Second paragraph of third story ("Old Faithful", by Raymond Z. Gallun):
The two messengers who had come to his workshop that afternoon had not seen into his heart, and he received their message with the absolute outward calm that was characteristic of his kind – at the end of forty days Number 774 must die. He had lived the allotted span fixed by the Rulers.
I got this in 2014 because the last story, "A Matter of Form" by H.L. Gold, was up for the Retro Hugo for Best Novella that year (beaten by the classic "Who Goes There?", which got my vote). It's a collection of seven stories from the Golden Age, published between 1934 and 1953, all by men. The weakest is an early story of Pohl's own, "Wings of the Lightning Land"; several of the others have aged poorly, including Eric Frank Russell's "…And Then There Were None". I don't especially like Kornbluth's "The Little Black Bag" but I think it's a well-executed story. You can get it here.
This was the sf book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next is another anthology from another era, Kaleidoscope: diverse YA science fiction and fantasy stories, eds Alisa Krasnostein and Julia Rios.
Tue, 12:56: RT @cult_edge: Sad to learn of the recent passing of writer James Follett. James wrote two episodes of Blake’s 7 – Dawn Of The Gods and Sta…
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Wed, 09:38: The first St Patrick’s Day celebration in America: 1600 and 1601 Here’s a fascinating piece by Michael Francis, looking at the history of St Augustine, Florida – the oldest continuously inhabited settlement in the contiguous USA founded by Europeans. https://t.co/GizDZ9hHL0
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Wed, 10:45: Government plans to change mayor of London elections to First Past the Post https://t.co/5S4z0J6RFC A late consequence of the botched 2011 referendum.
It's well known that St Patrick's Day parades were originally a diaspora phenomenon, and the first really big parades were in the eighteenth century in the USA. But the first recorded celebration of St Patrick's Day in what is now the United States was a good deal earlier. St Augustine, in Florida, is the oldest continuously inhabited settlement in the contiguous USA founded by Europeans, in 1565. It was a Spanish settlement, but in 1600 the parish priest was an Irishman, Richard Arthur, known as Ricardo Artur locally; and he invoked the protection of St Patrick (rather than St Augustine, after whom the town was named) for the settlers. Local historian Michael Francis has found records that Artur organised public celebrations of St Patrick on 17 March 1600 and 1601, including a public procession in 1601. It's not quite St Patrick's Day as we know it; there was not much of a diaspora in Florida, and the tradition ended when Artur left the town. But let's take a moment to think of the weirdness of that historical moment.
More locally to here, the Irish College in Leuven claims to be the first place to have celebrated St Patrick's Day as a diaspora festival, with a public sermon in around 1610. The Franciscans at the college were certainly instrumental in helping Luke Wadding to persuade the Vatican to make St Patrick's Day an official feast day of the church. There were Irish colleges elsewhere of course – most famously in Salamanca, Lisbon, Douai and Rome itself – but Leuven claims the earliest documentation, and as they are my neighbours I will take their word for it.
Most years there has been much celebration, both by the college in Leuven and by the Irish community in Brussels. Last year's St Patrick's Day was exactly when the lockdown was imposed, and this year things are not a lot better yet. Here's hoping for 2022.
17 March 1942: birth of Ken Grieve, director of Destiny of the Daleks (Fourth Doctor, 1979)
17 March 2011: death of Michael Gough, who played the Toymaker in The Celestial Toymaker (First Doctor, 1966) and Hedin in Arc of Infinity (Fifth Doctor, 1983). He was also married to actress Anneke Wills.
ii) broadcast anniversary
17 March 1973: broadcast of fourth episode of Frontier in Space. The Master has the Doctor and Jo captive, but all three are captured by the Draconians.
iii) dates specified in-universe:
17 March 1898: death of Mary Eliza Millington in The Curse of Fenric (Seventh Doctor, 1989).
In 2010, an exhibit on Vincent van Gogh opened at the Musée d'Orsay, as seen in The Lodger (Eleventh Doctor, 2010).
Also, for the day that’s in it, my guide to Ireland in Doctor Who written in 2019 (therefore missing last year).
