Back in 2004 I had a look at the maths around the application of the Twelfth Amendment to the US Constitution, in case neither Presidential candidate (Bush jr and Kerry on that occasion) managed to clear 270 votes in the Electoral College. As you know, Bob, in that case the delegation of each state in the House of Representatives gets to cast a single block vote for the election of the President, and repeats this until one candidate gets a majority (ie 26 of the 50).

The maths in 2004 were bad for Kerry (as was much else). By my reckoning the Democrats would have needed to be 7.2% ahead of the Republicans in the US-wide vote for Kerry to have a chance of catching the 26th state, whereas Bush was still on 26 even if the Republicans were 5.4% behind in national support.

This year things look more even. At present the Democrats control only 15 congressional delegations – Rhode Island, Hawaii, Vermont, Maryland, California, Connecticut, New York, Massachusetts, Delaware, Maine, Oregon, North Carolina, New Jersey, New Mexico and Iowa – with Minnesota evenly divided and the Republicans ahead in the other 34. That's with a Republican lead in the 2010 elections of 51.4% to 44.8% for the Democrats. But a lot of the crucial Republican seats were won by wafer-thin majorities in what was probably a better election than they will have this year: on a swing of less than 1% the Democrats would gain the swing seats in Illinois, Washington, West Virginia, Nevada, and the fifth seat of eight in Minnesota. If the swing is between 2.65% and 3%, the Republicans lose South Dakota, Colorado and Missouri to the Democrats, and the delegations of New Hampshire and Mississippi become evenly divided. NB that the Republicans could still be ahead in the popular vote by a margin of up to 1.3% in this case, but unable to get a majority of state delegations in the House.

However, there would still remain a hill to climb for the Democrats, who in this scenario would hold only 23 state delegations. The next four states to shift – Arizona, Wisconsin, Arkansas and Idaho – would all move from Republican majority to evenly split. Once you hit a 5.05% swing, though – which would mean a Democrat lead nationwide of 3.5% – the Republicans also lose South Carolina and the Democrats pick up Wisconsin, North Dakota and Indiana for their 26th state. (Pennsylvania is not far behind, requiring a 5.1% swing to shift from red to blue.) So the Democrats are disadvantaged, in that they need a larger nationwide vote lead than the Republicans to reach 26 states, but not as badly as was the case in 2004.

These figures are of course not merely speculative but actually wrong. The congressional districts are all being redrawn for this year's election anyway, and eighteen of the fifty states are gaining or losing Representatives. The Washington Post has a good guide to this process, listing each state as to which party controls the redistricting process and what the anticipated outcome is. This will shift the bar overall to the disadvantage of the Democrats, who will lose North Carolina and possibly New Jersey to the Republicans, while the Republicans will lose Illinois (which was very marginal anyway) to the Democrats. The result is probably that the Democrats must be ahead, or nearly so, in the popular vote before the Republicans lose their 26th congressional delegation, and may need a lead of 4% before the 26th state goes blue. Congressional elections are a complex phenomenon, with all the dynamics around incumbency and local issues, and even if the boundaries were not being changed, the detail of the above analysis would be far from 100% accurate in a real-world scenario. But I think it gives a feel for the big picture of what might happen.

The electoral college is, of course, much more likely to produce a clear result than the Twelfth Amendment procedure would, and has only once failed to deliver a majority for a single presidential candidate since 1800. In the unlikely event that the Twelfth Amendment did come into play, it would be pretty nasty, I suspect; much nastier than in 1825 which was bad enough. We would almost certainly be in the grey area where the result of the popular vote was very narrow rather than clear, and a handful of evenly divided state delegations held the balance of power. The fate of the election could rest on the decision of a single Representative from Mississippi, Arizona, Arkansas or Idaho to break with his or her party and vote for the other candidate. Fills you with confidence, doesn't it?

Obviously in such a case, purely idealistic considerations would be the sole preoccupation of the House, and there would be no prospect of political favours being offered by either candidate to any politician who might find themselves in that position; nor would there be any chance of such offers being accepted. Obviously.

(Little remembered fact – the Electoral College succeeded in choosing a Vice-President, without choosing his boss, in 1824; but failed to do so in 1836, the only occasion when the Senate alone chose the Veep under the Twelfth Amendment. But as the 1836 winning presidential candidate's running-mate was only a vote short, the Senate had little hesitation in selecting him. I imagine that in the scenario above the Senate would choose the running-mate of whichever candidate was selected by the House, with grumbling and possibly even high drama but a certain inevitability.)

• Estonian Roulette | Politics | News | ERR
  
  @lobjakas: Repeating the course of history in the 1930s, Estonia’s foreign policy focus is shifting away from the anglophone powers.
  (tags: estonia eu )
• The Handmaid’s Tale, Fahrenheit 451 & Other Beautiful New Folio Society Books
  
  Superb.
  (tags: art sf )
• Visualizing the Global Digital Divide By Mapping Internet And Population — vis4.net
  
  “shows more than 80,000 populated places in blue and about 350,000 locations of IP addresses in red. White dots indicate places where many people live and many IP addresses are available.”
  (tags: internet maps )
• Azerbaijan: Baku Fumes Over Scuttled Ambassadorial Appointment
  
  This is crazy: Bryza excellent choice, vetoed for no good reason.
  (tags: uspolitics azerbaijan )
• Resignation up-date | Roger Helmer MEP
  
  Resigning Tory MEP clarifies situation.
  (tags: ukpolitics eu )
• The Cheese “Terroir”
  
  The Bosnian dairy industry.
  (tags: economics eu bosnia )
• Citizenship: In praise of a second (or third) passport | The Economist
  
  “The old notion of one-man, one-state citizenship looks outdated: more than 200m people now live and work outside the countries in which they were born—but still wish to travel home, or marry or invest there.”
  (tags: migration )
• New 50p coin aimed at explaining offside law ‘gets offside law wrong’ | Football | The Guardian
  
  Glorious!
  (tags: sport )

A late Christmas present which I had been very much hoping for, this takes Lovecraft’s classic novella and puts it into a stark graphic novel adaptation, beautifully suited to the tale. The original story is a masterpiece of horror, ratcheting up the tension and dread with each sentence; Culbard’s adaptation must play with the text a little, but keeps many of the best lines. The drawing style is generally restrained, which makes the one or two moments of horrific revelation (particularly the gruesome fate of the advance party and the first sight of the hidden city) all the more effective. Dyer’s increasingly horror is conveyed very economically with subtle changes to the shading of his face, especially the bags under his eyes.

