10) Why Don’t Penguins’ Feet Freeze? And 114 Other Questions, edited by Mick O’Hare

The sequel to Does Anything Eat Wasps?, with again loads of scientific trivia. Though I’m not completely sure I believe what it says about snot.

Sheer egoboost:

(I’ve been an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Governance since March 2002. That was a five-year appointment, and anyway they have rejigged the way they do honorary titles, so it’s now going to be a Visiting etc etc at the School which the Institute was part of.)

Carnival costume:

(Strictly speaking Carnival is next week, but that’s also half-term so F’s school celebrated yesterday. As he explains:)
“This is what i dressed up as in the Carnival yesterday; It is Horus the egaptian god.”
(An unusual choice, but why not?)

has a question about the Alliance Party’s slogan.

9) The Three Yugoslavias, by Sabrina P. Ramet (.co.uk, .com)

Again, read for review elsewhere. Still digesting this one: the good bits are very very good, but the less good bits are very disappointing.

tnh

 points us to Terry Eagleton’s review of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, from the London Review of Books back in October. It won’t surprise you that I am on Eagleton’s side of this debate; since I’m up early due to B waking us at 5.30, I have been looking through the ‘net for other reactions. Marilynne Robinson did a less polemical, longer, and more intellectual takedown of Dawkins for Harper’s. Nobel Prize winning physicist Steven Weinberg, writing for The Times, defends Dawkins:

Terry Eagleton in the London Review of Books sneers at Dawkins for his lack of theological training. Are we to conclude that opinions on matters of philosophy or religion are only to be expressed by experts, not mere scientists or other common folk? It is like saying that only political scientists are justified in expressing views on politics. Eagleton’s judgement is particularly inappropriate; it is like saying that no one is entitled to judge the validity of astrology who cannot cast a horoscope.

Actually, that’s not what Eagleton is saying; expressing opinions is fine. Everybody votes, but I would prefer to read a book on politics by someone who is professionally engaged in it rather than someone who just happens to have strong views. Most people in the world have formed their opinions on religion without reading Aquinas or even Dawkins first. But before you write a book-length essay debunking something, you should make the effort to understand it in its own terms; otherwise you run the risk of becoming polemical and cartooney, as Dawkins appears to have done (I haven’t read his book or seen the TV series, and don’t feel especially inclined to, based on what I’ve read from both supporters and opponents).

And this applies also to astrology. As it happens, I have studied astrology, and do know how to cast a horoscope; my M Phil dissertation was on a twelfth-century text by the little-known scholar Roger of Hereford. One of the best known astrologers and mathematicians of his age, he argued for a rigorous mathematical approach to the subject. As a result of my in depth research, I am even more convinced than I ever was that astrology is bunk; but also because I went to the trouble of getting into Roger’s mind and trying to understand what he thought he was doing, I would like to feel that my views are better informed, maybe even more authoritative. I wrote this history of astrology for this encyclopedia many years ago, but the best analysis I have read is this book, taking it on its own terms and demonstrating its utter inconsistency.

Dawkins’ failure to engage with religion and theology on similar terms is to his discredit.

The 2007 Northern ireland elections contest is now up and running.

And check out sammymorse‘s commentaries on each constituency.

Nerve.com lists the following “25 20 comics that can change your life” – I would like views from my all-knowing f-list as to which are really worth pursuing.

Alias by Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Gaydos
Preacher by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon (which I am reading, got to #3)
“Bomb Scare,” Optic Nerve #8 by Adriane Tomine
Hate by Peter Bagge
Transmetropolitan by Warren Ellis
Heavy Liquid/100% by Paul Pope
Diary of a Teenage Girl by Phoebe Gloeckner
Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi (I loved this)
Blue Monday by Chynna Clugston
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel (already recommended to me by )
Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron by Daniel Clowes (I was disappointed by this though I very much like some of his other work)
Fortune and Glory by Brian Michael Bendis
Kabuki by David Mack
Love and Rockets by Los Bros Hernandez (I remember reading, and enjoying, ‘s copies of these, years ago)
Sandman by Neil Gaiman, et. al. (but of course!)
Miracleman by Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman
Zippy the Pinhead by Bill Griffith
Usagi Yojimbo by Stan Sakai
Fantastic Four Issues #1-#102 by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby
Planetary by Warren Ellis

So, what should I get next?

ETA: Thanks to for pointing out that I can’t count!

Look what my beloved got me for Valentine’s day!

[Nice present]

Thanks to for inspiration:

This is a 500 forint note from Hungary, correctly guessed by 11 out of 14 of you.

