1) Today is the 130th anniversary of G.K. Chesterton’s birth.
2) Immediately after Anthony Eden resigned as British Prime Minister in 1957, he went on a long cruise to New Zealand, and his cabin steward was John Prescott, who has himself been Deputy Prime Minister since 1997.
13) Humans by Robert J Sawyer
The last of this year’s Hugo nominees in the fiction category, and really I’m glad it’s over. I compained about the previous book in the series that the Neanderthal society was unconvincing. Add to that Sawyer’s usual leaden prose and clumsy attempts to generate sentimentality. Why do people vote for this? (Other than Canadians of course.)
12) Decalog 5 – Wonders edited by Paul Leonard and Jim Mortimore
With one dull exception (“Negative Space” by Jeanne Cavelos) this collection of ten sf short stories ranges from competent to very good. I bought it because my friend from college Dominic Green contributed one of the better ones, “King’s Chamber”. I’m not quite sure of the linkage between the stories and the Doctor Who universe – one of the stories features the unofficial companion Bernice Summerfield, heroine of the “Doctor Who without the Doctor” books produced by another old friend from college, Rebecca Levene – and I didn’t really feel there was much of an overall unifying theme, but no real complaints on that score. I can’t remember where I bought it but it was certainly cheap and good value.
I’m taking only the shorter version of this meme, as seen with
1. Who are you?
2. Are we friends?
3. When and how did we meet?
4. Do you have a crush on me?
5. Would you kiss me?
6. Describe me in one word.
7. What was your first impression?
8. Do you still think that way about me now?
9. What reminds you of me?
10. If you could give me anything what would it be?
11. How well do you know me?
12. When’s the last time you saw me?
13. Ever wanted to tell me something but couldn’t?
14. Are you going to put this on your LiveJournal and see what I say about you?
As you know, I’m running this competition to predict the results of next month’s European elections.
Please give me your real name – obvious pseudonyms will be disqualified. However, if you are professionally or politically invoved with the election campaign to the point where it would be embarrassing for you to be publicly associated with your predictions before the election, feel free to check the box opting for an anonymous entry; your identity will then be revealed only after the elections.
Please give a valid email address. I will not publish email addresses at any stage, nor use them for any means other than acknowledging your entry and notifying you of the result. However entries with invalid email addresses will be disqualified. Please don’t waste my time by giving an invalid address.
And yet despite my stating clearly that obvious pseudonyms will be disqualified I’ve had entries from people calling themselves “Joe Bloggs”, “QuizMaster”, “Petronius Predicts” and most bizarrely of all “Death on a Pogostick”.
And even more irritatingly, half a dozen of the more than 100 entries I’ve received had bogus email addresses. I mean, if I say entries with invalid email addresses will be disqualified it’s obvious that I’m going to test them (and I do in fact send an email to acknowledge each entry).
Now, I appreciate that Northern Irish politics is not a joking matter. But the fact is that the people who have submitted public entries include UUP and Sinn Fein activists (and indeed myself), and the people who I’ve accepted as anonymous entrants include DUP and Green supporters.
OK, as I’ve been writing this entry, one of the pseudonyms has sent me an email with his real name. But it’s still aggravating that others think they can get away with it.
I see my old friend David Feige has a piece about fingerprint analysis. Specific to the US, of course, but almost certainly of relevance to the rest of us as well.
Thanks to
The European Parliament is looking for someone to do a five-year contract job, working on European Security and Defence Policy. It’s an entry-level position, so the pay is only a little more than I get now, and I don’t think I’d take it on the terms offered; but if they could see their way to bumping me up a grade or two in view of my experience I would be very interested. I’ve often been very critical of the European Parliament (which I generally really like as an institution) for not knowing what it is talking about on these issues, and this is an opportunity to make a difference from the inside. So I’ll fill in the insanely complicated form and see what happens…
I’ve now had 80 entries for the competition to predict the results of the European election in Northern Ireland. (See prediction form and entries so far.) This is a lot more than I remember from this stage in the 2003 Assembly elections, itself the biggest such competition I have run so far. Well, it’ll keep me busy; as if I didn’t have enough to do!
http://www.livejournal.com/community/danger_army/9262.html
(Very long; found link via
nhw – shows my true dark nature I suppose.
