2) Halo and Sprocket: Welcome to Humanity, by Kerry Callen

This had been hanging around on my Amazon wish-list for ages, and I’ve no idea why I put it there – extensive searches have failed to reveal who it was that recommended it to me and why, though I am inclined to suspect

slovobooks

. Whoever it was, you did me a huge favour; it’s not been the best of weeks, but this was just the ticket – a bunch of stories about a young woman whose flatmates are an angel and a robot. The contrast between their two totally different takes on the human race is both funny and lightly philosophical, a sort of double-act of Candide or Mork (or, I suppose, a variation on Third Rock from the Sun). Well recommended.

I mentioned a few days back about how I had got vol 4 of About Time by mistake from eBay, but as far as I could tell it was my error. I had a funny feeling that when I bid for it, the book advertised was definitely vol 5, which is what I wanted, but when I check all the email records and images on eBay it was definitely vol 4 that appeared. I reckoned it was unlikely that the seller had sneakily sent me the wrong book, and then changed the images on display on the web page to cover their mistake, so my own error was a more likely explanation.

But I just got an email from eBay, saying “Our records show that you were a bidder or buyer of one or more items from the seller, [***]. We recently removed this seller’s active listings and suspended the seller’s trading privileges.” It suddenly seems more likely that I was deliberately sent the wrong book.

I shall file a complaint, not that it is likely to do any good.

Thanks, everybody

Many of you reading this will know about our family situation. Those of you who aren’t on my livejournal friends list, or who I haven’t seen in person recently, may not know about the latest developments. Since things seem to be fairly certain now, this is a general public update on what has been happening and what will happen next.

Our daughter B has a very serious autistic learning disability. Having developed relatively normally for her first two years, she then lost the ability to talk, and many other facets of normal development, in the following six months. The reason we live way out here in the wilds of Flemish Brabant is that we found the best school for her to be Ter Bank near Leuven. Not only did B enjoy it, but when her little sister U turned out to have similar problems, she started attending the school as well, and still goes there.

Towards the end of last year, however, B’s behaviour had got too much for the school to cope with, and it clearly wasn’t doing her much good; so we moved her to another wonderful day-care centre, ‘t Prieeltje in Tienen, about a half hour’s drive east of here. She loved it there at first – indeed, you can see her on their web page at present, one of the pictures is of her clearly having a ball – but last June, just before her tenth birthday, she suddenly rebelled, by refusing to get into the car, which meant she could no longer be transported back and forth from here to there.

Since then she has been at home, and my heroic mother-in-law has been helping us out ever since, as B’s behaviour has been very difficult. To cut quite a long story short, we have been negotiating with the various potential care options; and they have now come up with a solution for us. On Monday, B will move to the St Oda institute in Overpelt, about an hour’s drive away from us; they specialise in monitoring and treating children with very serious behavioural problems, which is the category B clearly fits into. She will stay there for a few months, and will then transfer to the to a closer facility as her permanent (or at least long-term) home.

We know it already, as they had been on the horizon as a long-term care option for a while, and like the quality of the care that they offer, though again that leaves out significant chunks of the story. Indeed, B has already been there a couple of times, and they told us today that they can take her from tomorrow until Sunday for respite care. That means that tonight is the second last night she will be at home, and Sunday will be the last. We are relieved, but also sad.

You can never tell what is in the package. When B was born, we certainly never anticipated that she would leave our household a few months after her tenth birthday. Even until last year, I certainly thought we would probably have her with us until her early teens. But of course, there are other families who are less fortunate than us; whereas our daughter, F and U’s sister, will only be a few minutes’ drive away even after she has moved out, there are others who are separated from their children by eternity.

Here is B in our back garden. She has just in the last few months developed an interest in catching a ball if it is thrown to her, though she enjoys bouncing a ball on her own very much too.

And here she is one of her recent stays, in almost exactly the same pose; looking a bit doped up, I’m afraid, due to extra medication. But we think she will be happier there, and better looked after than we are able to manage.

