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A Cypriot commentator on how the leader of the Russian spy ring skipped bail: "even by our own high standards of incompetence, what happened was incredible."
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density of twitter updates across New Yorkm London, Paris and Munich
World Cup semi-finals
The Dutch 2-1 victory was correctly called by
Only
Because I carelessly forgot to include a 4-0 option for the Germany-Argentina match, nobody called the results correctly.
It is striking that nobody’s name appears more than once in the above lists (and, er, less striking that my name doesn’t appear at all).
Dissatisfied reader
Apparently I suck.
Whoniversaries 4 July
Couldn’t find any.
ii) broadcast anniversaries
4 July 1964: non-broadcast of ‘Hidden Danger’, the fourth episode of the story we now know as The Sensorites, because of the gripping events at the third test match of the 1964 Ashes series (idf you’re interested, Australia took five wickets in the course of the day, and another five when the second innings resumed on Sunday; England were unable to make up the difference and so lost the Ashes as per usual), also the Wimbledon women’s final between Maria Bueno and Margaret Smith (later Margaret Court) which Bueno won 6–4 7–9 6–3 (Smith having defeated 19-year-old Billie-Jean Moffitt, later Billie-Jean King, int he semi-final – revenge for their match two years earlier having gone the other way when Smith was the world’s #1 seed). Aren’t you glad I told you that?
4 July 2008: release of The Baktek Illusion, tenth and last of the Doctor Who Writers’ Comics.
I admit I’m really scraping the barrel here. 4 July is a significant anniversary in some well-known real-life historical contexts, but not really for Doctor Who.
Delicious LiveJournal Links for 7-4-2010
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Mail on Sunday invents story about the EU forbidding gallant shopkeepers to sell eggs by the dozen; lots of people believe this ridiculous lie
July Books 1) Dead Souls, by Ian Rankin
One of the better Inspector Rebus novels (I do need to check back and see how often I have used that phrase). A returning psychopath, establishment paedophiles, and a long-lost ex-girlfriend infest Rebus’s life, and knowing that the law may never succeed in delivering justice is starting to grind him down. It’s also a very interesting novel about parenthood – Rebus and his daughter, still recovering from the injuries she sustained in the last book; his ex-girlfriend and her missing son, tangled in the decadent lives of the offspring of a senior judge; the parents and daughter of Rebus’ colleague whose death opens the book; children and moral panic in a depressed housing estate; and the ex-con returning from America to exert an ancient revenge. It is very compelling reading.
Whoniversaries for 3 July
3 July 2001: death of Delia Derbyshire who arranged Ron Grainer’s theme tune to make it as we knew it from 1963 to 1979. See
ii) broadcast anniversaries
3 July 1965: broadcast of ‘The Watcher’, the first episode of the series we now know as The Time Meddler, with newly acquired companion Steven fainting on the Tardis floor and then refusing to believe that they are in 1066. Features the First Doctor picking up a Viking headpiece and asking, “What do you think this is? A space helmet for a cow?” One of the great episode endings as the Doctor discovers that the chanting monks are actually on a gramophone record and is then imprisoned by a set of bars descending from the ceiling. The Monk is the first fellow member of the Doctor’s race we have met since Susan.
3 July 2009: broadcast of Torchwood: The Dead Line, the audio play where Jack spends most of the story unconscious (which is just as well since Barrowman is not a natural at audios) and Ianto gets to tell us how much he loves him; while Gwen and Rhys get cuddly too.
iii) dates mentioned in canon
3 July 2379: The date on which the Sixth Doctor story Mindwarp is set, ending with Peri’s brain being destroyed – or so we are led to believe. (1986)
Delicious LiveJournal Links for 7-3-2010
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Francesc Vendrell – former UN and EU representative in Afghanistan – on what has gone wrong and what can still be done. (I was sitting just to his right as he spoke, but am not in view of the camera at any point)
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One should never laugh at a fourth generation politician just because his name strikes you as slightly funny. But sometimes the temptation is irresistible.
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David Rennie's valedictory, ending with some serious and justified criticism of the European Parliament.
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Fairly general report of how the new intake of MEPs behave. "The Liberals face problems with French and Irish MEPs" – ie Bayrou's lot and Fianna Fáil!
