I am going to read through the Eighth Doctor Adventures, though it will take me several years at a rate of one a month or so. Since I have already read Terrance Dicks’ The Eight Doctors, Vampire Science is the next in line. I winced at first at the depiction of California vampires, so familiar from Buffy, who actually gets referenced (presumably meaning the Kirsty Swanson film rather than the TV series which started only a few weeks before the book was published in 1997). But actually the book takes the vampire mythology in a couple of interesting directions, one of which (the vampire nest squabbling about strategy) was later followed by Buffy, but others (the vampire intellectual researching what makes them vampires, the possibility of turning in reverse) which were new to me. With all of this, the book doesn’t particularly tie into the vampire lore of the Whoniverse (ie Terrance Dicks’ State of Decay and Blood Harvest, and Paul Cornell’s Goth Opera). I also expected a bit more to be made of the San Francisco setting, given its relevance to the Eighth Doctor’s only on-screen appearance (according to the lore, Grace Holloway was originally intended to be in the book but they couldn’t get clearance). The book does however do quite a lot for the development of the Eighth Doctor as a character – he gives the vampires several chances for redemption – and his relationship with Sam (presented here as a companion of long standing rather than someone who tagged along at the end of the last book). There’s also some intriguing continuity with a Jonathan Blum story which apparently brought the Seventh Doctor into contact with the US branch of UNIT. Anyway, a decent start to this little project, and I shall keep going.

I don’t want to keep writing whiny entries about Belgacom, but while they keep failing to provide the promised service I need to vent somewhere.

The latest is that on Monday they cut the office phone and internet without warning (as it turns out, because I had refused to pay the reconnection charge for the last time they cut it). I paid up under protest, and they told me that the line would be back by the end of the day Monday.

Come Tuesday, no line. Called again. (In that simple phrase "called again" should be understood as ten minutes on hold, to be answered by someone who can’t deal with your problem and puts you on hold for another 20 minutes until the phone is answered by someone else who can’t deal with your problem.) Conclusion: internet connection at least was restored, phone and fax still out.

In the midst of last week’s problems I had phoned and emailed Belgacom’s official spokesman, Mr M*****, who had sent a suitably apologetic reply and promised to send my complaint on to the director of customer services. I raised Mr M***** again on Wednesday, and got a reply at last late that night (by which time I had left Belgium) from Mr C**** in Belgacom’s customer services, telling me that my line was now working again, and incidentally the correct number to call is 078 150036. He also agreed to refund the disputed payment.

On Thursday my long-suffering assistant discovered that the phone line is still down, and also that the 078 150036 number does not work either. I shall let my assistant tell the story of her day yesterday in her own words:

11:15 The Belgacom saga has nearly brought me to tears of frustration. I can’t understand Dutch well enough to navigate their menu (though I understand enough to get to the third level of the menu) but actually as I have tried every menu option and NONE has sent me to the correct person (each person subsequently sends me back to the menu page), I think the options are a bunch of bull. So I’m now back on the general help line, which will mean that I will then have to be transferred (if they’re capable of doing so today, as yesterday they weren’t) to the i-talk department and then they will probably tell me that everything is working on their side so it must be our side, which will require someone coming out to the office probably, meaning the saga will continue tomorrow…

11:24 After having no luck with the Dutch version of the I-talk number given to us by Mr C****, I again tried the number shown on the website page that Mr M***** sent us (080055700). After finally getting through, I asked to be directly connected to someone responsible for i-talk and was told that he could not do that but could write me a “ticket” for being called back by the relevant department in 30 minutes.

[Of course, nobody called her back from that department until much later, and by then she was on the phone to Belgacom again.]

