I wrote a piece for the Newsletter about the elections yesterday – would be interersted to know if they used it for the print edition as it doesn’t appear to be on-line.
(I have written for the Tele and Irish News previously, and indeed helped the latter set up their online edition in the dim and distant past, so if the Newsletter did print the piece I now have the hat-trick of Belfast dailies.)
If it is possible to scan and email the article (assuming it exists), I would be very grateful!
My back has seized up, and I have been ordered to bed for the rest of the week, which was alarming at what would have been a busy time at work. But there you go. The upside is that I have been able to do some more due diligence re the Hugos, by watching the three non-Who nominees in the Best Dramatic Presentation: Short Form category. NB that these were the first episodes of Battlestar Galactica or Lost that I had ever seen.
So, in the end, my Hugo ballot in this category will probably be:
1) Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead (Doctor Who)
2) Turn Left (Doctor Who)
3) The Constant (Lost)
4) Dr Horrible’s Singalong Blog
5) Revelations (Battlestar Galactica)
Though I am still musing the second and third placings, and may swap them.
A Belgian correspondent on Facebook queries my statement that Bairbre De Brún has a particularly high personal vote, and of course he is quite right; when you take open lists (as we have here) into account, her 126,184 votes rather pale into insignificance behind Guy Verhofstadt’s 565,359. I haven’t gone through the EU27 figures to work out if anyone beat Verhofstadt, but it’s clear that several Belgians beat De Brún.
Jim Nicholson (UUP) + 37,942 = 132,227
Diane Dodds (DUP) + 24,462 = 115,722
Alban Maginness (SDLP) + 2,614 = 97,428
5,463 non-transferable
Nicholson is over the quota (which was 121,144), so he is elected.
Votes left in the system: the SF surplus of 5,040, and Nicholson’s surplus of 11,113. Even in the unlikely event that they all went to Maginness, he would still be more than 3,000 votes short of Dodds, so she is elected.
(
So 53% of Allister’s votes went to Nicholson, and only 35% to his former party.
On this basis I fancy his chances of winning a seat at the next Westminster election are good, esp in North Antrim which has a history oif maverick election results going back more than a century.
Distribution of Green and Alliance votes:
Alban Maginness (SDLP) +16,325 = 94,814
Jim Nicholson (UCUNF) +11,392 = 94,285
Diane Dodds (DUP) +2,914 = 91,260
Jim Allister (TUV) +4,284 = 70,481
Non-transferable: 7,548
Puts poor Alban ahead by a nose, but he will be easily overtaken by the other two on Allister’s transfers. The Green and Alliance transfers split pretty evenly between Unionists and Nationalists.
Bairbre De Brun, Sinn Fein – 126,184 (26%)
Diane Dodds, DUP – 88,346 (18.2%)
Jim Nicholson, Ulster Conservative and Unionist – 82,893 (17.1%)
Alban Maginness, SDLP – 78,489 (16.2%)
Jim Allister, Traditional Unionist Voice – 66,197 (13.7%)
Ian Parsley, Alliance – 26,699 (5.5%)
Steven Agnew, Green Party – 15,764 (3.3%)
Quota: 121,144
Looks like my former French teacher will have the largest personal vote of any member of the new European Parliament (because the only other places where there isn’t a list system are the Republic and the German-speaking cantons of Belgium, where the number of voters is much fewer).
Glad to see that my gut feeling that SF’s vote might have dropped slightly was correct. (SDLP vote share actually up slightly, but won’t help them, though I see some eternal optimists still think Alban can make it.)
Best Alliance result in a European election since 1979.
Very cheering I expect for Jim Allister, though he will still lose and see Nicholson and Dodds elected on his transfers.
i) I’m in that ‘what am I going do after I graduate’ place. What you do looks really interesting to me. What would you suggest to someone like me who wants to know more?
