This time, I took a different tack with a preemptive statement.

"I'm a Christian, and I believe in honesty, integrity, tolerance, complete equality, women in the workplace, evolution, and sex before gay marriage. If you think any of those things are incompatible with Christianity, there's no point our discussing things."

"Well, some of those, such as evolution, are difficult to reconcile with the Bible - "

"Not for me, they aren't."

"-but we won't keep you, and I hope you have a nice day."

I'm tickled to learn that they (or that one, at least, with the obligatory lurking sidekick) apparently think evolution is worse than gay sex/marriage.

Latest Labour MP to resign over the expenses scandal is Harry Cohen, who's been my MP for three years. He wasn't completely awful (some good positions, some really bad ones), but his responses to my letters have been almost entirely useless or nonexistent. I wonder whether we'll get a shiny new Tory MP next time...

Tags: politics

I'm looking at a map of my old university campus, and I really can remember when all that was fields. The fields I used to walk home through are now a science park, and they're expanding the campus itself massively.

And in the process, they're doing archaeology - thoroughly, of course, since York's archaeology department is one of the best there is. They've found an extensive farming landscape, high status Roman relics, and a two thousand year old brain.

That is so incredibly cool.

Now that's a grand big storm out there. The Welsh idiom is bwrw hen wragydd a ffyn - raining old women and sticks.

I would like to ask your advice, O wise and experienced people of LJ!

At the moment, I have a rather good satchel-style Targus laptop bag, with many useful pockets, that I use to organise and carry around Lots Of Things. It also functions, just about, for a weekend away. For larger needs, I have (what I'm fairly sure is) a 1972 pattern GS Bergen, which is to say a large green army surplus thing of more or less infinite capacity and more or less infinite lack of ergonomics.

I would like to replace both of these with a single smaller rucksack (for lack-of-back-and-shoulder-pain purposes), which should fulfill as many as possible of the following requirements.
( longish )

Current Music: The McCalmans - Shian Road

So they're being officially published online, with some key details blacked out.

Heather Brooke says: "I can see that avoiding embarrassment has been the key motivating factor of what's been deleted."

Clearly, not letting everyone in the world know MPs' addresses, their regular travel patterns, their bank details, their NI numbers, their signatures, and the names of people who deliver to their houses is entirely due to a desire to spare the government any more embarrassment.

Tags: politics

• Place names in fantasy
  
• Acacia, by David Anthony Durham (Part II, Part III)
  
• Obituary for David Eddings
  
• Review - Irons in the Fire, by Juliet E McKenna
  
• Review - Zahrah the Windseeker, by Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu
  
• Review - The Dazzle of Day, by Molly Gloss
  
• Re-reading - The Stainless Steel Rat Saves The World, by Harry Harrison
  

Tags: meta, sf
Current Music: McCalmans - Shian Road

We appear to have a second fox's earth in the back garden. Unfortunately, this one's decided to dig in the precise place I planted out thyme the other week. Most irritating.

I made this (original blog post) a while ago, and have been thinking about some others in the same style.



The question is, how far is it OK to go here? The technique positively requires tearing up printed matter.

Poll #1416309
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

It is acceptable to use:

Tags: art, poll

Looks like Prince Charles is being an idiot again.

Summary: Foreign firm Qatari Diar commissions Lord Rogers to design a block of flats. Charlie writes in to complain, probably in green ink. Qatari Diar withdraws planning application.

Dammit, I want attractive modern buildings on my city's skyline. I don't want a half-arsed pastiche job that looks like it belongs in some third-rate Lowry knockoff.

He'd be a lovely chap if only he gave up the princing job. (And the duking job, and everything else he got from his mum.)

Tags: irritation

While I was looking around for some folk lyrics, I found this interesting FT article on folk music and constructions of Englishness, focusing on Show of Hands and their song Roots.

Attempts to write English national songs tend to founder on the question of conservatism: does English identity mean no more than an insistence that nothing should ever change?

Well, obviously the answer to that is "no", but I think there are some interesting questions about moving forwards involved. They're basically not in favour of SoH's approach, but I think that ignores one of the most important strands of folk history & practice, which is the protest song.

Tags: folk, music, politics

Lots of people have been posting about this recently, with good reason. However, everyone I've seen posting recommendations has been either female or transmale, so here goes.

cereta has been hosting a discussion about rape and men's attitudes to it. I'm not going to attempt to summarize or quote; read it.
( a couple more links, and a poll )

Tags: feminism, signal amp

After reading this, I'm getting tempted to start using Twitter myself.

Since I am a very cautious adopter, however (except when I pick something up early on, complain about it, and abandon it for something else) I am not going to do so just from that. I know a lot of you use it; what does it do that's unique and useful? And is there likely to be any benefit to anyone else from my being on it?

With most social networking tools, I tend to be about 95% listener and 5% talker. So the ambient-verbal-grooming thing Ellis describes is possibly not ideal for me. On the other hand, I have four blogs, a facebook, a del.icio.us page, my own Coppermine gallery, and a wiki, and I've wandered through more virtual worlds than most people have supermarkets, so I can hardly claim the Luddite high ground.

Tags: geek

So, Labour have been beaten into third place by people who can't work out how to unfold their ballot paper, and who would have preferred us not to have been voting in that election at all.

I'm not holding any brief for Labour, but this is dismal.

The European Union is a fundamentally good thing. We're all Europeans together, and always have been. The UK's never been separate in any real sense - even after the sea levels rose and we weren't joined on any more, there's been constant economic & social traffic between island and continent. The whole island-race, silvery-sea thing is a propagandist delusion.
( longish )

Tags: politics, the matter of britain
Current Location: Europe

Lib Dem, for the record - was considering Green, but their science is about as rigorous as a rubber banana. If you can and you haven't, go do it. Polls close at 10 pm.