This is a 50 dinar note from Serbia, although it is described as Yugoslavia on the currency. I allow either answer; even so, it was correctly guessed by only 5 out of 12 people. (, I’m surprised at you – surely you know that Croatia doesn’t use Cyrillic?)

This is a 20 pound note, in good old UK pounds sterling, issued by First Trust Bank in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Despite the geographical bias of my friends list, only 8 out of 15 of you got this, with two guesses for Malta (where they would write in Maltese as well as English, I suspect). The six shields on the left-hand note represent the six historic counties of my native statelet.

This is a 10 denar note from the Republic of Macedonia, correctly guessed by 7 out of 12 (allowing and a point for the “FYR Macedonia”, whatever that is). ‘s response of “Somewhere where they keep peacocks” is insufficiently precise.

This proved the most difficult, with only 4 correct answers out of 13. In fact as many people opted for Algeria as for the correct answer, Lebanon. I can see why – if you are asked to think of a country that might have both French and Arabic on its banknotes, you might well try Algeria first. The diagonal white box on the image on the left was where I cut out a map which would have otherwise been a dead giveaway.

5 out of 12 correctly guessed this as a single Georgian lari. Given the unusual alphabet, ‘s guess of Ethiopia, ‘s of South Korea and ‘s of Armenia are not unreasonable. Again, I fear ‘s “Somewhere with a history of weird beards” is insufficiently precise to give him a point.

I was surprised by how difficult this was, with 4 correct answers out of 11. This is a 10 ruble note from Russia. and were not far off, orthographically and linguistically, with Bulgaria but still wrong I’m afraid. I cannot allow any points for “Somewhere with a famous bridge”.

This is a banknote for 50 convertible marks from Bosnia and Herzegovina. 5 out of 13 got it right. and – there are two alphabets on this banknote, but neither of them is Armenian. , you get a bonus quarter of a point for specifying which part of Bosnia issued the note.

Yes, 8 out of 14 of you got this: 10 Croatian kuna. This includes . Once again, ‘s answer of “Somewhere with Roman ruins” is not sufficiently precise to get any points.

5 out of 12 of you guessed correctly that this is 10,000 manat from Azerbaijan (and I’m giving an extra quarter point for almost spelling it correctly in Azeri, Azərbaycan). , not a bad guess, but Kazakh still uses Cyrillic. , also not a bad guess but the TRNC doesn’t produce its own banknotes. , “Somewhere very boring without any design flair” is not very precise and anyway a bit unfair – have you seen their carpets?

As with the Hungarian banknote, 11 out of 14 of you got this: 5 new Turkish lira. As with Lebanon, I had to excise a map of the country here.
, I don’t know what Marx brothers films you have been watching recently…

This note is a recent casualty of European integration: 100 Slovenian tolars replaced by the euro as of 1 January this year. 5 out of 11 got it, with, alas, ‘s answer of “Somewhere with even stranger beards” still getting no points.

So, the final scores on the doors, in the traditional sense of who got the most answers right, are:
0
1
1
2
3
3
4
5
5
7
7¼
7
9
11
12¼

So, congratulations to with his more than perfect score, and thanks to everyone, especially , for playing along.

I realised that I have been carrying a round a lot of extraneous stuff in my wallet, including currencies for countries I don’t go to regularly (and indeed in one case have never been to). But hey, it’s a good excuse for a quiz. Under the cut you will find a poll; all the banknotes have had the name of the country, the name of the currency, and other obvious clues like maps of the country or the address of the central bank removed. But I have left in things like national symbols and the words for numbers in the local language. Feel free to answer either using the text boxes or in screened comments.

Answers tomorrow evening.

Let’s start with a quote from Salman Rushdie’s controversial novel, The Satanic Verses

It seemed to him, as he idled across the channels, that the box was full of freaks: there were mutants – ‘Mutts’ – on Dr Who, bizarre creatures who appeared to have been crossbred with different types of industrial machinery: forage harvesters, grabbers, donkeys, jackhammers, saws, and whose cruel priest-chieftains were called Mutilasians; children’s television appeared to be exclusively populated by humanoid robots and creatures with metamorphic bodies, while the adult programmes offered a continual parade of the misshapen human by-products of the newest notions in modern medicine, and its accomplices, modern disease and war.