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For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity's affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss–a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity's mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world's thirstiest gerbil.
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Western countries' emissions down heavily due to economic crisis, China and India make up the gap though.
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(via Zac) leaving unlocked bikes tagged with GPS devices; if they are stolen, they and the thieves can be tracked down.
Worried about my image
I did an interview with a Kosovar journalist earlier in the week, and was alarmed when a friend in Pristina emailed to commiserate on how heavily the years are hanging on me:
http://www.koha.net/index.php?cid=1,22,26831
I think they have confused me with this gentleman.
Edited to add: They’ve changed the photo now!
Whoniversaries 2 July
2 July 1973: birth of Peter Kay, guest star on Love and Monsters (2006).
2 July 1991: death of Don Houghton, who wrote Inferno (1970) and The Mind of Evil (1971).
ii) broadcast anniversaries
2 July 1966: broadcast of the second episode of The War Machines, in which poor Dodo Chaplet is unceremoniously written out of the programme. Starts with WOTAN demanding the presence of “Doctor Who”. Ends with Ben being trapped by a newly activated War Machine.
2 July 2009: broadcast of Torchwood: The Golden Age, a somewhat bonkers radio play which brings Jack, Gwen and Ianto to India to meet an old flame of Jack’s.
Delicious LiveJournal Links for 7-2-2010
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Each year, the EU pays Morocco millions of Euros for fishing licences offshore Western Saharan waters – an area not falling under Moroccan sovereignty… a direct support to the illegal and brutal Moroccan occupation of Western Sahara.
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David Rennie of the Economist is leaving – we will miss him, but look forward to his acerbic insights on British politics in the future.
Whoniversaries, 1 July
The first in what may be a series of daily posts on anniversaries in Doctor Who history, covering i) real-world anniversaries of the births and deaths of people important to the history of the programme; ii) anniversaries of the first broadcast of Who stories on TV and radio (which get a bit thin over the summer, so we are starting gently); and iii) dates which are specified in broadcast stories or spinoff literature (of which there are surprisingly few). 1 July is rather a good date to start with; I wonder how long I’ll be able to keep it up though…
1 July 1934: birth of Jean Marsh, who played the great Sara Kingdom in The Daleks’ Master Plan (1965-6). She also appeared as Princess Joanna in The Crusade (1965) and as Morgaine in Battlefield (1989). She has done two Companion Chronicle audios for Big Finish, and a third one, The Guardian of the Solar System, comes out this month; I for one am looking forward to it. (She was also married to Jon Pertwee, before either was on Doctor Who.)
Also born on 1 July: Daphne Dare (1929), costumer for much of the black and white era; Sonny Caldinez (1932), four-time Ice Warrior who appeared as Kemal the Turk in earlier episodes of Evil of the DaleksThe Movie (1996).
ii) broadcast anniversaries
1 July 1967: broadcast of the seventh and final episode of Evil of the Daleks, Skaro collapsing in flames as the malignant pepperpots battle each other in civil war, and the Second Doctor, Jamie and new companion Victoria flee the ruins as Season Four comes to an end. Sadly, one of the lost episodes.
1 July 2006: broadcast of Army of Ghosts, which starts with that creepy voiceover by Billie Piper about how she died, and then goes on to feature celebrity cameos and Jackie’s great line “If we end up on Mars, I’m gonna kill you.” Then we get into serious business with Torchwood and the Cybermen, and finally, in the best reveal in the whole of New Who, the Daleks emerge. from the Genesis Ark.
1 July 2009: broadcast of Torchwood: Asylum, the first of the three radio plays leading up to Children of Earthiii) dates specified in broadcast stories
1 July 2058: Date of establishment of Bowie Base One on Mars, as seen in The Waters of Mars (2009).
(Free) Wi-Fi in Schiphol?
To those who know Schiphol better than I do – is there anywhere in the airport where there is Wi-Fi, preferably free?
Delicious LiveJournal Links for 7-1-2010
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Renard Sexton explains the World Cup
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New Czech government – all ministers male
June Books 19) The Bloody Sunday Report, Volume I
The admirable decision to post the whole of the report of the Bloody Sunday Inquiry online (first volume in PDF available here) may not actually spur a lot of people to read it, but it has gripped me, and over lunch breaks and commutes in the last week or so I have been poring over the details of the first volume. (In case you are interested, I’ve been saving the HTML files from the Inquiry website and converting them to Mobipocket format for the Blackberry.)
