- Your Face and Name Will Appear in Google Ads Starting Today
Unless you uncheck the box…
- mIt came from Outer Space Wearing an RAF Blazer – Martin Mobberley, 2013
Review of Patrick Moore biography!
- Rare color film shows what London looked like in 1927
Wonderful.
Links I found interesting for 10-01-2014
- Britain cannot afford to be the friendless pariah of Europe
Excellent piece from @telegraph: Britain “hiding under a duvet of doubt and debt”.
- Meat Atlas – Facts and figures about the animals we eat
*gulp* @boell_stiftung
- Steamship Routes of the World, 1914
Cool.
- The World’s Most Dangerous Trail on Mr. Huashan Leads to a Teahouse
Just looking at this gives me vertigo!
- Improbable Research: Postal Experiments
The USPS comes up trumps.
- Top EU official slams British ministers on immigration
#creditwhereitsdue Reding is right.
Links I found interesting for 09-01-2014
- Little England
- European commission braces for bitter battle over new chief
Guardian reports on the EU’s imminent problematic summer.
- Jo Cornu: “Is het nog aanvaardbaar dat er in stations en treinen geen wifi is?”
New Belgian rail boss’s agenda – excellent!!!
- Emails link top Christie aide to GWB lane-closing controversy
Extraordinary story of petty local politics.
Wednesday reading meme
Current
Raising Steam, by Terry Pratchett
Walk to the End of the World, by Suzy McKee Charnas
The Saint Zita Society, by Ruth Rendell
[Doctor Who] Happy Endings, by Paul Cornell (1996)
The Big Finish Companion v1, by Richard Dinnick
Last books finished
The Secret River, by Kate Grenville
[Doctor Who] Last of the Gaderene, by Mark Gatiss
Amsterdam, by Russell Shorto
Saints of the Shadow Bible, by Ian Rankin
About Time: The Unauthorized Guide to Doctor Who, 2005-2006; Series 1 & 2, by Tat Wood
The Next Generation, vol ii and vol iii, by John Francis Maguire (?)
Next books
Absalom, Absalom!, by William Faulkner
Motherlines, by Suzy McKee Charnas
[Doctor Who] Grimm Reality by Simon Bucher-Jones
Dawn, by Octavia E. Butler
Books acquired in last week
Een Geweer in het Water, by Hermann
Dodger, by Terry Pratchett
The World of Poo, by Terry Pratchett
La Galère d’Obélix by Albert Uderzo
Raising Steam, by Terry Pratchett
Dominion, by C. J. Sansom
January Books 4) Saints of the Shadow Bible, by Ian Rankin
Now that Rebus has retired, but is finding ways back into police work, Rankin seems to be hitting a new consistency of excellence. Here, Rebus and colleagues get tangled in a dodgy car accident whose ostensible only victim’s boyfriend is the son of Scotland’s Justice Minister, with links into both the 2014 independence referendum campaign and the more robust and less ethical policing days of two decades ago. Then the bodies start turning up, and Rebus finds that he himself is closer to the source of the story than he would like to be. It’s all intricately woven and unwoven, with nobody completely admirable in their behaviour and some pretty awful. There is a comedy relief scrapyard, which is a nice touch. Long may this continue.
January Books 3) About Time: The Unauthorised Guide to Doctor Who, 2005-2006, by Tat Wood
This has been my insomnia book since September, far more successful than my previous efforts at choosing insomnia books (note for self and other insomniacs – mystery stories actually not such a great way of getting to sleep; thoughtful books about material which you are already very familiar with are a much better idea).
That's not at all to say that it's boring – just that the 28 chapters, and the 28 accompanying essays, are actually meaty and self-contained enough that you can shut the book at the end of each and every one of them and drift off happily. Indeed, now that I have finished it, I wonder what I can turn to next? (Furtive glance at two volumes of the Big Finish Companion on the shelves…)
Anyway. As I had hoped, this is an in depth and critical look at the first two years of New Who, the time of Rose Tyler as a regular companion. It's the seventh volume of the superlative About Time series, and it's difficult to imagine anyone producing a better survey of the period. (Phil Sandifer's book on this, when it comes out, will also be on the must-have shelf, but he is pursuing a different intellectual project and anyway his chapters are usually shorter.)
