• Former US Secretary of Labor Robert Reich: 'Obama Failed to Connect the Dots' -SPIEGEL ONLINE – News – International
  1) We have got an unprecedented degree of concentrated income and wealth at the very top of our society. The top one-tenth of one percent of Americans now makes more than the bottom 120 million. 2) Courtesy of a grotesque opinion by the Supreme Court of the United States, we now have virtually unlimited money flowing from the rich and from corporations through secret devices that make it impossible to know who is contributing what to various campaigns and to advertising for and against various candidates. Such anonymous groups have spent more than $400 million on the latest election, according to estimates. 3) We have a broad electorate still unemployed or in danger of being unemployed, still in danger of losing their homes or already having lost their homes, still experiencing a major drop in their savings or their net worth. This frustrated and anxious population is easy prey to demagogues who will blame others for their problems rather than explain what needs to be done.
  (tags: usa)

Some of the greatest lines of the former Russian prime minster who died today (alas, no translation can really capture the tortured syntax of the original; many more on Russian Wikiquote here):

Что говорить о Черномырдине и обо мне?
What can I say about Chernomyrdin and me?

Хуже водки лучше нет!
Better than vodka there is nothing worse!

В Югославии катастрофа. Катастрофа – это всегда плохо!
In Yugoslavia it is a disaster. And disasters are always bad!

Пиво без водки — деньги на ветер
Beer without vodka is money down the drain.

Были у нас и бюджеты реальные, но мы все равно их с треском проваливали.
And we had a real budget, but we still failed miserably.

Учителя и врачи хотят есть практически каждый день!
Teachers and doctors want to eat practically every day!

Вино нам нужно для здоровья. А здоровье нам нужно, чтобы пить водку.
We need wine to be healthy. And we need to be healthy so that we can drink vodka.

Хотели как лучше, а получилось как всегда.
We wanted the best, but things turned out as usual.

The keen-eyed reader may spot a recurrent theme.

Lord Tebbit (Conservative): My Lords, is my noble friend aware that I had the pleasure of being seated at dinner last week next to our right honourable friend Mr Kenneth Clarke but that he did not talk to me, whereas the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who was opposite, was quite chatty? I particularly enjoyed a long conversation with our coalition partner the Viscount Thurso, who is of course a Member of the House of Commons.

Lord Strathclyde (Leader of the House of Lords, House of Lords; Conservative): It is immensely interesting to hear of my noble friend’s dining partners and the conversations that he had. I hope that he will update us regularly.

i) births and deaths

3 November 1910: birth of Richard Hurndall, who played the First Doctor in The Five Doctors (1983).

ii) broadcast anniversaries

3 November 1979: broadcast of second episode of The Creature from the Pit. Adrasta interrogates Romana and K9; the Doctor, now in the Pit, meets Organon and then the Creature.

3 November 2009: broadcast of first episode of Mark of the Berserker (SJA). Clyde’s father turns up and takes possession of a peculiar pendant found by Rani and Luke.

Back in the mid-1980s, as a regular train passenger between Belfast and Dublin, I used to cringe at the sound of American tourists pronouncing “Drogheda”. This was entirely the fault of the mini-series based on The Thorn Birds, starring Richard Chamberlain as the dashing Father Ralph, and set on an Australian sheep station named after (but pronounced differently from) the Irish town.

The book isn’t really all that great. It is quite well written, but loses focus by letting characters drift in and out of view. The core narrative is the doomed love between Meggie and Ralph, but then there are an extra 200 pages tacked on of what happens to Meggie’s children, not really resolving the fates of the characters from earlier in the book (apart from those who are killed off). The ending, where Meggie’s daughter Justine dithers between several different destinies, felt rushed and disengaged. It’s all epic human interest stuff but the first two thirds could have been trimmed down to make a better book, and the last third expanded slightly to make another. I know it sold like hot cakes back on the 1970s so it obviously scratched some collective itch among the bookbuying public.

Posted via LjBeetle

i) births and deaths

None that grabbed me.

ii) broadcast anniversaries

2 November 1968: broadcast of first episode of The Invasion. The Tardis lands invisibly, and the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe seek help successively from Isobel Watkins, and Tobias Vaughn of International Electromatics.