The graphic medium does mean a certain attenuation of atmosphere. In Lovecraft’s text, we are taken into Dyer’s mind, and he admits that he is a slightly unreliable narrator, partly unhinged by the horrors he has witnessed. As a drawn character, even as the narrator, he becomes someone who we readers watch along with the other members of the expedition (and the monsters); he may still be the central character, but his perspective is no longer as privileged as it is in the original text, and that’s probably unavoidable. (Dave Sim, for all his many faults, actually had some great moments in Cerebus where we could appreciate the points of view of particular characters, but I think that needs a different kind of story-telling than is really possible here.)

Anyway, a must-have for anyone who is even a mild Lovecraft fan, or indeed for anyone who hasn’t yet tried him but is wondering what the fuss is about.

Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!

This is a fascinating and brutal report commissioned by the Norwegian government on the Norwegian contribution to the failure of the Sri Lanka peace process, in which the government of Norway was the sole mediator between the goverment of Sri Lanka and the LTTE Tamil rebels. I learned a lot from it about the brutality of both sides during the war (the forty-page narrative section is probably the best summary of events you will find anywhere) but more importantly it is also very thought-provoking in its wider conclusions on peace-making.

One interesting conclusion is that to have one sole mediator, and for that mediator to be the government of a small and not very powerful state rather than an international organisation or an NGO, was unsustainable. It would have been much better to have had a diverse team of involved actors who might have had more ability to cajole or even coerce the parties; it would have been much better if the government had not allowed itself to be both overstretched and undermined, the inevitable risks in the role of a single mediator. The government of Norway chose to put itself in this awkward position, and chose not to extricate itself sooner, and the report points out the alternatives available and the consequences which resulted from those choices.

Second, there were only two brief windows of opportunity for actually resolving the conflict during the Norwegians’ mandate (in late 2001-early 2002, when a ceasefire was brokered, and in early 2005 immediately after the 26 December 2004 tsunami). On both occasions, the internal dynamics of the political situation allowed the situaton to slide back into violence, and while the report finds that the major responsibility for this lies with the parties, who were rarely negotiating in good faith and always negotiating at cross-purposes, still, a smarter and perhaps less modest mediation mission might not have let those opportunities slip.

As it was, the Norwegians remained impotently engaged well past the point when it was clear that a negotiated solution was impossible, and the report is clear that they should have terminated the mediation in 2006, thus making the extent of the crisis clear to the rest of the world, rather than hanging on until they were finally expelled in early 2009. There are words of praise for the individual and courageous efforts of the senior Norwegian officials involved and the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission, but basically the report concludes that the mediation could have been done better, if indeed it was worth doing at all.

Much credit to the Norwegian government for commissioning and publishing this important work. The authors, for the record, are Gunnar Sørbø, Jonathan Goodhand, Bart Klem, Ada. Elisabeth Nissen and Hilde Selbervik.

The European Council on Foreign Relations published this analysis of EU-Russia relations just before last year’s Russian elections. I found it very informative on how Russia has managed to crash out of the BRIC category (the other three being the rising economies of Brazil, India and China) to the point where the Putin machine has become exhausted, unable to deliver due to rampant corruption and a captive, stagnant economy, with the glory days of the 2008 military victory over Georgia forgotten and the far east being surrendered economically to Chinese domination. It is a compelling picture of a state in crisis and although the authors did not predict the remarkable outcome of the elections, it shouldn’t have come as a surprise to anyone who had read the booklet.

The authors are on less sure ground in proposing how the EU should react. The good news is that there is less divergence among member states than was the case a few years ago; now that the Poles less hostile to Russia and the Germans less complacent, they have converged around a pragmatic yet mildly principled centre of gravity. The ECFR trio propose some fairly sensible measures to crystallize this convergence, including anti-bribery measures, sanctions against the murderers of Sergei Magnitsky, but also a drastic easing of the visa regime for Russians visiting the EU.

Unfortunately it is not at all clear where the leadership for taking these sensible measures might come from. EU external policies are in crisis, with twelve out of twenty-seven foreign ministers demanding that the beleaguered Baroness Ashton up her game. This year’s EU presidencies are held by small countries whose governments are both deep in domestic crisis, and one of which is anyway notoriously pro-Russian. In any case EU leaders will be fully occupied with the new eurozone treaty for the next few months, whether or not they intend to sign it. So this is a set of good ideas which sadly have nobody caable of implementing them.

• Dallol – The World’s Weirdest Volcanic Crater ~ Kuriositas
  
  Wow.
  (tags: ethiopia geography )
• Putin and the Uses of History | The National Interest
  
  “I do not need to prove anything to anyone!”
  (tags: russia )
• Dallas teen missing since 2010 was mistakenly deported | wfaa.com Dallas – Fort Worth
  
  No comment necessary.
  (tags: uspolitics humanrights waronterror migration )
• Ashton on defensive over EU’s diplomatic service
  
  Twelve member states criticise European External Action Service for being useless.
  (tags: eu )
• Google+ Is Going To Mess Up The Internet
  
  Sums up the problems with it (entertaining to read the dissenting views from diehard G+ fans).
  (tags: socialmedia )
• Stephen Hawking at 70: Exclusive interview – 04 January 2012 – New Scientist
  
  Q: What do you think most about during the day?
  A: Women. They are a complete mystery.
  (tags: interview science )

I read this while finishing Gibbon, who is of course far superior, and in anticipation of tackling Diarmuid McCullagh’s much more impressive-looking survey later this year. It’s an assembly of short and very short essays, aimed at evangelical Anglicans in the UK, originally published in 1977 and revised in 1990. The one thing I really did learn from it was the Great Awakening of the eighteenth century, which I now realise was a hugely important step towards American independence in religious culture, leading to the political reality. But there was a lot that set my teeth on edge: the irritating point-scoring about which denominations performed well against Fascism, the total complacency about missionary activity. Apparently the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel was founded in 1701 by “devout Anglican clergymen, shocked at the prevalence of Presbyterianism and vice in the American colonies.” Well, as a lapsed Papist, I don’t have a dog in that fight. An amusing misprint has the pre-Reformation Church troubled by “sexual immortality”, that extra letter converting the description from cliché to erotic surrealism. The closing chapters touch rather superficially on the ordination of women. Homosexuality is not mentioned at all.

