• reading_gibbon: Chapter VI: Septimius Severus, Caracalla, Macrinus, Elagabalus and Alexander Severus; and taxation
  In a magnificent temple raised on the Palatine Mount, the sacrifices of the god of Elagabalus were celebrated with every circumstance of cost and solemnity. The richest wines, the most extraordinary victims, and the rarest aromatics, were profusely consumed on his altar. Around the altar a chorus of Syrian damsels performed their lascivious dances to the sound of barbarian music, whilst the gravest personages of the state and army, clothed in long Phoenician tunics, officiated in the meanest functions, with affected zeal and secret indignation.
  (tags: gibbon)

The first US president to win the Nobel Peace Prize was of course Theodore Roosevelt, in 1906 for his mediation of the Treaty of Portsmouth. Browsing through YouTube I found that several recordings of his speeches survive. His accent, to me, sounds completely unlike any I have heard in New York – his family of course being New York aristocracy:

But his younger cousin Franklin Roosevelt’s accent sounds entirely recognisably northeastern to me:

What then surprised me even more was to hear the voice of Eleanor Roosevelt – wife of Franklin and niece of Theodore:

Queen Elizabeth II would be proud of some of those vowels! For extra amusement, here’s Eleanor Roosevelt on What’s My Line?

• The Doctor Who News Page: Barry Letts (1925-2009)
  Sad news.
  (tags: doctorwho)
• Watch Doctor Who: The Classic Series Online | blinkbox
  The Sensorites / The Web Planet / Tomb of the Cybermen / The Krotons, all available to watch for free worldwide
  (tags: doctorwho)

Good Lord!

• Who should be the first face of Europe? Not Blair (Pierre Defraigne)
  For the inaugural stint in this high-profile function, EU citizens should expect the selection of a decent national statesman, a statesman with impeccable European credentials, a respected and experienced politician, with a genuine ability to convince his former colleagues with the right mix of technical and political skills. Blair is not that man. He is, as the Financial Times's Martin Wolf once stated, just another British populist.
  (tags: eu)
• FT.com / Comment / Letters – Europe must look beyond Blair for a credible president
  So Tony Blair is being considered for the job of European Union president… If the new, improved, post-Lisbon EU is to have any credibility or integrity, it needs a different leader.
  (tags: eu work)

Resolved. With a surprising amount of grace all round. Kudos to for his mediation.

It would seem appropriate that anyone else who has commented on-line on this affair in their own blogs should link to the joint statement (I see a couple of people already have done).

…but I was never planning to be, not having much enjoyed the previous one I attended in 2007. (Where I failed to witness any of the alleged incidents.)

has been given no choice in the matter. (Further discussed chez Cheryl here, by here and by here.)

A pretty good example of public relations Fail. It is amusing that on Octocon’s committee page, the short bio of the Press Officer states first that he “is looking after PR affairs for Octocon” and then goes on to say that he “feels strongly that most PR people deserve to be liquidated”. I think further comment is superfluous.

Any wikipedians out there who are willing to help me out on a small matter which I can’t fix myself?

Replies screened and feel free to contact me by other means.

This is the second volume in the NESFA series collecting Zelazny’s writings, again edited by David G. Grubbs, Christopher S. Kovacs and Ann Crimmins. I had high praise for the first of these; the second didn’t grab me quite as much. Almost half of it is occupied by the original “…And Call Me Conrad” text of This Immortal, a separately published chapter of Lord of Light, and the first few Dilvish stories, which is I suppose necessary for completeness, but most readers will already have Zelazny’s preferred final texts of those works. (Though it is fascinating to learn that Lord of Light was inspired by a train of thought started when Zelazny cut himself shaving at a science fiction convention.)

Anyway, I won’t complain too much. As well as some excellent short stories (including the three wrenching pieces written the day Zelazny’s father died), there are two speeches and a short essay, forewords by Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Walter Jon Williams (who tried, unsuccessfully, to get Zelazny to try the Amber roleplaying game), and Christopher Kovacs continues his fascinating bio-bibliography. I shall be getting the next two volumes which are apparently already out from NESFA.

