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Notes from canvassing (in the 2007 Irish election)
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Somehow this had passed me by when it was released: Nena looking fantastic at 49, revisiting her classic in an idiom of video games. Compare also the original at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQYQTFudrqc (she was 23 then).
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There are good examples of good practice in political communications, and there are bad examples. Yesterday’s performance by the UUP was the absolutely perfect representation of the bad examples. In fact, the UUP contrived to oppose banning sectarian chants at football matches, and then its Health Minister managed to find a more pressing engagement than discussion of the Autism Bill. Now, it is just about possible that Ulster Unionists privately had some reservations about the exact wording of the relevant bills. However, the public at large sees only: “sectarian party doesn’t care about autistic children“.
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Two roads diverged in a yellow wood. And Robert Frost took the one less traveled. Of course, he also heckled his rivals and started fires to disrupt their poetry readings. But that makes for a terrible motivational poster. Unless you're a petty pyromaniac. In which case, here you go.
Signs of the times
My local travel agent is offering two for the price of one on flights to Tunisia and 50% off flights to Egypt. I wonder why?
Irish General Election: My prediction #GE11
This is based on no more than casual scrutiny of the analysis on PoliticalReform.ie, Slugger O’Toole and my own gut instincts.
| Fianna Fáil | Fine Gael | Labour | Sinn Féin | Green | Others | |
| Carlow-Kilkenny | 1 | 3 | 1 | – | – | – |
| Cavan-Monaghan | 1 | 2 | – | 2 | – | – |
| Clare | – | 3 | – | – | – | 1 |
| Cork East | – | 2 | 2 | – | – | – |
| Cork North Central | – | 2 | 1 | – | – | 1 |
| Cork North West | 1 | 2 | – | – | – | – |
| Cork South Central | 1 | 3 | 1 | – | – | – |
| Cork South West | – | 2 | 1 | – | – | – |
| Donegal North East | 1 | 1 | – | 1 | – | – |
| Donegal South West | 1 | 1 | – | 1 | – | – |
| Dublin Central | 1 | – | 1 | 1 | – | 1 |
| Dublin Mid West | – | 2 | 1 | 1 | – | – |
| Dublin North | 1 | 1 | 1 | – | – | 1 |
| Dublin North Central | – | 2 | – | – | – | 1 |
| Dublin North East | – | 1 | 1 | 1 | – | – |
| Dublin North West | 1 | – | 1 | 1 | – | – |
| Dublin South | 1 | 3 | 1 | – | – | – |
| Dublin South Central | – | 1 | 2 | 1 | – | 1 |
| Dublin South East | – | 2 | 2 | – | – | – |
| Dublin South West | – | 1 | 2 | 1 | – | – |
| Dublin West | 1 | 1 | 1 | – | – | 1 |
| Dun Laoghaire | – | 2 | 1 | – | – | 1 |
| Galway East | 1 | 3 | – | – | – | – |
| Galway West | – | 2 | 1 | – | – | 2 |
| Kerry North-West Limerick | – | 2 | – | 1 | – | – |
| Kerry South | – | 1 | 1 | – | – | 1 |
| Kildare North | – | 1 | 2 | – | – | 1 |
| Kildare South | – | 1 | 2 | – | – | – |
| Laois-Offaly | 2 | 3 | – | – | – | – |
| Limerick City | 1 | 2 | 1 | – | – | – |
| Limerick | 1 | 2 | – | – | – | – |
| Longford-Westmeath | – | 2 | 2 | – | – | – |
| Louth | 1+CC | 2 | – | 1 | – | – |
| Mayo | – | 4 | 1 | – | – | – |
| Meath East | 1 | 1 | 1 | – | – | – |
| Meath West | 1 | 2 | – | – | – | |
| Roscommon-South Leitrim | – | 2 | 1 | – | – | – |
| Sligo-North Leitrim | – | 2 | – | 1 | – | – |
| Tipperary North | – | 1 | 1 | – | – | 1 |
| Tipperary South | – | 1 | – | – | – | 2 |
| Waterford | 1 | 2 | 1 | – | – | – |
| Wexford | 1 | 3 | 1 | – | – | – |
| Wicklow | – | 2 | 1 | – | – | 2 |
| Total | 21+CC | 78 | 36 | 13 | 0 | 17 |
Basically I started with a specific set of estimated seat totals, and then worked back to fill the constituencies. This will mean that I am wildly out on the specifics but possibly a bit more accurate in general. By this time tomorrow we will start to have an idea of today’s results.
