished Goodbye To All That, by Robert Graves Science Fiction: The Great Years, eds. Carol and Frederik Pohl The Ministry for the Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson Driving Miss Daisy, by Alfred Uhry The Unstable Realities of Christopher Priest, by Paul Kincaid
Next books Sandkings, by George R.R. Martin Romeinse sporen: het relaas van de Romeinen in de Benelux met 309 vindplaatsen om te bezoeken, by Herman Clerinx
Thu, 12:56: RT @doeantlers: A Terry Pratchett book signing was going pretty much as usual when a man in full wizard regalia asked, “You write about mag…
Thu, 16:05: Why I wept at spring’s arrival https://t.co/rGRO7dnXeg One of my neighbours was getting out of his car, and from our doorsteps we waved to one another. “Spring!” he called over, gesturing at everything: the blue sky, the sparrows voluble in the hedges, the yolky crocuses on the…
Thu, 20:03: TIL that Christopher Priest was the ghost-writer of the autobiographies of astronaut Helen Sharman and athlete Sally Gunnell. (Again, h/t @pkincaid_critic.)
5 March 1932: birth of Gertan Kauber, who played the dimly seen galley-master in the story we now call The Romans (First Doctor, 1965) and Ola in The Macra Terror (Second Doctor, 1967)
5 March 1972: birth of James Moran, writer of The Fires of Pompeii (Tenth Doctor, 2008) and the Torchwood episode Sleeper (2008); co-writer of Torchwood: Children of Earth: Day Three (2009).
5 March 1974: birth of Matt Lucas, who played Nardole in the Twelfth Doctor era.
5 March 2012: death of Philip Madoc, who was Brockley in Daleks – Invasion Earth 2150 AD (Movie 1966), Eelek in The Krotons (Second Doctor, 1968-9), the War Lord in The War Games (Second Doctor, 1969), Solon in The Brain of Morbius (Fourth Doctor, 1976), and Fenner in The Power of Kroll (Fourth Doctor, 1978-9).
ii) broadcast anniversaries
5 March 1966: broadcast of "The Steel Sky", first episode of the story we now call The Ark. The Tardis lands on a vast spaceship inhabited by humans and Monoids; Dodo's cold spreads throughout its inhabitants. First full episode with Dodo, for whom I have an obscure affection.
5 March 1979: broadcast of second episode of The Talons of Weng-Chiang. The Doctor and Jago find a ghost at the theatre; Leela and Litefoot find Mr Sin at the door.
5 March 2008: broadcast of Something Borrowed (Torchwood), the one where Gwen gets married despite an alien pregnancy.
iii) date specified in-universe
5 March 2005: death of Clara Oswald's mother Ellie.
From a very young age I kept newts and common toads in tanks in my bedroom, and this went atypically well. The toads in particular made great pets, seemingly taking to captivity and providing great entertainment by hoovering up mealworms with their extending, sticky tongues. When I grew bored of them, or ran out of mealworms from the supply that I bred in a box under my bed, I could simply release the toads back into the garden. However, I longed to have some more exotic amphibians, and eventually I badgered my parents into buying me a pair of North American leopard frogs for Christmas: attractive, bright-green frogs with (as you might guess from the name) a profusion of black spots. I filled one of my glass fish tanks with piles of stones, peat, some plants and a small pond, to make an attractive home for them. It looked great and the frogs settled in well, but after just a few weeks their energetic hopping about caused one of the piles of stones to topple; I came home from school one day to find them both squashed.
A very entertaining book about wildlife and diversity, mainly around the author's home in rural France but with flashbacks to his childhood and student and young researcher days in England. Mostly it is about insects, but there are three chapters on plants and one on reptiles and amphibians. The underlying theme of course is our need and responsibility to protect biodiversity and the environment, and the last couple of chapters are grim surveys of the risks ahead if we fail. Not my subject at all, but passionately written with lots of details that will keep coming back to me. You can get it here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2015. Next on that pile is Comic Inferno, by Brian Aldiss.
