Interesting Links for 4-11-2011

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Interesting Links for 2-11-2011

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The Tintin Movie (and the books it is based on)

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I took advantage of yesterday's public holiday to take F to see the new Tintin film, which has credits for Stephen Spielberg, Stephen Moffatt and Peter Jackson and so can reasonably expect to be the bearer of high expectations. Unfortunately I realised while we were out that I was coming down with some bug, and have spent most of the time since we came back from the cinema in bed, with no energy for doing anything much more than reading the three Tintin volumes that the film is based on (The Crab With The Golden Claws, The Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackham's Treasure) and writing rambling blog entries.

I enjoyed the film. I have seen a lot of Tintin purists complaining that the motion capture technique doesn't give the same results as Hergé's ligne claire style. I think this misses the point; while it was OK to produce quickie animated films which were based closely on Hergé's style in the 1950s and 1970s, today's cinema audience won't take it, and animations are expected to look a bit more substantial. There is a very nice homage in that literally the first scene features Hergé himself as a pavement artist doing a sketch of Tintin's head (in fact I think he says the first spoken lines heard in the film). The 3D effects are duly spectacular, the action is fun and the humour remains.

The politics are somewhat dubious – it barely passes the first step of the Bechdel test, with Mrs Finch and Bianca Castafiore, who do not meet let alone talk about anything – but there at least it is faithful to the original. The two scenes that I found most memorable were Captain Haddock reliving his ancestor's encounter with the pirate Red Rackham, and Thomson and Thompson's confrontation with the kleptomaniac Aristides Silk, both of which are magnified and frankly improved from equivalent episodes in the original Secret of the Unicorn book (the twins/pickpocket scene definitely one of Moffatt’s great moments). It's an entertaining film, though I think not a great one; and I'm prepared to allow Spielberg, Moffatt and Jackson the occasional bit of work that is merely good rather than excellent. Andy "Gollum" Serkis as Captain Haddock and Daniel "James Bond" Craig as the villainous Sakharine/Rackham particularly excel.

Reading the books last night and this morning, I realised to my surprised that the Unicorn/Rackham sequence was new to me; I had only read The Crab With The Golden Claws when younger. All three books are the product of Nazi occupation, when Hergé was trying to cheer up a brutalised populace with tales of derring-do in the supplement to Le Soir. The Crab With The Golden Claws is a farily straightforward tale of Tintin, not especially helped by the detectives Thomson and Thompson, investigating a mysterious death which turns to be linked to drug smuggling from Morocco. While the effects of the smuggled opium are not really described – it is assumed that the reader's parents will explain why it is a Bad Thing – there is much material about the effects of alcohol, incarnated in the new character of Captain Haddock. There's also an possibly sinister Asian character who turns out to be a Japanese detective and therefore a good guy. The moral, if there is one, is that things are not always as they seem, and depths are usually hidden.

Crab's contributions to the film include the story of how Tintin and Captain Haddock actually meet, and the sea voyage and landing for an exciting time in a Moroccan port. I noted several changes from these elements as they were adapted for the screen. First off, Haddock's destructive alcoholism, which teeters on the edge of being really not funny in the film, has actually been toned down from the book where he repeatedly and deliberately endangers himself and others for the sake of his addiction. I think the film makers moved this in the right direction, though not necessarily far enough. Once we reach Morocco, Omar Ben Salaad has been transformed from scheming Arab merchant and drug smuggler to genial local potentate with a taste for model ships and opera singers, who then gets his palace and town smashed up by Tintin and his enemies; and finally – think I caught this right – the seaplane which attacks Tintin, Haddock and Snowy is mysteriously said to have Portuguese markings in the film rather than Moroccan as in the book (which would make more sense). While the upgrading of Ben Salaad's character to victim rather than villain is probably an improvement, he still has an offensively silly name and the commander of the desert army fort is still mysteriously white.

Most of the film is, not surprisingly, taken from The Secret of the Unicorn. The original book is one of two Tintin adventures set entirely in his home country, chasing around the back streets of the capital city (and the mansion of Marlinspike) to try and track down the three parchments which put together will reveal the secret location of the treasure lost by Captain Haddock's ancestor. It has a lot of fun and action, and one very effective info-dump sequence where Haddock retells the events on the Unicorn in the seventeenth century (though as noted above I think the film does this even better). There is a less successful infodump near the end when one of the villainous Bird brothers explains what has really been going on. The antique dealer Sakharine, who is the chief bad guy of the film, is here a largely innocent bystander who vanishes without explanation. There are also some breathtaking moments of artwork, but actually the structure and plot are not without flaws.