I’ve been updating my presidential stats page to reflect recent developments and also to include some data on the wives of presidents and vice-presidents, and have run up against a slightly surprising problem: I can’t find a birth date, not even a year of birth, for the first wife of current Vice-President Joe Biden. As is well known, she was killed, along with their infant daughter, in a car accident in December 1972, just after he was elected to the US Senate; they apparently met in the Bahamas on holiday in 1964, and married in 1966. Biden had moved to Syracuse in 1965 after graduating to be with her, which suggests that she had not yet graduated so must have been a year or two younger than him (he was born in 1942).

Of course, she lived at a time when it was considered impolite to ask about women’s exact ages, but I am a bit surprised that I wasn’t able to find even her year of birth easily.

I am also still looking for sates of birth – though I have the years – for the following vice-presidential wives born in the nineteenth century:

• Evelyn Colfax, born in 1823, whose husband Schuyler served under Ulysses S Grant from 1869 to 1873
• Mary Wheeler, born in 1828, whose husband William served under Rutherford Hayes from 1877 to 1881
• Dorothy Barkley, born in 1882, whose husband was Truman’s vice-president in 1949-53 (though she had died in 1947).

Edited to add: Thanks to passer-by who pointed me at a good source which gave me 28 July 1942, so she was four months older than Joe.

Also Dorothy Barkley was born on 14 November 1882.

Still looking for Evelyn Colfax (née Clark) and Mary Wheeler (née King).

• reading_gibbon: Chapter V, which is mostly about Septimius Severus
  After Pertinax is murdered, the Prætorian Guards auction the empire to the highest bidder, one Didius Julianus. His rule is contested by Clodius Albinus in Britain, Septimius Severus in Pannonia, and Pescennius Niger in Syria. Septimius Severus outwits and kills the other three (starting with Didius Julianus), and settles down to rule Rome.
  (tags: gibbon)

looks like a swing of 15-25% from No to Yes in the Irish referendum, on a slightly higher turnout, according to RTÉ.

Last month was a bonanza for us Who audio fans. Not only was there an extra Big Finish release, concluding the story of Charley Pollard, but Tom Baker returned to the role for the first time since 1981 (not counting The Thing We Don’t Talk About).

Hornets’ Nest 1: The Stuff of Nightmares, by Paul Magrs, brings back the Fourth Doctor in alliance with ex-Captain Mike Yates (who was actually a Third Doctor companion, but never mind), inhabiting a peculiar country house with even more peculiar stuffed animals. I’ve seen a couple of reviews commenting that it has a lot more talking-book style narration by Yates and the Doctor, and hence much less actual dialogue, than we are used to from Big Finish; myself, I felt that this was being honest to an earlier style of doing things, namely that of Doctor Who and the Pescatons, the first ever Doctor Who audio from the. 1970s; except that The Hornet’s Nest, so far, is much much better. And I think it will certainly attract those who enjoy nostalgia for the glory days of Hinchcliffe and Holmes / Letts and Dicks, but are less interested in obtaining new adventures from the John Nathan-Turner era Doctors (let alone Paul McGann). Amazon tells me that the second CD is already winging its way to me; can’t wait!

The Prisoner of Peladon, by Mark Wright and Cavan Scott, is the latest in the Big Finish series of Companion Chronicles, although this time the story is told by a non-companion who appeared in only one story in 1972, King Peladon of the eponumous planet (played by David Troughton, son of Patrick, who has also of course appeared in other Who stories both Old and New and recently took on the cloak and dead bird of the Black Guardian for Big Finish). Troughton is, as ever, great, and Nicholas Briggs is, as ever, good as the monsters (Ice Warriors this time, of course). The concept is very interesting – Peladon has taken in large numbers of Ice Warrior refugees after an internal conflict, with the result that Ice Warrior politics spills catastrophically over to the host planet; the Third Doctor arrives to sort things out, of course, but – and this is the bit I really liked – the King gets a brilliant rant about how badly Three behaves to people, to which the Doctor has no answer. Scott and Wright would not have got away with it if Pertwee was still alive, but it gladdened my heart. (This was directed by Nicola Bryant who herself visited Peladon as Peri in a Fifth Doctor audio last year.)

