about Shakespeare’s views on alchemy.

(And the other participant is not , but someone else of the same name.)

Kosovo draft paper done! Well, not actually published, which will probably take another week. Now for Transdniestria. And then Azerbaijan, and the EU’s conflict prevention mechanisms.

http://www.dr-joe.net/quiz.html

Have been sitting here insomniacally for the last two hours musing about the fuss over Kos and Kathryn Cramer’s comments on the Fallujah killings of last week. I think Cramer comes out better; she posted some irresponsible speculations, and then withdrew them and apologised for it. In my line of work we come across the sort of links that she thought she had found all the time; sometimes the evidence we have is not sufficient to publish, although we may feel (or have it on good, non-attributable authority) that we’ve got it right. Putting an account of the entire research process on-line, including accounts of false leads or insufficiently supported leads, would be, er, foolish, as she has now discovered.

Having said that, the threats of physical violence she has been getting are disgusting, and it’s absolutely weird that the nutcases who are harassing her are now objecting to the fact that she retracted and withdrew her original comments.

Kos is a somewhat different matter. He has his own sincerely held views on Fallujah, based on his own personal experiences, which make uncomfortable reading even for people who generally agree with him. The specific direct action that his right-wing opponents succeeded in doing was to persuade several of his advertisers to pull their sponsorship of his site. Without getting into the rights and wrongs of it, that sort of tactic (as opposed to the death threats which he has also received) is surely fair enough. As a student activist I supported the boycott of Barclays for their involvement in South Africa, and of Nestle because of their campaigns against breast-feeding (the latter quite a sacrifice because I live on Nescafé). If you dish it out you have to be prepared to take it, and it seems that Kos is indeed prepared to take the consequences of publishing unpopular views. That too is fair enough; I disagree with what he said, but I think it would be a poorer world if he was prevented from saying it.

Some years ago – eight, to be precise – a friend of mine was threatened by the listowner of a political discussion list, most of whose subscribers had a different point of view to ours; he had sent her a private (if somewhat rude) email which she then posted to the list, with the comment “Do with him as you will”. He and I signed up to her list ourselves, and over the next weekend we both responded to every post, putting our point of view. This of course generated a lot of traffic from people who disagreed with us and weren’t used to an argument. And even more from the subscribers who came in on the Monday morning to find that they had 300 messages in their inboxes (those were more innocent days, when this was unusual). We were basically kicked off the list in the end. Legitimately enough, in fairness, though it did expose the pretensions of the list owner (and many of the subscribers) to openness and tolerance as the hypocrisy they were.

What troubles me about American political discourse, though, is the sheer gulf between the two sides and the intransigent nastiness of the debate. Death threats and threats of violence appear to be standard fare from some parts of the right. I don’t notice the same sort of tactic being used by lefties against right-wing commentators; maybe I’m not looking hard enough? And I also don’t notice more moderate right-wing commentators feeling under the same pressure to distance themselves from their violent political allies as the left have been to distance themselves from Kos, who has not actually directly threatened anybody.

Our work email is down, but I shall go in now and try to finish the infamous Kosovo paper.

Interviewed here. Warning: graphic details.

“I was more of a communist. I believed in [Ceausescu’s] speeches, in his texts, in his congresses. I was his product. In a way, I was driven by a proletarian wrath. If I’m not wrong, the entire trial had this character. We were angry at the system and not at the man Ceausescu. Anyway, I wouldn’t do this [again], and I wouldn’t wish such an experience on anyone. To take someone’s life violates biblical teachings. We’ve already been booed, cursed for what we did on the holy day of Christmas. Every Christmas, you can be sure that we’re not doing OK. Not even on 26 January. [Ceausescu’s birthday]. I wouldn’t do it again.”

