• Judge a Book by its Cover
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• 30 things any would-be politician should do this summer (Part I) – Liberal Democrat Voice
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  30 things any would-be politician should do this summer (Part II) | Mark Pack
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My office rent has been increased. Not by very much, so I don’t complain. What is a little amusing is that I realised that I was being asked to pay two invoices, one for the increased rent on my own office, and another for an office of about the same rent but with two rooftop broadcasting antennas. Which is odd, I thought, as I don’t broadcast.

Then I realised I had been sent not only my own bill but the one for ITN‘s Brussels studio, which is also in this building.

I’ll go upstairs and introduce myself now, and give them their exciting new rent invoice. (And also see if they are getting more or less space for the same money as I am paying.)

Edited to add: They weren’t in. No doubt out reporting somewhere.

From Mark Reckons via Nick Barlow: Can you list all your MPs?

1967-1974: Rafton Pounder
1974-1981: Robert Bradford
1981-1985: Martin Smyth (all South Belfast, all UUP though Bradford first elected as Vanguard)
1985-1986: Harold McCusker (Upper Bann), though I was working in Armagh when Seamus Mallon defeated Jim Nicholson in the bogus by-elections, and also spent two months in 1985 in Raunds, Northamptonshire, which was represented either by William Powell (Corby) or Peter Fry (Wellingborough), not sure which.
1986-1991: Robert Rhodes James (Cambridge, Conservative)
1991-1995: Martin Smyth again
1995 (briefly) Roy Beggs (East Antrim)
1995-1997: Cecil Walker (North Belfast, UUP like the other two)

That covers the almost three decades of my residence in the UK. Bosnia and Belgium don’t have single-seat constituencies so I can’t answer for the most recent period (Croatia did for half the Sabor, the rest being elected proportionally, so perhaps someone keen can identify who was elected in 1995 to represent the constituency containing the big office building at the lower end of Šoštarićeva where we lived for eight months in 1996). Likewise for the four months I lived in Leingarten, Baden-Württemberg, which presumably had a direkt gewählte MdB.

Very much enjoyed last night’s episode (apart from the peculiar slip of demoting Queen Victoria from HM to HRH – on a Home Office computer to boot). But we had a certain amount of background noise so I missed one important line about a character we didn’t actually see:

What was said about Martha’s wedding? And at what point in the episode?

I have social engagements in Brussels both tonight and tomorrow night, but will have to cut them short to get home in time…

…to fill in the time before Torchwood.

These are the top 15 books in each of the main Doctor Who series of novels, as ranked by the number of people who own them on LibraryThing (also the top 15 non-fiction Who books at the end). Apologies to co-authors who fall off the list due to LibraryThing’s practice of prioritising first-named collaborators compounded by my laziness in not looking them up.

Edited to Add: Bah, listed one book twice. The Face of the Enemy is of course a Past Doctor Adventure not a Missing Adventure. But you can’t edit polls, so there we are.

It’s not surprising that the “Companions of Doctor Who” series of books was dropped; if anything it’s more surprising that another two were published (Harry Sullivan’s War by Ian Marter and Terence Dudley’s novelisation of K9 and Company) after this very unimpressive start. The evil female leader’s name is Rehctaht, which probably tells you all you need to know. The plot, such as it is, has Turlough, back on his home planet, reinventing the Tardis and trying to prevent nuclear destruction. There is much confusion of timelines, and too much material hastily thrown together. I think there are about three different novels in here, but it is difficult to tell if any of them would have been any good.

(Lists from a combination of Wikipedia and LibraryThing, with fairly arbitrary cutoff points which meant I missed off The Manchurian Candidate etc. Interpret the word “read” to your own satisfaction.)

For as long as I can remember, I have been aware of the Democratic Unionist Party, founded by the Reverend Ian Paisley in 1971 and now the largest Unionist party in Northern Ireland.

Now I discover that there is another Democratic Unionist Party (referred to by its members as الحزب الإتحادي الديموقراطي‎) in Sudan, founded in 1967. I doubt very much that Ian Paisley and Desmond Boal were aware of it when they rebranded and slightly expanded the Protestant Unionist Party four years later, but I shall be on the lookout for parallels as I do my weekend reading of African history.

A decent enough Rose/Ten novel, based a little bit on Planet of Evil with human invaders disrupting a world that should have been left to itself. A couple of references to the Doctor’s friendship with Shakespeare (this is pre-The Shakespeare Code).

The BBC have broadcast three Torchwood plays over the last three days, available only with difficulty for those of us outside the UK. But my determination overcame the difficulty, and I managed to listen to all three.

