…time for a brief moment of nostalgia: the soon-to-be-ex-employers’ promotional video is now on YouTube. I have about ten seconds on it, starting at 02:02.

Turkmenbashi dead!

(Hat-tip

alexmc

)

12) [Doctor Who] Timewyrm: Revelation, by Paul Cornell

Cornell’s first novel, I think, and pretty good stuff, winding up the Timewyrm tetralogy (1, 2, 3) that kicked off the Virgin series of New Adventures of Doctor Who. A decent effort, certainly on a par with the first and second books of the series for quality (the third being pretty dire). The Doctor has to confront his enemy, the Timewyrm, by hunting through the nooks and crannies of his own mind with help from his own past incarnations (and I liked the Doctor/Doctor interactions, not usually done this well). Many of the characters spend much of the book taking sanctuary in a church which is their only protection against a bizarrely hostile environment outside – a setting Cornell of course used again in the Ninth Doctor TV story, “Father’s Day”.

The famous spoof broadcast last week is still stirring up trouble here. There has been a fascinating exchange of open letters between the chief editors of two leading Belgian papers, Le Soir for the Francophones, De Standaard for the Flemings. I may rise to the occasion of doing a translation into English (including pointing out where the respective translators have not done their job accurately), but meantime here are both originals and translations, originals (Le Soir’s letter in French, and De Standaard’s letter in Dutch) on the left, translations on the right.

I think De Standaard wins on points.

We’ve been re-watching last year’s Doctor Who, and finished on Sunday night with Bad Wolf / The Parting of the Ways. I’ve also meantime been watching the last of the Seventh Doctor’s stories, and so far have seen Battlefield (awful) and Ghost Light (Fascinating), and was pondering a deep and meaningful comparison of the two sets of stories. Maybe I will still do that, but meantime here’s my renewed take on the Ninth Doctor:

Overall: Ecclestone is one of the great Doctors. The only other two to convincingly portray the character as an alien were Hartnell and Tom Baker, and oddly enough I feel that there are similarities in style between their respective successors, Troughton, Davison and Tennant, all going for a more human, more cuddly version of the Doctor, more devoted to his human companions; which is fine, but it’s not quite the same thing; none of them ever felt dangerous. Ecclestone manages to do serious, funny, even afraid, and you can’t take your eyes off him.

The stories: To my surprise I found that I liked several of them much more on re-watching than I had first time round. This goes in particular for Boom Town, the second Slitheen story, set in Cardiff, where Annette Badland as the baddy gets her head and neck movements just exactly right, and she and the Doctor viciously expose each others’ ethics; and yet it’s still very funny when it’s meant to be.

But I saw new merits also in Father’s Day – perhaps because I feel I know more about Rose’s father now, after this year – and Bad Wolf / The Parting of the Ways. The World War II two-parter, The Empty Child / The Doctor Dances, is still the best, though I still dislike the Doctor’s patriotic speech – he’s pro-human, sure, but McCoy had a much better line about the British Empire in Ghost Light. The first Slitheen story, Aliens of London / World War Three, is still rubbish.

Anyway, more thoughts on new vs old Who when I finish watching the last of the old.

11) Crooked Little Heart, by Anne Lamott

A rather heartwarming novel of adolescence, grief, sexual awakening, and tennis set in the Bay Area of California. Definitely enjoyed it.

Top UnSuggestions:

1. Stitch ‘n Bitch: the Knitter’s Handbook, by Debbie Stoller
2. The Wee Free Men, by Terry Pratchett
3. Othello by William Shakespeare

If you can’t think of something helpful to say, it’s better not to say anything at all.

I picked up this handsome little fellow at F’s school Christmas fête last night. Unfortunately I have no idea what he is, and the scan doesn’t do him full justice. There was a note on the box that I bought him out of (where he was sitting along with numerous cousins) saying that he is about 175 million years old, and giving a very long genus name starting with Q. Anyone got any ideas as to what he is, or how I can find out?

Well, I’ve spent the morning happily putting all 400 of our children’s books onto my LibraryThing catalogue. (Which takes my total book tally to 2869; wonder when I will break 3000?)