For each episode, as before, there are substantial sections on continuity (fitting in what we are told into what we know from other Who stories and 'real' history), analysis and the production process. This last is the biggest improvement from previous volumes; About Time 7 has practically a day-by-day breakdown of production (Eccleston's first scene, filmed on 18 July 2004, was chasing the pig down the corridor in Aliens of LondonThe Parting of the Ways). The sections on guest stars are consistently more informative than in previous volumes as well, probably because there are a lot more of them. The sections on popular culture sources for the stories remain as interesting as ever.
Wood is consistently upbeat about the lead actors, particularly about Billie Piper, who of course was known mainly as a teen pop singer before 2005. His snark, however, is fully unleashed for the plotting and sometimes the directing of individual episodes – the "Things That Don't Make Sense" section, which has always been an attractive feature of the AboutTime series, reaches new lengths and depths here. As he points out, although Series Two was a huge hit at the time, there's an awful lot of plot nonsense in it, and the real difference is that the series had a bigger budget than it had ever had or would ever have again.
This volume doesn't have the strongest accompanying essays of the series (for those, you want the second edition of Volume 3), but they are still satisfactory enough. Probably the two most interesting are "Was Series Two Meant To Be Like This?", which speculates about original plans for the 2006 episodes, including Stephen Fry's unmade story, and "Did He Fall Or Was He Pushed?", looking at the various accounts given of Eccleston's departure and tryng to find the overall picture – the evidence pointing to his not having firmly signed on for more than a year in the first place, and then a series of circumstances and incidents which all pushed against renewal of his contract.
Though this is Volume 7 of the ongoing About Time series of books about Doctor Who, those who started with New Who can jump in here. It is strongly hinted that Volume 8, which will cover the rest of the Tennant era, as well as Torchwood and Sarah Jane, is already written – at the rate this volume goes, about 16 pages for each episode, I suspect that may appear in two pieces – and that a projected Volume 9 will cover the Matt Smith era. Anyway, it's well worth getting, not just for Who fans but generally for fans of 21st century sf television.
Standard formatting gripe – 90 endnotes? Seriously? Why can't we have footnotes, which actually put the interesting nuggets next to the text they illuminate?
Links I found interesting for 06-01-2014
- Buy-to-let property supremo shuts door on housing benefit tenants
Britain’s war on the poor continues.
- Interactive geospatial map of the Roman Empire
Wow!
- The Fatal Floor
30 seconds of terror, narrated by Patrick Troughton.
- What Do Y’All, Yinz, and Yix Call Stretchy Office Supplies?
The New Yorker spoofs the dialect quiz.
- The intense world theory of autism
Rings a lot of bells for me.
Oud-Heverlee, then and now
Took advantage of the fine weather this morning to try and reproduce the settings of some vintage postcards round our village – slightly hampered by the sun (should have got up earlier).
The old town hall, now the village library, was completely renovated inside a year or so ago, but retains the utilitarian brick facade, though the village name has disappeared. The school buildings behind ave been altered quite a lot.
The position of the sun was a particular problem for this shot and I might try it again. The building facing us from he far corner of the junction was a cafe when we first moved here in 2001, but closed soon after and is just a private residence. (In the very short walk from the former cafe to our house, you pass a former bank branch and a former flower shop, both now private residence.)
The Church of St Anne, at the core of the village, has been cleaned up since the older picture was taken (from the back garned on the adjacent property; we were not able to get across the wall). Also there was a clock on the south face of the 11th-century bell tower in the older picture, just about visible between the two small windows – it has now been moved to the east face, above the front entrance.
Finally, the one shot that turned out to be impossible to reproduce adequately is probably the nicest of the old pictures. The church in those days was painted white; the two quaint old buildings in front of it are both still there, in slightly better shape, and still painted white; but tree growth in the meantime makes it impossible to see except with the eye of faith.
The lost micro-continent of Avalonia
I am always fascinated by vanished places and buried landscapes, and was delighted recently to discover that I inhabit the remnants of the lost continent of Avalonia, which existed as a small but separate entity between about 490 and 460 million years ago.
