Booked the morning off work for a meeting with our financial adviser. He couldn’t make it at the last minute so I can catch up on some other things, including this (via ):

Language Scholar You scored a 370 out of 400 on language knowledge.

Outstanding! You’ve scored higher than even most Anthropology students would. You are probably a Linguistics or Anthropology Professor yourself (or at least a Grad student). You may even speak several languages and are possibly working on a new one. If not, then you just have an endless drive to learn about the different cultures of our world. Regardless, you are one of the gems of any society, always promoting a deeper understanding amongst all people. Unless you cheated of course.

On a different topic entirely, Greece was hard work but also at times reasonably good fun. The highlight was a discussion on the linkage between the future of Europe and developments in the Balkans; one participant, in the course of explaining to us why not everyone in the EU is ecstatic about the formation of new states, read out a Wall Street Journal editorial from last May in horrified tones, concentrating on the penultimate paragraph:

Balkanization doesn’t always deserve its bad name. Throughout history, Europe’s microstates have tended to be less bellicose (shrimps don’t pick fights), more democratic (government is closer to the people) and, with fewer resources to waste, economically savvier. To thrive the Tiny Tims need open trade — thank the European Union for that today — and peace, which now comes courtesy of a U.S.-led NATO.

The participant then added: “We are not striving for a Europe of shrimps!!!! Especially one designed by sharks!!!” I don’t really agree with his sentiments, but he did put it very well. With friends like the Wall Street Journal, the small wannabe states of Europe don’t need enemies.

I have to go to Greece now. But some of you may feel motivated to reply to this commenter to one of my book reviews (the comment is addressed to the author of the book, who I think is unlikely to respond on his own behalf, at least in this forum).

Poor Sam had a bad night at an inn in Wisbech, with one minor compensation:

By and by newes is brought to us that one of our horses is stole out of the stable, which proves my uncle’s, at which I am inwardly glad — I mean, that it was not mine; and at this we were at a great loss; and they doubting a person that lay at next door, a Londoner, some lawyer’s clerk, we caused him to be secured in his bed, and other care to be taken to seize the horse; and so about twelve at night or more, to bed in a sad, cold, nasty chamber, only the mayde was indifferent handsome, and so I had a kiss or two of her, and I to bed, and a little after I was asleep they waked me to tell me that the horse was found, which was good newes, and so to sleep till the morning, but was bit cruelly, and nobody else of our company, which I wonder at, by the gnatts.

More at .

Today is the 1910th anniversary of the assassination of the Roman emperor Domitian. Intrigued by the astrological features of this event, I wrote a short article about it a while back, and then found someone else had written a longer one. Not that I believe in any of it myself, but Domitian obviously did, and ended up dead as a result. (Some would argue that the real moral is that he should have stayed in bed all morning. I leave it to you to decide.)

15) Esprit de Corps: Sketches from Diplomatic Life, by Lawrence Durrell

Well, when I discovered that Lawrence Durrell had written a book of humorous short stories set in the British Embassy in Belgrade in the early 1950s, I absolutely had to hunt it down via the on-line second-hand books resources. Well, one cannot call it Great Literature, and he is rather patronising about the Yugoslavs (though in fairness the British diplomats are equally ludicrous stereotypes); it is, however, laugh-out-loud funny in places. The inside front cover quotes John Betjeman saying in a review, “I have not laughed at a new humorous book so much since the days of Stephen Potter’s Gamesmanship” (which is a bit ambiguous as to whether or not he actually found Potter funny, but leaves no doubt about Durrell). The episode of the botched baptism, the butler’s wig and the unfortunate confusion around the bishop’s crozier is probably the most memorable scene. There are some nice illustrations by V.H. Drummond, whose work I don’t think I knew, but I don’t think I can scan them without wrecking the binding so you’ll have to take my word for it. Apparently there are two sequels, Stiff Upper Lip and Sauve Qui Peut, but I don’t feel the need to order them unless I get a positive recommendation (or, of course, unless I see them in a shop when I’m looking for something else).

