Back when I were a lad, you got only two points for winning a game in a group match, and one for a draw. From 1994 onwards, that was changed to three points for a win, and one for a draw, the intention being to give incentives to teams to try and score goals.

It occurred to me to wonder how much difference this rule has actually made in practice. There are not all that many mathematical permutations possible for how the group mathematics might end up for a group of four teams who each play a match against each of the other three. (3W, 2W.1D, 2W.1L, 1W.2D, 1W.1D.1L, 1W.2L, 3D, 2D.1L, 1D.2L, 3L and that’s it.

The only three cases where I can see the three point rule making a difference are

1. a team with two wins and a loss now beats a team with one win and two draws on points, rather than potentially lose to them on goal difference;
2. a team that has a modest win, a big loss and a draw will now beat a team with three draws on points, rather than lose to them on goal difference; and
3. (least likely) a team that has one big win and two closer losses
   1. will now beat a team with two draws and a loss on points, and
   2. could beat a team with three draws on goal difference rather than lose to them on points. (Impossible, as pointed out by in comments.)

But did that situation ever arise before 1994? And since 1994, has there ever been a situation where the old two point system would have led to a different outcome?

The answer is yes, once or twice. I count 81 four-team groups in World Cup tournaments from 1930 to 2006, of which precisely one pre-1990 group would have had a different ranking with three points for a win (and none as far as I can tell that would have been ranked differently since 1994 had there been only two points for a win):

Hungary had beaten Mexico 4-0, but lost 2-1 to Sweden; Wales drew 1-1 with Mexico and 0-0 with Sweden. In fact the tie in points was decided by a play-off between Wales and Hungary, which Wales won 2-1 (having drawn 1-1 with Hungary in the original group match). Under the three-point rule, Hungary (who were runners-up in the previous final) would have faced Brazil instead of Wales but would probably still have lost (as Wales did, 1-0).

However, even this case is marginal. In the rules that applied later, Hungary would have gone ahead of Wales due to having a better goal average (as used in 1962 and 1966) or goal difference (as used since 1970), even if two points rather than three were earned for a victory.

There have been seven uses of a three-team group in World Cup tournaments (three in 1930 and four in 1982), and while the new scoring means that a team which wins one game and loses another now beats a team with two draws, it’s not actually possible to have those results in a group of three teams where each plays the other two once.

There has been one other occasion when the new system would have made a difference. In 1986, the four best-performing third-placed teams from all six of the first round groups got through to the second round. 

Once again, Hungary would have benefited from the three-point system, this time to the disadvantage of Uruguay (who were beaten 1-0 by Argentina in their next match anyway).

Variations on this scheme were used also in 1990 and 1994 but, while the different point allocation would have changed the rankings slightly, it wouldn’t have made a difference to which teams went through.

Fans will complain with justification that the three point rule hasn’t made much appreciable difference to the number of goals scored per match. It is a bit surprising, however, to find that it would have made so little difference to the results of past tournaments.

Someone pointed out in a locked entry that the same day that Julia Gillard slightly unexpectedly became prime minister of Australia, Iveta Radičová has been asked to form the next government of Slovakia. This is two days after Mari Kiviniemi took up her position as prime minister of Finland.

Oddly enough this isn’t the first time that two women have become prime ministers in different countries simultaneously: it was 17 years ago tomorrow, 25 June 1993, that Tansu Çiller and Kim Campbell became the first women prime ministers of Turkey and Canada. (And strictly speaking Radičová doesn’t formally take up office until she gets parliamentary approval.)

Apologies – I failed to crosspost the poll to yesterday and instead posted it here twice. This would explain why there were only 40 responses rather than the usual 60 or 70.

Current FIFA rankings: Netherlands 4th, Italy 5th, Cameroon 19th, Paraguay 31st, Slovakia 34th, Denmark 36th, Japan 45th, New Zealand 78th

Once again only one person got all four of today’s matches, and on this occasion it was – congratulations! especially on forecasting the Australia win which was very much a minority opinion.

Current FIFA rankings (looking increasingly irrelevant): Germany 6th, England 8th, USA 14th, Serbia 15th, Australia 20th, Slovenia 25th, Algeria 30th, Ghana 32nd

Hearty congratulations to , the only person to call all four of today’s matches correctly. I certainly was not bold enough to vote my hopes rather than my fears and predict the South African win.

Current FIFA rankings (looking increasingly irrelevant): Germany 6th, England 8th, USA 14th, Serbia 15th, Australia 20th, Slovenia 25th, Algeria 30th, Ghana 32nd

Hearty congratulations to , the only person to call all four of today’s matches correctly. I certainly was not bold enough to vote my hopes rather than my fears and predict the South African win.

I’ve written up the other three novella nominees in separate entries, as is my usual practice with books, and now come to the final two.

