In summary: The Jigsaw War is an excellent concept done well, The Revenants will please Ian and Barbara fans, and The Rings of Ikiria wasn’t all that special.
Links I found interesting for 28-06-2012
- Jenny Jones questions Stephen Greenhalgh
Watch the tongue!!!!
June Books 20) Falls The Shadow, by Daniel O’Mahony
There is a format that works much more often than not for Doctor Who: take an isolated building, and develop beyond the usual base-under-siege story by making the inhabitants a collection of strange indiviuals each with their own hidden motivations. Ghost Light on TV, The Chimes of Midnight on audio, last year’s New Who book Dead of Winter are all good examples; so is Falls The Shadow, a Seventh Doctor story in the New Adventures range featuring Ace and Bernice Summerfield, which runs through changing topography, off-stage sex, weird androids, temporary deaths, and mysterious travellers in a satisfying and well-written text. Seemed a bit longer than most in this series, but maybe that was just my frame of mind.
Bernice Summerfield: Road Trip
I am months behind on writing up my recent Big Finish listening, but one has to start somewhere. The three Road Trip audios take Bernice Summerfield, played as ever by Lisa Bowerman, to the edge of the universe in a quest for her son; they are fairly separate narratives (indeed, one mild frustration is that plot threads between the three are not really connected at all) which are reasonably penetrable even for listeners who have not previously encountered Benny, though the end of the third and final play is pretty heavy on continuity. All also feature actors who have appeared in televised Who or its spinoffs, notably Ayesha Antoine (who was Dee Dee in Midnight) as Benny’s friend and travelling companion Ruth.
Brand Management by Christopher Cooper was my favourite of the three, with Benny landing on the world of Lyndyaz and encountering a culture where she is worshipped as a goddess. Anjli Mohindra, who played Rani on the Sarah Jane Adventures, turns up as one of a pair of evil siblings who are running the place, and there are lots of larks involving archaeology and explosions.
Bad Habits, by Paul Morris and Simon Barnard, continues the religious theme with Benny and Ruth going undercover as nuns in an order run by Jacqueline King (who played Donna’s mother on TV Who) in order to get close to a vital relic. I went to a convent school so have heard all the nun jokes before, and several plot elements are wildly implausible even by the standards of Doctor Who spinoff stories, but at least everyone seems to be having fun.
Despite its title, Paradise Frost has no religious content, but instead features Benny, Ruth and their obnoxious pilot trying to solve the mystery of a frozen former resort with only three vaguely human inhabitants, of whom the most mysterious is played by Arthur Darville (Rory on TV Who) and the most evil by the ever-luscious tones of India Fisher (former audio companion Charley Pollard). There are also loads of sandroaches. I can’t remember another audio with both Bowerman and Fisher, and they spark off each other beautifully, but I felt the means and motivation of Fisher’s character didn’t quite hold together. And then the last scene, where the main story is over and Benny reaches her destination, is basically an extended trailer for the next series. Which I look forward to.
Glorious exchange
This is a beautiful video of a politician having a bad hair day, and indeed a bad tongue day.
It helps my enjoyment immensely to recollect the individual concerned as a young Tory activist in my Cambridge student days. But I think it is pretty impressive even without that background information.
Links I found interesting for 27-06-2012
- Panderee’s Box – Haley Sweetland Edwards (NYT)
In Georgia, more media freedom could mean a more polarized political debate; but that’s a good thing.
- The Olympic torch – from Hitler to Headingley
Penelope on sport and ritual.
- From Alrewas to Tavrobel
A forgotten educational experiment.
Links I found interesting for 26-06-2012
- Insufficiently Boring
An insider’s take on “the worst IT disaster in British banking history”, the RBS crash.
- ‘Fascinating’ (raises eyebrow)
The Asimov / Roddenberry letters.
Links I found interesting for 25-06-2012
- Farewell Elizabeth Shaw
One of the best DW vidders pays tribute.
- The Increasingly Monolithic Republican Party
Commentary from Lincoln Mitchell.