Though I had not read Red Rackham's Treasure, I had at least seen the 1959 Belvision animation and remembered the incidents of the wrong longitude (which is not in the film) and the statue of St John (which is). Though in fact the actual finding of the treasure is almost the only part of the book which made it to the screen this time, most of the rest apparently being saved for the next film which will also combine parts of The Seven Crystal Balls and Prisoners of the Sun. This means no trace of the book's main new character, Professor Calculus, whose shark-shaped submarine is vital to the expedition to retrieve the treasure, and whose unconsciousness of his own deafness makes him one of the most fascinating characters in the whole Tintin œuvre; he appears to operate in a blithe parallel reality which only occasionally intersects with ours. Again there is some goreous art, particularly the moment when Tintin finds the wreck of the Unicorn on the ocean floor. Apart from that, the moral of the book is that grand expeditions and expenditures may not always deliver the same results that you might have got from looking closer to home. I liked it the most of the three.

Anyway, @quarsan asked me for a summary review, which is that the film is good but not great, and the books are well worth reading but there is better to come.

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The SDLP leadership candidates, ranked on internet use and internal organisation

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Northern Ireland's Social Democratic and Labour Party elects its fifth leader this coming weekend, with four male candidates in the running (the deputy leadership has been filled, without contest, by a woman). Since 1998, when the party topped the first preference tallies for the first Assembly election, the SDLP has lost votes and seats at almost every election cycle (the one exception being a sliver of a gain at the last European election) and now runs consistently 10% behind Sinn Féin, whereas twenty years ago it was the other way round. Margaret Ritchie, elected leader in early 2010, did not reverse the trend, and announced in the summer that she would not be a candidate for the leadership at this month's conference. The new leader faces quite a challenge.

I realised as I followed the UUP's leadership election last year that I had missed a trick by not giving the same attention to the contest between Margaret Ritchie and Alasdair McDonnell a few months earlier, and resolved that I would do better this time. I vaguely know all four candidates. Patsy McGlone (52) is the outgoing Deputy Leader, the only candidate based outside Belfast, representing Mid Ulster in the Assembly. Alasdair McDonnell (62), the previous Deputy Leader who lost the 2010 vote, is the MP for South Belfast, the only one of the three SDLP MPs who has not held the leadership of the party, and also represents South Belfast in the Assembly. Alex Attwood (52), who represents West Belfast in the Assembly, is the party's only minister in the Northern Ireland Executive, responsible for the Environment portfolio. Conall McDevitt (39), the other MLA for South Belfast, is a former party staffer and rising media star though he has only been in the Assembly since 2010.

I have never been an SDLP member and I am not an SDLP supporter, and in any case I live in Belgium so my views are of limited relevance to the party delegates making up their minds this weekend. I certainly won't presume to judge the candidates on their political vision – I am not sure that I was right to make those judgements of the UUP candidates last year. I will note that all four advocate a United Ireland, and all four have slightly different ideas of how to get there; since I don't think that we will get there any time soon, this is not a subject that interests me tremendously.

I am, however, interested both in political communications using the internet, and in the detail of party organisation, and here I think I have enough data to rank the candidates fairly objectively in terms of their performance on the first and their credibility on the second. So I have duly done so.

Use of the Internet

Probably the last thing I did in Northern Irish politics as a participant rather than an analyst was to manage the website for one of the candidates in the last Alliance Party leadership election, back in 2001. (He won, by 86 votes to 45, though I cannot claim that the excellence of his website was a crucial factor.) Today, quite apart from websites, politicians have the options of Twitter and Facebook open to them. How do the SDLP contenders rank?

4) Alex Attwood has no personal website, no twitter account and appears to be invisible on Facebook. The http://www.alexattwood.com site belongs to a composer of incidental music for films and TV. There is a fake (and frankly not very funny) Twitter account for him at @AlexAttwood. As with McDonnell, I got his manifesto after phoning his office to see if they could send it to me.

3) Alasdair McDonnell's website is curiously silent about his leadership aspirations, and as with Attwood I had to phone his office to get his manifesto. But unlike Attwood he has a Facebook page and is vigorous on Twitter.