First off, it’s cheering to hear that my work sounds really interesting. Most days I think it is too, which I guess indicates that I am in more or less the right place. But I’m going to interpret your question (reading it as “how do I get an interesting job like that?”) in both a specific and a general way.
Specifically mine is not an entry-level job, and my employers are not hiring entry-level people for my sort of role. I am now 42, and I’ve got here by way of postgraduate degrees in completely different subjects, political activism, field work in post-conflict transition countries and eight years in Brussels thinktanks. I’d always hoped I might end up doing this sort of work, but the route to get here was not obvious.
Generally, it is worth investing some time in reflecting on what you want for yourself. The best book on this subject, for me anyway, is Richard Nelson Bolles’ What Color Is Your Parachute?. Go and buy it, as soon as your nearest bookshop opens. You won’t regret the tenner or so it costs, or the weekend you will need to spend filling in the worksheets.
ii) Related to the above, I’m hoping to do a Masters no matter what happens. Would an International Relations Masters or similar be useful, or would a Masters in a related discipline, specifically the War Studies MA at Kings be a good way forward?
Since my own masters is in medieval astrology, I am not sure I can give a terribly concrete answer. What you will get from a taught postgraduate degree is i) information about whatever it is about, ii) analytical and research skills, and iii) a few months’ respite from the job market. I’m not convinced that academe is ever especially up to date in international relations; you have to rate the comparative utility of going to lectures vs reading a couple of decent newspapers every day. IR theory is almost completely useless in terms of the day-to-day practicalities of diplomacy. I have never actually studied politics and have no regrets about that; nor has it hampered me from following a political career. (I do sometimes wish I had a better grounding in law.)
The analytical and research skills are, however, important and transferable, and doing a Masters allows you to hone those skills in an environment where your early mistakes are pretty cost-free. So I must say if I was shopping around I would be attracted by a course which had a decent component on the nuts and bolts of research and writing, whatever the particular area of interest.
And then there is getting a job, where it’s very true that just having any postgraduate qualification ticks one of the necessary boxes for a lot of positions (including the internships in my own office). I suggest you google the phrase “has just graduated with a masters in X from the university of Y” and see what comes up! I notice that I meet far more people who have studied at LSE than Oxbridge here in Brussels; I don’t know if either is on your list.
iii) how do I track down appropriate internships to get some insight into all of this?
This is the easiest of your questions to answer. For British-based internships, check http://www.w4mp.org; for Brussels positions, check http://www.eurobrussels.com and http://jobs.euractiv.com – I shall be advertising the next internship vacancy in my own office on all three (probably advertising at end of August for a start date in October). Also if you identify an organisation that interests you, there is no harm in the informational interview and direct approach.
A big job market is about to open up in the European Parliament, starting this evening. Likewise at Westminster a whole lot of opprtunities may open up next year (and also people will already be jumping ship in advance of the end of term). All of that has an effect on the overall market in political jobs.
My other piece of advice, not exactly internship related but in the same ballpark, is to check out the prospects of election observation missions – that link is a little out of date but the basic information remains correct. Doing ten days in a transition country is a good way of testing your attraction to working in the field!
I hope all that is helpful. Feel free to take this up with me directly by email as well.
I was rather expecting this to be a sober and gruelling tale of conflicted sexual identity. I was almost completely wrong.
Rather as Romeo and Juliet works partly because we are told up front by the Chorus that the title characters are going to die, Middlesex is absolutely clear about what is going to happen, and its charm is the clarity with which it is all laid out. I have absolutely no idea how relevant or true to life it is for readers who have themselves grappled with gender identification issues (and would be very interested to hear reactions from such quarters); it certainly raised my consciousness while also entertaining me greatly. Strongly recommended.
1. What is your degree(s?) in?
My first degree was a B.A. in Natural Sciences from Clare College, Cambridge (graduated in 1989).
I got an M. Phil. in History and Philosophy of Science, also at Clare College, Cambridge (in 1991).
