There is plenty of stuff to report. In fact there was last week too before I got mired in the mess that was the mad contraception=abortion insanity in the US.

We spent a chunk of last week with my MIL and family and friends in Dublin. BB has got to the 'tiring' stage for holidays. He is insatiably curious and adventurous and totally unconcerned with potential hazards. IE. he is a toddler! Well done BB! You are graduating. I think that much of the so-called Terrible Twos is not toddler malice but more their combination of super high energy levels and their burning urge to investigate EVERYTHING in deadly combination with their limited communication skills and blithe, living-in-the-present inability to be swayed by such concepts as 'it will break' 'it will bite' 'you will hurt it' or even 'it will kill you'.

It was a less than relaxing break really with that aspect factored in but we did stuff nonetheless. DD and Mr Wol spent a very pleasant time at the Urban Beach (I kept BB away from that delight as I didn't really want him to fall into George's Dock). It wasn't Paris Plage but fun and not too busy. We rode the LUAS - a must for DD - and went to various parks and also braved the crowds at the aZoo.

I do have to put in a word for how immeasurably improved Dublin Zoo is. Back in the 1980s it was a bit grim, short of space, a dumping ground for insane circus animals and really, really short of cash. The place is hardly recognizable now and they are still improving. The first thing that strikes you is the planting. Forests of amazing plants line all the routes which means that you never quite know what is coming round the next corner - fun - and even when it is busy with summer crowds it is not massively noisy as the hedges absorbs kiddie squeals a treat. The place is nearly double the size. There are baby animals everywhere - always a good sign. The cages and enclosures are full of interesting things for the animals to do and they all have places to get away from the public gaze if they want (with the possible exception of the sea lions - they seem to be stuck out in public) and some of the cages are so full of plants you have to really look HARD to spot the animals who are busy hunting aphids and spiders and other fun things. It is worlds apart from what it used to be and although some of the visitor amenities could do with a revamp (especially some of the newer bits which do not seem to be weathering very well at all) I am still well impressed.

DD is off at Fota camp this week - which does not seem as good as the Dublin Zoo camp - next year! so I am revelling in my comparative freedom. Holidays are rapidly running out! WOW!

Ahh, the joys of sitting outside on a beautiful summer day, waiting for my lunch to arrive (and so posting a quick entry from my phone).

People complain about the weather in Belgium, but coming from Belfast (unlike most of the complainers, who tend to come from points further south) I don't object to the rain, and the warm days like today are more numerous and pleasant than what I grew up with (though of course with global warming, that is now true of Belfast as well). And the winters are pretty mild, considering this is the same latitude as Calgary.

So, reasons to be cheerful. And here's my lunch.

Neil Patrick Harris has previous form, apparently.

(thanks to iamnikchick for the link.)

Recently sighted in a supermarket in Ranelagh, Dublin.

A package arrived for me today. I don't remember ordering any laptop pants.

Careful examination revealed a spare battery for the Eee PC, so I guess it was laptop parts.

Still want my pants, though.

"I just won't look!" Peri said, clenching her eyes shut but feeling the stiff vulpine feathers that had now emerged almost fully all over her arms.
(Philip Martin, Doctor Who - Vengeance on Varos)

Vulpine feathers, eh?

With extra irony, the chief villain is given to malapropisms due to a faulty translation unit. The omniscient narrator has no such excuse!

(synched to MOP's Ante Up, stolen from dr_f_dellamorte.)

Am reading two rather tough books - tough for different reasons - at the moment. First up is John Keay's India: A History lent me on the long term by a Norwegian colleague in the job before last; as you may have noticed I have been trying to prioritise my stack of unread history books this year. The basic problem with the early chapters are that he has almost no historical narrative to tie his descriptions of the archaeological evidence to, and I find it therefore a bit difficult to keep straight in my head. And I am looking at the end of the book and thinking, hmm, another 500 pages of this...