2) Not long ago I would have easily ranked Conall McDevitt first on performance in this area, with almost twice as many friends on Facebook as the other candidates combined and a vigorous Twitter presence. However, like McDonnell, his website is curiously silent about his leadership, his manifesto being available online at Scribd. His facebook page has two blog addresses, one of which is defunct and the other last updated in early 2009. So he loses points for failure to update and integrate.

1) Patsy McGlone has a dedicated website featuring his leadership manifesto at http://www.patsymcglone.com/, as well as being on Facebook and Twitter. I cannot quite give him full marks though; although his campaign materials are easy to access, look nice and are well produced, they were not adequately proofed before publishing and a number of misprints have survived to the final version.

I don't think anyone should take the above ranking as the sole criterion for judging between the candidates, but it may just shift the balance between two who may be otherwise equally ranked.

Edited to add: I have been informed that some websites are constrained from referring to their owner's leadership campaigns. That may well be so; I can only report on the impression I get of joined-up campaigning.

Internal organisation and campaigning

I was the Alliance Party's Director of Elections / Political organiser for three years in the 1990s, and then spent two years in the Balkans training local political activists on party organisation and campaigning strategy (where I probably learned more from teaching than I had by doing). I don't know if improved internal organisation alone will be enough to help the SDLP reverse its slumping performance; but I doubt very much that such a reversal can be achieved otherwise. In fairness, all of the candidates realise this, and Attwood and McDonnell both put out separate manifesto documents on this point alone. Again, I found it pretty easy to rank the candidates rather objectively on the strength of their proposals in this area.

4) Conall McDevitt devotes least space to this issue, and unlike the other three I think that some of his ideas are actually wrong. He wants the SDLP to organise in the Republic, saying nothing about rebuilding in areas of weakness in the North where the party might actually contest elections and win seats; he wants the party's executive to connect better with local activists by making it smaller, an equation which I don't really see adding up; and he takes it upon himself to propose a new party constitution, sounding a bit like De Valera in 1937, without really mentioning how party activists will be involved with that process. On the other hand, he wants to convene all elected representatives regularly and to introduce a £1 membership fee for young people, senior citizens and those not working, which seem sensible enough ideas, and also talks about enhancing the role of the party's Central Council, a body of which I know nothing more than its name.

REVISED: 4) Alex Attwood's short paper (four pages, one of which is the cover sheet) on "Taking the SDLP Organisation Forward" starts off by demanding loyalty and discipline from members, and asking that "the Leader and Deputy Leader must have the authority to lead". I'm not quite sure what this all refers to but it sends an odd message, a bit of Das Volk hat das Vertrauen der Regierung verscherzt. He too wants to convene elected representatives regularly, and to move quickly to select candidates as soon as the party leadership has been given the new powers he wants (the document is curiously full of timelines). He praises the performance of his rivals in Mid Ulster and South Belfast in growing the party. I must say that would incline me to vote for a leadership candidate from Mid Ulster and South Belfast.

REVISED: 3) Conall McDevitt has now sent me a much more more detailed twelve-page paper with the title: "Uniting the SDLP: My Plan For Renewing Our Organisation" which I find a considerable improvement on the statements in his manifesto. In particular, two of the three ideas to which I objected are redrafted more sensibly here, in terms of building SDLP support groups in the Republic – "we will, of course, be focussed on growing our organisation in the North, particularly in those constituencies where we have suffered major decline" – and delivering a new party constitution, which is now to be drafted by a working group. I still don't see how a smaller Executive is going to be better at engaging the grass-roots, but that may not matter. As well as convening elected members and the Central Council regularly, and discounted membership fees, he also proposes early selection of candidates, training and performance monitoring for prospective candidates, and a permanent election directorate. I am not sure if performance monitoring for prospective candidates is such a good idea – sounds like this is a reference to problems that I don't know about – and I find the plans really a bit sketchy and managerialist, but they are closer to being in the right direction than Attwood's.

2) Patsy McGlone has some much more specific ideas about rebuilding the party through cooperation between leadership and membership. He wants each candidate to have endorsements from two non-party groups, which may not be implementable but would be interesting to try. He aims to have a functioning branch in every District Electoral Area, which I think is unrealistic but not a bad aspiration. I liked his proposals on this when I first read them; although they could be more coherent (and should have been better proof-read) they are a good set of ideas for party reformers to work with.