This is the tenth year that I have been tracking these figures. Last year's winner was fifth out of sixthird out of five. The top ranked novel on this basis won the Best Novel Nebulas for 2017, 2016, 2015 and 2014. The 2013 winner (Ancillary Justice) was fourth of eight. The 2012 winner was second of six. So was the 2011 winner. So in the last nine years, the top-ranked novel on this ranking has won almost half the time, and one of the top two has won two-thirds of the time.
Striking that Mexican Gothic has more owners on LT than all the others combined, but the lowest reader ratings on both systems. Of course with best-selling books, it's often more likely that readers who didn't like them will register an opinion.
Skipping the Novella category because not all of them were separately published.
Last year the fifth out of six finalists won (as with Best Novel). The previous year, the top-ranked finalist in this category won. I failed to do the calculation for the 2017 award; for the 2016 award, the winner was fifth out of seven on this ranking.
Mon, 12:56: EU rail passenger rights revamp falls short of disabled groups’ hopes https://t.co/5r9GlhxJpC Trains are really unfriendly to people with disabilities – my old friend @jchoste is quoted.
Tue, 01:48: RT @sfwa: The #Nebulas2021 Finalists for THE ANDRE NORTON NEBULA AWARD FOR MIDDLE GRADE AND YOUNG ADULT FICTION are: (see next tweet)
Tue, 01:48: RT @sfwa: -Raybearer, Jordan Ifueko (Amulet) -Elatsoe, Darcie Little Badger (Levine Querido) -A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking, T. King…
Tue, 01:48: RT @sfwa: – “Badass Moms in the Zombie Apocalypse”, Rae Carson (Uncanny 1-2/20) – “Advanced Word Problems in Portal Math”, Aimee Picchi (Da…
Tue, 01:48: RT @sfwa: – “The Eight-Thousanders”, Jason Sanford (Asimov’s 9-10/20) – “My Country Is a Ghost”, Eugenia Triantafyllou (Uncanny 1-2/20) – “…
Tue, 01:55: RT @sfwa: – “Stepsister”, Leah Cypess (F&SF 5-6/20) – “The Pill”, Meg Elison (Big Girl, PM Press) – “Burn or the Episodic Life of Sam Wells…
Tue, 01:55: RT @sfwa: – “Where You Linger”, Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam (Uncanny 1-2/20) – “Shadow Prisons”, Caroline M. Yoachim (serialized in the Dystopia…
Tue, 02:07: RT @sfwa: – Blaseball, Stephen Bell, Joel Clark, Sam Rosenthal (The Game Band) – Hades, Greg Kasavin (Supergiant) – Kentucky Route Zero, J…
Tue, 02:07: RT @sfwa: – Scents & Semiosis, Sam Kabo Ashwell, Cat Manning, Caleb Wilson, Yoon Ha Lee (Self) – Spiritfarer, Nicolas Guérin, Maxime Monast…
Tue, 02:28: RT @sfwa: – “Tower of Mud and Straw”, Yaroslav Barsukov (Metaphorosis) – Finna, Nino Cipri (Tordotcom) – Ring Shout, P. Djèlí Clark (Tordot…
Tue, 02:28: RT @sfwa: – “Ife-Iyoku, the Tale of Imadeyunuagbon”, Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki (Dominion: An Anthology of Speculative Fiction from Africa…
Tue, 02:28: RT @sfwa: The #Nebulas2021 Finalists for THE RAY BRADBURY NEBULA AWARD FOR DRAMATIC PRESENTATION are: (see next tweet)
Tue, 02:28: RT @sfwa: – Birds of Prey: And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn, Christina Hodson, Warner Bros. Pictures – The Expanse: “G…
Tue, 02:28: RT @sfwa: – Lovecraft Country, Season 1, Misha Green, Shannon Houston, Kevin Lau, Wes Taylor, Ihuoma Ofordire, Jonathan I. Kidd, Sonya Wint…
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This is the last of the seven dates of the year on which six episodes of Old Who were broadcast; it saw the demise of Adric in 1982, of the Fifth Doctor in 1984, and of Paul Darrow's credibility in 1985.
i) births and deaths
16 March 1935: birth of Donald Tosh, script editor in 1965-66, author of "Bell of Doom", fourth episode of the story we now call The Massacre (First Doctor, 1966).
also 16 March 1935: birth of Tristan de Vere Cole, director of The Wheel in Space (Second Doctor, 1968).