Individual discussions of each below the cut, but one common slightly disappointing factor is that John Barrowman seems to be under sedation for all three plays. I guess he is just one of those actors for whom the visuals are essential – certainly, having seen him on stage, he seems to love the thrill of interaction with his fellow-performers, which perhaps is rather different in a sound booth (and I’ll note again that I wasn’t impressed with his reading of The Ancestor Cell). In the first and third plays it doesn’t matter so much since Jack is less prominent, but it rather takes the shine off The Golden Age. (I will add that the female guest stars in all three plays were excellent.)

Anita Sullivan’s Asylum centres around Gwen, Andy the policeman, and Frieda, a girl from the future who has mysteriously been thrown into today’s Cardiff. I found the ending inconclusive but none the less intriguing. Erin Richards is great as Frieda, and there is a nice Jack/Ianto exchange as they play with the weapon she has brought with her. I thought Andy’s character was pushed to places where a beat policeman wouldn’t normally go, but Tom Price carried it off well.

(Big space to allow for those who haven’t heard the other two plays yet.)

James Goss’s The Golden Age is just a bit silly: back in 1924, Torchwood’s Indian branch retreated inside the timeproof walls of a gentlemen’s club in Delhi, using salvaged alien technology which now needs to be fed, Matrix-like, with human lives. Oh yes, and it is run by a Duchess who is an old flame of Jack’s. Obviously this has to Be Stopped, and our team does it, though as mentioned above with an audible lack of enthusiasm from the show’s star. Jasmine Hyde is, however, suitably dotty and homicidal as the Duchess. (Though she ought to be addressed as “Your Grace”.) Eve Myles and Gareth David Lloyd are not given much to do other than wander round and get captured, but they do it very well.

(Space left for those who have’t heard The Dead Line yet.)

Phil Ford’s The Dead Line is probably the best of the three. Here we have the focus on Gwen and Rhys, for a change: all over Cardiff people are collapsing into comas when answering the phone. Jack becomes one of the victims, and Ianto can’t tear himself from Jack’s bedside (which gets Gareth David Lloyd a nice soliloquy about the future of their relationship). We meet another of Jack’s old flames, a neurologist played by Doña Croll (probably the best known of the guest stars), which gives an excuse for much gossip about the 1970s. Eventually Gwen and Rhys track down the problem to a building society’s internal phone system; it is all suitably horrific, though I found the ending a bit abrupt and had to play it again to make sure I wasn’t missing anything.

So, three worthy additions to the Torchwood canon. There is no internal order to the plays, so if you can only listen to one make it The Dead Line.

• YouTube – Ukulele Orchestra of GB – The Good the Bad the Ugly
  I almost gave up on this after the first minute, but that would have been a mistake.

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• A Literary Theory : Uncertain Principles
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Doctor Who Files 1: The Doctor, by Jacqueline Rayner with a story by Stephen Cole
Doctor Who Files 2: Rose, by Jacqueline Rayner
Doctor Who Files 3: The Slitheen, by Jacqueline Rayner
Doctor Who Files 4: The Sycorax, by Jacqueline Rayner with a story by Stephen Cole

These four 50-page hardbacks, published very early in the Tennant era, originally retailed for £5.99 each. I got the lot for 99p plus postage from eBay, which is just about what they are really worth. They would be an interesting element (though a small one) in a study of the rhetorical practices of Who merchandising as exercised under the RTD regime (perhaps with a comparative element considering the precedents set by JNT and others). The first 30 pages of each book consists of reheated Who lore (almost entirely of the first year and a half of New Who) of greater or lesser relevance to the topic, based on the TV series (and for the Slitheen also incorporating elements from Stephen Cole’s novel The Monsters Inside). The final section of each book has a short story, the two by Rayner being decidedly ordinary (the one in the Rose book is tediously educational on philately), but the two by Cole much better – his story at the end of the Sycorax book retells The Christmas Invasion from the monster’s point of view, which is a welcome shift of perspective and carried off smoothly. But really, I’d hesitate even to recommend these to completists, unless you can pick them up as cheaply as I did.

I took a detour from my usual intellectual pursuits at lunchtime yesterday and wandered over to my former workplace at CEPS, to hear the Financial Times journalist Gillian Tett talk about her book, Fool’s Gold: How Unrestrained Greed Corrupted a Dream, Shattered Global Markets and Unleashed a Catastrophe. I was CEPS’ researcher on Balkan issues when I was there in 1999-2002, but its strongest area is on the economic side, and although I don’t know the field I always suspected that Karel Lannoo, the chief executive, had carved out a commanding position in the world of intellectual analysis of how capital markets function and should be regulated.