1) I had not expected to come to this conclusion, but Alasdair McDonnell has by far the best set of proposals on rebuilding the party. In a six-page leaflet with the title "Decline Stops Now", he starts at the top by promising to appoint a collective leadership with clearly defined roles, and then goes on to describe a "battle ready SDLP". If I were voting, he would have secured my support with the last two sentences of this section, "Where we have no current MLA or councillor there will always be a clearly designated and supported SDLP representative with recognised party status. As a top priority this will be implemented in the four Antrim constituencies, Fermanagh-South Tyrone and Strangford." This seems to me more realistic than McGlone's aspiration for a functioning branch in every DEA. He tells the truth about the state of activism in the party: "There is a handful of active branches, usually built around a successful representative, others which are being valiantly carried by a few hard-working individuals, and many which hardly ever meet." And he promises a special conference on party organisation, as well as further thoughts on membership structures and fund-raising. I also like his line that "we should socialise together more". McDonnell gets it right on tone, analysis, and ways and means of finding a solution.

SDLP delegates will of course be taking at least two other considerations into account as they cast their votes – the resonance of each candidate's political vision with their own, and the personal chamistry of each candidate. I am not well placed to judge on either of those questions. But the question of fixing the party's structures is, operationally, the most important problem for the SDLP today, and based on what I have seen from the candidates themselves, Alasdair McDonnell has the best ideas of how to do that.

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The Beards of George McClellan, Horatio Seymour and Horace Greeley: a correction and retraction

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Nine years ago today, I set up a web-page on my site describing the history of facial hair in US Presidential elections. On that page I stated that Horatio Seymour, the unsuccessful Democratic candidate in the 1868 election, "sported only modest sideburns" and that Horace Greeley, the unsuccessful Democratic candidate in the 1872 election, "had only sideburns (his high collar looks a bit like a beard but this is an illusion)." I also stated that there had never been a Presidential election where more than one candidate had had a "proper" beard.

A former Commissioner of the New York City Department of Records has contacted me to point out that in fact Greeley "sported one of those whacky neck beards". On examining the portraits of him available on the Internet today (which are probably several orders of magnitude more numerous than the ones I could find in 2002), I see that my correspondent is entirely correct. What I had thought was a ruff or scarf is in fact the man's facial hair, his cheeks and chin shaved but his sideburns extending to meet in front of his neck.

Having realised that the former Commissioner was right and I was wrong, I looked again at the other Democratic candidate beaten by Grant, Horatio Seymour, who lost the 1868 election, and realised that he too had sported a similar arrangement"

I then went back another election and realised that once again the Democratic candidate was more bearded than I had thought. I had been blinded by George McClellen's luxuriant moustache; in fact he did also sport a wee tuft of hair on the front of his chin. It is really clear from this 1862 photograph of him with Lincoln, two years before they stood against each other:

I feel that my statement that there has never yet been an election where more than one candidate had a proper beard remains valid – but only because McClellan's, Seymour's and Greeley's beards are not really proper beards. So I shall have to rephrase that section as well. (And the page could do with a more comprehensive update some time.)

For info – candidates with proper beards won elections in 1864, 1868, 1872, 1876, 1880, and 1888 but lost in 1856, 1884, 1892 and 1916. (Abraham Lincoln was clean-shaven at the time of the 1860 election and grew his beard only later.) Both major candidates in 1904 had moustaches; otherwise the moustached won in 1884, 1892 and 1908, but lost to the bearded in 1880 and 1888, and to the clean-shaven in 1912 (twice), 1944 and 1948. You really needed to know that, eh?

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October Books

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Non-fiction 3 (YTD 55)
A New History of Ireland, Volume III: Early Modern Ireland 1534-1691, ed. T.W. Moody, F.X. Martin and F.J. Byrne
Newman, Elgar and "The Dream of Gerontius", by Percy M. Young
The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano

Fiction (Non-sf) 3 (YTD 41)
Sons and Lovers, by D.H. Lawrence
Exit Music, by Ian Rankin
The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck

SF (non-Who) 9 (YTD 66)
Half A Crown, by Jo Walton
The Borribles, by Michael De Larrabeiti
The Borribles Go For Broke, by Michael De Larrabeiti
The Borribles: Across the Dark Metropolis, by Michael De Larrabeiti
Other Edens, ed. Christopher Evans and Robert Holdstock
White Queen, by Gwyneth Jones
Other Edens 2, ed. Christopher Evans and Robert Holdstock
Falling Free, by Lois McMaster Bujold
Other Edens III, ed. Christopher Evans and Robert Holdstock