2 November 1981: BBC broadcast repeat of “An Unearthly Child”, the very first episode of Doctor Who, kicking off the “Five Faces of Doctor Who” repeat season.

2 November 1987: broadcast of first episode of Delta and the Bannermen. Ken Dodd sends the Doctor and Mel to 1950s Wales where a holiday camp is being infiltrated by aliens.

2 November 1988: broadcast of first episode of The Happiness Patrol. Helen A rules Terra Alpha ruthlessly by killing anyone who is unhappy, supported by the sinister yet ridiculous Kandyman.

2 November 2010: broadcast of second episode of The Empty Planet (SJA).

iii) dates specified in canon

2 November 1657: death and burial of Richard Maynarde, as described in Silver Nemesis (1988).

2 November 1941: The Eighth Doctor and Izzy Sinclair visit Coyoacan, Mexico, as seen in comic strip The Way of All Flesh (published in DWM #306 and #308-310, 2001).

• On Not Being Obliged To Vote Democrat
  Why abstention may be the right choice – with reference to Tuesday's elections, but with wider applicability.
  (tags: usa politics)

I don’t know about you guys, but I have been friended by seven Russian LJ accounts in the last week or so, none of which appear to have any mutual friends or interests in common with me.

I cannot escape the suspicion that this is related to my recent professional interest in Moldova, where in four weeks’ time elections will take place, in whose outcome various Russian forces have a keen interest.

I shall not be posting anything remotely sensitive about my work with Moldova here, even in locked entries, but will be interested to know if anyone else has been experiencing anything similar.

(Also noteworthy that I had a spate of friend requests on Facebook from people with Slavic or Turkish names, none of whom had mutual friends with me, over the last couple of weeks.)

Another shortish chapter, mainly about Attila the Hun with quite a long account of the mission of the Byzantine official Maximin to Attila’s headquarters in 448, presented as a first-hand travelogue by Priscus. At the end Theodosius II dies and is replaced by Marcian who marries his sister Pulcheria. Lots about Genghis Khan also for some reason.

I must have first read this when I was seven; of course as an older reader one realises the depths of the narrative a bit more, understanding a bit better the warped family dynamic between Huck and his father on the one hand and his various prospective adoptive households on the other. Indeed families are a major theme of the book in a way I hadn’t realised before – Jim’s search for his own lost wife and children, the feud between the Grangerfords and the Sheperdsons, the fake dynastic history of the duke and the king, the affair of Peter Wilkes’ estate and will, and finally of course the Phelpses who adopt Huck as Tom Sawyer and then Tom as his own brother Sid.

Even at seven I was disturbed by Tom Sawyer’s failure to grapple with the reality of Jim’s situation in the final chapters of the book. He sets up an elaborate plan to abuse the hospitality of his aunt and uncle, setting Huck’s and Jim’s lives at risk as well as his own, gets wounded in the process, and all for the sake of a rescue which he alone knows to be completely unnecessary. As a child I felt he got away with it rather too lightly and indeed is unfairly rewarded with Huck’s continued admiration and a minimum of chastisement from his family, and my views haven’t changed in 36 years.

Of course I’m even more disturbed as a mature reader by Twain’s own failure to really rise above the racial stereotyping of his day. Jim is an instrument of Huck’s own growing up rather than a three-dimensional character himself, and Mark Twain resorts to racist humour rather too often for comfort.

But it still remains a very enjoyable read, much better than Tom Sawyer (I think; though it is decades since I read the earlier book).

broadcast anniversaries

1 November 1975: broadcast of second episode of Pyramids of Mars. Scarman and the mummies chase the Doctor and Sarah around the Priory. I was just watching this the other day and it is still brilliant.

1 November 1980: broadcast of second episode of Full Circle. The Marshmen take the Tardis, with Romana inside it, and she gets to meet the spiders at close quarters.

1 November 1986: broadcast of first episode of Terror of the Vervoids (ToaTL #9), and first appearance of Bonnie Langford as Mel. She and the Doctor investigate mysterous goings on aboard the spaceliner Hyperon III.

1 November 1989: broadcast of second episode of The Curse of Fenric. Mysterious goings-on with Millington and the Haemovores.

1 November 2010: broadcast of first episode of The Empty Planet (SJA).

Four months down, eight to go!