Gillian Tett, given the task of summarising her 350-page book in 20 minutes, presented it as effectively an anthropological study of the small tribe of bankers at J.P. Morgan who invented the credit default swap, in the blind faith that the three deities of globalisation, innovation and market capitalism were infallible. (She mentioned her own much earlier anthropological field work in a village in Tadzkhikistan before she became a journalist.) The book is also an attempt to overcome what she described as the “information asymmetry” between the inside and the outside of the banking industry, where the technicalities of what was going on were too complex (or at least were presented as being too complex) for regulators, let alone politicians, to understand. This asymmetry happens within institutions as well; she feels that we should not describe banks as “too big to fail” but should ask if they are in fact “too big to manage”.

I found myself very sympathetic to both of these general points. I have remarked before that although I work in politics, I find that it is anthropology, rather than political science, which gives me much better insights into what I am doing and more useful ideas about what to do next (see several books on Cyprus, also this one.) It seems to supply a set of analytical tools which are operationally more useful, some of which I was fortunate enough to absorb when doing my PhD in the Social Anthropology department at QUB (though my subject was rather different). I am also fascinated by what Tett calls “information asymmetry”; my job at the moment is effectively ensuring that sensitive information reaches the information-poor in time to affect sensitive political decisions, which is a fascinating process; the role of information poverty in political decision-making doesn’t often get taken into account by IR analysts who assume that all actors have access to much the same set of facts. (The two sets of issues are more or less combined in the Haas concept of the epistemic community.)

The discussion afterwards was pretty high-powered – those who spoke included Ireland’s Permanent Representative to the EU, the top official of the Commission’s Directorate General for Economic and Financial Affairs, and the number two in the Internal Market and Services Directorate General – so I sat back and kept my mouth shut. At CEPS the discussion part of the meetings isusually off the record, but you won’t be surprised that it was more about debating (and failing to agree on) policy solutions rather than challenging Tett’s basic assumptions or intellectual framework.

It’s an interesting subject, I also had an interest in attending in that the author and I were exact conteporaries at Clare College, from which we graduated twenty years ago last week. In our first year, she lived on the same staircase as three future CUSFS committee members, , and myself. We have all changed in the meantime, but she did catch my eye when telling a Star Trek joke as part of her presentation…

• YouTube – Jumpin Jive – Cab Calloway and the Nicholas Brothers
  Just amazing

You won’t find this in dead tree format: it is an audiobook read by Gareth David Lloyd, who plays Ianto Jones in the series, and written by the show’s script editor/assistant producer (who also happens to be my cousin). The next week or so is going to be Torchwood-heavy, what with the new radio plays on today, tomorrow and Friday, and the new five-part TV story next week, but it was largely coincidental that I slapped this onto the MP3 player a few days ago.

To get the obvious out of the way first: it’s a monster-of-the-week story, with a resolution that effectively hits the reset button so that the world is not much changed after the events described. But I think it is a very good story of its kind. The Sin Eaters derive from Christian theology, and infiltrate their victims via a special form of baptism, with inevitably nasty consequences. It would be very easy to write a very stupid religion-and-Torchwood story; but Minchin confidently takes Gwen and Rhys through matters ecclesiastical, in what for me is the slightly foreign church environment of South Wales.

The brutal reduction in the core cast at the end of Torchwood’s second series means that we have only Jack, Ianto, Gwen and Rhys left as central characters. There is a neat contrast in the relationships – Gwen/Rhys, married over a year now; Jack/Ianto, still at the frenetic fumbling stage; and also Rhys’s friend Matt whose stag night provides the catalyst for the story as a whole. Given the extra space (2 CDs of audiobook is worth several Torchwood episodes) we get a lot of decent exploration of love and religion in the world of Torchwood, though I felt that the author would gladly have given us more if space had allowed.

Also, Gareth David Lloyd is an excellent reader, switching easily from strong to weak Welsh accent depending on character, and also doing a good job on Jack’s American. He is recognisably Ianto from the start, but (of course) more so when in character, and also carries a conviction that lifts the various character moments and vivid descriptive passages tremendously. I was disappointed by the first Torchwood audiobook I tried, and probably wouldn’t have bothered with this one if it hadn’t been for the family connection, but I will try some more in future.

Wow. Just… Wow.