As “statistically established” by Peter Sykes. As usual, have bolded the ones I’ve read (79 of 100) and linked to reviews if I’ve written one, with brief comment if I haven’t written a review elsewhere:

1 Frank Herbert, Dune 1965
2 Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game [S1] 1985
3 Isaac Asimov, Foundation 1951 – grand historical sweep
4 William Gibson, Neuromancer 1984
5 Ursula K Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness 1969
6 Robert A Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land 1961 – start of the swinging sixties
7 Larry Niven, Ringworld 1970
8 George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four 1949 – dystopian classic
9 Robert A Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress 1966 – more revolution
10 Dan Simmons, Hyperion 1989 – great stuff, Chaucer sort of retold
11 Frederik Pohl, Gateway 1977
12 Walter M Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz 1959 – maybe the greatest sf and religion novel
13 Joe Haldeman, The Forever War 1974
14 Arthur C Clarke, Childhood’s End 1954 – the next step in human evolution
15 Ursula K Le Guin, The Dispossessed 1974
16 David Brin, Startide Rising  1983
17 Alfred Bester, The Demolished Man 1953
18 Douglas Adams, The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy 1979 – still hilarious despite my reservations about his other work
19 Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles 1950 – wonderful landscape of another planet
20 Gene Wolfe, The Shadow of the Torturer 1980 – dense and eerie
21 Ben Bova, [ed] The Best of the Nebulas 1989
22 Arthur C Clarke, Rendezvous With Rama 1973
23 Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination 1956 – bizarre but gripping
24 John Brunner, Stand on Zanzibar 1969 – didn’t like this
25 Theodore Sturgeon, More Than Human 1953 – also next step in human evolution
26 Isaac Asimov, I, Robot 1950 – I’ve grown out of this one, I’m afraid
27 Roger Zelazny, Lord of Light 1967 – Zelazny’s best single work
28 Robert A Heinlein, Starship Troopers 1959 – not quite as fascist as it is reputed to be
29 Philip K Dick, The Man in the High Castle 1962 – alternate history without the whimsy
30 Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 1954 – another chilling dystopia
31 Orson Scott Card, Speaker for the Dead 1986
32 Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon 1966
33 H G Wells, The Time Machine 1895 – political fantasy disguised as time travel
34 Harlan Ellison, [ed] Dangerous Visions 1967 – great anthology
35 Niven & Pournelle, The Mote in God’s Eye 1975 – best from this collaboration, though over-rated here
36 Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars 1992 – first of grand political series where the planet is the story
37 Clifford Simak, Way Station 1963
38 H G Wells, The War of the Worlds 1898 – first great invasion-of-earth story
39 David Brin, The Uplift War 1987 – great world-setting in this series, though sadly later volumes have bloated rather than illuminated
40 Gregory Benford, Timescape 1980 – environmental sf disguised as time travel (paradox never quite resolved)
41 Vernor Vinge, A Fire Upon the Deep 1991 – great stuff, esp the aliens
42 Philip K Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? 1968 – the basis of Blade Runner but a great book on its own merits
43 Isaac Asimov, The Gods Themselves 1972
44 Connie Willis, Doomsday Book 1992
45 Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash 1992 – fantastic cyberpunk, still Stephenson’s best
46 Philip Jose Farmer, To Your Scattered Bodies Go 1971 – first and best of the Riverworld series
47 Aldous Huxley, Brave New World 1932 – another classic of an over-technologised and despiritualised future
48 Arthur C Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey 1968 – great book though greater film
49 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein 1818 – oddly, a really bad book, but carried along by the central idea
50 C J Cherryh, Downbelow Station 1981
51 Hal Clement, Mission of Gravity 1953 – superb extreme planetary environment
52 Gardner Dozois, [ed] The Year’s Best Science Fiction 1984 – unbolded as I’ve only got the last half dozen or so of this excellent series, and certainly haven’t read the very first
53 Robert Silverberg, Dying Inside 1972 – telepath loses his powers; heavy metaphors
54 John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids 1951 – everyone goes blind and we are attacked by walking poisonous plants – superb
55 Greg Bear, Blood Music 1985 (earlier version)
56 Isaac Asimov, The Caves of Steel 1954 – desperate attempt to mix detective and sf genres
57 Anthony A Burgess, Clockwork Orange 1962
58 James Blish, A Case of Conscience 1958 – the other great sf and religion novel
59 Pohl & Kornbluth, The Space Merchants 1953
60 Clifford Simak, City 1952
61 Tim Powers, The Anubis Gates 1983 – great timetravel novel
62 George R Stewart, Earth Abides 1949 – death of humanity
63 Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five 1969 – time-twisted rather than time-travelling
64 Jules Verne, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea 1870 – supertechnology (ie submarine) in private hands
65 Edgar Rice Burroughs, A Princess of Mars 1912
66 Lois McMaster Bujold, Barrayar 1991 – the most celebrated of her Vorkosigan series but I prefer some of the later ones
67 Isaac Asimov, (et al) [eds] Hugo Winners/New Hugo Winners 1962 etc – classic collections
68 Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age 1995 – Stephenson’s other great book, before cryptography completely went to his head
69 Arthur C Clarke, The City and the Stars 1956 – superb far future stuff
70 Philip K Dick, The Three Stigmata Of Palmer Eldritch 1964 – typically bizarre

