Catalogue of histories that never happened:

http://www.mts.net/~arphaxad/history.html

or rather, a reminder of why I gave up physics:

http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~kovar/hall.html

Old joke, new French version (when I first heard this over a decade ago, the protagonists were Helmut Kohl, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, President Bush senior, Dan Quayle and Henry Kissinger).

Jacques Chirac dîne avec la reine d’Angleterre. Soudain, il lui demande: “Votre Majesté, vous m’impressionnez, vous êtes toujours entourée de gens intelligents, comment faites-vous?”

La reine lui répond “C’est très simple. Je les tiens constamment en alerte. Je leur fais passer régulièrement des petits tests pour être bien sûre que leur intelligence reste vive.”

Chirac, stupéfait: “Ah oui ? Comment faites-vous ça ?”

La reine s’empare du téléphone: “C’est très simple. Je vais vous montrer.” Elle appelle Tony Blair: – Bonjour Tony!

– Bonjour Votre Majesté!

– Tony, j’ai un petit test d’intelligence pour vous. C’est l’enfant de votre père et de votre mère mais ce n’est pas votre frère, ni votre soeur. Qui est-ce?

– C’est moi!

– Bravo, vous l’avez! Merci Tony. À la prochaine.” La reine raccroche. Jacques Chirac est impressionné: “Wow!”

De retour à Paris, le président décide de mettre en pratique la technique de la reine d’Angleterre. Il téléphone à Jean-Pierre Raffarin [the French prime minister, not widely renowned for his intellect]:

– Bonjour Jean-Pierre, c’est Jacques ! J’ai un petit test d’intelligence pour toi!

– Ah oui? Vas-y.

– C’est l’enfant de ton père et de ta mère mais ce n’est pas ton frère, ni ta soeur. Qui est-ce?

– Oh! Attends un petit peu. Je n’étais pas préparé à ça. Laisse-moi quelques minutes pour y penser. Je vais te rappeler.

– D’accord, pas de problème!

Jean-Pierre Raffarin s’empresse alors d’appeler Nicolas Sarkozy [the French interior minister, seen by many as too clever by half].

– Bonjour Nicolas, c’est Jean-Pierre. Je ne sais pas ce qui lui prend mais Chirac vient de me faire passer un test d’intelligence. Et ce n’est vraiment pas évident. M’aiderais-tu?

– Avec plaisir.

– Voilà. C’est l’enfant de ton père et de ta mère mais ce n’est pas ton frère, ni ta soeur. Qui est-ce ?

– Ben, c’est moi!

– Parfait! Merci! Jean-Pierre Raffarin s’empresse de rappeler Jacques Chirac.

– Jacques, tu peux me redemander ton énigme.

– Ok. C’est l’enfant de ton père et de ta mère mais ce n’est pas ton frère, ni ta soeur. Qui est-ce?

– C’est Nicolas Sarkozy!

– Ben non, loupé! C’est Tony Blair!

Stuck in my traffic jam, I used my phone to time the intro to “Bat out of Hell”. 1 minute, 54 seconds!

…when one of the questions is, “In Operation Restore Democracy, in October 1994, with the unanimous approval of the UN Security Council, the United States invaded the Caribbean republic of Haiti in order to return which democratically elected president to power?”

(A few years later, one of the officials involved grumbled to me that it was the stupidest damn thing he’d ever been involved with, and shortly after our conversation resigned from the State Department. I hear he’s writing bad thrillers now.)

Or rather, searching on my name at Amazon.com produces some gratifying results; apart from the book-of-my-thesis and another one I co-edited, the new internal search facility finds:

• The book-of-my-thesis cited as an authority on the relationship between religion and science in Taking Flight: Inventing the Aerial Age from Antiquity Through the First World War by Richard P. Hallion, and as scientific commentary in the ‘Ithaca’ chapter of Joyce’s Revenge: History, Politics, and Aesthetics in Ulysses by Andrew Gibson
• My chapter in the book I co-edited, cited for obvious history-of-science reasons in History of Irish Thought by Thomas Duddy and in John Wilson Foster’s chapter, “Changes of Address: Tyndall, Darwin and the Ulster Presbyterians” in Hearts and Minds: Irish Culture and Society Under the Act of Union edited by Bruce Stewart
• my article on the history of astrology in History of Astronomy : An Encyclopedia edited by John Lankford and Marc Rothenberg (Editor)
• I turn up as a character in Twilight Whispers, a romantic novel by Barbara Delinsky: There was the oldest, Nicholas Whyte, somber yet dashing, the heir apparent to the Whyte Estate, and his wife, Angie, a stunning woman who had been the casue of many a broken heart when she had removed Nicholas from the ranks of the eligible many years before.