“Palimpsest”, by Charles Stross, didn’t really grab me I’m afraid. It is a tale of time police and overlapping universes and histories, broken up by some reflections on the evolution of the solar system presented in rather odd powerpoint format. I wasn’t really convinced either by the astronomy or the mathematics of deep time, and they appeared to be the point of the story.

On the other hand, the story does get my approval for being the only one presented to Hugo voters in a format that my handheld can read without a conversion process.

“Act One”, by Nancy Kress (PDF), appealed to me slightly more, dealing with disability and genetically altered children, close eough to my personal situation to read it with keen interest. I liked a lot of aspects of the setting, including the characters with plenty of empathy (ie ability to understand other people's feelings) who were none the less really unpleasant people. While it engaged my sympathy, I'm marking it down the list for two reasons: first, it really is very close in subject matter to her much earlier Hugo and Nebula winning “Beggars in Spain”, and doesn’t move us along much from there; and second, I felt that the authorities behaved either very stupidly or very intelligently depending on what the plot required at the time.

So my final ranking, rather to my surprise as it doesn’t much reflect my rating of these authors’ œuvres taken as a whole, is:

1. The God Engines, by John Scalzi
2. “Vishnu at the Cat Circus”, by Ian McDonald
3. Shambling Towards Hiroshima, by James Morrow
4. The Women of Nell Gwynne’s, by Kage Baker
5. “Act One”, by Nancy Kress
6. “Palimpsest”, by Charles Stross

Previous Hugo roundups: Best Novel, Best Graphic Story.

Current FIFA rankings: Argentina 7th, France 9th, Greece 13th, Uruguay 16th, Mexico 17th, Nigeria 21st, South Korea 47th, South Africa 83rd (but with home advantage for what that is worth).

A record 14 people called all three of today’s matches correctly. Congratulations to , , , , , , , , , , , , and .

Current FIFA rankings: Spain 2nd, Portugal 3rd, Chile 18th, Switzerland 24th, Honduras 38th, North Korea 105th

One big surprise in today’s results, one less surprising and one very much as expected. , , and all got three out of three.

I have got a third of the way through this and still don’t know what is going on, and have forgotten who the characters are, despite having read the two previous books in the series, so I’m putting it away.

I rated the previous volume in this series last in my Hugo voting last year, as did the voters, despite it being the only nominee that was made available to all as part of the Hugo voters package. This year all five nominees are available, though I’d already bought hard copies of the three that have been published in dead-tree format, and I am still putting Schlock Mercenary last. Longshoreman of the Apocalypse made slightly more sense than The Body Politic, but that’s not saying much, and I still found it not very funny; I guess I know too much about military escorts for humanitarian aid for a story based on the humorous ways people can get killed horribly in such an enterprise to appeal to me, and also the eponymous longshoreman turns out to be an anthropomorphic robot which, though not especially cute, like to be called Lota – it’s an acronym, see? – and so pushes one of my buttons.

My Hugo votes in the Best Graphic Story category:

1. Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader? by Neil Gaiman – will surely win by a country mile
2. Agatha Heterodyne and the Heirs of the Storm, by Kaja and Phil Foglio
3. Captain Britain and MI13: Vampire State, by Paul Cornell
4. Fables vol 12: The Dark Ages, by Bill Willingham
5. Schlock Mercenary: Longshoreman of the Apocalypse, by Howard Tayler

I’ve finally caught up with the current run of Big Finish audio plays, and have resolved that in future I’m going to do them individually as I listen to them, as I do with books. In the past I had been writing them up in groups, as much as anything so as not to spam readers who were less interested in Doctor Who; but I think that those who were bored by that sort have thing have already stopped reading me, so I am going to suit my own convenience in future. Twelve plays here, and I’m going to write them up in Who continuity order rather than in the order of release, the order I listened to them, or my ranking in terms of quality.

Andy Lane’s The Mahogany Murderers was my favourite Big Finish release of the whole of last year. Part of the Companion Chronicles sequence, which in theory bring back regulars from the first four Doctors to tell the stories of hitherto unheard adventures, it broke new ground in several ways: Henry Jago (as played by Christopher Benjamin) and Professor Litefoot (as played by Trevor Baxter) were never regular characters, but appeared only in the Victorian Sherlock Holmes pastiche The Talons of Weng-ChiangThe Spirit Trap).

So I gladly invested in the four new Jago and Litefoot plays from Big Finish (download or CD), even before I spotted that Big Finish had put some of their best writers on the case. And they are well worth it: The Bloodless Soldier by Justin Richards has werewolves, The Bellova Devil by Alan Barnes has Bulgarian vampires and a sinister London club, The Spirit Trap by Jonathan Morris has table-tapping and parallel dimensions, and The Similarity Engine, by Andy Lane who brought them back in The Mahogany Murderers, reprises the villainous Doctor Tulp (and signals that the next series is on its way). As Steve Mollman has pointed out, the plots aren’t always totally coherent but the super performances of Benjamin and Baxter as the central characters, and of pretty much everyone else, make these a joy to listen to.