February Books 18) The Sign of Four, by Arthur Conan Doyle
One thing that surprised me about The Sign of Four is its brevity – only 76 pages in my Complete Sherlock Holmes. But I think this shows a somewhat more disciplined approach by Doyle, and also perhaps a growing awareness that “less is more” which leads to the success of the short stories. It’s still not as tight as it could be – once again the actual mystery, which is literally a locked-room murder, gets rather sidelined in the tale of dangerous foreigners coming to disrupt London to gain an ancient revenge, though this time they are thieves from the East (and in fact, of the two only one is actually foreign, it is the other who is actually the thief, and it is really the conveniently dead English fathers, Sholto and Morstan, who are the villains) rather than religious fanatics from the West.
There’s a lot of family in this short book. We start with Watson and his brother, then we encounter the Morstans, the Sholtos, and Jonathan Small and his adopted family of fellow conspirators with the child-like Tonga (very small; can’t talk properly; er, also kills people with a blowpipe – I admit the analogy is not perfect). The book ends with the establishment of a new family as Watson gets engaged to Mary Morstan, who he has known for, what, two days? Of course, the point is to increase the dramatic effect as the reader imagines his or her normal family life being disrupted by the mistakes of previous generations, but I found it striking.
Sherlock Holmes has no family. (Mycroft and Vernet are in the future.) For him, as he says at the end, “there still remains the cocaine-bottle.” I can’t think of another novel which portrays the use of cocaine in such a positive light – “so transcendently stimulating and clarifying to the mind”. In fact, I can’t think of many novels about drug use at all, other than Philip K. Dick, William S. Burroughs, and Hunter S. Thompson, and even their more enthusiastic moments have a conscious sense of self-destruction about them. Again, Doyle is more subversive than I had realised. (And he has another, if briefer, go at the cosy relationship between the media and the police.)
I’m finding more in these than I had expected to. On to the classic short stories next.
Edited to add: new userpic is from a letter written by Arthur Conan Doyle to my distant cousin Frederic.)
Whoniversaries 25 February
25 February 1967: broadcast of third episode of The Moonbase. The Cybermen take over the base, but Polly works out a way of killing them with nail varnish remover.
25 February 1978: broadcast of fourth episode of The Invasion of Time. Leela and the Shobogans combine with the Doctor to destroy the Vardans; but the Sontarans have landed.
Delicious LiveJournal Links for 2-24-2011
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Tom Baker's tribute to Nicholas Courtney
February Books 17) A Study in Scarlet, by Arthur Conan Doyle
I’ve started to work my way through the complete Sherlock Holmes, inspired by last year’s rather glorious TV adaptation, and of course this is the place to start. I read most (possibly all) of Holmes as a teenager so it’s a return to former pastures.
Inevitably I started by comparing with the Moffat “A Study in Pink”. Common elements obviously include Watson’s time in Afghanistan and the cab driver, and I had forgotten about the bit with the pills being also in the original. The TV version is less satisfying as a mystery; in the original, Holmes works out who the murderer must be pretty early on by powers of observation and deduction, and then uses unorthodox methods (the Baker Street Irregular) to track the killer down. Much of this happens off-screen, in Holmes’ head, but it works in the voice of the baffled Watson. The Mormon back-story is merely chrome – any old grudge would do for plot purposes, though the TV version skipped even that – but gives Doyle a chance for imaginative and descriptive writing.
One point that struck me more forcefully this time round is Doyle’s merciless portrayal of police manipulation of the media to show themselves in the best possible light. In a story which is full of trendy commentary – Holmes is at the cutting edge of biochemical technology, he goes to see the current star female musician – this reads to me like a tremendously subversive and very direct attack on the integrity of the state institutions of coercive force, and their successful formation and constraint of public opinion. Perhaps this seemed normal enough to me as a teenager growing up in Belfast, but it feels rather shocking to me now for a writer of the 1880s to say this. It furnishes Holmes with the sardonic Latin epigram which ends the story. Of course it’s partly to reinforce the image of Holmes as background genius, but I think there is a sincere political commentary there too.
(And finally, I am always amused by my brother’s appearance in Chapter 5.)
Whoniversaries 24 February
24 February 1968: broadcast of fourth episode of The Web of Fear. Lethbridge-Stewart (*sigh*) leads a sortie to the surface but returns battered to the base as the only survivor; and the Yeti break in, with the possessed Travers.
24 February 1973: broadcast of first episode of Frontier in Space. The Doctor and Jo land on a space freighter and are accused of being Draconian spies; the freighter is attacked by Ogrons but the crew think they are Draconians.