14) 31 Days: The Crisis That Gave Us the Government We Have Today, by Barry Werth

My obsession with Gerald Ford flagged up this book on its publication earlier this year, and I managed to find a half-price review copy in Chapters in New York. This account takes us from 9 August 1974, the day the Richard Nixon became the first US president to resign from office, to 8 September, the day that his successor, Gerald Ford, issued “a full, free, and absolute pardon unto Richard Nixon for all offenses against the United States which he, Richard Nixon, has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 20, 1969 through August 9, 1974.”

The book has two real plot strands, first, Ford’s decision to issue the pardon and the subsequent negotiations over details with Nixon, and second, the scrabbling for office in the Ford White House, especially the decision to nominate Nelson Rockefeller as Vice-President rather than the other obvious candidate, George Bush the elder (or the last-minute dark horse alternative, Donald Rumsfeld – Ronald Reagan also fancied himself in the running, but Ford couldn’t even remember how to spell his name).

The first is, of course, the key to the failure of Ford’s presidency. Werth paints a convincing psychological and political picture of why Ford decided to do it so soon, against the advice of almost everyone he asked: the shock of realising, after his first press conference, that the issue of his predecessor’s fate was going to drown out attention to his own programme for government until it was settled, combined with his experience as a youth of concluding his relations with his absent biological father. There is no clear record that anyone said to Ford that the move would expend all his political capital and kill his moral authority stone dead; but it is abundantly clear that Ford felt he couldn’t live with himself until the decision was made, and would not have been swayed even if the argument had been put to him in those terms.

The second was a contributory factor to Ford’s inability to pull things round in time. Like John Adams and Lyndon B Johnson, he did not change enough of the cabinet, despite open treachery from his Secretary of Defense literally as he was being sworn in. His press secretary, one of his oldest friends, was out of the loop about the planned pardon for Nixon, and in consequence stole the headlines by resigning the same day. Having promised George Bush senior something decent in compensation for not getting the Vice-Presidency, all he could come up with was the post of Ambassador to China (this after Bush, as the US representative at the UN, had fought tooth and nail against the de-recognition of Taiwan). Al Haig was clearly a menace. The picture that comes across is of a very nice guy who simply lacked the killer instinct.

(Having said that, of course, he still came pretty close to re-election in 1976 – less than 2% behind in the popular vote, and closer than that in Ohio and Wisconsin which would have been enough to beat Carter).

Much else happening in this period as well, and given my own interests I would have liked more on the Cyprus crisis, which of course was in full swing that summer (including – a detail I had forgotten if I ever knew it – the assassination of the US Ambassador by a Greek Cypriot gunman in Nicosia), but I guess the fact that it appears mainly as background colour tells me most of what I would want to know. (In any case the Kissinger Archives have much more detail.)

There are lots of other charming details; the description of Jerry and Betty Ford dancing with the king and Queen of Jordan at the end of their first week, which reminds me both of this picture taken during the bicentennial celebrations a couple of years later, and also this one which overlooked our breakfast table in the Washington hotel we stayed in in May last year. The account of the impact of events on Betty’s life is cpmpassionate. (Though I do wonder if she has since regretted being photographed literally dancing on the Cabinet Room table.)

I can’t give the book full marks, unfortunately. I would have liked a judgement from the author, not just from quoted commentators, about the morality of some of the things that were done and decisions made – in particular the disposition of Nixon’s state papers, which at one point were piled so high on the third floor of the Old Executive Office Building that the Secret Service worried it might cave in. (Oddly enough, I was on the third floor of that building for a meeting two days ago – and it’s not in much better shape now, thirty years on.)

The other missing element for me was that, while we learn a gret deal about Ford’s own background, and a decent amount on the other older characters, Nixon, Rockefeller, Bush, Haig, we find out very little about the the new generation empowered by Nixon’s fall and Ford’s brief ascendancy – Rumsfeld, Richard Cheney, Richard Perle, etc. They appear pretty much out of nowhere in the narrative, and the book therefore fails to really deliver on its promise to explain how the crisis “Gave Us The [American] Government We Have Today”.

But still, a good read.