I turned to the next two releases in the main Big Finish sequence, which both came out last weekend, reflecting that the recent Companion Chronicles have often seemed the more sure-footed of the two series. But I changed my mind after listening to Paper Cuts and Blue Forgotten Planet. Marc Platt is a bit hit and miss for me (is he the only writer for Old Who who is still at it?) but Paper Cuts was a real hit. We return to another alien monarchy of the Third Doctor era, Draconia, or rather off Draconia, in the orbiting mausoleum of the Draconian emperors; the Draconian version of chess (“Sazou”) is prominent; the Sixth Doctor and Charley (though it isn’t really Charley, of course) expose long-hidden dynastic secrets; Platt plays with life and death and crossing between them, and the whole thing is very much up to the standards of his Seventh Doctor TV story, Ghost Light. Big Finish makes the scripts of the stories available to us subscribers after a decent interval, but I have never yet downloaded one – this time I will.

Blue Forgotten Planet by Nicholas Briggs, is India Fisher’s swansong as Charley Pollard. Once she hooked up with the Sixth Doctor after her adventures with the Eighth, it was clear that some pretty dramatic resolution was needed, and the stakes were raised a couple of stories ago by the introduction of a fake Charley identical to the real one. Briggs brings back the virus-hunting Viyrans, who he introduced for a series on one-episode stories a while back, for a resolution which barely works in plot terms but pays off very well emotionally and dramatically. Fisher is brilliant as the two versions of Charley – we are rarely in much doubt as to which she is acting. The setting of a devastated post-apocalyptic Earth is superbly portrayed, and the fact that the few surviving sane humans are making nature documentaries (with lovely background music) about their blue, forgotten planet, seems tragic rather than ludicrous. I didn’t find it quite as good as Paper Cuts, but it is pretty good. (Unfortunately one of the guest cast, J.J. Field, takes most of the first episode to wake up to the fact that he is supposed to be acting.)

See also review of this by and Why Charlotte Pollard Pwns Rose Tyler by .

Meanwhile the one-episode-per-release story The Three Companions continues; John Pickard as Thomas Brewster is finally getting the hang of it, I think.

I came across a really stupid article about the European Defence Agency, by Vincent Browne who should know better. The best analysis of it and where it fits into overall EU plans is by its former Chief Executive, here. I would like to summarise it but don’t have time.

Meanwhile this is a brilliant parody of the “No” posters:

• Pathetic Motorways
  (tags: maps)

I bumped into John Cushnahan this afternoon in the European Parliament, and he raised a perfectly reasonable objection to my description of him in this entry. Entirely fair; I should have written “sometimes acerbic” rather than “somewhat acerbic”, and I should have added “always a shrewd judge of character”. To which I would now add, “increasingly mellow”.

(I doubt that he is a regular reader here but any sensible person in public life has set up blog alerts for their own name.)

After reading Wally K. Daly’s untransmitted Doctor Who story, I became curious about his other work – he was a moderately prolific writer of (mostly radio) plays, and I discovered that he had written a science fiction trilogy in the late 1970s. The BBC as usual junked the original tapes, but Daly’s own off-air recordings survive and can be downloaded from various places around the internet (no links here; it’s easy enough to Google). They are an interesting demonstration of what a writer normally known for non-genre work might produce in the era of Blake’s 7 and the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide (and Doctor Who when it was very slightly past its peak). The biggest problem is that the sound quality is not all it could be – I couldn’t listen to these on my normal train commute, though they were OK for Wii workouts or driving.