I’m sorry to go on about the UnSuggestions, but some of them for classic children’s books are too good not to share:

Green Eggs and Ham, by Dr Seuss – Unsuggestion: Olympos, by Dan Simmons (at least until the system realises that I own both).
One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish, by Dr Seuss – UnSuggestion: Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance, by Noam Chomsky
Dr Seuss’s ABC and Fox in Socks, by Dr Seuss – UnSuggestion (1) (2): The Complete Stories, by Franz Kafka
Mr Brown Can Moo! Can You?, by Dr Seuss – UnSuggestion: No Logo, by Naomi Klein

When We Were Very Young, by A.A. Milne – UnSuggestion: Altered Carbon, by Richard Morgan (again, this will change once the system realises I own both)
Now We Are Six, by A.A. Milne – UnSuggestion: Learning Perl, by Randal L. Schwartz

Pippi Longstocking, by Astrid Lindgren – UnSuggestion: The Blind Watchmaker, by Richard Dawkins
Pippi in the South Seas, by Astrid Lindgren – UnSuggestion: The Naked Lunch, by William S. Burroughs

Esio Trot, by Roald Dahl – UnSuggestion: A Storm of Swords, by George R.R. Martin (though again, I have both)
The Tale of Two Bad Mice, by Beatrix Potter – UnSuggestion: A Game of Thrones, by George R.R. Martin (as before, I have both)

Five Children and It, by E. Nesbit – UnSuggestion: Being and Nothingness (L’être et le néant), by Jean-Paul Sartre

and this last one is rather poetic, though, alas, it too will probably vanish once the system realises I have both:

Doctor Dolittle, by Hugh Lofting – UnSuggestion: Getting Things Done, by David Allen.

10) Perfume, by Patrick Süskind

The story of a man in 18th century Paris, born with no body odour of his own, who grows up to be a perfumer and a psychopath, murdering teenage girls in order to capture their vital essences. The descriptions are tremendously convincing – smell is not something we often read about, so to have it here at short book length is quite an achievement. The perfumer is indeed monstrous, but the story very satisfying.

See also on the smell of Belfast.

Top UnSuggestions for this book: 11 books on evangelical Christianity, followed by Mercedes Lackey’s Storm Breaking.

Not quite the end of the year, but these were the posts on my lj that got the most posts since December 18 last year (I’ve made the cut-off point 20 rather than 15 replies too):

15 January: Most Recent Common Ancestors   [ +26 ]
15 January: Following up to this morning’s post   [ +41 ]
19 January: Lib Dem leadership   [ +21 ]
28 January: Bloggers on the Lib Dem leadership   [ +25 ]
4 March: Award winners meme, revisited   [ +21 ]
26 April: 6 April 1967   [ +27 ]
3 May: Failed States Index   [ +25 ]
4 May: Good luck   [ +22 ]
7 May: I am not really very computer literate   [ +27 ]
8 May: Start the week   [ +30 ]
14 May: May Books 6) Old Man’s War   [ +35 ]
18 May: Boundary Commission’s Revised Recommendations   [ +38 ]
20 May: Well…   [ +20 ]
21 May: My sekrit identity   [ +25 ]
27 May: DW   [ +21 ]
1 June: Public notice   [ +40 ]
8 June: Boycott analysis   [ +30 ]
10 June: The post you’ve been waiting for   [ +26 ]
13 June: Calling budding election observers   [ +33 ]
16 June: Where am I?   [ +29 ]
17 June: Thanks to burkesworks…   [ +27 ]
27 June: Strange Horizons   [ +46 ]
3 July: Social networks   [ +36 ]
3 July: That’s me told   [ +31 ]
7 July: Seen in passing   [ +21 ]
9 July: July Books 4) The Age of Fallibility   [ +21 ]
25 July: Dangers of blogging   [ +26 ]
10 August: Stranded   [ +28 ]
10 August: Thanks, and progress   [ +20 ]
14 August: Fantastic (?)   [ +26 ]
16 August: Inferno   [ +22 ]
27 August: More Hugo reflections   [ +34 ]
29 August: Bits and bobs   [ +35 ]
1 October: Important – resolve late-night marital dispute   [ +23 ]
5 October: Phone call   [ +20 ]
7 October: Job hunt concluded   [ +26 ]
10 October: October Books 1) The System of the World   [ +30 ]
13 October: Cryptic entry   [ +20 ]
18 October: I, CLAVDIVS update   [ +21 ]
9 December: Torchwood episodes 6-8   [ +26 ]

Alas, my first of two contributions to the mid-year reviewergate slapfight made the top spot; followed by the second of two more intellectual contributions on population movements, then some good old Northern Irish election stuff. The two locked posts on the list are updates on my job situation. But I’m glad that the majority of these are good sane discussions.