Like you (I suspect) I have the joke Cambridge M.A. (which I guess I got about 1992).
And my doctorate, also in History and Philosophy of Science, was eventually obtained from the Queen’s University of Belfast (in 1997).
2. What is your connection with Northern Ireland such that you ended up standing as a candidate there?
Well, I was actually born there! And lived there most of my life until I went to Cambridge in 1986; and then after I left Cambridge in 1991, went back to Belfast until I moved to Bosnia at the start of 1997. I joined the Alliance Party as a teenager, rejoined in the 1990s and ended up as the Party Organiser / Director of Elections for three years. That also included being a candidate in North Belfast in 1996.
Belgium was very much a positive choice. I read What Color Is Your Parachute? and decided I wanted a job working on the implications of EU enlargement for the Balkans; and found someone in Belgium prepared to pay me for doing just that. There have been several occasions when I’ve been very glad that my career worked out the way it did. On the positive side, the services provided by the state for our children are just fantastic, and would hardly be matched elsewhere. On the other side, I look at the challenges and frustrations of either electoral politics or academe (which were the two other tracks I was considering) and am glad to have ended up elsewhere. Let’s face it, living pretty much anywhere in the developed world is probably the best living conditions anyone has ever had in the history of the human race. For my career interests and my family’s needs, Belgium has some good extras.
That’s a tricky one. Actually my fantasy involves being able to sit by the beach and read science fiction books, rather than have absolute power. So I guess somewhere English-speaking with decent bookshops and good weather which would more or less run itself without bothering me. Perhaps Australia or New Zealand.
Re
Deliberate choice or natural tendency: Well, sometimes the one reinforces the other, doesn’t it? Do you choose to eat chocolate, or just happen to like it? I have always felt that “Cast your bread upon the waters, for you will find it after many days” was good advice, and so have invested my social capital in a diverse portfolio.
Yes, I do work on it actively. I have a contacts file of about 3,500 people, which I periodically – ie weekly – check against Facebook and LinkedIn to see if any new people have joined. And of course I am adding to that all the time through business meetings and fannish contacts.
The latter in principle, though both in reality. Everyone has the right to be heard; we do assess whether or not our clients can pass an ethical test, and have turned people down for that and other reasons. (The other likely reason being that there is not much we can do for them as our services are rather specialised.)
Others, feel free to ask.
Conall McDevitt has taken me to task for my back-of-an-envelope calculations about the drop in turnout last night. (Incidentally, Conall, I can spell your name correctly; I would appreciate it if you can return the favour.) We now have the full turnout figures for all 18 constituencies, so here they are, ranked by the fall in turnout between the last Euro-election in 2004 and this year’s vote, and coloured as to whether the 2001 census found more Catholics or more Protestants in each:
Newry and Armagh 49.1% (-16.9%)
FST 51.5% (-15.2%)
Mid Ulster 52.8% (-12.6%)
West Tyrone 50.3% (-12.1%)
Foyle 44.3% (12.0%)
West Belfast 46.6% ( -10.5%)
North Antrim 43.2% (-10.1%)
East Derry 42.3% (-9.1%)
South Down 45.0% ( -9.0%)
Upper Bann 41.8% (-8.4%)
Belfast North 41.0% (-7.7%)
South Belfast 42.1% (-7.2%)
Lagan Valley 38.9% (-7.2%)
East Belfast 38.8% (-6.1%)
South Antrim 38.0% (-5.8%)
Strangford 34.2% (-5.7%)
East Antrim 34.5% (-4.8%)
North Down 34.5% (-3.5%)
That is not a difficult table to read, even for SDLP supporters, who are habitually prone to wishful thinking; the average fall in turnout in Catholic majority seats is 12.6%, in Protestant majority seats 6.9%. I expect the gap between combined Unionist candidates and combined Nationalist candidates to widen from 2004 (when it was 48.5 to 43.2). I suspect that the intense rivalry between the three Unionist candidates has decreased the usual differential of turnout (Nationalists have been pulling out more of their potential voters at every election since 1996), and the combined Unionist vote will be comfortably over 50% even though it is split three ways. There is therefore no chance of the SDLP winning the third seat. (Incidentally the above figures suggest that the SF vote share will also be down, though word from the tallies is that this is not the case.)