Fan Lore has it that Rushdie is specifically referring to the 1972 Doctor Who story, The Mutants (where the Mutants of the title are indeed referred to as “Mutts”), and that he

…implies that its characterisation of mutations as evil just because they look different from human beings encourages racist attitudes. He thereby completely misses the point of the story, which in fact has an anti-racist message. (Howe and Walker)

This enables fans to feel superior to Rushdie, in that they can buy into the anti-racist message of the Doctor Who story and pat themselves on the back for being able to see the point better than Rushdie did. I cannot imagine that Rushdie is terribly bothered about this, in that The Satanic Verses gave him bigger headaches to worry about, but I think that Fan Lore is wrong. Rushdie is not attempting to give a blow by blow commentary on the themes of Doctor Who, or a critique of this particular story; it is an incidental illustrative detail in his story (and indeed the description of the semi-mechanical creatures with priest-chieftains that Rushdie gives does not especially resemble the inhabitants of the planet Solos).

In addition, though I haven’t read The Satanic Verses, my research (backed up by this essay) indicates that the book is largely about the ideas of hybridisation, merging, changing, which indeed the Doctor Who story also addresses. Rushdie’s character watching Doctor Who is the viewpoint character Saladin Chamcha, who has himself been transformed into a semi-human figure and back again, and here he is musing on popular representations of mutations which, let’s face it, tend not to be always positive. Rushdie himself states:

The Satanic Verses celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelization and fears the absolutism of the Pure.

To accuse Rushdie of “missing the point of the story” by attacking it for racism actually completely misses the point of Rushdie’s book.

(Incidentally later in the same paragraph, Rushdie reports that “Lycanthropy was on the increase in the Scottish Highlands.” An interesting foreshadowing of the 2006 story Tooth And Claw?)

Alas, one can easily write three times more about one paragraph of Rushdie than about the six episodes of The Mutants. Fan Lore may be wrong about the Rushdie detail, but it is right about this story in general. I watched it because I recall rather enjoying the Target novelisation (inevitably by Terrance Dicks) thirty years ago, but this is not good TV. The politics of the story could have been interesting – the colonial military government, scared that the rug is being pulled from under their feet, move towards a Rhodesia-style UDI but are stopped by the Doctor’s intervention; however, the allegory is far more heavy-handed than similarly political Pertwee stories such as The Green Death and The Curse of Peladon, with the evil Marshal completely one-dimensional and the natives either noble savages or deluded collaborators. (Also the anti-racist message is somewhat blunted by the dismal acting of the one black member of the cast, playing an Earth soldier who gets left in charge at the end.) There are also themes here of how dangerous it is to mess around with ecology, and of the importance of not judging by appearances, but it is all lost in the desperate filling of six episodes for a plot which New Who would comfortably do in 45 minutes.

To be honest the only two things about this story that work for me are i) the portrayal of the planetary surface on Solos (played, in a storming performance, by a quarry near Northfleet in Kent, which has been built on since and is now the Bluewater Park shopping centre, supposedly the largest retail and shopping complex in Europe); and ii) Geoffrey Palmer, who is the one good guy among the Earth colonials and of course is killed off before the end of the first episode.

8) Endgame in the Balkans: Regime Change, European Style, by Elizabeth Pond (.co.uk, .com)

Read for review elsewhere. But it was gratifying to see so many of the publications I have worked on for the last five years cited; including one or two references to me personally.

There being so many Doctor Who spinoff novels out there, there is no way that I can read them all; but occasionally I will have an idea for getting hold of several that share a common theme, or have been recommended in the same place, or whatever. Most of them are easy enough to get via second-hand shops or eBay, and some (including one of the four below) have been put online by the authors because they are out of print. I bought/downloaded all four of these because they are the only Doctor Who spinoff novels featuring the First Doctor’s somewhat obscure companion Dodo Chaplet. I will probably do another post at some point on Dodo’s life and times in the Whoniverse, but each of these books was actually rather good in its own different way, the pluses definitely outweighing the minuses in each case.

4) [Doctor Who] Salvation, by Steve Lyons (.co.uk, .com)

At the end of the televised story The Massacre, Dodo wanders into the TARDIS while it is parked briefly on Wimbledon Common in 1966; by the start of the next story, The Ark, she is perfectly happy to believe that the TARDIS has taken them to a different part of contemporary England, but has difficulty grasping the possibility of time travel. Also (to the mockery of generations of fans) her accept has completely changed, from something rather north of England to something more uncertainly southern. Salvation rewrites Dodo’s first scenes in the TARDIS as part of an encounter with godlike aliens in 1966, which takes her, the Doctor and Steven to New York. Lyons has invented vast amounts of back-story for Dodo here, all of which makes the character (and her accent quirks) much more believable; he does the same to a lesser extent for Steven, catching Peter Purves’ characterisation of him perfectly while also adding to his background. And his Doctor is very Doctor-ish, taking charge of the confused officials trying to deal with the situation, confronting and defeating the bad guys while also determined to minimise casualties. The exploration of humanity’s relationship with gods, and with belief, is a bit pale compared with Neil Gaiman, but then isn’t everything? My biggest criticism is that while Lyons gets New York’s physical geography, he does not really capture the city’s vibrant multi-ethnicity very well; most of the American characters might as well have been English, which is a bit ironic given that he saves the phenomenon of Dodo’s accent.