Non-fiction 7 (YTD 61)
Ireland in the Age of the Tudors 1447-1603, by Stephen G. Ellis
Pies and Prejudice, by Stuart Maconie
The Great Tradition, by F.R. Leavis
Sudan: Darfur and the Failure of an African State, by Richard Cockett
Up the Poll: Great Irish Election Stories, by Shane Coleman
A Short History of Myth, by Karen Armstrong
Burghley: William Cecil at the Court of Elizabeth I, by Stephen Alford

Fiction (non-sf) 4 (YTD 43)
Fallen Angels, by Walter Dean Myers
Advise and Consent, by Allen Drury
The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner
A Doll’s House, by Henrik Ibsen

SF (non-Who) 2 (YTD 62)
Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand
Earth Logic, by Laurie Marks

Doctor Who 5 (YTD 56)
Blue Box, by Kate Orman
Deceit, by Peter Darvill-Evans
The Crystal Bucephalus, by Craig Hinton
The Many Hands, by Dale Smith
Seeing I, by Jonathan Blum and Kate Orman

Comics 1 (YTD 15)
Scott Pilgrim & the Infinite Sadness, by Bryan Lee O’Malley

5/19 (YTD 51/238) by women (Armstrong, Rand, Marks, Orman x 2)
2/19 (YTD 18/238) by PoC (Myers, O’Malley)
12 owned for more than a year (A Short History of Myth, Earth Logic, The Great Tradition, Deceit, Seeing I, Burghley, The Sound and the Fury, Pies and Prejudice, A Doll’s House, Fallen Angels, The Many Hands, Ireland in the Age of the Tudors)
No rereads (YTD 21/238) though Ireland in the Age of the Tudors is a much updated second edition of Tudor Ireland which I read in 2008.
~6,500 pages (YTD ~75,900)

A very interesting biography of Elizabeth ‘s chief minister, who basically ran England from her accession in 1558 to his death in 1598 (and had held the same office of Secretary of State, though with less power, during the earlier reign of her younger brother). I found it generally more interesting, though in places more frustrating, than David Loades’ The Cecils which I read two years ago.

Alford is excellent at the big picture. The book is beautifully organised – in general chonologically, with occasional excursions into family life or household economics (facilitated by Burghley/Cecil’s obsessional record keeping) – and he usually has interesting things to say about what it meant to Burghley to be in a position of such political power, while running a growing household. He’s also very good at cautioning against Whiggism: Burghley did not know that Elizabeth would live to 1603, that she would never marry, that the Spanish Armada would fail, that Mary Queen of Scots would lose their decades-long battle of wits. I found it fascinating that Burghley/Cecil was so heavily involved with the intellectual leadership of the time, as was his second wife Mildred; even more fascinating that, while keeping meticulous records of his own correspondence and affairs, he was apparently instructing printers to generate largely fictional and utterly propagandistic pamphlets describing the issues of the day, which of course in the days before newspapers, and in a society where information was heavily censored, meant that he largely controlled public political discourse.

Burghley/Cecil was also a keen genealogist, but Alford has him as a man of Lincolnshire (rather than Wales as Loades has it), and the evidence is in his favour. Indeed, there is very little about Wales in this book, but lots about Scotland, which Cecil had first visited in the train of the English army during the Rough Wooing. Alford has Cecil obsessed with securing stability and Protestantism in Scotland, in order to secure England’s rear from the Catholic enemies on the Continent; Mary Queen of Scots became a direct threat to that policy, and had to be neutralised. Alford’s analysis of Burghley/Cecil’s Scottish policy is particularly lucid and convincing. Slightly frustratingly, given my own interest, Ireland appears only as a background issue – my ancestor Sir Nicholas White comes up as a correspondent to whom Cecil/Burghley would confide his concerns, though of course with an eye to the possible interception of the correspondence.