24 February 1979: broadcast of sixth part of The Armageddon Factor, ending Season 15; last regular appearance of Mary Tamm as Romana. Princess Astra herself is the last segment of the Key to Time; the Doctor assembles it, and the Black Guardian attempts to trick him into giving it to him. But the Doctor disperses the segments across the universe again.
24 February 1984: broadcast of second part of Planet of Fire. On Sarn, the Doctor is captured by Timanov and Peri by the Master (but she escapes).
24 February 1993: broadcast of sixth part of The Ghosts of N-Space on BBC radio; final appearance of Jon Pertwee as the Third Doctor. The Doctor and Sarah enter N-Space where Sarah redeems Louisa and the Doctor defeats Vilmio, and the Brigadier’s uncle’s castle is saved.
February Books 16) Short Trips, edited by Stephen Cole
I think that this was the first anthology of short stories featuring the first eight Doctors produced by the BBC, back in 1998. I had heard a couple of them previously from the audio release narrated by the late Nicholas Courtney and Sophie Aldred, but it’s nice to have the hard copy. The audio version memorably included the first Iris story, “Old Flames”; the book also has a very good First Doctor historical story, “The Last Days”, set during the siege of Masada, by one Evan Pritchard who is apparently really Rebecca Levene. A couple of others worth mentioning: “Freedom” by Steve Lyons, a nice Brigadier/Three/Master story; “Mondas Passing” by Paul Grice, not actually as good a story but a reflection on what Ben and Polly did in 1986, twenty years on; and “The People’s Temple” by Paul Leonard, a creepy take on Stonehenge. A collection that is worth looking out for.
Links
My Delicious cross-posting isn’t working reliably, so I’m on the lookout for alternatives which will aggregate links and post them here on a daily basis. What should have appeared last night:
YouTube – Australian broadcaster Belinda Heggen Mocks TV Co-Host
"Belinda, I just can’t understand how something so small can be so impressive.” “Well, Mark, *you* would know about that."
Analyzing The Beach Boys’s lyrical content
Classification of young American females according to Brian Wilson. (The Beach Boy, not the North Down politician.)
Libya’s regime at 40: a state of kleptocracy | openDemocracy
Analysis of Libya from September 2009 by the late great Fred Halliday.
Why are Middle East dictators so bad at media? | Daniel W. Drezner
YouTube – The Eleventh Hour Nineteenth Minute: The Irish Political Party
"You want a better Ireland. Of course you do. We don’t. We want one that we can be in charge of." Also, wigs.
R.I.P. Nicholas Courtney, Doctor Who’s Trustiest Companion
Nicholas Courtney obituary, with videos.
YouTube – Doctor Who Brigadier Skit "The Unsung Hero" – Gallifrey One Masquerade 2010
Tribute to the Brigadier
Whoniversaries 23 February
A sad day yesterday, with the passing of Nicholas Courtney. On to today’s anniversaries:
23 February 1918: birth of Bill Strutton, writer of The Web Planet (1965) and the novelisation Doctor Who and the Zarbi.
23 February 1928: birth of Bernard Kay, who played Tyler in The Dalek Invasion of Earth (1964), Saladin in The Crusade (1965), Crossland in The Faceless Ones (1967) and Caldwell in Colony in Space (1971).
23 February 1935: birth of Gerry Davis, script editor of Doctor Who from The Celestial Toymaker (1966) to part 3 of The Evil of the Daleks (1967), co-writer of The Tenth Planet (1966), The Highlanders (1967), and Tomb of the Cybermen (1967-68), and sole writer of Revenge of the Cybermen (1975).
23 February 2009: death of Laurence Payne, who played Johnny Ringo in The Gunfighters (1966), Morix in The Leisure Hive (1980), and Dastari in The Two Doctors (1985).
ii) broadcast anniversaries
23 February 1974: broadcast of first episode of Death to the Daleks. The Tardis lands on Exxilon, suffering a power drain; the Doctor finds a stranded earth ship, Sarah is captured by the natives and the Daleks arrive.
23 February 1982: broadcast of fourth episode of The Visitation. The Doctor and friends pursue the Terileptils to London and destroy their base, leading to a much bigger conflagration.
23 February 1983: broadcast of fourth episode of TerminusPlanet of FireJim’ll Fix It with Colin Baker as the Sixth Doctor, Janet Fielding as Tegan and young Gareth Jenkins saving the earth from, well, Sontarans.
also 23 February 1985: broadcast of second episode of The Two Doctors. The Sixth Doctor, Jamie and Peri pursue the Sontarans and the Second Doctor to Spain, where the anthropophagous and hungry Shockeye captures Peri.