To start with a comment on form rather than substance: one admirable skill displayed throughout the report by Lord Saville and his colleagues is the ability to boil down a great deal of conflicting evidence very succinctly. This is particularly so for the kernel of the report, Chapter 3, which chronicles the events of 30 January 1972Chapter 4, which allocates responsibility for the deaths and injuries directly to the soldiers who fired, also sharply criticising the decisions made by Lt-Col Derek Wilford who was in command; and the summary of the summary, Chapter 5, which concludes:
5.5 The firing by soldiers of 1 PARA on Bloody Sunday caused the deaths of 13 people and injury to a similar number, none of whom was posing a threat of causing death or serious injury. What happened on Bloody Sunday strengthened the Provisional IRA, increased nationalist resentment and hostility towards the Army and exacerbated the violent conflict of the years that followed. Bloody Sunday was a tragedy for the bereaved and the wounded, and a catastrophe for the people of Northern Ireland.
It is worth dwelling on this point a bit.
Some of the critics of the Inquiry have asked why Bloody Sunday is more important than any number of atrocities perpetrated by paramilitary groups over the course of the Troubles. I would make three points in reply, one sympathetic, the other two less so.
- Any death is an incalculable loss to the bereaved. It is impossible to compare or to give relative rankings to the personal impacts of any loss of life, and distasteful to even try. Everyone has an absolute right to know what happened to their loved ones, and to demand that justice be done to the perpetrators.
- But Bloody Sunday had a wider political impact than any other single violent incident in the course of the Troubles. All such incidents ought to be chronicled and examined, but understanding Bloody Sunday is of particular importance. History is usually shaped by political decisions made by individuals whose memoirs and contemporary records can be examined by later historians. This, however, was a confused and confusing event involving dozens of people, none of whom had a complete picture. The forensic sifting of evidence by Saville was necessary to establish that picture.
- Even more important, however, is that the State colluded with its own agents’ efforts to prevent the truth from emerging, and smeared the victims as legitimate targets who could justifiably be shot without warning. This was a lie, and most people in Derry knew it was a lie. The formal Inquiry led by Lord Widgery perpetuated that lie as a legal finding. The fact that the state colluded in the lies told by its own agents about the deaths of 14 citizens matters hugely.
So, for those reasons, I start reading the report with a prejudice in favour of believing that it was a worthwhile effort.
The opening summary: details that caught my eye
Saville’s overall narrative problem is this: the soldiers who fired the fatal shots maintained throughout that they were returning fire because they were under attack. The earlier tribunal could not bring itself to find that they were all lying. But, in Saville’s view, they were. Saville and colleagues examine a number of alternative explanations, and find them all wanting, for instance:
3.6.6: we have considered the possibility that one or more of the casualties might have occurred from soldiers firing by accident, in the sense of discharging their rifles by mistake and without intending to do so. We have found no evidence that suggests to us that this was or might have been the case.
But this doesn’t really get to the heart of the matter, which is the question of why soldiers, and particularly the Paras, thought that they could get away with such a mass conspiracy to deceive the world about what they had done. We must remember that initially they did get away with it, and were praised for their efforts by the British establishment. Saville raises an important avenue of interpretation, as follows (I truncate some of the text):
4.7 it was submitted that those who fired did so because of a “culture” that had grown up among soldiers at the time in Northern Ireland, to the effect that they could fire with impunity, secure in the knowledge … that their actions would … be investigated … by the Royal Military Police (the Army’s own police force), who would be sympathetic to the soldiers and who would not conduct a proper investigation… we are not in a position to express a view either as to whether or not such a culture existed among soldiers before Bloody Sunday or, if it did, whether it had any influence on those who fired unjustifiably on that day.
Given the firmness with which he knocks down other conspiracy theories elsewhere in the report, Saville’s countenancing of this theory in the first place, and the fact that he says nothing at all to contradict it, together rather suggest that he believes this nterpretation, though felt he could not make it a formal finding of the report.