Unfortunately I can’t work up the same enthusiasm for The Time Vampire, by Nigel Fairs, which brings back Leela and (for the first time in a Companion Chronicle) K-9 in the last story of a trilogy whose first two elements are The Catalyst and Empathy Games. I didn’t really understand what was going on in The Time Vampire, though I liked it more than this reviewer did (again, I’m in agreement with Steve Mollmann), and will go back and listen to it again after I’ve finished my current revisiting of the Big Finish Gallifrey series which included Leel, both K-9s and both Romanas. (Apparently there’s more of that on the way too.) It’s a shame because Leela is one of my favourite TV companions, and does well both in spinoff novels and in the Gallifrey audios, but her Companion Chronicles have been less memorable.

Big Finish have been doing a run of stories with Colin Baker as the Sixth Doctor and Nicola Bryant as Peri Brown, starting with those that were commissioned for the original Season 23 before it was decided to do the Trial of a Time Lord storyline, and then reaching out into basically every available Sixth Doctor idea that had once crossed John Nathan-Turner’s desk and was still retrievable. Colin Baker is gloating a bit because apparently this combined with the latest regular BF releases (see below) now means that he has starred in more Doctor Who stories, if you combine audio and TV, than Tom Baker or anyone else. Most of these Lost Stories have been about as good as the slightly better televised stories of the era (though the first, Mission to Magnus, is roughly as bad as The Twin Dilemma, the first Sixth Doctor story, which is regarded by many [including me] as the nadir of Old Who). These stories are much less moored in Who continuity than most Big Finish productions are, which reflects the difference in expectations between the mid-1980s Who viewer and the Big Finish’s audio marketplace of today.

Of the last three, the first in order, Point of Entry, is by Barbara Clegg (who wrote the surreal and lush Fifth Doctor TV story Enlightenment) and has Christopher Marlowe, Aztec relics, a Spanish spy and astral travelling. Unfortunately it also has no regard for astronomical realities and not a lot of coherence, but it’s a while before you work that out, probably because Clegg’s outline was developed and implemented by Marc Platt who has yet to find a middle ground between genius and tedium.

The Song of Megaptera, by Pat Mills, features a giant space whale and has certain similarities to this year’s Eleventh Doctor story, The Beast Below. It was originally proposed as a Fourth Doctor comic strip (Mills wrote the early great strips for Doctor Who Magazine as well as many other classic comics) and I felt would still have worked better as such; the story is OK but two of the guest cast, playing the captain and his first officer, really sound as if they are under sedation – bringing in moderately well known actors is only really successful if they can do audio (having said which, Susan Brown is excellent as the Chief Engineer).

Finally, Ingrid Pitt, better known as an actress who appeared twice in Old Who (in The Time Monster and Warriors from the Deep), also wrote a story called The Macros (plural of “Macro”, ie inhabitants of the planet Macron) which slightly oddly bolts together some well-researched material on the Philadephia Experiment with a rather standard parallel-universe plot; again there is a good female guest actor, this time Linda Marlowe as Marcon’s ruler Osloo, but I found myself distracted by my confusion between the (fictional) professor Tessler and the (historical) professor Tesla.

None of these three is as good as the two best in this series (Leviathan and Paradise 5, reviewed here and here) but none is embarrassingly bad either.

The main run of Big Finish audios has just concluded a Sixth Doctor mini-series, which began in City of Spires (reviewed here) with the Doctor encountering an aged Jamie McCrimmon in a very weird alternate Scotland. This plotline continued with a Companion Chronicle, Night’s Black Agents by Marty Ross, starring Fraser Hines as Jamie telling the story of an encounter with a standard baddie in a standard haunted castle; really very skippable, and I dislike the Companion Chronicles veering from their original intention of covering the first four Doctors. But we’re back in gear again with the next story, The Wreck of the Titan by Barnaby Edwards, which starts off on the Titanic, then abruptly shifts to the prescient novella of 1898, and then cuts to yet further stuff of legend and literature, setting up of course for a grand cliffhanger at the end. Finally Legend of the Cybermen by Mike Maddox brings back Zoe Heriot as well as Jamie, in a rather brilliant climax that steps outside the usual narrative (the scene set in the Big Finish studios was a particular touch of genius) and kept me guessing all the way through; I really can’t say more than that without spoilers, but let’s just say that if you know the best known of the Jamie/Zoe/Second Doctor stories you will love this one.