Someone challenged me to find an UnSuggestion where I was the only person to own both books. I have a couple of near misses – while I do own copies of Good Omens, the top UnSuggestion for both Gilead and John Adams, and I also own Goodnight Moon, the top UnSuggestion for Native Tongue by Carl Hiassen, I have omitted to put either of the UnSuggestions in question in my catalogue.

But eventually I found a case where I not only own both books but they are both in my LibraryThing, so I am indeed the only user to have catalogued both (and have reviewed both on this journal). The top UnSuggestion for Tom Shippey’s J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century is The Alchemist by Paolo Coelho. Not surprised – I found the latter insipid and self-indulgent, and the former dense but rewarding.

Well, that’s a satisfying start to the weekend!

Edited to add: Gosh, here’s another one that is a bit more surprising – the top UnSuggestion for Russell Shorto’s superb history of New Amsterdam, The Island at the Centre of the World, is the equally superb first volume of George R.R. Martin’s “Song of Ice and Fire” fantasy series, A Game of Thrones. Do enthusiasts for early American history have and aversion to epic fantasy, and vice versa? I wonder.

I’ve mentioned before about the odd comments attracted by my post from last July reviewing George Soros’ latest book. It has now taken a step in a completely different direction with someone requesting technical advice about Winstall.exe – I don’t plan to respond, and I don’t encourage anyone else to do so either!

Delighted to see that the Alliance Party has selected a candidate for South Belfast from outside the usual charmed circle of party activists. Back in the day, I was always hopeful that the party (indeed, that all parties) might be able to enlarge their talent pool a bit. It’s good to see that a) there are people like Anna Lo willing to take the plunge and b) poltiical parties ready to encourage them.

Note the careful wording of the statement that she is the first ethnic minority candidate to stand for the Northern Ireland Assembly. There was a minor candidate in the 1982 Westminster by-election, also in South Belfast, called Jagat Narain, and the Green Party ran a couple of candidates for the 1996 Forum whose names suggest non-European background. However, she is certainly the first ethnic minority candidate to be selected for a potentially winnable seat, and almost certainly the first ethnic Chinese candidate to stand for any election in Northern Ireland.

It would be unwise to overstate the importance of the Chinese vote – the 2001 census had 4155 ethnic Chinese in the whole of Northern Ireland, of whom the 1112 in South Belfast were the largest concentration; but some of those will be under 18, and not all of them will have registered to vote. But Alliance failed to win the last seat in South Belfast by only 150 votes in 1998, and the margin between the last elected and the runner up in 2003 was even tighter. So every vote will count in March (assuming, of course, that there is an election then).

See Slugger O’Toole for the usual begrudgery.

…in today’s Independent!

Well, the London office went through the 345 applicants for the internship in my new job, and weeded them down to 15, as far as I can tell by throwing out anyone who didn’t speak at least four languages and have a Masters degree. (One did slip through who doesn’t yet have his M.A., but he has written two books so I suppose that’s all right.)

Making the final selection is not going to be easy.

Two more classic Doctor Who series watched/listened to recently, the first featuring the First Doctor, Ian, Barbara and Vicki having a holiday during the reign of the emperor Nero, and the second plunging the Second Doctor, Jamie and Zoe into a well-intentioned attempt to do high Space Opera. All four episodes of The Romans are still available; only #2 of six of The Space Pirates survived the purges, though the full soundtrack with linking narration by Fraser Hines is available.

The Romans has a considerable, and surprisingly effective, comedy element, carried almost entirely by Hartnell’s Doctor. On a whim, he decides to leave their holiday villa and go to Rome (taking Vicki with him) pretending to be a murdered musician, and succeeds in fending off Nero’s jealous attempots to have him killed. There is a much less funny sub-plot involving Ian and Barbara, kidnapped by slavers, who also end up in Rome – Ian as a gladiator, Barbara as palace slave, pursued by the lustful Emperor – before making their escape. (Somewhere there must be a definitive list of the characters who have lusted after Barbara: Ganatus in a very gentlemanly way in The Daleks, the much nastier Vasor in The Keys of Marinus, the equally nasty El Akir in The Crusade, and now Nero.) The Ian/Barbara chemistry is very sweet – they have a nice joke between them about looking in the fridge. The script rather neatly resists bringing the travellers together, so that neither the Doctor and Vicki nor Ian and Barbara ever discovers what the other pair of characters is up to in Rome. Hartnell is simply superb, utterly watchable, imperious, funny, devious. It’s a shame that Maureen O’Brien can’t quite rise to the challenge of being his straight man, but this was only her second story, so I suppose one must make allowances.