The (possible) extent of Avalonia
The Avalonian remnants include, from east to west, the northwest corner of Poland starting around Szczecin; the northern chunk of Germany; possibly a sliver of Denmark; all of the Netherlands; almost all of Belgium; the Calais/Dunkirk area of France; all of England and Wales (but almost none of Scotland); Ireland southeast of a line from Drogheda to the Shannon estuary; southeastern Newfoundland (including the Avalon peninsula which gives Avalonia its name), with St Pierre and Miquelon; Nova Scotia except the parts south of Halifax; Prince Edward Island; New Brunswick roughly south of Monckton and Fredericton; Maine southeast of the Norumbega Fault which runs southwest from the border to Bangor and then more SSW to Portland, possibly including also the coastal strip of New Hampshire; Massachusetts southeast of a line from the lower Merrimack river valley to Worcester, however excluding Cape Cod ; all of Rhode Island; and finally Connecticut east of Hartford and New Haven. (But not Long Island, just across the Sound.) It's a remarkable mythic assemblage, from Pomerania to Providemce, including both the Avalon Peninsula and the original Isle of Avalon.
The precise borders are debatable, because Avalonian sediments are found at many depths, and it consisted of a series of islands anyway; one map puts remnants in the Carpathians, and also straddling the Straits of Gibraltar. Wikipedia page offers several options, including these:
Avalonia in Europe (one version)
Avalonia in Europe (another version)
The end of Avalonia (one version)
The end of Avalonia (another version)
Avalonia, when it existed, started at the South Pole, an arc of volcanic islands on the rim of Gondwana, bordering land now in Mauretania/Gabon, South Carolina/Georgia/Alabama, and Venezuela/Colombia. When it split off about 490 million years ago, at the end of the Cambrian, it set sail into the Iapetus Ocean, opening up the Rheic Ocean behind it. About 450 million years ago, at the end of the Ordovician, Avalonia joined onto the slightly larger continent of Baltica as a peninsula, and during the Silurian period closed up the Iapetus Ocean, merging with the northern continent of Laurentia. The rest of Gondwana eventually caught up behind it, closing the Rheic Ocean and bringing most of what is now Europe together during the Devonian as the supercontinent of Pangaea formed.
There's a lovely iPad app which lets you assemble Pangaea at your leisure (and another which lets you dismantle it). These screenshots show the history of Avalonia, the red pin marking my Belgian home.
Anyway, greetings, fellow-citizens of the former Avalonia! I bet you never realised that we had that in common.
Links I found interesting for 04-01-2014
- No, Kim Jong Un probably didn’t feed his uncle to 120 hungry dogs
Best headline of 2014!!!
- 2015: An Ugly Stramash
The UK parliamentary consequences of a Scottish Yes.
- How Britain exported next-generation surveillance
Number plates and abuse of power.
Links I found interesting for 03-01-2014
- “Ugly and stupid”
@TimFarron hits out at Tories on immigration pandering.
- Immigrants are not the problem
Unemployment and benefit cuts *are* the problem.
- The Geopolitics of the Gregorian Calendar
Unusually good article from @Stratfor about the length of the year.
- Where Will We Live?
The UK’s housing catastrophe – caused by all parties, esp Tories.
- Why the Passenger Pigeon Became Extinct (@thenewyorker)
“The short answer is that it tasted good.”
- Our Airport, Your Airport
The Brussels airport feelgood video. Really.
January Books 1-2) The Next Generation, by John Francis Maguire: Feminism and steampunk in 1871
I have been on the lookout for this book for over ten years, since first coming across John Clute’s description of it in the Science Fiction Encyclopedia. John Francis Maguire was an Irish Liberal MP of the mid-nineteenth century, representing the Munster constituencies of Dungarvan (1852-65) and Cork City (from 1865 till his death in 1872). He also founded the Cork Examiner, a daily newspaper which is still going strong (though recently rebranded the Irish Examiner in order to broaden its appeal). He also published several non-fiction books, on Pope Pius IX, the Irish in America, and Father Mathew; this is his only novel, published in 1871, the year before his death, in three volumes totalling slightly under a thousand pages. (Those pages are not long – here is a sample.)
The story is set in 1891 (with a discreet framing narrative in 1895). There is a railway tunnel between Dover and Calais, though the beastly French are not honouring their obligations about the internal lighting. Privately owned steam-powered balloons are becoming a traffic problem in London’s skies. New weaponry includes artillery with a range of dozens of miles, and special bullets that explode inside Chinese people. Incidentally Britain has just conquered China. So far, so steampunky.
But at the core of the book, women have had the vote and access to the professions of law and medicine for almost twenty years (incidentally, the best women doctors are Jewish). By 1891 they make up over 20% of all MPs – by 1895, after the story ends, almost 25%. (By contrast, in our timeline, the first British election at which women won more than 20% of the seats in the House of Commons was the most recent one, in 2010.) Ireland has Home Rule, with a royal prince as viceroy – this in a book published four years before Parnell won his first election – and the Irish, and British Catholics generally, are loyal subjects of the Crown, gleefully joining in the conquest of China. The House of Commons also has a few elected representatives from India, though we never see any of them and none are named (and the viceroy of India is not royal). Maguire was an early adopter on both women’s suffrage and Home Rule.