16:03 I have HAD it with Belgacom: My last call was made at 15:23. I called the 0800 55 700 number, as it seems to be the only one in English. As I-Talk seems to be in a category of its own, I chose “all other Belgacom services” from the menu. T** answered; I specifically told him that my PHONE was not working and could he please transfer me to the department responsible for I-Talk. I also asked if he could make sure the person spoke English. He was accommodating. However, he sent me to the TELEVISION I-Talk department. From there, I was transferred again and the person I spoke to said he would check to see what the problem was and put me on hold. The next thing I know, I was connected to T** again!! He was baffled. He transferred me again (I asked him to please put me through to the CORRECT I-Talk department) and I was then connected to someone who said that there had been a lot of problems with I-Talk both today and yesterday but he would try to help. I was put on hold again and then after 10 minutes on hold, the line went dead!

Summary: T**-> I-Talk Television -> I-Talk Phone -> T** -> I-Talk Phone -> Dead line, total time wasted: 30 minutes

16:59 I got a call and was literally on the phone for 6 minutes. During these 6 minutes, Belgacom called and left a message, saying that they had been “trying since very long to reach [me]” (which is absolute bull). They left no contact name or number (just the general number that I have called at least 5 times today).

I nonetheless called this number again, got the customer service desk, was put on hold in order to be transferred and was then cut off AGAIN.

I am now on hold again.

17:32: After being on hold 10 minutes, I was again connected to the I-Talk phone department. The staff member said that there was no problem with our account from their side. I explained that as the phone was still not working, I disagreed. I asked if he could send a technician the next day. He replied that they wouldn’t be able to fit us in the next day but could send someone next week!  I opined that Mr M***** and Mr C**** would probably agree that someone should be sent the next day. He said he would have to transfer me to another department which could arrange for the technician to come. After waiting on hold for 10 minutes, a French-speaking woman answered. In broken French (she could not speak English of course), we confirmed that she was NOT the responsible department and she promised to transfer me to an English-speaking person who could help me. This time, a French-speaking man answered, though he could at least understand English. He informed me that I had been connected to the general French telephone customer service and he would have to transfer me to the I-Talk department.

Summary: English customer service -> I-Talk Phone -> French customer service -> French general phone service -> I-Talk (though at this point, I decided it was time to call it quits for the day). Total time wasted: 33 minutes 

Meanwhile I had received a text message asking me to call a particular number to set up a service appointment (which I cannot do since I am not in Belgium); and an email alert sent at 1730 saying that they had tried to reach my assistant on her mobile phone but been unsuccessful; could she call their general number again? (Interestingly this message was flagged as "Solved" which tells us that Belgacom assume the problem has been fixed if the customer does not call back and complain.)

Mr C**** sent me another email last night saying that the technical people have been told to contact my assistant in the morning and that he will follow it up personally. This morning’s message from my assistant:

Apparently there is a problem with our I-Talk platform, which only a technician can come out and fix (hmm, I seem to remember asking them to send a technician 24 hours ago…). However, this time, instead of transferring me to that department, the staff member I spoke to (should have gotten his name, darnit!) said that he would fill out the “ticket” and call me back when he had received confirmation.

But shortly after, a technician got through on the land line to the office, and I am glad to report that 96 hours later, my office phone finally actually works again!!!

But it really should not be like this; customers should not have to badger senior members of staff in order to get the service that we have paid for.

My problems are not unique. Just have a look at the latest Facebook updates which mention Belgacom. Or these blog entries by other people:

Jon Worth, 24 August:

I placed my order online on Tuesday last week and they promised a delivery of the equipment today. Nothing. So I called them.

Belgacom: “But sir, your account has not been opened?”
Me: “Sorry I don’t understand. I have made the order.”
Belgacom: “Yes, but the account has not been opened.”
Me (frustrated): “What does that mean? Is there something I need to do?”
Belgacom: “No, it’s that your account has not been opened.”
Me: “But my modem was supposed to be delivered today. And I urgently need the internet connection.”
Belgacom: “I’ll see what I can do.”

The woman then typed away on the other end of the phone, told me the modem would be delivered Wednesday and that the line would be opened Friday, 4 days later than I had previously been told. No apology, no explanation. And if I had not called to push the matter I wonder when anything would have been fixed!