This is too short a book to rave about at length. It begins with a dead mouse and ends with a dead man. It has tremendous characterisation and horrible choices. It has biting but subtle commentary on gender, race and disability. Perhaps the ending is just a bit too inevitable, but it had a tremendous buildup. Superb, and I am amazed that I had never thought to read this before.

Just got an email from a very weird person who came to see me yesterday with a business proposition. The meeting was short and unsatisfactory as I simply couldn’t understand what kind of business proposal the guy was trying to make to me. He sent me a very weird email just now, saying that I appeared to him to be

…someone being intellectually channeled, somehow rigid and sinister in attitude and words, having a down turned voice, behaving in an odd way…

So, let’s resolve this by the wisdom of livejournal.

Non-fiction: 9 (YTD 45)

Shakespeare: 1 (YTD 19)

Fiction (non-sf): 6 (YTD 28)

SF (non-Who): 5 (YTD 41)

Who 2: (YTD 16)

Comics: 10 (YTD 16)

6 (YTD 34/165) by women (Woolf, Atwood, Rayner, Foglio, Carl, Rowling)
2 or 3 (YTD 9 or 10 / 165) by PoC (Tomine, Munif, and not sure if I can count Urrea)
Total page count ~9,400 (YTD 48,100)
Owned for more than a year: 6 (Sunset at Blandings, The Enchanted Isles, This Immortal [reread], Cities of Salt, The Devil’s Highway, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix [reread])
Other rereads: none (YTD 20)

I enjoyed this more than I remember doing first time round. I still think it has some pretty serious flaws. I find Harry’s adolescent surliness for much of the book simply boring, and his reconciliation with Dumbledore at the end feels flat to me since we have always been pretty sure that it was going to happen. And the construction of the legal system and governance of the wizarding world is not quite substantial enough to be described as superficial. (Just one example: in what sort of school would the Slytherin supporters’ merciless mockery of Ron Weasley not result in serious disciplinary measures against the perpetrators?)

Having said that, the high points were higher than I remembered. There are some good descriptive passages, especially of particular settings – the forest, the Ministry; and the second order characters, Sirius, Luna, the twins, etc, all get much more development. (One is a bit sorry for Cho Chang whose subplot gets lost in the second half of the book.) I still think this is one of the weaker volumes of the series, but I think I must have raced through it so fast first time round that I missed a lot of its better elements.

I’m going to end my Rowling re-read here, since this was the first part of my programme of returning to popular books I have read but not previously written up on Livejournal, and I have written up volumes six and seven. Next in this sequence is therefore Tolkien’s The Hobbit.

< Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone | Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets | Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban | Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire | Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix | Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince | Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows | The Tales of Beedle the Bard >

Inspired by this thread between and , I just tried cold-brewing some tea – filled the cup with cold water, put in a teabag, left it for twenty-five minutes, drank it.

Hmmm.

Probably should have left it in the fridge as recommends, so that it is refreshingly cold and not halfway to room temperature; probably should have left it a bit longer as well; but a pleasant experience none the less and not too dissimilar from what I have bought across the counter as “iced tea” in the US. Here in Belgium, “ice tea” is carbonated, heavily sweetened and often flavoured with peach or lemon. I still prefer it to other soft drinks, but that is not saying much.

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It will be fairly obvious that I spent most of the weekend sitting in the garden reading in the wonderful weather we have been having; my back is still not completely right so I have been taking it easy. I am relieved to report that this book brings me to the end of my Hugo reading, as the only other nominee in its category is an art book which I am not going to buy. (Though if anyone wants to send me a review copy…)

It feels a bit elegiac, and if anything belated, to look at a handbook to Bujold’s Vorkosigan universe. It is five years since the latest story of the cycle was published, and the most recent novel came out in 2001. Bujold continues to publish, but has switched to fantasy these days, and her silence about the likelihood of a return to the world of Miles and his family is increasingly deafening edited to add see and ‘s comments below for the latest on this.

I must say we do a brisk trade in this house of lending the books out to visitors, who usually return them gratefully, asking for more and complimenting us on our taste; and they are favourites to reread as well.

The Companion is rather thin for its price. It starts with several interesting bits from Bujold herself, but then has some not very inspiring essays on various aspects of her works. The best by far is Marna Nightingale’s description of Bujold fandom; I’ll shout out also to Doug Muir for his introduction to The Warrior’s Apprentice. But I couldn’t really recommend the book to anyone who is not a Bujold completist, and I’m afraid it goes fourth on my Hugo ballot for Best Related Book, which therefore looks like this:

1. Rhetorics of Fantasy
2. What It Is We Do When We Read Science Fiction
3. Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded
4. The Vorkosigan Companion

A truly intriguing novel, folding together a sordid upper-class Canadian family history with pulp science fiction writing in the 1930s; layers of truth and fiction in the narrative which drew me in gradually and inexorably. Fascinating.

