You’re Virginia!
Part of the old school, you like both historical sites and crazy
amusement parks. You like saying the word Commonwealth but couldn’t really explain the
concept or how it applies to your life. You like five-sided shapes, five-cent pieces,
and possibly anything else having to do with the number five. Every now and then, you
discard chaff from yourself that you just don’t feel you need. And since you’ve been
wondering… yes, there is a Santa Claus.

Take the State Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

More of my job:

Our televisual feasting was interrupted twice last night, half-way through the Chinese summit episode of the West Wing by a phone call for Anne, and then again half-way through Torchwood by a phone call for me. Well, the West Wing is on DVD and there are ways of catching up with Torchwood; so at least we know what we will be watching tonight…

7) The Rising of the Moon, by Flynn Connolly

I started off expecting this book to be just silly – in a future United Ireland where the Catholic Church has taken over, Nuala Dennehy foments a feminist revolution – but in the end I actually found the author’s enthusiasm for her cause and her characters rather endearing. There’s a lot for the Irish reader to nit-pick, not least that when the book was published, in 1994, the tide was definitely on the turn and Ireland’s lurch into modernity becoming irreversible. But taken as a tale of the general processes of revolt and revolution, it’s fair enough; and even if the situation of women in Ireland is unlikely ever again to be as bad as in Connolly’s novel, there are enough other parts of the world which are there or heading that way for the specific political message to remain relevant. The narrative falters only at the very end when the fate of Nuala and her closest friends seemed to me to be a bit implausible. I can’t say it’s great literature, and Irish readers will be annoyed by the errors (eg the crowd gathering in the park opposite Belfast City Hall – so where has City Hall been moved to? Or what block of commercial buildings adjoining Donegall Square has been demolished?), but it was a better read than I expected.

It’s the return of the interview meme! Some of these questions date from a while back – I have tracked down a number of you to whom I already owe five questions, and will try and deal with those tomorrow.

1. Leave me a comment saying, “Interview me.”
2. I respond by asking you five questions so I can get to know you better.
3. You will either update your LJ with the answers to the questions or post them here.
4. If you repost you will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the post; if you answer here, then any of my friends (or me) can do a set of follow up questions, but you get to ask them stuff too.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you can ask them five questions.
6. Or you can just ask me five question in comments here if you prefer.

Questions from :

1. How did you get into your line of work?

   Gradually. I was an academic researcher in history and philosophy of science, but also active in politics in Northern Ireland – I was the central campaigns director for the Alliance Party for three years in the mid-1990s just as the peace process was going. Then I managed to get a job in Bosnia, doing the same work that I had been doing in Belfast, but paid rather than unpaid, which is an important difference; and that gave me a taste for getting stuck into political analysis of complex and fast-moving situations. Then I had had enough of working for the Americans, and got jobs with two successive think-tanks in Brussels; and that gave me a taste for unpicking what was going on the EU and telling people about it. I moved to my current job a year ago, in order to input more effectively to the most vulnerable bits of the policy process.
   

2. What do you find most rewarding about what you do, and what would you change if you could?

   I love interacting at high-level with senior decision-makers, and (I hope) helping them to make better decisions. I hate the routine office admin, and it’s the one disadvantage of a relatively small organisation that there are fewer people to delegate the tedious bureaucracy too (though it’s a skill I am learning).
   

3. You seem extraordinarily sociable, you read a lot of difficult books and write thoughtful commentary, you do demanding work that involves travel and you are clearly devoted to your family. How do you find the time for all this, and what are the challenges associated with work/life balance for you?

   You’re clearly a very perceptive person yourself, Frankie! Having reflected on this very tricky question, I think there are three key things I try and do with my time. The most important is simply to get enough sleep, without which you have no energy to face the other challenges of the day. The second is to make sure I get out of the house for face-time with my wife at least once a week, to review and chew over everything going on in our lives. And the third is to also make sure I have a little time for reflection on my own – the daily commute is crucial in that way. Once you have the foundations in good order, it is much easier to balance on them.
   