- If History Repeats, Everyone’s VP Guess Is Wrong | RealClearPolitics
…but I think it will be Rubio.
June Books 18-19) The Unwritten, vols 4-5, by Mike Carey and Peter Gross
June Books 18) The Unwritten: Leviathan, by Mike Carey and Peter Gross
This is the second of this year’s Hugo nominees for graphic novel which I have read – a pleasing narrative of young Tommy Taylor, who gets separately from his girlfriend and his vampire side-kick to get sucked into crewing the Pequod and ending up in a confined space with Pinocchio and Gepetto, the Prophet Jonah, Sinbad the Sailor and Baron Munchausen (and a random Celt). The literary allusions are dense, the artwork generally good and the narrative coherent, though perhaps a little less adventurous than I had hoped for from previous volumes. The volume ends with a standalone story about a group of small scared animals attempting to escape up an apparently endless staircase, whose links with the main narrative aren’t clear. I don’t think I could recommend it to readers who haven’t already tried the first two volumens.
June Books 19) The Unwritten: On To Genesis, by Mike Carey and Peter Gross
I actually found this fourth volume a bit more satisfying – reunited with his colleagues, Tommy finds himself investigating and becoming entwined with the Tinker, a 1930s superhero who may or may not be his half-brother in either a literal or a literary sense. The two time lines are intertwined in ambiguous but fascinating detail, with some lovely homages to the 1930s art style. Will get my nomination for the Hugo next year.
What will happen in 2012?
Since we are now past the Solstice, I thought it might be intertesting to see what sf stories have been set in 2012 (and were written some time before 2012). This is not an exhauistive listing, just the things that caught my eye.
Probably bad film: 2012 (2009), starring John Cusack, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Amanda Peet and others, directed by Roland Emmerich, in which the world is devastaed by natural disaster. To be honest, the name of the director alone is enough to deter me from wanting to see this.
Possibly better film: Time of Roses (1969), original title Ruusujen Aika. Summary from here: “Taking place in the year 2012, the film is a fantasy of a “utopian” time when all class conflicts have been erased, at least superficially. A history researcher Raimo Lappalainen becomes obsessed by the life of nude model Saara Turunen, a woman who died in 1976, and tries to reconstruct it for TV, with help from an actress. At the same time a strike in a nuclear plant will lead to a violent upsurge, which media only manages to keep secret from public with a clever cover-up.” See New York Times review, and some pictures.
Comics: Bloody Mary (1996-7) by Garth Ennis. Concerns Corporal “Bloody Mary” Malone, an American commando, who in one story must raid a fascist-ruled Europe and in another must assassinate a religious tyrant ruling New York.
Radio: Deep Trouble (2005, 2007), a BBC sitcom set on a nuclear submarine. This one does look like it might be worth tracking down.
Robert Silverberg novels: Silverberg has written so many novels that it’s hardly surprising that more then one of them is set in 2012. I had heard of the first but not the second. Descriptions of plot from SF Encyclopedia.
Shadrach in the Furnace (1976) – “concerns the predicament of the personal physician of a future dictator who finds his identity in jeopardy.” Nominated for Hugo and Nebula.
The Second Trip (1971/72) – “an intense psychological novel describing the predicaments of a telepathic girl and a man whose Identity has been newly created in the body of an ‘erased’ criminal.”
Television: The mainstream school of thought on Joe 90 is that it is set in 2012-13, though apparently there is a minority faction who support 1998.
Doctor Who TV episodes:
Dalek (2005, Ninth Doctor) – set in an underground base in Utah, before this year’s presidential election
Fear Her (2006, Tenth Doctor) – set during the Olympic opening ceremony in July.
Other Doctor Who stories set in 2012:
Frozen Time (2007 audio, Seventh Doctor) – frozen in the Antarctic ice, both a mysterious blue box and also other things you often find frozen in ice.
Christmas on a Rational Planet (1996, New Adventures novel by Lawrence Miles) – parts of it sert in Arizona in 2012, though the main dated chunks of narrative are in 1799.
Relative Dementias (2002, Past Doctor Adventure with Seventh Doctor) – first chapter set in London in August 2012, rest of story in 1982.