Probably few of you have heard of the
For Jessica all ends well, I suspect; she and Wonkette made up and she gets a rather positive interview in the Washington Post. Best quote:
Sipping a strawberry Nesquik, she expressed amusement that her explicit diaries gripped the imaginations of Hill staffers and Web surfers all week. “It’s amazing to me that people have any interest in such a low-level sex scandal. If I were sleeping with a congressman, maybe, but I’m a nobody and the people I’m writing about are nobodies.”
Quite seriously, she has the sort of approach that means she will probably go far.
She’s setting her sights on the book publishing industry: “They’ll totally hire me if I say I got fired from my job on the Hill because of a sex scandal.”
But it does make me muse a bit on the relations between blogs and public profile. My job is a politically sensitive one, and I have to be careful. Fortunately my private life is less exciting than Jessica Cutler’s.
Picture of me:
(I’m at the far end of the table, on the left.)
Or rather, three final thoughts, since I wasn’t really awake enough while in Azerbaijan to write them down.
First, it’s much the most normal-looking city of the three capitals; apart from the old walled district which is very small, it could be practically anywhere in Central Europe, never mind the Soviet Union.
Second, the one bizarre aspect is the ubiquity of posters with photographs of the late President Heidar Aliyev (Heydər Əliyev to his friends) and presumably stirring slogans in Azeri.
Third, I realised that I have in fact read another book apart from Ali and Nino which is partly set in Baku; it is Kushiel’s Avatar, the last in the trilogy by Jacqueline Carey, where the climax of the quest takes place in a horribly transformed and much expanded but still recognisable version of the Shirvanshah palace in the old city (also the home of Ali’s ancestors in Ali and Nino).
In our universe, the prophet Zoroaster was inspired by the fire leaping from the natural oil and gas deposits around Baku where he grew up. There aren’t a lot of his followers left in the vicinity of Baku now, but Jacqueline Carey does a good number on the legend.
Via
| NOTE: z |
| No smoking around nhw. Thankyou for your co-operation. |
10) Too Long a Sacrifice, by Mildred Downey Broxon and 11) Sacrifice of Fools, by Ian McDonald
These are, respectively, the only fantasy and science fiction novels I’m aware of of which large chunks are set in Belfast, the city of my birth. I’ve been rereading them in preparation for writing an article for
Well, we got through the caviar with the help of a neighbour, J (whose wife K and the kids are spending the weekend watching beavers at the German border) and also some Georgian vodka. After all, it doesn’t keep. Then I cooked and ate dinner, and crashed for four hours. Woke up again about midnight, and will now go back to bed to try and reset my body clock to Belgian time.
Just up on infinity plus: my review of The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson.
9) The Confusion, by Neal Stephenson
A short review for a very long book (whose very size evoked consternation from my colleagues in the South Caucasus). If you liked Cryptonomicon and Quicksilver, and I did, you’ll like this as well. Qualifies as sf only on the Damon Knight principle. Set in Europe between 1689 and 1704 with most of it concentrated towards the first three years of that period. I thought actually better than Quicksilver, with more imaginative use of settings including Mediterranean, India, and Spanish America. Good stuff.
8) Irresistible Forces, edited by Catherine Asaro
I bought this because it contains the latest installment of Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan saga, the short story “Winterfair Gifts”, about Miles Vorkosigan’s wedding, so set a few months before the most recent novel of the series, Diplomatic Immunity. The book is worth it for this story alone; I’ve seen several reviews along the lines of “I haven’t read anything else by Bujold but this was very good”. Even if you have read everything else by Bujold, as I have, the story is very good.
It’s just as well, because most of the other stories are crap. This is an attempt at a cross-genre anthology linking sf and romance, and I think I’ll stay off the romance for now. “Skin Deep”, by Deb Stover, was so dire, and the plot resolution signalled so very very far in advance, that I couldn’t finish it. The only other one I felt was worthwhile was “The Trouble with Heroes” by Jo Beverly; perhaps not coincidentally, the story with the least “romance” in it. I’ll look out for Beverly’s work in future.