13) The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Third Annual Collection, ed. Gardner Dozois

This is always the best value for money of the various best-sf-of-the-year collections, if also the most intimidating (I don’t seem to have finished last year’s). Plenty of stories that I had already read and enjoyed, and several that were new to me – note especially “The Canadian Who Came Almost All the Way Back from the Stars” by Jay Lake and Ruth Nestvold, “The Blemmye’s Stratagem” by Bruce Sterling, “Audubon in Atlantis” by Harry Turtledove, “Softly Spoke the Gabbleduck” by Neal Asher, “Planet of the Amazon Women” by David Moles and “Gold Mountain” by Chris Roberson. Better than at least half the stories on the Hugo and Nebula nomination lists. Perhaps we should let the professional anthologists decide the awards, rather than the voters?

Transatlantic flight finished, now a wait for several hours in Heathrow for the connection back home.

Trip report below the cut, but first of all, congratulations to for securing no less than Iain M. Banks for next August’s MeCon in Belfast! Certainly increases the chances of my showing up.

I do hope I get to experience one of the superior classes of transatlantic flying some day. I really hate standard class. Having said that, flying over was not too bad, and JFK’s passport control section seems to have become a lot more human (though still took 35 minutes before I was processed).

I thought I recognised one of my fellow passengers as Julie Etchingham who I knew at Cambridge, though on reflection I was sure it was sleep deprivation on my part, as I haven’t seen her for fifteen years. On further reflection, once I had got into New York, I remembered that she is now an anchorwoman for Sky News so it almost certainly was her, coming into town for the anniversary. I should have said hello.

The New York hotel was a horribly grotty place called the Ameritania on the corner of 54th and Broadway. I woke at 6 on Monday, and realised around 7.30 that if I started walking south I would reach Ground Zero more or less exactly on time for the commemoration. It is about four miles. As recorded in an earlier entry, the commemoration was rather eerie. But I was able to fit in some bookshopping before my working day began.

Tuesday morning was the one morning of the trip when I slept relatively late, being woken at 8 by a very welcome call from , who, with , joined me for breakfast. Great to see him again and meet her for the first time. Then I had to zoom off to the UN for a coffee with a friend whose working conditions recently changed rather drastically.

On Tuesday afternoon I was able to indulge in a very small amount of culture; I was given a guided tour of the cast iron house at 101 Spring Street, designed in 1871 by an architect called Nicholas Whyte, of whom I know nothing more. I had happened to bump into the architect who is currently restoring the building last year, and he offered to have me shown round. The house was the New York home of the minimalist artist Donald Judd, and many sculptures and other artworks by him and others are on view for those who can get access – the whole thing apparently will be open to the public in a couple of years.

Tuesday night, off to Washington, and a much much nicer hotel – the Morrison Clarke Historic Inn on 11th and L. Back to the usual pattern of waking up early and going to sleep early; I didn’t manage any evening social engagements while I was there but it is probably just as well.

On Wednesday I did a talk at Johns Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies. The chairman of the meeting, in his introductory remarks, referred to the grim coincidence that he had also organised a conference in Virginia in 1990 en route to which my father suffered a fatal heart attack (at JFK airport), and said nice things about us both. I said that I was glad to be the first member of my family to arrive safely at a meeting he had organised. The talk went well.

On Thursday I met with another old friend who has just become his country’s ambassador to the US – the first time I have been to an embassy in Washington. My friend is an academic and former government official, who had been mildly but not outspokenly critical of his country’s current government (which rather lacks people with much talent), but suddenly found that he was back in favour with the president. The wheel of fortune, and all that.

Yesterday I started with two media interviews which I was told would be on-line by today; will edit this entry to link to them if that actually happens. Then started to get a little worried because my last meeting, in the amusingly named district of Foggy Bottom, was due to end at 4.30 and my flight from Dulles was at 6.35; in the end, despite the importance of the meeting, I left at 4.15 – and of course reached Dulles in only half an hour, and had loads of time (enough to get some decent food at the airport so as to avoid having to rely on the BA menu).