Agatha Heterodyne is struggling with the legacy of her family castle, which has a mind of its own (or several minds, as it turns out); meanwhile Gilgamesh Wulfenbach is trying to break into the castle and rescue her, against the wishes of his father the baron. The Foglio art style is distinctive (and a bit of googling revealed why I thought it looked familiar); the plotting and scrioting decent enough. It’s a fun romp, but difficult to appreciate without having read the first seven volumes. Unlike the other Hugo nominees this hasn’t yet been published in a single edition, so you have to read it off the website; no doubt the eventual dead trees version will have some explanatory front matter.

I have now read all six nominees for the Best Graphic Novel category in this year’s Hugo awards. Two observations strike me. First, some of them are not particularly good. This is often the case with Hugo nominations, with the Best Short Story list usually containing one or two total clunkers. I notice that not a lot of nominations were actually received in this category, and will be interested to see what the cutoff to get on the shortlist actually was. For all that, I hope that future WorldCons keep this as a Hugo category; comics are an important part of the sfnal world, and really this award should have been instituted decades ago.

Second, a lot of graphic novel series are pretty damn impenetrable if you jump in in the middle. The only two nominees which I really unequivocally liked were a) one based on a TV show which I loved and b) a standalone book (also based in a non-comics continuity). The other four included two climaxes to ongoing sagas (one of which I already knew, and the other of which I didn’t) and two volumes in ongoing stories where much of the humour rests in established characters with whom I am unfamiliar. I wonder to what extent Schlock Mercenary and Y fans will vote for these particular books as if they represent the entire series, without really reflecting on how they stack up compared to the Serenity or Dresden Files nominees as stories in their own right. Of course, this is a problem that exists in other Hugo categories as well, notably (but not only) the Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) award, and again is no reason not to choose a Best Graphic Novel.

My votes are pretty clear in my mind, as follows:

1. Serenity: Better Days
2. The Dresden Files: Welcome to the Jungle
3. Fables: War and Pieces
4. Girl Genius 8: Agatha Heterodyne and the Chapel of Bones
5. Y: The Last Man: Whys and Wherefores
6. Schlock Mercenary: The Body Politic

I read the first edition of this two years ago, since when it has been sitting on the shelf with the other volumes of this superb series of handbooks to Doctor Who, looking a bit thin in comparison with its fellows. This second edition is massively expanded from the first, with most of the new material simply being more of the same excellent analysis of the programme’s context (in this case the early 1970s) plus a lot more analytical essays and 147 endnotes (which is 142 more than in the first edition; though I repeat my complaint about them being endnotes rather than footnotes). There is loads more information about what was going on behind the scenes, most of which is very interesting; my own recent back problems make me very sympathetic to Jon Pertwee. A welcome shift in Wood’s attitude has him attempting to incorporate New Who continuity into Old Who analysis, rather than the invective he was previously lapsing into; this offers him room for writing such essays as “All Right, Then… Where Were Torchwood?” and additional evidence for “When are the Unit Stories Set?” There are a couple of other standout pieces, “Why Did We Countdown to TV Action?” on the early 1970s Doctor Who comics, and “Why Didn’t Plaid Cymru Lynch Barry Letts?” which ostensibly attempts to explain Wales to Americans but actually has a lot of good points to make.

When I read the first edition of this I hadn’t yet seen all the Pertwee stories, and tended to go and look them up in Wood and Miles after I had finished watching them. Now I want to watch several of them again to see the things I missed first time around. An excellent handbook, and I am very glad that Wood is planning a seventh volume to cover the first years of New Who.

I love Kay’s later works, Tigana, The Lions of Al-Rassan, Sailing to Sarantium and Lord of Emperors, so I was prepared to be forgiving of this earlier work. It is a competent enough portal fantasy, with five young Canadians wrenched into a largely Celtic world to fulfill a variety of quests. There is some odd pacing of info-dumping, and the characterisation is not as good as in Kay’s later works – did he take the wrong lessons from his work on The Silmarillion? But it’s decent enough, and is interesting for the way it draws on various different cultural roots without too much disharmony – the Summer Tree of the title being a particularly good example (Neil Gaiman uses it in American Gods as well, but more intrusively). So I will read the sequel in due course.