The Space Pirates features the TARDIS crew getting caught up in a conflict between pirates and law enforcement in outer space. My biggest problem with it was the accents of two of the key supporting characters: General Nikolai Hermack, played by plummy-voiced Jack May, later briefly famous as Garkbit the waiter in the Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy and less briefly as Nelson Gabriel in The Archers, who can’t quite decide if he is doing his usual toff or something slightly more foreign; and even worse, Gordon Gostelow’s veteran miner Milo Clancey, whose voice wanders all over the southern and western United States with hints of Irish and Antipodean as well. Especially when you have to experience five of the six episodes on audio, and #3 is of particularly bad quality, it is a real distraction from your enjoyment. Having said that, it’s not as bad a story as some people say, though it is rather unusual – the Doctor and his friends are more acted upon than acting, and spend a lot of time trapped or locked up while the story continues around them. To judge from the surviving episode, it looked like a half-decent effort, though my long-buried physicist instincts slightly rebelled at the immense violations of celestial mechanics committed by the writer.

Neither of these is essential Who, but both had their good points. The Romans is worth getting for amusement, The Space Pirates only for completists I think.

Total electorate 7482, total votes 2494 (34%), 25 invalid (1%), total valid 2469.

See further discussion.

The Alliance Party has won a local council by-election, in the not obviously promising district of Skerries, in Coleraine. It’s the first local by-election the party has won since I was its Director of Elections ten years ago. The figures on the first count were:

Alliance 694
DUP 678
UUP 625
SF 253
SDLP 219

I don’t as yet have the later figures, but obviously Alliance picked up more transfers from the Nationalist parties than the DUP managed from the UUP (some of whose votes would also have leaked to Alliance anyway). So, more sober analysis to follow; but in the meantime, congratulations to Barney Fitzpatrick and his team.

8) The Crying of Lot 49, by Thomas Pynchon

Woman discovers she has been made the executor of her ex-husband’s will, and is sucked into a bewildering world of conspiracies around subversive alternative postal systems. Reminded me a bit of Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon and associated books, which presumably drew some inspiration from this source. But it didn’t really grab me. At least it was short.

Top UnSuggestions for this book:
1 Don’t Waste Your Life, by John Piper
2 Honeymoon, by James Patterson
3 R is for Ricochet, by Sue Grafton

Those of you who are professional editors, or who speak Arabic, or who just like laughing at extremist rigt-wingers when they do something stupid, will appreciate this:

In order to forge closer ties with its political friends in the Middle Eastern Islamic countries, the Serbian Radical Party (SRS) printed the September issue of its party organ, Velika Srbija, in the Arabic language, but the writing was printed left to right, defying the Arabic right-to-left rule, the sensationalist Kurir tabloid writes on Wednesday.

In an effort to find out how the Radicals came to make such a major blunder, the tabloid contacted SRS Vice-Chairman Dragan Todorovic, who said he could not explain the omission “because he does not speak Arabic.”

Todorovic said that the Arabic-language edition of Velika Srbija is edited by Anjad Migati, himself an Arab, advisor to the SRS chairman and member of the party’s innermost leadership. Todorovic added that Migati is a highly educated and literate man and was surprised at the omission.

Migati, too, was surprised when informed of the error, pleading “a mistake made by the printing shop.”

“The mistake is obvious, but have no concern, the target readership is clever and will find their way about it,” he said.

I just love that last line.

Just had two messages forwarded to me that were sent to all registered alumni of one of the universities I have graduated from. One was a negotiation between landlady and lodger mistakenly sent to the address for all users, the other was a test message sent my one of my fellow alumni who (like me) couldn’t quite believe the system was so easily spammable. (Several of you must have also received the two messages, I expect.)

I hope they get it fixed soon!

Some day I should like to discover how these two dots on the map, in West Virginia and Minnesota respectively, got their names:

But for now, it must remain a mystery.