Doctor Who etc 8 (YTD 67)
The Twilight Streets, by Gary Russell
The Good, the Bad and the Alien, by Colin Brake
System Wipe, by Oli Smith
The Devil Goblins From Neptune, by Martin Day and Keith Topping
Legacy, by Gary Russell
The Wonderful Book of Doctor Who 1965, by Paul Smith
Doctor Who: The Stones of Blood, by David Fisher
Doctor Who and the Stones of Blood, by Terrance Dicks

Comics 1 (YTD 22)
Fables: Rose Red, by Bill Willingham

~7,000 pages (YTD ~73,500)
3/24 (YTD 55/251) by women (Walton, Jones, Bujold)
1/24 (YTD 13/251) by PoC (Equiano)
Owned for more than a year: 17 (The Grapes of Wrath [reread], Other Edens, Other Edens 2, Other Edens III [reread], Falling Free [reread], Newman, Elgar and "Gerontius", The Borribles [reread], The Borribles Go for Broke [reread], The Borribles: Across the Dark Metropolis [reread], Doctor Who and the Stones of Blood [reread], Legacy, Exit Music, White Queen, Half a Crown, Sons and Lovers, A New History of Ireland Volume III, The Devil Goblins from Neptune)
Other rereads: none, for a total of 7 (YTD 32/251)

Programmed reads: 17 from 13 lists
d) Sons and Lovers (non-genre books by entry order)
g) Other Edens, Other Edens 2  (sf anthologies in order of entry)
h) White Queen (sf non-anthologies in order of entry)
k) Falling Free (Nebula winners in sequence)
l) Legacy (New Adventures in sequence)
n) The Good, the Bad and the Alien, System Wipe (New Who books)
o) The Devil Goblins from Neptune (other Old Who by popularity)
q) Exit Music (Rankin's Rebus novels, in order)
r) A New History of Ireland Volume III (Tudors and Ireland)
s) The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (books by PoC)
t) Newman, Elgar and "The Dream of Gerontius" (books on the shelves at end 2005, otherwise not accounted for, going backwards in LT entry order)
u) The Borribles, The Borribles Go For Broke, The Borribles: Across the Dark Metropolis (unreviewed books acquired from 2006 on in entry order)
v) The Grapes of Wrath (books I have already read but haven't reviewed on-line, ranked by LT popularity)

Coming next, possibly:
Doctor Who: Autumn Mist by David A. McIntee (already started)
Diana Wynne Jones by Farah Mendlesohn (already started)
Ivanhoe by Walter Scott
Private Eye Annual 2008 by Ian Hislop
Race of a Lifetime by Mark Halperin
Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
I Shall Wear Midnight by Terry Pratchett
Doctor Who: Nuclear Time by Oli Smith
The Cambridge Historical Encyclopedia of Great Britain and Ireland by Christopher Haigh
Treason of Isengard by J.R.R. Tolkien
Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton
Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier
The Demon Headmaster by Gillian Cross
The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy
Heart of the Sea by Nora Roberts
Gulistān and Būstān by Sheikh Muṣleḥ-ʾiddin Saʿdī
Interpreting Irish History: The Debate on Historical Revisionism 1938-1994 by Ciaran Brady
History of Christianity ed. Tim Dowley and Pat Alexander
One Planet: A Celebration of Biodiversity by Nicholas Hulot
Beggars Banquet by Ian Rankin
Dreams of Empire by Justin Richards
Tehanu by Ursula K. Le Guin
Theatre of War by Justin Richards
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
The Year's Best Science Fiction 24 ed. Gardner Dozois

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Interesting Links for 30-10-2011

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October Books 23) Other Edens III, ed. Christopher Evans and Robert Holdstock

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Third of this set of anthologies of sf short stories by British-based authors, the only one of the three I had previously read. I felt the quality of the stories was a notch above the other too (themselves not at all bad). Topped and tailed with “The Grey Wethers” by Keith Roberts and “A Tupolev Too Far” by Brian Aldiss, with the others including “Rainmaker Cometh” by Ian McDonald. Excellent stuff.

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October Books 21-22) The Stones of Blood novelisations

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Earlier this year the BBC released a new novelisation of an Old Who story – David Fisher, who wrote the original TV story The Stones of Blood, has now converted it not to a print novel but to audiobook format, read with great gusto by Susan Engel (who played the villain of the piece on screen) with John Leeson doing K9’s lines. I had been looking forward to this with hopeful enthusiasm, as Fisher’s novelisations of his other two stories are among the best of the Target range.