Before the Screaming Begins (1977) is a good start: our central characters, Tom and Sally Harris, are celebrating their wedding anniversary with a walk in the woods when he is abducted by aliens. Sally is frustrated when the police refuse to believe her, but then Tom is returned with new strange powers and a message from the aliens for the people of Earth, and it turns out similar appearances and disappearances have happened simultaneously all over the world; we get mixed up with the Prime Minister (Patrick Troughton, doing a brilliant impression of Harold Wilson) and sinister official A.P. Smith (played by Donald Hewlett, the only main cast member to appear in all three plays).

The Silent Scream (1979) is I think the best of the three, and has interesting foreshadowing of Torchwood: Children of Earth – so much so that I wonder if RTD has acknowledged it as source material? – though of course The Midwich Cuckoos/Village of the Damned is probably a common root. Lots of creepy children endowed with super powers (one played by Susan Sheridan who was the original Trillian at about the same time), and the government pondering extreme measures to deal with them. No Patrick Troughton this time, but Hannah Gordon takes over as Sally Harris.

With a Whimper to the Grave (1984) has the best cast but weakest plot of the three. Patrick Troughton takes back the role of Prime Minister, but loses the election to “Marge”, played by Angela Thorne (not her only such role). Timothy West is a chief alien. Maureen “Vicki” O’Brien takes over as Sally. But the central character is Donald Hewlett’s A.P. Smith, who links between the aliens’ revelation of What They Were Really Up To, and the authorities’ attempt to neutralise the alien threat. Unfortunately the to plot strands confuse rather than reinforcing each other, and the wipe-out-the-alien-menace bit is very poorly paced (and there is a very irritating character called Geoffrey Palmer, which must be an in-joke). However you’ll want to listen to it for completeness if you’ve heard the first two.

I’m unlikely to finish any more in the next day (as of this evening I am 100 pages into two 700-page books, 60 pages into one 270-page book).

Non-fiction: 7 (YTD 74)
      
 
Fiction (non-sf) 7 (YTD 48)
       

SF (non-Who) 4 (YTD 62)
   

Who/Sarah Jane: 14 (YTD 56)
             

3 (YTD 54/284) by women (Kidd, Bronte, Rayner)
1 (YTD 13/284) by PoC (Naipaul)
Total page count ~9,100 (YTD ~80,700)
Owned for more than a year: 5 (Anglo-Norman Ulster [reread], Jane Eyre [reread], Stand on Zanzibar [reread], Appleseed, England’s Troubles)
Also reread: Doctor Who Programme Guide x2 (YTD 31 rereads)

I’m not a fan of Dawkins’ views on religion, but as editor of this book he has done a fine job; it clearly makes a difference that he is writing about topics he knows and likes, and his introductory pieces to each extract are informative and often self-deprecating.

I was less sure that the book actually works as a concept. The selected pieces are necessarily extracts rather than complete works, and the result feels more like a scrapbook than an anthology. Certainly none of the pieces is bad, and several of them made me want to seek out more by that author (from the sublime – Albert Einstein’s thoughts on God – to the ridiculous – Francis Crick’s advice to avoid gatherings of more than two Nobel Prize winners). But the nature of the book means a succession of changes of pace, some of which are rather jarring. This contains a number of chunks out of various excellent books about science but doesn’t quite end up being one itself.

• The Titfield Thunderbolt – The DWM Top 200 Meme
  (tags: doctorwho)
• Trousers! – Doctor Who: All 200 stories meme
  (tags: doctorwho)
• 413 – The McFarthest Place: 145 Mi to the Nearest Big Mac
  (tags: maps)

Looks like the Christian Democrats and FDP will have a clear majority, although this is the worst result for the CDU/CSU since 1949 and the worst for the SPD since, er, 1933 (scroll down).

Fingers crossed for Cem Özdemir in Stuttgart South (I’m not really a Green voter but I know and like him); I imagine it’s a bit of a long shot though.

NB the Pirate Party did best of the minnows, at 2.1%.

Two very good audiobooks read by Elisabeth Sladen as Sarah Jane Smith. In The Time Capsule, the team find their work experience disrupted by time-travelling aliens; The Ghost House has a similar problem but in the house down the road. Neither is totally perfect (Anghelides could work on his pacing; Cole has Sarah occasionally switching from first person to omniscient third which no doubt looked better in the script than it sounds) but both are fun listening.