5) [Doctor Who] Bunker Soldiers, by Martin Day (.co.uk, .com)

In some ways a very First Doctor-ish story: the crew land in Kiev in the year 1240, with the city about to be attacked and sacked by the Mongol hordes, and its defenders internally divided about how best to respond. However there is an element from later Who as well: under the city lurks an alien killer, working to its own agenda. Lots to like in this book: the descriptions took me back to my visit to Kiev in late 2005, and there is much good characterisation – even the bad guys have comprehensible agendas, and everyone gets something to do (the Doctor, at one point, riding off to plea for peace with the Mongol horde). Also, while Salvation was in part about belief, Bunker Soldiers addresses religion – the defenders of Kiev are weakened by tension between bigoted Christians and loyal Jews. About half the story is told in the first person by Steven, a tactic used also by in her novels (at least, in her novels that I have read). I’ve been very critical of this approach in Doctor Who novels elsewhere, it nearly works here, but not quite for me. (Also NB that the liturgical language of Kiev was not Latin.)

6) [Doctor Who] The Man in the Velvet Mask, by Daniel O’Mahony (.co.uk, .com)

Once again, (and immediately following Steven’s departure in The Savages) the TARDIS lands in what appears to be a familiar Earth environment, in this case post-revolutionary France. But all is not as it seems; the supreme leader is not Napoleon, but a mysterious Minski, under the patronage of none other than the Marquis de Sade. The Doctor gets involved with trying to work out What Is Really Going On, while Dodo falls in with a theatre company and takes on the lead role in The Misfortunes of Virtue, managing a fling with one of the other members of the cast along the way. I never really did work out What Was Really Going On, but very much enjoyed the ride; reminiscent of the crazy Managra, in a good way.

7) [Doctor Who] Who Killed Kennedy?, by James Stevens and David Bishop (.co.uk, on-line)

An unusual spinoff novel this: investigative journalist James Stevens (fictional, though listed on the cover as a co-author) decides to write up The Truth about UNIT and the mysterious set of individuals going by the code name of “The Doctor”. He ends up playing a very “Rosencrantz and Guidenstern are dead” role, as the man on the far end of the Brigadier’s yelling at journalists in seasons 7 and 8; and Bishop explores what the TV adventures would have looked like from the outside point of view – how the authorities would have covered it all up. Dodo comes into the picture because the very first Doctor Who story set in the “present day”, The War Machines, sees her brainwashed and written out of the series by being sent to the countryside to recuperate. Who Killed Kennedy? picks up her tragic story from several years later. Bishop describes her as “a late addition to the cast of the [book] and was originally only going to appear in [one] chapter, passing on information to Stevens. But once she appeared on the page Dodo wanted to stick around. It’s a strange experience when a character takes charge of their own destiny while you’re writing and Dodo was the first time this had happened to me.” Certainly the relationship between Dodo and the narrator is a core element of the story, in a way that (as the author admits in his on-line notes) the actual assassination of JFK, which is after all the title, is not. Some would probably accuse this novel of too much “fanwank”, ie obsessive references to continuity with the TV series, but I think that would be unfair; Bishop is actually doing something very different here, telling familiar stories from a different angle, and I think it largely works.

His commentary and notes for the online publication of the book seemed to me more engaging than any others I have read. I wonder if this is because Bishop, a native Kiwi, was writing for the New Zealand Doctor Who Fan Club, rather than for the BBC

found, appropriately enough, near Verona.

Was out for a couple of beers with colleageus from my previous job this evening. My successor said, “You look really unstressed, in fact, so much younger!”

I replied “That’s because I’m no longer doing the job you’ve just started!”

And the other ex-colleague added, “Why do you think I didn’t apply for it?”

