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Northern Ireland, Ireland, England and Brexit

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So, I had an article in the Irish Times yesterday:

It was a topic that had been on my mind for a while – the massive expansion in the non-aligned vote, and what that means for the calculations of both sides on a potential future united Ireland. I'm glad to say I've had a lot of positive commentary on the piece, and the few negative remarks were generally directed at things that were not in the article.

And I woke this morning to the tragic news that Noel Whelan, who I wrote a book with back in 2003, has died after a short illness. Writing The Tallyman’s Guide to the Northern Ireland Assembly Elections 2003 was a fun, creative, co-authorship process, made a little more difficult by the fact that we both had the habit of indicating which bits we wrote/were writing using our initials – and we had the same initials, NW. We had not been in touch much in recent years, but I continued to enjoy reading his analysis. Our collaboration was a cheerful episode which I must now look back on with some sadness. Here are pictures from the Belfast launch (with John Alderdice) and the Dublin launch (with Brian Cowen, who I understand is also in poor health):

This put me in apocalyptic mood at lunchtime, when I attended the Brussels presentation of the interim report of the "Alternative Arrangements Commission", a group of British Conservatives who are trying to find a way to wriggle out of the UK's commitment to the backstop. Their ideas are not completely awful, but do require the Irish government to collude in imposing Brexit on the island; a heavy lift, given that the Republic was not asked about Brexit and Northern Ireland voted against – and that's before we start looking at the contemptuous attitude shown by the British government to both parts of Ireland in the last few years. I'm afraid my rage blunted the force of my question to the group, but you can see it here at 38:25 in:

Anyway, better to get it out of my system.

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My tweets

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My tweets

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  • Tue, 12:12: RT @kevinhorourke: It would be good to see Dublin acknowledge that the logical corollary of “the backstop is needed to avoid a border” is “…
  • Tue, 12:56: RT @dmcbfs: For all you history buffs, the entire debate between Haughey/Fitzgerald in 1982 is now online https://t.co/2DGlO0SRiv
  • Tue, 13:49: RT @pmdfoster: The British-Irish Chamber of Commerce has run rule over “Alternative Arrangements” ideas of @ShankerSingham1 and co…and tr…
  • Tue, 15:47: RT @m4tt: My wife went straight savage in Waitrose. Fuck you, Doris, and your hatred of tattooed millennials. https://t.co/85ygVpz0rY
  • Tue, 16:05: RT @AnnaJerzewska: Much on free ports /zones over the last couple of days. The only thing you really need to know about them is that they h…
  • Tue, 16:33: RT @hilarybennmp: The WTO Director General says that in the event of a No Deal Brexit, Article XXIV of GATT would not apply. In other word…
  • Tue, 17:11: As if it were possible to bring them into disrepute!!! https://t.co/GCI6TMPKt5
  • Tue, 17:49: RT @pmdfoster: Indeed. Notes only – “significant” negative impact on NI economy – “Disruption” in N-South trade because of tarriffs/regs…
  • Tue, 17:49: RT @JP_Biz: Ireland’s revised no deal is plan out. It’s not very different from what’s been out before & doesn’t, as per earlier, reports b…
  • Tue, 18:33: RT @peterwalker99: Wow! Same sex marriage extended to NI by a massive 383 to 73 vote! Many congrats to @ConorMcGinn – who has battled for t…

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Tuesday reading

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Current
Gateways, ed. Elizabeth Anne Hull
The City of Brass, by S.A. Chakraborty
1913: The World before the Great War, by Charles Emmerson

Last books finished
Gigi, by Colette
The Cat, by Colette
First Generation, by Mary Tamm

Next books
The Making and Remaking of the Good Friday Agreement, by Paul Bew
Better Than Sex, by Hunter S. Thompson

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Karl Marx in Brussels

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Here’s a nice little research project which I was able to pull together fairly quickly, a Communist plotting if you will:

This map shows the six places where Karl Marx and his family lived in Brussels, 1845-48, plus his favourite cafe, plus the venue of the 1868 Third Congress of the First International.

Going top to bottom, the wee house symbols are:
– the sites of the Hotel de la Gare and Hotel de Saxe, where the Marx family spent their first few days in Brussels in 1845, now the INNO department store
– Rue Pacheco 35, where they lived briefly in 1845
– Rue de l’Alliance 5, where they lived from 1845-46, with Engels next door
– the Hotel du Bois Sauvage, now the site of the National Bank, where they lived briefly in 1845 and again briefly before getting thrown out of Belgium in 1848
– Place du Petit Sablon 24, where again they lived briefly in 1845
– Rue d’Orleans 42, now Rue Jean d’Ardenne 50, the only one of the Marx residences with a commemorative plaque; the family lived here 1846-1848 and their son Edgar was born here in 1847.