16 March 1943: birth of John Leeson, the voice of K9 in Old Who (apart from one season), New Who, the first Sarah Jane spinoff K9 and Company, the more successful Sarah Jane Adventures and let's not forget the Australian K9 series (though I think he himself might like to). He also appeared in person as Dugeen in The Power of Kroll (Fourth Doctor, 1978-79).
ii) broadcast anniversaries
16 March 1968: broadcast of first episode of Fury from the Deep. The Doctor, Jamie and Victoria arrive at an oil refinery where the chief refuses to do anything about the mysterious noises and pressure fluctuations in the pipelines.
16 March 1974: broadcast of fourth episode of Death to the Daleks. The Doctor destroys the City, freeing both Earth astronauts and Daleks; but Galloway has hidden on the Dalek ship, and destroys it as it takes off.
16 March 1982: broadcast of fourth episode of Earthshock. The Cybermen are defeated, but the freighter crashes into prehistoric earth, killing Adric. Last regular appearance of Matthew Waterhouse as Adric.
16 March 1983: broadcast of second episode of The King's Demons, ending Season 20. The Doctor takes control of Kamelion and defeats the Master.
16 March 1984: broadcast of fourth epsiode of The Caves of Androzani. The Doctor rescues Peri as everyone else on Androzani Minor gets blown up or otherwise killed, but is unable to save himself. Last regular appearance of Peter Davison as the Fifth Doctor, and first appearance of Colin Baker as the Sixth Doctor.
16 March 1985: broadcast of second episode of Timelash. The Borad turns out to be mad scientist Megelen, who the Doctor kills twice, returning Herbert to Scotland to become H.G. Wells.
16 March 2007: Lauren has a new English teacher. But who is Mr Logan? Or rather, Mr Logan is Who.
Second paragraph of third episode, “Station Management”:
The Night Vale Business Association is proud to announce the new Night Vale Stadium, next to the Night Vale Harbor and Waterfront Recreation Area. The stadium will be able to seat fifty thousand, but will be closed all nights of the year except November 10, for the annual Parade of the Mysterious Hooded Figures, in which all of our favorite ominous hooded figures — the one that lurks under the slide in the Night Vale Elementary playground, the ones that meet regularly in The Dog Park, and the one that will occasionally openly steal babies, and for a reason no one can understand, we all stand by and let him do it — all of them will be parading proudly through Night Vale Stadium. I tell you, with these new facilities, it promises to be quite a spectacle. And then it promises to be a vast, dark, and echoey space for the other meaningless 364 days of the year.
The scripts of the first 25 episodes of Welcome to Night Vale, the cult podcast's first year, with also the first stage show. The printed page is of course no substitute for the mellow tones of Cecil Baldwin delivering the words directly to our ears, but has the minor advantages that you can savour the text at your leisure and not worry about losing the next line due to laughing too much. Each episode is topped by a note from one of the creators, usually Fink or Craynor but with contributions from others as well. Really, it speaks for itself, and rathe than write more I'm just going to reproduce some of my own favourite lines, starting with the moment in episode 1 when we first realise that this is going to be seriously weird:
The City Council announces the opening of a new Dog Park at the corner of Earl and Somerset, near the Ralphs. They would like to remind everyone that dogs are not allowed in the Dog Park. People are not allowed in the Dog Park. It is possible you will see Hooded Figures in the Dog Park. Do not approach them. Do not approach the Dog Park. The fence is electrified and highly dangerous. Try not to look at the Dog Park, and especially do not look for any period of time at the Hooded Figures. The Dog Park will not harm you.
Followed soon after, in the same episode, by:
And now a brief public service announcement.
Alligators: can they kill your children?
Yes.
More pithily, from episode 3:
Monday would like you to leave it alone. It’s not its fault that you are emotionally unprepared for your professional lives.