I work here at the heart of the EU district in Brussels; I tend to conceive of the geography of the area in terms of international politics – my own office building is home to Belgium’s permanent representation to the EU at the bottom, and Scotland’s EU office at the top. If you pull out a bit, you can see the distinctive four-pointed star of the European Commission’s headquarters, the Berlaymont, building on the northwestern side of the roundabout, and (less clearly, though it is pretty unmissable in real life) the EU Council Secretariat, complete with helipad, across the Rue de la Loi.

Move southwest a bit and you can see the green space of the Parc Leopold, intruded on by the oval shape of part of the European Parliament’s complex (the “Caprice des Dieux” building). But look for a moment at the three buildings between the Parliament and the ponds in the park. The southernmost of the three I know well – the former Solvay library, it is now a conference centre where I have attended many events (and even organised one). The other two are typical Art Nouveau buildings, rather beautiful to look at but not part of my daily life.

Well, I shall look more closely at the northernmost of the three buildings next time I go through the park. Now a school, it was built as the Institut Solvay by the Belgian industrialist and philanthropist in 1895, and from 1912 hosted the Solvay Conferences. It was in this building in 1927 that Einstein, mocking Bohr’s attachment to randomness in quantum mechanics, asked him sardonically “…ob der liebe Gott würfelt?” (usually translated as the flat statement, “God does not play dice”). Bohr’s reply, that it was not up to Einstein to tell God what to do, tends to get lost in standard accounts of the exchange.

See pictures and a home movie of the conference, here.

wants to know which of the Livejournal virtual Valentines is worst. It’s a tough call.

is marking essays about vampires.

Neil Gaiman’s hair.

Someone on my f-list posted a link in a locked entry to New Scientist’s coverage of the astronaut love triangle story. Apparently:

Most astronauts are relatively young and in excellent physical health, putting them in a demographic that is unusually sexually active. In addition, most have higher than average levels of education. “That often translates into higher levels of sexual activity and adventurousness,” says Ray Noonan, a professor of human sexuality affiliated with the State University of New York, US.

So the more education you have, the more sexually active and adventurous you are? Sounds to me like something New Scientist’s readers will be pleased to hear about themselves, but that doesn’t make it true!

3) About Time: The Unauthorised Guide to Doctor Who, 1966-1969, by Tat Wood and Lawrence Miles (.co.uk, .com)

I read the first in this series last month: a wonderful cornucopia of facts and analysis of the early years of everyone’s favourite Time Lord. I think the second volume, dealing with the last two William Hartnell stories and the Patrick Troughton era, actually exceeds the high standard set by the first volume. Again, we have the exhaustive picking apart of each story looking for its sources of inspiration, broken up by substantive essays on more-or-less relevant topics – the one near the end, "Does Plot Matter", has considerable analytical depth and genre-wide interest – I hope someone (like perhaps Strange Horizons?) might consider approaching the authors to put it on-line for general information.

Lots of things I loved about this book. The vicious wit with which the authors savage any aspects of their favourite series that they disapprove of. (The chapter on every single story has a section devoted to Things That Don’t Make Sense. Sometimes these sections are long, and sometimes they are longer.) Wood and Miles seem to particularly enjoy being able to argue at forty years’ distance with Innes Lloyd, who was producer of the programme for much of this time, on the grounds that he betrayed the original Verity Lambert concept. Lloyd has been dead since 1991 and so can’t argue back. But the tone is witty rather than polemical and myself I think a more balanced view of Lloyd’s achievements emerges from these pages despite the authors’ efforts.

Two minor mysteries that had troubled me in the last few months are explained: i) Colin Baker’s narration of The Macra Terror is terrible not because Colin Baker is reading it but because John Nathan Turner wrote it; ii) Ian Marter’s novelisation of The Enemy of the World is incomprehensible because the publisher slashed large chunks out of it to bring it down to the right page count. There is learned discussion of i) whose accent is the worst in the entire history of Doctor Who, ii) whether or not anyone in the TARDIS (Doctor excepted) ever had sex, and iii) the possible alchemical significance of mercury in the works of David Whitaker. There is constant mockery of Victoria. And there is a very thoughtful piece on why The Power of the Daleks is such a good story. I read it all except the chapter on The Mind Robber, because the authors insist very strongly that you should see it in all its glory first.

(One small nit-pick – The Third Man is set in Vienna, not Berlin, which was divided into four parts, not three. But this is tangential to its likely influence on The Invasion.)

I cannot imagine that future volumes in this series can possibly be as good as this one – but I shall buy them anyway.

From and
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Just short notes on these; I re-watched them after having read the Ian Marter novelisations, so not a lot new to say about either.