Way way back before last summer I bought The Abominable Snowmen” and “The Web of Fear” as a two-disc MP3 set, and then spent a futile amount of time trying to burn them to ordinary audio CDs so I could play them in the car. Then came the change in our eldest daughter’s circumstances, which meant I was no longer using our big car with the CD player anyway; and then came the long-expected but sudden death of our little car, which meant that even the option I had been vaguely considering, of playing the mp3’s to a cassette and then listening to them, was no longer on. So I went out at the weekend and bought myself the Creative Zen mp3 player (on the recommendation of the head of the European Commission’s department for dealing with Sylvania, who I had had lunch with on Friday); and a jolly good thing it is too.

Meanwhile I had spotted the 1995 “Downtime” production, shortly after “School Reunion” was shown; and after several failed bids on eBay, I finally managed to get hold of a copy of it. However, my wife has meantime developed a deep dislike of Victoria Waterfield, and so I could not possibly watch it while she was conscious and in the house. Most unfortunately, she has been laid low this evening with a horrible bug of some indescribable nature; but the relatively small silver lining is that I have been able to watch “Downtime”, having listened over the course of my commute on Monday to “The Abominable Snowmen” and similarly today to “The Web of Fear”. I had meantime seen both surviving episodes (#2 of “The Abominable Snowmen”, and #1 of “The Web of Fear”) on the “Lost in Time” DVD collection. So by a strange set of circumstances, I am able to present a joint review of the Yeti trilogy.

The Abominable Snowmen

This was the second story in the famously monster-rich 1967-68 Season 5 (preceded by “Tomb of the Cybermen“, and followed by “The Ice Warriors“, “The Enemy of the World”, “The Web of Fear”, “Fury from the Deep” and “The Wheel in Space”). The Doctor, Jamie and Victoria land in Tibet in roughly the 1930s. The Doctor (in one of those irritating references to otherwise unseen adventures) happens to have the holy bell of the local monastery stashed in the Tardis as the result of a visit several hundred years previously. Much confusion over his and his companions’ real intent ensues, especially since a) an English researcher, Professor Travers, is there looking for Yeti and thinks they are there to steal his research, and b) the monks have been attacked by the Yeti (and indeed Travers’ colleague is killed by them in practically the first scene). In the meantime, the Great Intelligence controlling the (robotic) Yeti also has an unhealthy influence over the leader of the monastery. All ends in a dramatic confrontation inside the Det-sen monastery. You can get a jolly good impression of it for free from the photonovel on the BBC website (possibly even better than from the soundtrack, narrated by Fraser Hines who played Jamie). NB that one of the two co-authors went on to become one of the co-authors of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (though when his two colleagues sued Dan Brown for plagiarism in The Da Vinci Code, he stayed wisely silent).

Well, it’s OK but it’s not great. Troughton as the Doctor is, as always, fantastic (he has a couple of great one-liners – “They came to get their ball back!”), and the other actors give it their best as well. And the sinister beeping of the Yeti control spheres is a noise that will haunt me whenever I hear a mobile phone give off a similar ringtone. But there is a curious sapping of tension from the scenes with the monks – even if some of them are deluded warrior monks. Troughton does a lot of agonised groaning (he was very good at that) to maintain the tension, but he is working against the tide a bit. Jamie astounds everyone by having a couple of good ideas. Victoria, sadly, just screams. And the biggest problem is that it’s not readily apparent what the sinister plan of the Great Intelligence actually is. My second least favourite thing in sf is having villains whose means and motivation are not clear (my least favourite is cute anthropomorphic robots, but at least the Yeti do not fall into that category). But if the Great Intelligence takes over one Tibetan monastery – so what? And where do the raw materials for building the Yeti come from, halfway up the Himalayas? Bad news for Det-sen and district if it succeeds, but not clear that this is a potentially world-threatening danger.

The Web of Fear

The sequel, broadcast only a couple of months later, is in quite a different category. This is truly one of the great Doctor Who stories, and it’s very sad that the only surviving episode on video is the first, which is not the best. The Doctor, Jamie and Victoria arrive in contemporary (ie 1968) London, to find that the whole city centre is deserted, the Underground closed, corpses covered by sinister webs; it turns out that Professor Travers’ souvenirs from his Himalayan adventure of decades before have developed a life of their own, and the Great Intelligence is back and re-mobilising the robotic Yeti to try and Take Over The World.