The Shadows of Avalon (2000, Eigth Doctor Adventure by Paul Cornell) – the Brigadier becomes embroiled in conflict over a dimensional gate to the parallel world of Avalon.
NB that the Seventh Doctor appears to have visited this year at least three times, his successors once each (excepting the Eleventh Doctor for whom this year is contemporary) and his predecessors not at all.
Recommendations and additions to the list very welcome.
Links I found interesting for 24-06-2012
Wedding rituals
(Apologies to those who follow
Links I found interesting for 23-06-2012
- Caroline John (“Liz” in Doctor Who) Interview 1999 – YouTube
The actress reminisces about her career.
- Caroline John interview
Summary of the Youtube interview.
- Dick Bruna: Miffy and me – audio slideshow
Awww!
- sir_guinglain | Caroline John 1940-2012
Links I found interesting for 22-06-2012
Links I found interesting for 20-06-2012
- Museum of Endangered Sounds
Some of these are sounds you might never have wanted to hear again…
- Middle-Aged Woman Angrily Demanding Price Check On Rice Pudding Was Once Carefree Youth, Onlookers Speculate | The Onion – America’s Finest News Source
Ow.
June Books 17) Sauron Defeated, by J.R.R. Tolkien
The end of the story of the writing of The Lord of the Rings, including Tolkien's attempts to plot out the very end of the story – Gollum always had a role in the destruction of the Ring, but exactly what that was took some time to work out; but Saruman only gradually emerged as the villain in The Scouring of the Shire, and a postscript of Sam and Rose and their children twenty years on was dropped on the advice of Tolkien's beta readers (I wonder if whether J.K. Rowling was given the same advice about the end of the Harry Potter series; if so, she ignored it).
The book also includes drafts of an unpublished novel called The Notion Club Papers, written in the mid-1940s, in which a club of academics – in 1987! – listens to one of their number who has uncovered, through his dreams, another variation on the story of Eärendil and the fall of Númenor which was one of the earliest elements of Tolkien’s mythos and which he never quite got right. What’s interesting about The Notion Club Papers is that it clarifies the reason for part of the failure: the characterisation is all in the framing narrative, and the epic mythos all in the Númenor bits without really much in the way of interesting personal glimpses. What Tolkine managed in The Hobbit and particularly in The Lord of the Rings was to unite the epic and the personal, but it was only after long years of effort and rewriting, and I don’t think either half of The Notion Papers was really salvageable. Still, it’s interesting to map the roads not travelled.
June Books 16) Dying in the Sun, by Jon de Burgh Miller
Another Second Doctor novel featuring Ben and Polly (no less than five spinoff books are set between The Power of the Daleks and The Highlanders, if you count a Telos novella and an annual). Although there is an interesting idea here of alien intelligences infesting the movie industry (done better than in Pratchett's Moving Pictures, though this really isn't saying much), it is let down badly by the writer's failure to get American idiom at all accurately and by some ludicrous plot points – at one point a murder suspect outwits two policemen guarding his home to smuggle a corpse inside, for instance. And poor Polly gets possessed / hypnotised yet again; when I've finished reading her novels I'll do a count of just how often this happens to her.
June Books 15) Waking the Moon, by Elizabeth Hand
This is a tremendous novel, ancient pagan mysteries linked with dubious academics and sinister conspiracies, all based around a fictional sinister Catholic university in Washington DC; not so very different from the plot elements of Dan Brown's novels, only much better written and much more interesting. Some brilliant scenes of simmering sexuality and emotional confusion; a satisfactory amount of drawing from genuine mythology, with extra lore invented by the author which plugs in rather neatly. I'm surprised that it is not better known, it feels like a taproot text for much of the recent wave of urban fantasies.
Links I found interesting for 19-06-2012
- “As a British citizen I have always objected to being forced into bankruptcy in a foreign jurisdiction…” « Slugger O’Toole
The extraordinary case of the IRA hungerstriker turned property magnate who clings desperately to his British citizenship…
- The Oatmeal v. FunnyJunk, Part IV: Charles Carreon Sues Everybody | Popehat
Charles Carreon becomes an internet celebrity, and not in a good way.