I am very glad to say that I was not disappointed. The audio is about twice as long as the original series (four hour-long CDs), and Fisher has bulked out the material with lots more character background and atmosphere than was possible on screen – the full story of the campers gruesomely slain by the Ogri, for example, and various brazen but humorous infodumps. There are lots of decent sound effects as well. Very highly recommended.

I also went back and reread Terrance Dicks’ original novelisation of the story for comparison. It must be a lot shorter than Fisher’s new text. I noted of it three years ago that it is “a standard Dicks write-what’s-on-the-screen treatment, somewhat flattening a rather good story” and I found no reason to change my views. I did think Dicks handled the climax of the story with some finesse, but the rest it pretty thin.

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New book meme

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From Ian Sales:

Book meme! Here are the 25 titles chosen for 2012's World Book Night. Do the usual: bold for read, italics for owned but unread. 

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
The Player of Games by Iain M Banks
Sleepyhead by Mark Billingham
Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
The Take by Martina Cole
Harlequin by Bernard Cornwell
Someone Like You by Roald Dahl
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
Room by Emma Donoghue
Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
Misery by Stephen King
The Secret Dreamworld of a Shopaholic by Sophie Kinsella
Small Island by Andrea Levy
Let the Right One In by John Ajvde Lindqvist
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O'Farrell
The Damned Utd by David Peace
Good Omens by Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman
How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff
Touching the Void by Joe Simpson
I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
The Book Thief by Markus Zuzak

Any particular recommendations from the list of those that I have not read?

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October Books 20) The Wonderful Book of Doctor Who 1965, by Paul Smith

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This book – available on download only at http://www.wonderfulbook.co.uk/ – has one of the more peculiar disclaimers one is ever likely to read:

The contents of this book are entirely fabricated and should not be believed, not even the bits that say they are facts. All quotes by persons living or dead are not genuine and are intended for entertainment purposes only. They should not be taken as suggesting or reflecting the opinions then or since of anyone named in this book or concerned with the production of Doctor Who at any time, or even of the author of this book.

This is because the book is a combination of alternate fannish history and affectionate piss-take; what if the same creative spirit that moved Clayton Hickman and colleagues to produce last year’s Brilliant Book of Doctor Who 2011 had animated the production team of 1964 to produce an annual along the same lines? In reality, of course, the first of the Doctor Who annuals came out a year later, and the production values and brand management of the time were very far removed from what we expect of any serious cult series today. But Paul Smith gets some good laughs from any reader who knows either the original first season, or the Brilliant Book, or preferably both, and also makes us think about how the way we are told what we are watching in 2011 has changed since 1963-4; and how it has stayed the same.

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Interesting Links for 26-10-2011

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Presidential election 2011

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For those of you who haven’t been following it, the Irish Presidential election (voting on Thursday) grumbled into life over the last few weeks with the emergence of a dark horse front-runner, Seán Gallagher, who had a bit of a history as an activist with the utterly discredited former government party Fianna Fáil but was better known as one of the judges on the Irish version of the reality programme Dragon’s Den. Gallagher came from nowhere to lead the field of veteran candidates, with opinion polls over the last couple of days giving him an unassailable lead over the former favourite, Michael D. Higgins of the Labour Party.

And then last night it all fell apart. This is an amazing piece of political video, folks: watch as, under questioning from Sinn Féin’s candidate Martin McGuinness and moderator Pat Kenny, Gallagher’s political credibility disintegrates (and the person who speaks at the end is the likely winner Michael D. Higgins). One doesn’t need to know any of the material details (concerning the circumstances in which Gallagher accepted a donation on behalf of Fianna Fáil several years ago); the body language and tone of voice are enough to tell the story of a thousand votes being lost every second. Enjoy.

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Serpent Crest 2: The Broken Crown

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The third series of BBC Doctor Who audios by Paul Magrs, starring Tom Baker, have drastically improved on the first two by shifting to full cast plays and not having Richard Franklin as Mike Yates. The first episode here had us in a cyborg version of the later Russian Empire; here we have something narrsty in a Victorian vicarage, the vicar being ably played by Terence Hardiman. The young boy at the centre of the story is played by Guy Harvey, who struggles a little with the long passages of exposition inflicted on him by Magrs, but otherwise this is a rather good episode, Susan Jameson as the Doctor’s companion Mrs Wibbsey being on top form, and Baker himself being unusually disciplined.