An educational retelling of a number of ancient Egyptian myths, aimed at a readership of about a fifth of my age, so didn’t quite grab me. I knew far fewer of these stories than I had expected, but wasn’t sure that this was the way to treat them most effectively.

The end of the four-volume Sharing Knife series, in which the romance / action plot, of mutual suspicions between two human cultures, equally threatened by an ‘orrible supernatural menace, resolves in entirely satisfactory manner, with much character-building wisdom being imparted to the foolish younger relatives. But I found myself a bit dissatisfied with Bujold’s use of the very rich background she has developed, for three reasons: first, the story got way further into the technical details of her world’s magical system than I was interested in; second, my niggling concern about the uniqueness of Dag and Fawn’s mixed marriage was actually exacerbated when it becomes clear in this book that it isn’t unique at all (which disintegrates some of the framing description in the earlier volumes); and third, I got the lingering feeling that the entire story is to an extent an attempt to positively reframe the history of interaction between white settlers and Native Americans (note that the Lakewalkers are magical and basically a warrior culture) – I am not saying that this is a necessary reading of the series, but I would have been more comfortable if some way of deprecating that interpretation had made it into the text.

Anyway, even problematic Bujold is entertaining enough, but I’m not sure how strongly I recommend the series as a whole.

• sammymorse: The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, It Will Be On The Internet
  
  Today’s great information technology goes out onto the streets with us on our smartphones. It does not only convey information from top to bottom, but also from bottom to top and side to side. It continues to convey information, however, from top to bottom. A lot of information. In the internet age, those at the apex of politics, business or civil society still have enormously more leverage to convey information to the world at large than the average person. Barack Obama’s 2008 Presidential campaign is living proof of that, and his 2012 campaign might still underscore it.

  The internet can still be used for top-down purposes, and some time soon somebody is going to use that to maximum effect, for good or ill. We lose sight of that at our peril.
  (tags: politics internet )

• White House Denies CIA Teleported Obama to Mars | Danger Room | Wired.com
  
  Perhaps this all sounds fantastical, absurd, and more than a little nuts. We couldn’t agree more. That’s one of the reasons we love conspiracy theories — the more awesomely insane, the better.
  (tags: uspolitics )
• A List of Don’ts for Women on Bicycles circa 1895 | Brain Pickings
  
  Don’t try to ride in your brother’s clothes “to see how it feels.”
  Don’t scream if you meet a cow. If she sees you first, she will run.
  (tags: sexandgenderandsexuality )
• Ansible 294, January 2012
  
  “…it’s OK for a serious journalist to like Doctor Who and interview Matt Smith, because this is safely different from all that horrid sci-fi stuff: ‘Surely there are parallels with Douglas Adams – one of the early Who writers – who later, in Hitchhiker’s, created a universe to explore not science fiction but the human condition.’ “
  (tags: )
• The first ever science fiction convention
  
  includes pics of Arthur C Clarke aged 20 but looking 10.
  (tags: sf )
• Sherlock on the Fiddle
  
  I am here as Benedict Cumberbatch’s violin coach…
  (tags: sherlockholmes music tv )
• The man who saves Stephen Hawking’s voice – opinion – 30 December 2011 – New Scientist
  
  “the most interesting thing in my office is a little grey box, which contains the only copy we have of Stephen’s hardware voice synthesiser. The card inside dates back to the 1980s and this particular one contains Stephen’s voice. There’s a processor on it which has a unique program that turns text into speech that sounds like Stephen’s, and we have only two of these cards. The company that made them went bankrupt and nobody knows how it works any more.”
  (tags: disability science )
• The Lifehacker Workout
  
  “for normal people” – or so they say.
  (tags: health )
• How do you pronounce “scone”? A definitive poll | Love and Garbage – some commonplace musings
  
  As most people know there are three principal pronunciations of “scone”.
  (tags: languages )
• Pawns of Peace: Evaluation of Norwegian peace efforts in Sri Lanka, 1997-2009
  
  Fascinating and brutally honest analysis of Norway’s role in the Sri Lanka conflict.
  (tags: peace srilanka war )

• manjushra: Abbaye de Villers-la-Ville
  
  (tags: poetry belgium )
• This is What Happens When You Give Thousands of Stickers to Thousands of Kids | Colossal
  
  Amazing interactive art project!
  (tags: children art )
• Free eBook: ‘Georgia on my Mind’ by Charles Sheffield
  
  An excellent collection!
  (tags: ebooks sf )
• 22 Free Hitchcock Movies Online
  
  I did not know he had adapted ‘Juno and the Paycock’ for the big screen.
  (tags: films )
• Twitlines
  
  Interesting visualisation of Twitter updates.
  (tags: twitter )
• Somalia meets over federal Constitution
  
  “Members of the new federal parliament, expected to come into effect by June 2012, will be nominated by recognised traditional elders assisted by qualified civil society members, none of whom have any political aspirations.” So that’s all right then.
  (tags: elections somalia )
• Hating new year’s eve: a political analysis:
  
  ‘The manufactured celebration affirms our false understanding of time, that it is all about what is past and what lies ahead, when in fact life is “about” neither. Neither past nor future exists. There is of course only the present.’
  (tags: carneross )
• Polish MEPs leave ECR group
  
  Cameron’s allies dwindling…
  (tags: ukpolitics eu )
• End of the pro-democracy pretense – Salon.com
  
  The last thing the U.S. government has wanted (or wants now) is actual democracy in the Arab world, in large part because democracy will enable the populations’ beliefs — driven by high levels of anti-American sentiment and opposition to Israeli actions – to be empowered rather than ignored.
  (tags: arabspring usa )
• sammymorse: One cheer for Alasdair McDonnell
  