This may sound rather promising, but I have to admit that The Next Generation doesn’t quite deliver on its promise. The core plot, such as it is, concerns the rather gentle romantic and political travails of Grace O’Donnell, a young, clever and beautiful Irish MP who is appointed as the (liberal) government’s Chief Whip in order to counteract the success of the young, clever and beautiful English MP who is the (mildly Tory) opposition Chief Whip. The description of new technology is almost entirely concentrated in some throwaway remarks at the start of the first chapter of volume III. The plot ignores all these technological advances for the sake of mild-mannered political machination, lengthy parliamentary debate, and romance. The most exciting moment is when the two Chief Whips, paired together for a rowing competition in the middle of volume II, save two children from drowning.
My father, who read this book in 1954 when he was 26, commented “This is certainly not a great novel – the plot is hardly more than a series of loosely connected episodes, the characters are nearly all unrelievedly good or irredeemably bad, and there is the usual Victorian archness about relations between the sexes.” I would add that it massively fails, as you would expect a well-meaning Victorian liberal politician’s novel to fail, on class and race. There is a particularly awful chapter featuring a parliamentary debate on weaning the Chinese off opium – breathtakingly arrogant in conception given the history of that particular issue; the arguments put forward are partly a cut-and-paste from the Irish temperance movement, combined with the White Man’s Burden in civilising our Chinese brethren. It’s all very instructive.
Well, I hear you ask, how can I get hold of this amazing book? As I said at the start, I had been looking for it for ages – the first two volumes are available on various free online and print-on-demand sites, but I could not find the third volume and anyway don’t much like on-line reading except for very short books. However, I was delighted to find that iTunes in its wisdom is offering all three, decently formatted, for quite a reasonable price – Vol I, Vol II and Vol III. Some smart publisher could do quite well by publishing an abridged version (the text is long since in the public domain) with up-to-date illustrations. Happy to advise on that; my consultancy rates are quite reasonable!
Links I found interesting for 02-01-2014
- 10 Global Elections to Watch in 2014
A geopolitical roundup which tries not to be US-centric but does not quite succeed!
- Why I’m against immigration
…because Britain is full. A must-read piece.
- Crossroads And Coins: Naomi Mitchison’s ‘Travel Light’
@tithenai on Tolkien’s friend.
- Isaac Asimov Predicts in 1964 What the World Will Look Like Today — in 2014
- The Myth of Western Civilisation
Ta-Nehisi Coates starts with Tony Judt’s “Postwar” and goes on from there.
Links I found interesting for 01-01-2014
- What Could Have Entered the Public Domain on January 1, 2014?
How copyright law has changed since 1978.
- Murder on the Roof of the World
Misleading title for great article about the Karakoram Highway.
- The Year America’s Post-9/11 Foreign Policy Failed
@ForeignPolicy’s pessimistic 2014 outlook.
- US Dept of Homeland Security destroys 11 musical instruments as “agricultural products”
Another win in the war on – who, exactly???
2013 books poll
The traditional
And if you haven’t, please look at my 2014 books poll.
Books of 2012 and 2013
Looking back, I discovered that I never did a proper books roundup of 2012, unlike in previous years (2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005). Well, there’s plenty of time to put that right. So here are my picks of both last year and this, in various categories. (Curses – LJ ate a long version of this post, so I’m going to be much briefer than I wanted. Probably just as well)
Total books: 237 this year, 259 last year – more than 2006 or 2007, less than any year since. More active weekends, plus devoting some commuting time to watching Doctor Who and Game of Thrones episodes.
Total page count: ~68,000 pages this year, ~77,800 last year, ~88,200 in 2011
Diversity: 71 (30%) by women this year, 65 (25%) by women last year – compares with 22% in 2011, 23% in 2010, 20% in 2009, 12% in 2008 and I don’t seem to have counted previously. This year’s total augmented by 10 Agatha Christie novels.
11 (5%) by PoC this year, 12 (5%) by PoC last year – compares with 5% in 2011, 9% in 2010, 5% in 2009, 2% in 2008. Could do better.