I’m not doing the unread books meme again, because I actually invented it on Sunday. It’s funny how these things catch on – it seems to have been copied onto upwards of 300 blogs, and now has even reached the on-line section of the Daily Telegraph. Very gratifying.

1) The Satanic Verses, by Salman Rushdie

This book starts well, but gets a bit heavy; still, I found it not too difficult to make it to the end. There were two themes that I found particularly attractive. First off, the whole story explores the way in which we change and adapt our personalities to new circumstances, new people: the two main characters find themselves magically transformed into an angel and a devil, and then back again, but each has also changed names and other things about themselves in presenting themselves to different countries, to family vs outsiders, to different women. It is not always subtle, but I found it very entertaining.

The second is the experience of London. I think there must be a common experience of both familiarity and alienation for all of us who encounter London as non-English but citizens of the former Empire. I’ve found this in a couple of other places (Memories of the Irish Israeli War, The Web of Fear) but I found Rushdie’s portrayal of the immigrant experience of the Big Smoke gripping and familiar. (It possibly helps that my own family visits to London when I was growing up had a Bangladeshi edge.)

For the rest, I really enjoyed the effervescent use of language in the very first chapter, difficult to excerpt, and kept hoping it would come back again later in the book (and once or twice it did). There are lots of neat allusions – one of the main characters acquires the surname Chamcha, which must be a reference to Kafka’s Gregor Samsa. Rushdie shows also a welcome sensitivity to classic sf, though his treatment of Doctor Who is less thorough.

Younger readers may need to be reminded that this book was somewhat controversial when first published. It’s pretty clear who Rushdie is “really” writing about in the two extended passages set in Mecca/Jahilia and Medina/Yathrib. To say that this is not meant to be “about” Muhammad is unconvincing. (I bought the two Rogerson books partly in anticipation of tackling this one.) However, I find it fairly mild stuff; perhaps my sensitivities have been blunted by reading too much of what other people write about Catholicism.

Ebay replacement for Volume 5 of About Time turns out to actually be Volume 4!!!!

And as far as I can tell it is my mistake not the vendor’s. So annoying!!!!

13) Belfast, c. 1600 to c. 1900: The Making of the Modern City, by Raymond Gillespie and Stephen A. Royle

This only just about counts as a book, but I’ll tally it anyway. It’s a 19-page pamphlet produced jointly by the Royal Irish Academy and Belfast City Council, attached to a gorgeous multi-coloured map illustrating the developing historical streetscape, with today’s map faintly visible in the background. The landscape we live in is a palimpsest; this little publication helps to establish what was there before.

What is most fascinating is that the defensive walls built in 1642 almost precisely map the security zone I remember well from my childhood. There are one or two shifts of a few metres, but on the whole the twentieth century security gates were placed pretty much on top of where the town’s defences had been, a third of a millennium earlier. Extraordinary. (If you consider Dublin’s history, by contrast, the commercial heart of the city has slipped about a kilometre downriver over the last thousand years.)

(Click to embiggen)

The streets are colour-coded by the age of the map they first appear on – the darkest green, Castle St, High St, Ann St, Bridge St, Waring St, North St, Cornmarket, etc all appear on the 1685 map; the next level, Donegall St and the various entries including Pottinger’s Entry, all appear on the 1757 map; Donegall Square and the old Smithfield market (E31) are laid out by 1833, and the lighter yellow streets by 1901-02.

The original thirteenth-century settlement is marked as C3 on the map, the location of the original Belfast Castle, between Castle Street and Castle Lane and east of Donegall Place. It burned down in 1708, and I don’t think there are any visible remains of it. (The current Belfast Castle, 6 km to the north, was built in 1870.) The oldest surviving building in Belfast, dating from 1711, is McHugh’s bar on Queens Square, north of the box marked E11 on the map (the 18th-century customs house, which replaced the original one at E10 on Waring Street and was in turn replaced by the current one a block to the north in 1856).