The Ribos Operation (.co.uk, .com): Re-watching it confirmed my view that Ian Marter left out two of the best bits in his version, the banter introducing Romana to the story, and the deep sense of cold pervading the entire production – yes, we know it is only polystyrene snow, but it really sets the scene. Here we have, for the first time since Zoe was taken from the Doctor by the Time Lords at the end of The War Games in 1969, a companion who matches him intellectually; indeed he is actually hiding from her behind K-9 at first. Lots of other little typically Robert Holmes touches in it, but it’s the beginning of the story that sticks in your mind. Nothing about The Ribos Operation is outstanding, but taken together it is done well.

Earthshock (.co.uk, .com): As it happens I’ve just been reading Tat Wood and Lawrence Miles on the first two Cyberman stories, The Tenth Planet and The Moonbase, and it’s interesting that Cyberman stories seem particularly lacking on plot plausibility or scientific credibility (particularly as the scientific credentials of their co-creator Kit Pedler were widely touted by the BBC). I think the Cybermen are particularly naff here (but I haven’t seen Silver Nemesis, so there may be worse in store for me). Their plan makes no sense at all, they are less strong than their android slaves, and their failure to shoot all their enemies when they have the chance is totally illogical. In addition the Cyber-controller comes very close to displaying emotions (“Excellent!”).

Another annoying thing about the story is the way in which the troopers and scientists all merrily crowd into the TARDIS, which has normally been the private space of the Doctor and companions (indeed, we see Adric’s own teenage private space in the first episode – he likes decorating it a lot more than Susan did). Once Cybermen start wandering all round the TARDIS shooting people (like the unfortunate Professor Kyle, played by Clare Clifford who was later to try and seduce Anna/Daniela Nardini in “This Life” – and wouldn’t you?) it almost feels like just deserts for being over-hospitable to armed earthlings. Earlier Doctors would never have allowed it. (When Salamander violates TARDIS sanctity in The Enemy of the World, he gets sucked into the vortex.)

One good thing about the story, and a striking contrast with The Tenth Planet and The Moonbase, is the number of women in leadership roles – Professor Kyle, Beryl Reid as starship captain, plus numerous others. And unlike some commentators I thought both Janet Fielding and Sarah Sutton turned in good performances in their roles.

I remember at the time, when the first episode was broadcast, being slightly startled by Adric suddenly developing a personality after a year and a half of appearing without one. Of course this was build-up to him being killed off in the last episode, and that sequence, the credits being rolled in silence over a picture of his gold star for mathematical excellence, is still effective now; shame they didn’t spend more time on building up the character over the previous months.

I was going to review these two together with The Mutants from the Pertwee era, but that has got six tedious episodes, and also raises real world issues that I will want to write about at length, so requires a separate entry once I have finished with it.

See here for transforming fun!

(hat–tip to

thette

 )

For the few of you who haven’t already seen it chez  and actually care:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OHzKjLKKY8

What if Spongebob Squarepants partially converted his house into the TARDIS?

(contributed by F)

At least I think it is called სოუსი in Georgian; that’s the most likely transliteration of the name given in the recipe book (sousi) and I found it on a cookery webpage in Georgian, but am still not completely convinced.

Anyway it was a delicious beef stew. Recipe as follows:

What really lifted my spirits about this meal is that B, who had been grumpy and unable to communicate with us all day, really loved it, actually dancing for joy between forkfuls of meat and potatoes. She is the least fussy eater of the three children, and was not at all perturbed by the presence of hot peppers. The recipe claims to be enough for 4 to 6, but between two adults and a hungry nine-year-old we finished it all up.

artw

 pointed out as we licked our lips afterwards that for all this is presented as a typical traditional Georgian recipe, several of the vital ingredients – potatoes, tomatoes, both types of pepper – must have arrived in Georgia some centuries after The Knight in the Tiger Skin left. I’m sure Georgian cooking was pretty good even before 1492, but I bet that the introduction of said new ingredients has done no harm at all.

The Assembly election has now actually been called for 7 March. I will, as usual, be running a prediction contest on my elections website, but that will only be launched one we know who all the candidates are, ie 14 February (to allow for all nominations and withdrawals).

In the meantime, I have been tracking the speculation on the likely results so far:

my own initial thoughts, from December 2006

“Fair Deal” of Slugger O’Toole repeats the exercise, with closer examinations of the situation in the four Belfast constituencies, the three Antrim constituencies, Lagan Valley, North Down and Strangford, Upper Bann, South Down, and Newry and Armagh, and the West. See also on Slugger further debate on Lagan Valley, UUP nominations in Strangford, Conservatives in North Down, SDLP in West Tyrone, the PUP after David Ervine’s death, Sinn Fein in Newry and Armagh, the UUP in Foyle, and much more – I wish Slugger would get a decent indexing system, it doesn’t even seem to be searchable by the usual search engines at the moment.