Unfortunately the overnight flight was the least comfortable I think I have ever had. In the seat next to me was a very tall man who was unable to settle, and whose limbs kept spilling into what I felt was my personal space. Am now feeling very woozy indeed, and hoping for an afternoon’s sleep once I finally get home. Of course, now that I am much more sleep-deprived than I was on Sunday night, the test will be if I think I recognise celebrities on the next plane; if I don’t, than I guess I can be pretty certain that it really was Julie Etchingham!

12) Indefensible: One Lawyer’s Journey into the Inferno of American Justice, by David Feige

This is a very good book, in a number of ways, and perhaps it was a mistake of the publishers to market it as a book about the American justice system; it covers so much else. David Feige describes a day in the life of a public defender in the Bronx, where he worked for fifteen years, running from courtroom to courtroom with lengthy interspersed reminiscences about how he got there. The human stories of those who are damaged by the justice system – even those who are eventually acquitted – are described with compassion and occasionally humour. But he even manages to evoke our sympathy for those who are guilty:

Even after more than a decade in the system, I still fundamentally believe in the possibility of redemption and the value of every individual. I care for my murderous clients… Their shortcomings don’t disqualify them from my caring. But somehow, when I try to explain this in the context of my work, I’m met with blank confusion.

Reading this book on the reality of what the law does to people is an unsettling contrast with the glamorisation of cop shows on TV, be it the refined Morse or Dalziel and Pascoe, or even the more gritty but (I suspect) equally unrealistic Hill Street Blues in the old days. The biggest villains are certainly those evil judges whose sentencing is a mockery, and who cannot be reined in – indeed, the only likely effect of public opinion is to make sentencing practice harsher. (One of Feige’s clients asks in bewilderment, “Why wouldn’t any judge release me if they thought I was innocent? Isn’t that what they’re supposed to do?”) I suspect that the Bronx is much worse off in that respect than anywhere I have ever lived, or am likely to live; but that doesn’t detract from the universality of the message.

David Feige is actually a very old friend of mine – the year I lived in the Netherlands, when I turned 13, he was a year or two older and introduced me and my brother to the delights of Dungeons and Dragons, and (in my case anyway) Roger Zelazny’s writing. So it’s very good to find that he has turned out as a force for making the world a better place.

11) Rite of Passage, by Alexei Panshin

Well, that’s it: I have now read every single novel that has won the Nebula Award.

And while this one is not in the top half of my list, it’s not so very close to the bottom either. Most of it is a rather good retelling of Heinlein’s Tunnel In The Sky, with better world-building and characterisation. Mia, our narrator and heroine, has grown up on a generation starship where the young folks must endure a month on the surface of whatever nearby planet is handy to become full citizens. Her father, incidentally, is a senior politician on the starship.

This better-than-average sf Bildungsroman is then completely wrecked by the concluding section, in which Mia’s people decide to blow up the planet on which she underwent her rite of passage – not because of the brutal treatment meted out by its inhabitants to her and her friends, not because they might be a potential military threat in the future, but purely because they don’t use contraception enough. A truly great author might have made this into a great sf story (or at least a satisfactory denouement), but unfortunately Panshin isn’t up to it.

So, an OK book with a terrible conclusion.

Did it deserve to win the Nebula? In an indifferent year, it would have been excusable. But this was up against the Hugo-winning Stand on Zanzibar, and also against two books that I reckon are better than either, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick and Picnic on Paradise by Joanna Russ. So, as often happens, a very peculiar Nebula winner, but at least not one that is as embarrassing as The Terminal Experiment or The Quantum Rose.

Actually the full list of books I own but haven’t read is here. The ten most frequently tagged as “unread” by other Librarything users are:

1. The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky (☑)
2. Persuasion, by Jane Austen (☑)
3. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (☑)
4. Beloved by Toni Morrison (☑)
5. The Prince, by Niccolo Machiavelli (☑)
6. The System of the World, by Neal Stephenson (☑)
7. The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold (☑)
8. The Confessions of Saint Augustine (☑)
9. Villette, by Charlotte Bronte (☑)
10. The Color Purple, by Alice Walker (☑)