The formal finding of the report is that the deployment of the Paras in Derry on 30 January to arrest rioters was dubious in principle and wrong in practice.
4.8 [Commander of Land Forces, General Ford’s] decision to use 1 PARA as the arrest force is open to criticism, on the ground that 1 PARA was a force with a reputation for using excessive physical violence…
4.24 Colonel Wilford [the commanding officer of 1 Para] should not have sent soldiers of Support Company into the Bogside for the following reasons:
- because in doing so he disobeyed the orders given by Brigadier MacLellan [Commander of 8th Infantry Brigade, which was the Army brigade in charge of the Londonderry area];
- because his soldiers, whose job was to arrest rioters, would have no or virtually no means of identifying those who had been rioting from those who had simply been taking part in the civil rights march; and
- because he should not have sent his soldiers into an unfamiliar area which he and they regarded as a dangerous area, where the soldiers might come under attack from republican paramilitaries, in circumstances where the soldiers’ response would run a significant risk that people other than those engaging the soldiers with lethal force would be killed or injured by Army gunfire.
General Ford’s decision to deploy the Paras in the first place, and the way in which Colonel Wilford sent them in, are the top-level political decisions identified by Saville as having led to the deaths on Bloody Sunday. But the key events remain the decisions of individual soldiers to shoot at unarmed civilians who posed no direct threat.
The Background
The opening summary occupies less than a seventh of the pages of Volume I of the Inquiry’s report, but I felt I had to go on and read more; there is something grimly compelling about this awful event.
This does require adjustment by the reader to a real change of pace in the telling of the story. Chapters 8 of the report is longer than the first six combined: Chapter 9 is three times as long, accounting for 275 of the 488 numbered pages of Volume I of the report. Knowing that the total time taken up by the killing on Bloody Sunday was about ten minutes, and having already seen Saville’s forensic style, I imagine that we will get second-by-second dissections of events in future volumes. This first volume, however, leaves us teetering with suspense on the morning of the 30th.
It starts much earlier. Chapter 7 is a moderately detailed account of the history of Northern Ireland since 1920 (readers can follow in the footnotes some gentlemanly bickering between two academic historians called Paul, both of whom I have known for a long time). This essentially takes us to and through the decision to deploy the army in Northern Ireland in support of law and order, ie in support of the Unionist single-party government in Stormont, by 1972 led by Brian Faulkner.
Chapter 8 begins with a very detailed explanation of the security architecture in Northern Ireland, and how the accountability of the army to the London-based Ministry of Defence was integrated with its role in support of the autonomous Stormont regime and its police force. We then move fairly seamlessly to the history of the last five months of 1971, starting with Faulkner’s disastrous decision to introduce internment without trial of suspected terrorists, which lifted entirely the wrong people, mistreated them (slightly short of torture, according to the European Court of Human Rights) and thus further increased tensions with no corresponding security gain.
Here, unusually, we run into some ambiguity of analysis from Lord Saville and his colleagues. By late 1971, there appear to have been two contradictory currents of opinion on security policy in general and in Derry in particular. Describing a committee meeting in October 1971, Saville concludes:
8.92 The perceived need to keep Brian Faulkner in power as the last chance to avoid direct rule seems to us to have caused a shift in priorities towards a greater effort to defeat the terrorists, evident from the record of this meeting.
Yet at the same time local security force commanders in Derry – particularly the police, but to a certain extent the local army commanders also – appear to have decided that their aggressive stance had failed, and that they needed to wind down a bit. That takes us to the end of the year.
This book-length chapter is mainly about the security situation and decision-makng processes in the first 29 days of 1972. But actually the sections that jumped out at me were the brief discussions of moves towards a political settlement. Reginald Maudling (of all people!) appears to have taken on board the need to engineer Catholic representation in the Stormont government; indeed he recognised that:
[9.185] a solution would have to comprise three elements, these being reassurance about the border, a change in the composition of government and a redefinition of the powers of government.