The second book is a rather amazing lost classic, The History of Richard Calmady by Lucas Malet (a pseudonym for Charles Kingsley's daughter Mary) which I'm reading on my Palm Pilot courtesy of Project Gutenberg. I got hold of it because the main character is based to a certain extent on Arthur MacMorrough Kavanagh; it is proving a fascinating and attractive read, and I find myself wondering if Thomas Hardy is really so much better than this author that he deserves to be remembered while she is forgotten? But it is also very long - originally published in three large volumes, and I have barely started the second. Amd again, knowing that I will have to get through it all on the squinty Palm Pilot screen is a bit dismaying; I think the only book of this length I've tried reading this way before was A Feast for Crows, and I'm looking at the end and thinking, hmm, another 2500 pagedowns of this? Unfortunately Calmady doesn't seem to be available in dead tree format for a reasonable price.

So I am looking through the other books at the top of my TBR pile, and hoping that one of them will be suitably diverting to help me get through Keay and Calmady. But am putting off Doctor Who - Vengeance on Varos until tomorrow's commute.

Well, after posting and analysing the Best of Who and Worst of Who polls, the obvious next thing to do is combine them. So, a definitive final judgement by Livejournal: the best of the best, the worst of the worst, and deciding whether those stories that got two or more votes in each poll are Good or Bad.

( poll )

And yes, I will probably do one about the audios next.

In my genealogical surfings I have come across this account of the death of my grandfather's eldest brother, John Nicholas Whyte (1864-1906), which I knew from family lore had been quite a scandal at the time. Bizarrely enough it comes from the archives of a New Zealand paper, the Hawera and Normanby Star, from July and August 1906.

( sad story with medical details )

The case was sufficiently visible to give rise to a parliamentary question and debate in the columns of the New York Times; clearly there were competing narratives of a moral panic about Christian Science cultists, and a unjustified witch-hunt against a retired doctor who was following his patient's instructions. (I am quite sure that my great-grandmother was contributing to the first of these.)

Major Whyte was not married and (as far as we know) left no children; I am puzzled however by this street bearing his name on the northern edge of São Paolo, Brazil, but perhaps it is someone else!

Hello! I'm sure some of you already know this, but Jess Whedon wrote a supervillain musical, and now it is here. On Monday it will not be there. That's all.

james_nicoll's interest in matters counterfactual was piqued by my post about Arthur Kavanagh's 1860s cruise. He raised the question of what it would have taken to have a Dominion of the Ionian Islands in the British Commonwealth some time in the twentieth century, amd speculated that they might have got there quicker than India (1947) if not as quickly as Ireland (1922).

Well. ( A longer answer than I gave James )

( 21) Doctor Who - the Twin Dilemma - incredibly bad )

( 22) Doctor Who - Attack of the Cybermen - not quite as bad )

So basically my reading of the Sixth Doctor novelisations has not got off to a promising start.

Some of you will have already noticed the rotten development afoot in the US Department of Health and Human Services, discussed by (among others) liz_marcs, peaseblossom, and my own sammywol (also here).

Just looking at the text in question I really have to question the sanity (and the ulterior motives) of the drafters of the proposed regulation.

'...the Department proposes to define abortion as “any of the various procedures—including the prescription and administration of any drug or the performance of any procedure or any other action—that results in the termination of the life of a human being in utero between conception and natural birth, whether before or after implantation.”'

As per the clear-thinking analysis at Reproductive Health Reality Check, the proposed change in the definition puts the onus on the individual woman to prove she's not pregnant if she wants to obtain oral contraception, say, from any medical or pharmaceutical practitioner who decides that a contraceptive pill is a tool of abortionists.

This is a monstrous act, and one that clearly discriminates against women. Condoms = barrier method = no problem (subtext: condom = for men, allowable). Oral contraceptives = abortion (subtext: deny women control of their own fertility). By the above definition any act that could remotely be construed as likely to lead to a failed implantation (a hot bath, anyone?) is an abortion, and likely an entirely unconscious one. It's discriminatory bollocks and should be confronted as such.

twistedchick, for example, has links to actions US citizens can take. The rest of us should at least post and kick up a fuss.

From infov0re via technology: Watchmen Trailer. That is all.

There were some surprises here, most of all the surprise that more people voted than in the previous poll. Myself, I find it much easier to decide which story I like least than which I like most; perhaps I am unusual in that regard.

Anyway, as before, going in order of decreasing consensus by Doctor.