I don’t count this as one of the dates when six episodes of Old Who were broadcast, though fans of “A Fix with Sontarans” may differ.
February Books 15) The Hounds of Artemis, by James Goss
I had been very much looking forward to this audiobook, featuring the Eleventh Doctor and Amy Pond, after Goss’s brilliant Tenth Doctor story, Dead Air. In the event I was very slightly disappointed, in that rather than the promised Matt Smith / Karen Gillan double bill of readers, Smith is joined instead by Clare Corbett (who had two minor but still memorable parts in the Tom Baker Hornet’s Nest audios). But that was really the only problem; it’s a great tale of archaeological investigations in 1929 uncovering an ancient horror, a story which has of course been done many times before (including several times in Doctor Who, one of which is indeed explicitly referenced) but done here with humour and sympathy as well as easy horror, and with lots of rather glorious character moments for Smith as the Doctor. Well worth hunting down, if you can find a copy of Saturday’s Guardian, or wait until the commercial release in May.
February Books 14) Elizabeth I, by Christopher Haigh
This is one of the shortest of the various books I have read about Elizabeth I, and also one of the best. Haigh eschews the usual chronology of her life and reign and instead concentrates on her relations with the various centres of power: the church, the nobility, the Council, her own court, parliament, the military, and the people, dealing with each separately over the 44 years from late 1558 to early 1603.
I learned a lot from this revisionist account. The standard picture of Elizabeth as heroine of Protestantism doesn’t sit well with her recorded restraint of the puritans, her refusal to persecute the Catholics to the extent that her Protestant advisers wanted, and indeed her flirtations with potential Catholic husbands. Indeed, Haigh points out convincingly that the Council was much more Protestant than the Queen, to the point of orchestrating demonstrations of popular and political enthusiasm for Protestantism to try and keep her in line; Elizabeth found it very difficult to make a firm choice – witness her vacillation over execcuting Mary Queen of Scots, or intervening in the Netherlands.
I must say this explains a lot for me; if Elizabeth was perceived as being soft on religious issues, her advisers who were more hardline must have always been desperate to ensure she stayed on the straight and narrow, particularly since they held office only on her whim. Though in fact she rarely changed the guard – of her eleven councillors in 1597, six were sons or stepsons of the councillors at the start of her reign (the Cecils being only the most visible example). In other ways, too, she did not change the set-up much; the only man elevated to the House of Lords in her entire reign who did not come from a noble family was William Cecil.
I still wish I understood a bit more about the workings of the court. On Haigh’s account, it was a question of physical presence and ability to attract the right patrons, with devious machinations sometimes having dramatic results: for instance, both Sir John Perrot and the Earl of Essex were manipulated by their enemies into accepting the job of ruling Ireland in order to get them away from the royal presence, with ultimately fatal results for both. What I missed, from my selfish perspective, was any account of the opposite dynamic, the Irish presence at court. Haigh notes that Elizabeth packed her household and the court with her Boleyn relatives: well, the mother of her grandfather Sir Thomas Boleyn was an Irish noblewoman, and I know from other sources that her Butler cousins were able to short-circuit the Irish administration by going directly to her, but I found nothing more about that here.
A particularly interesting chapter concerns the queen’s relationship with the military, both army and navy. Basically, in every single campaign, no matter how specific and direct the orders she gave her commanders, they simply ignored her and followed their own plans instead. Haigh chronicles instance after instance of this, very helpful for me because it makes Essex’s disastrous Irish expedition not a baffling anomaly but simply another, if rather massive, instance in a fatally inevitable pattern of behaviour from leading noblemen given military command. After the first two, or three, or five, or ten commanders escape with impunity from disobeying the sovereign’s orders, obviously there is no point in following them yourself. Haigh argues fairly convincingly that the military simply would not take instruction from a woman. It would be interesting to speculate a bit more on why Elizabeth took no action against her disobedient commanders; did she, perhaps, at some level, also feel that this was men’s work? (It has to be said that the aristocratic commanders were almost all pretty rotten at the job, and would probably have done at least as well if they had followed her orders ratehr than making up their own.)
There were a bunch of details here that I had not previously seen in histories of the time. I had not heard of, or had forgotten about, the Newhaven (Le Havre) venture, when the English tried and failed to occupy a French port previously held by the Huguenots. I had forgotten, or not read about, the efforts of the Earl of Arundel, Sir William Pickering, and King Eric XIV of Sweden to marry Elizabeth. And it hadn’t really struck me before, though it seems obvious once it is pointed out, that after three decades of success culminating in the failure of the Spanish Armada, the last third of her reign was a comparative failure. Anyway, all very absorbing, and a useful corrective to the standard account of Elizabethan glory.