And one or two other odd ends that don’t seem to actually have my name in them but are pulled up by the search engine anyway. Fun.

Having an insomniac moment, I came across Dave Barry’s observations on housekeeping. So true!

10) The Sandman Book of Dreams, ed Neil Gaiman and Ed Kramer (and, uncredited, Martin Greenberg)

A nice idea, short stories based around the Sandman structure. The one that really stood out for me was the horrific “Splatter” by Will Shetterly, telling the story of the Cereal convention from a different perspective. (Oddly, Shetterly doesn’t appear to have published a short story since this 1996 collection.) Most of the other pieces were good but not remarkable.

I find it extraordianry that there is a western democracy in the 21st century where this is a serious debate.

Just got round to checking the SFsite‘s lists of best books of 2003, as follows; X means I’ve read it with link to a review if I did one, O means I haven’t, and I note my intentions as well. Any further feedback – especially on the lines of “X is fantastic” or “Y stinks” – much welcomed.

Obviously recent events have accelerated my desire to make the jump to NATO.

But who would have thought it was so difficult to work out what my past salaries were?

9) The Hounds of the Morrigan by Pat O’Shea.

Feeling ill and otherwise shattered, I’ve finally read this neglected classic. On my web page of Irish sf and fantasy I have catalogued a large number of Celtic legends retold for adults, some of which I have actually bought if I found them in cheap enough second hand paperback editions. They are all really crap. I don’t think I’ve read a good retelling of Cuchulainn since Rosemary Sutcliff, or in fairness Lady Gregory. And the efforts of non-Irish writiers to paint a realistic portrait of Ireland in any era, heroic or present day, are usually just embarrassing.

The Hounds of the Morrigan is several orders of magnitude better than any of these. The genre of children swept into a parallel world where they will make a crucial contribution in the supernatural battle between good and evil is an honorable and occasionally cliched one (I’m thinking especially of E. Nesbit and Alan Garner here). But O’Shea catches the voice of Ireland accurately and sympathetically, and as well as the main story, which depends completely on the structures of Celtic mythology, I caught references to James Stephens’ The Crock of Gold, Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman and rather to my surprise (perhaps I was imagining it) Eric Cross’ banned classic The Tailor and Ansty.

The book is perhaps a bit longer than it needed to be, and as with many quest narratives one does end up wondering why they had to go the long way around (the most recent Harry Potter is a particularly good example of this). But I’d have thought any literate and patient eight-year-old would find it very rewarding. In my current state of general debilitation, I certainly did.

The amusing bit: Georgia’s new Foreign Minister is the French Ambassador. Not, that is, Georgia’s representative in Paris, but France’s representative in Tbilisi. It’s fairly frequent for ambassadors to suddenly become foreign ministers of their own country, but to suddenly become foreign mnister of somewhere else is rather unusual…

The less amusing bit: things are looking very nasty in Ajara. And if you haven’t heard of Ajara yet, I very much fear you will have heard of it by Monday…

Your Reverse Astrology Results

Red is your most probable sign and Blue is your least probable sign. The scores are from 0 (not you at all) to 100 (dead on match).

According to our analysis, you are a Gemini, May 21 to June 21. But you are certainly not a Cancer, June 22 to July 22.
You claim to be a Taurus, but you are simply in error. Please consult your parents as to your actual birth date.

Very amusing. See here to try for yourself.

8) Coalescent, by Stephen Baxter

Rather a surprise, this, as Baxter tries to tell a human story and also a grand historical narrative using his characteristic stark narrative technique. While this may not be the best book I’ve read by him, it is probably the most interesting. For various reasons I don’t feel like going into it further at this stage.

The children have all had a horrible tummy bug over the last few days, which spread to my mother-in-law who has been staying. Today’s plan was that I would drop her to the airport en route to work. But no, I realised when I woke up that I wasn’t going to move for the rest of the morning; I’ve now struggled downstairs to post this and will go straight back up again.

This Madrid business is pretty horrible.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/3532609.stm

I only got 5 out of 10. Two of the ones I missed were really easy as well. Time I went home I think.