10) Peace at Any Price: How the World Failed Kosovo, by Iain King and Whit Mason

Iain King is an old friend of mine; I don’t think I’ve met his co-author, but the two of them together have written a fairly damning indictment of the international efforts to put Kosovo on its feet since the NATO campaign against Serbia and Yugoslavia of 1999. From the very beginning, international officials conceded to thuggery on the ground, committed by both the ethnic Albanian majority and by the remaining ethnic Serbs where they could manage it. UN officials retreated into a colonialist mentality, failing to implement their mandate and questioning their own ability to do so. (Kosovo’s electricity supplies now are in worse shape than they were before the conflict.) The highest ever per capita expenditure by the international community on post-conflict reconstructiuon has delivered indifferent results.

They have a list of prescriptions as to what could be done better in future. To me, the two key points – confirmed by this book – are, first, that any such international mission needs to move fast to establish the rule of law as a matter of extreme urgency; and second, that the end goal must be clear right from the beginning. The determination to put off deciding on Kosovo’s future independence led directly to the discrediting of the UN mission within Kosovo and the violence of March 2004, and has exacerbated uncertainty in the wider region.

There were one or two other points that occurred to me when reading. In Bosnia, politicians were reined in by the international community when they lied about what was actually in the peace deal. No such measure was ever applied or even threatened in Kosovo, with the result that nationalist fantasies continued to be peddled by the top leadership until the start of this year. Freedom of speech, sure, but malicious lies about the basis of government should at the very least have been countered by the UN.

King and Mason make the argument, though I feel they are not completely convinced, that holding elections in Kosovo before the moderates were in a position to win was a mistake. In my view that is wishful thinking. While in these circumstances elections do often simply confirm the hold on power of local thugs, at least they are now in by virtue of the ballot box rather than by force and it becomes thinkable that they can be removed. And anyway, the first elections in Kosovo did, in fact, remove from power many of the KLA-linked structures that had gained local ascendancy during the war.

I think this is the first book-length piece on the Kosovo protectorate, and it’s a thorough analysis, drawing of course among other sources from the work my own colleagues have been doing over the years. My one minor quibble are that some of the Serbian names are misspelt – the famously impaled Mr Martinović is Martimovic, Nenad Radosavljević has acquired an extra l in his surname, and Slaviša Petković’s first name is spelt Slavisha, as if in Albanian. But those quibbles apart, it’s a good book.

9) The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation, by Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colon

It’s almost two years since I read the original version of the 9/11 Report; thanks to Slate I became aware of this new and more approachable version, and bought it at the Borders shop on the corner of Wall Street and Broadway, a couple of blocks from the site of some of the events it describes.

A few things jumped out at me differently on reading this version. I didn’t remember the original making such a strong point of the non-involvement of Iraq and Hezbollah in the events of 9/11. The key passage about the FBI agent who speculated that someone might fly a plane into the World Trade Centre has been toned down. But the utter confusion among the US top leadership on the morning of the attacks is even better portrayed in graphical form than by the written word alone.

Two years on, the Commission itself has added to the original text a pretty damning report card of the US response to making sure that it cannot happen again, with a bit more stress on the necssity of getting to grips with the Arab world than the original had, and a general condemnation of the apathy of the Executive and still more the legislative branches of government.

Anyway, this is an excellent adaptation – true to the spirit of the original, very well presented. Strongly recommended.

8) Mrs Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf

This is very short, but very good. I was pleased (reading the intro to my Penguin edition after I’d read the book) that I spotted the influence of Joyce’s Ulysses – but this is much less hard work. I always like the narrative technique of looking at the same events from different perspectives, especially when the author gets the unreliable narrator technique right. Based on this I will look out for more – to my shame, I don’t think I had read any Woolf before.

7) The Terminal Experiment, by Robert J. Sawyer

This is not quite as bad a book as I had been led to believe. The prose is often leaden – in particular, the cringe-worthy opening passage which I think should be used as a model of how not to write in classes for impressionable young writers, and the numerous info-dumps idicating that the characters have read all the available scientific literature up to 1994 (which is a shame as most of the book is set in 2011). What appears to be the killer idea of the first half of the book – that science can detect the soul leaving the body at death – is simply forgotten for the last third of the narrative, which plays the rogue-AI’s in the net cliche as a murder mystery, leading to an unconvincing resolution. The detective character herself violates standard operating procedure by burbling her theories about the crime to one of the key suspects.