Whoniversaries 22 February
22 February 1964: broadcast of “The Roof of the World”, first episode of the story we now call Marco Polo. Trapped in the snow, the time travellers are rescued by Marco Polo, who however impounds the Tardis.
22 February 1969: broadcast of fifth episode of The Seeds of Death. the Doctor and friends get back to Earth and discover that the Ice Warrior’ pods are disabled by water.
22 February 1975: broadcast of first episode of The Sontaran Experiment The Doctor, Sarah and Harry discover that a bunch of South African astronauts are battling a mysterious alien foe who turns out to be a Sontaran.
22 February 1982: broadcast of third episode of The Visitation. The Terileptils plan to destroy humanity, and do destroy the sonic screwdriver.
22 February 1983: broadcast of third episode of Terminus. The Doctor realises tha the ship’s fuel dump actually caused the Big Bang.
22 February 2002: webcast of second part of “Planet of Blood”, the third episode of Death Comes to Time. Horrible slaughter discovered by the Doctor and Antimony in London; meanwhile Ace is undergoing mysterious training and there’s a time lord played by Stephen Fry. (I found it all a bit confusing.)
Whoniversaries 21 February
21 February 1981: death of Ron Grainer, who composed the Doctor Who theme tune. According to the lore, he was so gobsmacked by Delia Derbyshire’s electronic arrangement of the music that he asked her, “Did I really write this?” “Most of it,” she replied. Of course he got the on-screen credit and she didn’t.
ii) broadcast anniversaries
21 February 1970: broadcast of fourth episode of Doctor Who and the Silurians. The Doctor tries to reason with the Silurians but is captured and attacked.
21 February 1976: broadcast of fourth episode of The Seeds of Doom. Keeler starts to turn into the Krynoid; Sarah saves the Doctor from the crusher; Sir Colin and Amelia investigate.
21 February 1981: broadcast of fourth episode of The Keeper of Traken. The Master captures the Doctor and attempts to use the Source to take over his body, but Adric and Nyssa shut down the Source to prevent him. But! The Master takes over Tremas’ body and escapes.
More historic than I realised – my encounter with Gaddhafi
You may remember I attended last July’s African Union summit in Uganda as part of the Southern Sudanese delegation. One incident was sufficiently odd that I really could not quite bring myself to blog about it at the time, but the time has now come. It was on the Sunday, and we were milling around the buffet tables beside Lake Victoria finding our lunch, when we became aware of a biggish crowd, focussed on a single individual, approaching us from the main meeting tent. It was not difficult to see who was at the centre of this group, and I got a couple of decent pictures as he came towards where we were standing, before he swept past us:
I do not know who he was talking to; presumably another head of state, but one who is less well known. NB that there was no sign of the rumoured bodyguard of trained Ukrainian superwomen, though we understood that he was making his way to his personal travel tent, pitched further along the bay behind us.
At the time my sense was that he was being treated by the African leaders as an eccentric but rich old uncle; the road from Entebbe to Kampala sported posters ostensibly from the people of Uganda thanking him for his generosity, but these were clearly paid for by the Libyan government as a publicity stunt. How rapidly things can change. I doubt that there will be many posters thanking him for his generosity in his future.
Delicious LiveJournal Links for 2-20-2011
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I'm sure that if you're interested you've already seen this story of how Peter Davison got from London to this week's Gallifrey convention in California. But it is rather glorious.
February Books 13) Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
This is a tremendously important book, and I am surprised (but I suppose I should not be) that I have not read it before. It is a fairly straightforward narrative of life as a slave; Douglass was permanently separated from his mother soon after birth, his father being either her owner or one of his white household, in Maryland in about 1818; he endured the casual brutality – both the physical violence and the constant psychological degradation of enslavement – for about twenty-five years before escaping to the north with his (free black) wife. The narrative is brief but gripping, and basically speaks for itself; everyone should read it.
Two details particularly caught my eye. The first is that Douglass had a fascination with, of all people, Daniel O’Cornell, and drew direct parallels between the situation of American slaves and of the Irish. I guess the two causes shared the buzz-word of ’emancipation’. Looked at from 170 years on, now that O’Cornell (somewhat unfairly) is seen as a rather conservative revolutionary by Irish standards, it’s an interesting juxtaposition.