Fons Tuinstra, 15 September:

End August I had to look for a telecom and internet provider in Belgium. Because that is mostly packaged in a deal with TV, it needed some more study, but I initially decided to deal with Belgacom, the former state-owned telecom company. Our first appointment for the installation was three weeks later. Panic started to emerge, since my internet connection would be gone the next week.

My whole business and a big part of my social activities had moved online, I had – hail Google – retired most of the Microsoft software and did all my writing online. Without a connection I could not keep up with my speakers’deals and miss potential lucrative assignments. For my work on the WageIndicator, I had to deal with online operations in 45 countries. Without an internet connection I could as well retire myself too. Customer service at Belgacom seemed to deal nicely with this despaired customer and promised to speed up the process. Installation was moved and it looked that I would only be offline for a few days and I started to look for local wifi-connection.

At the agreed day – we had to stay at home, since they could not give a time – an engineer arrived to fix a phone line. That was the only thing we still had and we started to make a set of annoyed calls to the Belgacom customer service. After much switching, talking and yelling, we learned that somebody had killed the request for an internet connection. Next appointment we could only have in two weeks time.

We decided to kill the deal, went to the only real competitor of Belgacom, Telenet, and they promised to have us online in less than a week.

"Jaywalker", 1 December:

I spent last night spinning in fury at the mind-boggling sadism of Belgacom (who failed to turn up, or indeed call, during the allotted NINE HOUR call out slot yesterday, this after a two month wait for phone/tv/internet). This included scratching away at my legs until they bled with irritation induced, well, irritation, marching up the road to the Belgacom shop to huff around and call them exceptionally rude names, curling up on the hall floor in a wailing snotty ball unable to breathe for crying, and lying on a bench in the park keening like an orphaned spider monkey.

It’s that last testimony of despair that captures very well the gutwrenching horror of listening to Belgacom’s awful music without having any confidence that the person at the far end will be able to deal with your problem, indeed knowing that they will probably try to blame you for dialling the wrong number or pressing the wrong button.

I’m lining up several other telcom service providers to talk to when I get back. And I have an appointment with Mr C**** to see if he can persuade me that Belgacom actually takes customer service seriously.

Catherine is a rather silly kid who snags a husband despite her immaturity. End of story.

Top LibraryThing Unsuggetion: Brothers, We Are Not Professionals: A Plea to Pastors for Radical Ministry by John Piper

We know how we got this far
Strength and courage in a wonderbra

Facing a rather gruelling trip combined with grinding toothache and not enough sleep last night, I discovered to my delight that I could watch Spice World, the 1997 film starring the Spice Girls which I had never actually seen. I must say it cheered me up immensely. It is total nonsense, but not actually offensively bad; the music is toe-tappingly compelling; it is fun to see Meat Loaf, Richard O’Brien, Roger Moore, etc all doing their bit for this deeply silly project; also fun of course to see Naoko Mori in pre-Torchwood days (and likewise Richard E. Grant and Claire Rushbrook before their rather different Doctor Who connections). As for the Spice Girls themselves, it’s clear that while Mel C is the best singer, Geri Halliwell is the best actual performer, and already not quite in sync with the rest of the team. (Her best line: “Haven’t you ever heard of the word ‘compromisaton’?”)

It is perhaps 30 years since I watched A Hard Day’s Night, and I entirely accept the view that this is a pale imitation of it, but it lifted my spirits when they needed lifting, and you can’t ask much more than that.

Having finished the Fionavar Tapestry trilogy, I decided I didn’t need to keep them and listed them on BookMooch.

Where they were immediately requested by someone who works in the same corridor as me.

I’ll bring them in tomorrow, Aoife.

Having read The Summer Tree a few months back, and noting the result of my 2010 reading poll, I thought I would tackle the other two books of the Fionavar Tapestry trilogy together. As I’ve said before, I am a huge fan of Kay’s later work, but as with The Summer Tree, I felt that in these earlier books he is still getting his talent together. The explicit resurrection of Arthur and Lancelot (and Guinevere reincarnated as a Canadian) sat rather more uneasily in Kay’s fantasy world than his previous plundering of Celtic and Germanic folklore, and the various plot strands are not always easy to entangle, particularly in The Wandering Fire.