Thanks to all for your encouraging noises! Now trying to fit my CV into the standard NATO job application form – not a very easy task!

But the deadline for applications is not until 21 April, so I doubt if I’ll hear anything from them before May and probably not know if I have the job until June, with presumably the standard bureaucratic faffing meaning I wouldn’t start until August if I got it. (Actually if that was the timescale I’d take August off on holiday and start in September.)

But the good thing is that it doesn’t interfere with the timescale of what was until yesterday Plan A (and is now Plan B), to try and get into the European Commission. Belt and braces; a good combination!

This looks very interesting:

http://www.scifi.com/sfw/issue358/books.html

Shame it seems to be only in hardback; I blew my book budget in London last month.

Those of you who bother to read these things may well have noticed my earlier posts (here, here and here) about my ambitions to move into the European Commission. By a circuitous route (a friend who is a British diplomat passing on the job notice via his German wife who works at the OECD in Paris) I got word today of an opening in NATO which is rather attractive: the holder of the job “provides background research and draft speeches, articles and other public documents for communication on a wide range of subjects within NATO’s political and politico-military spheres of interest. He/she also works on the preparation of Ministerial meetings, including the drafting of communiques, or other special research projects, and gives briefings. He/she reports to the Assistant Secretary General for Political Affairs and Security Policy, is directly available to the Secretary General, and maintains close relationships with other divisions.”

So in fact most of the stuff I enjoy about this job (ie the research and writing short pieces); none of the stuff I hate (the editing long papers by other people); and exchanging the rather generalised medium-to-high level political hacking I do right now for a position as an almost senior adviser to the Secretary General. And then I checked the salary, which three years ago was considerably more than I am getting right now, after tax, if you have two children (and I have three, one of whom is disabled and so probably counts for extra).

The only thing I would have to swallow, really, is that it’s NATO. There’s enough of the Belfast Catholic in me to think long and hard before working for the military. And as far as the Brussels institutions are concerned, my heart is really with the EU. However, the job I really really want within the EU structures doesn’t yet exist, and won’t until the constitution is ratified and there is a proper EU diplomatic service. And this might be a better step towards it than doing yet more Balkan stuff in the Commission.

If I do decide to go for it, some of my more political past postings to livejournal may go friends-only, or disappear!

I got 188 out of 200 on the Schmies Vocabulary Test (thanks to via ). The twelve I got wrong :

tautology/pleonasm – OK I should have known;
gnomic/pithy – I think my answer is right and theirs wrong;
agrypnia/insomnia – never heard of agrypnia;
nimiety/paucity – never heard of nimiety;
precocial/altricial – never heard of either;
cunctator/procrastinator – never heard of a cunctator;
melancholic/antithalian – never heard of antithalian;
trefa/kosher – I’m not a specialist in that area;
shut/dehisce – de-what?
litotes/meiosis – OK I should have got that right;
extended/compendious – I think my answer is right and theirs wrong;
fuliginous/brilliant – obviously I misremembered my Gene Wolfe.

OK, has anyone out there actually ever come across the words agrypnia, nimiety, precocial, altricial, cunctator, antithalian, or dehisce in print?

Well, we sacked the au pair. She had wimped out of the vital early morning school run back in December, and wasn’t very keen on doing the cleaning, and not at all prepared to take our instructions on how to handle disciplinary issues with F, and things came to a head in my absence, and I am not sorry. Probably we’ll switch to a rolling system of at least three regular babysitters.

On the good news front, this fantastic astronomical cuddly toy which metaphorically jumped off the shelf at Washington airport shouting “Buy me! Buy me!” has been a huge hit with 14-month-old U who has been playing with it ever since I got home eight hours ago. Though she is sounding a little tired now; of course, so am I…

7) The Green Gene, by Peter Dickinson

From the author’s own website: An attempt to imagine for the British what Verwoerd-style apartheid would be like if applied here, and people of Celtic origin had green skins. P.P. Humayan, a naive Indian mathematical genius, is hired by UK racial police to do statistical analysis on likely increase of Green population. His hosts are murdered and he is kidnapped by and then becomes involved with a subversive Green movement.

From the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction: an amusing satire on many issues including racial prejudice, set in an alternate-world UK, where all Celts possess a gene that gives them green skin. It was runner-up for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. [It was beaten for the latter jointly by the classic Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke and the completely forgotten Malevil by Robert Merle.]