The second point is Douglass’ culture shock on moving to the free states of the North and discovering, to his amazement, that white people who did not themselves own slaves were not necessarily poor. He had expected Northern society to reflect the white working class lifestyle of Baltimore (where he had persuaded white kids to teach him to read by giving them the bread he got from his rich owner). It’s an interesting perspective both on how little slaves were allowed to know about the outside world, and on how slavery impoverished the whole society.
It is interesting to contrast this with Fanny Kemble’s account of life on a Georgian plantation, written at almost exactly the same time (though published 25 years later). The life of slaves in Georgia was certainly worse than in Maryland, which means that Kemble is more circumstantially dramatic, but of course Douglass’ account has the merits of being that of a participant rather than am observer. Still, the same subjects come up relentlessly in both: white men using slave women to bear their children, whipping them to a pulp when they did not comply, and denying their slaves any change of education. Both are essential reads.
Gibbon Chapter XLIII: Justinian, Part IV
This chapter is mostly a fairly straightforward military narrative, so the things that caught my eye were a couple of side details – apart from the last few pages, which deal with comets, earthquakes and plague.
Whoniversaries 20 February
20 February 1913: birth of Rex Tucker, who is credited formally as director of The Gunfighters (1966) but also played an important role in the genesis of the show in 1963.
20 February 1954: birth of Anthony Stewart Head, who played Mr Finch/Brother Lazar in School Reunion (2006), Grayvorn in the 2002 Big Finish Excelis audio plays, and voiced characters in Death Comes to Time (2001-02) and The Inifnite Quest (2007) as well as doing voiceovers for most Doctor Who Confidentials since 2006. (Also Giles in Buffy, not that you needed reminding.)
ii) broadcast anniversaries
20 February 1965: broadcast of “The Zarbi”, second episode of the story we now call The Web Planet. Barbara is captured first by the Menoptera and then by the Zarbi; the Zarbi get the Doctor and Ian too.
20 February 1971: broadcast of fourth episode of The Mind of Evil. The Master and his criminal helpers steal the Thunderbolt missile; meanwhile the alien inside the Keller machine is getting hungry…
20 February 2008: broadcast of Dead Man Walking (Torchwood), the one where Owen comes back to life.
Child development
Little U has started to talk.
I don’t want to exaggerate how much she says. She says her own name. She says “bye” sometimes. She will point to me and say “daddy”, and to her mother and say “mummy”, but won’t identify other relatives in that way. She can identify the characters from Winnie the Pooh, and from In the Night Garden…, and the Teletubbies, but not from the other programmes which she watches. And she says “go to s’eep” at bedtime.
She is eight years old. We have waited a long time to get this far, and who knows where her journey will take her, but we take pleasure in what we have got.
Votomatic.ie
Over at http://votomatic.ie/ you can test your views against those of the Irish political parties and see who you would vote for. Not being up on most of the current economic jargon I could not give clear answers in many cases, but none the less was astonished to find it rating me as a hard-line Green Party supporter (my complete ratings: Green +10, Labour +5, FF +4, SF -1, FG -3). However attractive their policies may be, the Green Party have completely failed the crucial test of their ability to actually implement them in their four years in government, and therefore their former voters will be looking to support parties which may have less satisfactory policies but may also turn out not to be completely spineless and ineffective; the Greens will deservedly be flushed down the toilet of history by the voters next week (and FF are heading for a colossal kicking too).
As I’ve said before, I would be voting Labour if I had a vote, based on their more convincing story on constitutional reform, but I am surprised that the system ranked me as fully 8 points more compatible with them than Fine Gael (my formative years were in Garret v Charlie days, when it was pretty clear who was good and who evil). My biggest difference with FG oddly was on transport, where I gave two answers (pro building Metro North, against bus privatisation, not that I feel very strongly on either) that aligned me strongly against them and with all the other parties. On the two issues I actually care most about, my support for Ireland participating in future EU defence initiatives is cancelled out by my support for Turkey’s EU membership in terms of agreement with FG, and together the two questions leave me positively aligned with only FF and Labour (and that only mildly).
For a laugh I went back and filled out the EU Profiler survey from 2009, which puts me much closer to Labour than to any of the others, which feels like a more accurate representation of my views, even though the questions (and policy positions) are almost two years old. So I must say I end up thinking that votomatic.ie has missed a few things, in particular the possibility of marking some issues as more and other as less important to the voter’s own strength of feeling.