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October Books 19) Falling Free, by Lois McMaster Bujold

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Reading through the Nebula winners which I have not already reviewed online brings me to this old friend, the first novel of Bujold’s Vorkosigan series (albeit one with no mention of the Vorkosigans or their planet at all). It’s a feel-good, future engineering novel with a social twist: our hero has to defeat the evil man from management and rescue hundreds of genetically modified children and teenagers from certain doom. A pleasure to reread it and refresh my memory of the origin of parts of Bujold’s future universe.

The other novels shortlisted for the 1988 Nebula were Deserted Cities of the Heart by Lewis Shiner, Drowning Towers by George Turner, Great Sky River by Gregory Benford, The Urth of the New Sunby Gene Wolfe, Mona Lisa Overdrive by William Gibson and Red Prophet by Orson Scott Card. I have read only the Gibson and the Card; as usual with Gibson, I can’t remember anything about Mona Lisa Overdrive, and while I enjoyed Red Prophet, Falling Free is better in almost every way. Bujold, Card and Gibson got Hugo nominations for those books, as did Bruce Sterling for Islands in the Net, but the Hugo itself was won by Cyteen (which I bounced off).

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October Books 18) Legacy, by Gary Russell

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Peladon is one of a surprisingly small number of planets to figure in more than one televised Who story, and though Big Finish have visited it twice I think this is the only spinoff novel set there. Gary Russell starts with the story of how the planet lifted itself from barbarism, and the stranded human astronaut who married the king; we then get folded into a fairly complex tale of an ancient off-world relic with Ice Warriors, Alpha Centauri, Peladonian factions and the rodent-like Pakhar aliens, with lots for Benny and the Seventh Doctor to do (but rather less for Ace who gets politely shuffled off-scene at a fairly early stage). It’s also rather gory with many characters meeting untimely ends. Generally good stuff though I felt the climax was not quite under control (but I did like the political twist at the end).

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Companion banter

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Sarah Sutton: I didn’t ever actually do a Dalek story…
Janet Fielding: I think that that means you weren’t a proper companion.
Sarah Sutton: You think?
Janet Fielding: Yeah, I do!
Sarah Sutton: I can’t call myself a companion?
Janet Fielding: No. No.
Sarah Sutton: Oh, poo. That’s not good, is it?
Janet Fielding: That just puts a lie to the last, you know, couple of decades.

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The Elite

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First in a new line of Lost Stories of the Fifth Doctor from Big Finish, written by BF regular John Dorney from an idea by Barbara ‘Enlightenment’ Clegg. These Lost Stories have been a bit hit and miss, with a substantial fraction of them perhaps better off lost, but this is a very strong start to this sequence, set just after Arc of Infinity, exploring an enclosed totalitarian ideological planetary regime, with a sinister influence behind it all. I had read a DWM review which commented that although the educated listener can guess what is likely to be revealed at the end of Episode 2, the end of Episode 3 comes as a complete surprise, and that turned out to be equally true for me as well. It was rather spooky to listen to scenes of revolutionary mayhem in the immediate aftermath of Gaddafi’s end and the Tunisian elections. I hope the rest of this sequence are as good.

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The Many Deaths of Jo Grant

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Latest of the Companion Chronicles range of Big Finish plays. Jo Grant tells us over and over of how she meets her end. Fairly obvious what is really going on from an early stage, but Katy Manning does it with charm and conviction.

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President Medvedev talks about playing badminton

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There cannot be many heads of state who would devote a video blog to the virtues of badminton. Watch through to the end for footage of presidential badminton-playing, and see if you can spot the name-check of Yuri Gagarin at about 2:17 (which is an ad-lib, not in the published script).

PS – There is a theory going round the internets that Medvedev’s opponent is Vladimir Putin, but I think it’s too good to be true – you can’t see his face clearly, and if it really was him I think you would be left in no doubt.

PS again – So much for my speculation. Kremlin sources confirm that it is indeed Putin.

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Recipe: Red cabbage and figs

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I invented this in a moment of inspiration this evening, and family reviews were good. The quantities are necessarily approximate.

Ingredients

Enough red cabbage
A little butter (probably a non-dairy fat or oil could be used; trick is not to let it get too hot)
One cardamom pod per person
Half a dried fig per person (round fractions up)
Salt

1) Melt the butter / heat the oil.
2) Add the chopped red cabbage, stir around to ensure it’s all covered.
3) Add the crushed cardamoms and sliced figs. And also a couple of pinches of salt.
4) Cover and cook on low heat, stirring every ten minutes, until the cabbage is soft. (Should take 30-45 mins.)