Provisional unofficial turnout numbers figures from the Northern Ireland constituencies (with the 2007 Assembly turnout in brackets) – from Stratagem:
Mid Ulster 52.83% (73.1%)
West Belfast 46.6% (67.4%)
South Down 44.97% (65.0%)
North Antrim 43.7% (61.3%)*
South Belfast 42.1% (62.4%)
North Belfast 40.98% (60.9%)
Lagan Valley 38.86% (60.0%)
East Belfast 38.82% (60.0%)
South Antrim 38.03% (58.6%)
East Antrim 34.53% (53.5%)
North Down 34.48% (53.8%)
Strangford 34.24% (54.5%)
* Mark Devenport at the BBC has this figure as Newry and Armagh rather than North Antrim, but if so it is very low!)
Looks to me like (very broadly speaking) the Nationalist vote is down 22%, the Unionist vote more like 20%. So I expect the “gap” to be if anything a bit wider than the Assembly elections in 2007, ie combined Unionist total at around 50% and combined Nats some way below that. So while de Brún will retain her seat for SF, looks like Alban Maginness has failed to sneak in for the SDLP.
Rumours rather incredibly have the Unionist vote split three ways, with James Nicholson of the UUP/Conservatives ahead of Diane Dodds of the DUP and Jim Allister (ex-DUP now TUV). The fact that these rumours come from Allister’s camp, thus admitting that he will probably lose his seat, make them more credible!
Mildly wishful thinking on my part: the turnout has dropped least in areas where the Alliance Party is strongest…
I’ve rephrased the wording of this meme floating round, so as to make it less annoying…
On LiveJournal, we often think we’re close, but really, we know less about each other than we like to think. So I want you to ask me something you would like to know about me, something that should be obvious, but you have no idea about, or something you’ve always been curious about but have never asked, or something completely silly that you’d like me to answer for kicks. No limits on the range of questions, either: ask me anything you want to know about, whether it’s a fannish opinion or trivia about my real life or my thoughts on events in the offline world.
Comments to this post screened; answers will go in public posts if appropriate.
Well, I’m inclined to vote the Open VLD ticket on Sunday. Their election literature arrived yesterday; they have what look like a sensible enviromental approach on the economy, and the law-n-order stuff which worried me in the summary on De Standaard’s website was simply not there. (So either De Standaard got it wrong, or Open VLD aren’t terribly serious about being hardline on those issues; I’m happy either way.)
Most strikingly, Open VLD are explicitly in favour of the right of same-sex couples to adopt; and this is a campaign promise which can actually be implemented, as we are electing the Flemish parliament which decides these issues in Flanders. Dear reader, would it be possible for a potential party of government (Open VLD held the prime minister’s position from 1999 to 2008) to run on adoption rights for same-sex couples in your country?
(Of course, here in Belgium we’ve had same-sex marriage for years – none of this “civil partnerships” compromising – and the world has failed to end; once you’ve got that far, it’s obviously an anomaly if some married couples can adopt and others can’t.)
The best of luck to Ian Parsley, who is the Alliance Party’s candidate in the European elections in Northern Ireland tomorrow.
Likewise to my Lib Dem friends, alphabetically arranged: Stewart Arnold, Neil Corlett, Chris Davies, Andrew Duff, Jonathan Fryer, Simon James, Ben Jones, Christopher Le Breton, Sarah Ludford, Deborah Newton-Cook, Rebecca Taylor, Diana Wallis, Graham Watson, and Peter Welch. I will see most of you in Brussels one way or the other.