71 Joan D Vinge, The Snow Queen 1980
72 Philip K Dick, Ubik 1969 – bizarre and sinister
73 Brian Aldiss, Helliconia Spring 1982 – first and best of the trilogy
74 James Blish, Earthman, Come Home 1955 – at least I think I’ve only read the first in this series, but it was a long time ago
75 Poul Anderson, Tau Zero 1970
76 E E ‘Doc’ Smith, Grey Lensman 1951
77 Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan 1959 – funnier than Slaughterhouse Five, perhaps better
78 Frederik Pohl, Man Plus 1976 – man gets to Mars but at what sacrifice?
79 Robert A Heinlein, The Door Into Summer 1956
80 Harlan Ellison, [ed] Again, Dangerous Visions 1972 – second volume of classic collection
81 Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men 1930
82 Jules Verne, Journey to the Center of the Earth 1864 – actually only a few miles down, typical rollicking fun
83 Thomas M Disch, Camp Concentration 1968
84 C J Cherryh, Cyteen: The Betrayal 1988
85 Michael Bishop, No Enemy But Time 1982
86 Arthur C Clarke, The Fountains of Paradise 1979

87 Joanna Russ, The Female Man 1975
88 Robert A Heinlein, Double Star 1956
89 Vonda N McIntyre, Dreamsnake 1978
90 Robert A Heinlein, Time Enough For Love 1973 – one of the silly ones, with brain transplants
91 Robert A Heinlein, The Puppet Masters 1951 – great alien invasion story with nudity
92 Robert A Heinlein, The Past Through Tomorrow 1967 – superb future history even if dodgy politics
93 Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale 1985 – male-dominated dystopia
94 Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle 1963 – his best book, a Cold War parable
95 Robert Silverberg, [ed] Science Fiction Hall of Fame 1 1970 – stories all look familiar but they’ve all been collected many times
96 John Varley, Titan 1979 – not really so great
97 Samuel R Delany, Babel-17 1966
98 Edgar Pangborn, A Mirror for Observers 1954
99 David Brin, The Postman 1985 – not quite as bad as the film
100 Robert A Heinlein, Have Space-Suit – Will Travel 1958 – one of his best juvenile novels

Interesting to see how many Heinlein novels come up here. I was struck that Ken MacLeod, who should know, suggests in his essay in the Cambridge Science Fiction Companion that all political sf should be considered as a response to Heinlein. He has a point.

[Later edit: since making this post, I have read:
The Demolished Man
Way Station
Downbelow Station
The Door Into Summer
Cyteen]

1: Grab the book nearest to you, turn to page 18, find line 4. Write down what it says:
219. Conductor, please tell me where I must get off. Кондуктор, пожалуйсте скажете, где мне сойти.

2: Stretch your left arm out as far as you can. What do you touch first?:
brick wall – at elbow distance.

3: What is the last thing you watched on TV?:
Video of The Office.

4: WITHOUT LOOKING, guess what the time is:
2310.

5: Now look at the clock, what is the actual time?:
2304

6: With the exception of the computer, what can you hear?:
Kettle boiling.

7: When did you last step outside? What were you doing?:
Went to work this afternoon (on Sunday, ugh).

8: before you came to this website, what did you look at?:
More Livejournal, including one where I found this meme.

9: what are you wearing?:
Favourite though somewhat smelly pullover. Favourite black jeans.

10: Did you dream last night?:
Can’t remember.