4. If you were in charge of the political system, what would you change to make it work better?

   Hmm, which political system? I work in several different ones…

   Though on reflection, it’s easy enough – what I see happening time and time again is bad decisions being made due to restrictions in the flow of information among policy-makers, and between policy-makers and those to whom they are accountable. I think that all areas of policy would benefit from more openness and transparency. I am struck by how often key official documents in foreign policy are available to a persistent researcher, but not really to the general public on whose behalf these decisions are made. I would open things up, in general.
   

5. What are the policy areas that are most important to you and why?

   Foreign policy, because it fascinates me; health and education provisions for people with autism, because of my family.
   

Looking through my reviews on LibraryThing I found to my alarm that seven of them have been flagged as “not a review”. I had no idea that this system was in operation, and no idea until I checked that my reviews had been flagged in this way; in addition, I would defend each of the flagged reviews as being very definitely a review – one of them is actually pretty substantial:

Actually *is* a review!

http://www.librarything.com/work/3093889/reviews/840956
http://www.librarything.com/work/11862/reviews/411717
http://www.librarything.com/work/115367/reviews/114931

Links to a review on my site or my blog!

http://www.librarything.com/work/4041453/reviews/114842
http://www.librarything.com/work/3116747/reviews/425710
http://www.librarything.com/work/3396/reviews/2191976
http://www.librarything.com/work/1386651/reviews/100281

It seems to me that the blue flagging system adds no value whatsoever to LibraryThing; the fact that you aren’t told when your review has been flagged and that there is no apparent way of unflagging incorrectly flagged reviews makes it even worse. It should simply be scrapped.

Edited to add: Well, you can now undo a blue flag, which is better than nothing!

6) Endgame in Ireland, by Eamonn Mallie and David McKittrick

This is basically a chronological account of the peace process, starting really from the Brighton bomb in 1984 and finishing in the depressing summer of 2001 when everything appeared to be stalemated. Mallie and McKittrick have used the archives of the four-part BBC series of the same name, which I haven’t seen, but which I imagine covers much the same points in much the same way. I didn’t really learn a lot from this, except that (as ever) my perceptions of what was happening through the media at the time were only loosely linked with the reality of behind the scenes; and the tale of the internal wranglings of the Ulster Unionist Party are now an incidental detail of history – the real story is now the shift in the DUP approach over the last few years. It’s well-written and thorough but has now been overtaken by events.

As ever, I’m a bit behind with my Who-blogging – in particular I want to do a decent write-up of the I, Davros series which I listened to commuting last week – but two of the recent batch had something interesting in common.

Real Time was one of the animated Who stories done by the BBC in the run-up to the real revival in 2005, bringing the Sixth Doctor and his Big Finish companion Evelyn Smythe to the screen, encountering the remnants of the Cybermen and faced with a time-travel paradox (and the rather wooden acting of Yee Jee Tso). It’s got its limitations – the drawing is not great, especially compared with the animations of the missing episodes of The Invasion, and the plot is as always with Cybermen stories rather nonsensical – but I was very intrigued by the concept of Yee Jee Tso’s character, a far-future humanised Cyberman, trying to prevent a time paradox – it seemed an original and potentially interesting riff on the basic Cyberman idea.

The Harvest is a Big Finish production in the standard sequence, with the Seventh Doctor and Ace visiting a near-future hospital and coming away with a new companion, Hex. The interesting thing about the Cybermen here is that they are in league with the fiendish shadowy forces of authority, in collusion with Brussels (a detail which made me giggle but also reflect on the extent to which knee-jerk Europhobia has infiltrated everywhere in the UK). Normally the Cybermen are invaders, infiltrators from outside; to see them converting and corrupting society from within was new and interesting. Also the story sounds intriguingly as if it is heading in the direction of The Evil of the Daleks, though then takes a different turn.

Neither of these is as good as the greatest Cyberman story ever, which is Spare Parts, but they both take the Cyberman concept to places it has not gone on TV, where the only original Cyberman story after their first appearance is Tomb of the Cybermen – sad to say, the most interesting thing a Cyberman does in their 2006 incarnation is the fooling around on the gag reel of the DVDs which is the source for my icon (thanks again to ).