Finally, Solitaire by John Dorney brings back two interesting Who figures – Charley Pollard, a Big Finish companion created for their Eighth Doctor audios (and later getting a second run with the Sixth Doctor) and the Celestial Toymaker, voiced here by David Bailie, who was Dask in The Robots of Death but also did the Toymaker in Big Finish’s resurrection of The Nightmare Fair earlier this year. I thought this was a brilliant two-hander, and I think it could be appreciarted even by Who fans with only a vague idea of Charley and/or the Toymaker; Charley is trapped in a peculiar toyshop and must work out what she is doing there, and indeed who she is. Continuity-wise it is set in her early days, before any later adventures in parallel universes etc, and is all the better for that simplicity. Great fun. I objected earlier to Companion Chronicles which do not feature the first four Doctors but I’ll make an exception for this one.

In summary, the Jago and Litefoot plays are excellent and would be entirely accessible for listeners who know nothing of Doctor Who (though it would probably help if they listened to The Mahogany Murderers first; but it is also equally excellent and equally accessible). The Time Vampire requires detailed knowledge of Leela’s story as seen on TV and then heard in The Catalyst, and is even then not very penetrable. The three Lost Stories featuring Colin Baker’s Sixth Doctor are OK but not essential. Night’s Black Agents is skippable but The Wreck of the Titan and Legend of the Cybermen are an excellent homage to Patrick Troughton’s last season. And Solitaire is great as long as you at least know who the two main characters are.

I do a fair bit of recruiting – hiring interns two or three times a year, and occasional involvement in more senior hires – and a couple of thoughts came together for me this week.

First of all, if you don’t get the job you applied for, it is always worth asking for feedback as to why your application was unsuccessful. You may or may not get a response, but you lose nothing by making the request, and may get some useful insights.

I get more requests from candidates who were not shortlisted, asking to know why they weren’t, than I do from those who were interviewed, wondering why they weren’t hired. Of course, the former category of candidates vastly outnumber the latter, but I’m surprised that so few of the latter do get back to me. I suppose that if you’ve been interviewed and didn’t get the job you tend to have a good idea why not, and also once you’ve had that face to face interaction with the potential employer it is more difficult to confront them with a request to justify their decision not to hire you (certainly both of these factors have affected me in my own past unsuccessful applications). It’s still worth asking though.

I must say that from the other side of the table, the most frequent reason for rejecting a candidate who has been shortlisted is simply that someone else interviewed better on the day. When I first started interviewing job applicants it was in my capacity as one of the governors of the Linen Hall Library in Belfast, and under Northern Ireland’s fair employment legislation we had to be pretty systematic: the interviewing panel agreed five questions to ask, rated each candidate’s response to each question, added up the scores we had given them at the end and had to submit a detailed written justification if recommending anyone other than the candidate who got top marks. It gave me, I hope, good habits which I like to think I have stuck to since.

“Another candidate interviewed better on the day” isn’t especially helpful feedback, I admit. Usually you can construct a further justification based on skills and experience – and the ability to talk about them in the interview – but the personality factor (“can I really bear to share the workplace with this person?”) is important too, and also intangible. Occasionally one gets a severely negative vibe – “this person is clearly a psychopath, do not hire them” – in which case I pray that they won’t ask for feedback. More often the problem is choosing between two or more enthusiastic and personable candidates, and the justfication can be difficult, but I think it’s good for employers to be asked for that justification from time to time.

It’s usually much easier to explain why candidates didn’t make the shortlist. I tend to delegate that decision, but am always happy to deal with requests for feedback (and have never felt that the person screening CV’s for me made the wrong call). Sometimes it is simply that the skills and experience are just not what I am looking for. (To which some enthusiastic but unskilled candidates protest, “but I am willing to learn on the job!” To which I reply, “I have another 20 candidates here who would not have to learn on the job!”)

Even more often, though, it is simply that the covering letter and CV do not pass the 20 second test of engaging the interest of the person scanning a hundred job applications to boil them down to a shortlist of five or ten. These are actually much the easiest to give feedback on, and the biggest piece of advice is usually the same: emphasise the bits of your career which make this job application look like an obvious next step (and if there are no such bits of your career, maybe that should give you pause for thought).

There are other points of detail which do crop up fairly often. If your university dissertation was relevant, give some details. If you’re a graduate, don’t bore me with details of your high school career (unless they are actually relevant). Don’t make stupid mistakes in listing your hobbies. Above all, don’t lie.

Of course, I’m writing here about applications for jobs which have been advertised and go through a shortlisting and interviewing process, and I have to admit that it is more than thirteen years and three or four jobs ago since I last successfully did this from the other side. (Two of my last four job changes involved me persuading a new employer to hire me for a position that was envisaged but had not been advertised; I have also moved to a different position with the same employer, and been recruited out of the blue for a position that I had seen advertised but hadn’t actually applied for.) But a lot of this also applies when you are trying to get a job through other mechanisms. In particular asking for feedback on an unsuccessful application does no harm and, particularly perhaps if it’s not a standard shortlist/interview/decision process, can help to give you closure.