11: George Bush: is he a power-crazy nut case or someone who is finally doing something that has needed to be done for years?
I’m not impressed. (Thanks to politics content this post is friends-only.)

12: Imagine your first child is a girl, what do you call her?:
She is; we called her Bridget.

13: Imagine your first child is a boy, what do you call him?:
Too late now!

14: Would you ever consider living abroad?:
I do!

15: When did you last laugh?
At the video of The Office.

16: What is on the walls of the room you are in?
Bricks to my left, white wallpaper on the other walls; many bookshelves, alos three framed maps and an aerial photograph.

17: Seen anything weird lately?
Not sure. I try to keep an open mind. The weirdest thing I’ve heard recently is about a certain country’s foreign minister actually being on the payroll of a different country’s foreign ministry; I think that’s taking co-ordination rather far.

18: What do you think of this quiz?
Mercifully brief and easy.

19: What is the last film you saw?
RotK, with Anne.

20: If you became a multi-millionaire overnight, what would you buy first?
Books.

21: Tell us something about you that we don’t know.
My favourite herbal tea is vervain. I’m going to make some now.

22: If you could change one thing about the world, regardless of guilt or politics, what would you do?
Give people enough to eat.

23: Do you like to dance?
I don’t mind. I’ll do it every now and then but I don’t seek out opportunities to dance.

2) The Salmon of Doubt: Hitch-hiking the Galaxy One Last Time, by Douglas Adams (edited by Peter Guzzardi)

I bought this yesterday, along with F’s Dr Seuss book, and zoomed through it this morning. It’s a quick read, and though marketed as fiction in fact two-thirds of it consists of essays, shorter pieces and even sleeve notes for a recording of the Brandenburg Concertos, all scavenged off Adams’ various hard disks after his unexpected death in May 2001.

And it’s all good stuff, with perhaps the exception of a long and rambling speech made in Cambridge in 1998. The first chapters of Adams’ unfinished novel take up the last few dozen pages, and point to the usual mix of transcendental enigmas and sharp one-liners that substituted for content in his later books.

But the sad fact is that none of the fiction Adams wrote after 1980 was really much good. Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency at first looks like an up-tick on the graph, but it was basically cannibalised out of two Doctor Who stories he wrote in the late 1970s. One of the later inferior novels ends with the sentence: “There was a point to this story, but it has temporarily escaped the chronicler’s mind” – and that could almost stand for his whole post-1981 fictional oeuvre.

He would have done better to expend energy on his non-fiction writing – which as this volume demonstrates was excellent – and on evangelising for the ecological and technological causes – working to preserve beautiful endangered species such as the ring-tailed lemur and the Apple Macintosh – which he made his own. Then, once he no longer felt a need to prove himself as equal to the task of producing another Hitch-Hiker’s Guide, he would probably have done so to everyone’s surprise, not least his own. But, alas, we shall never know.

Took a day off from worrying about the Kosovo paper – haven’t even checked my work email since leaving the office 24 hours ago – and brought F in to the local English language bookshop where they were having a Seuss celebration. As I should have anticipated, he was actually rather put out by the fact that there were people reading from the books, face-painting going on, etc rather than his usual routine which is to browse through the Dr Seuss rack and choose another to add to his collection. However we were able to do that as well, and he even allowed me to bring home a souvenir hat (a Cat in the Hat hat, in fact) as long as he didn’t have to look at it let alone wear it. Anne, like me, thinks the hat is great. F will no doubt come around.

U’s walking has drastically improved since she took her first steps

1) What If? 2: Eminent Historians Imagine What Might Have Been, ed. Robert Cowley

A competent collection of essays on counterfactual history. The best is the one proposing the death of Charles I and his children in an outbreak of plague in 1641; the British throne would then have passed to his cousin Elizabeth, better known to history as the Winter Queen, who would have been more politically astute (Charles I tends to get a poor write-up) and would have managed the late 17th century British Isles much better though to the impoverishment of political thought. The author left out the important Irish dimension though. Another promising one about Napoleon’s plans for North America didn’t really chase the scenario as much as I wanted it to. I’ve also never been very convinced by the “Harold wins in 1066” scenario, given how Normanised 11th-century England already was. And the last essay, about the importance of the potato, really missed the point of the whole book by not putting forward an alternative path of history.

