Russell Baker (and a sherpa) read Proust.

10) [In Search of Lost Time #4] Sodom and Gomorrah, by Marcel Proust

I’m more than half way through the seven-volume epic now, and sufficiently engaged to be sure that I will indeed finish it in due course. Sodom and Gomorrah puts homosexuality front and centre; at the very beginning, we discover that the monstrous Baron de Charlus is in fact perpetually on the lookout for attractive men; and throughout the second half of the book the narrator is tormented by the idea that his girlfriend Albertine is having affairs with her girlfriends. Proust is himself a gay but very closeted writer, putting words in the mouth of a heterosexual narrator who observes but is horrified by homosexuality, and for today’s reader there is more of the fascination of watching the author’s mental train wreck than the idea that we are learning anything.

There is other stuff going on as well. At first I was afraid that we would have yet more bitchy and superficial social events, but we have the interesting compare and contrast between two key relationships – the narrator and Albertine, and Baron de Charlus and the young plebeian musician Morel – which drives the narrative. There are a couple of interesting confrontations with modern technology – the elevator, the motor car, the aeroplane. There are reflections on art and how people respond to it (a discussion continued from earlier works). And the significance of placenames is a major sub-theme of the last third of the book. All quite fascinating, and yet again I feel will reward re-reading in due course.

9) Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster, by Terrance Dicks

Much of my Doctor Who reading this month has been a displacement activity from Proust (but more on that in my next post). This is one of the good Terrance Dicks novelisations, of the 1975 TV story Terror of the Zygons, the second Season 12 Fourth Doctor story to be written up (after Doctor Who and the Giant Robot), and one of the good early Dicks efforts: decent efforts at background characterisation given for Sarah, Harry and the Brigadier, and much entertaining back-chat between the Doctor and both his allies and his enemies. Obviously I got it as an exercise in nostalgia after reading Sting of the Zygons, at a cost of UK£3.95; worth every penny, I tell you.

I had originally planned to do an overall piece on the first two Doctor Whos, William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton, shortly after I finished getting through all their stories in the summer. But that was a point when energy levels were generally a bit low, and anyway it actually makes more sense to consider them together with Jon Pertwee. Tom Baker’s is the first Doctor I can remember watching consistently first time round, so my experience of all of the earlier three was formed first by the Target novelisations, then by Doctor Who magazine (and the Making of Doctor Who and the Jean-Marc Lofficier volumes), then by occasional viewing of surviving series, and only very lately, in the last year or so, by going through them systematically. And in fact the first three made similar numbers of stories (29, 21, 24) and episodes (134, 119, 128), all well behind T Baker but unmatched by any other subsequent Doctor (Davison ties with Troughton for number of stories but is way behind on episodes), so we are comparing like with like to a greater extent than is possible with any other grouping of three Doctors.

Hartnell, for me, has been the real discovery in this process. He is alien, in a way that only Tom Baker and Christopher Ecclestone have managed to convey since. He is a cosmic wizard in a way that only McCoy and Tennant have approached. He is distant, yet humorous. He is outraged by his enemies. To sum him up as a “grumpy old man” is just so unfair. And Hartnell dominates the camera, positions himself beautifully every time (Peter Purves remembered getting useful tips from him about it), simply cannot be ignored as the star of the show. Shame about the occasional fluffs, but standards were different in those days. Hartnell is the one Doctor who I don’t think has been adequately represented on the printed page; his performance is so visual.

And Doctor Who, in his day, was so very varied. I think each of the first three seasons on its own has more variety of settings and tone than any three seasons since combined. (Bar, just possibly, the most recent three.) It’s not just the alternation between sf and historical stories; look at Season Three, which is my favourite, and you have a) two companions dying horribly and b) a musical comedy, as well as a story in which the Doctor is invisible and another in which he and his companions are not seen at all.

High points: en bloc, Season Three which includes The Daleks’ Master Plan and The Massacre as well as The Gunfighters, a quite different kind of experience. Otherwise the original Daleks story, The Crusade and The Tenth Planet. There are a couple of stories which have brilliant individual episodes which the rest of the story does not match – the last two of The Keys of Marinus, for example, or the first of The Space Museum.

Low points: Two particularly cheesy sf efforts are The Sensorites and The Web Planet.