Most books by a single author:
2012: Jonathan Gash (11), Ursula Vernon (6), Ian Rankin (5), Alison Plowden and Justin Richards (4 each); though the Ursula Vernon and Alison Plowden books could be considered as component parts of a single work in each case.
2013: Agatha Christie (10), followed by Terrance Dicks (7), Jonathan Gash (6), Philip Sandifer (5), Cressida Cowell, Gary Russell, Ian Rankin and Neil Gaiman (4 each).
|
2013 |
2012 |
2011 |
2010 |
2009 | |||||
|
46 |
19% |
53 |
20% |
69 |
23% |
66 |
24% |
88 |
26% |
Best of 2012: The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance, by Edmund de Waal – brilliant story of heirlooms, Proust, the Holocaust and Japan.
Best of 2013: A Room of One’s Own, by Virginia Woolf – wish I’d read it when I was an undergraduate, a fundamentally important essay about literature and gender.
|
2013 |
2012 |
2011 |
2010 |
2009 | |||||
|
44 |
19% |
48 |
19% |
48 |
16% |
50 |
18% |
57 |
18% |
Best of 2012: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, by Anne Brontë – I came to it late, but much my favourite Brontë novel – seems somehow a bit more in balance than her sisters’ books.
Best of 2013: The Complete Stories of Zora Neale Hurston – brilliant collection of this unjustly obscured writer, not done any favours by its publisher.
|
2013 |
2012 |
2011 |
2010 |
2009 | |||||
|
65 |
27% |
62 |
24% |
78 |
26% |
73 |
26% |
78 |
23% |
Best of 2012: Among Others, by Jo Walton – like most of the Hugo and Nebula voters, I found that
Best of 2013: The Name of the Wind and The Wise Man’s Fear, by Patrick Rothfuss – I don’t usually go for big fantasy epics, but this somehow got to me.
|
2013 |
2012 |
2011 |
2010 |
2009 | |||||
|
72 |
30% |
75 |
29% |
80 |
27% |
71 |
26% |
70 |
19% |
Best of 2012: Shada, the long awaited novelisation by Gareth Roberts from Douglas Adams’ script.
Best of 2013: I’m going to cheat here. Although I enjoyed a lot of the Who,Torchwood and Sarah Jane fiction I read this year, pride of place goes to Philip Sandifer’s TARDIS Eruditorum series of books (vol 1, vol 2, vol 3, vol 4) which were tallied above with non-fiction, but are setting a new standard for Who criticism. (Honorable mention along the same lines to Graham Sleight’s The Doctor’s Monsters.)
|
2013 |
2012 |
2011 |
2010 |
2009 | |||||
|
30 |
13% |
21 |
8% |
27 |
9% |
18 |
6% |
28 |
8% |
Best of 2012: Digger, by Ursula Vernon – a deserving winner of the Hugo.
Best of 2013: The Blue Lotus, by Hergé – the master of the genre finds his stride.
Making up the numbers were two poetry collections, Paul Muldoon in 2013 and Walt Whitman in 2012.
What do I need to round this off? Oh yes, a poll…
December Books
Tardis Eruditorum vol 4: Tom Baker and the Hinchcliffe Years, by Philip Sandifer
Information is Beautiful, by David McCandless
Stuff I've Been Reading, by Nick Hornby
Fiction (non-sf) 5 (2013 total 44)
Eyeless in Gaza, by Aldous Huxley
Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson
The Popinjay, by Iona McGregor
The Truth Commissioner, by David Park
The Devils, by Fyodor Dostoevsky
SF (non-Who) 8 (2013 total 65)
Two unpublished novels
Patternmaster, by Octavia E. Butler
Rendezvous with Rama, by Arthur C. Clarke
The Wise Man's Fear, by Patrick Rothfuss
Looking for Jake and other stories, by China Miéville
The Father Christmas Letters, by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Next Generation, vol. I, by John Francis Maguire (provisionally classified as sf)
Doctor Who 4 (2013 total 72)
Dancing The Code, by Paul Leonard
Death and Diplomacy, by Dave Stone
City of the Dead, by Lloyd Rose
The Men Who Sold The World, by Guy Adams
Comics 2 (2013 total 30)
Animate Europe! (responsible editor Hans H. Stein)
Le Chat du Rabbin tome 1, by Joann Sfarr
~6,800 pages (2013 total ~67,000)
5/22 (2013 total 71/257) by women (McGregor, Butler, Rose and two more)
1/22 (2013 total 11/257) by PoC
Reread: Treasure Island, The Popinjay, Rendezvous with Rama, City of the Dead – 4 (2013 total 28)
Acquired 2011 or before: 12 (2013 total 105) – Rendezvous With Rama, City of the Dead, Death and Diplomacy, Treasure Island, Eyeless in Gaza, Looking for Jake, Le Chat du Rabbin v 1, Dancing the Code, The Devils, The Next Generation v I, Letters from Father Christmas, The Truth Commissioner
Acquired 2012: 1 (YTD 30) – The Men Who Sold The World
Acquired 2013: 9 (YTD 122) – The Wise Man's Fear, Pattern-Master, The Popinjay, Animate Europe, Information is Beautiful, Stuff I've Been Reading, TARDIS Eruditorum v 4, 2 unpublished.