- Zurker – Making Pyramids Appear Flat
Another sceptic. I think I’ll delete my Zurker account.
- Nesbitt’s UUP closes in on the buffers
“Mr Nesbitt’s own personal position is clear: there is little doubt he was genuine when he said he did not wish to be part of an organisation whose members equate homosexuality with bestiality. But here is his problem: he is a member of such an organisation; in fact, he leads it – and yet he can still do nothing about it.”
Links I found interesting for 18-06-2012
- What Would a Second Obama Term Bring?
Realistic assessment on the limitations of the presidency.
- Aung San Suu Kyi – Nobel Lecture
“The peace of our world is indivisible. As long as negative forces are getting the better of positive forces anywhere, we are all at risk. It may be questioned whether all negative forces could ever be removed. The simple answer is: “No!” It is in human nature to contain both the positive and the negative. However, it is also within human capability to work to reinforce the positive and to minimize or neutralize the negative. Absolute peace in our world is an unattainable goal. But it is one towards which we must continue to journey, our eyes fixed on it as a traveller in a desert fixes his eyes on the one guiding star that will lead him to salvation. Even if we do not achieve perfect peace on earth, because perfect peace is not of this earth, common endeavours to gain peace will unite individuals and nations in trust and friendship and help to make our human community safer and kinder.”
- 7 signs you are ready to self-publish (a checklist)
1. Do you have a great High Concept?
2. Have you practiced for 10,000 hours?
3. Have you subjected your work to serious criticism?
4. Are you well read in your genre (and preferably beyond)?
5. Do you have a platform?
6. Are you willing to invest in your book?
7. Are you ready?
- Anouar Boukhars, More Trash Talk on the Western Sahara, and the Rise of the Moroccan Americans
Following the money in policy discussions in Washington.
- The Foreign Language of ‘Mad Men’ – The Atlantic
How language changes over time!
Links I found interesting for 17-06-2012
Shakespeare’s Restless World
Another excellent series of podcasts from the BBC, exploring Shakespeare’s plays in the wider context of culture, politics and knowledge of the times; twenty 13-minute pieces, all presented by Neil McGregor, the Director of the British Museum, who was such a success with the History of the World in 100 Objects podcast series. The single one which was most useful to me was the one abouit Ireland, making the point that MacMorris is in fact the only Irish speaking character in Shakespeare, though there are plenty of Scots and several Welsh; and many plays have kern or gallowglass hovering round. The second-last episode, on cruelty and torture, is particularly gruesome. But generally an excellent investment of four hours or so of listening.
(And absolutely no mention of the so-called authorship debate!)
2012 Hugos: Best Related Work
I confess that I haven't completely read two of the five nominees, but I am sufficiently confident in what I have sampled of them to vote as follows:
1) The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Third Edition. The first two editions were essential enough; the third edition may not yet be Wikipedia but it is already more authoritative and in admirably ambitious. It's not a completed work; voting for it in this state it feels a little like giving Barack Obama the Nobel Peace Prize (I hope with a better outcome); but it gets my top vote anyway.
2) The Steampunk Bible: An Illustrated Guide to the World of Imaginary Airships, Corsets and Goggles, Mad Scientists, and Strange Literature. A beautiful book from which I learned more than I had expected.
3) Writing Excuses Season 6. I didn't vote for this last year because I could not bear to download and listen to three hours of advice on writing sf from enthusiastic authors whose works I haven't really warmed to. This year I found the transcripts which made it easier to form a judgement. I've read the first quarter of the season and feel it's a decent effort, but I'm just not in the target audience.
4) Jar Jar Binks Must Die… and Other Observations about Science Fiction Movies by Daniel M. Kimmel. It's decent commentary on sf cinema, which pointed me in some interesting new directions. But a book of essays written at different times over a decade inevitably loses some focus.
5) No Award.