But Kay shows early on that he is prepared to kill off key characters, so there is an underlying feeling of suspense as we wonder who will live and who will die. And the series is lifted by the climax: epic final battle, self-sacrifice, and a decent resolution. I am not sure that I would recommend the trilogy generally, but it is a decent enough portal fantasy in its own right, and of course points the way for Kay’s subsequent triumphs.

Top LibraryThing UnSuggestion for both books: My Utmost for His Highest by Oswald Chambers

I have decided to work through the Virgin New Doctor Who Adventures, and since I had already read the four Timewyrm novels, that meant starting with this, the first of the Cat’s Cradle trilogy.

It’s actually rather fascinating, just after watching The End of Time, to experience a completely different reinterpretation of the Time Lords and Gallifrey, the combination of Cartmel Masterplan and Marc Platt’s imagination which culminates in Lungbarrow (which is itself mentioned here as a concept for the first time). Like a lot of Platt’s writing it is eerie and confusing, early Gallifreyans and peculiar deserted cities, but with some fascinating insights and ideas, and some decent character development for Ace who has to carry most of the plot with the Doctor being in cold storage for much of the book. I do wish I’d been picking these up when they first came out in 1992.

http://cavalorn.livejournal.com/553650.html

(Hat-tip )

Ignore this if you have already seen on .

Dutifully filling in my Doctor Who Monthly annual poll, I realised that I didn’t have a convenient list of which Who stories are not yet available on DVD. So here are the as yet unreleased stories where all or most of the episodes survive (so including The Reign of Terror where there are two missing eps out of six and The Tenth Planet where there is one missing out of five). This list does not include DVDs due out in the next few months. It also doesn’t include The Ice Warriors, but that is my mistake.

I find it very weird that we got the complete Sixth Doctor before, say, Terror of the Autons, The Dæmons or Terror of the Zygons. But maybe we can pay them not to release The Dominators.

I was not quite sure what to make of this book. It outlines ten paths of action, all of which might be found in a good self-help book (they include “Embracing Family”, “Working With Others” and “Participating in Politics”), referred to a specific mandala in the shape of the eponymous wheel. But for me the book fell between the two stools of explanation and instruction. The reader is assumed to be already familiar with the history and culture of Buddhism; while mandalas in general are rather briefly explained, the background of this Wheel is not. So I didn’t learn much from it, except to discover that Engaged Buddhism exists (but even there I found Wikipedia more informative).

• reading_gibbon: Gibbon’s Vindication
  "It is not without some mixture of mortification and regret, that I now look back on the number of hours which I have consumed, and the number of pages which I have filled, in vindicating my literary and moral character from the charge of wilful Misrepresentations, gross Errors, and servile Plagiarisms… I am impatient to dismiss, and to dismiss FOR EVER, this odious controversy, with the success of which I cannot surely be elated; and I have only to request, that, as soon as my Readers are convinced of my innocence, they would forget my Vindication."

LibraryThing lists these authors as having the most ‘completist’ fans, ie that those who have one book by the author are likely to have a lot more. (I’m a bit surprised not to see Lois McMaster Bujold here, or more classic crime writers.) Not all of them are in fact single authors, but we live in an imperfect world.

Myself I have at least tried Terry Pratchett, Terrance Dicks, Anne McCaffrey, David Eddings, Franklin W. Dixon, David Weber, Dick Francis, Carolyn Keene, and Agatha Christie. Recommendations (and disrecommendations) welcome in comments.

I had never particularly aspired to read Ruth Rendell, but acquired this by mistake from a BookMoocher who had meant to send me an Ian Rankin. It is a gripping and somewhat grim read, of a lonely old woman and her obsessive lodger; he kills his Bosnian girlfriend, and hides her body under the floorboards. It’s a crime novel rather than a mystery novel, since we know what the murderer has done and why he has done it all the way through; the police barely feature in the story. The other main character in the book apart from the murderer and his landlady is the city of London in the Noughties; socially and ethnically mixed, but on edge and easily fractured. There are a lot of memorable minor characters as well – the model who the killer is obsessed with, the landlady’s long lost love, the fortune-teller who the victim worked for, even the Iraqi refugee who emerges rather abruptly in the final pages. If Rendell’s other books are this good I shall start looking out for them.