Anyway, I found it fascinating. Though it missed the charming detail from one of the very early maps of Belfast on display in the Ulster Museum, where the surveyors (presumably brought in by Lord Donegall from elsewhere) recorded the name or “Waring Street” as “Wern Street”. Even back then, the locals were capable of baffling outsiders with their accents.

These are the top 106 books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users (as of today). As usual, bold what you have read, italicise what you started but couldn’t finish, and strike through what you couldn’t stand. The numbers after each one are the number of LT users who used the tag of that book (that is, last time that the algorithm was done – when I checked, I found most of them had a few more added to the total).

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (149)
Anna Karenina (132)
Crime and punishment (121)
Catch-22 (117)
One hundred years of solitude (115)
Wuthering Heights (110)
The Silmarillion (104)
Life of Pi : a novel (94)
The name of the rose (91)
Don Quixote (91)
Moby Dick (86)
Ulysses (84)
Madame Bovary (83)
The Odyssey (83)
Pride and prejudice (83)
Jane Eyre (80)
A tale of two cities (80)
The brothers Karamazov (80)
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies (79)
War and peace (78)
Vanity fair (74)
The time traveler’s wife (73)
The Iliad (73)
Emma (73)
The Blind Assassin (73)
The kite runner (71)
Mrs. Dalloway (70)
Great expectations (70)
American gods (68)
A heartbreaking work of staggering genius (67)
Atlas shrugged (67)
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books (66)
Memoirs of a Geisha (66)
Middlesex (66)
Quicksilver (66)
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West (65)
The Canterbury tales (64)
The historian : a novel (63)
A portrait of the artist as a young man (63)
Love in the time of cholera (62)
Brave new world (61)
The Fountainhead (61)
Foucault’s pendulum (61)
Middlemarch (61)
Frankenstein (59)
The Count of Monte Cristo (59)
Dracula (59)
A clockwork orange (59)
Anansi boys (58)
The once and future king (57)
The grapes of wrath (57)
The poisonwood Bible : a novel (57)
1984 (57)
Angels & demons (56)
The inferno (56)
The satanic verses (55)
Sense and sensibility (55)
The picture of Dorian Gray (55)
Mansfield Park (55)
One flew over the cuckoo’s nest (54)
To the lighthouse (54)
Tess of the D’Urbervilles (54)
Oliver Twist (54)
Gulliver’s travels (53)
Les misérables (53)
The corrections (53)
The amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay (52)
The curious incident of the dog in the night-time (52)
Dune (51)
The prince (51)
The sound and the fury (51)
Angela’s ashes : a memoir (51)
The god of small things (51)
A people’s history of the United States : 1492-present (51)
Cryptonomicon (50)
Neverwhere (50)
A confederacy of dunces (50)
A short history of nearly everything (50)
Dubliners (50)
The unbearable lightness of being (49)
Beloved (49)
Slaughterhouse-five (49)
The scarlet letter (48)
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation (48)
The mists of Avalon (47)
Oryx and Crake : a novel (47)
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed (47)
Cloud atlas (47)
The confusion (46)
Lolita (46)
Persuasion (46)
Northanger abbey (46)
The catcher in the rye (46)
On the road (46)
The hunchback of Notre Dame (45)
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything (45)
Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance : an inquiry into values (45)
The Aeneid (45)
Watership Down (44)
Gravity’s rainbow (44)
The Hobbit (44)
In cold blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences (44)
White teeth (44)
Treasure Island (44)
David Copperfield (44)
The three musketeers (44)

Slightly to my surprise I am going to Octocon in two weeks time.

Anyone need a room-mate for the hotel?

My aunt and uncle on the early days of Bangladesh.

I have the first five Lensman books by E.E. “Doc” Smith – Triplanetary, First Lensman, Galactic Patrol, Grey Lensman and Second Stage Lensmen. I have read the first three, but have no intention of rereading them or of reading the other two. All five are therefore on offer to the first person who expresses an interest in them.