5) The City of the Dead, by Lloyd Rose

I got this simply because it is the highest-rated Doctor Who novel of any epoch by LibraryThing users, and I wanted a) to assess whether LibraryThing ratings can be considered a reasonable guide to quality and b) if it is worth giving the BBC series of Eighth Doctor Adventures another go, having been underwhelmed by my previous samplings.

Well, the answer to both questions seems to be a reasonably firm Yes. The setting of the story in Who continuity is unfamiliar to me – the Doctor is suffering from partial amnesia for some reason, and I have read nothing else with either of the two companions, Fitz and Anji. But the portrayal of the Eighth Doctor (amnesia apart) is consistent with the Big Finish audios, and I thought Anji came across well as an interesting character (Fitz rather less so).

I also felt initially suspicious about the setting, among occultists in New Orleans. Indeed, there is no scientific hand-waving anywhere in the book to explain away the magic – spells and summonings work, and elementals are real. Yet in the end I was satisfied; there are plenty of sf stories (indeed, many Doctor Who stories!) where there is detailed technobabble to explain what is going on, but the means and motivation of the bad guys remain unconvincing, and this is not one of them. Also the New Orleans setting was well sketched out (I suppose – I’ve never been there), and the plot had some genuine surprises – Lloyd Rose clearly has a good knack of misdirection. Plus the Doctor actually, possibly, maybe, has an intimate encounter, discreetly described.

I’d have enjoyed it more if I’d read more of this series, but if this is the best then some of the others must be pretty decent too.

In line with my new year resolutions I have been brushing up my Russian, listening to lessons on my MP3 player and muttering the responses to the alarm of my fellow train and passengers.

The one problem is, whenever I am asked to supply an answer to the question Это далеко? – “Is it far?” – I am tempted to respond, ungrammatically:

“YES! I AM A DALEK!”

4) Again, Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison

This is the famous follow-up volume to the even more famous Dangerous Visions, which I read almost exactly three years ago; an anthology of 41 stories, mainly by the leading lights of sf as it was in 1972, with vast amounts of prefatory material by editor Harlan Ellison and an afterword from each author, and nice art from Ed Emshwiller introducing each story.

But what is striking is how unmemorable and self-indulgent most of the stories are (also true of Ellison’s long-winded prefaces). The three best are definitely Ursula Le Guin’s “The Word for World is Forest”, Joanna Russ’s “When it Changed”, and James Tiptree Jr’s “The Milk of Paradise”; interestingly all three have the same basic plot, of an unspoilt planet being wrecked by us humans. Many of the others are just silly, Kurt Vonnegut being particularly proud of Using Rude Words To Be Grown-Up. In fact, the only other one I enjoyed was James Blish’s erotic pastiche “Getting Along”, which parodies numerous High Gothic writers – I particularly liked his riff on The Moon Pool.

But four memorable stories out of 41 is a very poor strike rate. I couldn’t in all conscience recommend anyone to spend money on this collection, and I am wondering, heretically, if it is really such a shame that the third volume of the series never appeared.

Fish driving a car, Gwen’s line which is the hook.

“Bloody Torchwood!” That’s how secret they are! (Line that wasn’t in the trailer!)

Actually the fish is not a particularly good actor!

Jack’s back. And yes, we missed him.

Ianto very smouldering, and jealous of the Doctor!

And look who’s come out of the rift! It’s Spike! And he’s thirsty.

Just as Gwen started by looking at dead bodies from a multi-storey in the first 2006 ep, we have that again in this ep.

Spike as Princess Leia! And then explicitly references it!

The bar scene – kiss, kiss, bang, bang! As we have seen it on the trailer.

(And Marsters is a good bit shorter than Barrowman. One never thinks about that – of course we’re used to the Marsters/Gellar height difference which is the other way round.)

The Time Agency, as started in Talons of Weng-Chiang; all over now.

John Hart, making fun of Torchwood, excellent! Size of the wrist strap!

Radiation cluster bombs, this week’s McGuffin. Actually quite well set up.

And Hart’s reaction to the Hub is well done – he is in a sense the New Viewer.

Gwen asking Jack where he was – tricky, but JB pulls it off well. “Coming home to you.” But Gwen is engaged to Rhys. Jack being gutted. Nice.