4 March 2016: death of Terence Woodfield, who appeared in two different First Doctor stories in 1966: as Celation in the story we now call The Daleks' Master Plan, and as Maharis in the story we now call The Ark
ii) broadcast anniversaries
4 March 1967: broadcast of fourth episode of The Moonbase. The Doctor defeats the Cybermen by using the gravitron to make them float away into space.
4 March 1972: broadcast of second episode of The Sea Devils. The Doctor and Jo escape the the nearby sea base and discover that the Master is stealing equipment.
4 March 1978: broadcast of fifth episode of The Invasion of Time. The Doctor and friends escape, and the Doctor persuades Borusa to let him have the Great Key.
iii) date specified in-universe:
4 March 2005: setting of the opening part of Rose, the first Ninth Doctor story.
Another very successful installment in the series of Thirteenth Doctor comics by Houser and an all-woman team of artists. Here, the Tardis team meet up with none other than the Corsair, subject of a throwaway line about Time Lords changing gender in The Doctor's Wife, here a swaggering part-time criminal who does it for fun rather than out of malevolence. The Corsair is a great creation, a different take on the Doctor's irreverence for authority and tradition, and Houser has the two developing a lovely sparking relationship, convincingly giving the sense of two people who know each other well but maybe not always as well as they think. The core narrative is that the Doctor is accused of stealing a valuable object which in fact was stolen by the Corsair, and this lands them in all sorts of trouble. The rest of the Tardis crew don't get a lot of page time, but this is the Corsair's story, and it's a good one. You can get it here.
This was my top unread comic in English. Next on that pile is Wonder Woman: The Golden Age, by William Moulton Marston with art by Harry G. Peter.
Tue, 19:03: RT @TheEconomist: Britain is the first big country to show similar results to Israel, where a jump start on vaccinations led to falling dea…
Tue, 22:17: RT @dmcbfs: 4 years ago today, we voted in an Assembly Election. Unionism is returned as a minority for the first time ever. https://t.co/a…
Wed, 08:02: RT @YearCovid: 3 Mar 2020 “Politicians who think panic is lines at Costco and angry parents when a school is closed, may find out that pan…
3 March 1924: birth of John Woodnutt, who played George Hibbert in Spearhead from Space (1970), the Draconian Emperor in Frontier in Space (1973), Broton and the Duke of Forgill in Terror of the Zygons (1976), and Seron in The Keeper of Traken (1981).
3 March 2004: death of Sheila Dunn, who played Blossom Lefavre in The Daleks' Master Plan (First Doctor, 1965), the computer voice of the Electromatic company in The Invasion (Second Doctor, 1968), and Petra Williams in Inferno (Third Doctor, 1970). She was married to Douglas Camfield, who directed all three of those stories.
ii) broadcast anniversary
3 March 1973: broadcast of second episode of Frontier in Space. The Doctor and Jo are brought to Earth for questioning, where the Doctor is captured by the Draconians and then recaptured by the humans.
iii) date specified in canon
3 and 4 March 1215: setting of The King's Demons (1983).
So my father sent me to King’s College School, Wimbledon. I was just seven years old, the youngest boy there, and they went up to nineteen. My father took me away after a couple of terms because he heard me using naughty words, and because I did not understand the lessons. I had started Latin, but nobody explained what ‘Latin’ meant; its declensions and conjugations were pure incantations to me. For that matter, so were the strings of naughty words. And I felt oppressed by the huge hall, the enormous boys, the frightening rowdiness of the corridors, and compulsory Rugby football of which nobody told me the rules. From there I went to Rokeby, a preparatory school of the ordinary type, also at Wimbledon, where I stayed for about three years. Here I began playing games seriously, grew quarrelsome, boastful, and domineering, won prizes, and collected things. The main difference between myself and the other boys was that I collected coins instead of stamps. The value of coins seemed less fictitious to me. The headmaster caned me only once: for forgetting to bring my gym-shoes to school, and then gave me no more than two strokes on the hand. Yet even now the memory makes me hot with resentment. My serious training as a gentleman began here.