(Thanks to

mizkit

 for stiffening my spine on this.)

Sometimes when you google old friends you find bad news.

And sometimes you find good news.

Two rather routine stories, followed by four very experimental ones and three stories revisiting old Who themes.

Nekromanteia: listened to it some time ago. Five, Peri and Erimem, rather incoherent plot with witches and planetary invasion, nice touch with the cat at the end.

The Dark Flame: felt this worked a bit better. Seven, Ace and Benny and a rather complex tale of identities and possession – seemed to borrow bits from Image of the Fendahl and The Hand of Fear, but no harm in that.

Doctor Who and the Pirates: billed as the Six and Evelyn musical story, though in fact the Gilbert and Sullivan songs are restricted to the third episode of the four. Bill Oddie as the pirate captain! But a very successful leavening of the comic overtones with a serious and tragic foundation.

Creatures of Beauty: Another experiment in format, with the plot fragmented non-sequentially across the four episodes, so that the crucial contribution of Five and Nyssa to the very beginning of the story only really becomes clear at the end. Very well done.

Project: Lazarus is a story in two parts, the first of which is (another) tragic tale with Six and Evelyn, and the second featuring Seven and Six together – or is it really Six? Rather on the horrific side for my taste, but well done.

Flip-Flop: Like Creatures of Beauty, requires some intellectual work from the listener. The two discs are alternate versions of the same planet’s history, in each case changed into the other by the intervention of the Doctor and Mel. Really very well done.

Omega: Five on his own, dealing with Omega who is attempting to re-manifest in this universe. Lots of creative playing with the listener’s head, culminating in a brilliant moment at the end of episode three. And an Irish time lord – Professor Ertikus, played by Patrick Duggan. Really liked it despite my lack of familiarity with Arc of Infinity. Despite the serious theme I thought it borrowed more than a few elements from Douglas Adams.

Davros: Alas, despite resurrecting Terry Molloy to play Davros, ex-Gulliver/Time Lord/Thal Bernard Horsfall to play the chief human villain, and the fantastic Wendy Padbury to play his wife, I felt the brilliant cast was let down by the plot, which has an episode of silly office bickering between the Sixth Doctor and Davros and then the predictable mayhem and slaughter.

Master: Again, alas, decent performances by all, rather let down by the plot which is an extended piece of the type of fan-fic we have all read so much of since June. (Except this is Seven/Beevers Master rather than Ten/Simm Master.)

In summary, the middle five of these are all excellent; not so sure about the two on either side, though Davros does have nostalgia value.

Two Third Doctor stories to write up here, neither of them particularly outstanding.

Colony in Space, from 1971, was the first Third Doctor adventure in space, after a sequence of earthbound adventures. The first episode is rather good, with the Time Lords manipulating the Doctor again, and Jo’s surprise at entering the Tardis being one of the better “it’s bigger…” scenes. Then I’m afraid I felt it lost its way in being padded out to six epsiodes. The danger signs are there when part two has exactly the same cliff-hanger as the part one! And, despite the valiant efforts of all actors, the sets and direction really fail to convey a convincing sense of the scale of this planet, of how far it is from one set of buildings to another. The Master gets in some good cackling and there are some tightly-choreographed fight sequences; but apart from that, nothing much really happens, and the moral message of the story is both plodding and muted.

Death to the Daleks, from 1974, also had good and bad points. This is Sarah Jane Smith’s first space adventure (as Colony in Space was Jo Grant’s) and we start off very well with her in a bikini. The set looks properly like an alien planet. The Exxilons are memorable aliens (and I reckon one of them is still wandering around the Tardis). The Daleks are well voiced by Michael Wisher, who was to become Davros a year later. The plot, unfortunately, has huge holes, and the Daleks’ plan (as usual) makes no sense at all. Wood and Miles identify the cliff-hanger at the end of Episode Three as the weakest in the history of the show, adn they have a point.

I see that both were directed by Michael Briant (who also did The Sea Devils, The Green Death, Revenge of the Cybermen and The Robots of Death

You decide.