Even for us folks from the Celtic fringe, London has a particular resonance. I discovered at the age of, I think, 15, that 43p is the amount of money you leave London with, no matter how much you had when you arrived. There are several wonderful scenes of (Scottish) Jamie and a Welsh soldier trying to find their way through the tunnels. And within London the Tube is very special; there s something pretty appalling even in the audio description of the gradual extinguishing of the lights representing Tubes stations not yet overwhelmed by the enemy. I guess the idea of horrors in the Underground has an extra resonance after July last year, though this would have been very far from the makers’ minds in 1968. (The Blitz, of course, would have been nearer.)

There’s a real peak in the middle of the story. The Doctor is wholly absent from episode #2 (presumably Troughton had the week off), but rather than embarrassedly scramble for continuity as tended to be the case in Hartnell’s day, the Doctor’s absence is a real source of tension, leading Jamie and Victoria into rash efforts to track him down. When the Doctor does turn up in episode #3, it is in the company of a mysterious colonel, who seems a deeply ambiguous figure – is he what he claims to be, the new commander sent in by the authorities outside the zone affected by the crisis, or is he a tool of the Great Intelligence? Of course, we long-term fans know what the answer is as soon as we hear the colonel’s name; but the character portrayed by Nicholas Courtney here is far more interesting than the buffoonish Brigadier of the Pertwee years.

Unfortunately the last two episodes slip back into chasing through tunnels, but the form picks up again for the climax, which sees the Doctor apparently trapped in a sinister mechanism which will drain his mind into the Great Intelligence. Again, we long-term fans know that he may well have a trick up his sleeve, but Jamie and Victoria don’t, and dutifully rescue him before he has time to turn the tables on the enemy, which is therefore defeated but not destroyed, leaving room for another story.

Downtime

That story was finally produced 27 years later, in 1995, in a story written by Marc Platt (author of various spin-off fiction and the canonical story “Ghost Light”) and directed by Christopher Barry (whose credits go right back to The Daleks), and starring Nicholas Courtney as the Brigadier, Deborah Watling as Victoria, Jack Watling as Professor Travers, and Elisabeth Sladen as Sarah Jane Smith; so it’s pretty damn close to canon. Platt’s visions are, frankly, confusing. I didn’t get a lot out of his novel Lungbarrow, and I have also been listening this week to one of his audio plays which was similarly complex; I have never seen “Ghost Light” but it seems to be famously impenetrable. “Downtime” scores rather better. Victoria is now in charge of a new hi-tech academy, where all the students are controlled by rasio signals from the mainframe; it turns out that once they have been correctly programmed, they can get turned into Yeti by holding a control sphere.

I groaned at two unnecessarily self-indulgent and self-referential moments – at one point the Brigadier tells Sarah Jane that the important codes ar “NN and QQ”, the original production codes for the two first Yeti stories; and there’s a conversation when Victoria reminisces about her father (killed by the Daleks) to Professor Travers, who in turn reminiscences about his daughter (last seen in “The Web of Fear”); but we fans know, of course, that the two actors are themselves father and daughter in real life.

Having said that, Courtney again is very good as the (now long-retired) Brigadier, trying to solve the problem and also patch up his relationship with his daughter Kate (played very luminously by Beverley Cressman – who seems to have done surprisingly little else). Both Watlings reprise their parts from a quarter-century earlier well, with the added touch that both characters are now more or less under the sinister influence of the Great Intelligence (and this is reasonably canonical, as both were taken over by it at differnt point in the earlie stories). And Elisabeth Sladen is given very little to do but does it very well (and was to do essentially the same role, investigative journalist checking out what is going on in peculiar educational establishment really controlled by alien powers, even better in “School Reunion” this year). Peter Silverleaf as Victoria’s sidekick Christopher, however, is just unwatchable. (John Leeson – the voice of K9 – also has a small part, as does Geoffrey Beevers who played the Master at one point.)

To be honest, I think even completists can give this one a miss in good conscience. But I’m glad to have watched it and to have rounded out the story of the Yeti, as far as it can be taken.

Summary: Get “The Web of Fear” – essential listening for the Who fan. And if you like it, get “The Abominable Snowmen” as well.

writes about snooker. And also elections.

Pictures from my presentation at the European Parliament two weeks ago:

1)

2)

3)

4)

5)

I do like this one:

Can’t quite see who the bloke on the far left is, but the woman is my departing assistant, and the guy between her and me is her replacement.