I had read a few of Peter Dickinson’s books a long time ago (Annerton Pit and Tulku) and of course remember the Changes TV adaptation from when I was very small. I’d also much more recently read his King and Joker, an alternate history centring around the adventures of the British Royal Family in the early 1970s – a much saner set of royals than the real ones, as it turns out, despite their unusual domestic arrangements.

This one, of course, hit my radar screen because of the Irish angle. As the author’s own description makes clear, it describes an England where Celts are visibly green-skinned and therefore face discrimination. A lot of the 1970s neuroses are there – for instance, Celtic terrorists bomb Harrod’s, something that didn’t happen in real life until 1983, ten years after the book had been written – indeed I think the only casualties of the IRA campaign in England at the time the book was published were the five kitchen staff and a chaplain killed at the Aldershot barracks in February 1972. A lot of the satire is spot-on. The girl who our hero eventually ends up with describes herself as a “latter day Satanist” (are you listening, ?). Enoch Powell is reincarnated as a dangerous Welsh radical (in contrast to the fabulous What If Gordon Banks Had Played… saga). The whole of Ireland got independence in 1921 but England remains swamped by “pickles” from Ireland, Scotland and Wales. They control the music scene and London youth rocks to rhythm-and-pibroch.

The one point where I felt the book lost its edge was in its portrayal of the Celts themselves, especially (for some reason) the Welsh. Shaw sails pretty close to the wind in John Bull’s Other Island and is only really forgiven because his most over-the-top Oirish character turns out to have been “Born in Glasgow. Never was in Ireland in his life.” I don’t think Dickinson would have dared to depict black South Africans in the same way as he does the stupid, alcoholic, squabbling Celtic terrorists in this book. (I’ve always felt the best commentary on this period of history – whether your paramilitaries are Irish or Palestinian – is Monty Python’s Life Of Brian, especially Scene 7 and Scene 10.)

But the author redeems himself considerably by having his central character a confused, randy, Indian mathematical genius who has been declared an honorary “Saxon” for political purposes. It’s a good book, though a book of its time, and I’m surprised it isn’t better known.

My brother just emailed to say he had been quoted on Bookslut, and challenging me to identify his quote. The possibilities are :

Karin Kross, in her interview with Craig Thompson, writes “A co-worker of mine who doesn’t read comics noticed my copy of Blankets and said, ‘Oh, I’ve heard that’s great.’ ” My brother used to read a lot of comics but I think he doesn’t so much these days.

Liz Miller, reviewing P by Andrew Lewis Conn, writes of “this guy I knew in college — well-read, outspoken and crazy good at writing. The kind of guy who had the potential to be a Great Writer of Our Time, but for two fatal flaws: he couldn’t stop ripping off his favorite writers, and he was one pretentious motherfucker, with no substance to his style.” Obviously not my brother, because Liz Miller went to college in L.A. and my brother studied in Dublin and Oxford. 😉

Further on, however, one of Liz Miller’s commentators on Cold Mountain has a boyfriend who “pointed out one problem with both the book and movie: Ada, Inman, and Ruby are all perfect people, never doing anything wrong. Meanwhile, all around them is a highly flawed world of evil”. Liz Miller’s friend’s name is not given.

An anonymous Amazon reviewer of a book by a Democratic presidential candidate is quoted as saying “This sad, sorry literary effort merely reaffirms that Mr. Sharpton is little more than a posturing, flamboyant, hate-driven windbag whose chief purpose seems to be promoting divisiveness.”

And finally, a reader of the weblog section found Margaret Truman’s Murder at the Library of Congress “a bit unsatisfying as a mystery, but refreshingly pro-sex for the over-sixties.”

I can’t see my brother caring much about sex for the over-sixties or the Rev. Al Sharpton, and Karin Kross lives and works in Austin, Texas while my brother lives and works in Boston, Massachusetts, so I reckon his girlfriend has been reading Cold Mountain.

I have to go to the airport in ten minutes. I hope he emails me before that.