Add to that the necessity for an all-Ireland dimension, however cosmetic, and you basically have British policy from that day to this. In the meantime, the Taoiseach, Jack Lynch, was thnking along similar lines, and thinking out loud about them to Edward Heath and other British officials, and no doubt to many others. I would observe that little thought was being given as to how to bring Faulkner on board with any such policy, and none at all as to how to engage Northern Ireland Catholics; the key diplomatic problem for London was dissuading Lynch from presenting his ideas in such a way as to kill off Maudling’s similar undrafted proposal (as would have certainly happened had he gone ahead and launched his own initiative from Dublin).
That is not, however, the meat of Chapter 9, which starts with a grim portrayal of the security situation in Derry: a recurrent picture of riots, gunfights between army and paramilitaries, bombing and arson. It is not clear if this was getting worse in late January, but it is clear that it was bad. The Bogside and Creggan were essentially free of government control. In these circumstances, General Ford wrote his notorious memo proposing the shooting of selected ringleaders of the Derry Young Hooligans, which was seized on by the representatives of those killed on Bloody Sunday as evidence of an assassination policy going right to the top of the military hierarchy. Saville shows from the documentary evidence that Ford’s memo was bureaucratically buried; it never went further up the tree than his immediate superior, and rather more crucially did not make it down the tree as far as Colonel Wilford. In addition, Ford’s proposal, bone-headedly homicidal though it was, was to shoot ring-leaders after due warning with .22 inch ammunition; the shootings of Bloody Sunday were not of ring-leaders, were carried out without warning, and were done with 7.62 mm rounds. Saville reasonably concludes that Bloody Sunday was not an implementation of Ford’s memo. (The political negotiations described above are part of this analysis; however wishful the thinking in London about a political settlement, nobody could have believed that shooting civilians would bring it closer.)
Because it explores in so much depth the military and police perceptions of the situation, the Inquiry somewhat neglects the reality of the situation on the ground. Not always; Saville reports that though the army thought they had shot and probably killed 15 IRA men in Derry in January 72, there is no evidence to support even a small fraction of this number [9.239]. But more strategically, the Inquiry misses an important point about the inflitration of the Civil Rights Association by the Official IRA. Nobody denies that this was happening, but what the security forces missed at the time, and what Saville fails to explain, is that this was not the subversion of a peaceful campaigning group by paramilitaries, but in fact part of the process of conversion of a paramilitary group to peaceful means. The security forces as a whole appear to have made little effort to differentiate between the organisation and agendas of the Officials, the Provos, and the Derry Young Hooligans (this last group existing as an organisation only in imaginative internal army memos). This surely counts as an intelligence failure, and I fault Saville for not picking up on it.
I do not fault Saville for querying Ford’s decision to use the Paras on 30 January, as the key force in arresting the leaders of the supposed ‘Derry Young Hooligans’ after the planned (illegal) march. The previous weekend, a diifferent company of 1 Para had brutally attacked an anti-internment march at Magilligan Strand, a few miles from Derry, as reported in depth by the well-known pinko rag, the Daily Telegraph. Of course only one soldier was investigated for attacking unarmed civilians, and he was rapidly cleared by the RMP’s internal inquiry process. More than one senior officer from other regiments queried in advance the decision to deploy the Paras as the arrest force on 30 January. Saville is understanding but critical of Ford’s decision to use them; I would be less understanding.
Immediately below Ford, Brigadier McLellan was much more sensitised to local conditions, and very aware of important issues like ensuring that peacful marchers and rioters were well separated before any arrest operation was implemented. It is absolutely clear from Saville that McLellan failed to communicate this concern adequately to Colonel Wilford, in charge of the Paras. Saville is equally clear that this was entirely Wilford’s fault; that it was his duty to seek clear orders from McLellan and his failure that he did not do so. I am not so sure; in environments where I have been managing gifted and idiosyncratic individuals, I certainly felt it my responsibility to give clear guidelines as to what behaviour and actions were and were not acceptable, and at least partially my failure if those guidelines were not followed because they had not been clearly issued. Perhaps the military environment is different.