I’m sorry to say that I found some serious flaws in the book. Alford’s prose is sometimes clunky and often repetitious. His efforts to get inside Burghley’s head do not always succeed. An early and unsuccessful chapter deals with how Burghley (then plain William Cecil) dealt with the nine day reign in 1553 of Lady Jane Grey/Dudley, in a situation where he was still Secretary of State (as he had been for Edward VI) but faced with the crumbling of the new queen’s rule from the moment her accession was proclaimed. Alford concentrates on the tension between Cecil’s loyalty to the wishes of the dying teenage king and his obligations under the law passed by Henry VIII. To me the much more interesting story is that Cecil obviously spotted that Jane was dead in the water from the word go, and made sure he had not signed a single document which could demonstrate that he was seriously complicit in her attempt to take power – which is pretty impressive given that he was the chief minister of the government. He obviously could not know whether Mary would take months, weeks or days to take power (in the end it was only days) but equally obvously saw what was going to happen from pretty early on and made his plans accordingly.

So, a bit annoying in places but generally enlightening and stimulating, if you are interested in the period.

One of those classics which one really ought to see on stage, but can try to get to grips with by reading the script. A rather good psychological study of a woman who is stuck in a bad marriage, infantilised by society, but doesn’t actually realise what is going on until she is confronted with her husband’s readiness to dump her to avoid scandal – at which point she suddenly (and perhaps a little unrealistically) catches herself on. Today (I hope) the situation itself would seem rather unrealistic, but I can see how it might have shocked the audience of 1879.

I thought this was a rather good Eighth Doctor novel, with the Doctor and Sam finally reuniting after three years in which Sam becomes an environmental activist and basically grows up, while the Doctor is held in a very creepy and nasty prison. I was one of many Old Who fans who took a while to get used to the romance element between the companions and the Doctor in New Who, but here is an example of it being worked rather well into the narrative. The last few books in the series I have read have been pretty decent, and I hope this trend continues.

broadcast anniversaries

31 October 1964: broadcast of “Planet of Giants”, first episode of the story we also now call Planet of Giants, starting Season 2 of Classic Who. The Doctor, Ian, Susan and Barbara arrive in contemporary England, but miniaturised; they witness a murder and face peril from a cat.

31 October 2009: broadcast of Regeneration, the first episode of the K9 spinoff series. In a totalitarian London in 2050, K9 Mark 1 appears, regenerates, and teams up with teenagers Starkey and Jorjie. (This is the only episode I have seen but I enjoyed it.)

A couple of weeks back the Newsletter published my analysis of the 2010 election in Northern Ireland, which gave rise to a typically long discussion on Slugger O’Toole, in the course of which several discussants gently critiqued me for one particular sentence: “The decline from 51.8 per cent of votes for unionist parties in 2005 to 50.5 per cent in 2010 is more than accounted for by the gains made by Alliance and smaller centre parties.” Commentators responded:

…I suggest that the fall in nationalist turnout to levels approximating to Unionist turnout is a more important factor…

…It seems to me that nationalist/republican exuberence with the GFA, and a latter realisation that they don’t need ‘every vote’ to win most western constituencies caused an exceptional voter-turnout in early post GFA elections. Whyte shows that nationalist vote is constant despite latter lower voter turnout down in nat-majority areas…

…do you agree that in the Westminster election there was a narrowing of the differential in the community background turnout with the Nationlaist turnout falling and the unionist turnout either stabilsing or growing?…

I posted a comment that turnout differential between the communities may not tell us all that much, but agreeing that we might learn more from some more analysis. This post is that analysis.

Now, the question itself needs careful unpacking. Many (myself admittedly sometimes included) fall into the lazy trap of assuming that all Catholics are default Nationalist voters, and all Protestant voters are default Unionist voters. This of course isn’t so. A voter can only be defined as Nationalist or Unionist if they actually go into the polling booth and mark the ballot paper for a Nationalist or Unionist candidate. A fall in support for Nationalist parties doesn’t mean that Nationalist voters did not turn out, it means that voters who were Nationalist voters last time either didn’t vote or opted for someone else.

Nationalist votes in 2010 were down from 300,156 to 282,912 (but up from 41.8% to 42.0%); Unionist votes down from 369,704 to 340,602 (decrease from 51.8% to 50.5%). That’s a 5.7% drop in absolute voting numbers (17,244) for Nationalists and a 7.9% drop (29,084) for Unionists. If the Unionist vote had dropped by the same 5.7% as the Nationalist vote in 2010, it would have been 348,464 rather than 340,602, a difference of 7,844 between the counterfactual situation and the reality. The Alliance Party got 14,471 extra votes in reality. So my initial broad-brush statement that “The decline from 51.8 per cent of votes for unionist parties in 2005 to 50.5 per cent in 2010 is more than accounted for by the gains made by Alliance and smaller centre parties” is at least accurate though possibly could be more precise.