12) First Lensman, by E.E. “Doc” Smith

The Lensman books are sitting on the shelf, looking at me; and every time I feel I need to cut down the “unread” pile by another notch, they look like an easy quick option. I will probably trudge through them all in the end, but this is another whinge: awful style, awful plotting (especially the way in which important concepts and characters are just plonked into the story without introduction), and the political message being that democratic institutions should be taken from the corrupt ordinary humans and handed over to the control of supermen. *rubs his eyes wearily*

There’s no harm in having ambitions.

Some people have been chortling about the fact that a script of President Bush’s speech to the UN got onto the internets, including helpful pronunciation guides for the more difficult foreign words. Myself, I’m sympathetic: lots of names out there are difficult. Even some pretty senior people in NATO have difficulty with the name of their own Secretary-General.

But what surprised me is that at least half of the pronunciation advice given to Bush is clearly incorrect!!! While I’m in agreement with the speechwriters on Harare [hah-RAR-ray] and Caracas [kah-RAH-kus], I have serious doubts about three of the other four cases:

• “Mauritania [moor-EH-tain-ee-a]” – surely the stress is on the third syllable, not the second?
• “Mugabe [moo-GAHbee]” – surely the last syllable is pronounced more like “bay” than “bee”?
• “Sarkozy [sar-KOzee]” – surely stress on the last syllable, sarko-ZEE /saʁkɔˈzi/ ?

Finally, “Kyrgyzstan [KEYRgeez-stan]” is a valiant effort (myself, I would stress the last syllable, though Wikipedia disagrees with me) but in delivering the speech Bush actually got it wrong.

10) Athens-Skopje: an uneasy symbiosis, ed. Evangelos Kofos and Vlasis Vlasidis
11) Μακεδονία (Macedonia): a Greek term in modern usage, [Georgia Daidikou and Anna Pasali]

One of the things about being in my line of work is that people often send you books to try and convince you of the intellectual credibility of their cause. The Research Centre for Macedonian History and Documentation, part of the Museum of the Macedonian Struggle Foundation, sent me these two books some time ago, and I’ve been looking through them this week. My own sympathies for the Skopje position on the Macedonian name dispute are sufficiently well-known that you will find me (and one of the authors from the first of these books) smeared as a fiendish conspirator with the Jews and the Turks to destroy Hellenism on certain nationalist websites.

Having said that, these are valiant and valid efforts to put forward the Greek side of the story. The first of them is a meaty volume of seven essays on the seven years of the 1995 Interim Accord between Greece and Macedonia agreeing to disagree on the name, and what will happen next (the authors’ prediction, borne out by the facts since, being that things can go on as they are). All seven authors are Greek, and it’s sad but not surprising that I find points of disagreement with most of them. There is a consistent tendency to gloss over the lasting damage done by Greece, both to the newly independent state to the north and to Greece’s own reputation as a responsible international actor, in the early 1990s. It is surely unreasonable to say that Greece cannot look at its own minority issues clearly until “foreign governments stop using minorities and ethnic groups living in border zones for propaganda purposes” (p. 81). It is all very well to state that the Yugoslav state did not officially use the word “Macedonia” to describe its southernmost territories before 1945 (p.191), but to imply that this means nobody did is utterly incorrect, as a quick glance at pages 631-831 of Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon will demonstrate. I’m stunned to find an entire essay claiming to describe “The name dispute in FYROM after the signing of the Interim Accord” which takes most of its information about the political situation in (the Republic of) Macedonia from the Greek media. The essay on the presentation of Greece in the Macedonian media and education system actually gives the media a better write-up than I expected, and in its criticisms of school textbooks rather overdoes some reasonable points. The chapter on civil society is OK.