Having said that, most of Saville’s criticism of Wilford appears very well founded – helped by the evidence which Wilford himself gave over the years to Widgery, to the media and finally to the Saville Inquiry itself, which is a mess of contradictions, evasions and inaccuracies. From the analysis in the summary of the report, I had expected to find Wilford a homicidal maniac, determined to prove the valour of his men; this certainly seems to be Saville’s inclination, dwelling on his remark years later to a journalist that he did not want his soldiers to stand there having things thown at them “like Aunt Sallies”. But in fact the picture I see is of a man out of his depth, given dangerously to woolly thinking, indeed wilfully so. A telling paragraph for me was Saville’s summary of Wilford’s rather perfunctory recce of the ground over which the operation would take place, a few days in advance:
9.553 We find that this was an unsatisfactory reconnaissance. In our view, a more careful examination of the terrain should have taken place… Colonel Wilford should have consulted closely with those stationed in the city on how best an arrest operation should be conducted and should have looked at the route through which he proposed to send troops. We formed the firm impression that Colonel Wilford was intent on showing the local troops how an arrest operation should be conducted and was not keen to take advice from them on how it should be done…
And so the chapter ends, with the Paras tucked up in bed on the verge of launching an unprecedentedly large arrest operation in hostile and unknown territory, amid warnings that the peace of Northern Ireland for years might depend on the outcome of the operation. (And yes, there was a palpable sense of apocalypse among both military and civilians on the day.)
I have left out a lot here – the army’s distrust of the local police commander because he was a Catholic, the internal discussions among the civil rights leaders, the overall question of marching. I don’t pretend to be writing a balanced overall summary of the report; rather I am just noting the points that jumped out at me. If you are at all interested in the topic I urge you to do the same.
Volume I | Volume II | Volume III | Volume IV | Volume V | Volume VI | Volume VII | Volume VIII | Volume IX | Volume X and conclusions
Linkspam for 30-6-2010
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Dissidents from the Irish Greens to set up their own group. Their disgruntlement with their former party is entirely comprehensible, but unfortunately their command of Irish rather poor; you can have "Fís Nua" or "An Fhís Nua" but not, as they seem to think, "An Fís Nua".
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Niall Harrison did like Doctor Who under Moffat, more so than in the RTD years.
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Abigail Nussbaum didn’t like Doctor Who under Moffat.
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Stefani Weiss of the Bertelsmann Stiftung takes a short but hard look at the new European External Action Service and is unimpressed. I think she nails it. (PDF)
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How the recent Supreme Court decision will damage peace-making.
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Presumably the proposed Thirty Meter Telescope will actually be 30m in length rather than aperture.
World Cup quarter finals
All four of the matches yesterday and today saw victory for the more widely tipped team; for once I myself called all four of them correctly, and so did
Reassuring
As I arrived at a meeting this morning, the keynote speaker, who I hadn’t seen for about three years, greeted me very jovially and told me I was looking very well.
Since he is a former surgeon (though better known for other activities) I take this as a reassuring professional judgement!
June books
+ Bloody Sunday Report vol 1
Fiction (non-sf) 2 (YTD 28)
sf (non-Who or comics) 5 (YTD 45)
Doctor Who (non-comics) 4 (YTD 32)
Comics 3 (YTD 8)
5/19 (YTD 34/144) by women (Harrison, Delinsky, Valente, Mirrlees, Foglio)
0/19 (YTD 11/144) by PoC (as far as I know)
6/19 owned for more than a year (Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, Mother of Plenty, The Portadown News, The Provinces of the Roman Empire, Option Lock, Twilight Whispers, Wetworld)
No rereads, though I was familiar with a lot of the Portadown News from the website. (YTD rereads 11/144)
~5,800 pages (YTD 42,900)
By-election blues
When Derviş Eroğlu was elected President of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus in April, he had to resign his seat in the TRNC’s parliament. His daughter Resmiye Canaltay ran as his party’s candidate in the by-election held last Sunday, and lost by an agonising two-vote margin.
Eroğlu, his wife and his bodyguard did not vote in the election as they were travelling to New York!
(Further confusion was caused when the electoral authorities mixed up the tallies for the candidates and declared that Canaltay had been elected, then checked the figures and realised that Hüseyin Angolemli had actually got the two crucial extra votes.)
Flanders and Swann’s continuing relevance
We were discussing England’s exit from the World Cup over breakfast, and my wife hit on the reason for Germany’s success: “they practice beforehand, which ruins the fun.”