Companions: The best is Sara Kingdom, who never actually travels in the Tardis, followed by Ian and Barbara, followed by Stephen. I have a peculiar fascination with Dodo Chaplet, but cannot bring myself to argue that she was much good.

While I was immediately intrigued and engaged by Hartnell’s Doctor, Troughton took a while to grow on me, but I came to appreciate him in the end. He’s much more human and humane, much less mysterious, though one picks up odd hints about his home world here and there. There is a warmth towards his companions that is unmatched by any other Doctor (except the Four/Romana II relationship). It’s here that the show takes on the shape it has had pretty much ever since, apart from the Pertwee years, of mainly travelling to future Earth or earth-like planets, with only two and a half stories out of 21 set in the past (compared to over a third of the Hartnell’s stories), and a large number of bases under siege by inhuman monsters.

I started with the CDs of missing Second Doctor stories, and only gradually moved to the videos and DVDs of the survivors, so one thing that struck me was quite how posh his accent actually is – you tend to miss this because of the eccentric clothing, which makes him seem scruffy, but just listen to the vowels; would perhaps have been considered standard Received Pronunciation (or BBC English) in the middle of last century, but I’m sure he’s closer to it than any of the others. Since this was indeed a fairly standard accent, it’s sometimes difficult to pick Troughton’s voice out on the audios; but once you see him, there is no doubt – his face and mannerisms are magnetically attractive, and everyone else responds to him in the scene.

High points: I’m a Season Six rather than Season Five fan. It’s partly because of the company he is keeping, partly also that there are several amazing stories in it: The Mind Robber, The Invasion, and The War Games which established the Doctor’s true nature for the first time (and is Neil Gaiman’s favourite story). Of the earlier stories, I am one of the few who prefers The Power of the Daleks to Evil of the Daleks – I’ve been re-listening to them over the last few days, to reconfirm my prejudice – and the stories from Season Five that I rate are Tomb of the Cybermen and The Web of Fear.

Low points: The Underwater Menace; The Faceless Ones; Fury from the Deep; The Dominators; The Space Pirates.

Companions: Zoe, Zoe and Zoe. Apparently there is a bloke in most of the stories as well, and apparently there is another companion in the middle of the run who screams a lot, but there is only one real Troughton companion as far as I am concerned.

Pertwee has been the loser in my estimation in this process of engagement with classic Who. He comes over as condescending and patronising; his snarling at the Brigadier and Jo in particular often seems to lack any real affection or humour. The Venusian aikido is particularly irritating (there must be a potential Pertwee drinking game where any shout of “Hai!” means you have to down your beverage in one).

Far too many of his stories are interchangeable, and grievously over-padded (oddly the average length of a Troughton story is longer, but doesn’t feel it). The earth-bound setting (for two thirds of the 24 stories) deadens the sense of variety which characterised the Hartnell era and was not wholly muted for Troughton. All the future stories are set in a Star Trek-ish environment, which would have been great as part of a grand narrative plan but doesn’t really hang together. Several of them are rather heavy-handed political parables.

High points: Having said all that, there are some. The first season is, for my money, the best, with Spearhead from Space a great introduction and Inferno a great conclusion, with not too much padding out of the good bits of the two intervening stories. There is a peculiar feeling that the show could have gone a completely different direction if the pattern of Season Seven had been followed, to end up being like The Avengers but with a non-human lead and more armed men that he could call on if necessary. Of the rest, I enjoyed most The Curse of Peladon, The Sea Devils, Carnival of Monsters and The Green Death.

Low points: Far too many. Worst is probably The Mutants, but Colony in Space and The Three Doctors are pretty dire too.

Regulars: Liz Shaw is great, and it is a real shame that she was dropped; they could easily have kept her as brainy woman and brought in a thick bloke to whom the plot would need to be explained. The Master is a stroke of genius, and helps excuse the Doctor’s brusqueness; in a sense, the Master is his Jungian ‘shadow’. The Brigadier, however, gets steadily sillier as the stories progress, and Benton and Yates are good only when they actually have something to do. Sarah’s first season is not her best, and apparently there is another one in the middle of the run who screams a lot.

I think it will be a while before I do another post like this!