6) Wicked Girls by Seanan McGuire. I'm sorry, I enjoyed this very much but I just don't think it is eligible. The rubric for this category is: "Any work related to the field of science fiction, fantasy, or fandom, appearing for the first time during the previous calendar year or which has been substantially modified during the previous calendar year, and which is either non-fiction or, if fictional, is noteworthy primarily for aspects other than the fictional text, and which is not eligible in any other category." This is an album of songs which all describe more or less fictional situations, of which a bit more than half have more or less clear fantasy elements in the narrative. In so far as the songs themselves relate to the field of science fiction, fantasy, or fandom, it is precisely in their fictional content. Agreed, the lead singer / writer is an author and fan who has three other Hugo nominations in different categories this year; but that seems to me far too slender a thread to justify nomination in this category, let alone voting for it. I liked it a lot but it drops off my ballot.
See also: Best Novel | Best Novella | Best Novelette | Best Short Story | Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) | Best Professional Artist | Best Fan Writer | Best Fan Artist | Best Fancast | The John W. Campbell Award (Not A Hugo)
June Books 14) The Steampunk Bible, by Jeff VanderMeer with S.J. Chambers et al.
This is perhaps the single most beautiful book in the Hugo Voter Packet, with lavish illustrations of the very visual subculture which it describes. I must admit it also turned around my own opinion on steampunk – I had a lot of sympathy with Marigold’s father on Questionable Content, but VanderMeer and his fellow contributors have convinced me that there is an interesting, potentially subversive and liberating aesthetic and literary movement out there, whose roots are broader than I had appreciated and whose aspects extend further than I had realised. I will give it a good place on my Hugo ballot.
Unfortunately the experience of reading the PDF on a computer screen is rather trying. The lovely illustrations break up the text in a way which might be rather pleasant in a dead tree edition but makes the electronic version difficult to follow. To give two examples: a double-page picture spread about balloons on pages 22-23 interrupts – in mid-word – a two-page feature on Edgar Allan Poe on pages 21 and 24, which itself interrupts in mid-sentence the second chapter, the reader being expected to follow the chain of thought directly from page 20 to page 25. Later on, a sentence started on page 134 finishes on page 143, interrupted by five pages of (admittedly gorgeous) photographs and a three-page feature on steampunk fashion. This really isn’t an e-reader friendly text, and I fear that it will not do as well as perhaps it deserves if voters are deterred from ploughing through it.
The Master’s Timeline
I have just been listening to the new Big Finish Fourth Doctor play, The Trail of the White Worm, which reunites Tom Baker and Geoffrey Beevers as the Doctor and the Master, clearly and explicitly set between The Deadly Assassin and The Keeper of Traken. I was then moved by an irrational impulse to try and establish a clear timeline for the Master, as seen from his own point of view. Most of this I think is reasonably well-supported, though some of the Third Doctor short stories and the various Masters who confronted the Eighth Doctor in different media are a bit disputable in terms of canonicty and sequencing. Anyway, here goes – the Master on TV, and in novels, short stories, audios, comics and computer games:
The Delgado Master
Time and Relative (Telos novella, 1st Doctor – appears obliquely in Susan’s memories)
The Dark Path (MA novel, 2nd Doctor)
“Reconnaisance” (short story in 1994 Doctor Who Yearbook, 3rd Doctor)
Terror of the Autons (TV, 3rd Doctor)
The Mind of Evil (TV, 3rd Doctor)
[in an alternate timeline, the Doctor was not exiled to Earth and the Master, played by Mark Gatiss, brought the secrets of the Mind Parasite to the Chinese; see BF Doctor Who Unbound audio Sympathy for the Devil]