(Health warning: all figures for individual seats below are calculated from notional 2005 results rather than actual results. For some of the seats of course this makes no difference but it means that for those that have changed the precision of my figures should be taken with a pinch of salt.)

Anyway, my conclusion from staring at the figures in a jet-lagged state for some time is that one can’t really draw much more from them than that turnout was down overall and particularly in the West and in boring contests. I will, however, refine my previous statement that the Unionist decline is more than accounted for by Alliance growth. In fact, the 7,844 gap between votes for Unionist parties as cast in reality, and as they would have been had their party support declined at the same rate as Nationalist support, is not only less than the 14,471 votes gained by Alliance, it is less than the 9,019 extra votes gained for her party by Naomi Long in East Belfast. The bigger picture is messier. There was no other seat where Alliance gains exceeded Unionist losses. So the picture is clearly much more complicated. (I should clarify that Alliance support is of course much more broadly based than picking up disaffected Unionists; the context of my original remark was an article looking at what had happened to Unionist votes since 1921.)

The four seats with a more than 10% drop in turnout are all safely held by Sinn Fein – West Tyrone (-11.7%), Mid Ulster (-10.3%), West Belfast (-10.3%), and Newry and Armagh (-10.2%). We could add also Foyle, safely won by the SDLP with a turnout change of -8.8%, to this category. However, it is not only Nationalist parties whose vote was falling there. Nationalist vote share actually increased in West Tyrone, Mid Ulster and West Belfast, and dropped by only 1.1% in Newry and Armagh and 0.9% in Foyle; in West Tyrone there were special circumstance because of Kieran Deeny’s candidacy in 2005, but in Mid-Ulster the Unionist vote fell by 2100 and in West Belfast by 1500, proportionately rather more than the Nationalist decrease (respectively 2500 and 3300). So I think this disproves the theory that post-Agreement Nationalists are now sitting back from the polling station, comfortable in the glow of victory, unless we add to that picture post-Agreement Unionists morosely abstaining in the gloom of defeat (ie we would have to believe in people being both less likely to vote if their side wins, and also less likely to vote if their side loses, which rather removes the usefulness of the analysis).

One thing does seem clear to me though. Turnout dropped least where there was an interesting contest (with one exception which I’ll get to later). In the two seats won by moderate women challenging the Unionist establishment, North Down and East Belfast, turnout actually increased (though not by much – 0.8% and 0.9% respectively). In North Belfast, where there was a possibility of a sufficiently split Unionist vote for SF to gain a seat, and Strangford, where the UUP had put up one of its more credible candidates and the DUP were defending the dubious legacy of Iris Robinson, turnout dropped by only 1.5%. In South Belfast, where the SDLP had what would have been a tough defence in a different year, and South Antrim, where the UUP leader was doing his ineffective best to unseat the DUP, turnout dropped by 3.2% and 3.5% respectively. Everywhere else was within the 4-7% window, apart from the five safe Nationalist seats mentioned in the previous paragraph. (The TUV challenge doesn’t seem to have made much difference to turnout.)

One anomaly really jumps out. If people are more likely to keep voting where there is an interesting contest, why did turnout in Fermanagh and South Tyrone drop by 4.5%, 1500 fewer votes cast in an election where the electorate had increased by 1200, and where the result was determined by a margin of only 4? One could of course argue that we’re simply seeing the same geographically based turnout drop of around 10% in other western seats, masked by a bonus of 6% or so extra because of the closeness of the race. In comparison with 2005, the total Nationalist vote decreased by 990, the total Unionist vote by 1625 (and we can be exact because the boundaries were the same). This is the one seat where a local differential in the change in community turnout surely did determine the outcome. Had the two sides lost proportionately the same number of votes – had indeed the Unionist and Nationalist vote totals decreased by the NI-wide average of 7.9% and 5.7%, rather than the actual figures of 7.0% and 4.0% – the Unionist candidate would have defeated Sinn Féin by 175 votes. But my own gut feeling is that the numbers bear out the reports of serious internal problems in the Unionist campaign which were discussed on various blog posts after the election (and, frankly, indicated between the lines of the court judgement affirming the election result).