Top LibraryThing Unsuggestion: rather surprisingly, Smoke and Mirrors by Neil Gaiman, followed by a whole lot of Pratchett, Gaiman and Robert Jordan. Shows a sharp divide between crime writing fans and sf fans – certainly the latter would have no reason not to enjoy this, and I’d have rated Smoke and Mirrors as one of Gaiman’s more accessible books for the reader who doesn’t usually buy sf. Also shows that LibraryThing haven’t updated the Unsuggestion database since before I accidentally acquired this book.

For those of you who care what I listed in my response to Doctor Who Monthly’s poll:

TV Specials
The Next Doctor: 7/10
Planet of the Dead: 6/10
The Waters of Mars: 7/10
The End of Time: 8/10 

Doctor Who Books – Fiction
Realised that the only ones published in 2009 which I have read are the ten Darksmith Legacy books, and decided not to vote for them. (The others are Prisoner of the Daleks, Judgement of the Judoon, The Slitheen Excursion, Autonomy, The Krillitane Storm, The Taking of Chelsea 426, The Sontaran Games, Short Trips: Indefinable Magic, Short Trips: Recollections, The Doctor Who Stories [the good bits from The Doctor Who Files], and The Doctor Who Storybook 2010.)

Doctor Who Books – Non-Fiction
Only one I have read published in 2009 is the second edition of About Time 3, which gets my vote.

Doctor Who Audio Dramas (Big Finish)
First and second choices were easy; third place was a close call with The Cannibalists, The Drowned World and The Eternal Summer
1) The Mahogany Murderers
2) Death in Blackpool
3) Key 2 Time – The Destroyer of Delights

Doctor Who Audio Releases (BBC)
Again an easy ranking esp since I haven’t got any of the audio novelisations:
1) Beautiful Chaos
2) The Eyeless
3) Hornet’s Nest 1: The Stuff of Nightmares

Doctor Who DVD releases a) favourite release of 2009
1) The War Games
2) The Deadly Assassin
3) The Rescue/The Romans

Doctor Who DVD releases b) favourite special feature
All three of mine are from the War Games DVD:
1) Talking About Regeneration
2) On Target – Malcolm Hulke
3) Devious

Doctor Who DVD releases c) Most wanted DVD release
1) Terror of the Zygons
2) Terror of the Autons
3) The Tenth Planet
Despite my general lack of enthusiasm for the Pertwee era I have to admit that there are some significant gaps in the currently available range; if we can have the whole Sixth Doctor era, then why not Day of the Daleks or The DæmonsThe Gunfighters as a guilty pleasure, but no, if I can choose The Tenth Planet then I think it gets priority.
(And can we pay them not to release The Dominators?)

The rest of the poll questions are all to do with DWM itself, and I think I need to start reading it more thoroughly before expressing a judgement.

…have selected Julian Huppert.

I don’t know him but wish him well.

The last year before I was born which was a prime number was 1951. There was a long gap then until 1973. So far I have lived through seven years which were prime numbers:

1973, 1979, 1987, 1993, 1997, 1999 and 2003.

There was an unusual concentration between 1987 and 2003, five in seventeen years. The next few are in general more widely spaced (apart from one pairing in the late 2020s): 2011, 2017, 2027, 2029, 2039, 2053, 2063, 2069 and another big gap to 2081, which very few of us will see. I have probably lived through the majority of the prime number years of my lifetime; another seven takes me to 2063 when I will be 96.

Yesterday it became apparent that the office phone had problems yet again; we could not hear outgoing or incoming calls, though the people on the other end could hear us fine.