  Northern Ireland plc has plenty of real economic and social problems to deal with without debating changes to the machinery of government that won’t take place any time soon. Alasdair was right to nix such a pointless debate. The SDLP needs to use its limited airtime on topics more likely to get more people to vote for and join the SDLP.
  (tags: northernireland )
• Would you bet against Alex Salmond? | The Spectator
  
  “while I wish him nothing but failure, I also regard him as one of the most formidable and effective politicians not just in Britain but Europe.”
  (tags: scotland scot )
• Eurosceptics gain MEPs | New Europe
  
  Five new members for the EFD group.
  (tags: eu )
• Rick Santorum: British Empire’s Decline Due To Growth Of Social Programs
  
  I do hope he does well in Iowa.
  (tags: ukpolitics uspolitics ushealth usa )
• Travel Postcard: 48 hours in Brussels | Reuters
  
  Actually also includes the Tintin museum in Louvain-la-Neuve (good call, IMO).
  (tags: belgium )

• The Salmond That Slipped Through The Net
  
  Joyce McMillan in the Scotsman on “perhaps the most formidable incumbent politician in Britain, one who had defied the odds to win a stunning electoral victory, largely by offering an optimistic world-view that no other party could match.”
  (tags: ukpolitics scotland )
• Elections improbability — Gazeta.Ru
  
  Statistical analysis of Duma election results shows how artificial United Russia’s success was.
  (tags: elections russia )
• Maltreating victims may condemn us to the folly of repeating the past « Slugger O’Toole
  
  Anne Travers speaks out.
  (tags: northernireland )
• The Xinjiang Procedure | The Weekly Standard
  
  “Beijing’s ‘New Frontier’ is ground zero for the organ harvesting of political prisoners.” – a horrible story.
  (tags: humanrights china )
• What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland’s School Success – Anu Partanen – National – The Atlantic
  
  (tags: education usa finland )
• Relativeren van autisme is in de mode
  
  Great but sobering piece in NRC Handelsblad by Ingrid Robeyns
  (tags: autism )
• What is space exploration worth? – The Planetary Society Blog | The Planetary Society
  
  Obviously, I believe NASA is worth the money. But it’s such a lot of money that it’s difficult to explain briefly why it’s worth it. Here’s what I think: investing in NASA makes us smarter, improves our lives, and increases our capability to overcome technological challenges. Even more important, though, are the intangible benefits of pride, respect from other nations, respect for our place in the universe, and hope for a future in which we can accomplish even greater things. In this post I’m going to explain why I think these things. This will be an unusually U.S.-centric post for me, but many of the ideas in it apply to other spacefaring nations.
  (tags: space )

Condolences to my Macedonian friends on the sad but not hugely surprising news that Kiro Gligorov, the first president of independent Macedonia, has died at the age of 94. He had a remarkable political career, beginning as a rising star among Tito’s Partisans during the Second World War, serving as Yugoslav finance minister in the 1960s, and as speaker of the Yugoslav federal parliament in the 1970s before emerging from retirement at the age of 74 to become President of Macedonia, in its first multi-party elections, in 1991 and then steering it to independence that year rather more peacefully than Slovenia, Croatia or Bosnia were able to manage. He retired in 1999, his job complete.

I saw Gligorov speaking at conferences several times, but only got talking to him once. He would always speak in Macedonian, through an interpreter, if making a public address, though in fact he was fluent in English and several other languages. As the result of an assassination attempt in 1995 he had a cavity practically the size of a golf ball in his forehead; he lost an eye in that bomb attack but otherwise appeared to have recovered pretty well.

My one conversation with Gligorov was shortly after the fall of Milošević, when I was fortunate enough to end up at the same table as him at a conference dinner (in the significantly named Herzegovina restaurant in Copenhagen). One of us asked Gligorov what his own most recent contact with Milošević had been. He told us that he had called the presidential office in Belgrade, in what turned out to be Milošević’s last month in power, to express his concern about the mysterious disappearance of Ivan Stambolić, Milošević’s predecessor as President of Serbia and a friend of Gligorov’s. He left a message with a secretary, expecting to hear nothing more, and was surprised to get a direct call from Milošević a few minutes later. “But all he wanted to talk about was the trouble he was having with Djukanović [then president of Montenegro].” Of course we now know what we only suspected then, that Stambolić had been kidnapped, killed and buried by the police on Milošević’s orders.

Vladimir Gligorov, Kiro Gligorov’s son, is a well-known economist based in Vienna; we used to see each other quite a lot on the Balkan conference circuit where, though he does not particularly identify himself as a Macedonian, he combines the Macedonian traits of pessimism and wit. One of his lines that I find applicable in many circumstances is his warning that “The European Union should realise that it is cheaper to keep its promises than to break them.” Anyway, my thoughts are with him and the rest of his father’s extensive circle, in Macedonia and elsewhere.

My 2011 books poll. Tick if you have read (for any value of ‘read’ which satisfies you). All books are written up on Livejournal and Librarything.

Total number of books for the year: 301 (counting the various Gibbon volumes as one). This is up from 278 in 2010 but below 2009's 346 and 2008's 374, thanks to watching old TV episodes (mostly Doctor Who) on my commute.

65/301 (22%) by women (23% in 2010, 20% in 2009)
15/301 (5%) by PoC (9% in 2010, 5% in 2009)
42/301 (14%) rereads (9% in 2010, 11% in 2009)

Non-fiction
Total 69 (23%; 24% in 2010, 26% in 2009)
Best of category: The two slave narratives by Olaudah Equiano and Frederick Douglass. Though Gibbon is in a category of his own.

Fiction (other than sff)
Total 48 (16%; 18% in 2010, 18% in 2009)
Best of category: greatly enjoyed Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy: The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets' Nest.

SF (other than Doctor Who)
Total 78 (26%; 26% in 2010, 23% in 2009)
Best of category: This may seem a rather odd choice but Tom's Midnight Garden, published 53 years ago, grabbed me in a way that none of the more recent books published for a more mature audience managed to.