So, my conclusions are that i) the relatively greater drop in Unionist turnout is very marginal and more than accounted for by the East Belfast result alone; ii) we’re now seeing a lower turnout from both Catholic and Protestant voters in the rural areas where a high turnout was once accepted as inevitable; and iii) voters, like commentators, will pay more attention if the race appears to be a close one.

Having been disappointed by Armstrong’s The Age of Transformation, I’m glad to report that I enjoyed reading this very short reflection on the development of mythology through the ages – I’m still not convinced by Armstrong’s Axial Age hypothesis, but I found a lot of resonance for me in her thoughts about the importance of myth and how societies have changed their approach to it in the wake of technological and social change since the invention of agriculture to the present day. She urges a wider appreciation of the importance of myth in the present day to which I’m totally sympathetic.

I’ve been on the road for the last ten days, so updates have been limited to linking and Whoniversaries, and actually reading LJ and email has barely happened at all. If anything interesting happened while I was away please tell me!

Meantime I managed to read several more books, of which the first was this set of anecdotes, borrowed from , about (southern) Irish elections mostly since independence (a couple of notes on the 1917 and 1920 elections, and on Cashel as a rotten borough in the years before 1832). A lot of it was material I had lived through or read about previously, though it is all entertainingly told and there are some extra details that I hadn’t previously seen – for instance, on the marathon 21-stage count in Tipperary in 1943, or the biographical details of Richard Mulcahy, or Fine Gael’s tendency to call elections at the wrong moment in contrast with Fianna Fáil’s record of getting that right.

But Coleman concentrates almost entirely on Dáil elections, so missing the drama of European and Presidential elections, not to mention the extraordinary case of the 1925 Senate election (and for all I know local council elections may have also produced moments of excitement I’m not aware of). So while the prose is generally catchy, and it would be a good stocking-filler for anyone with an interest in Irish politics, I wished for a little more breadth as well as depth.

i) births and deaths

30 October 1978: death of Brian Hayles, writer of The Celestial Toymaker (1966), The Smugglers 1966), The Ice Warriors (1968), The Seeds of Death (1969), The Curse of Peladon (1971) and The Monster of Peladon (1974).

30 October 1997: death of Sydney Newman, without whom etc etc.

ii) broadcast anniversaries

30 October 1965: broadcast of “Death of a Spy”, the third episode of the story we now call The Myth Makers. Steven and Vicki are imprisoned by the Trojans; the Doctor designs the wooden horse and it is brought into the city.

30 October 1976: broadcast of first episode of The Deadly Assassin. The Doctor returns to Gallifrey to try and prevent the assassination of the President – but fails.

30 October 2009: broadcast of second episode of The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith. The Doctor, Luke, Clyde and Rani are trapped in a time slip; Sarah persuades Peter to restore normality at the cost of his own life.

iii) date specified in canon

30 October 1938: the Eighth Doctor and Charley Pollard land in Manhattan and encounter Orson Welles, as told in the Big Finish audio Invaders from Mars (2002).

i) births and deaths

29 October 1935: birth of Michael Jayston, who played the Valeyard in 1986.

ii) broadcast anniversaries

29 October 1966: broadcast of fourth episode of The Tenth Planet. The Cybermen are defeated, but when Ben and Polly return to the Tardis, the Doctor collapses and his face shimmers and changes. Will Doctor Who ever be the same again???

29 October 1977: broadcast of first episode of Image of the Fendahl. The Doctor and Leela are drawn to Fetch Priory, where scientists are performing experiments on the skull whose nickname is Eustace.

29 October 2006: broadcast of Ghost Machine (Torchwood), the one with the gizmo that lets you see into the past, and Gareth “Blake” Thomas as an elderly sex criminal.

29 October 2007: broadcast of first episode of Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane? (SJA). Sarah has been mysteriously replaced by a woman called Andrea Yates, and only Maria remembers her. The answer lies in a 1962 seaside trip via the Graske.