proposes trying to establish a slightly different focus to the Where Were You When… meme. Her suggestions are:

…when the Israelis “did” the refugee camps at Shatila, Lebanon? [18 Sept 1982] – I was at school
…when US forces shot down an Iranian passenger plane? [3 July 1988] – I was on holiday, somewhere in central Europe
…when Dutch troops at Srebrenica were overrun? [6-18 July 1995] – I was on holiday in Cornwall with my wife’s family
…when the Moscow theater was taken over by Chechyen terrorists? [23-26 October 2002] – I was working in Brussels

But actually apart from Srebrenica those don’t really fill in the blank in the meme between 1991 and 1997. (Also I have to confess I don’t really remember the Iranian plane being shot down; I think I was in Switzerland or something.) I’d want to find a few more memorable events for the mid-90s, and even Srebrenica, which was so long and drawn out, and where the full scale didn’t become so obvious until days later, doesn’t have the same impact as the other one-off and unexpected events on the list.

I’ve looked at a couple of time-lines from that period, and the only other three really memorable and unexpected events where I can immediately remember where I was in the same way were the announcement that Charles and Di were splitting up on 9 December 1992 (I was warding a student resident tower block in Belfast), the Oklahoma bombing on 19 April 1995 (I was buying a sandwich in Chapel Hill, North Carolina) and the Canary Wharf bomb on 10 Feb 1996 (I was at home in Belfast settling down to a weekend on my own as Anne was away). The IRA and Loyalist ceasefires, announced on 31 August and 13 October 1994, also come close. But I wonder if the last three of these would be as significant to someone who didn’t share my background?

I see my friend Jadranko Prlic has been indicted for war crimes and crimes against humanity. This came as little surprise to anyone who knew what he was up to in Mostar during the war. I only got to know him more recently when he was foreign minister of Bosnia-Herzegovina, and he had been trying reasonably hard to work himself into a different political space, by distancing himself from his former ultra-nationalist party and trying to inject an intellectual component into Bosnian foreign policy. But the past always catches up with you in the end…

Molvania website at http://www.molvania.com/

My review

Guardian review

Reuters (via Yahoo)

Foodies searching for the ultimate ‘upmarket’ place to eat in Lutenblag might care to visit ther famous Revolving Restaurant (Gastrodizzi) where diners can sample fine food whilst enjoying a panoramic view of the city. Due to an intermittent power supply the restaurant itself does tend to revolve rather slowly (a full rotation can take up to six months), but the stunning vistas from three floors up make the wait truly worthwhile.

The Vzintga Gorge was cut between precipitous cliffs by the powerful River Vzintga, which flows down numerous pools and waterfalls. There is a marked trail to the top of the gorge where the views are quite outstanding. Sadly, the spectaular cable-car that once carried visitors across the gorge no longer operates, but you can still see the old pylons and engine-house as well as view a memorial plaque dedicated to the service’s last 20 passengers.

The unofficial capital of the Great Central Valley region, Jzerbo may not look all that inviting to the first-time visitor, with its jumble of grim Soviet-era housing and concentration of heavy industry. But thanks to frequent, heavy smog, many of these visual eye-sores remain hidden from the average visitor.

And listen to the Molvanian idol winner

One of my colleagues tells me:

I have to share with you the latest sign that the world is being made safer. If you explore purchase of a Dell computer on-line from Dell UK, you are advised that as Dell is a U.S. registered company, the prospective buyer must answer the following question: “Will this computer be used in the manufacture of weapons of mass destruction (WMD)?”

Well, I for one am glad that they are taking such stringent security precautions! I dread to think how many Dell computers might have been sold to terrorists before they started asking that question!

A few months back I was experimenting with different browsers to look
at an lj entry using four different alphabets. I came to the conclusion
that Explorer didn’t really repect similarities of font between Latin
and Cyrillic, Opera did but has difficulty aligning strange letters
correctly, and Netscape gave the best presentation but was far too slow
and clunky.