All of those buildings have long since been demolished. So has the Theatre du Cirque, at top left, where the International Workingmen’s Association held their Third Congress in 1868.

But the Maison du Cygne in the Grand’ Place, where Marx and Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto, is still there in all its glory, and if you check inside you will find Marx’s portrait and a small plaque indicating where the two men (possibly) sat.

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My tweets

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  • Mon, 10:45: RT @ottocrat: Spectacular lying from @ThatKatyaGirl in this tweet, so much so that it’s going to take a thread to set the record straight.…

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Gigi (1958), plus original book and bonus cat

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Gigi won the Oscar for Best Motion Picture of 1958, and picked up another eight, Best Director (Vincente Minnelli), Best Adapted Screenplay (Alan Jay Lerner), Best Art Direction – Set Decoration, Best Cinematography (color) (Joseph Ruttenberg), Best Costume Design (Cecil Beaton), Best Film Editing (Adrienne Fazan, a rare woman winning one of the off-screen categories), Best Musical Score (André Previn) and Best Original Song (“Gigi” by Lerner and Loewe). Winning nine Oscars was a new record at the time (eight had been won by From Here To Eternity, On The Waterfront, The Best Years of Our Lives, Going My Way and Gone With the Wind), but this record was broken by Ben-Hur the following year. It should be noted that although none of the cast were nominated in the acting categories, Maurice Chevalier got a special award from the Academy.

The other contenders for Best Motion Picture were Auntie Mame, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Defiant Ones and Separate Tables. On the IMDB rankings, Gigi places 18th and 9th, with Vertigo, Touch of Evil, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Blob and The Fly ahead of it on both lists. Hugo voters chose “No Award”, the first year this ever happened, ahead of Dracula, The Fly and The 7th Voyage of Sinbad. (This was also the year they No-Awarded Brian Aldiss for Best New Writer.) I have seen absolutely none of these; in fact the only other film I’m sure I have seen from 1958 is Jacque Tati’s Mon Oncle.

It’s a musical romance set in Paris in 1900. Gigi is a young girl who is being educated to be a rich man’s female companion by her grandmother and aunt. She grapples with her relationship with young Gaston, whose uncle Honoré is an old flame of her grandmother’s. It’s the third consecutive Oscar-winner based on a story first written in French (after Around The World in 80 Days and Bridge on the River Kwai, two films that are very different from each other and from this). It’s also the first musical we’ve had since An American in Paris, though there are a few more coming up. Here’s the Oscar-winning title song (with Spanish sub-titles, sorry), the moment when Gaston realises that she has grown up and he loves her.

As usual, starting with the bits I didn’t like so much, and as usual that list begins with whitewashing: there is not a single non-white face to be seen in the film, although Paris in 1899 was already pretty multi-ethnic (Severiano de Heredia served as the equivalent of Mayor of Paris in 1879-80 and as a minister in the French government in 1887) and Paris in 1958, when the film was made, even more so.

Apart from that, there’s not a lot to dislike. The story is actually somewhat subversive of gender politics; Gigi and her older relatives are navigating a world ruled by men, sure, but doing it at their own pace and according to their own rules; the climax is where Gigi puts Gaston in the position where he must ask her grandmother for permission to marry her. It’s not quite as in-your-face as the original – once again, Hollywood removes feminism from the text – but the fact that sex outside marriage is portrayed from the very beginning as a cheerfully accepted relationship choice is startling for 1958. I wrote previously that in both Wings and All Quiet on the Western Front, France is a place of wartime fascination and moral hazard, and the same is true for Casablanca, another war film. The Life of Emile Zola is set almost entirely in Paris, a place of superior achievement, the centre of the cultural world, with its own drama and internal dynamics which the audience is expected to recognise and relate to. The Paris of An American in Paris is much more wholesome, if also spectacular. But here we’re back to a combination of Zola’s colourful city with the divergent morality of the war films.

The two male leads are a little weaker (and this is another of the rare Best Movie winners where none of the cast were nominated in the acting categories) – Louis Jourdan is a bit underwhelming as Gaston, and Maurice Chevalier, a grand old man of stage and screen, distinctly over the top as Honoré. My heart sank a bit when I realised that he opens the film singing “Thank Heaven for Little Girls” – though in fact it’s a much less creepy song than the title suggests in these less innocent times.