29 October 2009: broadcast of first episode of The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith (SJA). Sarah is in love with the handsome Peter: as the wedding ceremony gets underway, the Tardis materialises, the Doctor appears and the Trickster kidnaps the newlyweds.

I just had a friends request on Facebook from someone who rejoices in the name of Anastasia Micklethwaite. That is such a glorious name that I am tempted to friend her back, even though I don’t know her at all.

I fear that she has mistaken me for this bloke who was in my year in my college in Cambridge but Spells his name Wrong.

i) births and deaths

28 October 1944, 28 October 1986: birth and death of Ian Marter, who played companion Harry Sullivan in 1974-5, and also wrote nine Target novelisations.

28 October 1982: birth of Matt Smith, an actor who I am told appeared in some new New Who episodes earlier this year, though I can’t remember offhand what role he played. Oh yeah, he was on the Sarah Jane Adventures earlier this week too.

ii) broadcast anniversaries

28 October 1967: broadcast of fifth episode of The Abominable Snowmen. Victoria is hypnotised by Padmasambhava; the monks evacuate; and the Intelligence grows in physical manifestation. (Yeah, I posted this plot summary last week mistakenly for episode four.)

28 October 1978: broadcast of first episode of The Stones of Blood, the 100th story of Old Who. The Doctor and Romana find archaeologist Amelia Rumford and local druidic cultists all very interested in the Nine Sisters, a stone circle on Dartmoor.

i) births and deaths

27 October 1923: birth of Peter Bryant, producer of Doctor Who from The Web of Fear (1968) to The Wheel in Space (1969)

27 October 1991: death of Paul Erickson, writer of The Ark (1966)

ii) broadcast anniversaries

27 October 1979: broadcast of first episode of The Creature from the Pit. The Doctor is captured by Adrasta; Romana is captured by the bandits and then by Adrasta; the Doctor is thrown down the Pit.

27 October 2009: broadcast of second episode of Secrets of the Stars (SJA). Trueman attempts to summon the Ancient Lights, but is thwarted by Sarah and company.

• Western Sahara: The Forgotten Injustice « Jonathan Fryer
  (tags: westernsahara)

i) births and deaths

None that caught my eye.

ii) broadcast anniversaries

26 October 1987: broadcast of fourth episode of Paradise Towers, In a final confrontation, both Pex and Kroagnon are killed, and the inhabitants of the Towers look forward to a new future.

26 October 1988: broadcast of fourth episode of Remembrance of the Daleks. Grand battle between the Dalek factions; the Doctor destroys Skaro and also forces the Black Dalek to explode.

26 October 2010: broadcast of second episode of Death of the Doctor.

iii) historical event in canon

26 October 1881: The gunfight at the O.K. Corral, as witnessed by the First Doctor, Steven and Dodo in The Gunfighters (1966).

• Asking the Wrong Questions: A Shire of Shopkeepers: Thoughts on The Hobbit
  "Martin Freeman as Bilbo (possibly the most inspired piece of casting of the last few years, if only because it's made me realize just how much Bilbo and Arthur Dent have in common)"
  (tags: sf)

broadcast anniversaries

25 October 1975: broadcast of first episode of The Pyramids of Mars. The Doctor and Sarah land in the future UNIT headquarters, the Scarman brothers’ family home, and encounter robotic mummies and various Egyptian relics.

25 October 1980: broadcast of first episode of Full CircleMindwarp (ToaTL #8). Peri is killed by brain transplant!!! (Or is she?) Her last appearance as a regular character anyway.

25 October 1989: broadcast of first episode of The Curse of Fenric. The doctor and Ace, and also a Soviet military mission, land at maiden’s Point during the second world war, and find themselves decoding ancient messages.

25 October 2010: broadcast of first episode of Death of the Doctor (SJA)

• The Moroccan Army surrounds the Protest Camp – Laayoune | Demotix.com
  Crisis in the desert
  (tags: westernsahara)

Another in the series of graphic novels about Scott Pilgrim’s battles with Ramona’s seven evil ex-boyfriends – though in this case the evil Todd shows up dating Scott’s own evil ex-girlfriend, Natalie aka Envy. As usual, an entertaining combination of youthful angst with the fantasy of computer games; Scott’s extra life, and Todd being robbed of his powers due to being insufficiently vegan, are highlights.