Deadly Reunion (PDA novel, 3rd Doctor
The Claws of Axos (TV, 3rd Doctor)
Colony in Space (TV, 3rd Doctor)
The Dæmons (TV, 3rd Doctor)
“Doctor Who Fights Masterplan Q” (published on the backs of chocolate bar wrappers in 1971, 3rd Doctor)
The Face of the Enemy (PDA novel, 3rd Doctor)
“The Man in the Ion Mask” (comic strip in DWM 1991 winter special, 3rd Doctor)
“The Switching” (short story from Short Trips: Zodiac, 3rd Doctor)
The Sea Devils (TV, 3rd Doctor)
Who Killed Kennedy? (MA Novel, 3rd Doctor, narrative covers all of previous 3rd Doctor stories but denouement is set at this point)
The Time Monster (TV, 3rd Doctor)
“Doorway into Nowhere” (short story in 1973 Doctor Who Annual, 3rd Doctorl)
Verdigris (PDA novel, 3rd Doctor)
Frontier in Space (TV, 3rd Doctor)
“Hidden Talent” (short story in Short Trips: Companions, 3rd Doctor)
“Smash Hit” (short story in 1973 Holiday Special, 3rd Doctor)
“The One Second Hour”, “Fogbound” (stories in TV Comic holiday issue 1973, 3rd Doctor)
Last of the Gadarene (PDA novel, 3rd Doctor)
“The Seismologist’s Story” (short story in Short Trips: Repercussions, 3rd Doctor)
“Listen – The Stars”, “DWAN: Out of the Green Mist” (short stories in 1974 Doctor Who Annual, 3rd Doctor)
“The Glen of Sleeping” (TV Action comic, 3rd Doctor)
“The Duke of Dominoes” (short story in Decalog, 3rd Doctor)
Legacy of the Daleks (EDA novel, 8th Doctor – the Delgado Master degenerates into the Pratt form)
The Pratt Master
The Deadly Assassin (TV, 4th Doctor)
The Beevers Master
Trail of the White Worm (BF Fourth Doctor audio – the Master has gained energy from the Eye of Harmony to take on the Beevers form)
The Oseidon Adventure (BF Fourth Doctor audio, out next month)
The Keeper of Traken (TV, 4th Doctor – the Master takes over the body of Tremas of Traken )
The Ainley Master
The Keeper of Traken (TV, 4th Doctor)
Logopolis (TV, 4th Doctor)
Castrovalva (TV, 5th Doctor)
Time-Flight (TV, 5th Doctor)
“Night Flight to Nowhere” (short story in 1983 Doctor Who Annual, 5th Doctor)
The King’s Demons (TV, 5th Doctor)
The Five Doctors (TV, 5th Doctor plus 1st, 2nd and 3rd Doctors)
“Birth of a Renegade” (short story in Radio Times 20th anniversary special, 5th Doctor)
“The Creation of Camelot” (short story in 1984 Doctor Who Annual, 5th Doctor)
Planet of Fire (TV, 5th Doctor)
The Mark of the Rani (TV, 6th Doctor)
“The Time Savers” (short story in 1985 Doctor Who Annual, 6th Doctor)
“The Fellowship of Quan”, “The Radio Waves” (short stories in 1986 Doctor Who Annual, 6th Doctor)
The Ultimate Foe (TV, 6th Doctor)
Doctor Who and the Mines of Terror (video game, 6th Doctor)
The Quantum Archangel (PDA novel, 6th Doctor)
Survival (TV, 7th Doctor)
“Stop the Pigeon” (short story in Short Trips, 7th Doctor)
Prime Time (PDA novel, 7th Doctor)
Destiny of the Doctors (video game, 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th and 7th Doctors)
The Master has regenerated:
First Frontier (NA novel, 7th Doctor)
“Housewarming” (short story in Decalog 2, Lost Properties, set in 3rd Doctor era)
Happy Endings (NA novel, 7th Doctor)
The Master degenerates back into the Beevers form:
Dust Breeding (BF main sequence audio, 7th Doctor)
Master (BF main sequence audio, 7th Doctor)
The Roberts Master:
Doctor Who, the TV Movie (TV, 8th Doctor – the Master is executed by the Daleks but takes possession of Bruce the driver )
The Master escapes the Eye of Harmony and takes possession of Sir George Steer:
“Forgotten” and “Prologue” (short stories in Short Trips: The Centenarian, 8th Doctor)
The Master is given a new body by Esterath:
“The Fallen”, “The Glorious Dead” (comic strips in DWM, 8th Doctor)
[non-canonical yet somehow true: the Pryce Master who appears with the Atkinson and other Doctors in The Curse of Fatal Death, and ends up in love with the Lumley Doctor]
The Jacobi Master
The Eight Doctors (it is totally speculative as to which of the various Masters is in the main narrative here; of course the Delgado Master also appears in the 3rd Doctor sequence, which is set during The Dæmons)