But apart from that, the characters were not too unbelievable and the exploration of the issues of artificial intelligence and the scientific basis of the soul not too undergraduate (with all due respect to my undergraduate readers). And he does predict a future Pope Benedict XVI. (Of course, whether the present Pope will still be there in 2011 is another matter.)

Still, it is pretty surprising that this won the 1995 Nebula Award for Best Novel. I confess I haven’t read any of the other nominees, and if this was voted better than them I don’t really intend to. (Actually, I may have read Beggars and Choosers by Nancy Kress – I know I read one of the later books in the series, and was seriously unimpressed.) The Hugo for the equivalent year went to Bujold’s Mirror Dance, which is the start of the superb four-book climax to the Vorkosigan saga (as continued in Memory, Komarr, and A Civil Campaign).

This is not the worst Nebula-winning novel I have read – that title goes to either The Quantum Rose by Catherine Asaro or The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov – but it is certainly in the bottom four. I can’t decide if I like it less than Neuromancer, because I can’t remember anything about the Gibson book, even though I know I have read it several times.

OK, only Rite of Passage by Alexei Panshin to go…

6) Girl with a One-track Mind: Confessions of the Seductress Next Door by “Abby Lee” [Zoe Margolis]

Many of us who write blogs like to occasionally fantasise that there may some day be a market for our words of wisdom. (Of course, some who write blogs are already established professional writers, so this does not apply to them.) Very few, however, manage to make the transition from blogger to published author on the basis of what is in their blog; I doubt very much that my book reviews from here will ever appear in dead tree form in your local bookshop.

Of course, that’s because I write about books I have read, and occasionally sf cons I have been to, or arguments I have had, or speeches I have made, and not about sex. The Girl With A One Track Mind has written a very entertaining blog about the sex she has had for the last couple of years, and managed (somehow strangely) to persuade a publisher to take it on, and here it is.

And it is an entertaining, in some ways rather a moral read. Sex with strangers, or semi-strangers, is not always satisfactory. Wildly successful sex does not necessarily lead to a wildly successful relationship. By the end of the book, she is firming up her ideas about what she wants from a long-term partner. In that way, the novel format is more sustainable than the blog – done properly, as it is here, it imposes a duty on the author of character development, of story arc rather than the episodic narrative we get from the blog.

The Sunday Times wrote an incredibly spiteful article exposing the author’s real identity – typical of the trash rag it is (a friend of mine who was briefly its foreign correspondent had to help the then foreign editor work out where the Balkan states were, one of many events that I thought Evelyn Waugh had invented for Scoop). However, she has since made a few more media appearances on her own terms. Let’s hope that her fears of being finished in her film industry career are exaggerated, and that she continues to write entertainingly and for profit.

My colleague in Belgrade has started a blog. Here he tells a story about me. Many of the details are wildly inaccurate but nonetheless entertaining.

PS – it should be added that Zoran Zivkovic is guest-blogging over at VanderWorld.

Am sitting at an internet terminal on Broadway, a couple of blocks from Ground Zero, where the five-years-on commemoration is taking place at this very moment. It is a very peculiar feeling. Not really one I can describe at any further length.

(Of no interest unless you are interested in Christianity)

This is the start of one of the five versions of the Creed supplied in our local parish missal:

I believe in the origin
of all life,
in a God who is Father-Mother.
The basis and meaning of my existence,
hope and prospect each day.

It is a pretty loose reformulation, to put it mildly, of the original opening of the Nicene Creed: Πιστεύομεν εἰς ἕνα Θεόν, Πατέρα, Παντοκράτορα, ποιητὴν οὐρανοῦ καὶ γῆς, ὁρατῶν τε πάντων καὶ ἀοράτων / Credo in unum Deum, Patrem omnipotentem, factorem cæli et terræ, visibílium omnium et invisibílium.