Skipping ahead to episode 24:
Here’s a public service message to all the children in our audience:
Children, the night sky may seem like a scary thing sometimes. And it is. It’s a very scary thing.
Look at the stars, twinkling silently. They are so far away that none of us will ever get to even the closest one. They are dead-eyed sigils of our own failures against distance and mortality. And behind them, just the void. That nothingness that is everything, that everything that is nothing.
Even the blinking light of an airplane streaking across it does not seem to assuage the tiniest bit of its blackness – like throwing a single stray ember into the depths of a vast arctic ocean.
And what if the void is not as void as we thought? What could be coming towards us out of the distance? Insentient asteroid with a chance trajectory? Sentient beings with a malicious trajectory? What good could come of this? What good, children, could come of any of this?
Fear the night sky, children, and sleep tight in your beds, and the inadequate shelters of blankets and parental love.
Sleep sound, children.
This has been our Children's Fun Fact Science Corner.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2016. Next on that pile is Roger Zelazny's The Dawn of Amber, by John Gregory Betancourt, which I fear I will not enjoy as much.
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15 March 1928: birth of Mervyn Haisman, who co-wrote The Abominable Snowmen (Second Doctor, 1967), The Web of Fear (Second Doctor, 1968) and (uncredited) The Dominators (Second Doctor, 1968).
15 March 1943: birth of Scott Fredericks, who played freedom fighter Boaz in Day of the Daleks (Third Doctor, 1972) and turncoat scientist Maxilian Stael in Image of the Fendahl (Fourth Doctor, 1977).
15 March 1947: birth of Tony Osoba, who played Lan in Destiny of the Daleks (Fourth Doctor, 1979), Kracauer in Dragonfire (Seventh Doctor, 1987) and Duke in Kill the Moon (Twelfth Doctor, 2014).
15 March 1992: birth of Anna Shaffer, who plays Ram's girlfriend Rachel in two episodes of Class (2016).
15 March 2008: death of Dennis Edwards who played the Centurion in the story we now call The Romans (First Doctor, 1965) and the surgeon Time Lord Gomer in The Invasion of Time (Fourth Doctor, 1978).
ii) broadcast anniversaries
15 March 1969: broadcast of second episode of The Space Pirates, the one surviving episode of the six-part series. With the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe trapped on one of the fragments of the beacon, Milo Clancey is arrested as a suspected pirate.
15 March 1975: broadcast of second episode of Genesis of the Daleks. The Doctor and Harry meet Davros and his team, including the newly-invented Daleks. Sarah, captive in the Thal dome, tries to escape.
15 March 1982: broadcast of third episode of Earthshock. The Cybermen take over the space freighter.
15 March 1983: broadcast of first episode of The King's Demons
15 March 1984: broadcast of third episode of The Caves of Androzani. Morgus kills the President; The Doctor, captured by Stotz, manages to take control of Stotz's ship and bring it back to Androzani Minor for a crash landing.
15 March 2003: webcast of "The Child, part 2", sixth episode of Death Comes to Time.
15 March 2010: broadcast of Curse of Anubis, tenth episode of the Australian K9 series. K9 meets the Anubians, a race he helped in his forgotten past. Once peaceful, these creatures have now become warmongers. They trick K9 by worshipping him as their saviour. They unleash control devices and take over Gryffen, who banishes Darius from the mansion. Starkey opens up the Anubian Book of Deliverance and discovers their true plans. It is left to Darius to release K9 from Anubian control and thwart an alien invasion.
Having done my epic tour of western Belgian megaliths, I realised that I didn't have any photos of the one closest to us, so took U on an expedition to photograph it this afternoon. In the grand park behind the Africa Museum in Tervuren, three stones, now referred to as a "dolmen" (although they do not even touch each other, let alone form a structure) were placed at the intersection of seven woodland paths.
They are large but not obviously structured, suitable for smaller people than U to clamber on. Having been moved from the nearby village of Duisburg (not to be confused with the large German city of the same name), it is now still called the Duisburg Dolmen.
An early postcard shows them fenced off from the public, but also declares that they are in fact simply parts of an erratic stone from the glacial period.