The biggest disappointment of the book is that it doesn’t really examine the reasons for the attitudes of either side in particular depth (though it’s understandable as such research has not always been profitable for the researcher). Oddly enough the second book, Μακεδονία (Macedonia): a Greek term in modern usage, does this rather better, if only for one side: it is a glossy assemblage of pictorial and historical evidence of the use of the name “Macedonia” by Greeks to mean Greeks going back over the last two hundred years or so, the basic message being that the Greek Macedonians are Not Pretending. Which is fair enough; of course, neither are the “Slav-Macedonians”. The introductory text to the last section of the book actually put the situation rather well:

The existence of another Macedonia, which was not Greek, was seen as illogical by those who had forgotten that a part of geographical Macedonia had not been included in the Greek state, as well as by those who had never learned that as a term of geographical origin, the word “Macedonia” was not a Greek monopoly.

The country with the memorial of gratitude to Napoleon in its capital city, and with (as a bonus) the grave of a nineteenth-century French ruler, is indeed Slovenia – as correctly established by

getawaywithit

,

drplokta

, elmyra,

saare_snowqueen

,

agirlnamedluna

,

arwel_p

,

annafdd

,

patchworkmind

, and most especially

sunnygirly21

. See it on Google maps here. (Or paste into your mapping programme: 46.0471,14.5028.)

The dead French ruler was the raving conservative Charles X as correctly stated by

miteque

 and

redfiona99

 (whose answer to the first half of the question was, er, not so accurate). If you want to see dead Bourbons – one real king, and a few pretenders to the throne – you need to go to the Kostanjevica monastery in Nova Gorica.

As originally published by the UN (now corrected but Google cache is your friend):

Middle East Quartet meeting gets under way at UN Headquarters

23 September 2007 – Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has brought together the principals of the Middle East diplomatic Quartet today for a briefing at United Nations Headquarters in New York from their newly appointed Representative, the former British prime minister Tony Blair, on the latest developments in the troubled region.

Participants at the high-level meeting of the diplomatic grouping – which comprises the UN, the European Union, Russia and the United States – will hear from Mr. Blair on his two visits to the Middle East since assuming his post in late July.

They are also expected to discuss general political issues of the Muddle East, which will be followed by a formal dinner for the Quartet principals, members of the League of Arab States follow-up committee for the Arab Peace Initiative and Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Støre.

Says it all really.

has brought me back to a rarely visited childhood memory…

I was taken aback by one of the comments to my Belgium post, saying that religion is “the biggest cause of strife in the world”. Even Richard Dawkins doesn’t say that (at least as far as I can tell; he dances jolly close to saying so in what I’ve seen, but seems to pull back from going the whole hog). Christopher Hitchens does appear to say so, at least according to Richard Harries, but he’s a different category of polemicist.

There are, of course, actual figures available on this. I commend the totally comprehensive datasets generated by Uppsala University, especially as processed by the Human Security Project, for anyone who wants to get into this subject in depth; the figures below are for the latest year they cover in detail, 2005, where they find 17,458 deaths worldwide as a result of all types of political violence, including war, in 34 different countries. I won’t review them all here, but the top thirteen, accounting for 84% of the death toll, were as follows:

Iraq. 3,388. While religion is an element in this, I think that there is just a little more going on as well. ETA: this estimate is way below that provided by other sources. The Iraq Body Count has 14,000 civilian deaths in 2005, not to mention the coalition forces.
India. 1,823. Of these, 80% (1464) relate to the conflict in Kashmir, which certainly started and continues as a conflict about religious identity, though again with other elements involved.
Nepal. 1,474. Only counts as religious if Maoism counts as a religion.
Colombia. 1,438. All parties are from the same religious background (Catholics).
Afghanistan. 1,329. Again, there are religious elements, but as with Iraq there is a bit more going on.
Sudan. 1,015. Almost entirely related to Darfur, where all sides are nominally Sunni Muslims.
Uganda. 997. Yep, this is definitely a religious conflict, in that the repulsive Joseph Kony claims to be receiving instructions directly from God.
Ethiopia. 918. Arguable, in that 641 of these relate to the conflict between the (Christian) government and (Muslim) Somalis in the Ogaden province; but there is more than just religion to this particular situation.
Russia. 668. As with Ethiopia, just because Russians have a Christian background and Chechens an Islamic background doesn’t make this a religious conflict.
Thailand. 490. Once again, the Patani insurgents are Muslims and the government Buddhist, but there is more to this one than religion.
Philippines. 418. This is half and half: 237 due to the conflict with Communist insurgents (see Nepal), and 181 due to the Muslim insurgency in Mindanao, where, again, religious identity is a factor but not the only one.
Somalia. 370. No religious difference between the factions; all are Sunni Muslims.
Turkey. 359. Minimal religious difference between the Turkish government forces and the Kurds, both being somewhat non-fundamentalist Muslims.