The music in general is fine. The only other Lerner and Loewe musical I know is My Fair Lady (which we’ll be getting to in a bit) and basically it has more memorable songs. One of them is not “Say a Prayer for Me Tonight”, originally written for Eliza Doolittle but removed and given instead to Gigi. Here’s Leslie Caron singing it, with a heavily drugged cat. (This is a reconstruction – Betty Wand dubbed for Leslie Caron’s voice in the film.)

The three leading women are all adorable and watchable – Isabel Jeans as Aunt Alicia, Hermione Gingold as grandma Madame Alvarez, and especially Leslie Caron in the title role, at 26 convincingly playing a character ten years younger.

The women are poorly served by the score – there are twelve songs, eight of which are sung by men only and another three by Betty Wand dubbing Leslie Caron. But the one song which actually features one of the female leads in her own voice is I think the film’s most memorable, the duet between Hermione Gingold and Maurice Chevalier, “I Remember It Well”.

I have been in love with Leslie Caron ever since I first saw An American in Paris (also directed by Vincent Minnelli from a script by Alan J. Lerner), and hugely enjoyed her cameos in Damage (1992) and Chocolat (2000). I think she dominates the film, despite being the youngest of the lead performers.

Let me just remind you that she umpired a cricket match as Countess Mavrokordati in The Durrells only two years ago.

I liked Gigi and I’m putting it 14th out of 31 films so far, behind It Happened One Night but ahead of Marty. You can get it here.

Next up is Ben-Hur.

The book by the great French feminist writer Colette is very short. Here is the second paragraph of the third section:

– Tu as l’air d’un singe savant, lui dit Lachaille. Je t’aimais mieux dans ta robe écossaise. Avec ce col qui te gêne, tu ressembles à une poule qui a avalé du maïs trop gros. Regarde-toi.‘You remind me of a performing monkey,’ Lachaille said to her. ‘I liked you much better in your old tartan dress. In that uncomfortable collar you look just like a hen with a full crop. Take a peep at yourself!’

It’s recognisably the same story, with some of the same jokes and lines, though there is no Honoré – completely invented for the film, and I guess to an extent for Chevalier. Gigi is explicitly not yet sixteen years old; obviously Hollywood could not go near there. Gigi’s mother, completely invisible in the film, makes a few appearances in the book (the father has been long absent):

As for her features, no one could yet predict their final mould. A large mouth, which showed beautiful strong white teeth when she laughed, no chin to speak of, and, between high cheekbones, a nose – ‘Heavens, where did she get that button?’ whispered her mother under her breath. ‘If you can’t answer that question, my girl, who can?’ retorted Madame Alvarez.

It’s a succinct sketch of Paris in 1899 from the point of view of women trying to get by in a man’s world.

I got it in combinations with a slightly longer book by Colette, La Chatte/The Cat, about a young woman who discovers that her new husband loves his cat more than he loves her. Here’s the second paragraph of the third chapter:

Avec précaution, il tourna la tête, entrouvrit les yeux et vit, tantôt blanche et tantôt bleu clair selon qu’elle baignait dans l’étroit ruisseau de soleil ou qu’elle regagnait la pénombre, une jeune femme nue, un peigne à la main, la cigarette aux lèvres, qui fredonnait. « C’est du toupet », pensa-t-il. « Toute nue ? Où se croit-elle ? »He turned his head cautiously and opened his eyes a trifle wider. He saw someone moving about, now white, now pale blue according to whether she was in the narrow strip of sunlight or the shadow. It was a naked young woman with a comb in her hand and a cigarette between her lips, wandering about the room and humming. ‘What impudence,’ he thought. ‘Completely naked! Where does she think she is?’

It’s a bad sign when a newlywed husband is irritated at the sight of his wife naked. None of the characters in this story is pleasant, including the cat, but it’s well told, and reminiscent of a notorious recent Reddit thread.

You can get Gigi and the Cat here.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