See also on the prospects of the dissident Republicans and ‘Fair Deal’ on the Unionist right, and the surge in registrations.

I had hoped that I would be writing up four Hartnell stories this weekend, rather than three; but because the thieves who stole my laptop have also got my DVD of The Web Planet, you’ll have to settle for this smaller selection.

The Reign of Terror: (.co.uk, .com or audio – episode 4 and 6 of six are missing) This ended the first ever season of Doctor Who, back in 1964. It is a very straightforward historical story, with crew landing in 1794 and meeting up with Robespierre just before he is overthrown and guillotined (and in the last episode with a pre-imperial Napoleon Bonaparte). It’s six episodes, which is perhaps a bit long (too long for Carole Anne Ford as Susan, who spends a lot of time whining and a significant chunk of it off-screen), but it’s competently done. Hartnell is particularly good, doing the business of stepping in and taking charge – he looks fantastic in costume as the District Commissioner, and also escapes from the work gang with aplomb. The plot is of course nicked straight from Baroness Orczy (apart from the jailer who is the Porter from Macbeth) but as with Ian Marter’s novelisation, there is a very real sense of menace and terror in the air. And the music is generally pretty good, apart from the occasional annoying bit of comic xylophone.

This meshes nicely with the shifting relationship between the Doctor on one hand and Ian and Barbara on the other, plus Barbara’s romantic spark with the locals. At the start of the story he is throwing them out of the TARDIS (I haven’t seen The Sensorites, the immediately preceding story, so not sure what has led to this). But by the end they have all bonded again, and the final exchange between the Doctor and Ian is a treat, as the screen dissolves from the TARDIS crew changing out of their 1790s costumes into a receding field of stars:

Ian: And what are we going to see and learn next, Doctor?
Doctor: Well, unlike the old adage, my boy, our destiny is in the stars, so let’s go and search for it!

The Time Meddler (.co.uk, .com), by contrast, ended the second season of Doctor Who in 1965. (I’ve done quite well on season-end stories, actually; see also The War Machines, The Evil of the Daleks, The War Games, Inferno, The Green Death, Survival and, stretching a point, The Five Doctors and Shada). It is another historical adventure, also written by Dennis Spooner, but of a very different kind. For the first time ever, we meet another member of the Doctor’s own race, the Monk, who is determined to change the course of history by giving Harold atomic bazookas to win the Battle of Hastings. Interestingly, although the Doctor mutters about this breaking the Golden Rule of time travel, he seems much more upset that the monk’s plans are in bad taste – a “disgusting exhibition”!

Locals and Vikings clash in a not especially original but at least not utterly stupid way. But Peter Butterworth as the Monk is very watchable, and his exchanges with the Doctor are great fun. The script is in general pretty good – I didn’t even notice that Hartnell was off-screen for the whole of episode 2. We also have Steven, who sneaked onto the TARDIS at the end of The Chase, being the first new companion to boggle at it in disbelief since Ian and Barbara right back at the beginning (Vicki takes it very much in her stride at the end of The Rescue). But then we all boggle in disbelief and shock when he and Vicki enter the Monk’s sarcophagus and find that inside, it is the same as the Doctor’s. Our hero is Not Alone.

No snappy dialogue to finish the story this time, but a nice set of arty film shots of Steven, Vicki and the Doctor’s faces over a star field, before the music starts.

The Celestial Toymaker (.co.uk, .com) was the last Dodo story I had to catch up with, though I’ve decided to do further research before doing the long piece on her that I have vaguely planned. She, the Doctor and Steven are captured by the eponymous Toymaker, brilliantly played by Michael Gough, who wants to play games with them for eternity. The companions are challenged to a series of sinister games against the Toymaker’s minions; the Doctor has to play the Tri-Logic game (which is just a ten-piece set of The Tower of Hanoi) to its conclusion, and is made invisible (and at one point mute as well) by their fiendish host.

I had been very much looking forward to this one on the basis of fan lore and the fourth episode (which is on the Lost In Time collection), and was taken aback by just how negative Tat Wood and Lawrence Miles are about it in their book. In the end I come somewhere in between. The Toymaker’s means and motivation seem to me too arbitrary, not sufficiently rooted in their own reality let alone the reality of the established lore of the series. On the other hand the cast (and, four decades later, Peter Purves’ narration) give it all they can, and I felt swept along by the action.