Well, that’s it; I have now completed the Jon Pertwee era, as I did the Hartnell era in June and the Troughton era in July. (It will take me a bit longer to get through T Baker and Davison, though I’ve already seen half of McCoy and almost half of C Baker.) I promised a long post on the first two, but now might do a longer one on the first three. Before I get there, though, the last two Third Doctor stories on my list.

Day of the Daleks has benefited in fan memory from having one of Terrance Dicks’ best novelisations, as Ian was reflecting not so long ago. In fact it is by some way the most widely owned of the Target novelisations on LibraryThing, at 117 copies (the next are the novelisations of Genesis of the Daleks, Revenge of the Cybermen and Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon = Colony in Space, at 97 each; four of the new series books score higher, Only Human with 119, Monsters Inside on 122, The Clockwise Man on 128 and The Stone Rose on 129). Ian also links to the Alan Stevens / Fiona Moore discussion of the story.

I think he is a little harsh on the 1972 TV version. It is indeed nothing like as good as the book; I watched it for the first time ten or fifteen years ago and thought it was really rubbish, but this time round I could see the good points, in particular the excellent performance of Aubrey Wood as the controller, and forgive the basic cheapness of the sets. The looming threat of global war between the superpowers is a piece of context that has now been utterly changed, in today’s unipolar world where threats come from the disaffected. The guerillas too are very seventies. But as political stories of the Letts era go, it is much less strident in its messages than say The Mutants or The Monster of Peladon.

Also, surely this is the first ever flashback showing pictures of the earlier Doctors? (Apart from the brief glimpse of Hartnell at the start of The Power of the Daleks.)

I was trying to think of the times when the Doctor is seen drinking alcohol; he has a jolly good go at the Styles wine cellar here, and the Second Doctor did similarly well out of the Waterfields in Evil of the Daleks, and of course the First Doctor toasts us all in champagne during The Daleks’ Master Plan. I can’t remember the Fourth Doctor going for it though.

The Mind of Evil, first broadcast almost exactly a year earlier in 1971, was completely fresh for me; I don’t think I had even read the book. It is also almost entirely in black and white, so there’s a funny kind of retro-feel to it. Here too we have a world peace conference, a rather more credible one than the one organised by Styles, and we have some really memorable Delgado!Master moments: his aggression towards Captain Chin Lee is very sexual, and his phone calls to the Doctor (of course referenced in The Sound of Drums) hint at the depth of the relationship. Again we have flashbacks to earlier monsters, with even War Machines making an appearance. The prison scenes are memorably nasty, and the gun battles suitably vicious and body-strewn. The plot doesn’t quite hang together (so, what happened with the peace conference in the end? and the nerve gas on the missile?) but Jo was not as bad as usual, beating the Doctor hands down at draughts, and even Benton and Yates as well as the Brigadier seem to get plenty to do. Weirdly, Pertwee’s Doctor seems to be at his worst, condescending and making silly mistakes, and the mind parasite seems introduced a bit rapidly at the end. But it teeters on the edge of greatness.

So there we have it; all 24 of the Third Doctor stories now watched. The Green Death was actually the first Doctor Who story I reviewed here; I started on a relatively high note, and did not finish too badly, considering I had tended to watch the good ones first. A reminder for those of you who care that I have archived all my TV reviews here, and all my other DW reviews here.

…well, not quite of the whole year; here are the posts on this blog that attracted the most comments since 16 December last year.