I don’t have a strong view on that; I will say that initially I was very suspicious about the Belgian habit of moving megaliths from their original locations for the sake of farmers – Irish farmers seem to manage OK – but on reflection I can see that it’s nice to put them where everyone can see them, and they occupy a sort of position of honour. (Cf also the menhir at Neerwinden.)
Sat, 12:56: RT @davidallengreen: Post-Brexit policy does not need to be like this – no, it really does not – but there are no other post-Brexit policie…
Sat, 14:48: RT @journeymaxx: Blackadder II may have been the pinnacle of the series certainly the Potato episode with a post-DW Tom Baker as the mad Re…
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Sun, 08:07: RT @johnreppion: Ah, I see that the same people who were all for Lockdown protests (because “freedom of speech” and “lockdown’s worse than…
14 March 1938: birth of Eleanor Bron, who played one of the art critics in City of Death (Fourth Doctor, 1979) and Kara in Revelation of the Daleks (Sixth Doctor, 1985).
ii) broadcast anniversaries
14 March 1964: broadcast of "The Wall of Lies", fourth episode of the story we now call Marco Polo. Marco Polo confiscates the Doctor's spare Tardis key; Tegana continues to plot against him.
14 March 1970: broadcast of seventh episode of Doctor Who and the Silurians. The plague is cured, the Silurians return to hibernation, and the Brigadier blows up their caves.
14 March 1981: broadcast of third episode of Logopolis. Nyssa arrives at Logopolis; the Master has sabotaged the city and it collapses. But will he bring the rest of the Universe down with it?
Some names have been changed below; some have not.
As previously mentioned, I’ve been getting a lot of useful distraction from the Ancestry.com website of late. Back in December I reported that I’d had a call with a lady whose mother was found abandoned in a Philadelphia park as a three-week-old baby, in 1917. DNA suggests that she and her siblings are my fourth cousins or thereabouts. As it happens, my American grandmother was born in Philadelphia in 1899, but the genetic distance is too great for the baby to have been in her immediate family, or even first cousins; and she had loads of second cousins, never mind more distant possibilities.
To give a fuller picture, here are my top seven hits from Ancestry.com, with all names but one blanked out. These are Ancestry.com users who have submitted their DNA and who match with mine. For six of the seven, I had enough genealogical information to confidently identify them. None is closer than second cousin once removed, ie (in both cases) my great-great-grandparents are their great-grandparents, my great-grandparent is their grandparent’s sibling, my grandparent is their parent’s first cousin, and my parent is their second cousin. Those coded yellow are descended from at least one of the parents of Rebecca Hibbard née Wickersham, my American grandmother’s mother, who died in childbirth in 1905. Those coded orange are descended from the parents of Jean Stewart née McElroy, my Irish grandmother’s mother (who I remember well; she lived until 1985). Like most people, I have eight pairs of great-great-grandparents, but only the Wickershams and McElroys seem to have direct descendants on Ancestry.com.
So “Bella” stood out. It became clear after some back and forth that her brother “Derek” and sister “Patricia” are also linked to me on Ancestry.com. Patricia and I share about half the DNA that I share with Bella, and Derek and I half that again; our relationship could be anything from third cousin to much more distant. It was their mother who was found abandoned in a Phildelphia park as a baby. That story is told in a newspaper article from 25 August 1917:
Bella, Patricia and Derek, all now in their 70s, knew nothing more about their mother’s origins, and were somewhat frustrated by the DNA results that they got and also by not always getting hugely helpful information from others who they had contacted on the site. I corresponded back and forth quite a lot with Patricia, and with her friend Susan who was doing some of the research on the ground (if hampered by the pandemic situation).
I spent some time thinking about it, and eventually sent over a list of forty Ancestry.com users who I know I am related to through my American grandmother. Patricia and Susan, god bless them, cranked through my list and found nothing at all. Not a single one of my grandmother’s forty identified DNA relatives had also a DNA link with Patricia.