Well, it has happened: I have finally read a John Scalzi story that I actually liked. The God Engines is a very tight story about a future spacefaring humanity which relies on harnessing the powers of captive gods for spaceflight; there are a number of very good set-pieces as Ean Tephe, the central character, deals with shipboard crises, confronts his own ecclesiastical hierarchy, takes on a colonial mission, and finally particiaptes in a battle where the stakes are much larger than he at first realises. There are strong elements of horror and some nasty violence; and while Scalzi doesn’t turn it into a polemic on religion, he does pick around the edges of religious belief and obediance in a way that I found satisfying rather than undergraduate. My favourite of the Hugo-nominated novellas so far, though I still have Nancy Kress and Charlie Stross to go.

Not Scalzi’s fault at all, but I had some difficulties with reading the story. Over the years I have read dozens of e-books by converting them from PDF to Mobipocket format and reading them on my handheld (the good ol’ Palm T|X in the old days, more recently the Blackberry). For the first time I can remember, the capitalisation in The God Engines was screwed up, the two main characters appearing as “ean tephe” and “croj andso” rather than “Ean Tephe” and “Croj Andso” and the first letters of sentences often appearing in lower case too. (There were other glitches too: one sentence in the Mobipocket version, split by a page break in the original, reads “They would reach for the coins with one hand and throw trash and rotten John Scalzi things at the passing god with the other, shouting as they did so.”) Presumably the publisher (or possibly the writer) thought they were doing something clever with the font setup.

Current FIFA rankings: Brazil 1st, Italy 5th, Côte d’Ivoire 27th, Paraguay 31st, Slovakia 34th, New Zealand 78th

So Cameroon are the first team to be eliminated, and the Netherlands the first to qualify for the second round. Congrats to , , and on calling all three of today’s matches correctly!

I’ve just finished rewatching the 1970 season of Doctor Who (my thoughts on it will be posted on Tuesday when I’ve finished Terror of the Autons) and so the time was right to dig out the PDF of the 1971 Doctor Who annual from the Inferno DVD set. I must say I found this to be the best written, and one of the best illustrated, of the annuals so far. Somehow tying the format down to Earth, with the threesome of Brigadier, Liz and Doctor, must have prevented the writer(s) from turning in naff space opera tales. The stories (eight in total, no comic strip this time) are a tad derivative of the televised Season Seven but basically OK and sometimes better than OK; the Doctor/Brigadier relationship is nicely done (though poor Liz is a bit screamy). One of the stories (“The Ghosts of Grestonspey”) appears to have had a couple of final paragraphs omitted (on page 41), but it’s clear what is going to happen and if it was done to make more space for the artwork that was probably a good call. (See also Finn Clark’s review, which says the same I do here but at greater length.) Apparently there was no annual the following year – the year when Jo, the Master and Mike Yates were introduced – so it’ll be a couple of months before I get to the next one.

Very funny if you know the background.

Current FIFA rankings: Netherlands 4th, Cameroon 19th, Australia 20th, Ghana 32nd, Denmark 36th, Japan 45th

Another day of unexpected results – while over a third of us saw the US-Slovenia draw, the England-Algeria draw was predicted by only 8 out of 77 who replied to yesterday’s poll, and Serbia’s victory by only 5. Nobody got all three results right; indeed nobody got both of the surprise results. Of those who did predict the US-Slovenia draw, and also called the England-Algeria result but (like most of us) thought that Germany should win; and spotted the Serbia win but also expected it to be accompanied by victory for Algeria.

Current FIFA rankings: Germany 6th, England 8th, USA 14th, Serbia 15th, Slovenia 25th, Algeria 30th

Congrats to , and on calling all three matches today – neither Greece nor Mexico were widely fancied as winners of their matches (though the vast majority of people did expect Argentina to beat South Korea).

I believe that it is still theoretically possible for any of the eight teams in Groups A and B to qualify for the next round; though we are now in the uncomfortable situation that if Uruguay and Mexico draw they both go through no matter what happens between France and South Africa (and yes, I remember 1982).

The first in a semi-regular series of posts on who is at today’s European summit (which as usual is screwing up traffic and public transport – apart from trains, thank heavens – around my office), listed in order of how long they have been in office. Those in italics are not full members (indeed Buzek just gets to say hello at the start of the meeting and then normally has to leave the room).