Reading now:
About Time: The Unauthorized Guide to Doctor Who, 2005-2006; Series 1 & 2, by Tat Wood
Saints of the Shadow Bible, by Ian Rankin
The Secret River, by Kate Grenville
December Books 22) The Next Generation, vol. I, by John Francis Maguire
I’ll write this up in full next year when I read volumes II and III; just to note for now that it is a political novel written by an Irish MP in 1871, set twenty years in the future (ie 1891) in a Utopian future Westminster with women MPs, Irish Home Rule, and a recent British conquest of China. After much searching I found all three volumes available from iTunes.
December Books 21) Stuff I’ve Been Reading, by Nick Hornby
I was unaware of the existence of The Believer, the magazine for which Nick Hornby writes a regular book review column, but I may have to give it a go (I also find the Charles Burns covers very attractive). This assembles columns from mid 2006 to the end of 2011 (though he skipped 2009), all very deftly written with self-deprecating humour, aware of his own prejudices. One of the delights of the book is his discovery of YA literature as a thing of beauty, starting with Skellig (which I haven’t read) and then Tom’s Midnight GArden (which I have). Sadly Hornby refuses to read anything sfnal (he doesn’t like “sprites and hobbits and third universes) so our tastes are not completely aligned. (I didn’t count, but the number of books that I have read which are also reviewed by Hornby here is certainly less than ten and may be as low as six).
You will have noticed that I tend to write most about non-fiction books here, and it’s Hornby’s non-fiction recommendations which are going on my wishlist now: Spike & Co., by Graham McCann, about Spike Milligan, Eric Sykes, Ray Galton, Alan Simpson and Beryl Vertue (who is Steven Moffat’s mother-in-law); Austerity Britain, 1945-51, by David KynastonClaire Tomalin’s Dickens biography. But basically the joy of the book is one of meeting a fellow enthusiast for reading.
December Books 20) The Devils (aka The Possessed) by Fyodor Dostoevsky
I found this a bit of a slog, to be honest. An awful lot of time is spent setting up the bourgeois country town whose peace is destroyed by a few men who turn to revolutionary violence for no particularly good reason. It’s obviously rather chilling to read in retrospect, given that the forces of revolutionary violence did actually win in Russia decades after this was written. But I would have liked some more sympathetic characters.
Interesting that America, with its egalitarian but tough environment, is explicitly the inspiration for several characters.
What should I read in 2014?
As in previous years, I found your votes very helpful in thinning out my unread shelf this year, and I would once again very much appreciate your advice on what books to read next, by filling in this poll. (I believe that even if you don’t have a livejournal account, you can sign in with your Twitter or Facebook credentials.)
So as not to overburden the polling process, I’ve stripped out of my unread books list all books by white men which I acquired before 2013. This left about 50 in each category (sf, non-genre and non-fiction) which is a pleasing symmetry.
NB that the question for the non-fiction books is different from the questions for the other two categories.
Individual recommendations, pro and anti – preferably of books actually on the lists – are very welcome in comments.
Edited to add: aargh! I see at least one mis-categorised book in the non-genre section. Oh well.
Links I found interesting for 31-12-2013
- The Blood Telegram
US complicity in the 1971 Bangladesh genocide.
Links I found interesting for 30-12-2013
- Food banks: cowardly coalition can’t face the truth about them
The British government’s successful war on the poor.
- A visual history of the Apollo missions
All the moon-landing photographs online.
- A Deadly Mix in Benghazi
Thorough report from NYT: locals, not Al-Qaeda, inflamed by video.