If you’re wondering what happened to Israel/Palestine, 2005 was a relatively quiet year there with “only” 176 deaths due to political violence. The full list of other conflicts tallied by country for 2005 is as follows: Burundi (353); Myanmar/Burma (260); Algeria (253); Nigeria (217); Indonesia (213); Mexico (180); Israel/Palestine (176); Côte d’Ivoire (141); Egypt (124); Sri Lanka (115); Pakistan (111); Chad (100); Democratic Republic of the Congo (92); Rwanda (also 92); Kenya (68); Jordan (62); Guatemala (54); Haiti (40); Brazil (35); Saudi Arabia (31); Iran (28); Azerbaijan (26).

Basically, in all of these cases apart from Uganda (and just possibly Kashmir), to say that the conflict is caused by religion is misleading and wrong. In almost all cases, the drivers of conflict are competition for resources, fuelled by distrust of the idea of government by or with the other side on the basis of past historical experience. In some of the worst cases of violence (Iraqi locally recruited government forces vs local insurgents, Colombia, Darfur) people are fighting their co-religionists. To blithely say that religion is the worst cause of conflict worldwide is incorrect and patronising, suggesting that the solution is for the warring parties to become enlightened like Richard Dawkins, and that if they won’t there is little to be done about it. It is the excuse that was used for non-intervention in the Bosnian war. It is bad analysis of the problem which leads to (or at least excuses) very bad policy decisions.

As for Joseph Kony, he is surely one of the best advertisements for the international war crimes tribunal imaginable.

The discussion over on Crooked Timber of Republican candidate Fred Thompson’s claim that “our people have shed more blood for other people’s liberty than any other combination of nations in the history of the world” reminds me of one of the few monuments I have seen which sincerely thanks another country for fighting for the liberty of the locals. It’s in an Eastern European capital, and the nation thanked are the French (specifically one Frenchman, Napoleon), not the Americans.

The monument also contains the remains of an unknown soldier of the Napoleonic wars; as you see on one side there is an enthusiastic endorsement of Napoleon in the local language, and on the next side is this poem:

Sous cette pierre nous avons déposé tes cendres
Soldat sans nom de l’armée napoléonienne
Pour que tu reposes au milieu de nous
Toi qui en allant à la bataille pour la gloire de ton empereur
Es tombé pour notre liberté

This country’s gratitude for past assistance from France is not well known even in France, let alone elsewhere. I can’t imagine that there is any other capital city where Napoleon is so enthusiastically venerated (certainly not Paris, where I have always sensed a certain ambivalence).

OK, folks, no sneaky googling: which capital, and which country, am I talking about?

(For a bonus: which ruler of nineteenth-century France is buried in this same country?)

A series of five (well, four and a half) audios from Big Finish, featuring the now retired General Sir Alastair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart and his successors at the head of the British branch of UNIT, portraying them as a sort of military X-Files, but locked in combat for Britain’s security with the Internal Counter Intelligence Service (ICIS). UNIT’s new commander, Ross Brimmacombe-Wood, is played by none other than David Tennant. I enjoyed them very much.