This was disappointing but really not so surprising. I get the sense that some bits of DNA are more “sticky” than others; you may get quite a large lump from a distant ancestor, you may get nothing at all from a closer ancestor. I have identified genealogical links with tenth and eleventh cousins with whom I share scraps of genetic material from mutual ancestors born in the 16th century. On the other hand, I also have a known third cousin with whom I apparently share no DNA at all – apparently the chance of this is around 10%, and we are both genetically linked to other known relatives, so it’s not like there has been any messing with the records.
Patricia then gave me access to her own records and requested that I just try anything that might seem to work. The Ancestry.com search interface is somewhat frustrating, and also must respect privacy; after a couple of false starts, I tried inputting the surnames of my grandmother’s great-grandparents and seeing how many hits that got from Patricia’s DNA matches. If there were a significant number of hits, I tried to link them via genealogy to my own ancestors with those surnames.
I was pleasantly surprised to find that this actually did produce results. My American 5xgreat-grandparents’ surnames (my grandmother’s great-grandparents) were Hibbard, Charlton, Smith, Locke, Wickersham, Shallcross, Belt and Bordley. Smith is obviously useless, with far too many hits to tell us anything; of the others, only Hibbard and Belt pulled up anything resembling a decent number of credible hits, which meant I could provisionally eliminate the other five. Encouraged, I tried the surnames of the mothers of my Hibbard, Smith and Belt 5xgreat-grandparents – respectively Talcott, Whitehouse and Dulany. Only Talcott produced results of the same strength as I had from Hibbard. When I tried the next generation back, the maternal grandmothers of my Hibbard 5xgreat-grandfather, I again got very good results for their surnames, Leavens and Lyman.
So I felt pretty sure that Bella, Patricia and Derek were all descended from my Hibbard/Talcott ancestors, who were born in Connecticut in the 1750s and died in Vermont (her in 1831, him in 1845). The Hibbard family actually have an official genealogy published in 1901, which made things a little easier.
Er, yeah. That’s 13 children, and even knocking off the one who died young, and the one I’m descended from (Lyman, the third son), that still leaves eleven. (Research revealed that Electa did in fact marry and have children, contra this record.)
I tried the same trick as before, inputting the surname of each child’s spouse into Patricia’s records to see which produced the best hits. Again, this weeded out quite a lot of them, leaving only two that seemed particularly promising. I tried again for those children’s spouses, and unhelpfully both of them had results that looked equally plausible, neither more than the other. But then I looked at the next generation, and things became clear. One of the lineages I was following had moved to California, and never came back. The other family had settled in a New England town which I will call Hilltown, about 300 miles from Philadelphia and about 150 miles from Concord, VT. The only descendant of the right age to have fathered a baby in 1917 was a travelling salesman, born around 1870, who I will call Bill. It’s not impossible of course that someone based in California could have fathered a child in Philadelphia, but a travelling salesman living only a couple of states away seems a much better bet.
Bill, the travelling salesman from Hilltown, New England, would have been my grandmother’s third cousin. They probably did not know of each other’s existence. (How many of your third cousins do you know about?) When the baby in the park was conceived in 1916, Bill had a wife and three young sons back in Hilltown, the kids all fourth cousins of my father’s. It’s entirely possible that he died in 1942 unaware that he had a daughter. His sons all married in due course, and some of their children may still be living; if I am right, Bill’s grandchildren, all born with his surname, are half first cousins to Patricia and her siblings, and all of them are fifth cousins to me.
Having got this far, I then had a look at Patricia’s other DNA hits to see if anything else could be learned. She has a lot more close relatives on Ancestry.com than I do – starting of course with her siblings Bella and Derek, and then another five who are all genetically her second cousin or closer. The top two of those five, I quickly realised, were both descended from a couple who I will call Hugh and Peggy, both born in the 1890s, who married in 1919 in Philadelphia. The other three were all related to Peggy but not to Hugh. It seemed pretty clear to me. The baby in the park’s mother was certainly Peggy. The baby’s father was definitely not Hugh.