I went out and bought a new handset (the old one was rather crappy and we needed one with a better loudspeaker anyway), but the problem remained, so clearly it’s something to do with the line.

I called Belgacom’s customer service – after the usual insane delving through their website to find the number – and after 20 minutes on hold finally spoke to a technician. He took my details, said he would look into it, and promised to call me back on my mobile number in a few minutes. Needless to say, he never did.

I called them again this morning before leaving home to find out what had happened to my report from yesterday. Needless to say, the technician I spoke to (and I wish I had taken his name; I will always do that with Belgacom staff in future) had made no record of my call. That really is the last straw.

Not being in the office yet, I couldn’t give the technical details needed. I got them to promise to call me back mid-morning; but I am not holding my breath.

ETA: In fairness, they did call mid-morning and appear to have fixed the problem! Yay! But I am still unimpressed with their failure to do anything about it yesterday.

Meanwhile I am looking at the other service providers I can go to. If Telenet now cover Brussels (they didn’t last time I checked) they will get my business; they have been perfectly acceptable providers at home.

Back in the days when I worked on Kosovo I had a lot of dealings with Hédi Annabi, a Tunisian UN official who was then deputy head of the Department of Peace-Keeping Operations. I remember several brown-bag lunches hosted by him inside UN headquarters where I would expound on why the UN should be doing better, and Annabi, in the courteous way of a Mediterranean official with the best Parisian education, would explain to me that I was partly wrong and that where I was right it was not the UN’s fault. His staff seemed to enjoy our sparring and the events were always vigorous and I hope educational all round.

Annabi moved from New York in September 2007, when he was appointed head of the UN Mission in Haiti. Reports from there indicate that the UN mission building there was completely destroyed yesterday’s earthquake, and that over a hundred people inside, including Annabi, were killed.

Edited to add I hear that the victims probably also include Gerardo LeChevalier, who I knew vaguely at NDI when he was head of their Latin American operations: a former political activist from El Salvador who was entertaining company, and had a special personal insight into the US Central America policy of the 1980s.

No need for condolences to me; I didn’t know him all that well. But a chill goes down the spine none the less.

Collection of essays on evolutionary biology by Gould, which topped the non-fiction section of this poll. Some of these pieces are a bit dated (not so surprising in a book published in 1980); his rather daring efforts to finger Teilhard de Chardin as a participant in the Piltdown Man hoax were easily refuted by the first researcher to check the documentary evidence. But his thoughts on punctuated equilibrium are pretty convincing, as is his (less developed here) criticism of Dawkins for obsessing about genes rather than individuals. And his essay on heartbeats and breaths in the lifespan of a mammal was very sobering.

Top LibraryThing Unsuggestion: Blue Like Jazz, by Donald Miller – I read this after it figured in a couple of other unsuggestions, and was deeply unimpressed.

Well, I am feeling a little better now, but it didn’t prevent me watching the second of the two Doctor Who films starring Peter Cushing. It is much inferior both to the original six-part TV Dalek Invasion of Earth and to its own predecessor which I reviewed earlier. Somehow where the TV series succeeded in making the sets appear a realistic future occupied England, the big screen fails to do so; the sequences around the mines are particularly striking, where the original show achieved five times the effect for perhaps a tenth of the money. The music is often terrible, though of course the TV version had some of the best incidental music ever to feature in Who. Peter Cushing and Roberta Tovey, returning from the previous film, are much less effective; the more striking performances are Jill Curzon as Dr. Who’s niece Louise, Philip Madoc as a short-lived black marketeer, Andrew Keir as a Scottish freedom fighter, and particularly Bernard Cribbins as Tom Campbell, a 1960s policeman who accidentally enters Tardis thinking it is a police box and gets swept forward to 2150.