Nostalgia: Vision On and UTV – the music of Wayne Hill
Those of us of a certain age who grew up in the UK will vividly remember the music played to accompany the gallery of viewers’ submissions for the kids’ art programme Vision On, which ran from 1964 to 1976. The name of the tune is “Left Bank Two”, by composer Wayne Hill; it is performed by the Noveltones on vibraphone.
Delightfully, the theme music played by Ulster Television (ITv’s local franchise in Northern Ireland) from the early 1970s to the early 1980s (ie most of the time I can remember watching the channel) is also by Wayne Hill (in some accounts co-credited with Earl Ward), a tune called “The Antrim Road”. Comments on this Youtube rendering describe it as much the best of the old ITA idents; I’m not going to put in the research time myself to form a judgement on that.
My one source tells me that Wayne Hill also wrote the theme to a forgotten ATV series called The Power Game, which has now become the anthem for Middlesbrough Football Club, as played by the Cyril Stapleton Orchestra:
Apart from that, there’s very little else online: two tracks from the Jumping Jewels‘ LP Guitars About Town. And I have found nothing biographical about him, except that in the 25 March 1967 issue of Billboard he is referred to as “the late Wayne Hill”. So, this man who composed two of the iconic tunes of my childhood died before I was born. Let’s raise a glass to his memory.
Foursquare visualisation (f-locked though not especially sensitive)
Those of you (not very many) who are Foursquare users: they have a lovely animation now of all your past check-ins over at https://foursquare.com/timemachine, slightly marred by advertising for the Samsung Galaxy. At the end it gives you a downloadable graphic: this is mine.
I like it – though this is friends-locked basically so that people cannot quite so easily detect which is my favourite Brussels restaurant. (I tell people about it all the time, though, so it would not be a stunning piece of detective work…)
Links I found interesting for 29-12-2013
- An open letter to the citizens of Bulgaria and Romania
From @TheEconomist: “You’re welcome.”
- Internet Archive puts classic 70s and 80s games online
For @MarioFannio.
- How To Backup Your Facebook Data In 5 Easy Steps
Warning: I have not tried this myself yet.
- The Year We Broke the Internet
Long but important – why viral sharing is bad for us all. #fb
- Scientists tell us their favourite jokes: ‘An electron and a positron walked into a bar…’
*Groan*
My 2013 on Facebook
Facebook is loathsomely opaque when it comes to retrieving information about any discussions you've been involved with. But they are featuring a "Year in Review" app which delivers supposedly your 20 top posts from 2013, mine being as follows:
(21 January; 23 likes, 2 comments, 6 shares)
Danijela's birthday
(22 January; 32 likes, 7 comments)
"Under a car park?"
(4 February; 62 likes, 5 comments, 41 shares)
My pictures from Gallifrey One
(21 February; 14 likes, 10 comments)
The illuminated Atomium
(9 March; 30 likes, 2 comments, 1 share)
Being Clement Attlee
(17 April; 21 likes, 11 comments)
Vintage Dutch safety posters
(10 May; 14 likes, 4 comments, 3 shares)
Combined joy
(18 May; 20 likes, 1 comment)
GRRM vs JKR
(3 June; 16 likes, 7 comments, 4 shares)
William Marshall, Earl of Pembroke
(28 June; 15 likes, 8 comments)
"the Croats have us by the throat"
(2 July; 12 likes, 2 comments, 2 shares)
South Sudan [in happier times]
(9 July; 32 likes, 2 comments)
Office drinks
(23 July; 22 likes, 6 comments)
Miley Cyrus
(27 August; 11 likes, 7 comments)
Tom Baker's biggest memory of Doctor Who
(14 November; 40 likes, 1 comment, 6 shares – this was a much bigger hit on Twitter)
My son and I appear in the Five(ish) Doctors
(24 November; 44 likes, 12 comments)
Berlaymont flags at half-mast for Mandela
(6 December; 46 likes, 3 comments)
My Christmas present
(24 December; 48 likes, 16 comments)
Happy Christmas!
(25 December; 84 likes, 3 comments)
Family portrait
(25 December; 209 likes, 38 comments)
The algorithm doesn't seem to include the last 24 hours' worth of posts; I've had an extraordinary viral success overnight with a snapshot of a New Statesman article about the Daily Mail which I found on Twitter and uploaded to Facebook – it has now been shared 111 times, apparently, but only 11 of those are by people I know (one of whom, admittedly, is an MEP). Also 53 likes (which is more than all but three of the above) and 10 comments. I would of course prefer if Facebook would give me access to my own data so I could crunch it to my own satisfaction. This is what will doom them in the end. I hope.