UNIT 0 – The Coup: an introduction to the series, revolving around the Brigadier and new UNIT spokesperson Emily Chaudhry (played by Siri O’Neal), with also recurring journalist character Francis Currie (Michael Hobbs). The Brigadier expiates his own past crimes by cutting a deal with the Silurians, more of whom have now woken up and started infiltrating London. A very short play but memorable.

UNIT 1 – Time Heals: I felt this was the weakest of the plays, mainly because I didn’t really understand What Was Going On. Stephen Carlile, playing the evil scientist’s sidekick Kelly, sounds unnervingly like Matthew Waterhous as Adric. But even though I didn’t really get the plot, I loved the atmosphere, and the instant chemistry between Chaudhry and her new colleague (after Brimmacombe-Wood’s disappearance) Robert Dalton (played by Nicholas Deal).

UNIT 2 – Snake Head: Chaudhry and Dalton go to the seaside to investigate what turns out to be a heady combination of illegal migrants and invisible Albanian vampires. As a Balkanist myself I was on the lookout for gross errors; I didn’t hear any (though Goran is an unusual name for a Kosovo Albanian, it’s not completely unknown). I thought the story tackled this volatile political issue as well as any story in this genre ever can. My one minor reservation about it is that the invisible vampire turns out in the end to be an invisible vampire, rather than having some scientific explanation.

UNIT 3 – The Longest Night: This turned out to be a truly prescient choice of plot, with suicide bombers striking around London and paralyzing the city – it went on sale in March 2005, just four months before this happened in real life. Big Finish takes on racism and extremism, frankly far more effectively than in their earlier play The Fearmonger. The sense of tension and uncertainty was brilliantly conveyed, and the shock ending of killing Dalton (having already killed off the Deputy Prime Minister) is very effective. This is probably the best of the four-and-a-half plays.

UNIT 4 – The Wasting: Now we have old Who meets new Who meets spinoff, with Lethbridge-Stewart phoning an unheard Harry Sullivan (Ian Marter, alas, not being available), David Tennant appearing at long last as Ross Brimmacombe-Wood, and the whole thing being directed by Nicola Bryant (who also makes an appearance as one of the minor characters). The plot is a bit wobbly – again, going back in history, we have, as in The Invasion, a Russian-launched missile resolving the issue, though not quite as much off-screen as in the Troughton story; and the plague killing off much of humanity was originally the Silurians’ plan, so in a sense they get a bit of closure by helping the unheard Harry Sullivan to cure it. But the acting is superb, especially David Tennant (who recorded this not long before getting the job of the Tenth Doctor), and Nicola Bryant must deserve much of the credit for it all seeming to hang together as well as it does.

So, in summary, these are all good fun; if you want to listen to just one to sample, make it #3, The Longest Night.

One side issue: I was comprehensively spoiled for important plot twists by reading the Wikipedia entry for UNIT, and while normally I don’t especially mind, in this case it really did impair my enjoyment of the plays. Hoping to preserve others from being caught the same way, I deleted the key sentences from the WikiPedia page; they were immediately restored by another editor citing WP:SPOIL: “It is almost never acceptable to delete information from an article because it constitutes a spoiler.” WTF?

The full sentence was:

“No other fish is so closely associated with Portugal as the cod.”

I admit, I was completely baffled. But my friends list know better. Out of 40 answers, fifteen of you got it right; so kudos to Belgian Waffle, , , , , , , , , , , and extra extra kudos to , , , and for using the correct Portuguese Bacalhau or some variant thereof. I was completely ignorant of this, I have to admit.

The next most popular answer was sardines, favoured by eleven of you (, , , , , , , , , , , and I suppose a twelfth in that made it her backup option).

and favoured tuna. and went for the anchovy. and backed the swordfish. and (and , on second thoughts) went for the Portuguese man-o’-war jellyfish even though it isn’t a fish.

I fear that the other six answers may have been jesting about this serious question, but I will give them here for completeness: : mullet (no, Michael, that’s your hairstyle): carp; : hake, in a nice cider sauce (Yummm); : The Portuguese haddock; : blue grouper; and : a herring! [sic]