1920s: Wings (1927-28) | The Broadway Melody (1928-29)
1930s: All Quiet on the Western Front (1929-30) | Cimarron (1930-31) | Grand Hotel (1931-32) | Cavalcade (1932-33) | It Happened One Night (1934) | Mutiny on the Bounty (1935, and books) | The Great Ziegfeld (1936) | The Life of Emile Zola (1937) | You Can’t Take It with You (1938) | Gone with the Wind (1939, and book)
1940s: Rebecca (1940) | How Green Was My Valley (1941) | Mrs. Miniver (1942) | Casablanca (1943) | Going My Way (1944) | The Lost Weekend (1945) | The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) | Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) | Hamlet (1948) | All the King’s Men (1949)
1950s: All About Eve (1950) | An American in Paris (1951) | The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) | From Here to Eternity (1953) | On The Waterfront (1954, and book) | Marty (1955) | Around the World in 80 Days (1956) | The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) | Gigi (1958) | Ben-Hur (1959)
1960s: The Apartment (1960) | West Side Story (1961) | Lawrence of Arabia (1962) | Tom Jones (1963) | My Fair Lady (1964) | The Sound of Music (1965) | A Man for All Seasons (1966) | In the Heat of the Night (1967) | Oliver! (1968) | Midnight Cowboy (1969)
1970s: Patton (1970) | The French Connection (1971) | The Godfather (1972) | The Sting (1973) | The Godfather, Part II (1974) | One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) | Rocky (1976) | Annie Hall (1977) | The Deer Hunter (1978) | Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)
1980s: Ordinary People (1980) | Chariots of Fire (1981) | Gandhi (1982) | Terms of Endearment (1983) | Amadeus (1984) | Out of Africa (1985) | Platoon (1986) | The Last Emperor (1987) | Rain Man (1988) | Driving Miss Daisy (1989)
1990s: Dances With Wolves (1990) | The Silence of the Lambs (1991) | Unforgiven (1992) | Schindler’s List (1993) | Forrest Gump (1994) | Braveheart (1995) | The English Patient (1996) | Titanic (1997) | Shakespeare in Love (1998) | American Beauty (1999)
21st century: Gladiator (2000) | A Beautiful Mind (2001) | Chicago (2002) | The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) | Million Dollar Baby (2004, and book) | Crash (2005) | The Departed (2006) | No Country for Old Men (2007) | Slumdog Millionaire (2008) | The Hurt Locker (2009)
2010s: The King’s Speech (2010) | The Artist (2011) | Argo (2012) | 12 Years a Slave (2013) | Birdman (2014) | Spotlight (2015) | Moonlight (2016) | The Shape of Water (2017) | Green Book (2018) | Parasite (2019)
2020s: Nomadland (2020) | CODA (2021) | Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) | Oppenheimer (2023)

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Two Hugo rules revisions in search of co-sponsors

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It’s the time of year when people start to think about ways in which the Hugo process can be improved. I have two small tweaks to propose, one of which is really technical and the other intended to make the award a bit more special. If I can get a co-sponsor or co-sponsors for either of them (needs to b a member, but not necessarily an attending member, of Dublin 2019: An Irish Worldcon) I will put them forward to the WSFS Business Meeting this year; if passed there, they will still need to be ratified at next year’s Worldcon, CoNZealand, before coming into force.

I have not yet got co-sponsors for either; expressions of interest very welcome.

1) No deadline for nominations eligibility

Proposal: remove the struck-through words in the Constitution.

3.7.1: The Worldcon Committee shall conduct a poll to select the finalists for the Award voting. Each member of the administering Worldcon or the immediately preceding Worldcon as of the end of the previous calendar year shall be allowed to make up to five (5) equally weighted nominations in every category.

Explanation: At present, those who want to nominate for the Hugos must either be members of the previous year’s Worldcon, or have joined the current Worldcon before 31 December of the previous year.

Until recently, the deadline was 31 January. The move to make it a month earlier (proposed by Nicholas Whyte and Kathryn Duval in 2017, ratified in 2018) was partly prompted to fit with the then proposed three-stage nominations process (which did not pass) and partly inspired by tidiness (no other date is in the constitution).

In practice, it has led to some frustration among members who join after 31 December and who did not realise that there was a deadline.

From the administrator’s point of view, it is actually much easier to give new members nominating rights, up to the deadline, than to exclude them.

This does carry a certain risk of entryism, with people joining at the last minute as part of a campaign. The deterrent here is social: Hugo voters have now demonstrated that they will react strongly against any such moves by voting for No Award ahead of finalists who have reached the ballot as a result of such campaigns.

2) Five and five

Proposal: to amend the Constitution thus:

3.8.1: Except as provided below, the final Award ballots shall list in each category the six five eligible nominees receiving the most nominations as determined by the process described in Section 3.9.

Explanation: “Five and six” was one of the reforms made in 2015-16 to minimise the future effects of block voting. It already has a 2022 sunset clause and a provision that any business meeting may suspend its operation for the following year’s Hugos.

After three years, we now have enough information to be clear: EPH does make a difference to deter bad actors, “Five and six” rather less. On the other hand, having 20% more finalists does significantly increase the administrative and financial burden on each year’s Worldcon, as anyone who has been to a recent pre-Hugo reception can testify.