The United Nations Special Representative for Sudan, Jan Pronk, got into hot water recently for sentiments expressed inter alia on his weblog, which culminated in his being declared persona non grata by the government of Sudan.

He has now responded with a spirited defence of blogging in general, and blogging as a senior political figure involved in a delicate and dangerous political situation in particular.

First, he points out that despite the press spin ("Envoy Kicked Out of Sudan for Blogging", that kind of thing) in fact the statements that got him into trouble were not in any way Special Sekrit Blogging Thoughts.

It has been said that my blog reflected my personal opinion, different from an opinion in my capacity as Special Representative of the Secretary General of the United Nations in Sudan. This is nonsense. In my blog I said the same as in press conferences and on other public occasions, attended in my official capacity. How could somebody in my position make a distinction between official and private?

He explains that he has two reasons for writing a weblog:

First, I like combining my work as a politician with analytical reflections on what I am doing and on the environment within which I am working. I have always done so, by lecturing, by writing articles and essays and by making extensive notes for myself. It helps me focus. Blogging for me was a convenient extension of this practice, simply by using a new instrument. I had a second reason. Why not share my reflections with others? I wanted to be accountable, not only to the UN bureaucracy in New York, whom we were sending regularly extensive analytical reports, but broader. I consider myself much more a politician than a diplomat. Politicians have to be accountable and transparent.

He muses a bit on the difference between his role, as a political actor and insider, and that of a journalist, and cautions against confusing the two. And he concludes with five rules of political insider blogging:

1. Present only facts, not rumours or hearsay. Check the facts; don’t make up stories.
2. Present only quotes of public statements. Do not quote what other persons said in official or informal meetings. In references to such meetings only quote your self. Do not breach confidentiality.
3. Present criticism in a balanced manner. Approach all parties alike. Be even handed.
4. Do not attack individual persons. Criticize organizations, institutions or movements. Criticize their values, policies and behaviour, when they are in conflict with internationally agreed principles and norms.
5. Do not only present criticism. Do not only report negative developments. Highlight also positive facts. Do not withhold praise, when deserved.

All exceptionally sensible. Go read the original article in full. And remember as you do so that this man is trying to prevent (or at least stop) horrendous atrocities.

On yesterday’s date in 1663, Samuel Pepys went bookshopping:

Thence to St. Paul’s Church Yard, to my bookseller’s, and having gained this day in the office by my stationer’s bill to the King about 40s. or 3l., I did here sit two or three hours calling for twenty books to lay this money out upon, and found myself at a great losse where to choose, and do see how my nature would gladly return to laying out money in this trade. I could not tell whether to lay out my money for books of pleasure, as plays, which my nature was most earnest in; but at last, after seeing Chaucer, Dugdale’s History of Paul’s, Stows London, Gesner, History of Trent, besides Shakespeare, Jonson, and Beaumont’s plays, I at last chose Dr. Fuller’s Worthys, the Cabbala or Collections of Letters of State, and a little book, Delices de Hollande, with another little book or two, all of good use or serious pleasure: and Hudibras, both parts, the book now in greatest fashion for drollery, though I cannot, I confess, see enough where the wit lies.

At today’s prices:

• History of the Worthies of England by Thomas Fuller: There are a couple of abridged editions from the 20th century available, but to get the full text the most recent printing was in 1840. If you’re lucky, you can pick one up for £25, but more likely to pay twice that.
• Cabala, Sive Scrinia Sacra, Mysteries of State and Government: In Letters of Illustrious Persons and Great Ministers of State as well Forreign as Domestick, in the Reigns of King Henry the Eighth, Q: Elizabeth, K: James, and K: Charles: Wherein such Secrets of Empire, and Publick Affairs, as were then in Agitation, are clearly Represented; And many remarkable Passages faithfully Collected. … To which is added several Choice Letters and Negotiations, no where else Published: the 1663 edition, which Pepys bought, starts at around £200; the 1691 reprint rather more.
• Les delices de la Hollande. Avec un traité du gouvernement, et un abregé de ce qui s’est passé de plus memorable jusques à l’an de grace 1660, by Jean Nicolas de Parival: Also at least £200 – this was the third edition, and Parival updated it twice again before the end of the century.
• Hudibras, by Samuel Butler: still in print, available in paperback for £ 11.99.

So, the cost to Samuel Pepys of these four books (plus “another little book or two”) was within his budget of £2 or £3. Buying them today you would be lucky to get much change out of £500!