My most commented posts of 2013 (aka the slow death of Livejournal)
Well, the slow death of lj appears to have accelerated this year. I admit I am conscious myself of posting less – work has had its intense moments, Facebook and Twitter are becoming preferred channels for my stray political and literary thoughts, but more importantly, a lot of my spare time which I would previously have spent blogging has been taken up by Loncon 3, the 2014 Worldcon next August. (Have you signed up? Hotel bookings open on 2 January!)
Setting the bar far lower than I have ever done before, 23 posts got 10 or more comments, more than a third of them in April, and only six from the second half of the year. (Compare 37 with 12 or more last year, 26 with 12 or more the year before, and far higher counts in 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, and 2005.) They were, in chronological order:
6 January: A Euro Coins meme – 25 comments
9 February: January Books 11) Neverwhere, by Neil Gaiman – 18 comments
23 March: The Oscar poll – 41 comments
1 April: Not an April Fool: distancing myself from the Lib Dems – 14 comments
5 April: 2013 is the first of a sphenic triplet – 10 comments
14 April: April Books 6) Swallows and Amazons, by Arthur Ransome – 10 comments
21 April: This won’t do: all-male conferences – 19 comments
22 April: Books of 1963, 1913, 1863 and 1813 – 24 comments
24 April: Yet another pronunciation quiz [Kiribati] – 12 comments
26 April: 26 April – 12 comments
30 April: April Books 18) 1632, by Eric Flint – 12 comments
30 April: Congrats to the new Executive Producer of Doctor Who – 10 comments
2 May: Perry Rhodan – 10 comments
10 May: Data point [flu jab] – 11 comments
12 May: The Brussels dialect of English – 13 comments
23 May: Georgian restaurant in London – 14 comments
11 June: How to find missing historical documents [the missing census] – 10 comments
26 July: Links I found interesting for 26-07-2013 [royal baby names] – 10 comments
10 August: 50 SF Novels That Everyone Should Read – 16 comments
24 September: 50 years of Who: 1963 – 11 comments
4 October: [locked post about a politician] – 10 comments
24 November: Links I found interesting for 24-11-2013 [review roundup for Day of the Doctor] – 11 comments
24 November: The Doctor Who anniversary weekend – 14 comments
December Books 19) Information is Beautiful, by David McCandless
First of my Christmas books, a nice present from
Oddly enough I found myself less interested in the political graphs than in his desperate attempts to make sense of psychobabble and cooking – here’s one for instance mapping what flavours go with what main dishes. I also felt that he gave a bit too much weight (ie any at all) to the climate deniers in a couple of compare and contrast graphs. But the futurology ones are all very interesting. The other problem – which is hardly McCandless’s fault, but is imposed by the format – is that the graphs are all static. If you want nifty moving graphics of the future (and immediate past) of our world, you need to talk to Hans Rosling over at Gapminder.
December Books 18) Tardis Eruditorum vol 4: Tom Baker and the Hinchcliffe Years, by Philip Sandifer
Latest output from the prolific Sandifer’s blog, with a few extra essays and updates included. This is of course my favourite era of Old Who, the run from Robot to Talons of Weng-Chiang, and so I read the book with more than the usual degree of interest (also looking to see if my brother is quoted again – he is, in the essay on Brain of Morbius but talking about Terror of the Zygons).
As usual I found myself nodding in satisfied agreement 90% of the time and blinking in surprise 10% of the time. Sandifer’s deconstruction of The Android Invasion, for example, is brutal; his defence of Planet of Evil a little surprising. Almost fifty pages out of 320 total are devoted to a single story – but The Deadly Assassin was my favourite Old Who story anyweay, and Sandfer convinces that there is far more going on within those 100 minutes than I had realised (and also makes it seem pretty obvious in retrospect). I also very much liked the “Time Can Be Rewritten” entries on spinoff books (Managra, System Shock, Asylum, Corpse Marker and Eye of Heaven), all of which I had read and most of which I enjoyed. And the penultimate piece on The Valley of Death, a Big Finish “lost adventure” by Hinchcliffe, points out some general problems with the era as a whole. Basically this series – in the definitive ebook / print version – joins About Time as key material for the inquiring Whovian.
(Sandifer is currently offering discounts on all his e-books, including the first four Tardis Eruditorum volumes, valid until 1 January.)