( Ninth Doctor: The Empty Child / The Doctor Dances )
( Fifth Doctor: The Caves of Androzani )
( First Doctor: The Dalek Invasion of Earth )
( Sixth Doctor: Revelation of the Daleks )
( Seventh Doctor: Remembrance of the Daleks )
( Fourth Doctor: Genesis of the Daleks )
( Second Doctor: The Mind Robber )
( Third Doctor: Inferno )
( Tenth Doctor: Blink )
( Eighth Doctor: Err, yes. )

So that's it. Thanks for playing, and I shall probably do the same this time next year or thereabouts.

RE. earlier post on Reproductive Rights in the US. http://liz-marcs.livejournal.com/337117.htmlhas a great summary of the mess and http://vito-excalibur.livejournal.com/181983.html has some links to campaign sites etc.

Would be nice to see a few more people with testicles getting exercised about this issue. Any male acquaintance who ever wants to use the 'I'm really a feminist myself ...' line with me EVER again should be showing some solidarity here, even though, as mature reflection and helpful comments have pointed out to me, condoms will not be affected ... yet ... - and why am I not surprised that the one form of contraception that offers men some protections as well as women is not affected!? - get out there and shout too damnit! After all, these gits obviously don't give a shit what women think!

It may not have been apparent to President Sarkozy just how ill-advised his recent remarks on the Lisbon Treaty were. In Brussels circles, the official orthodoxy remains that the treaty should be ratified by all member states before the end of the year, and that the process in Ireland is not finished. In real life, of course, the process in Ireland is finished; there will be no second referendum, even though this is the preferred option of 26 other governments.

Context and nuance are everything of course, and we don't know if President Sarkozy was simply making the normative statement that for the Lisbon Treaty to survive, it is necessary to have another Irish referendum, or that the Irish must (with all the undertones of compulsion) vote again; both would roughly be covered by "Il faut". I'm open-minded, though also aware that the latter is entirely possible.

(Also subject to interpretation are his remarks last week about the tradeoff between further enlargement and Lisbon. When he said that the Treaty issue must be "settled" before any more countries can join the EU, did he deliberately not stipulate that it should be approved?)

The wider problem is that many inside the Brussels beltway just don't get how serious the problem is. Someone terribly well-meaning invited me to join a Facebook group the other day whose description began: "EU should not be a hostage of 1 milion Irish who voted NO to the Lisbon Treaty." Well, too bad; it is - and had there been similar votes in other countries, I can easily think of half a dozen which would have produced a similar result. As I've said before, I rather feel that the drafters of the grand design have been asking the wrong questions.

I was at a breakfast meeting this morning (ugh! Getting up at unaccustomedly early time) and found myself sitting (as Facebook folks will have noticed) next to one of the numerous living former prime ministers of Belgium. Although the meeting was on entirely a different topic, I could not resist asking him what he thought of the current crisis situation. He said that he felt the big mistake had been to allow the federal Belgian electoral cycle to get out of step with the regional elections: everyone was now positioning themselves for the 2009 polls for the various sub-national parliaments and Europe. I asked if there was now a chance that the federal elections could be brought forward to help resolve the crisis. He pointed out that the root cause of the current crisis is precisely the nature of the arrangements for the elections to the federal Belgian parliament, so unless that is sorted out first, the legitimacy of any new federal elections is not clear.

Leterme's government lasted longer than I predicted (since I actually predicted he wouldn't even get to the start of his term, never mind the end). My prediction now, in full knowledge of my previous inaccuracy, is that his party - whose new leader lives in the next village to ours, and used to be one of our numerous record-breaking female local councillors - will dump him and either find a different potential prime minister, or (more likely) opt to back someone else's candidate while licking their wounds, as they did last December. And Belgium will muddle through for another few years.

Last night I attended the summer party of the Brussels branch of the [UK] Liberal Democrats, where the guest of honour was Ros Scott, the blogging Baroness. She is campaigning for the position of President of the overall party, to be elected in a few weeks from now in an all-member ballot. The other likely candidate is Lembit Öpik MP, who lost by a fairly substantial margin to Simon Hughes in 2004 (though he got my vote).

I didn't know a lot about Ros Scott before last night, but she talked a good line on how to run the party better; mostly to do with parts of the machinery I have had little to do with even in my more activist days, but it all seemed to make sense. Also it cannot be said that the events of the last few years have made Lembit's powers of judgement look particularly impressive, and I suspect that a lot of us who voted for him last time will be somewhat leery of repeating the experience. So as of now, the blogging Baroness has my vote; and good luck to her.