I have some suggestions as to why this film manifestly fails where its predecessor did not, and where the TV story succeeded. First off, the TV series has an ensemble of regular characters with established relationships; the film loses time and momentum setting that up (and also has no particularly good reason for it). Second, the switching round of the narrative strands fails to work in the film’s favour. Here, Tom and Louise, rather than Ian and a local, head up to Derbyshire in the Dalek saucer; and Dr. Who and granddaughter Susie travel by land separately rather than together. (Susie follows roughly the route of Barbara on TV, accompanied by Weir’s Scottish resistance fighter.) Opportunities are missed to generate much spark between Tom and Louise, let along their terrestrially travelling friends. Of the good scenes from the TV story, only Dortmun’s last stand and the treacherous women in the woods survive, and are done less well. (The women are played by Eileen Way and Sheila Steafel.) Finally, the geology of the Daleks’ plan actually – and this is difficult to believe – makes less sense than the original TV version.

Anyway, this is really for completists only.

(I have a memory of seeing a version where Roberta Tovey’s character is locked out of the Tardis at the end à la Carole Ann Ford’s departure, but I guess I must have dreamed it.)

I see that Dan O’Brien of the Irish Times and the Economist Intelligence Unit has come around to my point of view on requiring government ministers to be members of parliament, though he is wrong about the electoral system. (Though right about referendums, and, for all I know, about judges too.)

Hat-tip to Ian, whose second post I await eagerly.

…if you like. 

When Arlene Foster resigned from the Ulster Unionist Party and joined the DUP, I reckoned that it was. probably a good career move on her part. But I must say I didn’t imagine (and I am sure that she didn’t imagine) that it would lead to her becoming acting First Minister of Northern Ireland a little more than six years later. And frankly I think it is likely she will stay in place; it’s not easy to see Peter Robinson coming back in six weeks’ time.

Ten years ago, who would ever have thought that the first woman to lead a devolved government in the UK would be from the party of Ian Paisley?

PS: Much the best blogosphere coverage of the Robinson and Adams stories is on Slugger O’Toole.

I resolved last year that I would keep better track of the films I watch this year. I have been lying in bed finding it difficult to concentrate today, and this was just about the right level of intellectual engagement to start off this particular resolution.

As a Doctor Who fan, it is impossible not to judge this film in comparison with the original seven-part Dalek story, so I won’t really try. The positives: it is in colour, which is a huge difference. It looks better (except, oddly enough, the interior of Dr. Who’s Tardis, which just looks like a film set with some machines dotted around it). The plot is tighter – it’s difficult (with one exception, which I’ll get to) to remember what has been cut from the original story to produce a film half its length, and some of the best bits are still there. The music is decent – not as unearthly as in the TV version, but not offensive either.

The huge difference, however, is in the performances and portrayals. Peter Cushing plays elderly slightly comical scientist Dr. Who, who keeps a time machine called ‘Tardis’ in his back garden, shaped like a police box for some reason. He doesn’t have the grumpy gravitas of William Hartnell, but I detect some homage to his portrayal in the approach taken by Silvester McCoy. Roberta Tovey as his nine-year-old granddaughter Susie is actually rather good, and recasts Carole Anne Ford with perhaps a bit more grit.

When I first saw this on a Saturday morning repeat aged about 11, the surprise was that Ian is played by Roy Castle, who of course I knew as the presenter of the BBC children’s programme Record Breakers. This was actually his second film role – he had also appeared with Peter Cushing in another Max Subotsky film with a doctor in the title (Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors) earlier in 1965. Castle’s Ian starts as a clown but more or less settles into the heroic sidekick to Cushing’s Who by the end, probably the closest of the four main characters to the TV version (though William Russell’s Ian is much brainer).

The most serious cut in the film as compared to the TV original is Barbara, Dr. Who’s other grand-daughter, played by Jennie Linden. She gets almost nothing to do, except that her over-vigorous embrace of Ian sets Tardis going in the first place. (And even that is portrayed as Ian’s clumsiness.) She is practically background scenery, especially when compared to Jacqueline Hill’s history teacher.

Well, unless I start feeling better, I shall watch the other Cushing film later on.