25 December 2006: Luke 2:1-14 – Δοξα εν υψιστοις θεω, και επι γης ειρηνη εν ανθρωποις ευδοκιας – 16 comments
26 December 2006: *falls over* – 29 comments (locked post: story of a domestic accident)
5 January 2007: The language is Irish, not Gaelic – 45 comments
6 January 2007: Enjoyable if your French is up to it – 16 comments (Who Wants to be a Millionaire and bad astronomy)
6 January 2007: Books of 2006, for the last time I promise – 32 comments (have you been reading what I’ve been reading?)
21 January 2007: Icons meme – 23 comments
23 January 2007: Synthesis post – 17 comments (BSFA and Clarke awards)
24 January 2007: Genes reveal West African heritage of white Brits – 29 comments
2 February 2007: February Books 2) The Catcher in the Rye – 22 comments
11 February 2007: What has it got in its pocketses? – 16 comments (Banknotes quiz)
12 February 2007: Banknotes – the answers – 18 comments
14 February 2007: “25^H^H 20 comics that can change your life” – 38 comments
16 February 2007: Eagleton on Dawkins; me on astrology – 94 comments (this year’s clear winner)
16 March 2007: Well, that’s a relief – 26 comments (apparently I am Irish)
28 March 2007: I couldn’t possibly comment – 19 comments (WHO official has an appropriate name)
29 March 2007: The Mind Robber; the Deadly Assassin – 23 comments
15 April 2007: What really struck me about this story… – 19 comments (losing your virginity in the US and Africa)
17 April 2007: Wanna work for me? – 24 comments
23 April 2007: Interests and icons meme – 17 comments
26 April 2007: 40, 30, 20, 10 – 61 comments (my birthday)
27 April 2007: My birthday present to me: longer life – 21 comments
28 April 2007: Evolution of the Daleks instant reaction – 35 comments
20 May 2007: May Books 18) Sailing to Sarantium – 23 comments
3 June 2007: Free stuff – 19 comments
16 June 2007: Utopia liveblogging – 17 comments
27 June 2007: One last thing – 27 comments (guess the language)
1 July 2007: Who – 22 comments (commentary on Doctor Who season finale)
4 July 2007: Who recommendations – 17 comments
20 July 2007: How did you first encounter Harry Potter? – 24 comments
23 July 2007: Frustration – 17 comments (poor signposting in Ireland)
25 July 2007: Plato/Huxley – 17 comments
29 July 2007: Which paper? – 19 comments (boycotting the Observer)
30 July 2007: Stoned – 20 comments (megaliths in County Down)
2 August 2007: Being fit – 51 comments
11 August 2007: A question that occurred to me… – 16 comments (how to pronounce “shaman”)
12 August 2007: Not such a good return – 42 comments (locked post; problems with B)
14 August 2007: U’s favourite music – 26 comments (link since taken down, alas)
5 September 2007: RapLeaf – 76 comments
7 September 2007: What appears to have happened with RapLeaf – 48 comments
8 September 2007: More on RapLeaf – 18 comments
21 September 2007: Q: Is Belgium an artificial state? – 31 comments
23 September 2007: “tombé pour notre liberté” – 24 comments
23 September 2007: Religion as a cause of conflict – 39 comments
3 October 2007: She’s leaving home – 60 comments (B’s departure)
7 October 2007: Is it just me? – 23 comments (Audi drivers)
15 October 2007: That was the Octocon that was – 21 comments
18 October 2007: Facebook in my work – 44 comments
16 November 2007: Time Crash – 21 comments
17 November 2007: Spice grope – 16 comments
6 December 2007: Is Europe a country? – 20 comments
18 December 2007: You read it here first (perhaps) – 33 comments (Lib Dem election result)
20 December 2007: There’s just one thing I don’t understand… – 27 comments (Windows Vista)

Thanks, everyone, for responding as you have done.

Christmas and Who:

Paul Cornell’s Doctor Who story

Solstice:

The Newgrange sunrise webcast as people gather where their ancestors did 5000 years ago (live at 0830 GMT this morning, but you can already watch yesterday’s on the archive) – see also Kieran Healy on Crooked Timber.

Charity:

donates his hair to charity.

Tragedy:
on Omagh
on Lockerbie (includes graphic descriptions)

The last working day of the calendar year today, and I decided to go to the office in weekend clothes as nobody else is around. Normally I wear suit and tie on the basis that I might just be asked to go on television and thus ought to be prepared, but today I reckoned I could chance it.

So guess what happened? Yep, I was asked to do a live broadcast this evening on a French news channel. (France 24, but it was an English-language programme.)

On a day when I wasn’t hoping to clear my desk for the holidays, and more importantly when the temperature was above freezing, I might have gone home to change clothes and come back in again, though the journey is a good hour each way by public transport. But that was out of the question; likewise Anne was busy and I was not going to ask her to drop by with my suit. I racked my brains; most of my friends who I could ask that kind of favour of had already left Brussels for Christmas.