Second Round, Second Half
Three of this weekend’s matches had the expected result (sorry, England fans, but you were outvoted 3-1 in my poll and 4-1 on the field). The USA-Ghana match was evenly split, 34 of you backing each team. It is not therefore surprising that 19 people out of 68 called all four of the weekend’s matches correctly. They were:
June Books 18) Twilight Whispers, by Barbara Delinsky
This is a throbbing sensual romance about the serving girl who falls in love with the prince, set among America’s East Coast aristocracy, involving also a murder mystery which is resolved by a caring and sensitive police detective who violates all credible investigative routine to do so. There is much flashbacking to the mid-20th century (the book was written and set in 1988). I got hold of it for the totally spurious reason that one of the characters, described as “somber yet dashing”, rejoices in the name of Nicholas Whyte, but he turns out to have little to do with the plot. Will appeal to steamy romance readers but doesn’t really pull off the police procedural leg of the plot.
June Books 17) Lud-In-The-Mist, by Hope Mirrlees
I was inspired to buy this by Farah Mendlesohn’s Rhetorics of Fantasy, which ranks it as a key exemplar of one of the four modes of fantasy story-telling, the ‘liminal’ in which the boundary with the fantastic is hazy and uncertain; other examples being Little, Big (which I bounced off) and the first two Gormenghast books (which I remember loving as a teenager). I think it also fits a lot of Neil Gaiman’s work.
I am firmly on the side of the fans of Lud-In-The-Mist. It is a superb tale of the inhabitants of the eponymous town, trying to sort out their relationship with neighbouring Fairyland, which is in large part a relationship of denial and corruption. It feels amazingly modern for a book written in 1926, a time period that I would otherwise associate with Lord Dunsany and H.P. Lovecraft, whose works are classics of their kind but somewhat dated; no such apology is needed for Lud-In-The-Mist (though I suppose one could read a commentary on Prohibition into some of the incidents involving trafficking in forbidden fruit). It is a story of hidden messages from the past, disruption to the social order, uppity women (to a certain extent) and the dangers of questioning what appeared certain. I look forward now to reading Michael Swanwick’s biography of the author.
Brahms and Ravel on the Vuvuzela
As explained by Helge von Niswandt and colleaguies; non-German-speakers will appreciate the tone of the Terribly Serious Explanation even if you can’t understand it.
(From here via Graham.)
On yer bike
In the name of fitness, I have been vaguely wondering if I should consider getting a bit more use out of my bicycle. (Young F has recently cracked the art of cycling, and now confidently bikes the 5 km to school and back daily.) One rather audacious plan that crossed my mind was to try and cycle to work. There is a whole blog dedicated to the different routes between Leuven and Brussels, but it didn’t quite inspire me – Leuven is already some way north of us, and most of the routes recommended seemed to go further north before they came south, which is not especially helpful since my preferred route would be pretty much exactly due west or east (my home is roughly 850 metres closer to the Equator than my office).
Well, I thought, I would set several preconditions before making the attempt: it would have to be good weather, on a day when I didn’t have any meetings outside the office, when I was in good health generally, and I’d have to find a satisfactory way of planning the route. I then realised about the middle of this week that the first three of these conditions were likely to be fulfilled yesterday. After a little more digging I came up with http://www.routeyou.com which actually specialises in calculating bike routes in the Netherlands and Belgium, punched in the two addresses, printed the result, took a deep breath and set off.
The inbound leg went rather well, I thought: about an hour and a half for 23 km, 14.5 miles, the longest single trip I’ve done on a bike in 20 years or so. I had chosen the “shortest route” option which directed me through pleasant enough commuter villages and the odd woodland path, and culminated with a long and agreeable downhill coast along the avenue de Cortenbergh towards the EU institutions. The worst part was the supposedly state-funded bike paths which are not well maintained. An hour and a half, door to door, is often as long as my commute takes anyway if I am unlucky with my bus and/or train connections. If I could somehow gain access to a shower at work, I’d be inclined to try this a bit more often.