Doctor Who
Total (not counting comics) 80 (27%; 24% in 2010, 19% in 2009).
Best of category: Torchwood: First Born, the best of a good crop of Who books published this year; honourable mention also to Paul Cornell's fannishly gleeful No Future.

Comics
Total (including Doctor Who comics) 27 (9%; 8% in 2010 and 2009).
Best of category: I was blown away by the first two volumes of Mike Carey's The Unwritten, Tommy Taylor and the Bogus Identity and Inside Man.

Audios
I was hugely impressed with Big Finish's Peri and the Piscon Paradox which took one of the least satisfactory bits of TV Who continuity, and got Nicola Bryant and Colin Baker to exorcise it very effectively. It was generally a good year for Big Finish though.

Most read author of the year
Arthur Conan Doyle, with all 9 Sherlock Holmes books.
Also-rans: James Goss (7), Hergé (6), Ursula Le Guin (6), J.R.R. Tolkien (6), Justin Richards (4), Ian Rankin (4), David Martin (4).

Worst books of the year
A close-run thing between Kuifje in Afrika / Tintin in the Congo and The Onion's Our Dumb World.

All reviews indexed on Livejournal and Librarything.

Incidentally I read one book called Blackout and listened to an audiobook also called Blackout. Both were pretty poor.

Non-fiction 10 (Total for year 70)
Interpreting Irish History, edited by Ciaran Brady
Elisabeth Sladen: The Autobiography
Unrecognised States, by Nina Caspersen
Gulistān, by Sheikh Muṣleḥ-ʾiddin Saʿdī
Būstān, by Sheikh Muṣleḥ-ʾiddin Saʿdī
The John Nathan-Turner Memoirs
A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett, of the State of Tennessee
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: Vol 3 by Edward Gibbon
Vanished Kingdoms, by Norman Davies

Fiction (non-SF) 2 (Total for year 48)
The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest, by Stieg Larsson
Het Boek Van Alle Dingen / The Book of Everything, by Guus Kuijer

SF (non-Who) 5 (Total for year 78)
The Tombs of Atuan, by Ursula Le Guin
The Farthest Shore, by Ursula Le Guin
Tehanu, by Ursula Le Guin
Tales from Earthsea, by Ursula Le Guin
The Other Wind, by Ursula Le Guin

Doctor Who + Torchwood 7 (Total for year 80)
Theatre of War, by Justin Richards
Interference Book One, by Lawrence Miles
Interference Book Two, by Lawrence Miles
First Born, by James Goss
Nuclear Time, by Oli Smith
The Eye of the Jungle, by Darren Jones
The Silent Stars Go By, by Dan Abnett

Comics 2 (Total for year 27)
Kuifje in Afrika / Tintin in the Congo, by Hergé
Operation Red Dragon, by Thierry Robberecht, Marco Venanzi and Michel Pierret

~8,000 pages (total for year ~88,200)
7/25 by women (Sladen, Caspersen, 5x Le Guin); total for year 65/302
2/25 by PoC (2x Saʿdī); total for year 15/302
Owned for more than a year: 10 (The Tombs of Atuan [reread], The Farthest Shore [reread], Tehanu [reread], Tales from Earthsea [reread], The Other Wind [reread], Interference Book One [reread], Interference Book Two [reread], Theatre of War [reread], Interpreting Irish History, Nuclear Time)
Other rereads: none for total of 8 (Total for year 42/302)

I was very glad to get this as a Christmas present, a book with fifteen chapters exploring the demise (and occasional revival) of European states. The first eleven chapters look at countries which once existed and appeared to be as permanent as any other, but have now disapeared; three of the last four look at countries which have (re)gained their independence (Montenegro, Ireland and Estonia); and we also explore the brief appearance of the Republic of Carpatho-Ukraine which lasted for less than a day in March 1939.

It’s all fascinating stuff. I felt most interested where Davies is most comfortable, on his favoured territory of what is now Poland and its surroundings; the chapters on Poland/Lithuania, Prussia, Galicia and Saxe-Coburg-Gotha are passionately written. I had not realised, for instance, that the Hohenzollern rule over Prussia (as opposed to Brandenburg) came about as a result of the commander of the Teutonic Knights, a junior Hohenzollern, converting to Lutheranism and shifting his territory to a hereditary monarchy. Nor had I known that Queen Victoria had two older siblings (from her mother’s first marriage). And the second chapter, on the Brythonic heritage of what is now south-west Scotland, was also an eye-opener; I knew very little of the Hen Ogledd, a cultural tradition that has been completely erased but once challenged for dominance of Great Britain and the Irish Sea. Even in the less exciting chapters one runs across odd eye-catching details:

….the sister of Juan II of Castile was married off to Alfonso of Aragon, while the sister of Juan II of Aragon married Juan II of Castile. Both of these brides were called Maria; they were first cousins, and each of them married a first cousin. After their marriages, Princess Maria of Castile became Queen Maria of Aragon, and Maria of Aragon became Maria of Castile. The phrase ‘keeping it within the family’ gains new significance.

Unfortunately I found that in the two chapters about countries which I know particularly well, while Davies’ heart is generally in the right place, there are many annoying errors of detail. On Montenegro: Adria Airways is Slovenia’s national airline, not Montenegro’s. Djukanović did not break with Milošević over the Dayton Accords, which he did not consider too conciliatory (I know Wikipedia says otherwise, but Wikipedia is wrong). In the local language the country’s name is Crna Gora, not Črnagora, and it just means “Black Mountain”, not “land of the Black Mountain”. Count de Salis was never referred to as “the earl de Salis”. To describe the current democratically and fairly elected coalition government as “Putinesque” is unjustifiable, and if the reference is to politicians serving terms as prime minister (or president) interrupted by a term as president (or prime minister), it would be more appropriate to descibe Putin as “Djukanović-esque” since Milo did it first (and then gracefully retired, twice).