4) The Sandman Companion by Hy Bender: Great stuff, this, very much helping one understand the series much better. Structured very nicely as well so as to avoid spoilers – one could easily read the series a book at a time and cross-refer to the relevant chapters here. Obviously there’s much more to say about Sandman, and plenty of room for debate – for instance, I really rather liked the Cluracan’s story about the city of Aurelian from World’s End, though Gaiman reckons it one of the weakest of the series; and I wasn’t particularly gripped by Ramadan which seems to be a general favourite. Basing the book around interviews with Gaiman about what he thought he was doing is a risky tactic – Theodore Krulik’s book about Roger Zelazny is a yawn a minute as a result of doing the same – but Bender is not afraid to debate Gaiman’s own writing with the author. It really does enhance one’s enjoyment of the books. (But is Gaiman claiming too much when he seems to imply that with Death he invented the Goth look?)

5) Ask Me Anything about the Presidents by Louis Phillips: A harmless little book picked up at the Smithsonian shop in Washington National Airport. I did not know that two nineteenth century presidents were arrested during their terms of office for offences involving horses. You learn something new every day.

Amusing follow-on to my rant about Clare Short a week ago. I was in the UN today and had a chat with an old friend who works in the Secretariat, and asked her what the reaction in the building had been. She said that in fact a) everyone in the UN assumes they are under surveillance anyway (noticeably my one “work” meeting took place at a quiet table in the cafeteria) and b) if anything people feel flattered to be the subject of attention by various security services.

Everyone here seems obsessed by the outcome of the Martha Stewart trial. I have barely heard of her (when I first heard about it I thought she must be a Star Trek actress, but I was getting her mixed up with Patrick Stewart). Still, good to see that celebrity doesn’t always confer immunity.

Flying home this evening, thank God. Only three proper meetings today, hardly worth really coming to New York for. Best meetings of the trip were at the National Security Council and the House of Representatives International Relations Committee. And have got no further on the Transdniestria paper…

(see http://cuddlepuddle.org/~adam/trustmetric )

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Oddly enough I do read ‘s blog. Will look at some of the others as well.

…must surely be the Borders down near the White House at 14th and F. Here I am at Dupont Circle, betwen Books-A-Million and Kramers, but the two combined come nowhere near the size of Borders. But bearing in mind my extravagance in London the other week, I have been much more modest in my purchases here.

In other news, today’s conference was fun, but I can say even less about it than I can about yesterday’s. I was cast in the uncomfortable role of being both spokesman for my own organisation and explainer to some rather senior people of what the EU is up to. My energy levels had completely given up by the end of the meeting.

On one of the Balkan lists I monitor, someone posted a criticism of the infamous pan-Albanian report:

Greater Albania my not have materialised by the changing of borders but as a state of mind it’s being implemented quite literally
I would suggest the authors venture on the ground and get amongst it all they’ll see exactly what I mean.

Their view wasn’t tempered by recommendations to confront Albanian Separatism either.

I posted a grumpy reply:

As a matter of fact our report was precisely the result of investigations on the ground, and does indeed include recommendations to confront extremism. Next time, why not read it before posting your response?

His next reply was:

Thankyou for your response I did indeed read the text in entirety your assumption in that regard is wrong. What I would like to do is ask the following question, which I hope you, can share with us all in relation to the ICG report into the subject of Pan-Albanianism.

As the article was devoted chiefly as an Albanian commentary – the entire report obviously was representative by or on behalf of the Albanian viewpoint. Readers would’ve leaned a great deal more if an analysis were done between opposing opinions, experiences and events which wasn’t acknowledged is that an Ingredient of irrelevance?

And my riposte – mysteriously not yet posted to the moderated list – was:

I’m sorry for presuming you hadn’t read the text. You asserted that we hadn’t been “on the ground” and “amongst it all”; I had incorrectly assumed that most readers of the report would be able to detect that we had in fact been on the ground and amongst it all, from the numerous footnotes citing on-the-spot interviews, and from the fact that we continue to maintain offices in Belgrade, Pristina and Skopje.

I’m not sure what “opposing opinions, experiences and events” you think we omitted. Our report does acknowledge several such opinions, including (with implicit disagreement) the 1998 report of the Institute of Geopolitics in Belgrade on “Greater Albania – Concepts and Possible Consequences”, and (also with implicit disagreement) the recent statements of Momir Stojanovic, and (with implicit *agreement*) the condemnation by the Macedonian Academy of Arts and Sciences of the infamous “Platform” published by the Albanian Academy of Sciences in 1998. Again, this should be clear to most people who read it. I’m sorry that you found it difficult to follow.

Further developments will be posted here as they happen.