Jack being ordered by Gwen. Nice. The three rules. Also nice. Though it feels a little too pacy.

And Rhys calls to say he got the job, and Gwen can’t be there – meanwhile Hart has disappeared – oh, there he is.

Oh, Gwen, you let him get behind you, and then you let him kiss you! What a bastard, paralysing her with a kiss – indeed, almost biblical.

The second canister – same story. Bang! Poor Owen!

Jack and Ianto. Dating! But not in the office!. “He’s a reminder of my past.” And here is John Hart to send Ianto to save the others, so he can have Jack to himself.

This is very biblical, John tempting Jack on the height…

And then pushes him over, but does he know Jack is immortal?

Here’s Ianto saving Tosh and Owen.

And now Gwen. Lucky that they have just the right stuff to save her.

So, was the fish in on it all the time?

And the dénouement, actually fairly predictable, but a fun ride.

Ianto still has a stopwatch!

Gives an excuse for more John/Gwen grappling…

Last-minute rescue! Rather glorious! (If a bit rushed.)

“I found Gray” – great closing line.

Look folks, I don’t care what you say, I enjoyed that; I thought Marsters was great at taking the Spike character into new territory, and though it was a bit rushed in places, that’s better than the dragging so characteristic of Old Who. And next week’s looks like a lot of fun too.

So, the season has begun again with the first ad hominem attack of the year, here – WARNING: disturbing image on page.

The author of the blog, “Lee Mayr”, appears to be a pseudonym for Anton Koslov, the Russian academic who debated me on TV at the end of last year.

Wanker.

Assisting Mr Stroehlein with the 40 beers at 40 project.

Thanks, Andrew!

Two classic stories from the end of the Tom Baker era – the first to be filmed with Lalla Ward playing Romana, and then the first to be filmed after she left.

The Creature from the Pit, which I missed first time round due to living in the Netherlands that year, is nothing like as bad as I had feared it might be. The Creature itself is admittedly not fantastic, but by the standards of Season 17 (which includes the Nimon and the Movellans, and the Mandrells who I have yet to experience) it’s pretty decent. Lalla Ward is still getting into being Romana and notably less assured in the role than in any of the other stories I’ve seen her in. And the plot makes the cardinal mistake of finishing at the start of episode 4 rather than the end, relying on hand-waving and dodgy special effects to get us through the last 20 minutes. But it’s all done with great gusto, especially from Geoffrey Bayldon as the court astrologer. And there are some great lines as well. I remember David Fisher’s novelisation with affection, and I’m sure I’d still rate it higher than the original show, but it really wasn’t too embarrassing, rather to my delight.

The Keeper of Traken, broadcast barely a year later, seems like a completely different show; gone are K9 and Romana, replaced by the ambiguous Adric and the newly appointed Nyssa; and we have the return of the old enemy as well. I saw a comment on the New Beginnings box set from somewhere to the effect that it’s basically the same story told three times over, and there’s something in that, but Traken still has some originality, as the corruption of the Melkur brings about a military coup and the downfall of order. Geoffrey Beevers is better than I remembered as the Master, and the disrupted Trakenites all put in a good show. Tom Baker, however, rather seems to have lost interest. Eight-year-old F offered the most damning comment when I was trying to get him to guess the true nature of the Melkur (his first guess was that it was a weeping angel from Blink, his second that it was a Cyberman, and he got it right third time); he asked me slightly plaintively, “Why didn’t they make Doctor Who exciting back then?”

Anyway, two stories which are neither especially bad nor especially outstanding.

Back in the days of my doctorate, the department had an annual Christmas party at which various people would perform sketches. My PhD supervisor and I did two Fry and Laurie sketches in successive years, which was great fun.

(script). I was Mr Nude here, with Peter as the interviewer; I nicked two spoons from the students union as props, which was probably one of the better fates awaiting cutlery from that institution. Most memorable to spectators was the fact that I performed wearing only an academic gown and underpants; I thought that would reasonably celebrate the concept of Mr Nude.