The fourth of the Rebus detective books, an engaging read about an MP who is caught in a brothel, and the relationships between him and his schoolfriends which run out of control; there is also a very charming institutionalised psychopath, plenty of office politics and personal dilemmas for Rebus, and some excellent plot twists. I will keep at this series.

What with there not being much televised Who this year, the BBC have partially filled the gap with this series of books for younger readers, the first of which was published in January and the tenth and final one last week. The full list is:

1. Doctor Who – The Darksmith Legacy: The Dust of Ages by Justin Richards
2. Doctor Who – The Darksmith Legacy: The Caves of Mordane, by Colin Brake
3. Doctor Who – The Darksmith Legacy: The Colour of Darkness, by Richard Dungworth
4. Doctor Who – The Darksmith Legacy: The Depths of Despair, by Justin Richards
5. Doctor Who – The Darksmith Legacy: The Vampire of Paris, by Stephen Cole
6. Doctor Who – The Darksmith Legacy: The Game of Death, by Trevor Baxendale
7. Doctor Who – The Darksmith Legacy: The Planet of Oblivion, by Justin Richards
8. Doctor Who – The Darksmith Legacy: The Pictures of Emptiness, by Jacqueline Rayner
9. Doctor Who – The Darksmith Legacy: The Art of War, by Mike Tucker
10. Doctor Who – The Darksmith Legacy: The End of Time, by Justin Richards

There are basically two models for multipart stories like this, the Key to Time / Keys of Marinus model where our hero has to pick up individual items which make a wholen and the McGuffin model as in the Daleks’ Master Plan (or indeed the Lord of the Rings) where the vital object has to be kept out of the hands of the bad guys and if possible destroyed. This is an example of the latter approach, with the Eternity Crystal, as created by the Darksmiths, clearly drawing inspiration from both Tolkien’s One Ring and the Nation/Spooner Time Destructor (or more exactly its taranium core). These are good precedents, and the Darksmith Legacy makes the most of them. Each book has a different setting (including two historical visits to Earth) and usually a new alien species as well as the relentless Darksmiths in the background. The Doctor travels solo for the first few volumes and then picks up a young companion, Gisella, who is more than she seems. There are excellent cliff-hangers at the end of each book, and I rather regret reading them all in one go rather than spacing them out as they were published. Also each book has a puzzle or two, integrated into the plot (“Which button should the Doctor press? Crack the code!”) and some further information “from the Tardis databanks”, either about fictional planets or something factual and relevant. All in all they are a jolly good contribution to the younger end of Who literature; I felt the third (by Richard Dungworth) was the least accomplished but all the others are pretty good.

I enjoy social networks. Finding connections with people I’ve met is a small hobby in itself. I have 441 livejournal contacts (ie those who are reading me rather than vice versa), 1010 on LinkedIn, 1456 on Facebook; basically people whose continued existence in the world I am glad to be reminded of now and then. I realise that this is unusual, as some have been kind enough to point out. But my attention is always caught by research like the Milgram small world experiment or the Erdős–Bacon number.

I was therefore interested to see Keith Ferrazzi’s recent article, slightly recycling a chapter from his Never Eat Alone, listing seven types of person who are likely to be super-connectors:

1. Restaurateurs
2. Headhunters
3. Lobbyists
4. Fundraisers
5. Public relations people
6. Politicians
7. Journalists

I scratched my head a bit at this. My job has aspects of #3 and #5, and I personally used to be an example of #6, but I would describe what I do as closer to consultancy; we are after all a "diplomatic advisory group", not lobbyists or a PR firm. I wondered what other super-connectors I know, and how they would fit in to Ferrazzi’s categories?