In addition, the burden placed by the Hugo process on diligent readers has also increased in recent years, with the addition of a new category of novels (the Lodestar) and especially of the Best Series category. In 2019 there are 31 categories in the Hugo Awards, a record. It would be a kindness to voters to reduce the required reading from six finalists per category back to five.

Although there is a 2022 sunset clause for “Five and Six”, realistically we already have enough information to repeal it now, and to make life a little easier for Hugo administrators and voters in 2021 and 2022.

The losers will be those who had placed sixth in recent years. There is only one case of a sixth-placed finalist at nominations stage going on to win the Hugo in the last three years (the rather odd situation of Best Fan Artist in 2017, where two finalists were disqualified). On the other hand, a reduced pool of finalists increases the cachet of being among that number.

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My tweets

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  • Fri, 10:32: RT @JP_Biz: The Alternative Arrangements Commission has been on the road this week promoting their report in Belfast & Dublin. What’s the I…
  • Fri, 10:45: How a video game community filled my nephew’s final days with joy https://t.co/vwz0kYFOcu Online community can be amazing.
  • Fri, 11:51: RT @pmdfoster: I know I’m a #Brexit border bore but this column from @ChrisGiles_ on the simple of issue of how VAT works in Ireland if a b…

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Art and family in Luxembourg

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We went to Luxembourg last weekend, to visit my cousin J and her family (husband D, children L, N and S). We took the opportunity to explore the rather charming capital, where my attention was caught by a couple of instances of public art. This fascinating sculpture, with somewhat feminine curves, sits just to the south of the Notre Dame Cathedral.

There is no plaque explaining what it is called or why it is there. I appealed to social media for help in identifying it, and it did not take very long to Establish both artist and title: it is “La Grande Isis”, by Maggy Stein (1931-1999), commissioned by the government of Luxembourg as a monumental sculpture in 1978. (Luxembourgish Wikipedia gives her age of birth as 1934, but this seems unlikely from the other information given, and this article says 1931.) I find it a fascinating piece. This exhibition brochure says more, in French and German:

As a woman, a mother, a divorcee, an artist and a sculptor, she faced constant resistance. She was largely denied the prizes and public commissions which her work deserved. Probably her most important public work is the sculpture near the cathedral in the center of the city of Luxembourg: it is the only one of its kind.

At a completely different level, down in the valley of the river Alzette as it flows past the walls of the old city, we found wire and paper sculptures of insects and various other creatures. It looks like a temporary display, but we have no idea why.

Quite close to J and D’s house, a 1930s shrine to St Martin gives the saint a nice view over the valley:

In fact he is guarding a mysterious old inscribed stone, the “Hellegesteen”, which marks the spot where he apparently had a vision while travelling to (or maybe from) Trier.

It’s always interesting to track younger relatives as they grow up. Here is F with his second cousin L, taken in 2019 (19 and 7), 2014 (15 and 2) and 2012 (12 and very small).

And this is me with my near-namesake, L’s brother N, in 2019 and 2014 (he was not available in 2012):

A fun weekend.

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Swinson v Davey – I think I’ll @JoinJo

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I’m only very loosely engaged with the Lib Dems these days, but apparently I am engaged enough to get a vote in this month’s leadership election – as I did in 2006, 2007 and 2015. There really seems very little to choose between the two candidates on policy grounds. They have similar sets of supporters, of whom I know roughly the same number in both camps. The Lib Dems are on a roll at present and seem to me likely to have a jolly good election result and a chance of participation in another coalition government under either potential candidate.

And for me that last point is crucial. The Lib Dems failed to differentiate themselves sufficiently from the Conservatives in government in 2010-15, and rightly paid the price for that. Of the two candidates, I see Jo Swinson has having had a better record during the coalition in that she staked out and defended policy territory that was distinctive to the Lib Dems. It’s also a matter of fact that she has simply got more press coverage. (See Google Trends chart below; she is ahead of Ed Davey in 98 months out of 178, while he leads in 58 months; just looking at the coalition period, the lead is narrower but still there.) The coalition’s record is one of the few clear dividing lines between them: Jo Swinson is clear that the party needs to “own the failures” of its time in government. “We lost too many arguments. When they fought dirty, we were too nice.” Ed Davey on the other hand seems to think that the cratering of the party’s reputation in government was a mere PR problem. It was much worse.

It’s not just a matter of who will get the party into government after the next election; it’s a matter of who is more likely to preserve it from the voters’ wrath at the election after. So I think I’ll #JoinJo.