On Ireland: Captain Boycott was not a landlord. While there may well have been a prospect of “looming confrontation” between the Ulster Volunteers and Irish Volunteers in 1914, both groups were more interested at the time in defying British authority. Sinn Féin does not mean “Ours Alone”. Edward Carson and F.E. Smith may have seen “British law as the sole fount of legitimacy” but had no difficulty in defying it when it suited them, and their support for Ulster long predated the Ulster Volunteers being “slaughtered on the Western Front”. There was no “second vote” after the first Northern Ireland election in May 1921 to determine the future of the statelet (the Northern Ireland Parliament unanimously approved a “loyal address”). W.T. Cosgrave never used the title ‘taoiseach‘. Lord Brookeborough’s name is misspelt. Terence O’Neill was never known as Sir Terence O’Neill. County Offaly has no beaches, and anyway the incident reported to have occurred there actually took place in County Longford (which also has no beaches; like County Offaly it is landlocked). I will admit that I cannot challenge Davies on his real area of expertise, which is well to the north of Montenegro and far to the east of Ireland, but it’s disappointing that he could not find a handy Balkan or Irish expert to smooth out the bumps.

This should not detract from Davies’ main argument, which is that small and forgotten states are important, that history written from the perspective of the winners is misleading and even dangerous, and that all constitutional arrangements must be regarded as ephemeral in the longer run of things. He takes inspiration from Gibbon, who of course I have just finished reading myself, in wanting to get into the detail and seeing how this can be translated to get a better understanding of the bigger picture. He writes of how he would have liked to write about ancient Cornwall, Nieuw Amsterdam and D’Annunzio’s Fiume but did not have space; I am sorry about that, and would also have liked to see mention of my favourite forgotten Balkan state, Eastern Rumelia. Strongly recommended, though with the occasional pinch of salt where indicated. (And my Estonian friends will be annoyed that their chapter bears the title “СССР”.)

I'll do a roundup post on the entire Decline and Fall later in the weekend, but for now I just want to log that I have reached the end. The last two volumes of the original publication deal with the later Byzantine Empire, the rise of Islam, the Crusades and the final fall; the chapters are:

(Original Vol 5)
Chapter XLVIII: Plan of last two volumes, and later Byzantine emperors
Chapter XLIX: Iconoclasm, Charlemagne and the Holy Roman Empire
Chapter L: Mahomet
Chapter LI: the successors of Mahomet
Chapter LII: The limits of the early caliphate
Chapter LIII: The Byzantine Empire in the Tenth Century
Chapter LIV: The Paulicians and the Reformation
Chapter LV: The Bulgarians, the Hungarians and the Russians
Chapter LVI: Italy and the Normans
Chapter LVII: The Turks

(Original Vol 6)
Chapter LVIII: The First Crusade
Chapter LIX: The Later Crusades
Chapter LX: The Fourth Crusade
Chapter LXI: The Latin Empire, the Crusades and the Courtenays
Chapter LXII: the East in the later thirteenth century
Chapter LXIII: The East in the early 14th century
Chapter LXIV: Genghis Khan, and the return of the Turks
Chapter LXV: Tamerlane / Timour, and the Turks again
Chapter LXVI: The Eastern Empire and the Popes
Chapter LXVII: The Beginning of the End
Chapter LXVIII: The Fall of Constantinople
Chapter LXIX: Rome, 1100-1300
Chapter LXX: Rome, 1300-1590
Chapter LXXI: The End

Whew.

Latest Doctor Who book from the prolific Abnett, this one with a bit of a Christmassy theme (the chapter titles, like the title of the novel, are all lines from carols), but bringing back the Ice Warriors (who as far as I can tell haven’t been in a Who novel since 1998) interfering with a generations-long terraforming project, whose human crew have lost most of the details of their assignment over the centuries. Lots of references both to Who continuity and to the classic generation starship stories of Harry Harrison and Brian Aldiss, with perhaps a nod to Riddley Walker as well, and some great flashes of humour on the way. This year’s main sequence of Eleventh Doctor / Amy / Rory hardcovers have generally been a cut above the norm and this one continues the pattern.

I was startled to find this referenced in the bibliography for Lois McMaster Bujold's The Sharing Knife: Passage, and sufficiently intrigued to track it down on Project Gutenberg and speculate about the author's uncle. It's a book which is quite obviously a first step in a presidential election campaign that never happened, full of references to the incumbent Andrew Jackson, most of which are rather obscure to anyone not familiar with the micro-politics of the year 1834. There is a lot of interesting detail about life on the frontier, including gruesome details of combat with various tribes and indeed with other white men; there's a surprisingly lengthy section about the intricacies of bear hunting; there's a sense that Crockett (and/or his ghost-writer) intended for large sections of it to be read aloud to his adoring public. There is surprisingly little detail on the politics – this is the most substantial passage about his falling out with Andrew Jackson:

I can say, on my conscience, that I was, without disguise, the friend and supporter of General Jackson, upon his principles as he laid them down, and as "I understood them," before his election as president. During my two first sessions in Congress, Mr. Adams was president, and I worked along with what was called the Jackson party pretty well. I was re-elected to Congress, in 1829, by an overwhelming majority; and soon after the commencement of this second term, I saw, or thought I did, that it was expected of me that I was to bow to the name of Andrew Jackson, and follow him in all his motions, and mindings, and turnings, even at the expense of my conscience and judgment. Such a thing was new to me, and a total stranger to my principles. I know'd well enough, though, that if I didn't "hurra" for his name, the hue and cry was to be raised against me, and I was to be sacrificed, if possible. His famous, or rather I should say his in-famous, Indian bill was brought forward, and I opposed it from the purest motives in the world. Several of my colleagues got around me, and told me how well they loved me, and that I was ruining myself. They said this was a favourite measure of the president, and I ought to go for it. I told them I believed it was a wicked, unjust measure, and that I should go against it, let the cost to myself be what it might; that I was willing to go with General Jackson in every thing that I believed was honest and right; but, further than this, I wouldn't go for him, or any other man in the whole creation; that I would sooner be honestly and politically d—nd, than hypocritically immortalized. I had been elected by a majority of three thousand five hundred and eighty-five votes, and I believed they were honest men, and wouldn't want me to vote for any unjust notion, to please Jackson or any one else; at any rate, I was of age, and was determined to trust them. I voted against this Indian bill, and my conscience yet tells me that I gave a good honest vote, and one that I believe will not make me ashamed in the day of judgment. I served out my term, and though many amusing things happened, I am not disposed to swell my narrative by inserting them.