Now I have a new love, which is Mozilla.
Look! Special Latin alphabet characters! Ë ë Ç ç Ğ ğ ı İ Ö ö Ş ş Ü ü Č Ć č ć Đ đ Š š Ž ž and trickiest of all ə and ə.
Look! Armenian! Հայաստան = “Hayastan”, Armenia in Armenian
Look! Cyrillic! “Албанцы впервые открыто нападают на миротворцев, – говорит Николас
Уайт. – В глазах западных держав именно
они являются агрессорами.”
Look! Georgian! კ, ქ and ყ are all written as K or k in our reports. ჩ and ჭ are both written Ch or ch. პ and ფ are both written as P or p. თ and ტ are both written as T or t. ც and წ are both written Ts or ts. ძ is written Dz or dz. ღ is written Gh or gh. შ is written Sh or sh. ჟ is written Zh or zh. ხ is written Kh or kh. ჯ is written J or j.

By far the best. I’m using Mozilla from now on.

PS: Those of you not using Mozilla may have difficulty seeing what I mean. But go download it now!!!

This one is a bit less American in orientation than many of these tend to be (as you can tell from the way the dates are written), and also a lot of them are concentrated in what was a dramatic period of my own life.

1. When John F. Kennedy was shot (22/11/1963)
Not born.

2. When Mt. St. Helens blew (18/5/1980)
Living in the Netherlands for a year. One of my parents’ colleagues was from Washington State so it became a bit more personal.

3. When the space shuttle Challenger exploded (28/1/1986)
I’d just come back from a day’s “work” at the Armagh Observatory to the house I was lodging at. The daughter of the house turned from the television to me as I came into the front room and said, “Have you seen this???!!!”

4. The Hillsborough disaster. (15/4/1989)
Easter vac of my third year in Cambridge; I was in Dublin at the time.

5. When the Berlin Wall fell (7/11/1989)
The day I split up with my last girlfriend (that is, before the one I married). We were too intensely concerned with splitting up to listen to the news; I kipped on her floor in Greenwich, and didn’t manage to look at a paper until I was on a train back to Cambridge.

6. When Nelson Mandela was released from gaol. (11/2/1990)
Having dinner with the student representatives of Hughes Hall, a small postgraduate Cambridge college, in my capacity as deputy president of the overall Cambridge students union. The guy who was supposed to host the dinner was a political activist from Grenada in the Caribbean (doing a one-year masters of some kind; now a political consultant in Trinidad) and made only a brief appearance, being glued to his TV.

7. When Thatcher resigned (22/11/1990)
The day of the first in a series of annual lectures in memory of my father, who had died six months previously. The lecture that afternoon was given by Garret Fitzgerald, who told a couple of stories about funny conversations with her mostly at European summits. I actually heard the news over coffee that morning with an elderly cousin, whose daughter phoned up from London to tell her.

8. When the Gulf War began (16/1/1991)
Still in Cambridge, doing my M Phil, in unwedded bliss with Anne, but we deliberately didn’t buy the newspapers for those two weeks because it was just too depressing.

9. When Princess Di was killed (31/8/1997)
In Bosnia. (hey, we’ve completely leapt over the time I spent back in Belfast in between.) I was sleeping badly as usual and as usual tried listening to the BBC World Service to lull me back to sleep. That morning it didn’t work. We had a staff party with our Bosnian staff later in the day, fun but slightly surreal. Anne, staying in her parents’ house on her own apart from the baby, didn’t hear until the Guardian arrived the next morning.

10. When Omagh was bombed (15/8/1998)
In Croatia; again, we didn’t hear until the next morning via BBC World Service. Pretty awful. In my Alliance Party days we used to go to Omagh at least once a year for party council meetings, so it’s a town I know my way around.

11. When Bush was first announced President (7/11/2000)
We were now living in Belgium. I had been determined to stay up until the result came through, but in fact it was curiously anticlimactic. Then weeks of watching Gore’s attempts to get the fair result gradually fade under pressure. It was then that I started reading Slate regularly.