(script) Here I played the father and Peter the son – there is of course a fairly glorious irony in doing it that way round – and a fellow postgrad, Angela, who I think now works as a producer in RTÉ, played the mother at the end of the sketch; the students union, once again, provided Berwhale the Avenger. All great fun.

F has been making things that he got for Christmas.

This is half of the fruits of the Doctor Who 3-D Model Making Kit. The rest of it is a Dalek and a Cyberman’s head. Notice that you can see the inside of the Tardis

This is marked as for 9 years and up, so it’s pretty impressive if you can build it with a bare minimum of adult help at the age of not quite eight and a half.

The aim of it is to get the little surfer dude around the circuit automatically:

And here it is in action, with his mother’s piano playing in the background:

A pleasant weekend is being had by all!

As resolved, I have just finished writing a piece on Kelly Link’s ‘The Faery Handbag‘. Not my best one in the series, but good to get back into the swing of it.

Saw this report during the week, and was amused to note that I have worked for two of the top ten (non-US) think tanks identified in the survey:

Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS), Belgium
French Institute of International Relations (IFRI), France
German Institute for International Politics and Security (SWP), Germany
Institute of World Economy and International Relations (IMEMO), Russia
International Crisis Group (ICG), Belgium
International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), United Kingdom
Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies (now merged into the Institute for National Security Studies), Israel
Japan Institute of International Affairs (JIIA), Japan
Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House), United Kingdom
Shanghai Institute for International Studies (SIIS), China

I’ve had dealings with all six of the western European ones but none of the other four, which I guess reflects the places that find my areas of expertise of interest.

If you’re interested in the top thirty American think tanks, they are:

I think I’ve had dealings with about half of them.

I met someone yesterday whose business card had her name and phone number embossed on it in Braille. Apart from my own general fascination with alphabets, my grandmother used to do some work with Braille, though I was never quite clear what – her eyesight was better than mine is. I spotted immediately that the Braille spelling on this person’s business card was wrong – her surname has six letters, but the Braille version had only five and was missing the one Braille letter I can actually recognise. (‘a’)

She works for an organisation involved with equality issues, though herself is not on the disability dossier, which explains both why they made the effort and why nobody had yet spotted the mistake. But I wonder how many people, in general, have their names in Braille on their business cards (and indeed how many of them have got it right), and I also wonder if this is actually much use for people with visual disabilities, who possibly on the whole aren’t in the same habit as I am of collecting small bits of card with very small writing on them.

posts about a bad experience with an Amazon vendor who had a 95% reliability rating and says she will never again buy from anyone with less than a 98% rating. I suspect she is in the right ballpark for what the safe cutoff should be. I also placed a fairly large order with an Amazon vendor with a 95% rating before Christmas, and not only did it never arrive but there was no response to my polite email enquiries asking if the order had ever been dispatched. Needless to say I’ve applied for a full refund from Amazon, and expect to get it. Looking through the Amazon feedback pages for Wessex Books Ltd / The Book Cupboard of Bristol, I find that their failure to reply to emails about disappearing orders is a recurrent theme (and in one or two cases the shop has actually posted grumpy responses to complaints from thwarted buyers, which would be amusing if they weren’t so unprofessional).

So I reckon ‘s cutoff point of 98% rather than 95% is about right. If they can’t deliver a satisfactory service forty-nine times out of fifty, just don’t risk your money with them.

Any fans of Iain Banks in or within reach of Brussels may like to know that he is speaking at Scotland House, Rond Point Schuman 6 (top floor) on Tuesday 29 January at 13h. Tickets are free but must be reserved in advance from brusselsevents AT scotland.gsi.gov.uk – thanks to for the heads-up.

As luck would have it, that is the same building as my office, so I will certainly be there!

(And I suppose in a way this continues the theme of Scotch whisky from my post yesterday…)

How do you pronounce “Chivas Regal”?

One hundred years.