Also tomorrow the Netherlands elects its MEPs. Best of luck to Sophie in ‘t Veld, as lead candidate for D’66 – hope you get re-elected too.
Some countries will vote on Friday and Saturday, but most on Sunday. I shall cast my vote for Annemie Neyts here in Belgium; my best wishes go to Marianne Mikko in Estonia, Gisela Kallenbach, Doris Pack, and Heide Rühle in Germany, István Szent-Iványi in Hungary, Jelko Kacin in Slovenia and Ana Maria Gomes in Portugal; and especially to Nina Suomalainen in Finland who is not an incumbent but trying to get elected for the first time.
This is a bit complicated, so bear with me.
Go to: http://www.zdf.de/ZDFmediathek/content/9602?inPopup=true
Click on “Sendung verpasst?” at the top
Click on “Di GESTERN” on the next page (NB if you don’t do this today, it will be “Di 02.06.09”)
Click on the right arrow at the bottom of the page
Click on “22.45 Uhr / Dokumentation / Die EU von A bis Z”
Click one of the three options for “Bandbreite” (probably the bottom one) and then on the word “Übernehmen”
The playback window then appears. My segment is from 07:00 to 09:00. Voiceover in German from my English original (and Mohamed Sidati’s French).
Anyone else using it? Feel free to add me. (Firstname.surname@gmail.com)
Naomi Long elected Lord Mayor of Belfast!
Category A:
Category A½:
Category B:
Category C:
Edited to add: Yeah, Hamlet should have been listed under Category B!
I think this will be the last Shakespeare play I review, a historical work from the earlier part of his career which is increasingly accepted as part of the canon (available here). It was odd to read it without the benefit of Arkangel or other performers, and it seemed to go very quickly (it’s also I think very short).
It’s actually a play of two very distinct halves. The first two acts concern Edward III’s attempts to seduce the Countess of Salisbury, which she successfully repulses; Acts III-V cover the Black Prince’s campaigns in France, including the Battle of Crécy and the Burghers of Calais. Chunks of Shakespeare’s sonnets are soldered into the text, which is part of the reason people think he was involved at a more substantial stage of the creative process. Certainly both halves of the play have obvious parallels among his other works, and I found the prose style enjoyable. The theory goes that the play was censored from the historical record because it is rude about the Scots, which seems entirely possible. An interesting curiosity.
Henry VI, Part I | Henry VI, Part II | Henry VI, Part III | Richard III / Richard III | Comedy of Errors | Titus Andronicus | Taming of the Shrew | Two Gentlemen of Verona | Love’s Labour’s Lost | Romeo and Juliet | Richard II / Richard II | A Midsummer Night’s Dream | King John | The Merchant of Venice | Henry IV, Part 1 / Henry IV, Part I | Henry IV, Part II | Henry V | Julius Caesar | Much Ado About Nothing | As You Like It | Merry Wives of Windsor | Hamlet / Hamlet | Twelfth Night | Troilus and Cressida | All’s Well That Ends Well | Measure for Measure | Othello | King Lear | Macbeth | Antony and Cleopatra | Coriolanus / Coriolanus | Timon of Athens | Pericles | Cymbeline | The Winter’s Tale / The Winter’s Tale | The Tempest | Henry VIII | The Two Noble Kinsmen | Edward III | Sir Thomas More (fragment) | Double Falshood/Cardenio
Those in other jurisdictions may like to note how sensible our arrangements for voting are: from 8 am to 3 pm on a Sunday, so you really have to get it over with before lunch; the results are out by early evening; and voting is compulsory (that is, turnout is compulsory; you can always cast a blank ballot). I decided long ago that I would probably vote for Annemie Neyts for the European Parliament, as I know her personally. But now that we are Belgian citizens, we get the bonus of voting in the elections for the Flemish regional parliament also held on Sunday, and I’m not at all sure which way to go.