I wish he had swelled his narrative by inserting them. There's almost no indication in the book as to what Jackson's "Indian bill" (actually the Indian Removal Act) was about, and none at all as to Crockett's objections to it (other than that he thought it wicked and unjust).

Part of the charm of the book is the obscure vocabulary. What are we to make of the word "toated" in this passage, where he has an unexpected encounter with his future first wife?

I was sent for to engage in a wolf hunt, where a great number of men were to meet, with their dogs and guns, and where the best sort of sport was expected. I went as large as life, but I had to hunt in strange woods, and in a part of the country which was very thinly inhabited. While I was out it clouded up, and I began to get scared; and in a little while I was so much so, that I didn't know which way home was, nor any thing about it. I set out the way I thought it was, but it turned out with me, as it always does with a lost man, I was wrong, and took exactly the contrary direction from the right one. And for the information of young hunters, I will just say, in this place, that whenever a fellow gets bad lost, the way home is just the way he don't think it is. This rule will hit nine times out of ten. I went ahead, though, about six or seven miles, when I found night was coming on fast; but at this distressing time I saw a little woman streaking it along through the woods like all wrath, and so I cut on too, for I was determined I wouldn't lose sight of her that night any more. I run on till she saw me, and she stopped; for she was as glad to see me as I was to see her, as she was lost as well as me. When I came up to her, who should she be but my little girl, that I had been paying my respects to. She had been out hunting her father's horses, and had missed her way, and had no knowledge where she was, or how far it was to any house, or what way would take us there. She had been travelling all day, and was mighty tired; and I would have taken her up, and toated her, if it hadn't been that I wanted her just where I could see her all the time, for I thought she looked sweeter than sugar; and by this time I loved her almost well enough to eat her.

At last I came to a path, that I know'd must go somewhere, and so we followed it, till we came to a house, at about dark. Here we staid all night. I set up all night courting; and in the morning we parted. She went to her home, from which we were distant about seven miles, and I to mine, which was ten miles off.

I'm mystified. I find definitions for 'toat' including "The handle of a joiner's plane" and "A tenth of a ton, or a woman weighing 200 pounds", but those are nouns; I need a verb which suits the situation, and can't really think of one. But it certainly has the effect of adding to Crockett's homespun mystique. He concludes that

I do reckon we love as hard in the backwood country, as any people in the whole creation.

Of course, the book failed to get Crockett re-elected to congress in late 1834, and consequentially he went south to Texas and his story ended at the Alamo on 6 March 1836. But it's interesting to see an early example of a potential presidential candidate writing his autobiography, a path later pursued more successfully (from the perspectives of both political success and literary quality) by the current chap.

As can be seen from my tally here, I found last year’s poll asking what books on my TBR shelves you have read tremendously helpful in deciding what to read in the course of 2011. Unfortunately, the number of books on the shelves remains about the same as acquisition more or less keeps pace with completion. So I would be very grateful once again if you could fill in this poll:

Again, particular recommendations of books to read or avoid very welcome in comments; I shall also bank recommendations from previous years.

F had to do a report on this book for school, and invited me to read it too. It's quite a fascinating package, and very short at only 100 pages; Kuijer gives a very strong sense of a repressed Dutch society of the early 1950s, still coming to terms with the recent war and occupation (Thomas, the central character, is 9 so would have been born in 1942), combined with some startling magical realism as Thomas and the slightly sorcerous neighbour call down the plagues of Egypt on his wife-beating father. The line that sticks with me is from quite near the beginning (repeated again at the end) when Thomas first talks with the witch next door:

“Wat wil je later worden eigenlijk?” vroeg ze.
“Gelukkig”, zei Thomas. “Ik word later gelukkig.”

“What do you want to be when you are older?” she asked.
“Happy”, said Thomas. “I want to be happy.”

Anyway, definitely impressive enough for me to look out for more of Kuijer's work.

A decent enough audiobook read very effectively by David Troughton; aliens intrude into an 1827 British expedition on the Amazon, with some fairly horrific experiments being carried out on their captives – not really one for the younger listener!

Last year I went to the trouble of searching through my Facebook posts of the past twelve months to see which had attracted most comments. But Facebook's interface has now become so user-unfriendly that I will not waste time on that exercise.

Twitter is a different matter; there are a bunch of different metrics out there (of which my favourite, despite its imperfections, is Crowdbooster) which enable you to see which of your tweets has been picked up by the Twitterverse at large.

My most retweeted tweet ever was on 7 November 2010, a link to a Livejournal entry:

What happened to the Doctor Who companions? http://j.mp/ajlxru

It was retweeted by 20 people, and Crowdbooster (which caught only 16 of those) reckons it reached over 36,000 people (though there will of course have been some overlap).

My most frequently retweeted tweet of the last twelve months was on 5 December, as I livetweeted the International Court of Justice's ruling against Greece on the Macedonia name issue:

ICJ says that #Macedonia entitled to refer to itself as "Republic of MAcedonia" in dealings with Greece!!!! http://t.co/Aj65uyPU

This was picked up by 18 people, with (again according to Crowdbooster, which missed a couple of them) an outreach of over 6,000. The typo is a bit embarrassing, but there you go.

However, a single retweet by Paul Cornell, who has 16,000 followers, gave much more depth of penetration to this message on 16 August:

@Paul_Cornell I am very impressed that you put the Goodies into a #DoctorWho novel!

The most replies have I ever received to a single tweet (according to Crowdbooster anyway) came a few days later on 21 August:

D'oh! If I had realised Randall Munroe writes xkcd, I'd have voted for him and he would have been joint winner in the #hugos. #renosf

Crowdbooster claims that I got four replies to this (but I only seem to have records of three, from @niallharrison, @omegar24 and @elmyra).

I don't have any way of tracking the longest conversation I have been involved with on Twitter, and I think it would be quite difficult to compare, say, a prolonged back-and-forth with a friend which is mainly seen by the two of us, versus a broader exchange between lots of people to which I may have only contributed once or twice. No doubt there are mechanisms out there which will claim to quantify that sort of thing.

If I were more concerned about building my online profile I would now be planning all kinds of optimization strategies; but I am not!