LinkedIn, which is a more professional social network than Facebook or LJ, conveniently gives the number of contacts for each person in your network, and I discovered that there were precisely ten who fit its superconnector category (more than 500 contacts) and who I know from my list. (Also in the course of this exercise I realised that there were a couple of other superconnectors on my list who I don’t know from Adam, so I removed them.) In order of length of time I have known them, they are the following:

1. a friend from my days in postal Diplomacy around 1983-85, who now describes himself as a "Strategist for Social Investment, Grassroots Lobbying, and Corporate Accountability Campaigns" (he has moved from his native England to Washington DC). Like me, his job has aspects of lobbying and of PR but doesn’t really fit comfortably into either category. Interestingly, he is the only one of the ten who is on livejournal.
2. a fellow student at Clare College, who I only really got to know as he was crashing out of his postgrad science course in 1989, now a "Freelance Business Analyst". He does a fair amount of consultancy in the telecoms area these days, and I get the impression that he actively uses LinkedIn as a means of drumming up business. He does not appear to fit into any of Ferazzi’s categories.
3. a fellow member of the Cambridge University Students Union executive in 1989-90, now a "Search and Talent Intelligence Expert", ie a head-hunter, with over 3600 LinkedIn connections. She clearly fits Ferrazzi’s category #2. Interestingly, she is the only one of the ten who is not on Facebook (as far as I know).
4. a former MEP who served from 1999 to this year, though I have known him since 1993 or thereabouts through liberal politics. A clear case of category #6.
5. a member of the same political party who I knew around 1996 through young liberal politics, now working his way up the political tree in his country’s largest city. Another clear case of category #6.
6. a Brussels-based management consultant who I have known since 1999 as a promoter of business connections between Belgium and Luxembourg on the one hand and certain other countries in which I take an interest on the other. Probably the oldest person of these ten.
7. another former MEP from the same country as d (though from a different political party), who I got to know only after she was elected in 1999. Now works as chef de cabinet to a very senior (though not very prominent) international official. Yet another clear case of category #6, though she has other interests as well.
8. a Canadian guy who I turned down for a research job in 2003, but he forgave me, we got on well and have stayed in touch; he is now a "Principal at a research-based strategy firm" in Toronto.
9. One of my former interns (from 2005) who has now also gone into business consultancy in the energy sector in Brussels
10. the youngest on the list, a researcher at one of my former workplaces who I met last year for the first time; also does a little journalistic writing but not enough to qualify as category #7.

Now, of course, Ferrazzi’s seven categories will not map directly onto LinkedIn connections, especially not LinkedIn connections of mine – I don’t know many restaurateurs, and I am on emailing terms with very few of them; and I imagine that LinkedIn would not be a terribly useful tool for you if you are in the catering business. I do, however, know a lot of journalists, who are not at all represented in the above list; and I suspect that they choose not to share their contacts with LinkedIn, since they are operationalising them daily in quite a different way.

What does strike me is that I think my relatively few friends who are business consultants are over-represented in the above list, and I think Ferrazzi has missed something here. I’m sure (indeed, I know from occasionally passing on messages) that they are operationalising LinkedIn as part of their business approach, as a means of contacting and checking out clients. Possibly they are less likely to put their vast network of connections at the service of a friend or acquaintance (thus not the type of virtuous superconnector that Ferrazzi is highlighting in his article), but in fact that’s not my experience of any of them.

Or possibly they are just compulsive about plugging every business card they collect at conferences and receptions into LinkedIn to see if the people they meet are there. <irony>Can’t imagine doing that myself.</irony>

• Chapter IV: The cruelty, follies and murder of Commodus [with added Pertinax]
  This chapter is about 70% Commodus and 30% Pertinax; the former reigned for 13 years and the latter less than three months. Though from what Gibbon says, Pertinax is much the more attractive of the two as characters. A lot about Commodus himself, but it is rather long on outrage at his infamy (…infamy, they’ve all got it in for me) and short on detail; compared to Caligula he seems fairly small beer.
  But then the story of Pertinax is told succinctly and well, actually rather moving in places – an old man, unexpectedly made emperor, trying to do his best to undo his predecessor’s mistakes and then move forward, but who is then very quickly brought down by the military. If you don’t know what’s coming (and I didn’t) the end of the chapter is a brutal shock.
  (tags: gibbon)