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Tuesday reading

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Current
Gateways, ed. Elizabeth Anne Hull
First Generation, by Mary Tamm

Last books finished
“Goat Song”, by Poul Anderson
Amazing, Fantastic, Incredible, by Stan Lee, Peter David and Colleen Doran
The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame
Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney, by Dennis O'Driscoll
The Poppy War, by R.F. Kuang
Becoming, by Michelle Obama

Next books
1913: The World before the Great War, by Charles Emmerson
The Making and Remaking of the Good Friday Agreement, by Paul Bew

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I have reached Level 40 on Pokemon Go

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Well, I've done it. This morning I received a 50,000 point gift from a friend, evolved a Rattata into a Raticate, and finally spun the Pokestop outside my office to get the last few points to reach Level 40, the top and final level on Pokemon Go. If you don't know what any of this is about, this article in the Guardian is a good intro.

I tracked the last 15 levels by date, and it's straightforward to see how long each level took me:

Date Level

Days since
last level
17-Jun-17 25
25-Aug-17 26 69
23-Oct-17 27 59
21-Apr-18 28 180
15-Jun-18 29 55
5-Jul-18 30 20
18-Jul-18 31 13
30-Jul-18 32 12
15-Aug-18 33 16
3-Sep-18 34 19
30-Sep-18 35 27
15-Oct-18 36 15
24-Nov-18 37 40
11-Jan-19 38 48
12-Apr-19 39 91
13-May-19 39¼ 31
3-Jun-19 39½ 52
16-Jun 39¾ 65
1-Jul-19 40 80

Not sure what explains the almost six-month gap to Level 28 – I guess that was the height of my Duolingo fixation?

Also the last few levels were distinctly slower.

Well, now that I've hit the top level, I don't think I will continue playing it as regularly. There are still fun little side quests that you can do, but I never got into the social aspect; it was something to do in the non-reading parts of my commute. Now I'll go back to Big Finish and maybe find some podcasts instead.

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My tweets

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  • Sun, 12:56: RT @JamesMelville: A massive trade deal has been agreed between the EU and South America. The biggest free trade deal ever agreed between c…
  • Sun, 13:51: RT @TimClarePoet: Say what you will about TERFs, they show a touching concern for my daughter’s putative future amateur wrestling career. P…
  • Sun, 13:56: This would be pretty awful. Three men from founding member states… https://t.co/Q0dpTvjEtN
  • Sun, 14:48: RT @ManyFacedGodess: And it begins. You’ll start seeing a lot of posts about butch lesbians being confronted in toilets now. Because appare…
  • Sun, 16:01: RT @carneross: @nwbrux Thanks Nicholas. Much I learned from you.
  • Sun, 16:05: RT @jonworth: All Olly Robbins – like Ivan Rogers – did was actually try to make Brexit workable. Like any decent civil servant would. Bu…
  • Sun, 18:10: June Books https://t.co/mL3N4nL50Y
  • Sun, 19:35: RT @Dublin2019: #Dublin2019 is pleased to present the World Premiere of Erwin Strauss’ musical adaptation of The Enchanted Duplicator, the…
  • Sun, 20:48: RT @barrabest: Good people of Twitter, I need your help, especially if you have contacts in France A French photographer took this photo…
  • Sun, 21:32: RT @apcoworldwide: Our respective political systems are experiencing an earthquake-like paradigm shift, and the business community has the…

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June Books

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Non-fiction: 1 (YTD 19)
Robert Holmes: a Life in Words, by Richard Molesworth
1845830911.01._SX175_SY250_SCLZZZZZZZ_[1].jpg

Fiction (non-sf): 3 (YTD 16)
Five Women Who Loved Love, by Ihara Saikaku
The Paying Guests, by Sarah Waters
In Another Light, by Andrew Greig
20079fdcea26315597377376b67437641506f41[1].jpg 0349004609.01._SX175_SY250_SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg 0753820072.01._SX175_SY250_SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