Jean-Claude Juncker (born 1954), Prime Minister of Luxembourg  since 20 January 1995 (EPP)
Jan Peter Balkenende (born 1956), Prime Minister of the Netherlands since 22 July 2002 (EPP) – has just lost election so won’t be back next time
Matti Vanhanen (born 1955), Prime Minister of Finland since 24 June 2003 (ELDR) – resigns effective tomorrow
José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero (born 1960) Prime Minister of Spain since 17 April 2004 (PES) 
Lawrence Gonzi (born 1953) Prime Minister of Malta since 1 May 2004 (EPP) 
José Manuel Barroso (Portuguese, born 1956) President of the European Commission  since 23 November 2004 (EPP)
José Sócrates (born 1957) Prime Minister of Portugal since 12 March 2005 (PES)
Andrus Ansip (born 1956) Prime Minister of Estonia since 12 April 2005 (ELDR)
Angela Merkel (born 1954) Chancellor of Germany since 22 November 2005 (EPP)
Robert Fico (born 1964) Prime Minister of Slovakia since 4 July 2006 (PES) – did badly in last weekend’s election and probably won’t be back
Fredrik Reinfeldt (born 1965) Prime Minister of Sweden since 6 October 2006 (EPP)
Nicolas Sarkozy (born 1955) President of France  since 16 May 2007 (EPP)
Donald Tusk (born 1957) Prime Minister of Poland since 16 November 2007 (EPP) 
Dimitris Christofias (born 1946) President of [Greek] Cyprus since 28 February 2008 (PEL)
Brian Cowen (born 1960) Taoiseach since 07 May 2008 (ELDR)
Silvio Berlusconi (born 1936) Prime Minister of Italy since 8 May 2008 (EPP) – previously PM 1994-95 and 2001-06
Borut Pahor (born 1963) Prime Minister of Slovenia since 21 November 2008 (PES)
Werner Faymann (born 1960) Chancellor of Austria since 02 December 2008 (PES)
Andrius Kubilius (born 1956) Prime Minister of Lithuania since 09 December 2008 (EPP) – previously PM in 1999-2000, before Lithuania joined the EU
Emil Boc (born 1966) Prime Minister of Romania since 22 December 2008 (EPP)
Valdis Dombrovskis (born 1971) Prime Minister of Latvia since 12 March 2009 (EPP)
Lars Løkke Rasmussen (born 1964) Prime Minister of Denmark since 05 April 2009 (ELDR)
Jan Fischer (born 1951) Prime Minister of the Czech Republic since 8 May 2009 (Independent) – was a technocrat leading government of experts and will certainly be replaced after last week’s elections
Jerzy Buzek (Polish, born 1940) President of the European Parliament since 14 July 2009 (EPP)
Boyko Borisov (born 1959) Prime Minister of Bulgaria since 27 July 2009 (EPP)
George Papandreou (born 1952) Prime Minister of Greece since 06 October 2009 (PES)
Yves Leterme (born 1960) Prime Minister of Belgium since 25 November 2009 (EPP) – previously PM in 2008; has just had an appalling election result but may take a while to agree his replacement
Herman van Rompuy (Belgian, born 1947) President of the European Council since 01 December 2009  (EPP)
David Cameron (born 1966) Prime Minister of United Kingdom since 11 May 2010 (ECR)
Viktor Orbán (born 1963) Prime Minister of Hungary since 29 May 2010 (EPP) – previously PM 1998-2002, before Hungary joined the EU

Jean-Claude Juncker has been in power for longer than the combined terms of his second and third longest serving colleagues, Jan Peter Balkenende and Matti Vanhanen – both of whom are on their way out, while he remains pretty secure.

14 of the 27 heads of state and government, and the presidents of all three EU institutions, are in the European People’s Party. (Though Leterme and Balkenende are on their way out.) 6 (including Fico, who is also on his way out) are in the Party of European Socialists. 4 (including Vanhanen who will be replaced by a party colleague) are Liberals. Politically isolated are Fischer (independent), Christofias (Communist) and Cameron (Tory).

The only woman is Angela Merkel, though the new Finnish PM who takes over tomorrow will improve that score.

The average year of birth is 1956, the year that European Commission President Barroso was born, with 18 of the 30 born between 1951 and 1960 inclusive. 

Silvio Berlusconi is the only leader born before the second world war. His oldest child is older than the Romanian, British and Latvian prime ministers. I am still younger than all of them except the Latvian PM and the new Finnish PM who takes over tomorrow.

To be continued next time…

Rather fortuitously I read this novel while also working through Gibbon’s chapters in The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire on Julian the Apostate, the mid-fourth century Roman emperor who tried to reverse his uncle’s adoption of Christianity and failed. (See here, here, here and here.) Julian Comstock, nephew of the 22nd century president of a post-apocalypse America, is modelled a bit on his namesake of 1800 years earlier, though there are some significant differences of detail – Julian Comstock is not promoted to junior co-ruler by his uncle, he is not proclaimed emperor by his own troops, he doen’t have to march across a disputed continent to claim the throne, his uncle doesn’t conveniently die of natural causes, Julian doesn’t then take up arms against the traditional enemy to the East, and then doesn’t die in battle. It should also be added that the real Julian the Apostate was a fervent pagan believer rather than an atheist, was never forced to enlist in the army under a false name, and was a writer of polemics and satires – sometimes self-deprecating – but certainly could not have written a musical screenplay about the life of Charles Darwin.