On the way back I chose the option for the “nicer” rather than “shorter” route; 25.5 km instead of 23. This took me along a mostly parallel set of paths and roads, but to the south of my earlier route. I did not like it as much – the morning run was definitely nicer. It started with much less bike-friendly Brussels suburbs (with the odd poorly-maintained bike path), and then – after actually rather a pleasant run alongside the lakes in the park at Tervuren – brought me to a km of narrow trail with huge stinging nettles on the left and a sharp drop into a stream on the right. The next bit appeared to be an overgrown grass and dirt track uphill in the middle of a field; I couldn’t quite believe it and backed up to the hard surface to try and get my bearings. That was a mistake and I eventually found myself in Neerijse, much to the south of Korbeek-Dijle where I had hoped to be. The detour added a good 5 km to my journey, which means I passed the 50 km mark somewhere along the way; probably the most I have cycled in one day in 25 years (since a tour of Donegal with my friends from school).
I have a long train journey today and tomorrow; I can see myself insisting on an aisle seat and doing a lot of walking up and down in the carriage as my limbs and especially my backside continue their protest against unaccustomed service. But I may repeat the experience before too long.
(.kmz files of the two routes for Google Earth here and here.)
World Cup – Round 2 weekend
I’m not going to bother with the FIFA rankings; if you really want them, they are recorded in previous polls. The highest rated team not to make it was the current holder, Italy; the lowest rated team that did make it was South Korea. 만세 !!!
All four results on the last day of the group stage were called correctly by
Wold Cup Day 15
Current (and increasingly irrelevant) FIFA rankings: Current FIFA rankings: 
Today’s matches included Slovakia’s extraordinary defeat of the title holders, leaving Italy languishing below New Zealand at the bottom of the group. Very few people predicted that, and of those even fewer predicted the results of the other matches correctly.
Hugo short stories
Finally, rounding up my reviews of the Hugo written fiction nominees, here is my rating of the candidates for Best Short Story, as before in reverse order of preference.
5) “Bridesicle”, by Will McIntosh, is a very icky story indeed where cryogenically preserved young women are periodically woken up from death by well-off but sexually frustrated men looking for dates. If (and it’s a big if) you can get past the ick factor, it’s an interesting idea, but Roger Zelazny did it better at least twice, and the execution squicked me out so badly that I rate it lower than the Mike Resnick story.
4) “Bride of Frankenstein”, by Mike Resnick, is not as crass and embarrassing as some of his other recent nominees but that is not saying much. Here we have the viewpoint of Baroness Frankenstein, irritated with her husband for frittering away her money on experiments in the basement. That’s the joke. Funny, eh?
3) “The Moment”, by Laurence Schoen, seems to be a story commemorating the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11 in the style of Olaf Stapledon (or the odder end of Arthur C. Clarke’s writings). Well meant, but in a piece this short it is quite difficult to do justice to the rise and fall of several distinct civiliations. And I did not see the point of the Marx Brothers reference.
2) “Non-Zero Probabilities” by N.K. Jemisin is an engaging tale about a New York where luck has become much more malleable and prone to human intervention. I found it charming but a bit insubstantial.
1) “Spar”, by Kij Johnson, is a short story of intense sexual frenzy between a woman and an alien marooned on a small spaceship. A mild ick factor but nothing like as bad as “Bridesicle”, and a much more original and better executed idea, which slightly faute de mieux gets my top vote. (And won the Nebula earlier this year.)
Previous Hugo roundups: Best Novel, Best Novella, Best Novelette, Best Graphic Story
Format irritation
I generally read e-books on my Blackberry, converting them from PDF, HTML or word processor format with Mobipocket’s free converter. As mentioned previously, this sometimes proves problematic with PDFs. I hit another such problem reading Peter Watts’ story, “The Island”, which got chopped about quite seriously by the process. One example – I encountered this jumble of words:
A red
The chimp has forgotten to care dwarf glowers dimly at the center of the Tank. named it DHF428, for reasons I’ve long since about.
Which it turns out originally read:
A red
dwarf glowers dimly at the center of the Tank. The chimp has
named it DHF428, for reasons I’ve long since forgotten to care
about.
I have no idea if this is due to the PDF taking up the text from the original wordprocessor incorrectly, or if it is Mobipocket choking on the conversion (which it manages OK nine times out of ten) to treat as sequential the last three words of the next three lines. It does show the wisdom of making such texts available in a variety of formats – kudos to Charlie Stross for actually providing “Palimpsest” in the .prc format that my gadget can read.