The Perpetual Bond
Big Finish have played some brave tricks with continuity in the past (eg Peri’s two-year sojourn in fifteenth century England set in the gap between Planet of Fire and The Caves of Androzani), but it is particularly brave to invent a new First Doctor companion. But the potential gap is there, between The Daleks’ Master Plan and The Massacre, and Tom Allan (best known as a comedian) joins Peter Purves for an adventure of alien invasion of the City of London in the mid-1960s. The plot is fairly standard, but the story scores for a) the brilliant evocation of Hartnell’s Doctor (doing a turn as galactic legal expert, for a change) by Simon Guerrier’s script and Peter Purves’ performance, b) the Swinging Sixties soundscape, not overwhelming but decently scene-setting, and c) Tom Allan’s young commodities broker Oliver Harper, who has a secret of his own which we do not yet share. There’s also a slightly odd moment involving Purves and Allan trying to sing the Marseillaise as performed by the Beatles in All You Need is Love. We know that Oliver returns with Steven in another play scheduled for release in June, and Steven and a bunch of other companions will be back in August, so hopefully Big Finish are setting up for a decent story arc (an enterprise where they are generally quite succcessful).
February Books 12) Fantastic Beasts & Where To Find Them, by ‘Newt Scamander’ [J.K. Rowling]
I don’t think even diehard Harry Potter fans will find much to thrill at in this book, 100 pages of guff about monsters looked at from the perspective of the Ministry of Magic bureaucrats with hand-written annotations supposedly by Harry and Ron.
Whoniversaries 19 February
19 February 1966: broadcast of “Priest of Death”, third episode of the story we now call The Massacre. Admiral de Coligny is shot and wounded; the Abbot (or is it the Doctor???) is killed.
19 February 1972: broadcast of fourth episode of The Curse of Peladon. The Ice Warriors kill Arcturus who was behind it all; Aggedor kills Hepesh; and all ends happily.
19 February 1977: broadcast of fourth episode of The Robots of Death. The Doctor alters the voice of Dask/Taran Capel with helium, and he is killed by his own robots.
Delicious LiveJournal Links for 2-18-2011
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The mind boggles. Sure, USIP is not immune from criticism, but this is sheer intellectual vandalism.
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"The very move towards more representative governance will raise huge popular hopes of socio-economic improvement, many of which will be impossible to fulfil. In addition, we see few (if any) circumstances in which an Israeli government of any conceivable stripe would seriously entertain a just settlement for the Palestinians."
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"our legislators seem to have no understanding of the principles of the rule of law and democracy that require that minorities should have judicial protection against the will of the majority as expressed through the legislature."
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"They have the country half destroyed, and I think if they got in for another term they would totally destroy it!"
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HËNJ
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'Can you believe that "in Hosni Mubarak's Egypt," private wealth translates into great political power and vice-versa? What is it like, wonders the curious and concerned [New York] Times reader, to live in a country like that? No wonder there's an uprising.'
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"The Ring of Steel", free with tomorrow's Observer, was one of the best Who audios I listened to last year. And I have been eagerly anticipating "The Hounds of Artemis", free with today's Guardian.
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This week's "Métro, Tram and Bus strike in Brussels was provoked by… a Métro driver punching a customer. Seriously."
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When the TARDIS materializes in a familiar junkyard in the 1960s, the Doctor and Steven are soon embroiled in a mystery in the City of London. Who are the mysterious bowler-hatted businessmen with their deadly umbrellas? And what secret is young Oliver Harper desperately trying to conceal?
Contracts have been signed. A deal is in place. And the Doctor discovers that perhaps not even he can stop a terrible business… -
Many years ago, the vast space parasite Axos attempted to suck the planet Earth of its energy. Now it’s all but forgotten – a dried-up husk, marooned in orbit, still stuck in the time loop it was placed in by Earth’s defender, the Doctor.
Forgotten, that is, except by space tourism billionaire Campbell Irons – who’s hatched a plan to solve the world’s energy crisis by reviving Axos, and transmitting its power back to Earth. But the crew of the spaceship Windermere aren’t alone aboard the parasite. The Doctor has returned, to correct an error of decades past…
And Axos is waiting.
Whoniversaries 18 February
18 February 1989: death of John Bailey, who played the Commander in The Sensorites (1964), Edward Waterfield in The Evil of the Daleks (1967), and Sezom in The Horns of Nimon (1979-80).
18 February 1993: death of Jacqueline Hill, who played the First Doctor’s companion Barbara Wright (and actually says the first audible line in the very first episode) from 1963-65, and returned in 1980 to play Lexa in Meglos.
ii) broadcast anniversaries
18 February 1967: broadcast of second episode of The Moonbase. The Doctor works out that the Cybermen have been poisoning the sugar.