• reading_gibbon: Chapter XVI: Early Christianity and the emperors
  A run through the historical record, staring with Tacitus on Nero's blaming the Christians for the Great Fire, then Pliny on his administrative problems in Bithynia, then a long section on Cyprian (who I think gets more coverage than any other non-emperor); then a period of relaxation, which however is abruptly reversed by Diocletian (though that period of persecution seems to be more effective in the East). A rather more detailed but slightly less interesting chapter than the previous one, and I wonder if he might have been better to organise the material more chronologically across the two.
  (tags: gibbon)

For several years in the 1990s I gave tutorials on Darwin and evolution in support of Peter Bowler’s history of science course in Belfast, but I had never actually read the book that started it all. My recommendation to the casual reader would be to skip about half of it. Darwin basically has three startling ideas here, and the chapters where he talks about them are excellent, almost exciting, as he modestly challenges the received wisdom of the day. He wanders off topic, though, into areas like hybridism and geographical distribution, and I found those chapters much tougher going.

Darwin’s three ideas are these:

1. Most fundamentally, that it is possible to come up with a scientific explanation of how species change. (This is actually the second argument in the book, but it is the most important.) Although most of the book is a massing of evidence in favour,he takes one or two moments to tilt against any idea that species originate through acts of supernatural creation. “To admit this view is, as it seems to me, to reject a real for an unreal, or at least for an unknown ,cause.  It makes the works of God a mere mockery and deception; I would almost as soon believe with the old and ignorant cosmogonists, that fossil shells had never lived, but had been created in stone so as to mock the shells now living on the sea-shore.”
2. Darwin works up to this gradually, reviewing in considerable detail how humans change domesticated species of both animals and plants through artificial selection. He is not in general as lucid a writer as Gould, or even Dawkins. But the first four chapters on their own set out a compelling case that the answer to the question posed by the book’s title is that species generally originate by descent from other species with modification by natural selection. (The word “evolution” is not used.)
3. The third new element introduced by Darwin is the enormity of geological time. Having proposed a very slow process of change, he needs long ages to have passed for it to operate. This also helps him with another difficulty – he needs the fossil record to be incomplete in order to account for the fact that we don’t find many intermediate stages of species change (though there are other factors here). He is coy about the details but does propose that the Weald has taken 300 million years to erode to its present situation. I think today’s estimate is more like 100 million years, but he’s within an order of magnitude.

We are still hazy about some of the details on all of this – in particular, the development of genetics has bolstered the general argument while muddying some of the details. But basically Darwin was right on all three of his big ideas, and on all three of them he was challenging received wisdom – though of course he was not alone, and in an appendix lists other writers who had come to similar conclusions in recent years

It is worthing also noting what Darwin doesn’t do. He doesn’t use the word “evolution”; he says little about God and nothing about the Bible; he has precisely one sentence about the relevance of this to humanity, saying that as a result of his book, “Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.” But the implications are pretty clear.

Top LibraryThing Unsuggestion: Lucy Sullivan Is Getting Married by Marian Keyes

Spent the afternoon preparing dinner for Mr and Mrs , and then realised that I am suddenly not feeling well enough to eat it. Have retired to bed while the rest of the household eats.

I’ve messed around a bit with the map I found of antipodes on Wikipedia to produce this, outlining the northern hemisphere bits:

The only parts of the continental USA with land antipodes are a small patch in Montana, opposite Kerguelen Island (which also straddles the border into Canada), and two small patches of Colorado which are opposite the remote Île Amsterdam and Île Saint-Paul. Parts of the far north of Canada and Alaska, and most of Greenland, are antipodal to the coast of Antarctica.

The only parts of Europe with land antipodes are the parts of Spain and Portugal opposite New Zealand (which also grazes Morocco), and Svalbard, which has antipodes in Antarctica.

Africa contains the antipodes of a number of Pacific islands: Hawai’i, and everything from French Polynesia to Vanuatu and New Caledonia.

South America contains the antipodes of parts of eastern Asia: most of eastern China (with Mongolia mapping onto the tip of Argentina and Chile), Taiwan, sothern Vietnam, Cambodia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei, and most of Indonesia.

It’s not much, is it?

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