Coming as I do from a rather conservative Catholic culture, I was stunned that our local church (presumably at the instruction of the Belgian hierarchy) recognises God as both Father and Mother in this way.

Of course this is a Good Thing, and it is entirely right to look behind the particular words agreed as the result of a political debate almost seventeen centuries ago to try and reformulate the essential message in language that is more relevant today. (We can debate whether or not they have actually succeeded – the punctuation and grammar are also rather loosely consructed, and the Belgian formula is much less specific than the Greek; but that’s a different matter.)

There’s still a bit of me that wonders, though, if the Belgian Catholics are praying with a different Creed to the Irish Catholics (and indeed the other Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox and other Christians who use the Nicene Creed), are they still in the same church? (And then another bit of me responds, does that really matter so much?)

The picture is of our local church, taken by Carolien.

Given that I won’t use the laptop on the plane, but will need it once I get there, is it a viable solution to pack it in my suitcase, inside its bag, and send it off to be stowed in the hold?

Google Answers suggests that it is entirely feasible, though with certain risks, which I think I am prepared to take.

(Funny) A very long list of quotes from Terry Pratchett

(Serious) examines memory and reality

Will be in NY from late tomorrow night (like midnight) till Tuesday evening.

Then in DC from late Tuesday night till Friday afternoon.

Monday, Wednesday and Thursday evenings are free at the moment, if anyone has any suggestions?

5) The Last Word and other stories, by Graham Greene

A collection of short stories ranging from 1923 to 1990, compiled by Greene in the latter year, shortly before his death. Actually it is fairly clear why these stories have not been numbered among his more memorable works; they are mostly very short and while good illustrations of his style have little to engage the reader in terms of content.

ObSF: the very first story, written in 1988, is set in a future where the entire world has been united under a single government and follows the final days of the man who had been the last Pope. It reminded me of ‘s remark that “if you show me a planet with a single government I’ll show you the mass graves”. Another story, written in 1989 but set in 1997, tells of the opening of the Channel Tunnel in 1994 being disrupted by a terrorist attack. Does any of Graham Greene’s other work count as sfnal?

Look at your LJ userpics list….

If you have fewer than 50 icons, pick every fifth one.
If you have between fifty and seventy-five icons, pick every seventh one.
If you have over seventy-five icons, pick every tenth one.
If you have fewer than ten, pick all of ’em.

List them on your LJ, and tell everyone exactly why you have it, why it’s interesting to you, what significance does it have.

	This was one of the first ones I made myself, from the famous Apollo photograph of the Earth rising as seen from the Moon. At first I was using it as the default icon for book reviews, but I decided that I preferred to use a part of an illustration of the cover of an Earthsea novel instead. Now I generally use it for sad or contemplative entries, especially for deaths. There is something awfully profound about the whole planet seen from a quarter of a million miles away.
	I wanted an icon that would be a good illustration for posts about the more military bits of my day job. There’s something very uncompromising about a tank. This one is Australian.
	I felt that all the icons I had designed myself were rather grim and unhappy, and so made this one, from the famous photo of Einstein, to illustrate particularly funny entries or comments. It’s impossible to look at this picture and not feel slightly cheered up, I think.
	The first American presidential election I can remember was 1976, and I was cheering (at the age of nine) for the candidate I had heard of, which was that nice Mr Ford. Since then, of course, I’ve come to realise that my personal politics are much closer to Carter’s, and that indeed Carter was the better president of the two. Nonetheless, despite his manifest flaws, Ford did put in place the CSCE process which was a much greater contributory factor to the fall of communism than any of Reagan’s military posturing. I also hope very much that he will defeat Reagan again, as he did in the 1976 primaries, by simply outliving the old fraud, and I have a ticker on my lj profile counting down the days until that happens.
	I made this icon to illustrate a single livejournal entry on the tangled history of Eastern Rumelia, now an integral part of Bulgaria, but at one stage a potential flashpoint in the geopolitics of Europe. I basically cut down one of the maps of the region that I found on WikiPedia to the point where only the word “Philippopolis” was visible. “Philippopolis” is such a fantastic name, don’t you think? Much more memorable (sorry, ) than the modern name of Пловдив.
	This is one where I not only made the icon myself, I also took the picture it is cut down from, a couple of months ago during the warm summer weather. This is U, my youngest, enjoying bubbles being blown for her in our back garden. I intend to use it to illustrate posts about my family.