Peggy’s family lived less than a mile from Fairmount Park in Phildelphia, where the baby was found. She is recorded as being a professional musician in the 1910 and 1920 censuses. She and Hugh appear to have had a baby together in 1916, but did not get married until he returned from the war in 1919. Their marriage did not last, and the 1930 census records that Peggy and their child were living in Philadelphia while Hugh was living with a new wife on the West Coast. Hugh died in the 1930s, and Peggy successfully applied for a pension as his widow, with dependent child, from the Veterans’ Administration, suggesting that their divorce, and Hugh’s other relationship, were never formalised. As noted above, several of Patricia’s DNA connections are descended from their child born in 1916; they had no other children together. (Actually I have no genetic proof that the 1916 baby’s father was Hugh, except that he seeems to have acknowledged his own paternity.)
Reading between the lines, I speculate that Peggy and Hugh had split up around the time that their child was born in the first half of 1916, and somehow she and Bill got together – perhaps only once, perhaps more – towards the end of the year, with the August 1917 baby in the park as a result. But by the time the baby was born, Peggy and Hugh had reconciled. Hugh had just been drafted for the war, and the new baby was surplus to the requirements of the rekindled relationship. So Peggy took a sad walk to the park that warm August evening. (Or possibly her mother did, if the reports of the older woman in the area are correct.) I find this really heart-breaking: she gave up her baby to a completely uncertain future, for the sake of a relationship which had already failed once, and was destined to fail again.
The note left with the baby said that “The mother died at childbirth at the age of 22. The father, a professional singer, travels, but has now gone to the war.” If I am right, the only true fact here is that the father travelled for a living. The mother had not died, was 27 rather than 22, and it was she who worked as an professional entertainer. The baby’s father was too old to be drafted; it was the mother’s fiancée who was just about to go to the war. To quote G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown:
“Suppose someone sent you to find a house with a green door and a blue blind, with a front garden but no back garden, with a dog but no cat, and where they drank coffee but not tea. You would say if you found no such house that it was all made up. But I say no. I say if you found a house where the door was blue and the blind green, where there was a back garden and no front garden, where cats were common and dogs instantly shot, where tea was drunk in quarts and coffee forbidden — then you would know you had found the house.”
The story ends with a twist. The baby in the park was adopted, grew up, married her childhood sweetheart, whose parents were of Jewish and Scottish ancestry (which is rather helpful in distinguishing his genetic relatives from hers), and had three children, Bella, Patricia and Derek. Eventually she and her husband retired, after a life mainly spent in Illinois where he was a lecturer. And here’s a truly extraordinary coincidence: the place they chose for their retirement, and where both eventually died, was her biological father’s home – Hilltown, New England (whose population is only 12,000, on a good day). Bill had been dead for years at this point, but one of his sons was still living elsewhere in the state. I wonder if he or any of his brothers ever returned to Hilltown and unknowingly bumped into their half-sister? Edited to add: As previously mentioned, I was way off here, and the Hilltown relatives were second cousins not siblings to the baby in the park. Still, they may well have unwittingly bumped into each other.
One final reflection: the available genetic information can be somewhat hit-and-miss. As noted above, of my top seven DNA matches in the system, three are descended from one of my eight pairs of great-great-grandparents and three from another (one of those three has a different great-great-grandmother to me and the other two). I have not identified any Ancestry.com user descended from any of my other twelve great-great-grandparents. (I’ve had more luck with 23andMe in this regard.) Of Patricia’s hits, the relatives of the mother of the baby in the park are very much more strongly represented than the family of the baby’s father, or Patricia’s own Scottish-Jewish father. So I think the warning for anyone else hoping to resolve their family past through Ancestry.com is that you may not be as lucky as Patricia. But I’d be happy to try and help.