sf (non-Who): 16 (YTD 51)
Gods, Monsters and the Lucky Peach, by Kelly Robson
Sovereign by R.M. Meluch
The Belles, by Dhonielle Clayton
Binti: The Night Masquerade, by Nnedi Okorafor
Perelandra, by C.S. Lewis
Artificial Condition, by Martha Wells
Beneath the Sugar Sky, by Seanan McGuire
The Weapon Makers, by A.E. van Vogt
Earth’s Last Citadel, by C.L. Moore and Henry Kuttner
The Black God’s Drums, by P. Djèlí Clark
The Tea Master and the Detective, by Aliette de Bodard
Bedknobs and Broomsticks, by Mary Norton
The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, by H.P. Lovecraft
“Goat Song”, by Poul Anderson
The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame
1d309b7b307ca4f597a4e515a77437641506f41.jpg B071XNWRHC.01._SX175_SY250_SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg 4d58d40dd23a871596a65646f77437641506f41.jpg e734572fe8f8ce4597754545451437641506f41.jpg d984481ec9e1096596f6f537041437641506f41.jpg 8ec3c0372a72ffe5970464d7067437641506f41.jpg B00H8CKJKO.01._SX175_SY250_SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg c983e6ed3b9037b596a45517341437641506f41.jpg 303a7814c8e63d0596e4d4b7241437641506f41.jpg f29212c9afb22c55968544e7141437641506f41.jpg 1e952ef9cfdf2ac596837596a77437641506f41.jpg 0156528207.01._SX175_SY250_SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg 150052686X.01._SX175_SY250_SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

Doctor Who, etc: 3 (YTD 13)
The Secret Lives of Monsters, by Justin Richards
Filthy Lucre, by James Parsons and Andrew Sterling-Brown
Moon Blink, by Sadie Miller
1849907706.01._SX175_SY250_SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg B00COP1CJ2.01._SX175_SY250_SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg 0993519202.01._SX175_SY250_SCLZZZZZZZ_[1].jpg

Comics 6 (YTD 12)
Will Supervillains Be On The Final?, by Naomi Novik, art by Yishan Li
Monstress, Volume 3: Haven, written by Marjorie Liu, art by Sana Takeda
Black Panther: Long Live the King, written by Nnedi Okorafor and Aaron Covington, art by André Lima Araújo, Mario Del Pennino and Tana Ford
Abbott, written by Saladin Ahmed, art by Sami Kivelä, colours by Jason Wordie, letters by Jim Campbell
Paper Girls, Volume 4, written by Brian K. Vaughan, art by Cliff Chiang, colours by Matt Wilson, letters by Jared K. Fletcher
Amazing, Fantastic, Incredible, by Stan Lee, Peter David and Colleen Doran
0345516567.01._SX175_SY250_SCLZZZZZZZ_[1].jpg 1534306919.01._SX175_SY250_SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg 1302905384.01._SX175_SY250_SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg 1684152453.01._SX175_SY250_SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg 1534305106.01._SX175_SY250_SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

6,300 pages (YTD 31,500)
15/29 (YTD 51/112) by non-male writers (Waters, Robson, Meluch, Clayton, Okorafor x2, Wells, McGuire, Moore, de Bodard, Norton, Miller, Novik/Li, Liu/Takeda, Doran)
10/29 (YTD 18/112) by PoC (Saikaku, Clayton, Okorafor x2, Clark, de Bodard, Novik/Li, Liu/Takeda, Ahmed, Chiang)
6/29 (YTD 12/112) rereads (Perelandra, Bedknobs and Broomsticks, The Little Prince, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, “Goat Song”, The Wind in the Willows)

Reading now
Becoming, by Michelle Obama
The Poppy War, by R. F Kuang
Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney, by Dennis O'Driscoll
Gateways, ed. Elizabeth Anne Hull

Coming soon (perhaps):
1913: The World before the Great War, by Charles Emmerson
The Making and Remaking of the Good Friday Agreement, by Paul Bew
Better Than Sex, by Hunter S. Thompson
Het Amusement, by Brecht Evens
The Ghosts of Heaven, by Marcus Sedgwick
For the Love of a Mother: The Black Children of Ulster, by Annie Yellowe Palma
Small Wonder, by Barbara Kingsolver
Grimm Tales, by Philip Pullman
The Time Ships, by Stephen Baxter
The Dispossessed, by Ursula Le Guin
Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Kate Bush: Under the Ivy, by Graeme Thompson
Berlin Book Three: City of Light, by Jason Lutes
Smallworld, by Dominic Green
Alina, by Jason Johnson
Anthropological Studies of Religion: An Introductory Text, by Brian Morris
David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens
Be My Enemy, by Ian McDonald
Lightning Days, by Colin Harvey
Adorable Illusion, by Gary Russell

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My tweets

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My tweets

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My top tweets, first half of 2019

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I'm hoping to raise my Twitter profile to a bit better than my 2018 ranking of 39th of the 40 top EU influencers (or even 37th as I managed in 2017). These are my top 25 tweets so far in 2019 (from various rankings extracted from Twitter analytics):

25

A visceral reaction to a Boris Johnson piece about Bloody Sunday.