Further evidence, if any were needed, of the slow fading of Livejournal: two years ago I was able to list 42 posts of the previous twelve months which had attracted 20 or more comments; last year I could only find 32 with at least 15, and this year it's a mere 26 posts with a lower limit of 12 comments. They were:

30 December 2010: What to read next year? – 41 comments
31 December 2010: 2010 Books poll – 20 comments
4 January 2011: Literary anniversaries – 22 comments
9 January 2011: Getting rid of Amazon; problems with The Book Depository – 12 comments
19 January 2011: Android brick again: Do Not Buy a HTC Desire – 52 comments
19 February 2011: Child development – 28 comments
3 March 2011: Tor top 50 novels – which have you read? – 19 comments
29 March 2011: March Books 27) Contested Will, by James Shapiro – 80 comments
24 April 2011: April Books 28) A Song for Arbonne, by Guy Gavriel Kay – 13 comments
26 April 2011: Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form – 15 comments
4 May 2011: Serbian ћ, Maltese ħ and Planck's constant – 26 comments
5 May 2011: Another conversation with a taxi driver – 28 comments
12 May 2011: 2011 Hugos: Best Dramatic Presentation – Long Form – 21 comments
17 May 2011: A question for my legal friends – 15 comments
22 July 2011: Oslo bombing – 13 comments
23 July 2011: Hackgate – 20 comments
31 July 2011: July Books 23) A Dance with Dragons, by George R.R. Martin – 14 comments
21 August 2011: 2011 Hugos – some (not much) analysis – 18 comments
26 August 2011: Pronouncing "chair" and "charity" – 35 comments
1 September 2011: Air travel: safety vs comfort – 21 comments
13 September 2011: Northern Ireland: the new constituency boundaries – 36 comments
8 October 2011: British Fantasy Awards – 24 comments
2 November 2011: The SDLP leadership candidates, ranked on internet use and internal organisation – 12 comments
2 November 2011: The Tintin Movie (and the books it is based on) – 16 comments
27 November 2011: Third Doctor celebration – 12 comments
11 December 2011: The wine/whine and ant/aunt differences – 16 comments

As ever, best results are polls and topics that appeal to wingnuts.

An unexpected Christmas bonus for us subscribers from Big Finish (unexpected to me at any rate, though I admit I tend to just download my own subscriptions and the occasional podcast and therefore miss a lot of the interactivity on offer). This is the original 4 CD set of the memoirs of Doctor Who’s longest serving producer, read by JNT himself and originally released by Big Finish in November 2000, eighteen months before his death.

I must say that my opinion of JNT as a human being has improved considerably as a result of listening through the whole set. He is, with a few exceptions (notably Eric Saward, though even there he records some good moments along with the bad), loyal to those who worked for him and reserves most of his criticism for the higher-ups at the BBC who made his job difficult and eventually impossible while also insisting that he keep on doing it. One gets the sense of a man of limited vision but a keen sense of pragmatism, not perhaps as burdened with ego as I had expected, though with very few regrets. Fan criticism obviously did get to him; his riposte to those (including me) who did not like Dimensions in Time is to ask if we would rather have had no commemoration of Who’s 30th anniversary at all (because that was the only other option on offer)? I wished that it had been twice as long, and I wished also that he had gone into a bit more detail about the major casting and crew decisions which he made. But his insider account of the Great Cancellation Crisis of 1985 is particularly compelling, and his voice is laden with emotion at the very end as he discusses why he would not want to be involved with any revival of Who, while wishing any such project well. I wondered if he was already aware that he might not live to see it happen.

Anyway, essential listening for anyone interested in the history of Who, and quite an enlightening insight into the internal politics of TV production in its own right.

This was the last of the 2010 releases in the main Doctor Who series to hit my reading list, and to be honest it’s not a strong contender. Some interesting concepts, particularly the moving of the Doctor both backwards and forwards in the same timeline, and the intersection of the Whoniverse with the US politics of the Cold War era, but Smith’s style is irritatingly unpolished in places.

I guess it’s possible that you have missed some interesting developments over the other side of Europe, where the voters of the unrecognised state of Transdniestria have kicked out not only the strongman who had run the place since the end of the 1992 conflict with Moldova, but also the Kremlin’s chosen candidate to replace him. In the first round of the election, on 11 December, incumbent Igor Smirnov came third with less than 25% of the votes; he was pipped for second place by the Kremlin-supported Anatoliy Kaminsky, who got 26.5%, with Kaminsky’s predecessor as Speaker of the Transnistrian Supreme Soviet, Yevgeny Shevchuk, on 38.5%.

Christmas is celebrated in January in Transnistria (as far as it’s celebrated at all) so the runiff between Shevchuk and Kaminsky was held yesterday. I must say that looking at the first round results I wondered if traditionalists who had supported Smirnov in the first round would shift behind Kaminsky to take him ahead. The number of votes involved is very small – Shevchuk had got 95,000, Kaminsky 65,000 and Smirnov 61,000 in the first round. But in fact the opposite occurred; Kaminsky actually lost votes, getting only 44,000 in the second round, and Shevchuk crushing him with 165,000. (Almost 10,000 voted against both, which is an option in Transdniestria – see official results.)

It’s small beer, of course, compared to what has been happening in Russia, but it makes an interesting pattern with the elections in both South Ossetia and Abkhazia this year also having gone the wrong way from the Kremlin’s perspective. It is all grist to the mill of Nina Caspersen’s thesis that the internal politics of unrecogised states, even the most marionettish of puppet regimes, can be worthy of study and analysis.

As guides to Who go, this is one of the better ones I have come across, with a main core narrative recounting the televised Dalek stories of Doctor Who (shamefully little space given to The Power of the Daleks, but otherwise decent enough) and lots of brilliant little sidebars about how and why the Daleks have been brought to the screen, and also going through the non-televised Dalek material in great detail – particularly the comic strips and computer games, of which I must say I knew very little.

I would be very interested to hear of James Goss writing a televised story. His credits are not vast in number but very impressive in quality; I find almost all of his stories excellent and all of them at least above average. Here he shows (as he had previously done when he ran the Cult TV section of the BBC website) that he is a committed keeper of the flame. More power to him.