My brother-in-law. God bless , who happens to live in Brussels barely a kilometre from my office. He is roughly my size – a bit taller, a bit thinner. He kindly came around in the afternoon with a suit and a selection of ties (and his fiancée). I had deliberately worn a shirt today that doesn’t go with any of my own ties, because I didn’t think I would have to wear one. Fortunately we identified one of his that went with my shirt without potentially endangering the TV cameras.

(Perhaps some of you are wondering why the suit is such a big deal. The fact is that a TV interview like this is a performance, and to perform well you have to be wearing the right costume. It helps me to get my mind focussed into public debate mode; it probably helps others to slot me comfortably into the role the situation demands. If I had not been able to get hold of a suit, I would not have done the TV show; I would be too unnerved by my own pullover, comfortable though it is. Gore Vidal famously said that one should never miss an opportunity to have sex or appear on television; I try and take a more relaxed attitude, at least as regards television.)

So I shuffled into the borrowed clothes at the end of the day. Oof, the trousers! Did I say earlier that my brother-in-law is just a little thinner than me? I knew nothing about the studio set-up, and imagined myself sitting very very still on some soft cushiony sofa, minimising both the compression of my viscera and the chance of bursting through the waistline. But fortunately once I arrived I found I was to be filmed seated behind a table. I removed my brother-in-law’s trousers (and that’s not a phrase I use very often) and shuffled back into my comfy green jeans. Behind the camera, of course, but in full view of the amused studio crew in the next room.

Then it was time. Sitting in the otherwise empty studio trying to address the camera as if it were a person. Trying to ignore the only visible human presence, my own image projected onto a screen high above the camera; when I look at it, I see myself appearing to cast my gaze despairingly into the heavens. I beg a glass of water from the floor manager; he puts it on a chair, out of shot, rather than on the table.

It’s a peculiar programme, with the presenter and one panellist in their Paris studio and me and two others being beamed in from afar. The guy in Paris is taking one side; I am on the other. Then they switch to someone in Berlin on my side, and then to an opposing view somewhere else in Brussels. The programme is in two twenty-minute segments; each of us gets roughly two goes of two minutes each. I think my ally and I make more sense than the other two, but I suppose that is natural. My earpiece gets dislodged in the middle of the second half, but I manage to reinstall it without losing too much of the debate. (I’ve heard it all before anyway.)

And then, it’s all over; the broadcasters spring for my taxi home, and it’s the start of the Christmas holidays. Whew!

(And I will give my brother-in-law his clothes back sometime.)

Edited to add: The programme appears to be on-line here, for now anyway.

A business colleague asked me yesterday what I thought of Windows Vista. I said I hadn’t tried it myself, but that anecdotal accounts from the blogosphere were very negative indeed, particularly about the way it freezes up terminally if it suspects that your software might have been obtained in some irregular manner. He then told me of his problems with it, including lost data and generally poor performance.

Given how lousy it appears to be, why are we not seeing an aggressive advertising campaign from the producers of other operating systems to get people to switch?

Here. Certainly the best comment on the subject I have seen.

Apparently we have a new government after 191 days; Verhofstadt was able to turn the key where Leterme was not. But will we notice the difference?

Clegg 20988
Huhne 20477

Clegg wins by 511 votes, one of them mine. Obviously the electorate as a whole had as much difficulty deciding as I did.

Greenpeace have totally blockaded all the entrances to the EU Council Secretariat, beside my office, in a protest against overfishing. I feel sorry for them because it is such a bitterly cold morning, but the Eurocrats don’t seem too devastated at being unable to get to work! And the point is one well worth making.

We had a vegetarian friend over last night, and a spare butternut squash in the cellar, left over from ‘s last visit at the start of November, when she demonstrated the range of her non-meat cooking repertoire. We also had some tofu in the fridge, and by careful googling I soon found a recipe for butternut squash with creamy tofu, thyme and walnut stuffing, took my courage in my hands and cooked it. Had to do a little bit of shuffling of ingredients (is Martini Bianco sufficiently similar to vermouth?) but people seemed to like it.

The butternut squash! Wondrous vegetable! I like my meals to have a substantial centrepiece, usually a juicy chunk of meat with a suitably fragrant sauce. But the butternut squash, suitably adorned, is a superb centrepiece in its own right. Cut it into four lengthways, scoop out the seeds, sprinkle with salt and pepper and bake at 175° (350° for primitive Fahrenheit users) for 45-60 minutes, and you practically have a juicy, tasty meal for four people right there. (Or three people, if one is my brother-in-law.) (I mean ‘s brother, not ‘s husband; I have two brothers-in-law.) (I’d better stop.)