Fri, 12:43: RT @jonworth: Interesting thread. The common problem seems to be Downing Street not wanting to see Northern Ireland as a problem until it…
Fri, 12:46: It is a fascinating interview, like several others have been, but the most jaw-dropping moment is when he whines that the Irish government did not do enough to educate No 10 staff about Northern Ireland. https://t.co/KzvPh442lc
Fri, 12:51: RT @AndrewPRLevi: @nwbrux Whining. Ignorance. Arrogance. Cynicism. Self-awareness on a sub-atomic scale. It’s hard to work out why it all w…
Fri, 14:23: RT @HeleneBismarck: @nwbrux Quite. Why would a government led by the conservative and *unionist* party need the Irish government to explain…
Fri, 16:05: Brexit Britain: The buccaneering begins at home – European Council on Foreign Relations https://t.co/Rjz6qxnGjo What Global Britain means may be starting to take shape – but its emphasis appears more on the “Britain” than the “global”
Fri, 17:11: RT @borzou: “The F-35 is the most expensive weapon in history, with a cost of $1.7 trillion. That’s more than Russia’s GDP. If this aircraf…
Fri, 20:01: 180 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.
Fri, 23:34: RT @DecKelleher: At no stage from 2016 on did the Irish Government consider leaving the north south border issue to the trade talks. For us…
Sat, 09:10: RT @Malmstrom4OECD: It was as an honour to be in the race for Secretary General of @OECD I want to thank everybody who supported me and th…
Sat, 09:24: RT @nwbrux: More than 100 times when people warned that Brexit would create problems on the Irish border, *before* the referendum.
Sat, 10:34: My next Oscar-winning film is Dances With Wolves. Unfortunately I discovered that I don’t have the original 3-hour theatrical release but the 4-hour Director’s Cut. Wish me luck…
Sat, 10:45: RT @williamnhutton: These are extraordinary numbers just out – a Brexit trade implosion.British goods exports to the EU month on month down…
13 March 1965: broadcast of "Invasion", fifth episode of the story we now call The Web Planet (not to be confused with The Invasion, the 1969 Second Doctor story). The Doctor controls a Zarbi with his ring, escapes with Vicki and joins forces with Barbara and the Menoptra.
13 March 1971: broadcast of first episode of The Claws of Axos. Furge thangering muck witchellers rock throbblin' this time o' day… Ur bin oughta gone put thickery blarmdasted zones about, gordangun, diddenum? Havver froggin' law onnum, shouldnum? Eh? Eh? Arn I?
13 March 2009: broadcast of From Raxacoricofallapatorius With Love (SJA), a mini-episode for Comic Relief.
I've been sequencing these ten-day updates from St Patrick's Day last year, when the full lockdown was imposed, but the first inkling we got of how bad things would get was almost exactly a year ago on Friday 13 March, when the foundation where B and U live told us that we would not be able to see them until 3 April. We knew that it was unlikely that the situation would improve in three weeks; we didn't think that it would be more than three months before we could see the girls again (we next saw B on her birthday on 19 June, and U came home again a week later).
Thank heavens, we are now relatively unimpeded in our contacts with the girls; U has just come home for the weekend, and we visited B last Sunday and took her to the new park that I discovered for her in Landen in January. And if that was the worst thing that happened to our family during the pandemic, we can count ourselves lucky.
That morning on my way to work I took a picture of the relatively empty platforms at Ottignies station; from the perspective of a year later, it looks pretty crowded.
Back in those days, three months of lockdown seemed an inconceivable prospect. It's now five months since October…
Meanwhile the numbers for Belgium remain stubbornly in much the same place they have been since mid-December, with the mini-surge of late February having subsided. Vaccinations are still moving slowly, but surely; I went to the dentist for a checkup this afternoon, an appointment that had been postponed from yesterday because he was getting his jab done. My mother in Dublin also got hers yesterday.
I managed a couple more walks in Brussels last week with diplomatic contacts.
But the weather has turned nasty again and the forecast for next week is also miserable, so I'm going to leave it a bit longer before I return to the city. There are also reports that the authorities are checking offices to make sure that nobody is sneakily going to work. And I am kept quite busy enough operating from home anyway.
I haven't mentioned it much, but votes are rolling in for nominations in this year's Hugo Awards, a process that I am overseeing. We have managed to get a decent software solution in place for actually counting them using the peculiar system introduced four years ago. My current reading, however, is dominated by the extra long BSFA Award shortlist. Some good books there; one or two that aren't.
Anyway, we are promised that vaccination will accelerate next month, and that non-essential travel will be authorised after Easter. Here's hoping.
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.
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.