The other problem is a very specific one. The SLP’s lead candidate in Flemish Brabant happens to come from a part of the world where there is a long-standing conflict in which I am particularly interested, and originates from, as it were, the side I am less sympathetic to. I’ve been around a lot of international conflicts, and in every case there is an activist diaspora using the political platforms to which they have been elected in other countries to promote their homeland political opinions. I had no idea whether this particular candidate is that kind of diaspora politician, but due diligence before casting my vote for him seemed to me to require that I check out his position on the conflict in his homeland. Unfortunately he has not replied to my emails or to a facebook message on the subject, in which I politely made my own views clear and asked what his position was. I might well been satisfied with a “tragic-situation-supporting-peace-process” type answer, but he didn’t even send me that much, so I can’t vote for him or his party.
So that leaves me wavering between the other parties; the survey from De Standaard that I linked to above suggests that my views are closest to the Greens (Groen!) and the Liberals (Open VLD). To be honest I have problems with both of them; the Greens are a bit wacky economically and Open VLD are too hardline on law enforcement for my taste. I am leaning towards Open VLD because they were quite close to preventing the odious Vlaams Blok (now Vlaams Belang) from getting a fifth seat last time; the Greens are likely to win a second seat with no chance of a third. But not leaning very much in any direction right now.
Shakespeare: 4 (YTD 18)
Fiction (non-sf): 6 (YTD 22)
SF (non-Who, including Apuleius): 9 (YTD 36)
Who: 2 (YTD 14)
Comics: 2 (YTD 6)
11 (YTD 28/132) by women (Nafisi, Tocci, Mendlesohn, David, Oswald, 3x Wilson, Jenkins, Spencer, Rowling)
2 (YTD 7/132) by PoC (Nafisi, Jenkins – Apuleius discounted for being a full citizen of the Roman Empire even if he was African)
Total page count ~8,500 (YTD ~38,700)
Owned for more than one year: 5 (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire [re-read], Ravens Gathering, On the Place of Gilbert Chesterton in English Letters, The Stories of Elizabeth Spencer, Elric)
Also re-read: The Man in the High Castle (for a total of 2, YTD 18).
Browsing through LibraryThing one day, I noted that Beverly Jenkins, of whom I had not heard, was one of the highest rated authors by the owners of her books – not many, but enough to reassure me that this was not astroturfing. Her particular subgenre – African-American historical romance – is not one that I had ever considered sampling, but I thought, what the heck, and BookMooched a couple of her books.
Jewel is actually a rather nice book. I particularly appreciated the historical setting, a Black community in the northern USA (specifically, Cass County, Michigan) in the 1880s. It’s not an environment I had ever thought much about, and Jenkins has clearly done her homework: the book is perhaps intended partly as a didactic device to educate readers about that period of Black history, especially the increasingly important role of journalism, and I was happy to be educated.
I’m not a connoisseur of romance novels so feel less qualified to judge the plot. I found the setup a bit implausible (the eponymous heroine, a 24-year-old virgin, agrees to pose as a friend’s wife and then finds inevitably that the fiction becomes reality). But the execution was entertaining, with lots of sexy newlywed moments. There were no really nasty characters in the book except for the husband’s ex-girlfriend, and she is suitably dealt with. An uplifting and cheering read.
I’ve read a certain amount of Michael Moorcock, but until now no Elric, so have filled that gap in my knowledge of sff classics. This is the Fantasy Masterworks edition which brings together The Stealer of Souls and Stormbringer, which I think are the first two Elric books published though apparently several more were subsequently inserted into the internal continuity.
I found the stories a quick and undemanding read. Elric’s tortured relationship with his soul-drinking sword and his own family heritage makes him an unusually complex hero. Moorcock’s prose is always engaging and often rises to the entertainingly baroque. His roots in Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft are clear (I think a bit less Tolkien). As I have noted before, immersive fantasies don’t always work for me but this was an entertaining enough ride.