7) Light, by M John Harrison
I bought this some time back because it was very well reviewed by a number of people whose opinions I respect; it was on the shortlist for last year's BSFA and Clarke awards, which to me is usually a good sign, and won the James Tiptree Jr award for "gender-bending" science fiction. I didn't like it. I thought the sex was sordid, the characters unpleasant, and the plot barely comprehensible. Maybe I was just too tired from my travels, but if this is Harrison's best work I don't think I need to try again.
6) Blind Lake by Robert Charles Wilson
I managed to finish three books on my recent trip and will probably finish a fourth on the last of my six flights at lunchtime today, so will be posting a few more book updates over the weekend. Blind Lake is the penultimate of the Hugo nominees that I have read – and that now includes all the short fiction, which I managed to print out and take with me. I’ll do a page for my website with reviews of them all once I can bring myself to finish Humans.
I liked almost all of Blind Lake. It’s about a community of research scientists in the very near future who have been able (for reasons they don’t fully understand) to observe remotely a community of aliens on a planet far far away. Their research facility is suddenly isolated from the outside world, with no communication possible, and the human relationships between the researchers churn out of control. I thought it was much more successful in this regard than Chronoliths, by the same author, nominated last year. However, as with Chronoliths, I felt the ending was a bit weak and left too little explained. Kubrick barely gets away with it in 2001: A Space Odyssey and I’ve never read a book that managed the trick of leaving you with the sensawunda without explaining What Was really Going On.
I got up at 0530, and it’s now 1000; but of course it’s 1000 in Prague, and 1300 in Tbilisi where I actually spent last night, so I’ve been awake for hours (though managed to nod off a bit on the first plane).
Well, the trip seems to have been a success; I will have to buy myself another copy of Ali and Nino since I gave the one I had to my boss. I may write up more details on what we were actually doing other than sightseeing, but it will be in a locked post if I ever get around to it; suffice to say that we met all three presidents, all three foreign ministers, two out of three prime ministers, and numerous other officials, activists, and diplomats, and came away understanding a lot more than I had before. Also I am now the owner of a fine carpet from the village of Shahnazarli, some Caspian Sea caviar, and a bottle of Georgian red wine and another of the lethal chacha. And, all being well, I’ll be home in four hours.
And my next planned trip, to the Balkans, has been postponed from mid-June to early July, which is a relief.
Welcome to lj,
This livejournal is one year old this week. It’s rather grown on me, especially once I decided to keep it also as a booklog back in November. So far the only person I’ve met from reading their livejournal is
Right, must go for Azeri meetings now.
The Stalin birthplace museum is recommended by many including Young Fogey. We didn’t quite manage that, as it’s a two-hour drive from Tbilisi, but we did manage the old capital of Georgia at Mtskheta.
Last night we were all tired, so much so that one of my colleagues visibly fell asleep over dinner. On top of that we all had to get up at 0500 to catch the 0730 flight from Tbilisi to Baku, so even worse today.
Azerbaijan is my 41st country in my life (my boss mutters that he is roughly a hundred countries ahead of me; I shall have to scramble to catch up). Baku is very windy. The old city is really rather attractive. We walked around quoting bits of Ali and Nino at each other. I bought a carpet from the Quba region. Getting it home is going to be interesting…
Tomorrow evening fly back to Tbilisi for a night and then home the next morning. The trip is great fun but I can’t wait to be back with wife and children again.
Still in Tbilisi (then flying to Baku first thing tomorrow morning).
I’d hoped that we would be on a helicopter trip up to the border with Chechnya this morning. Unfortunately the weather apparently doesn’t allow (though it’s OK down here). But it turned out that the people who own the helicopter are based in a dacha (summer house in the countryside) that used to belong to Khrushchev when he was leader of the Soviet Union. Ex-President Shevardnadze’s suitably palatial residence is next door. We stood on the balcony, sipping our coffee, speculating about who might have stood there before us, and what decisions they might have made.
Yes, Young Fogey, Yerevan is still very pink. Interesting contrast with Tbilisi; here, the hey-day of civic construction and national culture was obviously over a century ago. Yerevan is full of new money from abroad, and not a lot else. The lack of traffic on the main road to the outside world from Armenia is telling.
Thanks for the restaurant tip,