Anyway, I thought you ought to know.

Three Classic Who stories to write up, with The Talons of Weng-Chiang decidedly superior, The Monster of Peladon decidedly average, and The Ambassadors of Death decidedly different. (Only two Third Doctor stories left to go now.)

The Monster of Peladon, from 1974, is probably the least memorable of Sarah Jane’s first series with the Third Doctor. The Tardis returns to the scene of an earlier adventure, but this time the politics is really clunky rather than subtle; Sarah tries to teach the Queen about feminism, the miners are revolting (as they were in real life at the time), the Ice Warriors are baddies again, the most interesting character (Chancellor Ortron) is killed off far too early, and the whole thing is (as so often with Pertwee stories) a couple of episodes too long. One for completists really. I recognised Eckersely as Bob Hoskins’ sidekick from adult literacy programme On the Move.

The Talons of Weng-Chiang, from 1977, is the climax of the great Holmes/Hinchcliffe era of Doctor Who (also the last directed by the superb David Maloney), and is as good now as I remember it being when I was nine. (I admit I have also seen it a couple of times since, once in the company of a girl from Manila who giggled pleasingly at the line about the Filipino army advancing on Reykjavik.) Thanks to my background reading I was now alert to look out for a particular shot at the start of episode 4 which had escaped my notice previously (on the DVD commentary track, Louise Jameson laughs loudly). There is so much great stuff here: Leela and the Doctor are both alien to Victorian London, so Jago and Litefoot are effectively the viewpoint characters; Deep Roy, later to play hundreds of Oompa-Loompas in Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, turns in a great Mr Sin. Yes, the ethnic stereotypes are rather regrettable (and quite apart from the Chinese, I would draw the attention of Irish viewers to Chris Gannon’s Casey), but the setting and drama are just fantastic.

Jon Pertwee’s first season in 1970 was certainly his best, but also in a lot of ways quite unlike any other season before or since. The Ambassadors of Death is Who as James Bond-ish adventure story with lots and lots of shootouts and fighting, and aliens who can kill at a touch. I though Caroline John as Liz Shaw was particularly good here, though she does scream once or twice. Not quite sure what the point of the time experimentation at the beginning was. The plot was exceptionally convoluted in order to cover the seven episodes, and I felt the camera lingered on guest star Ronald Allen for longer than the quality of his acting really deserved (some of the other recurring actors, eg John Abineri and Michael Wisher, were rather better I thought), but altogether it is pretty compelling. It’s quite uncomfortable and spiky in places; the congealing of the UNIT “family” in the next season made for a much safer and basically less exciting programme.

So, in summary, one total classic, one interesting (if you can bear to take in all seven episodes) and one for completists only.

(bumped up from a comment to )

I am not hugely surprised. It is well recorded that Peter Davison, who was the last Doctor apart from Ecclestone to choose the time of his leaving the part, talked to Patrick Troughton as he started filming, and that Troughton told him to do it for no more than three years. It is also well recorded (even before last month made it effectively canon) that Davison is Tennant’s favorite Doctor, and that he visited the set to talk to Tennant shortly after filming started on Season Two. It would be pretty astonishing if Davison had not passed on that piece of advice (though Tennant, as a big fanboy himself, presumably already knew about it).

Having said which, of course it has not really been confirmed yet.

There has been a lot of Doctor Who posting here this month, and there will be more as I am way behind with reviews of the audio plays I have been listening to. Here is a little alternative content.

So, Livejournal has been sold to the Russians. I am fairly convinced by Mark Kraft’s thought on the subject, from which I have taken the title of this post (“Trust, but verify”, Ronald Reagan’s old catchphrase). I am perhaps half a degree more optimistic, for a couple of reasons. The first is that SixApart were lousy owners of LJ. The infamous nipplegate and strikethrough controversies indicated that at heart this was a company that really didn’t care about the product or its consumers. Various statistics suggest that Livejournal use has been falling off of late. Change is not necessarily a bad thing, and change was needed here. (In more SixApart news, I’ve seen two blogs using their Moveable Type interface practically immobilised by technical difficulties in the last couple of months.)