…you start writing a post to send a message to someone and then realise that they are actually staying in your house so you can just tell them directly…

…and then you wake up, because it was all a dream…

…so you start writing a post about the dream, but your keyboard starts to behave really oddly…

…and then you wake up, because that one was a dream too!

dissects the meme.

dissects the candidates. (Hat-tip to )

84% Dennis Kucinich
81% Mike Gravel
80% Chris Dodd
78% Barack Obama
77% Joe Biden
74% John Edwards
73% Hillary Clinton
73% Bill Richardson
39% Rudy Giuliani
35% John McCain
32% Ron Paul
25% Mike Huckabee
25% Mitt Romney
15% Fred Thompson
14% Tom Tancredo

2008 Presidential Candidate Matching Quiz

Not a huge surprise; though I’m actually furthest from Kucinich on his foreign policy positions, where he is (as far as I can tell) pretty isolationist.

Myself, I’ve been very much influenced by the Washington Post piece in October about who is advising the front-runners on foreign policy. Clinton and McCain have easily the most heavyweight lists of experts, but Obama’s list includes my former colleague Rob Malley and several others with whom I feel instinctively in sympathy – Samantha Power, Dick Clarke, Ivo Daalder. (The Edwards team seems surprisingly mil rather than pol in balance; perhaps they have been updated since?) It is of course wrong to assume that because X is advised by Y that X will share Y’s views; but if Y is someone whose judgement I respect, and has chosen to support X, that counts for something too.

Had three more successful recipes over the last couple of days, one New Internationalist, one Georgian, and one even from Good Housekeeping, which I shall record here.

I was dissatisfied with the Kenyan lamb stew recipe I tried last weekend from the same book, so this Colombian beef stew was in the nature of giving it a last chance. However, it worked pretty well, and served six just like the recipe said.

Colombian beef stew
Ingredients
1.5 kg stewing beef
50g dried apricots
50g raisins or sultanas
50g dried prunes
50g dried apples of pears
3 tablespoons oil
2 onions, finely chopped
4 cloves garlic, crushed
2 carrots, sliced
bunch of coriander (original recipe says a teaspoon of ground coriander but might as well use the real thing)
300 ml dry red wine
salt and pepper

Recipe:
1) Soak the fruit for an hour in water; drain it and keep the liquid
2) Saute the onions and garlic in a heavy pan for 2-3 mins. Then add the beef and carrots and cook for a few more minutes, turning the meat often. Then add the salt, pepper and coriander.
3) Now pour in the wine and the liquid from the dried fruit, and bring to the boil. Reduce the heat, cover the pan and let simmer for at least two hours.
4) Put in the fruit, cutting into smaller pieces if you like. Simmer again for another 30 minutes. Add more wine if the sauce is too thick, and serve.

It worked well – the heavy beef flavour deepened by the sweet fruit. We had it with potatoes, broccoli and the following surprisingly good recipe from the Good Housekeeping book, using up some odds and ends that had accumulated:

Braised celery with walnuts

Ingredients
a large head of celery
50g butter
1 onion, chopped
150ml chicken stock
50g walnuts
parsley

1) Chop the celery into 2.5 cm lengths.
2) Melt the butter, cook the onion and celery in it for 5-10 minutes, until soft but not coloured. Add the stock, cover and simmer gently for 20 minutes ntil the liquid is absorbed.
3) Stir in the walnuts and heat through. Turn into a warmed serving dish and sprinkle with parsley to serve.

I was doubtful about the mixed texture of crunchy walnut and floppy cooked celery, but there is not enough nut to really create a problem. This didn’t go far among six, and I would use greater quantities if cooking for more then four next time.

ხის სოკო: Khis soko, Georgian wild mushrooms

We had this the previous evening, as a side dish, and I was really pleased with it: for the first time, a Georgian dish that I cooked looked just like it did when I have had it in Georgia – I’ve had near misses, especially with khinkali, but this was perfect.

Ingredients:
500g flavourful mushrooms – the Georgian ხის სოკო means “wild mushrooms”.
3 eggs
2 tablespoons chopped fresh coriander
1 tablespoon chopped fresh mint
2 tablespoons chopped chives (though I used a shallot)
salt
pepper
50g butter

1) Chop the mushrooms very fine.
2) beat the eggs and combine with the herbs, salt and pepper.
3) melt the butter and cook the mushrooms quickly over a high heat. Do not let them give off liquid.
4) Add the egg mixture and stir until the eggs are just cooked through.
5) serve immediately.

Yum!