The Adventuress of Henrietta Street (EDA novel, 8th Doctor, the Master is “The Man with the Rosette”)
Brief and contradictory appearances in EDA novels Sometime Never…, The Deadstone Memorial, and The Gallifrey Chronicles, all with the 8th Doctor
[with the Richard E.Grant Ninth Doctor: Scream of the Shalka, “The Feast of the Stone” webcasts – canonical or not, this Master is definitely played by Derek Jacobi]
[during the Time War the Jacobi Master takes on human form as Professor Yana]
Utopia (TV, 10th Doctor)
The Simm Master
Utopia (TV, 10th Doctor)
“Speech Day” (short story published in The Doctor Who Stories, 10th Doctor era)
The Sound of Drums (TV, 10th Doctor)
The Story of Martha (NSA story collection, 10th Doctor era, cameo appearance in framing narrative)
Last of the Time Lords (TV, 10th Doctor)
The End of Time (TV, 10th Doctor)
And that’s it so far. Corrections and queries gratefully received.
Links I found interesting for 16-06-2012
- Which of Doctor Who’s 11 Doctors is your boss?
Not sure, myself!
- Behind the scenes in the EU
Catherine Ashton greets the new president of Serbia. (Page is in Croatian but embedded video entirely in English.)
- The border vote: A trend stretching back 44 years
#fb My piece in Belfast Telegraph.
- Vandezande gaat voor zevende legislatuur
Our mayor is seeking a seventh *six-year* term.
The border vote: A trend stretching back 44 years
From http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/politics/the-border-vote-a-trend-stretching-back-44-years-16172970.html :
The poll’s results on voting and the border are convincing.
This trend they illustrate goes at least as far back as Richard Rose’s surveys of political opinion in Northern Ireland in 1968. Since then it has been clear that a substantial chunk of the Catholic population do not actually want a united Ireland.
It has been of the order of 20% to 40% in the past and it has varied with circumstances.
People wonder why, if this is true, 80%-90% of Catholics who vote are voting for parties who favour a united Ireland.
I believe that it is about the politics of communal representation rather than Irish unity.
People want to vote for politicians who share their background and instincts and the party’s position on the border is less of an issue.
Historically, pro-Union Catholics have been repelled by the trappings of political unionism like the Orange Order and do not feel inclined to vote for parties that are obsessed with them.
This poll does show that there is, as there has always been, cross-community voting.
Dr Nicholas Whyte runs the NI Election website
[A bit shorter than I would have liked, but 250 words is a pretty tough limit.]
Links I found interesting for 15-06-2012
- Time Travel and the Black Death: Connie Willis’s Doomsday Book | Tor.com
- Amazon Infographic: How a Single Company Gained a Stranglehold over Online Shopping and the Future of Retail | Institute for Local Self-Reliance
A nice graphic summary of just how evil Amazon are.
- Georgia: In need of a closer look from US leaders – The Hill’s Congress Blog
“Democracy is deteriorating rapidly as President Saakashvili and his allies are increasing repression and rights of opposition political parties, as well as average citizens.”
Links I found interesting for 14-06-2012
- First Disk Of Rosetta Stone Hungarian Just Urges Listeners To Rethink This Whole Thing | The Onion – America’s Finest News Source
“Think really hard for one second: Do you really want to be doing this? Hungarian? Really?” asks the instructional software, which subsequently reminds users that the Hungarian language contains a 44-letter alphabet, with each noun having 17 different forms.
June Books 13) Lust, Caution and Other Stories, by Eileen Chang
A short collection of short stories about people getting on with their lives, mostly in 1940s Shanghai, while the world changes around them. The title piece, a tale of espionage and seduction, is the most memorable but they are all interesting and well-observed.