Happy Independence Day, Macedonia!

I used to use the dry-cleaners near the office, the Rue de Bailli branch of 5àSec. Until this morning, that is.

I left my best suit in before the summer break for dry-cleaning, and unfortunately misplaced the ticket. I went back a couple of weeks ago, and explained what had happened, and they were most unhelpful. I gave them a description of the suit, and they promised to look again.

I went back again last week, and they said that they had looked but hadn’t found it. I gave them a more precise description of the suit and they promised to have another look, and would let me know by Thursday, ie today.

I went back this morning and again they said they hadn’t found it. I stood there, fortuitously backed up by a colleague who had just turned up to see if they could do some dry-cleaning for him, and eventually they said that if I didn’t believe them I could look on the rack for myself.

I found my suit in a very few seconds, exactly as I had described it, safe and sound.

I’m not going back there again. Neither is my colleague.

The BBC had two completely different and completely incorrect pronunciations of the name of the NATO Secretary-General this morning.

1) “Yap de Hop Sheffer” /jæp də hɔp ʃɛfə/
2) “Djap de Hupe Sheffer” /dʒæp dɘ hʊ:p ʃɛfə/

It is of course “Jaap de Hoop Scheffer” /ja:p də ho:p sχɛfər/ but I expect he’s used to it by now.

I’m very pleased to be addressing this meeting in your parliament building, one of the most beautiful parliament buildings in the world, and one of the very first to be constructed for that purpose.

It’s not a very well known fact that the first ever building specifically constructed to house a parliament was in Dublin, in the mid 18th century. Unfortunmately it was abolished in 1801, and the building is now a bank; today’s Irish legislature meets in a former lecture theatre, in a house built as an aristocratic residence.

The city of my birth also has a rather pretentious parliament building on a hill on its eastern fringes. If you visit, you will see the founder of the statelet standing outside, making rude gestures to his enemies in the south.

Of course, one of the features of your parliament is that you no longer have a Senate, so you have a very beautiful chamber which unfortunately has no content. Oddly enough, the same is true in Northern Ireland, where the rather less attractive Senate chamber (actually about the size of the room we are meeting in, but with only 26 members – they must have fairly rattled around) is also empty since the reforms of the 1970s. In Dublin, interestingly, the old House of Lords chamber is the only room of the old Parliament which still has the original decorations.

Let me now extend the metaphor of beautifully designed superstructures with no actual content to the topic of our meeting today…

4) A Time of Changes, by Robert Silverberg

Two more Nebula winners to read, Rite of Passage by Alexei Panshin and The Terminal Experiment by Robert J Sawyer.

I thought I’d read a fair amount of Silverberg when I was a teenager but this one had definitely passed me by. I thought it was rather good. The narrator, living in a culture so reserved that the words “I” and “me” are obscenities, gets hold of a drug that allows him to telepathically share thoughts with others, and sets out to revolutionise his society. Sounds a bit like a metaphor for the late 1960s, but I thought it was very well done. Would make an interesting paired reading with Dying Inside. Probably deserved to win the Nebula that year; I haven’t read any of the other nominees except The Lathe of Heaven which is not as good as this. It was beaten for the Hugo by To Your Scattered Bodies Go, which I guess is more of a Hugo book than a Nebula book. (As a Zelazny fan, I’d have voted for Jack of Shadows that year myself.)

Well, what a contrast. The Cambridge anthropologist with an Irish accent (who is surely on livejournal, or knows people who are) scored 19 points on her specialised subject – the “Little House” books by Laura Ingalls Wilder. And the Scottish guy who chose the Rolling Stones had one of those mind-gone-blank moments, and scored only 3.

The general knowledge round was a bit more evenly distributed, but the pattern set in the first round was not broken.

And I felt very sorry for the student doctor on University Challenge who confused the ankle and the heel at a crucial moment…