There are some striking parallels with the penultimate Ninth Doctor episode, Bad Wolf. The TARDIS is invaded by an external force, its occupants (the Doctor, a male companion and a female companion) are made to participate in games in which their lives are at stake. The 2005 version is better in two ways (though I would make the same criticism about the means and motivation of the bad guys not being sufficiently clear). First, of course, the vastly greater resources available – it makes episode four of The Celestial Toymaker look like a cheap studio-bound set of recordings, as indeed it is.

The second point of comparison is perhaps less obvious. In Bad Wolf, the other participants in the games are fellow humans, thus subject to the evil gamesmasters in the same way as the Doctor and friends, and indeed people we can empathise with – be it the Big Brother participant who throws her lot in with the Doctor, or the Weakest Link participant who gets Rose zapped. In The Celestial Toymaker, it’s not entirely clear what the status of the Toymaker’s minions is. Steven thinks they should be treated as mindless, soulless enemies and simply fought with. Dodo is inclined to show them compassion as if they too are being manipulated. Is Dodo being weak, or is she in some basic sense right to recognise them as having their own potential for personhood too? The question is not satisfactorily resolved (and indeed not even very satisfactorily framed).

Thoughts on the Doctor’s past: I found it interesting that both The Time Meddler and The Celestial Toymaker featured people who had encountered the Doctor before, or at least knew of him by reputation. This happens several times in Season 3 – in The Savages, the Elders claim to have been following him for some time, and in The War Machines he wanders happily in and out of the British scientific establishment of 1966, though when last in London he was hiding in a junkyard. However, I don’t think it happens in any earlier story than The Time Meddler, apart from (of course) the Doctor’s relationship with Susan, and the returns of the Daleks in The Dalek Invasion of Earth and The Chase. I guess it is something you couldn’t do while Susan was still there, since then you would have to have expository dialogue of the lines of “Remember what happened when we were on the planet Quinnis?” But as far as I remember from the Troughton years, we don’t have any more of this sort of thing until The War Games establishes a whole culture for the Doctor to have come from. As I’ve said before, Season 3 has a bad rep among a lot of people but I am finding it very intriguing.

I now have only six Hartnell stories left to watch/listen to: Marco Polo, The Sensorites, Planet of Giants, the rest of The Web Planet, The Space Museum, and Galaxy 4. Watch this space.

I’ve seen a few people doing this.

GLORY be to God for dappled things—
  For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
    For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
  Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
    And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
  Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
    With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
                  Praise him.

(Pied Beauty, by Gerald Manley Hopkins)

2) The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger (.co.uk, .com)

Another one of my reading resolutions. It is mercifully short, which is the best thing I can say about it. Holden Caulfield is a spoilt teenager of the east coast elite; he keeps getting thrown out of expensive boarding schools for doing no work. He is an unattractive character; he learns nothing in the course of the book (a narrative of a couple of days hiding from his family in New York); it’s rather difficult to see why his mentors waste much time on him. In addition I found no common ground whatever with his easy access to money and confidence with girls as a sixteen-year-old; my experience was much closer to Brian Jackson’s in Starter for Ten. So I am mystified by why this has achieved the cult status that it has, and am left wondering again if there is something about American (non-sf) writing that I have simply failed to grasp.

Top UnSuggestions for this book:

1. The supremacy of God in preaching by John Piper
2. God’s passion for His glory by John Piper
3. Path of the fury by David Weber
4. Dark destiny by Christine Feehan
5. The Valley of vision by Arthur G. Bennett

1) A Soldier in Time: The Nicholas Courtney Memoirs, by Nicholas Courtney

I’m not sure what relationship this 2002 audiobook from Big Finish has to either his 1998 published autobiography, Five Rounds Rapid (edited by John Nathan-Turner) or the 2005 version, Still Getting Away With It (co-written by Michael McManus). It’s harmless enough stuff, somewhat jumbled chronologically at the beginning, the anecdotes about Doctor Who clearly well-honed by decades of retelling at conventions. Courtney is a more complex character than he lets on, with his lifelong commitment to Christianity only mildly expounded, and his activism with the actors’ union , Equity, touched on but not explained in any depth. The life of an actor is sketched in sufficient detail that I would be inclined to give this (in any of its incarnations) as a present to any young relative thinking of going on the stage. Those who want to hear about what it was like to be the Brigadier will be satisfied with this account. Those who hoped for a literary equivalent of Tom Baker’s memoirs will be disappointed.