Am in the V&A. Have learnt, among other things, that Ronald Pickup played Rosalind in 1967. In quite a modish white dress.

I've started blogging elsewhere-too at Cold Iron & Rowan-Wood, because I wanted to write about SF in a different sort of way. Mostly, I intend to ramble about things that annoy me. There's a proper rationale here, and a couple of longish posts, because I wanted to make sure I had enough to talk about before I started telling people about it.

I am making no guarantees of regular updates, comprehensive coverage, actual competence at criticism, or indeed anything at all.

Tags: meta, sf

Bah. Lost my temper with a pair of Jehovah's Witnesses - well, with the one who did alllllll the talking, while her sidekick lurked ominously in the background - who wouldn't accept evolution.

"Everything was created in its kind. Dogs, for instance."
(Explains about the mutation clock. There is, provably, a time before dogs. You cannot deny this.)

Damn, if I hadn't lost my temper (later on, after a particularly egregious I-am-your-teacher implication) I might actually have managed to confuse her properly.

(And yes, I mostly just posted so I could use the phrase "a time before dogs".)

Edit: This is not stopping upsetting me. I hadn't previously encountered this particular strain of evolution denial, and hadn't realised just how incredibly bad theology it was, as well as bad science. "God went through a period of creativity, and then stopped." That's just... so sad.

Tags: religion

The methodology here is a bit dodgy (I'm using Google, with site:librarything.com "Author 1" "Author 2" - it's known to return a small number of duplicate results, and an unknown number of false negatives) but frankly it's the best I've got. The percentages for an intersection are the percent of the lower-ranked author who also had the higher-ranked one.

597 people list at least one book by Walter Wink.
5,530 list at least one book by Diane Duane.
44 (7%) list both authors.

I wanted to look at a couple of control groups, so I did this two ways. First, by picking two other authors who wrote Star Trek novelizations.

2,260 list at least one book by John M Ford. His intersection with Duane is 648 (29%).
782 list at least one book by Vonda McIntyre. Her intersection with Duane is 171 (22%). Ford & McIntyre intersect at 155 (20%).
58 (10%) list both Ford and Walter Wink; 1 (0%) lists both McIntyre and Wink.

A corresponding & connected religious philosopher seemed to me to be Rene Girard. His LibraryThing stats give him 298 fans, and his intersection with Wink is 54, or 18%.
Girard's intersection with Duane is 40 (13%); with Ford it's 33 (11%); and with McIntyre it's 2 (0%). (Neither of them the one who also has Wink.)

The second method I looked at was to find another religious philosopher who had similar stats to Wink, and another SF author with similar stats to Duane. It turned out to be John Polkinghorne (605) and Elizabeth Bear (5,780).

Polkinghorne's intersection with Wink is 49 (8%), and Bear's with Duane is 384 (7%) so they seem to be connected pairwise at about the same distance in L-space.

Polkinghorne's intersection with Duane is 32 (5%) while Bear's with Wink is 7 (1%). For completeness' sake, Polkinghorne's intersection with Bear is 17 (3%).

So overall, the Duane/Wink match does seem to be a bit more than random noise after all.

Tags: sf

Through the kind offices of webcowgirl, I saw this last night.

The title was a bit offputting, but it proved (not really surprisingly) not to be a pretentiously gothy and overpolished job after all. The premise is simple, but ambitious - 16 scenes done in an order determined by the audience beforehand. I got there too late (thanks to the Central Line) to shuffle objects around in the bar, but I'm assured it was fun. (Relatedly - I was impressed and slightly surprised at the degree of audience investment & enthusiasm. It could be a habitual Southwark Playhouse audience... my cynical first reaction was that the actors had awfully large families. But it was a good play.)

The really impressive part was in how well the actors managed the scene changes. They were doing all the SM work themselves, and every scene needed up to half a dozen props and/or costume changes. Given that they only found out what order the scenes would be in when the audience finished mucking around in the bar when they did it (see comments), they did it really smoothly and energetically. It helped, of course, that the floor was marked out in different colours of SM's tape, and that the projection screen flashed up the number of the scene before each one.

The projection screen formed most of the set, generally with a variety of indefinably Welsh backgrounds. (I'm fairly sure I recognised part of Swansea there.) The only thing that struck me as rather off was a pair of angel wings, projected behind an actor on a stepladder - they were four inches off registration, so that one tip was clipped by the edge of the screen. That might have been deliberate, since they were also a tiny bit crooked and done in the classic slightly-mistuned-TV style, fuzzy and flickering and strewn with analogue artifacts. They did also deliberately do something which I'd normally consider a complete no-no, which is to have the actor standing in front of them lit by an off-centre profile lamp, giving a hard-edged shadow on the screen, but on top of the shoulder joint of one wing rather than in between them. The final effect was extremely disturbing and worrying, which I suspect was precisely what they intended.

"Disturbing" covers most of the play, in fact - it was a lot of hard work, continually forcing you to reevaluate your assumptions about the last few lines in an effort to work out what's going on. Gently, though, with none of that depressing twist-in-the-tale shock-revelation business. My mind definitely feels exercised. Interestingly, it felt quite science-fictional in that respect, with the parallel engagement and suspension of critical thinking about the action. Of course, I'd still maintain that treating that as a specifically SFnal trope is a case of genre exceptionalism, but that's a rant for another time.

I'm impressed with everyone involved with the production - it's not just an actor's showpiece, but a director's too, given that any of the scenes could have come first and the one which did was riveting from the get-go. The only criticism I could possibly make is that I'd have chosen a more matte paint for the stage (one actor's white top was reflected in it from time to time), but that's down to the venue not the production company.

Tags: theatre