24

First of many tweets from the European Parliament election count for Northern Ireland, this one sent just after I had arrived.

23

A sensible contribution to the culture wars; at least, I thought so, and felt it deserved wider dissemination.

22

One of two particularly well-performing tweets from the Northern Ireland local elections count at the start of May. I think this did well because it was fairly early in the afternoon of the results, and a lot of people gloated about the TUV.

21

Also from the local election results. Not sure why this one did particularly well, but I guess there were several points of interest.

20

This really did upset me – scandalously, it took Karen Bradley several days to walk back this disastrous statement, culminating in the classic line, "It is factually wrong. It is not what I believe." The perception of callous incompetence remains

19

End of one of my twitter threads about Brexit, which was picked up by a couple of more visible Tweeters.

18

My quick summary of one of the turning points in the Brexit process.

17

Preparations for the 2019 Hugos, explained at greater length here.

16

Flagging up my local elections broadcasts.

15

I've found Peter Foster (@PMDFoster) of the Telegraph to be the most lucid British journalist covering Brexit. The best journalist of all is Tony Connelly (@TConnellyRTE).

14

My pessimistic take from January. Although the 29 March no-deal Brexit which I then gloomily expected did not happen, I still think a 31 October no-deal Brexit is the most likely outcome.

13

BBC interview from April, in which I actually called it right.

12

Can't claim the credit for this, though I am glad to have helped disseminate it.

11

Start of the Brexit thread whose end I've already listed. I've found it quite a successful format.

10

Another tweet from the count in Magherafelt, this time from the end.

9

Am rather proud of this brief thread about the failures of the British diplomatic system.

8

I should have credited this excellent piece to @tomgauld.

7

Another tweet from the count in Magherafelt, from an earlier stage.

6

This jumped right off the newspaper page and into my brain, and resonated with a lot of other people too.

5

Yet another tweet from the count in Magherafelt, from the penultimate stage.

4

I'm not generally in favour of point-and-laugh tweets. I should have been a bit more generous here, and said that I don't share the enthusiasm of many of my friends for Fintan O'Toole's writing, and that in fact the central paragraph describing the UK government's mistakes is well-founded. But the overall thesis is completely wrong; Boris Johnson's approach to Ireland as foreign secretary was so crass that British diplomats warned Irish officials not to pay any attention to anything he said.

3

Another of my longer Twitter threads.

2

I think my best ever performing tweet with original content, this time from just after the end of the count in Magherafelt. I actually took two pictures – in the first one, only Martina Anderson was looking at me; she said my name in acknowledgement, and Diane Dodds and Naomi Long then both turned their heads to catch my eye, so that was the moment I captured with my second take.

1

Again, I'm not generally in favour of point-and-laugh tweets. But sometimes your restraint gives way.

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My tweets

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  • Fri, 11:23: RT @SexWorkHive: Home Office is quick to invoke “anti-trafficking” to justify its violent raids and crackdowns but will do anything it can…

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Filthy Lucre, by James Parsons and Alexander Stirling-Brown

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

‘Pardon. Sorry.’ Ruth sniffed.

Another short and digestible Bernice Summerfield novel, with two nicely intertwined timelines about a crashed spaceship and a randy corporate sponsor, it only becoming clear at the end of a short book how the two are related to each other. Minor but enjoyable. You can get it here.

Next in the Bernice Summerfield series: Adorable Illusion, by Gary Russell.

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My tweets

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In Another Light, by Andrew Greig

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

I had never even seen a photograph of him from before he met my mother, and she has none. Apparently he had never been young.

My father was born in Penang, now in Malaysia, in 1928, and this book is about a middle-aged Scotsman tracing the history of his own father’s time in Penang at almost exactly the same time. So there was a lot of personal interest in it for me. The narrative cuts back and forth between 2004 Britain (mostly Orkney with bits of London and elsewhere) and 1930s Malaya, both of them vividly portrayed – one certainly gets a sense of Penang as a colonial outpost with much restrained ferment (and Orkney as a much more unbuttoned island community). Both father and son have romantic intrigues and dilemmas, and several plot strands are brought together very satisfactorily at the end. All the characters are Scottish, English or local to Penang (so no Irish like my grandfather or Americans like my grandmother), but on the other hand the narrator’s father’s specialisation is obstetrics, which is rather relevant for my family in this case. I really enjoyed this. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2011, and the non-genre fictyion book that had lingered longest on my unread shelves. Next in those piles respectively are Anthropological Studies of Religion: An Introductory Text, by Brian Morris, and Alina, by Jason Johnston.

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