Still, it’s interesting to compare the two narratives – Gibbon on Julian the Apostate, Wilson on Julian Comstock – because in the end both are about rulers who acquire imperial office through family relationships and military success, and then try to reverse the evangelical Christian regime established by their predecessors. (I haven’t read Gore Vidal’s novel Julian, which may be a more direct source than Gibbon for Wilson). There isn’t a lot of suspense in either case; we have a pretty good idea how things are going to turn out. The reader’s interest in both stories is engaged by the incidental details of the plot and the way in which the story is told.

As to the details, both writers are covering a world we barely recognise. Gibbon has Julian proclaimed Emperor in the great hall of the Roman baths in Paris, which we can still see today. Wilson has the presidential residence located in New York’s Central Park. Wilson of course has the harder task here, as he is inventing a setting rather than retrieving it from historical accounts, and there are only three groups of settings described in much detail – the small village where Julian and the narrator grow up, the battlefields of Canada, and New York when Julian arrives as ruler. Wilson’s future America has suffered economic and military catastrophe, and seems not to have many non-white people in it (though it does have invading Europeans and persecuted Jews). For Gibbon’s past Roman Empire, the big catastrophe is yet to come, though he sees his Julian as the last, lost hope of reversing the Decline and Fall. Each story has a central military set-piece, the army of the West’s march from Gaul to the middle Danube and the battle of Goose Bay (in both cases prepared by the central character’s earlier military successes) and Wilson has the edge over Gibbon here as he can make up an eyewitness account rather than try to analyse other people’s reports.

The most memorable feature of both stories is the way that they are told. The delight of reading Gibbon is that he thinks he is smarter than the reader, and nonchalantly shows it at every stage. Wilson’s narrator, Adam Hazzard, is probably not as clever as the reader, and probably not as good a novelist as he thinks he is; luckliy for us, both the woman he falls in love with and his friends Julian and Sam are smarter than he is, and this drives the book’s humourous side. As for the central character, though, I found Gibbon’s Julian more interesting and convincing than Wilson’s. (NB that the author in both cases is sympathetic to the project of rolling back Christianity, though Gibbon disapproves of the details of the attempted restoration of pagan superstition and Wilson’s narrator isn’t as sure of the virtues of the project in the first place.) The similarity of background and basic plot is there; but Wilson’s Julian, once he gains power, starts to become dictatorial while also writing a screenplay about his hero, Darwin; Gibbon’s Julian as emperor seems much more consistent in character with his behaviour before gaining power (including his continued literary output).

A final point on languages. Gibbon can nonchalantly throw in extended footnotes in Latin (in fairness, he doesn’t do this often) in the expectation that the reader of 1781 will be able to follow the argument without too much difficulty. Wilson has the odd phrase in French (mostly from the narrator’s Canadian lover) and most strikingly a letter in Dutch (p. 189) from an enemy soldier, killed in Canada, to his lover; I wonder how many readers will follow it (no translation is given) and get the rather grim joke about the dog on the next page?

Well, that concludes my reading of this year’s nominees for the Hugo Award for Best Novel. Without much hesitation, my final ranking is:

1. Palimpsest
2. The City & The City
3. The Windup Girl
4. Julian Comstock
5. Boneshaker
6. Wake

Current FIFA rankings: Argentina 7th, France 9th, Greece 13th, Mexico 17th, Nigeria 21st, South Korea 47th.

Congrats to and for forecasting today’s results – very few people thought Switzerland could do it, certainly the most surprising result so far (at least going by the series of polls I have been posting).

I bought this three years ago, ages before I had my plan of reading Gibbon from start to finish, but at a time when I had vague thoughts of another project which in the end I gave up on before I started – reading books by winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature. One of the reasons I gave up, of course, was that in its earliest phase the prize often went to worthy but unexciting writers. The second laureate, after French poet Sully Prudhomme, was German historian Theodor Mommsen, and his History of Rome was particularly cited by the committee. The Provinces of the Roman Empire, from Caesar to Diocletian was one of the later volumes in Mommsen’s series (or possibly two, depending how you count them), surveying everywhere other than central and southern Italy, starting with northern Italy (including the Adriatic) and then going clockwise around the borders starting with Spain and ending with Mauretania (modern Morocco).