18 February 1978: broadcast of third episode of The Invasion of Time. The Vardans take over; Leela and Rodan contact the Shobogans; Andred threatens to kill the Doctor.
Delicious LiveJournal Links for 2-17-2011
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The freedom enjoyed by EU citizens to live and work in each others' countries is a unique liberty. It is the basis around which European governments have tried to build a single border, a compensatory system of co-operation between police, judges and immigration officers and a common refugee policy. But hardening attitudes towards immigration in many countries and widening policy disagreements between governments and the EU's institutions are exposing fault-lines in this structure. As the cracks threaten to widen over the coming months, policy-makers face some tricky dilemmas.
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I have covered this issue previously, but it is a good summary of the story of the fake Obama birth certificates.
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Now that the truth about this propaganda has been revealed, we can expect that those who constructed it – Tony Blair, Dick Cheney et al – will now amend their usual arguments to suggest that they were innocently misled by evidence such as Curveball's. After all, if a defector claimed that there was a substantial bio-weapons programme, as "Curveball" did, how could they know that he was lying? Again, we will be confronted with the "not my fault!" excuse from those who manufactured the case for an avoidable war.But once again, they are trying to mislead.
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large pluralities of the public in the surveyed Mediterranean countries of France, Italy, and Spain see increasing development aid to poorer countries as the most effective policy to reduce irregular immigration, more so than increasing national border controls… It’s time for the rest of Europe to listen to those on the front lines.
February Books 11) The Book of Lost Tales Part II, by J.R.R. Tolkien
The second of the History of Middle Earth series edited by Christopher Tolkien. Here we are looking at two of the core stories of The Silmarillion, and several other narratives which were largely or completely set aside as Tolkien’s work developed. I found the very first story, “The Tale of Tinúviel”, particularly interesting. For the first time I was struck that it is a tale of love between one character with a short name starting with B and another with a longer name starting with T, whose father opposes the romance just as Tolkien’s own guardian opposed his relationship with Edith Bratt. Beren goes off to prove himself in battle and returns maimed, as Tolkien returned with trench fever from the Great War (though after his marriage rather than before). And of course Tolkien was himself always explicit that Tinúviel’s dancing in the forest was inspired by Edith dancing for him one day in 1917 when they were out in the woods near his base. His personal identification with this particular story can be seen on his tombstone. I was always a bit disappointed that the version in The Silmarillion doesn’t convey much emotional freight, but The Book of Lost Tales is worth getting for this chapter alone.
(We also meet the earliest version of Sauron, as Tivaldo the evil king of cats and servant of Melko, a counterpart to Beren’s heroic dog.)
The other story treated in depth here is “Turambar and the Foalókë”, which however has since been published in a pretty definitive format as The Children of HúrinThe Silmarillion, a lost tale that underlies a fair bit of Middle Earth mythology but never seems to have found a definite written form; one almost senses Tolkien feeling more comfortable with it inside his head, so that Bilbo and Aragorn could make in-jokes about it in Rivendell, rather than spoiling it by putting too much down on paper.
(Also a shout out for “The Fall of Gondolin”, with its gripping account of hand-to-hand combat as the city is taken.)
Despite the density of the prose I have found both Lost Tales volumes fairly quick reading, Tolkien’s prose being as fluent in his twenties as it was later in his life, and Christopher Tolkien’s annotations being complete enough to satisfy curiosity without being overwhelming. I’m glad to have got back into this series of books.
< Book of Lost Tales I ¦ Book of Lost Tales II
Whoniversaries 17 February
17 February 1916: birth of David Blake Kelly, who played the captain of the Mary Celeste in The Chase (1965) and Jacob Kewper in The Smugglers (1966).
ii) broadcast anniversaries
17 February 1968: broadcast of third episode of The Web of Fear, introducing Nicholas Courtney as Colonel (later Brigadier) Alastair Lethbridge-Stewart. The Doctor reappears with a mysterious colonel; the Yeti attack the base to retrieve the model.
17 February 1973: broadcast of fourth episode of Carnival of Monsters. Kalik and Orum release the Drashigs, but Vorg is able to destroy them, and the Miniscope is deactivated.
17 February 1979: broadcast of fifth episode of The Armageddon Factor. The Doctor meets up with Drax; K9 is evil; Romana and Astra are still captives.
17 February 1996: broadcast of fifth episode of The Ghosts of N-Space on BBC Radio. The Doctor and Sarah return to 1818, where they unsuccessfully try to save Louise and Giuseppe.