12. When terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center (11/9/2001)
In a somewhat surreal meeting with the deputy head of mission of Yugoslavia to the EU. When the meeting started the second plane had just hit; by the time it ended both towers were down, and cars were already choking the streets out of Brussels. In those days I went home by train, fortunately. We’d moved house to where we now live three weeks before, and hadn’t yet plugged in the television; this motivated me to do so.

13. When the Queen Mother died (30/3/2002)
Easter Saturday, here in Belgium with the family, just about to change jobs. The event didn’t hit me particularly hard though there were a couple of memorable aftershocks. One of them I mentioned in my post about Queen Juliana a few days ago; I happened to be at a meeting the following week in the Foreign Office when the Queen Mother’s cortege went past down Whitehall, and one of the younger diplomats present sighed and said, “There’ll only be one more like this.” The other was at a reception in Brussels a few months later, thrown for some reason by the Stationery Office (formerly Her Majesty’s Stationery Office) where the Chief Executive proudly boasted to me that they had managed to get the official death notice printed and on sale in the (specially opened) official Stationery Office shops in London, Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast by 10 o’clock the following morning, even though it was Easter Sunday!

14. When Columbia disintegrated during re-entry over Texas. (1/2/2003)
Had just struggled home, through heavy snowfall, from a Soros/Ahtisaari conference on the EU policies in the Balkans. Anne’s brother was staying too. U was not quite six weeks old. As he often does, Ken MacLeod got it right:

Husband, McCool, Anderson, Brown, Chawla, Clark, Ramon.
Komarov, Grissom, White, Chaffee, Dobrovolsky, Volkov, Patsayev, Resnick, Scobee, Smith, McNair, McAuliffe, Jarvis, Onizuka.
These names will be written under other skies.

Just came across ‘s superb look at the Fish symbol. Did you really do it as long ago as 1995, Min?

[edit: disclaims all responsibility. Oh well.]

Just discovered that is one of my colleagues at work. Привет, Игорь!

Mouth ulcers. Probably brought on by combined stress of the weekend meeting and drinking unfamiliar brands of coffee. I find the best thing is to rinse my mouth out with tea tree oil. Must try and get hold of some.

Highlights from Board meeting:

Mark Eyskens re Benelux, and my reply that I felt uneasy talking about the Benelux in front of him and Wim Kok.

Wes Clark rowing behind my analysis that the troop reduction int he Balkans was driven by the Pentagon not by Brussels.

Gareth liked my line about the Contact Group versus the Great Powers.

Highlights from yesterday:

Farcical inability of UUP and SDLP to meet with me.

Trying to persuade Stephen to allow Euro-candidate to join whatever group necessary.

Peter Robinson’s prediction on SDLP meltdown (courtesy of Tom Kelly)

Reading Two Books at Once? Combine Them.

For example:

Of Stupid White Mice and Men searing indictment of the vast albino mouse conspiracy that controls America.

Three Musketeers in a Boat Genteel sail upriver with armed Frenchmen.

Amongst the Women’s Room Hero of the Irish struggle for liberation gets mixed up in a different kind of struggle for liberation altogether.

Little House of the Spirits Laura and her family build their own cabin and learn life lessons against a backdrop of revolution in Chile. There are psychic chickens.

King Henry the Fourth Protocol Henry snuffs out rebels, commies.

Men are from Red Mars, Women are from Blue Mars Kim Stanley Robinson’s epic about terraforming the relationship between the sexes.

At Swim Two Birdsong Sweeney climbs trees to escape trenchfoot and the horrors of war.

Tales of the Two Cities the gay scene in 18th century London and Paris.

Cold Comfort Animal Farm modern city girl tries to educate her primitive country relatives out of their communist ways.

The Player of Patriot Games Set in a anarchist/right-wing future where a government agent infiltrates a mysterious game organised by the IRA

Close Encounters Of The Third Policeman – Man is beset by strange visions of mountains and lights in the sky. Discovers it is all, in fact, about a bicycle.

Snow Crashing on Cedars Hacker uses futuristic technology to solve murder in Pacific Northwest. Jake Gyllenhaal to play lead in film version.

Underworlds in Collision A young boy finds a baseball, throws it into the air. It breaks the pull of gravity and becomes Venus. 900 pages of mythology back it up.