One of my increasing frustrations with Gibbon (as chronicled on ) is his habitual haziness about the geography of places that don’t interest him, which is basically everywhere outside the very narrow triangle connecting Rome, Paris and London (by my reckoning Lausanne is just on the longest edge of the three). Mommsen totally reverses this, with a detailed discussion of the niceties of local administration from Scotland to Mesopotamia. I hadn’t really appreciated how varied the arrangements were between client kingdoms / statelets and formal provinces. Another point that is clear from Mommsen, but denied by Gibbon in the face of the evidence, is that the Empire’s boundaries were actually fairly fluid where geography allowed; central Germany, lowland Scotland, Dacia, and the eastern frontier of Mesopotamia and Armenia all slipped in and out of Roman control over the years. (In fairness, Gibbon rules out the earlier and more volatile half of Mommsen’s time period by starting in the mid-second century, but I think his line that the borders were stable is still simply incorrect.)

Mommsen is a bit romantic about the Germans; gives a great account of Trajan’s column; is utterly fascinated by the Jews (apparently he was an anti-Semite as regards contemporary public policy in Germany, but it doesn’t really come across in his historical analysis – see comment from below), very good on Palmyra, Persia and Ethiopia; very bigoted on Africa (ie Tunisia/Algeria) and Syria. The English translation did not strike me as having the excellent fluency of style attributed to the German original, let alone being anywhere near a match for Gibbon. But it filled in a lot of gaps in my knowledge, and I’m a little regretful that I didn’t grind through this before starting The Decline and Fall.

Newton Emerson’s satirical online newsletter brightened up the early Noughties in Northern Irish politics (previously celebrated on this blog here, here and here). It irritated the heck out of some, to the point that the Andersonstown News, that bastion of free speech and unbiased enquiry, got him sacked from his job for updating his website at work. The book basically pulls together, somewhat edited, his articles from March 2001 to 2004, a period of political stagnation; it’s all somewhat dated now, and his casual sexism was not even funny then, but his sæva indignatio at the sectarianism and hypocrisy of all sides in Northern Irish politics is still refreshing and justified. (Full disclosure: I was myself mildly and indirectly targeted by Emerson back in November 2003.) The book is a bit of a curio now but still has plenty of enjoyable moments.

The British and Irish media are full of the Bloody Sunday report, and justifiably so. We have witnessed the extraordinary sight of a Conservative Prime Minister standing at the despatch box and admitting that British soldiers killed 13 unarmed civilians in Derry on 30 January 1972. I haven’t had a chance to read more than the summary and skim one chapter of Lord Saville’s report, but it is thorough and forensic: the Paras shot without justification, and lied thoroughly, and had the full backing of the state.

The House of Commons was the setting for the statement yesterday. It was one of many arms of the state that failed in 1972. Hansard’s report of the debate the day after records the refusal of the Speaker to allow the one member actually present on the day to give her account. It doesn’t record – but the Guardian did – her physically taking out her frustration on the Home Secretary of the day (of whom the Guardian’s description as “placid” should be taken as a euphemism for “drunk”). I would not normally use this adjective of her, but her behaviour was rather mild under the circumstances.

The British state is not good at holding its own agents to account when they use deadly force. (Back in the mid-90s I got into some controversy when defending the continued imprisonment of another Para who had been convicted of murdering a civilian; since he was subsequently acquitted on appeal, I should not comment further on that particular case.) We shouldn’t be under any illusions that the Saville Report will lead to justice, but at least it has produced truth.

Current FIFA rankings: Spain 2nd, Uruguay 16th, Chile 18th, Switzerland 24th, Honduras 38th, South Africa 83rd (but with home advantage).

Congratulations to and for calling all three of yesterday’s matches. Congratulations even more to Ji Yun-Nam and Winston Reid for their last-minute goals yesterday!

Current FIFA rankings: Brazil 1st, Portugal 3rd, Côte d’Ivoire 26th, Slovakia 34th, New Zealand 78th, North Korea 105th; the last match of the day pits the highest-rated team in the contest against the lowest-rated team in the contest.

Not a great start for the defending champions, was it? Congratulations to , and for calling all three of today’s matches correctly.

Current FIFA rankings: Netherlands 4th, Italy 5th, Cameroon 19th, Paraguay 31st, Denmark 36th, Japan 45th

Congrats to , , , , and on calling all three of today’s matches correctly. I must say it’s nice to have three clear results and no draws.

I should add that I am cross-posting these polls to and may even shift to posting the polls there and just a link here in due course.

A fairly standard Ten / Martha adventure set in a near-future world where a small human colony is dealing with unseen monsters and cute little otter-like creatures. Interesting because Martha is knocked out for a chunk of the narrative, allowing the companion role to be distributed among several other characters. It’s getting increasingly odd to read books with David Tennant’s manic cheeky chappie at the same time as watching Matt Smith’s alien young fogey (must try not doing two books and new episode in the same weekend too often).