It worked for us, anyway. I am aware that you can also use apple and/or raspberry with cabbage, but figs do give an extra granularity of texture and depth of flavour. And cardamoms go well with all brassicas.

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Planet Word, by Stephen Fry – Tourette’s

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We're a bit behind with Stephen Fry's brilliant series about language, and just watched the third episode this evening (while some of you will have been watching the fifth and final one as it went out on BBC Two). Lots of fun intellectual stuff, but I was bowled over by the courage and humour of Jessica Thom, who has Tourette's syndrome and explained her situation as follows (here, from 1:57):

Lots of people misunderstand Tourette's, and they say, "I wish I had Tourette's, cos it would mean I could get away with swearing, and it means I could say whatever I – BISCUIT! BISCUIT! – I could say whatever I wanted to." – BISCUIT! – The whole point is, I can't say whatever I wanted to, lots of what I say I don't want to say, I just [bangs chest] HAH! it's just there, I just – FUCK! – and it's – BISCUIT! BISCUIT! BISCUIT! HAPPY CHRISTMAS! – but, you know, that doesn't mean that I haven't, I can't articulate my thoughts and make myself understood. FUCK! BISCUIT!

I think one has to be creative about it to be able to, sort of, to have a decent quality of life and not let the tics impact on me, especially socially, and part of the, part of the im, part of – BISCUIT! – one of the big elements of Tourette's is the social FUCK impact that it has. And by then engaging with people, and engaging with it creatively, and FUCK celebrating the humour and saying, look [bangs chest] HAH! it's not OK to laugh because I have Tourette's, but it's all right to laugh – FUCK! – I'm saying, laugh at – FFF! – the funny things that – FUCK! – I say as tics that are the result of Tourettes's – BISCUIT! – because they're often – FUCK! BISCUIT! – very visual. HAH!

She dresses up as a superhero with Tourette’s to educate children about the condition. More power to her.

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October Books 17) Other Edens II, edited by Christopher Evans and Robert Holdstock

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I have been steaming through my large collection of unread sf anthologies this year, but often finding it difficult to say much about them. I’m reviewing here primarily for myself, and since most of the anthologies concerned are long past their sales peak I can’t imagine that it makes much difference to anyone else. Most of these collections are of generally decent to excellent stories, and I do feel a slight twinge of conscience if the only ones I single out are for negative reasons. But only a slight twinge.

Anyway, this is another good collection of decent to excellent stories from 1988, of which the only one I will single out is “Confluence Revisited” by Brian Aldiss, a sequel to his 1967 alien dictionary piece “Confluence”, which was originally published in Punch and collected in The Moment of Eclipse, A Tupolev Too Far and Man In His Time, not to mention the Puffin Book of Science Fiction. The sequel, written twenty years on (and also in A Tupolev Too Far, though I had forgotten), is more reflective but still drily witty – for instance, it is explained that the Myrinian word JA can be translated as “A type of depraved underground mammal; mathematics; one’s appearance on certain mornings”. We’ve all had those, though fewer of us will have need of WAN, “A type of tortoise used in races”.

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October Books 16) The Devil Goblins From Neptune, by Martin Day and Keith Topping

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This was the first of the BBC Past Doctor Adventure novels, from 1997, featuring the Third Doctor and Liz Shaw with the core UNIT team of the Brigadier, Benton and Mike Yates. It has its moments, particularly in injecting a past history to the Brigadier and Benton and attributing (separate) sex lives to Liz and Yates. But there’s a lot of Stuff here, some of which works OK – Chancellor Goth was responsible for sending the Doctor to Peladon, apparently – and some of which doesn’t – the convoluted international back-story to UNIT, the fifth Beatle, the aliens of the title. I suppose it catches the spirit of the very early Pertwee shows quite well, but this isn’t necessarily an entirely good thing.

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Soon it will be filled with parking cars – the end of ROSAT

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Another satellite is crashing to the earth – the German-built X-Ray astronomy probe, ROSAT (short for Roentgen Satellite), launched in 1990 and crashing to a planet near you tomorrow morning. It could basically hit anywhere between 53° north and 53° south, which covers most of the inhabited world (Dublin is safe; Nottingham is not.) There is a twitter account tracking it at @ROSAT_Reentry (how do I get a twitter user icon for that?) and from there and elsewhere it looks to me like it will come down tomorrow mid-morning European time. So, keep an eye out for a 1.7 ton telescope mirror crashing to the ground from 150 km up.

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