OK, so of the four main parties here:

• one set me up for a meeting with their deputy leader which was very entertaining and enlightening
• one set me up for a meeting with their director of elections, who pulled out at the last moment but sent a well-briefed substitute
• one set me up for a meeting with their deputy press officer, who forgot to show up and then promised to put me in touch with their campaign manager for the June election, once they’d decided who it would be
• one completely failed to get their act together to set up any kind of meeting with me despite repeated phone calls

…and interestingly but not surprisingly there is a very high level of correlation between the relative levels of efficiency as revealed in the above list and their relative placings in the popular vote in last November’s election!

(Since I’m staying with the fifth party it can’t be fairly compared.)

I’m sitting at a borrowed computer in the parliament buildings in Stormont, looking down the avenue past the sttue of Edward Carson making rude gestures to the south, in the midst of meeting politicians here to talk about my elections website.

Very productive meeting with a well-known Northern Ireland politician, who is, er, rather far from my own political position. But he gave me some excellent feedback: a) do a better front page with better indexing; and he’s quite right; and b) more analysis of transfers and of shifts between elections; and he’s also quite right. He also discouraged me from thinking about putting in a biographical directory of candidates; which was something I had been considering, but with some concern on my part as to whether or not the effort would be appreciated by potential consumers, such as an elected representative for East Belfast. We also discussed various other issues which will not be recorded here.

Off for more meetings now.

http://www.angelfire.com/extreme4/kiddofspeed/

It’s an extraordinary story, with photographs that will linger for a long time. And yet, when I think of the town of Kozarac (memorably described by Carl Bildt – scroll halfway down) whose ruins I used to know well in Bosnia, devastated by human malice, it’s comforting in a way that this all happened by accident. Of course the downside is that these days Kozarac has been largely rebuilt, mosques and all; it will be a long time before that can happen in Chernobyl.

It seems that president Saakashvili’s coalition has won all 150 seats that were up for grabs in yesterday’s election. That’s pretty impressive in a proportional system. (OK, so the threshold was a rather high 7%, but even so…)

14) The Master by TH White

A while back Ansible quoted an unintentionally humorous passage from this novel:

“Look,” said the practical Judy. “Do you approve of being spanked?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Well, then.”
“Well, then what?”
“If you can’t make people be good with a hair brush, you can’t with a vibrator, can you?”
“I don’t think it is the same.”
“It is the same,” said Judy.

But in fact the vibrators in question are the sinister machines with which the 157-year-old Master plans to Take Over The World from his island hide-out on Rockall in the North Atlantic. Judy and her brother Nicky, twins who, quite by coincidence, are the children of a duke and whose uncle is an American senator, happen to stumble across the Master’s secret plans; what can they do to foil his fiendish plan?

And yet that’s not fair to this remarkable book either. The Master’s entourage are beautifully sketched, and each of them has their own moral dilemma of how to prevent – or take over – the master plan. And most of the time we get the story from the children’s point of view (indeed the above dialogue is about as close as they get to a philosophical discussion); with one memorably sympathetic though brief chapter told from the point of view of their pet dog.

White of course is much better known for The Sword in the Stone and its expansion The Once and Future King, but this is a nice example of his skills.

Congrats to and on organising this afternoon’s event. Good to see and again, and also to meet , amd . I think this makes me the first person who was there to blog the event!

Off for dinner with Dept of Foreign Affairs now.

I’m with Kip Manley. (Thanks to William for the link.)

13) Kushiel’s Avatar, by Jacqueline Carey

The third and last in the hugely entertaining trilogy by Jacqueline Carey, after her earlier Kushiel’s Dart and Kushiel’s Chosen, set in a medieval world strangely different from ours, but not so different as to be unrecognizable. Carey winds together familiar and completely invented legends for a richly imagined cultural background, and a tale of gripping political intrigue. Here her heroine, Phèdre nò Delaunay, ventures on a rescue mission combined with a quest for knowledge that takes her to a horrendous citadel on the shores of what we know as the Caspian Sea, and then to find the lost tribes of Israel on the shores of the lake we call Lake Victoria. As always the various settings are lushly imagined. And I haven’t even mentioned the kinky sex (though there is less of it in this than the previous two books).