The second is that despite predictions of doom when SUP took over Livejournal’s Russian operations over a year ago, I haven’t picked up any scary stories of interference with Russian content by the service provider to the extent that SixApart felt they needed to do with some of the English content. Livejournal is a significant brand in Russia, where blogging is often referred to as ЖЖ (short for Живой журнал, the Russian for Livejournal) and many prominent political and other public figures use it; the Russian sector of Livejournal has apparently doubled in size in the last year. That’s not to say that a Kremlin-inspired crackdown on content is impossible, of course. But SUP are quoted in the Moscow Times (for what that’s worth) as saying that the new owner, Alexander Mamut, is more interested in money than politics.

The third, and perhaps the least weighty (and admittedly none of these reasons for relative optimism is terribly weighty) is that the new ownership have started well by forming a LiveJournal Advisory Board. Mark Kraft, as quoted above, fears that this will be mere window-dressing, and of course he’s right that it has no actual power. But even that appearance of listening to users was beyond SixApart, and as straws in the wind go, I think this one is blowing in the right direction.

See here.

6) Doctor Who: The Official Annual 2008

A great gift for the eight-year-old (or, cough, older) fan in your life this Christmas. Includes two comic strips by Davey Moore and a prose story by Jusrtin Richards (both featuring the Tenth Doctor and Martha), plus numerous random facts about both science and Who lore. The Krynoid from The Seeds of Doom is the one Old Who monster featured which has not appeared in New Who – will we see it make a comeback in 2008? The most interesting bit I thought was the two-page spread on the Master (though the bit on the Daleks was rather good too).

5) At Swim-Two-Birds, by Flann O’Brien

Generally thought of as O’Brien’s masterwork, though personally I prefer the more structured lunacy of The Third Policeman. It must be the third time at least that I’ve read it, but only the first time that I’ve tried to write down what I think it’s about.

There is a lot more sex in it than I remembered, but women are barely visible except as seen by men – there’s only one speaking human female character (plus a cow plus perhaps the Good Fairy). Oddly enough the cover of this edition is a picture of a man and a woman by Jack B. Yeats, with the two separated by the spine of the book so that they are apart rather than together as the artist intended.

One can imagine the origins of the book as being a series of fantasies told in the pub, especially the all-male Dublin pub environment of the 1930s. It’s about telling stories and the tellers of stories; it’s about confronting the epic with the demotic; it’s about the supernatural encountering the familiar; it’s about a student, a hotel full of characters and Sweeny the wanderer. It’s quite hard work to read as well.

I still like The Third Policeman more, but I can see why people get obsessed with At Swim-Two-Birds.

I would just like to draw attention to everyone reading the above that this should be interpreted as ‘I am not dead’. I will, of course, be dead at some future point, as will everybody else.

Up early to get to a breakfast meeting in Brussels, and it is clear enough to see no less than three bright planets – Mars in the west, glowing bright red at the feet of Gemini; Jupiter Saturn to the south, grazing Leo’s belly; and Venus emerging in the morning twilight, perhaps in Virgo, can’t be entirely sure from here. There are compensations for an early start.

The show is called “are you smarter than a 5th-grader”. Apparently in the course of the show our hero, Kellie Pickler, “was unsure whether or not a roadrunner was a bird, hoped that a foreign language might be English, stated she felt “really smart right now” after identifying that “watermelon” contains two E’s, said that a piccolo was a percussion instrument, stated that she thought Europe was a country but France was not, and decided that Franklin Pierce was a US president because her ears were pierced.”

Reminds me a bit of this.

An old article but a good one on the expat life here. (Actually the Guardian’s pieces on Brussels generally are worth exploring.) I don’t think I’ve met the author of the first piece but he has interviewed me by phone.

3) Back in Time: A Thinking Fan’s Guide to Doctor Who, by Steve Couch, Tony Watkins and Peter S. Williams

Another of the books about the programme rushed out in 2005, this looks at Doctor Who from a Christian perspective and finds it illustrative of all kinds of things of interest to the authors. A good illustration of how what you get from art depends critically on what you bring to it, but I didn’t find it terribly exciting or insightful.